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  “What do you mean?” Celeste was reminded that Carlotta, as much as she irritated her, was far from stupid.

  “Bearing a child changes a woman.”

  “Of course it does.”

  “Some experience diminished enthusiasm for physical relations.” Carlotta held up her hand. “It can cause husbands to wander.”

  “I’m not a husband.”

  “Curtis is, but you do like attention. You’ve thrived on it since childhood.”

  “That doesn’t mean I need physical attention.”

  “Must you be so blunt? It doesn’t matter in the sense that being a mother truly changes a woman. You aren’t going to be first with Ramelle, Celeste, and you have to be first.”

  This statement, true, hit Celeste like a thump to the chest. She felt the sting of truth in it.

  “I’d like to think I’ve outgrown that,” Celeste softly replied.

  “You can’t outgrow that any more than I can stop being your big sister. I know I have faults.” She sighed, then smiled. “But being wrong isn’t one of them. Come to church with me. We’ll be fine.”

  “I promised you I would.”

  “And I pray for you every day, and for Stirling and Curtis. For Mother and Father, whom I trust we will see in the sweet bye and bye, and for Spotts. We will all be together again. My nephews and now a new nephew or niece.”

  “And Herbert?” Celeste couldn’t resist. “Do you pray for him?”

  “Yes, although I occasionally lack the proper enthusiasm. I ask the Blessed Virgin Mother to help me. You should become acquainted with her.”

  “I’m acquainted with you. Perhaps that’s close enough.”

  “Do you think so? Do you really think so?”

  Herbert came into the room, noticed the unusual flush on his wife’s cheeks, and knew spirits had produced this glow. “Mrs. Van Dusen, come and take a walk with me. I have missed your company.”

  As she walked out on the arm of her husband, Celeste took a deep breath and stood up. She chatted with guests, reached the grand staircase, stepped up halfway to gaze down upon the rooms below, buzzing with people. Attractive as some of these people were, there was not one for whom she felt even the slightest twinge of sexual excitement. What an odd and sad commentary. She had been more or less faithful to Ramelle, but no matter where she was, there was nearly always someone to catch her eye, provide that sweet surge of energy. Celeste realized she was becoming mature when she no longer slept with everyone she was attracted to, but this was different. Her body—alive, strong, vibrant, capable of various pleasures—felt not the slightest urge toward anyone.

  Behind her loomed John Singer Sargent’s extraordinary full-length painting of Celeste, completed in 1897, when she was twenty. It almost glowed. She looked like a dazzling Artemis then. Now with the first blush of middle age on her high cheekbones, one might hear a whisper of vulnerability, a touch of mortality: Artemis older but Artemis still.

  Celeste remembered her Virgil. In Eclogues a tomb appears with an inscription to Daphnis and this idyllic setting was later made famous by the painter Nicolas Poussin in the seventeenth century. “Et in Arcadia ego.” Death tells us that even in beauty, he is there. It’s a line known by most people in the Western world and it came to her now with peculiar force. What Celeste didn’t know was what or who was dying. Or was it simply a warning? Best to live while one can.

  “It’s like a shroud.” Celeste stood at the window, watching the mid-afternoon snowfall.

  Fannie Jump and Fairy laid down their cards on the table. A good game of Five Hundred failed to alleviate the dismal feelings about a winter that wouldn’t end. Even the main fashion magazines from France, Italy, and England didn’t entice them now that the card game ended. They liked to study fashions together but not today.

  Celeste returned to her seat. “Sherry?”

  “Oh, why not?” Fannie played with the edge of her cards, then tried to peek at Fairy’s hand.

  “Stop that,” Fairy commanded.

  “I thought we’d finished,” Fannie replied.

  Cora stuck her head in the warm library where the table had been set up. “Sandwiches?”

  “Yes, we’re ready.” Celeste smiled as Fannie rose to pour herself something stronger than sherry.

  Crystal decanters sparkled on a built-in bar. The shelves, jammed with books, reflected Celeste’s wide range of interests. Fannie poured a sherry for Fairy, then sat down.

  When Cora came in with the tray of sandwiches, she looked to Celeste, who said, “We’ve finished. We lost heart.”

