From the journals of Don Wanderley

14

What was to have been my introduction to a wider Milburn community ended in a disastrous shambles.

Peter Barnes, a tall black-haired boy who looks both capable and sensitive, was the dropped bomb. He seemed merely uncommunicative at first-understandable in a seventeen-year-old playing servant at his parents' party. Flashes of warmth for the Hawthornes. He too responds to Stella. But underneath the distance was something else-something I gradually imagined was- panic? Despair? Apparently a friend of his disappeared under a cloud, and his parents evidently assumed that to be the cause of his moroseness. Yet it was more than that, and what I thought I saw in him was fear-the Chowder Society had either tuned me to this, or caused me mistakenly to project it. When I was making my pompous remarks to Sonny Venuti, Peter stopped in his tracks and stared at me; he really searched me with his eyes, and I had the idea that he wanted badly to talk to me-not about books. The startling thing was that I thought that he too had heard the Dr. Rabbitfoot music.

And if that's true- if that's true- then we are in the middle of Dr. Rabbitfoot's revenge. And all Milburn is about to blow up.

Oddly, it was something Anna Mostyn said that caused Peter to faint. He trembled when he first saw her: I am sure of that. He was afraid of her. Now Anna Mostyn is a woman not far short of beauty, even the awesome Stella Hawthorne sort; her eyes seem to go all the way back to Norfolk and Florence, where she says her ancestors came from. She has apparently made herself indispensable to Sears and Ricky, but her greatest gift is for merely being politely there, helpful when that is needed, as on the day of the funeral. She suggests kindness and sympathy and intelligence but does not overwhelm you with her excellence. She is discreet, quiet on the surface of things a supremely self-contained, self-possessed young woman. She really is remarkably unobtrusive. Yet she is sensual in an inexplicably unsettling way. She seems cold, sensually cold: it is a self-referring, self-pleasing sensuality.

I saw her fix Peter Barnes with this challenge for a moment during dinner. He had been staring at his plate, forcing his father into yet more bluster and bonhomie, and annoying his mother; he never looked at Anna Mostyn, though he was sitting next to her. The other guests ignored him and chattered away about the weather. Peter was burning to get away from the table. Anna took his chin in her hand, and I knew the sort of look he was getting. Then she said to him very quietly that she wanted some of the rooms of her new house repainted, and she thought that he and one or two of his school friends might like to come to her house to do it. He swooned. That old-fashioned word fits perfectly. He fainted, passed out, pitched forward- swooned. I thought at first that he'd had a fit; so did most other people present. Stella Hawthorne calmed us down, helped Peter off his chair, and his father took him upstairs. Dinner ended shortly afterward.

And now I notice this for the first time: Alma Mobley. Anna Mostyn. The initials, the great similarity of the names. Am I at a point where I can afford to call anything coincidental "a mere coincidence"? She is not like Alma Mobley in any way; yet she is like her.

And I know how. It is their air of timelessness: but where Alma would have flown past the Plaza Hotel in the twenties, Anna Mostyn would have been inside, smiling at the antics of men with flasks in their pockets, men cavorting, talking about new cars and the stock market, doing their best to knock her dead.

Tonight I am going to take the pages of the Dr. Rabbitfoot novel down to the hotel's incinerator and burn them.