The Necklace Read online

  On the grass, Dicky organized pairs for a three-legged race. Men leaned forward, drunkenly tying their interior legs together with silk neckties.

  “Really, I don’t want . . .” Ethan started. But before he could finish, Ambrose had loosened his orange and black striped tie, pulled it over his head, and leaned down, knotting it around their knees.

  “Defend the Quincy name,” he said as he rose.

  They put their glasses down and put their arms around each other. Someone to the side snapped a picture. At Dicky’s “go,” the contestants stumbled, some with glasses in hand, to the cheers of the onlookers. Ethan took off at a swift hop, rearranging his arms and hefting Ambrose with a forearm under the ribs. The brothers stumbled once. Ethan insisted Ambrose match his rhythm. Ethan huffed them across the grass so quickly that Ambrose felt like he might fall face-first. They were neck and neck with the Rensselaer twins when Ambrose’s foot slipped. They fell to the sound of tearing silk.

  As the Rensselaers crossed Dicky’s makeshift finish line, May rushed to them and awarded the winners a ragged bouquet of late summer flowers ripped from a nearby garden bed. Each twin tucked a posy behind an ear and, with a mincing pose in their white flannel knickers, smiled for a photograph, their lady victory between them, laughing.

  Pale in white chiffon with a bunch of violets pinned low in her dark hair, May played the hostess well. A sheen of excitement covered her heart-shaped face, her huge doll eyes alight. She was usually languid, carrying a sense of easy dreaminess wherever she went, but she brought her full attention to a party.

  Ambrose unknotted what was left of his shredded necktie and swept the grass from his knee. He stood, fumbling in his pockets for a cigarette, which he lit, and then exhaled a plume of smoke through his nose. Shading his hand above his brow, he watched May walk toward them, her swinging gait mindless of two full glasses in her hands.

  She’s happy, Ambrose noted, though she’d been arguing with him for the last week. She reached up and kissed Ethan’s cheek in greeting and handed him a coupe of bubbles. Ambrose watched his brother blush and look away and felt a lightning flash of pride. May charmed most anyone. Then she turned and landed a loud smack near Ambrose’s ear, saying, “They’re all drunk.” She reached for his low-burning cigarette.

  He took his silver cigarette case out of his shirt pocket and nudged it into her elbow. “Come on, May, have your own,” he said, taking her offered drink.

  She shook her head and lodged his cigarette in the side of her mouth, talking around it. “Nuh-uh. Nice girls don’t smoke in public. Just steal little bits here and there.”

  “Since when are you a nice girl?” he asked, surrendering his cigarette to her and repocketing his case.

  She laughed. It was one of the things he liked about her, that she could laugh at herself. She hip-checked him, and to hear her laugh again he purposefully fell down on the ground and rolled forward in an exaggerated somersault, as if she’d really toppled him. He spilled his drink in the process.

  Righting himself and brushing his white flannels, he said, “Now look what you’ve done.” He reached for his overturned glass and picked bits of grass off it. “ ‘Waste not, want not’ is the motto of all Quincys.”

  A look of annoyance crossed May’s face, and then she resettled it into its usual bright social arrangement. “How was it down at the mines?” she asked, handing Ambrose back his ashy cigarette and surveying him through a haze of smoke. “Saying good-bye?” She turned to Ethan and, in an exaggeratedly confidential tone, said, “He was down at the mines this week.”

  Ambrose’s eyes widened; he hadn’t told anyone he’d been out there. May had a way of finding out all his secrets.

  “You can’t possibly accomplish anything down there,” Ethan said to his brother, ineffectively masking his irritation.

  “Who says I’m trying to accomplish anything?” Ambrose threw the cigarette to the grass, grinding it under his foot.

  Ambrose was leaving his job at their father’s iron ore and shipping company on the Great Lakes. He’d been an undergraduate when the US got into the war, and he’d immediately wanted to enlist, along with half his class at Princeton. His father tried to convince him that finishing college was more important than dying in a trench in Europe. Such a justification might be fine for others, but Ambrose knew what his conscience told him to do. Action, that was the only basis for judging a life, or so he’d decided after declaring a major in philosophy. When Ambrose revealed that he intended to refuse officer’s training and enter the army as a private, he delivered the news with a pert lecture to his father on Rousseau and the veil of ignorance.

