The Perfect Year
By Eleanor A. Hallowell
When Dolly Leonard died, on the night of my débutante party, our little community was aghast. If I live to be a thousand, I shall never outgrow the paralyzing shock of that disaster. I think that the girls in our younger set never fully recovered from it.
It was six o’clock when we got the news. Things had been jolly and bustling all the afternoon. The house was filled with florists and caterers, and I had gone to my room to escape the final responsibilities of the occasion. There were seven of us girl chums dressing in my room, and we were lolling round in various stages of lace and ruffles when the door-bell rang. Partly out of consideration for the tired servants, and partly out of nervous curiosity incited by the day’s influx of presents and bouquets, I slipped into my pink eider-down wrapper and ran down to the door. The hall was startlingly sweet with roses. Indeed, the whole house was a perfect bower of leaf and blossom, and I suppose I did look elfish as I ran, for a gruff old workman peered up at me and smiled, and muttered something about “pinky-posy”—and I know it did not seem impertinent to me at the time.
At the door, in the chill blast of the night, stood our little old gray postman with some letters in his hand. “Oh!” I said, disappointed, “just letters.”
The postman looked at me a trifle queerly—I thought it was my pink wrapper,—and he said, “Don’t worry about ‘just letters’; Dolly Leonard is dead!”
“Dead?” I gasped. “Dead?” and I remember how I reeled back against the open door and stared out with horror-stricken eyes across the common to Dolly Leonard’s house, where every window was blazing with calamity.
“Dead?” I gasped again. “Dead? What happened?”
The postman eyed me with quizzical fatherliness. “Ask your mother,” he answered, reluctantly, and I turned and groped my way leaden-footed up the stairs, muttering, “Oh, mother, mother, I don’t need to ask you.”
When I got back to my room at last through a tortuous maze of gaping workmen and sickening flowers, three startled girls jumped up to catch me as I staggered across the threshold. I did not faint, I did not cry out. I just sat huddled on the floor rocking myself to and fro, and mumbling, as through a mouthful of sawdust: “Dolly Leonard is dead. Dolly Leonard is dead. Dolly Leonard is dead.”
I will not attempt to describe too fully the scene that followed. There were seven of us, you know, and we were only eighteen, and no young person of our acquaintance had ever died before. Indeed, only one aged death had ever disturbed our personal life history, and even that remote catastrophe had sent us scampering to each other’s beds a whole winter long, for the individual fear of “seeing things at night.”
“Dolly Leonard is dead.” I can feel myself yet in that huddled news-heap on the floor. A girl at the mirror dropped her hand-glass with a shivering crash. Some one on the sofa screamed. The only one of us who was dressed began automatically to unfasten her lace collar and strip off her silken gown, and I can hear yet the soft lush sound of a folded sash, and the strident click of the little French stays that pressed too close on a heaving breast.
Then some one threw wood on the fire with a great bang, and then more wood and more wood, and we crowded round the hearth and scorched our faces and hands, but we could not get warm enough.
Dolly Leonard was not even in our set. She was an older girl by several years. But she was the belle of the village. Dolly Leonard’s gowns, Dolly Leonard’s parties, Dolly Leonard’s lovers, were the envy of all womankind. And Dolly Leonard’s courtship and marriage were to us the fitting culmination of her wonderful career. She was our ideal of everything that a girl should be. She was good, she was beautiful, she was irresistibly fascinating. She was, in fact, everything that we girlishly longed to be in the revel of a ballroom or the white sanctity of a church.
And now she, the bright, the joyous, the warm, was colder than we were, and would never be warm again. Never again... And there were garish flowers down-stairs, and music and favors and ices—nasty shivery ices,—and pretty soon a brawling crowd of people would come and dance because I was eighteen—and still alive.
Into our hideous brooding broke a husky little voice that had not yet spoken:
“Dolly Leonard told my big sister a month ago that she wasn’t a bit frightened,—that she had had one perfect year, and a perfect year was well worth dying for—if one had to. Of course she hoped she wouldn’t die, but if she did, it was a wonderful thing to die happy. Dolly was queer about it; I heard my big sister telling mother. Dolly said, ‘Life couldn’t always be at high tide—there was only one high tide in any one’s life, and she thought it was beautiful to go in the full flush before the tide turned.’”
The speaker ended with a harsh sob.
Then suddenly into our awed silence broke my mother in full evening dress. She was a very handsome mother.
As she looked down on our huddled group there were tears in her eyes, but there was no shock. I noticed distinctly that there was no shock. “Why, girls,” she exclaimed, with a certain terse brightness, “aren’t you dressed yet? It’s eight o’clock and people are beginning to arrive.” She seemed so frivolous to me. I remember that I felt a little ashamed of her.
“We don’t want any party,” I answered, glumly. “The girls are going home.”
“Nonsense!” said my mother, catching me by the hand and pulling me almost roughly to my feet. “Go quickly and call one of the maids to come and help you dress. Angeline, I’ll do your hair. Bertha, where are your shoes? Gertrude, that’s a beautiful gown—just your color. Hurry into it. There goes the bell. Hark! the orchestra is beginning.”
And so, with a word here, a touch there, a searching look everywhere, mother marshalled us into line. I had never heard her voice raised before.
The color came back to our cheeks, the light to our eyes. We bubbled over with spirits—nervous spirits, to be sure, but none the less vivacious ones.
When the last hook was fastened, the last glove buttoned, the last curl fluffed into place, mother stood for an instant tapping her foot on the floor. She looked like a little general.
