The Last Season by Ronald Florence

Author:Ronald Florence
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2012-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

15

Off and on, for twenty years, Sybil Westcott had tried to establish a salon in Newport. She didn’t call it that. No one she knew in Newport would have known what a salon was. Her society friends knew everything there was to know about teas, balls, shooting parties, Marie Antoinette play-farm parties, the hunt, yacht races, tennis matches, dinner parties, cocktail parties, debutante parties, and garden parties. Had they heard her idea, most of them would have looked down their noses at the notion. Even a book club would have been frowned upon as insufferably boring. Still, Sybil had never abandoned the idea, and she was ever on the lookout for writers, musicians, artists, or architects who would add spice and substance to the dreary intellectual life in Newport. For a while she had teamed up with her artist friend Caroline Fiske, until Sybil realized that Caroline, who had a different sort of activity in mind, had seduced Russell and almost every other man she met through the tentative salon efforts.

It was then that Sybil realized that it wasn’t really a salon that she craved. What she wanted was a man friend. Not a lover. Wes, as tenuous as their marriage ties remained, was all the lover she had ever needed. Even when he had brazenly paraded trollops before her, Sybil had never desired another man. But after the years of business talk with her father, and the years after his death when boat captains, heads of truck fleets, bootleg suppliers, and owners of well-known and fabulously profitable speakeasies had respected and dealt with her—not with the namby-pamby chitchat of the Newport ladies, but in frank, straight talk—Sybil craved a man friend, an intelligent man who would listen to her and talk to her as an equal. In Newport, it had never happened.

For all his infinite charms, Wes was a child at heart. When he first met a woman, he was all ears, hanging on her every word, drawing out conversation with his incomparable smile. Women thought him a wonderful listener, but Wes was only listening for cues, for signals that a woman was susceptible. For Wes, every conversation with a woman was the first step in a seduction. Every relationship, even those that went no further than a quick conversation or a dance at a ball, was an affair. When he no longer wanted to seduce Sybil, he stopped talking to her. After a year of marriage, their conversation had descended to quips and banalities, mean-spirited and ungracious digs at one another followed by civilities that might have been exchanged by strangers. Each time, Sybil regretted the bitter sarcasm in her voice—she would wince inside when she heard herself—but the hurt of what had become of their relationship was so deep that she was powerless to stop herself.

Russell was afraid of her. Even as a boy, long before he discovered his marvelous good looks and charm, he had been wary and standoffish, as if he were afraid his mother’s probing mind would discover his secrets.

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