  For years, Cora had circled the card table offering sandwiches and condiments. A system had developed so she would move a sandwich to give Celeste a hint as to what the other card players held in their hands. Celeste’s old school chums never caught on, but that was the only thing she could slide by them. They knew her too well.

  “Is Stirling selling the shoe factory?” Fannie reached for a ham and cheese sandwich cut into a perfect triangle.

  “No. Why?”

  “Creighton wants to know. Since Stirling is no longer managing the company, he thought perhaps it would be for sale. He’s feeling quite competitive with Herbert Van Dusen, who’s taking a chance and buying some sort of a motor dealership. Creighton swears the internal combustion machine naysayers will eat their words.”

  “Stirling keeps his eye on the leather market.” Celeste settled back into her chair. “He’ll never let it go, because Owings Shoe keeps winning those army contracts. I asked him what about a war’s end. Stirling said we’d lose a great deal of business, although he did hope there would be no more huge wars. However, if one should occur, Owings Shoe will be ready. We still have the army business. But he gives all his attention to the ball bearing factory now. Stirling is prudent in selecting people to run companies, no matter what the product. He’s found a man who believes he can move production into civilian men’s shoes.”

  Fannie agreed. “I’d perish from boredom, wouldn’t you? One ball bearing looks pretty much like another.” She held up her cards as she giggled behind them.

  “Oh no. Different sizes. Different uses, but those ball bearings are critical for industry. You should hear him.”

  “But wouldn’t you be bored, dear?” Fairy asked in her perfectly modulated voice.

  “No. No. I’d want to make deals, to sell more to make even more deals with other companies in other countries.” Celeste fanned and folded her cards with a snap.

  “Worshipping at Our Lady of the Cash Register, are we?” Fannie prodded.

  This reminded Celeste of her discussion with Carlotta at the wedding party, which she relayed.

  “How very odd. Carlotta, civil.” Fairy inhaled the word civil.

  “She was tight,” Celeste informed them, “but we actually sat in the dining room and did not engage in intense disagreement.” She held up her hand. “She did, as you would expect, bring up the Blessed Virgin Mother, but she surprised me.”

  Fairy thought about this. “She is your big sister. She is brilliant and well educated, as you all are. She just took a turn down an avenue to the Vatican, I suppose. Who is to say why?”

  Fannie, enlivened by the thought. “Say, Celeste, you don’t think she’s suffering some sort of guilt about having a child out of wedlock. Oh, wouldn’t that be juicy!”

  “No. She never went away for any extended time. Carlotta suffers no guilt, period. Mother never said anything either. Well, she wouldn’t, but the strain always showed. Mother couldn’t hide anything.”

  “I adored your mother.” Fannie smiled.

  “Everybody did,” Fairy added.

  “I always felt I would never measure up to Mother,” Celeste confessed. “Not that she criticized me, but I took such a different path.”

  “We all feel that way. Can you imagine measuring up to Amelia Schneider?” Fannie named her deceased mother. “She starved herself so she’d fit into those Worth gowns.”

  Celeste recalled the el
egant woman: “Perfection.”

  “Yes, well, I am not starving myself.” Fannie glanced down at her ample bosom.

  “Did you enjoy the company of Keith Goldschmidt?” Celeste inquired lightly. “He seemed to think your proportions perfect.”

  “A sweet man.”

  That always meant she’d slept with him.

  “Just so,” Celeste remarked, and Fairy laughed.

  “Here we are and I forgot to ask how Ramelle and Curtis fared. I assume they made it to the train. All is well?” Fairy tilted up her chin, a smile poised on her lips.

  “A flurry of hugs, kisses, promises to write, and send news the moment the baby is born. Curtis handed her up to the porter as though she was the loveliest, most fragile treasure on earth.”

  “She is,” Fairy said.

  “She is,” Celeste agreed, then lowered her voice, glanced from friend to friend. “But I had the oddest sensation standing on the steps as the festivities raged on. I thought, ‘Et in Arcadia ego.’ ”

  Startled, both women stared at Celeste.

  Fannie, trying to put a good face on it, replied, “But of course. In the midst of rejoicing, we must remember that constant shadow. Don’t you recall Professor Loomis’s lecture about Virgil and then Epicurus our junior year in Latin?”