  But Israel was nothing if not a seasoned strategist. Appalled, he promised his son a trip around the world after the war, if he’d only graduate college before enlisting. Ambrose couldn’t resist the lure. In this way he was weak; he’d admit it. But then the war ended quickly, with most of the men Ambrose knew barely finishing their training before the armistice was announced.

  He still wanted his trip, even more so since he felt he’d been cheated out of fighting. But after graduation Israel lagged on his promise, insisting Ambrose come home and work first.

  If Ambrose was going to work, he had thought he might at least be useful. So he’d taken his Kant and his Kierkegaard and his Nietzsche down to the mines and talked to the men about their lives. After a few trips, his father asked to have lunch with him at the Union Club downtown. The men were uncomfortable with him in the ore yards, his father explained. The manager at the mine was complaining. You have to respect their work, his father told him. Ambrose had quoted St. Augustine to his exasperated father, who patiently explained that such things were fine for study, but one didn’t live one’s life based on them.

  “He just gets in the way when he goes to the mines,” Ethan said now, turning to May as if Ambrose weren’t there.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ambrose said. “Thank you for the party.” He put an arm around May’s waist, wanting to bring her close, wanting to change the subject. He was leaving to see the world, his dream for years. He didn’t want to think about the mines. He landed a kiss in May’s hair, which he’d meant for her cheek.

  “Just don’t come home with some tropical disease,” May said, elbowing him. He kissed her again, this time at the corner of her mouth.

  “Come home with a bride,” Ethan said, and Ambrose held May a little more tightly into his side. Ethan could sometimes blunder.

  “Corrupting a spinster?” Ambrose said, trying to cover his brother’s faux pas.

  Ethan fumbled with his glass and then drained it. “Some maidenly sister of a British officer stationed out in God knows where.” He said it in a hearty, joshing tone, trying to cover up his suggestion, in front of May, that Ambrose come home with a wife. “Even you could land a girl like that.”

  Ambrose had a moment of mercy for his brother. Could Ethan be blamed for saying what everyone else thought? Ambrose’s travels would have him gone for at least a year, perhaps longer.

  “No corrupting,” said May, joking and clearly not upset by this topic, to Ambrose’s surprise.

  Ethan cocked his head, as if hearing something far away. Then he held a hand out to May and said, “I seem to remember that you like this song.”

  Ambrose watched his brother lead her off, wishing he’d thought to ask her first. May did like the song, how attentive of his brother to remember. A sour note echoed in Ambrose’s head like a faint memory. He watched Ethan take her in his arms, watched them begin to sway on the dance floor—parquet over grass in a corner of the lawn surrounded by summer phlox and asters.

  Ambrose had met her first. He’d been intrigued from the start, lots of men were. And he’d spent a good amount of time trying to unravel why. May was lovely, yes, but so were lots of other girls. She was smart, but not uncommonly so. Ambrose had finally decided, after a good amount of contemplation, that what May had was an appealing underlying hunger. An appetite that peeked out at him th
rough her varied reading, her smoking, her love of movement and music. She radiated a constrained want, glimpsed tantalizingly, but fleetingly, since they’d been going around together. She was the only girl in their set who knew the passwords to the hidden speakeasies he and his friends liked to frequent downtown. Really, most of those back rooms were grimy. May would order herself a lime-based cocktail and polish it off with a smart licking of fingers. Her subtle watching of the world, a lying in wait, as if given an opening and a blind eye, she’d grab the biggest piece of cake, the costliest jewel, the rarest prize. It was part of her allure—an appetite that matched his own.

  Now, in a patch of afternoon sunlight, watching May laugh at something Ethan said, sweat dampened Ambrose’s collar. Their social circle was small, and he and Ethan went to all the same parties. In this way, May had become Ethan’s friend as well. But that laughter, it lit an unfamiliar feeling in Ambrose, a tiny spark of anger, fanned with a breeze of envy. He noted how close Ethan was holding her, and how quickly she’d agreed to dance. But this laughter between them—it was as if he’d caught them doing something much more intimate. He tried to remember the last time he made May laugh like that.

