Three Bright Pebbles. Leslie Ford

      Copyright © 1938, 1966 by Zenith Brown.

      All rights reserved.

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidepress.com

      1

      Dan Winthrop shifted his blond six-feet-two a notch lower in the green and white awning-shaded chair, and stared moodily at the large divot he’d been digging with the heel of his shoe in my blue-grass lawn.

      “Oh, I know, Grace. But the thing nobody realizes about Mother is she’s never really happy unless she’s stirring up a hell’s broth for somebody else to stew in.”

      It was hot and sultry out there in my back garden in Georgetown, the air pungent and heavy like ominous ripe fruit ready to burst. I tried to tell myself—being a sensible woman, mostly—that it was the weather, so appallingly unseasonable for early June, that was making this young man whom I knew very well into somebody I didn’t know at all. His jaw was set so that his big good-natured mouth, usually twisted into an infectious and engaging grin, was drawn grimly down at the corners. His blue eyes, ordinarily lighted with an exasperating sort of nothing-sacred twinkle, were as somber and sultry as the leaden clouds gathering behind the summer sky . . . and as disturbing.

      I shifted in my own chair, as if moving would dispel the strange uneasiness that had settled between us.

      “Actually, of course, darling,” I said, “your mother’s one of the most utterly charming people in the world.—Isn’t she?”

      I didn’t add, as my colored cook Lilac had done when Dan Winthrop appeared on our doorstep two days before, “And aren’t you just like her.”—“Law, Mis’ Grace,” Lilac had put it, “ain’t Mist’ Dan sho’ the spit of his Ma?”

      He gave me a gloomy grin.

      “That’s the trouble again, Grace. You see her when she opens Romney for the Garden Pilgrimage, or pours for the Colonial Dames. You don’t have the morning mail turned into a slow motion ticker tape to see whether your stock is up or down or just out in the snow—if you know what I mean.”

      I don’t think I’d ever heard quite such unemotionally distilled bitterness before . . . certainly not from Dan Winthrop. I’d got out of the habit of expecting anything else from his brother Rick, whom I used to run across from time to time, or his little sister Mara, whom I see occasionally. But Rick Winthrop is drunk all the time, or most of the time, and Mara . . . well, I just wouldn’t know about Mara. I didn’t see her often enough even to know whether she was sticking to Alan Keane because she loved him or because it infuriated her mother. And because the children-in-revolt movement always seems rather unreal to me—most parents and children I know getting on more like friends than relatives—I never thought much about it. And if I did, after I’d spent a little time with any of them, I always came comfortably back to the fact that Dan Winthrop, at least, really got on marvelously with his mother. That seemed to make everything all right, some way. Even Mara had a sort of grudging admiration for the way he managed to smooth all the paths.

      Rick, so far as I’d known, never managed to get along with anybody, least of all, apparently, with the girl he’d married just before Christmas—against his mother’s wishes, of course—and deposited, bag and baggage, in the front hall of Romney while he returned to café society. But Dan hadn’t ever gone in for night spots. He’d even had a job that he’d got himself with a shipping company in Paris. He’d been over there three years, and while Mara insisted he only got the job to get on the good side of his mother, he’d certainly kept it, and even gone ahead in it.

      I’d seen him once in Paris, two summers before, working like a horse with everybody else off to Iceland fishing, or climbing about in the Tyrol. I’d expected, some way, when Irene Winthrop called me on the phone and said, “My dear Grace, it’s too marvelous, Dan’s coming home, he’s landing tomorrow, and he’s going to stop by for you, and you’re coming down to Romney with him—it’s really important, I’ll explain everything!” that he’d have grown up in two years, become more serious and adult. So I’d been surprised, when he first turned up, to find he hadn’t changed at all. His ready grin was just as boyish and debonair, and the quick twinkle in his eye just as infectious, and just as many girls phoned him at just as ungodly hours as they had done when he used to be down in Washington during vacations when he was at Williams.

      At least I’d thought he hadn’t changed, up to this moment. I wasn’t so sure, now. Was he, I wondered, like Rick and Mara, a chip off some atavistic block? Because certainly they weren’t any of them like Irene, or like their father, who was a cousin of my husband’s, and died the same month, eight years ago. Which is how I’d known them all so well during their adolescent and college days. Even then Dan had been the only one who didn’t complain constantly about his mother . . . a gay, charming woman, as capricious as an April day, and as lovely, who always seemed much more amused at having produced two great hulking blond sons and a dark elfin daughter than concerned with raising them, or training them for the business of living. I imagine that might explain how, in turn, Dan’s attitude toward her took on, as he grew up, an air of affectionate and protective, rather big-brotherish amusement.

      “I suppose I’m nothing but a first-class bounder,” he said morosely. “Or I’d have stayed over there and said the hell with it.”

      He sat up abruptly and hunched forward, elbows on his knees, plucking at the cellophane wrapping on a pack of cigarettes.

      “But the idea of brother Rick quietly sluicing the family finances down the drain burns me up.”

      I looked at him.

      “It seems to me,” I said, “that brother Rick was making practically the same complaint about you, the last time I saw him.”

      “I know. And the fact is I haven’t had a sou, except at Christmas, from Mother for two years. Not since I wouldn’t throw up my job and come home.”

      “I thought she was delighted you’d got a job,” I said.

      “She was. Only her idea of a job is something you go to Tuesdays, if you feel like it, and knock off for the week end at lunch Thursdays. She couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t take a couple of weeks off to go to Budapest to a party the new air attaché was giving for his freckle-faced daughter. So she stopped my allowance. Then she heard somebody lecture about Youth and Spring in Paris, and decided I was right to stay there, and started it again. Then she heard another guy on The Pitfalls of Paris, and wired me to come home on the next boat. That practically ended everything.”

      He lighted a cigarette, a sardonic grin in one corner of his mouth.

      “That was O. K. till somebody started advertising