  “God, eight years of Latin. Four in high school and four at Smith.” Fairy also wished to lighten the mood. “No one can say we don’t tote around the wisdom of ancients.”

  “That’s just it, isn’t it?” Celeste, enlivened now, spoke a bit louder. “We deny it. How can death spur us on if there is resurrection? Does not death drive us on and on? The sheer fear of it and we’ve blunted it. I think the Greeks and the Romans were more honest than we are.”

  “About everything. Especially sex.” Fannie laughed.

  “Darling, you would know.” Fairy teased her. “But Celeste, Saint Augustine wrote that ‘It is only in the face of death that man’s self is born,’ and who is more Christian than Saint Augustine?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.” Celeste felt the soft bread between her fingertips, putting the sandwich down on her small plate for a moment. “My conversation with Carlotta must have affected me more than I thought.”

  Fairy and Fannie again stared at her. In silence.

  She looked at them. “Well, it did.”

  “Celeste,” Fannie simply said, her register low.

  “Ah.” Celeste’s shoulders dropped. “Is it true? Does being a mother change a woman?”

  “You’re asking that? It hasn’t changed me and when my younger beloved son leaves for college, I am changing the locks on the doors!” Fannie burst out, followed by peals of laughter, her cheeks rosy.

  “You are awful. Truly awful.”

  “Fairy, you didn’t have children and I know you wanted them. I’m sorry that couldn’t be, but I had three and I would have strangled all three were it not for the nannies and then the governesses, and thank God, truly, thank God for their grotesquely expensive schools out of state.”

  “Fannie.” Fairy frowned.

  “I was not meant to be a mother.”

  “But you love them.”

  She wiggled in her seat a moment. “I do love them but that doesn’t mean I want to listen to every word, to constantly set their feet on the paths of righteousness.”

  “We don’t worry about that.” Now it was Celeste’s turn to erupt in laughter.

  Fannie squared her shoulders. “Celeste, who knows how Ramelle will act? She may become one of those women who thinks her baby is the alpha and omega and she will constantly be wiping the alpha and omega. You won’t know until the blessed event occurs.”

  “And she’ll come home for six months each year.” Fairy brightened.

  “Um,” was all Celeste said.

  “Oh, darling.” Fannie leaned over to touch her elbow. “If she’s lost her desires as Carlotta suggested, you put a good face on it and take a mistress or a divine young man. I assume you haven’t lost your eye for a beautiful woman, a handsome man, a good horse. And that’s the real problem here. There is no ill that can’t be cured by a good canter. No one has been able to ride for three weeks!”

  Celeste was relieved to slide out from under the topic she had initiated. “I’m sure that’s it.”

  Fairy finished one of her triangles. “No one can make a sandwich like Cora. You know I thought of our philosophy class. Montaigne wrote, ‘Although the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death saves us.’ So you see, we are deepened, enriched. All is well, Celeste.”

  “It really is.” Fannie, for all her joking, loved Celeste, and she knew heartache also attended the joy of seeing her lover get what she always hoped for: motherhood.

  The back door slammed. Juts could be heard tromping into the kitchen.

  Cora, carrying back the emptied tray, called out, “Did you wipe your feet?”

  “I did. I did, and Momma, I am going to kill Dimps Jr. She called me flat-chested in front of all the girls in gym class. I am not flat-chested.”

  “Pipe down. Celeste is playing cards.”

  Celeste called from the library, “Juts, come in here.”

  Crestfallen, fearing a reprimand first from Celeste and then her mother, Juts walked through the open door to the library. “Good afternoon, Miss Chalfonte, Mrs. Creighton, and Mrs. Thatcher. I’m sorry I yelled.”

  Fannie turned to fully face the fourteen-year-old, soon to be fifteen. “She’s spiteful and jealous. Pay her no mind. You look quite nice and you have a few years to go in the development department.”

  “That’s what I tell her.” Cora put her hand on her youngest daughter’s shoulder. “Your sister has curves. Don’t worry, honey, you will, too.”

  “Your mother is right, Juts.” Fairy smiled.