  He felt his sister, Loulou, at his side before he saw her. She had the habit of stealth. “Are you already gone?” she asked. “You look a million miles away.”

  Though only fifteen, she’d begged Israel to let her come to May’s party. It was both a testament to his father’s fondness for May and to his general cluelessness when it came to raising a daughter that he let her, imagining an afternoon of punch and cake under supervision of the faultless May. It was not the sort of thing a girl with a living mother would be permitted.

  Loulou singsonged in his ear, “You love her.”

  “What do you know about love?” Ambrose noted a Rensselaer twin had tried to cut in on May, but Ethan had rebuffed him.

  “I know you two belong together. And don’t think it escaped my notice that you didn’t deny it just now. Or ask me who I was talking about, for that matter.”

  He turned to focus on her then, noting she was almost chest-height now. “I suppose there are little bluebirds circling my head? Or is it the stars in my eyes?”

  Loulou watched May’s feet while ghosting the dance steps, practicing.

  “Longing glances across the dance floor, lots of sighing?” he continued.

  “Make fun, but I know the truth.”

  “Tell it to Sweeney.”

  “Maybe I’ll tell it to May,” she said, starting for the dance floor.

  Ambrose grabbed her forearm, stopping her.

  “See,” she said, looking where he’d grasped her arm. “Proof’s in the pudding.”

  “You can’t embarrass me during my own party,” he said, trying to deflect.

  “You should never be embarrassed by love, brother.”

  “That’s older brother to you, and I swear I am talking to Father about your reading habits, Louisa. It’s made you soft in the head.”

  “My head’s fine. It’s yours that needs examining. You might be older, but you’re hardly wiser. Why don’t you just marry her and spend the honeymoon traveling?”

  “I’m not in love with May. We’re not getting married.”

  “Sure you’re not. I just hope she’ll wait around for a wet blanket like you. She’s so popular, you know.”

  “Everything you know about love you’ve read in those novels. Jane Austen was a spinster.” Ambrose signaled to a passing waiter for a drink.

  She flushed, and Ambrose realized his harshness too late. She was addicted to those books, to the entire notion of romance, really, and she wasn’t even out yet.

  Ambrose tried to think of something kind to say, glad for the waiter with his tray of new drinks. Loulou also took a stem, raising her eyebrows at him over the rim, daring him to stop her. And because he didn’t want to be harsh twice, he didn’t.

  Ethan and May parted at the end of the song. Ethan silenced the orchestra with a wave, and then cupped his hands around his mouth, announcing loudly to all, “Shoe dance.” He picked up a willow laundry basket he’d stashed next to the band’s dais for just this purpose.

  Tittering girls removed one dancing slipper and put it in Ethan’s basket, while the wallflowers waited for him to come by with his cajoling before they gave up a shoe.

  Loulou leaned her drink on Ambrose’s arm and slipped her foot out of one kidskin slipper, watching her brother’s face to see if he’d object.

  “Lou, I didn’t mean . . .”

  “Save it,” she said. “You always could be a jerk.”

  Chastened, Ambrose was silent.

  “But I love you anyway,” she said lightly, dropping her shoe in Ethan’s basket as he gave her a wink. Fondness for their little sister was one of the few pure things the brothers agreed on unobstructed by competition or self-protection. That alone was simple.

  “Probably because you’re a romantic,” she continued. “More so than you think. The true definition of one, actually.”

  “Now, Prince Charmings,” Ethan called. “No elbows and no pushing.” The orchestra started up a drumroll. “Wait until I say, ‘Go,’ please, before you find your Cinderella.” He dumped the shoes in the middle of the dance floor in an untidy heap and stepped back gingerly, as if from dynamite.

  Ambrose spotted May’s gold T-strap with the curved Louis heel and started to edge toward the side of the dance floor nearest to his target.

