White Jade. V. J. Banis

now I had been mostly amused, but as he handed me the paper, I had a presentiment of what I was going to learn. The paper was open to the society page. How on earth he had even come across the announcement I couldn’t guess, since he was not given to reading the society columns. Something must have caught his eye as he turned through the section.

      I truly had not given any thought to Jeff’s beautiful heiress since that one conversation, but I recognized the name at once” “Mary Morgan to Wed,” the headline announced. I suppose I knew without reading further who the bridegroom was going to be. I was less surprised than I would have expected to be.

      I never saw him again until that unsettling meeting in Elsinore. At first, because I was young and in love and thought the world ought to accommodate itself to that fact, I refused to accept it as the truth. I waited, thinking he would call and assure me it had been some awful silly mistake.

      He didn’t call, and I went through another stage in which I railed and swore how much I hated him, and avoided the truth in my father’s eyes. I would never speak to him again, I vowed. He could come back, begging for forgiveness, and I would spit on him.

      In the end, hating myself for the humiliation I was subjecting myself to, I went to him. Or at least I tried to. I went to his apartment. I rang the bell and listened, positive I heard him inside. I knocked and I cried and I called his name until the blowsy woman who lived next door came out to investigate the ruckus.

      If he was there, inside, he never opened the door, any more than he answered the phone, or replied to my letters, letters that were increasingly desperate, increasingly shameless.

      I don’t know what cruel sense of humor, what perverse emotion, brought him to send me an invitation to his wedding. I often wondered afterward how he explained my name on the list. Even more heartbreaking, I wondered how he had intended to introduce me to his bride if I had been so bold as to show up.

      But of course I did not. He had known I would never come. He had always known, better than I, just what I would do.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      It was evening when I came through the vaulted waiting room at Grand Central and out into the cold air again. There was no snow falling here. It was a chilly autumn evening. The raucous after-work traffic had begun to thin.

      Ordinarily I would take the subway home, but I was tired from the long trip and from the strain of anxiety. I got into a cab and gave the driver the address of my little apartment in the village.

      The city that should have been familiar to me appeared jangled and strangely alien. I had a sense of disassociation that I could neither understand nor set aside. I leaned forward and said to the driver, “Take 42nd over to Eighth and down Eighth.”

      It was a slower route but there was no reason why he should mind. We inched our way through Times Square and then we were moving along Eighth Avenue.

      “Wait, stop here for a moment,” I said. He gave me a dubious look in the mirror but he pulled over to the curb.

      The drugstore was still a drugstore, its brick front recently whitewashed. I did not remember clearly the man who had bought it. He had been soft spoken and placid of expression. I had only a vague image of white hair and spotted hands.

      I could remember all of the store, however, with the worn, thin flooring and the old cabinets, some of them dating back before my birth. The big old fans at the ceiling spun lazily during the summer, little more than rippling the warm air.

      The soda fountain with its black marble top and dilapidated fixtures had always been crowded in the hour or so after school let out. The pharmacy counter, with its apothecary jars of colored water had so fascinated me as a child.

      Behind the prescription counter stairs went up to our apartment above, small and ordinary, but comfortable. A little balcony opened off the living room. I could look up from the taxi window and see the railing still. I had kept potted geraniums on it. It was here that Jeff had proposed to me, standing in the blending light of moon and neon. He had slipped the white jade about my neck and told me he loved me.

      No geraniums graced the balcony now. A wet rug hung over the wrought iron to dry.

      “Drive on,” I said, leaning back against the seat again.

      How had I come to have the past so suddenly thrust upon me again? I had worked hard to rid myself of it—moving into a place of my own, breaking all the old ties, losing myself first in school and then in work.

      At first it had seemed hopeless, as if I would never be relieved of that weight of unhappiness, losing first Jeff and then my father so soon after. Gradually, however, the wounds healed, as they must. I had begun to feel like and less like misery’s child and more and more my own servant.

      I had rediscovered the great joy to be found in little things—the laughter of a child, the scent of a rose, the sound of distant singing as someone passed beneath my window. I had learned to laugh, and to laugh at myself, and even to sing as I passed under windows.

      One day I had awakened to discover to my surprise that I was happy, that I loved life, that I was one with the world again. The past was dead and buried—or so I had thought.

      Now that dead past had risen from the grave to haunt me. I would have liked to turn my back on it, ignore it, let it die again, but in my purse I felt the weight of that jar I carried. It might have been all the tea ever brewed, it weighed so heavily.

      * * * *

      In the morning I took the bottle to have the tea analyzed. I did not go to the shop that had been my father’s, although of course that kindly old man who had it now could have done what I needed.

      That was another of the ties from the past that I had severed, and when I had need of a pharmacy I went to a little one near my apartment where the pharmacist, only a year or two out of school, flirted a bit half-heartedly. This shop was all chrome and glass and sparkle. It had no soda fountain. It had no romance, but at least it inspired a certain confidence.

      “Hello,” Jerry, the young pharmacist, greeted me when I came in. “How’d the job interview go?”

      “Still undecided.” I gave him a wan smile. I had slept poorly.

      I took my ominous burden from my purse and set it atop the counter. “I want to have this analyzed,” I said. “Can you take care of that sort of thing for me?”

      He picked up the jar and looked at it. “What’s in it?”

      “That is why I want to have it analyzed.”

      He unscrewed the lid and sniffed. “Smells like tea.” At my impatient sigh, he said, quickly, “Okay, okay, it’s not really up my alley, you understand, but I know a man.... Got any ideas yourself what to look for?”

      I hesitated for a moment before shaking my head. It was no use making guesses. For all I knew—and I hoped it would be so—it was nothing but tea with a dash of lemon and maybe some sugar.

      “Fine, be mysterious,” he said, grinning as he replaced the lid. “I’ll give you a call when I find out, unless you’re in some sort of hurry.”

      “I am, a little, actually.” I might be, or I might not, depending entirely upon what he found in that brownish liquid, but there was no use trying to explain that.

      He gave a mock grimace and a shrug of resignation. “I’ll see if I can find out anything today. That suit you better?”

      I managed a grateful smile. “Yes.” Then, growing sober, I added, “There is one more thing. I don’t know how this works, but if you could exercise a little discretion....”

      “Sure,” he said, too quickly. I saw the guarded look that came into his eyes and I knew this was becoming a bit suspicious looking. Why should I want to have something whose properties were completely unknown to me analyzed so quickly and so quietly? I searched my mind for some excuse.

      “Someone recommended it to me as a home remedy.” That story sounded lame even to my own ears.