“Girls,” she said, “there are five hundred people coming to-night from all over the State, and fully two-thirds of them never heard of Dolly Leonard. We must never spoil other people’s pleasures by flaunting our own personal griefs. I expect my daughter to conduct herself this evening with perfect cheerfulness and grace. She owes it to her guests; and”—mother’s chin went high up in the air—“I refuse to receive in my house again any one of you girls who mars my daughter’s débutante party by tears or hysterics. You may go now.”
We went, silently berating the brutal harshness of grown people. We went, airily, flutteringly, luminously, like a bunch of butterflies. At the head of the stairs the music caught us up in a maelstrom of excitement and whirled us down into the throng of pleasure. And when we reached the drawing-room and found mother we felt as though we were walking on air. We thought it was self-control. We were not old enough to know it was mostly “youth.”
My débutante party was the gayest party ever given in our town. We seven girls were like sprites gone mad. We were like fairy torches that kindled the whole throng. We flitted among the palms like will-o’-the-wisps. We danced the toes out of our satin slippers. We led our old boy-friends a wild chase of young love and laughter, and because our hearts were like frozen lead within us we sought, as it were, “to warm both hands at the fires of life.” We trifled with older men. We flirted, as it were, with our fathers.
My débutante party turned out a revel. I have often wondered if my mother was frightened. I don’t know what went on in the other girls’ brains, but mine were seared with the old-world recklessness—“Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.” We die!
I had a lover—a boy lover. His name was Gordon. He was twenty-one years old, and he had courted me with boyish seriousness for three years. Mother had always pooh-poohed his love-story and said: “Wait, wait. Why, my daughter isn’t even out yet. Wait till she’s out.”
And Gordon had narrowed his near-sighted eyes ominously and shut his lips tight. “Very well,” he had answered, “I will wait till she is out—but no longer.”
He was rich, he was handsome, he was well-born, he was strong, but more than all that he held my fancy with a certain thrilling tenacity that frightened me while it lured me. And I had always looked forward to my débutante party on my eighteenth birthday with the tingling realization, half joy, half fear, that on that day I should have to settle once and forever with—man.
I had often wondered how Gordon would propose. He was a proud, high-strung boy. If he was humble, and pleaded and pleaded with the hurt look in his eyes that I knew so well, I thought I would accept him; and if we could get to mother in the crowd, perhaps we could announce the engagement at supper-time. It seemed to me that it would be a very wonderful thing to be engaged on one’s eighteenth birthday. So many girls were not engaged till nineteen or even twenty. But if he was masterful and high-stepping, as he knew so well how to be, I had decided to refuse him scornfully with a toss of my head and a laugh. I could break his heart with the sort of laugh I had practised before my mirror.
It is a terrible thing to have a long-anticipated event finally overtake you. It is the most terrible thing of all to have to settle once and forever with man.
Gordon came for me at eleven o’clock. I was flirting airily at the time with our village Beau Brummel, who was old enough to be my grandfather.
Gordon slipped my little hand through his arm and carried me off to a lonely place in the conservatory. For a second it seemed a beautiful relief to be out of the noise and the glare—and alone with Gordon. But instantly my realization of the potential moment rushed over me like a flood, and I began to tremble violently. All the nervous strain of the evening reacted suddenly on me.
“What’s the matter with you to-night?” asked Gordon, a little sternly. “What makes you so wild?” he persisted, with a grim little attempt at a laugh.
At his words, my heart seemed to turn over within me and settle heavily. It was before the days when we discussed life’s tragedies with our best men friends. Indeed, it was so long before that I sickened and grew faint at the very thought of the sorrowful knowledge which I kept secret from him.
Again he repeated, “What’s the matter with you?” but I could find no answer. I just sat shivering, with my lace scarf drawn close across my bare shoulders.
Gordon took hold of a white ruffle on my gown and began to fidget with it. I could see the fine thoughts go flitting through his eyes, but when he spoke again it was quite commonplacely.
“Will you do me a favor?” he asked. “Will you do me the favor of marrying me?” And he laughed. Good God! he laughed!
“A favor” to marry him! And he asked it as he might have asked for a posie or a dance. So flippantly—with a laugh. “A favor!” And Dolly Leonard lay dead of her favor!
I jumped to my feet—I was half mad with fear and sex and sorrow and excitement. Something in my brain snapped. And I struck Gordon—struck him across the face with my open hand. And he turned as white as the dead Dolly Leonard, and went away—oh, very far away.
Then I ran back alone to the hall and stumbled into my father’s arms.
“Are you having a good time?” asked my father, pointing playfully at my blazing cheeks.
I went to my answer like an arrow to its mark. “I am having the most wonderful time in the world,” I cried; “I have settled with man.”
My father put back his head and shouted. He thought it was a fine joke. He laughed about it long after my party was over. He thought my head was turned. He laughed about it long after other people had stopped wondering why Gordon went away.
I never told any one why Gordon went away. I might under certain circumstances have told a girl, but it was not the sort of thing one could have told one’s mother. This is the first time I have ever told the story of Dolly Leonard’s death and my débutante party.
Dolly Leonard left a little son behind her—a joyous, rollicking little son. His name is Paul Yardley. We girls were pleased with the initials—P.Y. They stand to us for “Perfect Year.”
Dolly Leonard’s husband has married again, and his wife has borne him safely three daughters and a son. Each one of my six girl chums is the mother of a family. Now and again in my experience some woman has shirked a duty. But I have never yet met a woman who dared to shirk a happiness. Duties repeat themselves. There is no duplicate of happiness.
I am fifty-eight years old. I have never married. I do not say whether I am glad or sorry. I only know that I have never had a Perfect Year. I only know that I have never been warm since the night that Dolly Leonard died.