“Your dinner dress is on your bed,” she told me. “The shoes are beside the bed. Mrs. Brittany has returned, and she also brought you some perfume to try. Dinner will be served in the main dining room in two hours. Mrs. Brittany will see you first in an hour and a half in her office. Besides Portia and Mr. Whitehouse at dinner, there will be a gentleman guest. He’s an old friend, and Mrs. Brittany relies on his opinion about a great many things, not least of all her new girls.”
“Am I supposed to be nervous?”
“Of course. How you behave when you are nervous is very important,” she replied. She looked at Claudine. “N’est-ce pas?”
Claudine laughed. I looked up at her and then smiled myself. It seemed that even my breathing was being examined and judged here. I began to wonder if candidates for the CIA were more anal
yzed. Mrs. Brittany was one careful businesswoman, but looking around at what she had, I couldn’t think of how to criticize her for it.
“By the way,” Mrs. Pratt said, looking at me now, “you’re very beautiful.”
I didn’t blush. It was more like something that took my breath away. Mrs. Pratt certainly had seen very attractive women around here. To find myself now included in that category filled me with more pride and happiness than I could ever have imagined for myself since I had left home.
“Merci, madame.”
“De rien,” she said, and left us.
“Well. If Madame Pratt approves of you, Mrs. Brittany usually will as well. Felicitations.”
“I’m not there yet, Claudine, but merci.”
I rose, gazed at myself in the mirror again, and smiled at her.
Whenever anyone gave me a compliment in front of my father, he would always check his own happiness and tell me not to get a swelled head. Sometimes he would come back with something inane, like “Beauty is only skin deep.” Once, a friend of his at work, Morty Kasner, retorted with, “Right, but who wants to go any deeper, anyway?”
It brought laughter to the table but not to my father. He just glared at me to wipe the satisfied smile off my face. You can wash it off my face, I thought, but not off my heart.
I was glad I had a little time to myself finally. It wasn’t until I got up to my suite and flopped in the soft-cushioned armchair that the weight of all I had done that day announced itself in my legs and my shoulders. I thought I would just close my eyes for a few moments, but I didn’t open them again until I felt someone shaking my shoulder.
“I had a feeling you might have dozed off,” Mrs. Pratt said. “You should be getting into your dress. Mrs. Brittany wants to see you in ten minutes in her office, and don’t forget to use the perfume she brought for you.”
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s been a long day.”
“And it’s not over yet,” she pointed out. “This is why you have to get yourself in better shape. Our girls don’t peter out on their clients.”
I nodded and took a deep breath to get myself up and dressed. I told myself I was only half joking when I compared what I was going through here with some army boot camp with someone like my father shouting orders and threatening KP duty. How did they expect me to go through all I had gone through and then attend a formal dinner, drink wine, and return to this room to do the homework Professor Marx had assigned? Was all of this designed to discourage me? Was this how they weeded out their so-called candidates?
I found the perfume, tested it, liked the scent myself, and sprayed it on. I checked my hair quickly, and then, literally nine minutes later, I was on my way down to Mrs. Brittany’s office. I imagined I was about to get another lecture in preparation for this dinner. I knocked on the closed doors and waited to hear her give me permission to enter. She opened the doors herself and stood back.
Sitting there on the settee, wearing a very pretty turquoise dress and with her hair pinned up, was Mrs. Brittany’s granddaughter. Surely she had told on me, I thought. Randy’s words came rushing back: “It could be fatal.”
I felt my heart sink.
Was it possible?
After all this, I had been brought here to get my walking papers.
9
“Don’t just stand there in the doorway,” Mrs. Brittany snapped. “Come in and close it behind you.”
I did so slowly and looked again at her granddaughter. She was smiling at me, and not the sort of smile someone who had come to hurt you wore. It wasn’t condescending or sly. It was soft, anticipating, making her look hungry to receive a smile back. I breathed some relief but still felt myself trembling inside, expecting trouble.
“Hi again,” I said.
“Hi. Oh, look at your hair. I might not have recognized you. Yes, I would,” she quickly corrected. “Oh, I never got a chance to tell you my name. It’s Sheena.”
“Please be quiet for a few moments, Sheena,” Mrs. Brittany told her. She turned to me. “Sit,” she commanded, as if she were giving orders to a well-trained dog. She walked around her desk. Since she didn’t tell me where to sit, I sat next to Sheena, who looked delighted about it.