  At Ethan’s “Go!” Dicky Cavanaugh skidded headfirst into the pile with a flourish. May’s shoe landed at Ethan’s feet. But Ambrose sped up and snatched the shoe by the beaded strap at the last minute. Ethan looked his brother in the eye and then put his hands in his pockets. “You’re leaving soon.”

  Men huddled around the dance floor flourishing shoes on bended knee, or enacting exaggerated tug-of-wars over particularly delicate prizes. Dicky pretended to faint from the smell of a satin pump, much to the red-faced humiliation of Gretchen Van Horn, who stormed across the grass, slightly limping on one stockinged foot.

  Ambrose found May chatting with a group of friends at a distance from the hilarity. He swung her shoe by the strap.

  “Have you tried that on others?” she asked, barely turning from the group. “Are you sure it’s mine?”

  “Course it’s yours,” he said, kneeling down and balancing her calf as he helped her slip her foot in, indeed the match. May bent down to adjust the buckle.

  “You make a handsome retriever. Good dog.” She patted the top of his head before he’d had a chance to straighten himself, then she turned back to her friends.

  “That means you dance with me,” he said, holding out his hand.

  “Dance card’s full,” she said, flourishing the little tasseled book with a drawing of a pagoda on the cover that hung from her wrist. He removed it by its thin silken cord and briefly scanned it, noting the many crossing outs and overwritings of men’s names.

  “What dance card?” he asked, tucking it into his back pocket next to his hip flask. “It’s my party, isn’t it? And I want to dance,” he said, leading her to the dance floor. “With you.”

  She felt lavish in his arms as he brought her close in the afternoon heat.

  “You’re a luxury,” he said, overwhelmed by the realness of her. Her pale white dress hinted at paler delights beneath. “An extravagance. Anyone ever tell you that?”

  She socked his arm. “I’d rather be a necessity.”

  The band leader launched into the popular song they’d been dancing to all summer, “Down by the Ohio.” She smelled of the violets at her neck.

  “Don’t give me the absent treatment.” He jostled her elbow. “I’ve rescued your shoe. Shouldn’t you be trying to captivate me?” They rounded the edge of the dance floor.

  “Capture you?” she said, mishearing him. “You’re leaving. Why would I waste my time?” He could feel her hand on the back of his neck, palm facing out, waving to a friend across the dance floor.
/>   After they’d made one full circuit without speaking, she finally said, “Maybe if I were a necessity, you wouldn’t be leaving.” She tugged at his collar.

  He pulled her closer yet. He’d put off his dreams once for his father. He wouldn’t do it again. “Come with me,” he breathed in her hair. This was his familiar line in their drama.

  May nodded to a couple dancing next to them, smiling. “You know I can’t. Don’t tease me.” Indeed, he’d asked before. Each time, she’d refused. Each time, he hadn’t expected her to say yes.

  “Just come.” Ambrose had stopped them now. They stood still on the dance floor. “With me.” He understood he was being outrageous. All the other times they’d discussed this had felt hypothetical. He’d used it to tease her, to create distance before their separation. But in this moment, he felt the primacy of the truth that had been there each time. He wanted her with him. He could see her hesitate this time, could feel it in his arms.

  “I’m supposed to travel overseas alone with you for months at a time, and then just come back and what?”

  And there it was—floating between them was the knowledge that of course May would go with him, if only he’d propose. Yet even under those circumstances—traveling together while affianced, not married—there’d be incredible scandal, as much as if they’d eloped. To May’s credit, he guessed she was ready to buck convention just that much, but no farther.

  They started moving again, dancing in a circle. They’d argued on the periphery of this all week. Bickering about music, people they knew in common, even ice cream flavors. Never discussing the real issue before them, or, more precisely, before Ambrose. He could propose and endure what he knew would be immediate excitement and instantaneous pressure from both their parents. A round of frantic parties and planning that would tie them both to social expectation and derail his plans for a second time. He refused to be thwarted again. This time he’d be free, and he wanted May to share that feeling, that high so close to liberation. If he could just get her to see that one brave decision was all that was called for. After that they’d be free, both of them.