The Longest Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

his every move as if it were fantastic and exciting and rare. She wondered how well this worked, how well people believed it, if they saw what she intended or only bore witness to her exhausting efforts.
    She smoothed the tablecloth with her palm and arranged the gravy boat, the place cards, a better selection of flowers (roses in red, pink, and white). Returning to the bread hutch she grabbed the daisies, which lolled like idiot clowns, carried them to the waste bin, and snapped their necks one by one.
    —
    T HE GUESTS BEGAN TO arrive at six. Her house smelled of gravy and roast beef; she’d swapped her cooking apron for her company apron, white and smooth down her hips. Baby Angela was in the nursery with the nannies—Martha, their usual, and Martha’s sister Lupe, who would help watch the guests’ children during the party—and Mitch had just come home from a day of golf. Jeannie could hear him washing his face in the bathroom, which he always did with no comprehension of how much water he threw onto the sink and mirror. He left the room as if he had just sprayed it down with a hose, and glibly turned off the light. Thank God he was tucked away in the master bath, where he could splash around like some oversized happy otter and none of the guests would have to witness the mess.
    The doorbell rang and she gave an inner jump. She checked her hair and lipstick one last time, smoothed her apron, and went to answer it, smiling broadly before her fingers even touched the doorknob.
    It was Lennart and Kath Enzinger, the bunco champions. “Come in!” Jeannie beamed, though the Richardses’ Wednesday loss to the Enzingers was still fresh.
    The Enzingers helloed: Lennart, as always, was squinty with cheerfulness, while Kath was as solemn as a bloodhound. German-born Len had spent time in an American internment camp at the outbreak of World War Two. No one held it against him now, since it had only been because of his nationality and because he had handled it graciously. Rather recently he’d married Kath, who was an enigma to Jeannie. Kath never used a dab of makeup and on weekends wore Len’s shirts, which Jeannie knew because she had once stopped by on a Saturday to drop off a sweater Kath had forgotten at bunco. Kath wore her husband’s shirts not in a sexy sort of swapping way, but tucked into her pants, as if that were just what she was wearing that day.
    Lupe poked her head up the hallway but Jeannie waved her back; the childless Enzingers required no nanny.
    The Frankses arrived—an unstylish but friendly couple, dressed in matching brown—and then the Kinneys, classy dark-haired Patty and her husband, who just went by Kinney, and their three children. There were Minnie and Deke Harbaugh: Deke, the supervisor from Combustion Engineering, who Mitch said had some awful disease from insulation work he’d done years ago and who spent most of his time whooping into a handkerchief; and Minnie, who enjoyed the fact that her husband, though weakened by his illness, was everyone else’s boss. Next came the unattractive man, Slocum. He was followed by the startlingly young Webb, who seemed to give off a glow of awkward goodwill and who stood by the wet bar, sucking in one cheek a little. Franks called him over and got him to talking. Soon folks were mingling and men helped themselves and their wives to drinks. Mitch appeared from his extensive freshening, red-faced and shiny; he looked as if he had just been steamed. The hair at his temples was wet and he grinned at everybody. He would complain for weeks in advance of any gathering Jeannie planned, but once there he enjoyed himself tremendously.
    The men gathered to talk baseball: Early Wynn’s good season for the White Sox; the recent integration of the Boston Red Sox, the last professional baseball team to allow black players. Few things interested Jeannie less than baseball or integration, so she returned to the couch and love seat where the women had