The Snare

1. THE SQUIREMEISTER PARTY

1. THE SQUIREMEISTER PARTY It had been the most wonderful party, all the better because nobody had expected it to happen—no party at all had been planned or intended. It was just that Bucky and Marie Squiremeister suddenly found themselves with more and more people dropping by, and it was New Orleans, and it was spring. More: it was a noticeable, a particular spring, which kept coming on (they talked of it in New Orleans at the time and later) forever. It kept coming on, and on and on, from January when the camellias bloomed in the small green yards along the broad flat residential streets out toward Highway 90 and the Mississippi coast, about the time of the New Year's game in the Sugar Bowl, when they beat the big drum boom-boom and the little majorettes strutted on their thin little legs in white tasseled boots and white satin skirts up to highwater level. Distinctly feverish, the whole show, the reporter thought. He was sitting on a couch at the Squiremeister party. But the spring was not feverish. His vision basked in a diffuse glow of softest sunlight, westering without glare, fading without elegy. The city was mellow and knew itself, and the spring had crept in, after the scarlet of poinsettias, in yellow and pink, rose and white, a bloom here, a scent there, here a raised window, a warm terrace, a splash of sun. Then, teasing, there would come a raw wind, a gray afternoon, a sudden explosion of hail bounding in the 3 4 T H E S N A R E streets. Once in a while a hell-sky threatened, roiling in over the river or the lake or up from the swamps, livid with lightning, with the suspicious look of being able to toss automobiles, roofs, and shrimp boats around as easily as children's toys. But that would fall, fade, fail, drop away like a gruesome Mardi Gras mask, and then, smiling, the spring had returned before you knew it, saying like a gracious young mother soothing a dreamtroubled child, "I'm here. I was here all the time." So one's own forgotten Easter feeling waked up again. (What was it like? the reporter wondered, looking closer inward. An Easter child with the scent of a rose pinned in safety-pin firmness to the lapel of a navy-bluedoublebreasted little-girl coat, arriving on the punctual strokeof the church bell to slip a white-gloved hand into a waiting palm in a moment not-quite-awkward and sure with joy. . . .) "What are you sitting there thinking?" a girl, distinctly not a little girl, asked him. "Not thinking, just drinking," returned the reporter, who had been uncritically letting his own purple phrases rejoice him because nobody could black-pencil him. She sat down. "Isn't it a marvelous party?" He nodded. "It's the best ones you never plan for. Can't. They just happen." "What do you do?" "Hey, be careful. Questions like that, even one or two, and this misty creation will crumble to dust. You know that. Save it for the next Junior League open house." "I don't belong to it, and anyway I really wanted to know. I wanted to know what you do." "I'm a guesser. What I've guessed is: you already know what I do. You'veguessed it." "Newspaper?" He nodded and braced for the next dull question to put up its little comic strip balloon above her pale rather narrow forehead, when she suddenly left him. Then he wished she would come back. Elizabeth Spencer 5 Then he felt old, for she had looked about twentyfour at the most; then he went and threw his weight around a little, kissing the hostess, Bucky Squiremeister's wife Marie, and getting another drink. But nothing would quite do it; the peak was past; from now on it was only coasting, drifting down. He wandered into the garden and back again through French doors thrown wide, sampling shrimp, cold chicken, olives, and almonds, watching the fish in the garden basin, joining one cluster of people, exchanging it for another. But always wafting down. It took a long time because the point had been a high one, really remarkably high. The damp weightless iridescent bubble had not come out of any bottle, but was after all what people were only trying their...