Free By The Sea, Book Two: Amanda by Antoinette Stockenberg

Meissen.

Chapter 6
     
    As it turned out, the evening ended on a
pleasant note. Mrs. Fain, so hopelessly drab when propped up beside
the other more colorful Fains, glowed like an evening star when
placed before a pot of tea with a well-mannered young Englishman to
pour for her. She loved tea, Geoff learned, and was so grateful to Sir Tom for introducing his tea to America that she
hoped he'd win, if not the America's Cup, then some other kind of
trophy for good fellowship.
    She loved to read while she drank tea: True Story was her favorite magazine. Was Geoff familiar
with it? With the wonderful stories, all of them true, of girls
who'd got into the most pitiful circumstances and somehow come
through them all right?
    Geoff was not, and so she lent him a
copy.
    She loved motion pictures, and magazines
about motion picture actors. Had Geoff seen Mary Pickford in Daddy Long Legs or Douglas Fairbanks in The Knickerbocker
Buckaroo? But surely he had seen Broken Blossoms ? How
she'd cried; it filled her up with tears just to think about it.
Did they have movie houses in England?
    She loved shopping. Shopping she loved best
of all. When she went to New York City she was beside herself with
ecstasy; she would be heartbroken when they moved, as her husband
had plans to do, closer to the shipyard and farther from Macy's.
She had always had such great hopes that Amanda might become a
buyer at Macy's. Amanda had a real flair for fashion; probably that
came from being an artist. Or perhaps being an artist came from
dressing well. She wasn't really sure.
    And so the time passed quite easily, and
Geoff at last stood up to bid his hostess good night before driving
to the city. He had no idea whether Jim Fain had let his wife know
that he'd been invited to stay. But Mrs. Fain, grateful for Geoff's
company and practically smitten with friendliness, pressed him to
stay all on her own.
    So he did. He was exhausted. He thought it
must be the salt air, but his subconscious knew better: his dreams
that night were a jumbled mess of the Fain family, shouting,
weeping, laughing, sniping. The Fains wore him out that way until
just after dawn, when the piercing ring of a telephone dragged him
back to their real world. He tried to fall back asleep but
couldn't. He got up and began to dress, with some vague plan of
scrounging a cup of coffee from the kitchen. When the knock on the
door came he was nearly dressed. It was Mrs. Fain, deeply
upset.
    "Would you go see my husband, please, Mr.
Seton? Right now? I haven't been able to get a word in edgewise and
he doesn't listen to me anyhow and I'm just so afraid that he'll do
something rash—" she said, all in a rush.
    "What's happened?"
    "Who knows? He won't say, but he's throwing
on clothes left and right and it's got to do with Amanda. All he
keeps saying is, 'I will kill her when I see her.'"
    Geoff followed Mrs. Fain downstairs to the
drawing room, where Jim Fain was writing down directions over the
telephone. He hung up and turned to his wife and Geoff.
    "That idiot has got herself arrested. She's
in jail. My daughter's in jail. My daughter! I want you to
do something for me, Geoff. Get her out. If I go I'll probably hang
her after I spring her. I know it's asking a lot. There will be
reporters at the station. You have a way with, well, I don't know,
you just sound better when you open your mouth. Go. Please.
Consider yourself on my payroll as of this morning."
    Geoff, dumbfounded, opened his mouth, and
nothing came out at all.
    Fain scribbled a number on a piece of paper
and handed it to Geoff. "This is my New York office. I'll be here
all day. Call me after you clean this up. And keep her out of my
way for a while. This is a good time for her to work in the
Greenwich Village studio. Tell her that."
    "I'd like very much to oblige you, sir, but
I'm afraid it's quite impossible," Geoff said at last.
    "See? Now see, Mother? When he says no it
don't sound like no." He took both Geoff's shoulders in