Superior Women by Alice Adams Page A

whom could she tell?
    “Well,” says Mrs. Harcourt, blinking pale blue eyes in the general direction of some feeble Washington winter sunshine, just visible through one narrow leaded window, “well, I suppose you’d better talk to your father.” And then, with one of her odd lurches into clarity, sobriety: “And in that case I’ll start my packing.”
    The prospect of introducing Gordon to her mother is of course a further source of anxiety to Lavinia, but if her plan of Christmasin Fredericksburg, at “the farm,” succeeds, that too will be resolved: Mrs. Harcourt so dislikes the country, and particularly that house, its wrap of river mists, its drafty rooms, that she generally takes to her bed and stays there, during long family stays in Fredericksburg. With luck, her mother will not even appear for meals, Lavinia calculates; Mrs. Harcourt subsists at such times on bouillon and soft-boiled eggs, which the maid takes up on trays, at intervals. She can easily be described to Gordon as “not very well,” which is, God knows, the truth.
    Another virtue of Fredericksburg is just that, the maid situation: at Fredericksburg there is only one, the inconspicuous brown Bessie. Whereas in town, along with Bessie, there is Clarissa and her husband, Oscar, who is not actually a butler, but he looks and acts like one, in his formal black suits, serving dinner. (Well, at least all of them are Negroes, none of them Irish, Lavinia suddenly thinks, wanting both to laugh and to cry at the very thought of Gordon confronted with Irish help. Jesus, with her luck they would turn out to be his distant relatives. At which Lavinia does laugh a little, to herself. She wishes Kitty were around.)
    Six months of exposure to Boston have instructed Lavinia in certain social truths: while “Gordon Shaughnessey” sounded, at first, so romantic and glamorous to her, and sounds so still—so redolent of kings and castles, Irish poetry—in Boston it is not a “good name.”
    But she does not care anymore about those distinctions, those family-money-position badges that used to mean so much to her, about which she has always been so finely acute. None of that is important, of course it is not; she is so much in love with Gordon, and only love is really important. Only love.
    Besides, Gordon is a National Scholar, and he belongs to the Fly Club, despite his name, and the Fly is really tops.
    Lavinia looks like her father, the same gray eyes, same delicate, fine nose, and longish chin. And perhaps this striking resemblance is one of the things that makes her father adore her; more andmore he adores his mirror, this increasingly beautiful young woman, his only child. Middle-aged, almost fifty at her birth (her mother, the beauty, was twenty-five years his junior), Mr. Harcourt’s self-image has been kept young by his daughter, almost atoning for such disappointment with his wife. He is not old and gray and paunchy; he is young!
    But he does not always yield to the whims of his beautiful daughter; of course not, he won’t spoil her.
    And so he now says, “But you know your mother, she isn’t happy at Fredericksburg, Lavinia.”
    He looks at her sternly, and Lavinia returns the look. She does not say, however: Mother isn’t happy anywhere. Neither of them says this, but the sentence lies there between them; it is the truth.
    Mr. Harcourt sighs. “Well, we’ll have to see,” he says.
    Knowing that she has won, they will spend Christmas at Fredericksburg, Lavinia retains a sad smile: it would not do to show triumph over an issue that will surely make her mother unhappier yet.
    But.
    “My mom’s that upset,” says Gordon over the phone, that night. “She’d planned on me being here all the time. And when I said Washington—”
    “Oh,
darling,
” Lavinia cries out, at this announcement of Gordon’s that he is not, after all, coming down to Washington. It seems the worst thing that has ever happened to her: things gone all wrong, for almost