So, there I was that summer night in 1960, twenty years old, growing out of being someone’s daughter, not sure I was ready to be someone’s wife, and searching for a place to hide in my own home because my sixteen-year-old sister was absolutely livid about my dress.
I told you, she’d “allowed” me to wear green. And so I had. But apparently it was meant to be only green, not green over gold. She was wearing silver, which somehow made her look “less special.” (I still don’t fully follow this logic, I should add. Maybe I’ll go up to Nelle’s room once I’ve finished this letter and ask her. I might get the pleasure of seeing her head explode all these years later!)
Normally, I would have given her hell right back, but as I said, it was a strange summer, and I had no real desire to engage in another sisterly skirmish, so I’d retreated, heading for the one room I knew would be deserted during a party—my father’s office.
I opened the door, the only light a banker’s lamp on Daddy’s desk, the familiar smell of furniture polish and cigar smoke hanging in the air.
But as I closed the door behind me, I realized it was not cigar smoke I was smelling at all. It was a cigarette, freshly lit, and the cologne in the air wasn’t the lingering hint of Daddy’s Acqua di Parma. It was something sharper, warmer. Something that made my toes curl in their mint-green pumps.
“If my mother sent you to drag me back to the party, you should know that I’m not going without a fight.”
Startled, I stepped back, my heel hitting the brass plate at the bottom of the door, the sound unnaturally loud in the quiet room.
I had known Duke Callahan would be at Nelle’s party. Nelle had practically danced around the room when his RSVP had been delivered. I later learned that he had been something of her “white whale” for the past year, and long after Duke was dead, I found an old diary of Nelle’s stashed behind those fancy copies of Charles Dickens that no one ever read. Mrs. Eleanor Callahan was scribbled on several pages, and I suddenly understood that Nelle’s tears at Duke’s and my wedding had had nothing to do with hay fever as she’d claimed.
I’d caught only the briefest glimpse of him earlier, as he’d made his way across the foyer to say hello to Daddy. That was when Mrs. Sidney had issued her warning, lifting the little skewer from her martini and gesturing at Duke’s retreating back with it, the pickled pearl onion on the tip nearly slipping off.
“Trouble,” she pronounced, puckering her lips. Her pale pink lipstick had bled into the fine lines there, and I suspected the empty martini glass in her hand was not her first cocktail of the evening. “And, from what I hear, on the hunt for a wife. Pretty and rich as you are, sweetheart? I’d steer clear.”
And I had, until I walked into my father’s study to find Duke Callahan leaning against the bookshelves lining the far wall.
He straightened up, walking closer to me, his eyes slightly narrowed. The end of the cigarette tucked between his lips glowed a bright, hot red as he took a drag, smoke curling around his head when he exhaled.
“On second thought,” he said slowly, “I think I’d go anywhere you wanted me to.”
Then he grinned.
It was a good grin, one he’d probably flashed a million times in his twenty-four years, and never once thought anything about it.
The people who’d seen it, though?
They thought about it.
The girl at the café who’d brought him his coffee, the boy who’d shined his shoes at the train station in New Haven. The mothers of his friends who’d welcomed him into their homes, then spent the rest of the night conjuring up that smile and wondering why it made their stomachs flutter, their blood feel hot.
And me.
I still think about it now, more than fifty years later.
And I think, sometimes, how if he hadn’t given me that grin, if I hadn’t fallen so instantly and powerfully in what I thought was love, he might still be alive.
Duke Callahan, an old man. I can’t even picture it.
Or maybe I just don’t want to.
There’s a picture of him in my nightstand if you want to see him. Oh, I know, you can look him up on the internet, but honestly, I think Duke would prefer to be admired in that silver frame. He’s smiling, but you should know that’s not the smile. It’s close, but not quite the same.
Actually, don’t look. The picture doesn’t do him justice. To understand Duke, you had to see him in person, and I’m afraid that, thanks to me, no one can ever do that again.
He wasn’t just handsome, you see. Handsome, I could’ve resisted. So many young men in my circle had those same good cheekbones, the chiseled jaw and straight nose, hair the same burnished gold as an old coin. All of them could wear a suit well and hold a cocktail just so and knew exactly how to light a woman’s cigarette in a way that felt both chivalrous and the tiniest bit predatory.
I always found them boring, if I’m honest. There was a sameness to them that made me think they must all take the same class in that sort of thing at their various boarding schools. They all played at being some kind of debonair man-about-town, but they each ended up back in their hometowns, doing whatever it is their fathers did, marrying the girls their mothers wanted them to marry.
But Duke? No, underneath all those familiar traits and manners, I knew he was something different.
I remember being so glad for the dim light in Daddy’s office because maybe he couldn’t see me blushing. (He absolutely could, he told me later, and used that observation to launch into a soliloquy of things he noticed about me that gradually grew more and more explicit until I was blushing everywhere a person could blush, but I suppose that’s not the kind of story you want from me. Fair enough.)
“The only place I want you to go,” I said, making myself stand up as tall as I could, “is out of my father’s office.”
“Ah,” he said, pleased. “So, you are the infamous Ruby. I thought as much.”
I probably should’ve pressed him on that “infamous” bit, but at the time, there was a chorus in my brain shouting, He said my name, he said my name, why does my name sound so different when he says it?
“I can’t believe I’ve never met you before now,” he went on, stepping closer. “How come you didn’t have one of these big parties when you turned sixteen?”
Hands clasped behind my back, I watched him from beneath my lashes. Later, I’d perfect this particular look, coy and careless all at once, but that night, there was no artifice in it. I just couldn’t look directly at him without stammering.
“I did,” I told him. “Four summers ago. You just didn’t come.”
I dared a glance then. He had moved even closer, standing just beside Daddy’s desk. “Well, that was fucking stupid of me.”
(Knew I was going to use it again later! Damn.)
He wanted to shock me, maybe. Watch my mouth drop into a horrified O, my eyes widen.
Instead, I met his gaze evenly while my heart threatened to pound right out of my chest.
“Yes,” I said, as though ice water flowed in my veins. “It was.”
That made him laugh, and if the smile was an arrow to the heart—and other, lower portions of one’s anatomy—then the laugh was Fourth of July fireworks, wonderful, thrilling, the kind of thing that made you want to hug yourself with the sheer delight of it.
“Your father said you were at college in Atlanta,” Duke went on. “Are you home for the summer or home for good?”
He propped one hip there on the corner of Daddy’s desk as he reached into his evening jacket for a sterling silver case. It popped open with a loud snick, and he plucked out a cigarette from a neat little row of them. His family’s brand, of course, Callahans, but a special blend made only for the Callahans themselves.
“For the summer,” I told him. “I think.”