On the morning of her twenty-first birthday, when Elizabeth came down to breakfast, Sam said, “Order some theater tickets for tonight. Supper afterward at ‘Twenty-one.’”
Elizabeth thought, He remembered, and she was inordinately pleased.
Then her father added, “There’ll be twelve of us. We’ll be going over the new Bolivian contracts.”
She said nothing about her birthday. She received telegrams from a few former schoolmates, but that was it. Until six o’clock that evening, when an enormous bouquet of flowers arrived for her. Elizabeth was sure it was from her father. But the card read: “What a lovely day for a lovely lady.” It was signed “Rhys.”
Her father left the house at seven o’clock that evening on his way to the theater. He noticed the flowers and said absently, “Got a beau, huh?”
Elizabeth was tempted to say, “They’re a birthday present,” but what would have been the point? If you had to remind someone you loved that it was your birthday, then it was futile.
She watched her father leave, and wondered what she would do with her evening. Twenty-one had always seemed such an important milestone. It signified growing up, having freedom, becoming a woman. Well, here was the magic day, and she felt no different from the way she had felt last year, or the year before. Why couldn’t he have remembered? Would he have remembered if she were his son?
The butler appeared to ask her about dinner. Elizabeth was not hungry. She felt lonely and deserted. She knew she was feeling sorry for herself, but it was more than this uncelebrated birthday she was regretting. It was all the lonely birthdays of the past, the pain of growing up alone, without a mother or a father or anyone to give a damn.
At ten o’clock that night she dressed in a robe, sitting in the living room in the dark, in front of the fireplace, when a voice said, “Happy birthday.”
The lights came on and Rhys Williams stood there. He walked over to her and said reprovingly, “This is no way to celebrate. How many times does a girl have a twenty-first birthday?”
“I—I thought you were supposed to be with my father tonight,” Elizabeth said, flustered.
“I was. He mentioned that you were staying home alone tonight. Get dressed. We’re going to dinner.”
Elizabeth shook her head. She refused to accept his pity. “Thank you, Rhys. I—I’m really not hungry.”
“I am, and I hate eating alone. I’m giving you five minutes to get into some clothes, or I’m taking you out like that”
They ate at a diner in Long Island, and they had hamburgers and chili and french-fried onions and root beer, and they talked, and Elizabeth thought it was better than the dinner she had had at Maxim’s. All of Rhys’s attention was focused on her, and she could understand why he was so damned attractive to women. It was not just his looks. It was the fact that he truly liked women, that he enjoyed being with them. He made Elizabeth feel like someone special, that he wanted to be with her more than with anyone else in the world. No wonder, Elizabeth thought, everyone fell in love with him.
Rhys told her a little about his boyhood in Wales, and he made it sound wonderful and adventurous and gay. “I ran away from home,” he said, “because there was a hunger in me to see everything and do everything. I wanted to be everyone I saw. I wasn’t enough for me. Can you understand that?”
Oh, how well she understood it!
“I worked at the parks and the beaches and one summer I had a job taking tourists down the Rhosili in coracles, and—”
“Wait a minute,” Elizabeth interrupted. “What’s a Rhosili and what’s a—a coracle?”
“The Rhosili is a turbulent, swift-flowing river, full of dangerous rapids and currents. Coracles are ancient canoes, made of wooden lathes and waterproof animal skins, that go back to pre-Roman days. You’ve never seen Wales, have you?” She shook her head. “Ah, you would love it.” She knew she would. “There’s a waterfall at the Vale of Neath that’s one of the beautiful sights of this world. And the lovely places to see: Aber-Eiddi and Caerbwdi and Porthclais and Kilgetty and Llangwm,” and the words rolled off his tongue like the lilt of music. “It’s a wild, untamed country, full of magical surprises.”