The place is called Restawhile—and having some twenty rooms, not to speak of servant quarters, is known modestly as a cottage.
Here Dick Cunningham brought his bride following their honeymoon trip through the Orient. Here they spent the greater part of each year. For with its kennels and stables, Nancy loved it next to the house of the fir trees which would always be her castle of romance. Besides, it was not too near Broadway, not near enough for whisperings of the Rialto to tug at the heart or fill the eyes. Or if the dull ache of longing too deep for tears did come, it was a place to hide them from a curious public.
The announcement of Nancy’s marriage and retirement from the stage had come as a shock to the social world and a bomb to the theatrical. Broadway buzzed, Fifth Avenue bristled, and poor Jerry Coghlan almost went crazy. But as the calcium of the society column replaced her beloved footlights, the star of the theater became a star of the social realm and another nine days’ wonder became memory.
The column told of her dinners and dances, of her trips to Florida, her visits to Newport. It listed her [313] ]with her husband among inveterate first-nighters and usually added: “The one-time Nancy Bradshaw whose romantic marriage robbed the stage of one of its most promising young actresses.”
Eventually it announced with clarion blast the arrival of Dick Junior and later Nancy the Second, quite as if a chubby Dick and Nancy Cunningham were more important than the same weight John and Mary Smith.
A fairy tale come true even the most caustic observer would have remarked, had he known the history of the beautiful woman seated on the stone-paved veranda of Restawhile one April afternoon five years after the curtain descended on Act I.
She wore a short white skirt, green sweater and white sport shoes. Strands of hair had been tossed across her eyes by a romp on the lawn with young Dicky. He sat at her feet now, pink legs outstretched, and mobilized between them a regiment of wooden soldiers.
Ted Thorne and her former manager had driven out to read Thorne’s latest drama, written with Lilla Grant in mind. She was the season’s new darling and her hybrid little face with its eyes from the Orient and nose from Erin’s Isle decorated many a magazine cover and wood-cut. It might also have been seen at the Ritz lunching daily with varied and various conquests. She had acquired an air and no longer spoke of her profession as “the show business.” Her gowns were the talk of fashion editors, her hats the despair of imitators. She was colorful as a Bakst drawing and as decorative.
The woman in white skirt and sweater that matched the lawn sat listening at one side of the tea table, while [314] ]Coghlan at her right measured three fingers of Scotch against two of soda and the playwright’s voice sounded vibrant against the sweet spring stillness. It was a tense elemental story suggested to him by Nancy, with Hawaii—land of love—as a setting. Finally he closed the script and looked across at her.
“What do you think of it?”