Hope and wonderment stirred in Nora. She checked her grief. “It’ll never look lovely!”
“Come along. My! Your dress is a mess. Never mind….”
Beth beckoned her husband to the front-hall door. “I’ve got to take Nora on an errand,” she said.
“Is she sick?”
“No. But—”
“Ye gods, Beth! This is an important meeting. And somebody has to serve the refreshments afterward.”
Beth shook her head. “Nora’s important, too! Lenore can serve. She knows where everything is, Henry. Tell her the refrigerator—and the plates are all stacked in the pantry. Oh, she’ll know …!”
5
Charles Conner, Lieutenant Conner, had always liked his mother’s sister and her family. Perhaps it was the kids he had particularly liked, for the father, Jim Williams, wasn’t actually much: an archetypal nobody, a draftsman, a little gray chap who would get lost in a crowd of two. And Beth’s sister Ruth, though she had been very blonde and very pretty at twenty, was careworn now. No wonder, with so small a salary and six kids.
Still he boarded the Central Avenue bus reluctantly. He’d been home for a week now, and he’d had only one real date with Lenore. The rest of the time she’d been busy—or had merely dropped in for an hour, or permitted him the same privilege. But there was a tension in the Bailey house he didn’t understand, though the Baileys had always been tense. And there was a kind of—distance—about Lenore: an attitude he’d never before seen in her. It made him feel with increased anxiety that growing up, entering the service, getting an architectural degree and a commission-doing the things men do—was steadily alienating him from the loyalties, affections and intimacies of his youth.