The lunch was to take place in the Arcadian Court. This was where the ladies lunched, up at the top of Simpsons department store, on Queen Street—a high, wide space, said to be “Byzantine” in design (which meant it had archways and potted palms), done in lilac and silver, with streamlined contours for the lighting fixtures and the chairs. A balcony ran around it halfway up, with wrought-iron railings; that was for men only, for businessmen. They could sit up there and look down on the ladies, feathered and twittering, as if in an aviary.
I’d worn my best daytime outfit, the only possible outfit I had for such an occasion: a navy-blue suit with a pleated skirt, a white blouse with a bow at the neck, a navy-blue hat like a boater. This ensemble made me look like a schoolgirl, or a Salvation Army canvasser. I won’t even mention my shoes; even now the thought of them is too discouraging. I kept my pristine engagement ring folded into my cotton-gloved fist, aware that, worn with clothes like mine, it must look like a rhinestone, or else like something I’d stolen.
The maître d’ glanced at me as if surely I was in the wrong place, or at least the wrong entrance—was I wanting a job? I did look down-at-heels, and too young to be having a ladies’ lunch. But then I gave Winifred’s name and it was all right, because Winifred absolutely lived at the Arcadian Court. (Absolutely lived was her own expression.)
At least I didn’t have to wait, drinking a glass of ice water by myself with the well-dressed women staring at me and wondering how I’d got in, because there was Winifred already, sitting at one of the pale tables. She was taller than I’d remembered—slender, or perhaps willowy, you’d say, though some of that was foundation garment. She had on a green ensemble—not a pastel green but a vibrant green, almost flagrant. (When chlorophyll chewing gum came into fashion two decades later, it was that colour.) She had green alligator shoes to match. They were glossy, rubbery, slightly wet-looking, like My pads, and I thought I had never seen such exquisite, unusual shoes. Her hat was the same shade—a round swirl of green fabric, balanced on her head like a poisonous cake.
Right at that moment she was doing something I had been taught never to do because it was cheap: she was looking at her face in the mirror of her compact, in public. Worse, she was powdering her nose. While I hesitated, not wishing to let her know I’d caught her in this vulgar act, she snapped the compact shut and slipped it into her shiny green alligator purse as if there was nothing to it. Then she stretched her neck and slowly turned her powdered face and looked around her with a white glare, like a headlight. Then she saw me, and smiled, and held out a languid, welcoming hand. She had a silver bangle, which I coveted instantly.
“Call me Freddie,” she said after I’d sat down. “All my chums do, and I want us to be great chums.” It was the fashion then for women like Winifred to favour diminutives that made them sound like youths: Billie, Bobbie, Willie, Charlie. I had no such nickname, so could not offer one in return.
“Oh, is that the ring?” she said. “It is a beauty, isn’t it? I helped Richard pick it out—he likes me to go shopping for him. It does give men such migraines, doesn’t it, shopping? He thought perhaps an emerald, but there’s really nothing like a diamond, is there?”
While saying this, she examined me with interest and a certain chilly amusement, to see how I would take it—this reduction of my engagement ring to a minor errand. Her eyes were intelligent and oddly large, with green eyeshadow on the lids. Her pencilled eyebrows were plucked into a smoothly arched line, giving her that expression of boredom and, at the same time, incredulous astonishment, which was cultivated by the film stars of that era, though I doubt that Winifred was ever much astonished. Her lipstick was a dark pinkish orange, a shade that had just come in—shrimp was the proper name for it, as I’d learned from my afternoon magazines. Her mouth had the same cinematic quality as the eyebrows, the two halves of the upper lip drawn into Cupid’s-bow points. Her voice was what was called a whisky voice—low, deep almost, with a rough, scraped overlay to it like a cat’s tongue—like velvet made of leather.
(She was a card player, I discovered later. Bridge, not poker—she would have been good at poker, good at bluffing, but it was too risky, too much a gamble; she liked to bid on known quantities. She played golf as well, but mostly for the social contacts; she wasn’t as good at it as she made out. Tennis was too strenuous for her; she would not have wanted to be caught sweating. She “sailed,” which meant, for her, sitting on a cushion on a boat, in a hat, with a drink.)
Winifred asked me what I would like to eat. I said anything at all. She called me “dear,” and said that the Waldorf salad was marvellous. I said that would be fine.
I didn’t see how I could ever work up to calling her Freddie: it seemed too familiar, disrespectful even. She was after all an adult—thirty, or twenty-nine at least. She was six or seven years younger than Richard, but they were pals: “Richard and I are such great pals,” she said to me confidingly, for the first time but not for the last. It was a threat, of course, as was much of what she would say to me in this easy and confiding tone. It meant not only that she had claims that predated mine, and loyalties I could not hope to understand, but also that if I ever crossed Richard there would be the two of them to reckon with.
It was she who arranged things for Richard, she told me—social events, cocktail parties and dinners and so forth—because he was a bachelor, and, as she said (and would continue to say, year after year), “Us gals run that end of things.” Then she said that she was just delighted that Richard had finally decided to settle down, and with a nice young girl like me. There’d been a couple of close things—some previous entanglements. (This was how Winifred always spoke of women in relation to Richard—entanglements, like nets, or webs, or snares, or merely like pieces of gummy string left lying around on the ground, that you might get caught on your shoe by mistake.)
Luckily Richard had escaped from these entanglements, not that women did not chase after him. They chased after him in droves, said Winifred, lowering her whisky voice, and I had an image of Richard, his clothing torn, his carefully arranged hair dishevelled, fleeing in panic while a pack of baying females coursed after him. But I could not believe in such an image. I couldn’t imagine Richard running, or hurrying, or even being afraid. I couldn’t imagine him in peril.
I nodded and smiled, unsure of where I myself was assumed to stand. Was I one of the sticky entanglers? Perhaps. On the surface of things however I was being led to understand that Richard had a high intrinsic value, and that I’d better mind my p’s and q’s if I was to live up to it. “But I’m sure you’ll manage,” said Winifred, smiling a little. “You’re so young.” If anything, this youthfulness of mine should have made managing less likely, which was what Winifred was counting on. She had no intention of giving up any managing, herself.
Our Waldorf salads came. Winifred watched me pick up my knife and fork—at least I didn’t eat with my hands, her expression said—and gave a little sigh. I was hard slogging for her, I now realize. No doubt she thought I was sullen, or unforthcoming: I had no small talk, I was so ignorant, so rural. Or perhaps her sigh was a sigh of anticipation—of anticipated work, because I was a lump of unmoulded clay, and now she would have to roll up her sleeves and get down to moulding me.
No time like the present. She dug right in. Her method was one of hint, of suggestion. (She had another method—the bludgeon—but I didn’t encounter it at this lunch.) She said she’d known my grandmother, or at least she’d known of her. The Montfort women of Montreal had been celebrated for their style, she said, but of course Adelia Montfort had died before I was born. This was her way of saying that despite my pedigree we were in effect starting from scratch.