Star-Dust Part 70

"What is 'radiantly innocent'?"

"Good Lord! I don't know any definition of it except--you."

"Zoe has no innocence in one sense, Mr. Daab. Her real innocence lies in the fact that life has no ugly secrets from her. She knows the beautiful from the ugly, and why it is so. I think that is what Mr. Daab means by 'radiant innocence,' Zoe.' Fearless knowledge of truth."

He whistled softly in the gloom.

"Extraordinary!" said Mrs. Daab. "And you are one of us--aren't you, dear?"

"For suffrage? Oh yes; and I am going to be a real one when I grow up."

"What else are you going to be?"

"A singer."

"You said that as if you meant it."

"I do. I've already heard nine operas. I am allowed to be anything I want so long as I get to the biggest--the very biggest!"

"Are you studying?"

"I've had piano lessons for five years."

"I'm looking about now for a vocal teacher for her. She may be too young, but at least I want her voice tried. I--we think she has quite an amazing range."

"Have you tried Trieste?"

"Oh, I haven't dared contemplate anyone so inaccessible as he."

Mrs. Daab turned her head.

"Gedney," she said, "couldn't you give her a note to Trieste?"

"Good!" he said, feeling for a card and scrawling across its face. "This will pa.s.s you directly to his nibs."

"You couldn't have granted us a bigger favor," said Lilly, feeling her face glow.

"Then you grant me one. Bring your little girl to my Fifty-ninth Street studio. I want to paint her."

"Indeed I will!"

"When?"

"Sat.u.r.day afternoon is our only time."

"Fine. To-day two weeks?"

"Yes."

They Were at Ninety-first Street now, and he saw them up to their door.

"Good-by," he said. "You're a great youngster, and you've picked a great little mother for yourself. Mrs. Daab and I want you both at the studio often."

Up in their room, they embraced, Zoe's arms tight about her mother's neck.

"It's begun, Lilly, to be wonderful!"

"What?"

"Life!"

The Sat.u.r.day afternoon following, in a brownstone house in West Forty-sixth Street that was more like a museum of the storied loot of many lands, Trieste himself opened the pair of Florentine doors, originally unhinged from a campanile outside of Rome, of his very private studio, without appointment, to the magic of Gedney Daab's scrawled card.

He had a head, Lilly decided, like the one of Praxiteles in the St.

Louis Museum of Fine Arts--only, the bust implied young hair, and Trieste's curls were full of gray and the lines of his face were slashed deeply. He listened, while Lilly talked her brief preamble, as he invariably did, with his eyes closed and finger tips touching. Finally, he opened them, regarding Lilly from under swollen, rather diabetic lids.

"You should sing," he said, his acquired language grating slightly against the native one.

"No! No!"

"You are young," he said, running his eyes down her body, "and fine and big and strong."

She rose as if to throw off the crowding stress of the moment.

"Once," she said; "but that is all over now. My little girl--"

"You have temperament--let me hear," he said, reaching out to the piano and striking out a bold C. "Sing the scale."

"Please!" she cried, the situation an agony to her. "Not me. My little--"

"Why, Lilly!" said Zoe, regarding her mother with wide, unaffected eyes.

"Sing the scale, dear."

"Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si-do"--through a crimson flush.

He seemed to lose interest then, turning to Zoe.

"Let me hear you," he said.

"Shall I sing 'Jocelyn' or 'How Like a Bird'?"

"Anything--something simpler."

"Schubert, then, Zoe."

In her straight frock, with its wide patent-leather belt and flat white collar, the cascade of her hair down over it, Zoe held the center of the vast studio, singing straight into her mother's eyes.