“If you know so much, why don’t you put them into practice? There’ve been nothing but scenes in this family since I was old enough to talk, and I’m sick of it.”

The girl’s footsteps crossed the veranda, and the elder Slocums were silent. A full minute passed before the woman said, in a voice I barely recognized: “Leave her alone, James. I’m warning you.”

The throaty whisper made the short hairs prickle at the back of my neck.

Chapter 4

I moved to the center of the room and leafed through a Theatre Arts magazine that was lying on a table. In a little while Marvell came back with a bowl of ice, glasses, Scotch, and soda, clinking together on a myrtlewood tray. “Excuse the delay, old man. The housekeeper’s busy making canapés, and gave me absolutely no help at all. Do you like it strong?”

“I’ll pour my own, thanks.” I made a tall highball with plenty of soda. It was still early, a few minutes after five by my watch.

Marvell made himself a short one and took it in two gulps, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a soft egg caught in his throat. “The Slocums aren’t inhospitable,” he said, “but they’re nearly always late. One has to fend for oneself. Cathy informs me you’re a literary agent?”

“Of a kind. I work for a man who buys fiction if he thinks it has movie possibilities. Then he tries to interest a producer, or make a package deal with a star.”

“I see. Would I know the gentleman’s name?”

“Probably not. I’m not allowed to use his name, anyway, because it’s worth money. It bids up prices.” I was improvising, but I knew twenty men in the game, and some of them operated like that.

He leaned back in his chair and hitched one thin knee over the other. His legs were pale and hairless above the drooping socks. His pale blond gaze seemed lashless. “You don’t seriously think my play is cinematic? I’ve sought a rather difficult beauty, you know.”

I dipped my embarrassment in whiskey and soda, and waited for it to dissolve. It stayed where it was, a smiling mask on my face. “I never make snap decisions. I’m paid to keep tabs on the summer theaters, and that’s what I do. There’s a lot of young acting-talent floating around. In any case, I’ll have to see all of your play before I can make a report.”

“I noticed you there this afternoon,” he said. “What did happen before that frightful scene between Cathy and her father?”

“I wouldn’t know. I was watching the play.”

He got up for another drink, moving sideways across the room like a shying horse. “The girl’s quite a problem,” he said over his shoulder. “Poor dear James is positively hag-ridden by his womenfolk. A less responsible man would simply decamp.”

“Why?”

“They bleed him emotionally.” He smiled palely over his second drink. “His mother began it when he was a very small boy, and it’s gone on for so many years that he actually doesn’t know he’s being imposed upon. Now his wife and daughter are carrying on the good work. They’re wasting the dear man’s emotional substance.”

He realized then that he was talking too much, and changed the subject abruptly: “I’ve often wondered why his mother chooses to live on a barren slope like this. She could live anywhere, you know, absolutely anywhere. But she chooses to wither away in this dreadful sun.”

“Some people like it,” I said. “I’m a native Californian myself.”

“But don’t you ever weary of the soul-destroying monotony of the weather?”

Only of phonies, I thought. Of the soul-destroying monotony of phonies I wearied something awful. But I explained, for the hundredth time, that Southern California had two seasons, like any Mediterranean climate, and that people who couldn’t tell the difference lacked one or more of the five senses.

“Oh, quite, quite,” he told me, and poured himself another stiff drink, while I was still sipping the dregs of my first. The whisky didn’t seem to affect him at all. He was an aging Peter Pan, glib, bland and eccentric, and all I had really found out was that he was fond of James Slocum. Everything he said and did was so stylized that I couldn’t get at his center, or even guess where it was.

I was glad when Maude Slocum came into the room, her straight white smile gleaming in the amber light from the windows. She had left her emotions on the veranda, and seemed in control of herself. But her eyes looked past me, and far beyond the room.

“Hello, Francis.” He half rose from his chair, and slumped back into it. “You really must forgive me, Mr. Archer, I’m a most unsatisfactory hostess—”

“On the contrary.” She was dressed to attract attention in a black-and-white striped linen dress with a plunging neckline and a very close waist. I gave her attention.

“Francis,” she said sweetly, “would you see if you can find James for me? He’s somewhere out front.”

“Right, darling.” Marvell seemed pleased with the excuse to get away, and trotted out of the room. Nearly every family of a certain class had at least one hanger-on like him, dutiful and useless and untied. But unless Maude Slocum and he were smooth actors, Marvell wasn’t the apex of her triangle.

I offered to make her a drink but she poured her own, straight. She wrinkled her nose over the glass. “I hate Scotch, but James so loves to make the cocktails himself. Well, Mr. Archer, have you been probing the household secrets, rattling the family skeletons and so on?” The question was humorously put, but she wanted an answer.

I glanced at the open window and answered in a lower tone: “Hardly, I’ve had some talk with Marvell, and some with Cathy. No light. No skeletons.” But there was electric tension in the house.

“I hope you don’t think Francis—?”

“I don’t think about him, I don’t understand him.”

“He’s simple enough, I should think—a perfectly nice boy. His income’s been cut off by the British government, and he’s trying desperately to stay in the United States. His family’s the fox-hunting sort, he can’t abide them.” The chattering stopped abruptly, and her voice went shy: “What do you think of Cathy?”

“She’s a bright kid. How old?”

“Nearly sixteen. Isn’t she lovely, though?”

“Lovely,” I said, wondering what ailed the woman. Almost a total stranger, I was being asked to approve of herself and her daughter. Her insecurity went further back than the letter she had given me. Some guilt or fear was drawing her backward steadily, so that she had no enthuse and emote and be admired in order to stay in the same place.

“Loveliness runs in the family, doesn’t it?” I said. “Which reminds me, I’d like to meet you mother-in-law.”

“I don’t understand why—”

“I’m trying to get a picture, and she’s a central figure in it, isn’t she? Put it this way. You’re not so worried about who sent the first letter—that’s safe in my pocket—as you are about the possible effects of a second letter. If I can’t stop the letters at their source, I might be able to circumvent their effects.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. The main thing is that your husband, and your daughter, and your mother-in-law, shouldn’t take the letters seriously. Your husband might divorce you, your daughter might despise you—”

“Don’t say that.” She set down her glass peremptorily on the coffee-table between us.

I went on evenly: “Your mother-in-law might cut off your income. I’ve been thinking, if I launched a poison-pen campaign against the whole family, and made a lot of different accusations, the one that hurts could get lost in the shuffle, couldn’t it?”

“God no! I couldn’t stand it, none of us could.” The violence of her reaction was surprising. Her whole body heaved in the zebra-striped dress, and her breasts pressed together like round clenched fists in the V of her neckline.

“I was only playing with the idea. It needs refining, but there’s something there.”