The sound of the music spilled out from the bright dining room, mixing with the evening chorus of crickets and peepers. Greenwich was a sylvan stretch of countryside in the full throes of late summer, tucked against the Long Island Sound and stocked with soaring old trees; a light summer wind rippled those leafy oaks and elms and maples now. I looked up at the sky and breathed in the night air, thinking back to the Battle Creek stars. How Papa used to point out the shapes they made across the sprawling backdrop of black. In the summers of my girlhood, Papa had rented a house for us on the shore of nearby Gull Lake, where I learned to swim and would invite my friends out for evening bonfires. On nights when it was too warm for a fire, we’d spend hours chasing lightning bugs, which we’d store in empty jam jars and release at dawn.
A voice behind me interrupted this reverie, signaling that I was no longer alone on the terrace. “Is that Miss Post standing out here in the dark?” It was a smooth voice, low but tinged with the softness of velvet.
I turned to see Ed Close approaching, his stride long-legged and relaxed. Smiling, he took the place beside me at the terrace railing and held me with his gray-eyed gaze. He was the only young man so far that evening who had not seemed to look at me like I was some strange, foreign specimen. “Indeed it is. Hello, Mr. Close,” I answered, staring sideways at him. I realized then that those were the first words I’d spoken to him.
“Would you please call me Ed?”
“Oh? All right. Ed.”
“Has our assembly so quickly bored you that you’ve been forced to come out here and count stars?”
I let loose a quick, quiet laugh. “Not counting,” I said.
“Then what?”
I breathed in slowly before answering. “Simply admiring. Where I live—in Washington—we don’t have such a clear view of the night sky. I live on a busy street filled with homes and streetlamps.”
“Which street is that?” he asked.
“M Street. Are you familiar with Washington City?”
“Not as familiar as I am with New York City, I must confess. I really ought to visit, get to know the place better. It is our capital, after all.”
“Well, you certainly should not visit this time of year,” I declared.
“Why is that?”
I shuddered. “Terribly hot. A thick heat. The swamp waters. And the mosquitoes! No, no. Papa and I had to get away. That’s why we are up here.”
He nodded at this.
I looked back out over the evening. “When I was a girl…well, before Washington really, I loved summer evenings.”
He pressed his hands on the railing and fixed his stare squarely on me. I met his gaze. Candlelight from inside flickered through the windows and out onto the terrace, catching the glint of his blond hair, casting a pleasant glow over his attentive face. “And where was that?”
“Battle Creek,” I answered, aware that it must have sounded like a remote backwater to Mr. Close of Connecticut, a law student from Columbia and a member of the Four Hundred. As an afterthought, I added, “It’s in Michigan. Battle Creek, Michigan.”
“Ah yes. Cereal City,” Ed said, a good-natured grin rippling his features.
“Yes.” I narrowed my eyes to study him—was he mocking me? But his smile was earnest and wide as he said, “And your father is its mayor, from what I hear?”
I laughed at this. “Only informally.”
“Is it true what they say about Dr. Kellogg?”
I tilted my head sideways, cocked an eyebrow. “What do they say about Dr. Kellogg?”
“Is he as stiff as he sounds?”
“Oh yes. More than stiff. Cold. You’ll make me shiver thinking about him,” I said.
“I wouldn’t want that.” Ed put his arms around my bare shoulders, a quick, playful gesture meant to ward off my shivers, but my body startled at feeling such sudden and intimate contact with his. Within an instant he had remembered himself, and he dropped his hands and stood straight beside me once more, a proper distance between our two bodies. But I could feel the whirl of my heartbeat.
Ed, appearing far more at ease than I felt, flashed half a smirk as he tipped his head toward me and said quietly: “For what it’s worth: I favor Grape-Nuts over Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.”
I fixed him with a playfully stern gaze. “Then you’re a man of good taste.”
“Exquisite taste,” he declared with a decisive nod.
“Good. Otherwise I was ready to tell you that this conversation was over.”