  “But Dimps Jr. is my age and she’s…” Juts made a curving motion with her hands over her own bosoms.

  “Dear, Dimps Jr. looks like a cow.” Celeste pronounced this with finality. “I suggest you send her to Green’s Dairy.”

  Delighted, Juts laughed as did the others. An idea popped into her head for the St. Patrick’s Day dance at school. She wouldn’t kill Dimps Jr. This would be worse.

  “They need to be taller.” Juts eyed the wooden representation of the fork and spoon that ran away with one another.

  The cat, the fiddle, and the moon were finished but not yet painted. Although the approaching dance was a St. Patrick’s Day dance, the high school always seized upon a theme. This year it was “The Cat and the Fiddle,” done up to be Irish, of course. Large shamrocks, cut out from heavy paper, with green sparkles, were lined up in a vertical bin. The school’s art teacher, Mrs. Stiles, worked with each art class to produce the objects.

  Arms crossed over her chest, she studied the fork and spoon. “You don’t want them too tall.”

  “How about our height?” Juts motioned to Ev to stand tall.

  “Well—”

  Dick Yost walked over. “Mrs. Stiles, the fork should be a little taller. My height.” He smiled at Juts. “After all, the fork is a man.”

  “Where are we going to get his shoes?” Ev wondered.

  “We’ll find something.” Juts smiled back at Dick. “But a fork doesn’t need shoes.”

  Ev disagreed. “He has feet.”

  Juts studied the figure. “You’re right. Like I said, we’ll think of something.”

  Dimps Jr. called out, “Mrs. Stiles, I can’t find the glue pot.”

  “All right, make the fork four inches higher, and don’t forget, big smiles. They’re happy.” Mrs. Stiles unfolded her arms to walk to the other side of the room.

  Glue pots, while not expensive, would dry out or some student would sit on one. Mrs. Stiles kept careful books, as did most of the teachers at South Runnymede High.

  “I’ll bring shoes,” Dick volunteered.

  Juts glanced down at his feet. “I’d better measure your foot if you’re bringing an old pair of your shoes.”

>   He bent over, untied the right shoe. Juts slapped down a piece of heavy construction paper. He placed his foot on it. She outlined his foot.

  “Okay, the left.” He untied his left shoe.

  As Juts traced his foot, Dimps Jr. sashayed by. The lost glue pot had been found, and she just happened to toss a dollop onto Juts’s hair.

  Jaw open, Dick stepped back as Juts shot up, grabbed the glue pot from Dimps Jr.’s hand, whipped the brush out, and smacked her flat across the face with it.

  “Oww!” Dimps Jr. screamed, although it didn’t hurt.

  Not satisfied, Juts jammed the brush into Dimps Jr.’s mouth. Ev, behind Juts, put her hands on Juts’s shoulders to back her away.

  Dimps Jr. squalled like a baby. Mrs. Stiles, furious at both the girls, charged over, snatched the pot from Juts’s hand, gave it to Dick, who still hadn’t said a word. “You two. The principal’s office right now!”

  Head high, Juts marched out of the room, Dimps Jr. following, weeping. Mrs. Stiles, a yard ruler in her hand, walked behind the two, every now and then giving them a good crack across their calves.

  Back in the room, the other students talked at once, some laughing. Dimps Jr.’s coterie feigned tremendous shock and disapproval.

  “Juts should be thrown out of school!” Maude Ischatta loudly proclaimed.

  Betty Wilcox came right back at her. “Dimps started it. She’s got it in for Juts because Dick Yost asked Juts to the dance.”

  As this was news to Dick Yost, he blushed.

  Richard Barshinger, carefully oiling his small handsaw, said, “Oil and water.” He looked at Dick. “She does have her cap set for you, but Dimps has had it in for Juts since first grade. Really, oil and water.”

  The others agreed.

  Ev wisely changed the subject. Everyone knew she was Juts’s best friend. No need to defend her.

  “Juts is good with her hands. We need her for these decorations and we need Dimps to sell tickets. She’s got a lot of friends in the junior class and some in the senior. We need them both.”

  “Oh, the seniors aren’t going to come. We’re beneath them.” Betty shrugged.