Many Mansions

by Isabel Bolton

  Yes, that was about as she had pictured it—dying and going to heaven—and though she was by no means frequently visited by these divine anticipations nonetheless they vaguely fringed her reveries whenever she dwelt at any length on the thought of her parents, both of whom, for she had heard nothing to the contrary, had died and gone, as Annie used to tell her, to heaven to live with God.

  And it was certainly because of these bright mansions of her imagination that Easter became the day of all days in the year to be anticipated. How vividly she gets those Easters back, the beauty of the season and her delight in being dressed as gaily as the spring. That drive to Boston accompanied by her grandparents, and oh, so happily aware of the new shoes and coat, the straw hat trimmed with its bright wreath of Easter flowers, the special sense she’d had of it, spring and joy and resurrection, gaining momentum as they drove along, the church bells on the air, the children on the sidewalks carrying pots of flowers contributing enormously to her peculiar joy. Why, by the time she arrived at church and alighted from the carriage, it had reached a peak of the highest solemnity. Walking down the aisle behind the grandparents, she was, you might say, drenched, baptized in Easter sentiment. What with the profusion of spring flowers massed beneath the windows and banked upon the altar, and that cool sweet smell of Easter lilies flowing through the other perfumes like the very breath and fragrance of the day, the glory spread, became a great effulgence streaming from her heart. The organ voluntary rolling through the aisles and arches seemed to be rolling back the clouds of heaven. They bloomed, they burst asunder. Aware that her acquaintance with loss had left her open to receive the glory and the splendor, she was translated, lifted in her new spring coat and hat right into heaven.

  On this memorable Sunday Easter was as she recounts it unusually late, and the drive home after church delightful with the trees in leaf and the birds caroling away. But what stood out so clearly in her mind was her grandfather’s high spirits and that after-church solemnity that enveloped her grandmother, and how suddenly out of a portentous silence she remarked, “Let the dead past bury its dead. Do not speak of it again. Treat the event as though it had not occurred.” To all of which her grandfather, continuing his whistling, folded his arms without rejoinder.

  This had left within her heart an area of apprehension, some sense that it could not go without a sequel, an expectation carried with her to the dinner table, and she cannot now go over the dramatic disclosures that finally ensued without feeling she is there in that familiar room, seeing the picture, vivid, animated, before her eyes—the table drawn out with all the extra leaves set in to its extremest length, the damask cloth of incredible dimensions, the napkins folded to look like Easter lilies, displaying their embroidered monograms, and all the plates, the knives and forks and spoons, the goblets and wineglasses set to such absolute perfection, the flowers in the center of the table so fresh, with the ferns, the daffodils and freesia and narcissus doing their best to conceal the painted eggs so discreetly hidden in their midst, all the festival decorations, the gold-and-lace-fringed snappers, the place cards, the bonbon containers adding a touch of the naive and childish to this positively regal laying out of the best family glass and napery and china.

  There they all were, the various members of her extraordinary family, Aunt Georgie, Charlie Lamb, Aunt Eleanor and Lucien Grey, Cousin Cecilia Ware, the great-uncles and their wives, Uncle William and Aunt Mary, Uncle Richard, Aunt Amelia, Uncle James, Aunt Harriette, and she in their midst, with Lucien on one side of her and Great-Uncle William on the other, perfectly certain that something was about to occur.

  Dinner went on as usual. The familiar jokes and platitudes from everybody, the change of plates, and finally the arrival of the champagne, Grandfather accomplishing his part of all this business with his usual grace, extracting the first cork and then out of the smoking bottle, without so much as spilling a single drop, pouring a little of the sparkling wine into his glass. With equal grace he opened a second bottle and a third.

  The wine went round the table. Everyone’s glass was filled. The Easter toast, “To the family, the living, and the dead,” was downed. Then Grandfather got up. “Let us drink,” he said, “to the burial of the feud.”

  And then all the voices, all the questions, everything so quick, so surprising—getting the startling news trying to adjust to it, sitting there stunned, bewildered. “Horace!” her grandmother’s voice so sharp and so peremptory, and Aunt Eleanor, “What feud, Papa?” and all together taking up her grandfather’s announcement.

  “Silvestro’s dead. He’s had the grace to take himself off.”

  “You mean to say,” Uncle William sputtered it out, “Silvestro’s dead?” And Uncle Richard, “I was under the impression that he was long since dead—or as good as dead.” And Uncle James, “Suicide, eh? the poor fellow did away with himself?”—“James!” Aunt Harriette, she remembers, casting an eye in her direction.

  “He couldn’t have done that, Papa,” from Aunt Eleanor.

  And here it was that Lucien Grey had laid his hand on hers, the two of them caught up together, listening.

  “Oh,” Grandfather said, “we needn’t call it that. The poor fellow fell off a cliff. You know they have ’em in the south of Italy—lots of cliffs and vineyards on the top of ’em.”

  “Horace,” from her grandmother, reprimanding him down the length of that long table.

  “Lucky thing!” muttered Uncle William, still gobbling his lamb. “No more trouble from that direction.”

  “Well, I can’t say,” her grandfather corrected, “that we did have any trouble from him, since he took himself away to Italy—signed the papers and all.”

  “Horace!” Grandmother’s voice had risen to a shriek.

  “But you never can tell,” he said, “it’s a good thing for everyone concerned the poor fellow’s out of it.”

  How could she possibly have digested it? The ice cream, she remembers, was presently brought on, a great pink and white and chocolate colored lamb, with flowers for ears and spun sugar all around the platter, and everybody, happy enough to change the subject, exclaiming how beautiful it was, and Grandfather giving her one of his famous winks, remarking that they’d slain the paschal lamb especially for her. Sitting there stunned and wondering who she was, Sylvester or Silvestro, and what she could make of a father who had not all these years been waiting in a condition of angelic expectation for her in heaven. He had been right here on earth, and made no attempt to get in touch with her—just taken himself off to Italy.

  Now he was dead. There was something unforgettable about it all, trying to accommodate herself to the information, and with Lucien caught up in it, knowing the way she felt—sitting there and watching the ice cream go round the table, his hand on hers.

  SIX

  She closed her eyes and gave herself up to meditation. It was a curious thing, she thought, but she could not for the life of her remember—really remember Lucien. There were of course the amber eyes, the dark mustache, the mobile, enigmatic countenance, but when she tried to reconstruct his features, the expressions of his face, she could not make an image clear enough to bring him back as she had known him then.

  For her now he represented all that overwhelming passion, that ecstasy and anguish, the sorrow and the severance which was to say the lamentable story of her love for him, and there were in this connection so many things still left to be conjectured, the fact that he belonged to that closed world, the world of Chamberlains and Fosters, of people walking about among their splendid properties, was naturally to be taken into account.

  “Ah well.” She looked out at the familiar buildings. The lights were extinguished except for a few scattered windows still bright in the Metropolitan Tower. “Ah well,” she said, and there appeared upon her face an expression of profound gravity. Life was tragic enough in all conscience, but it had its exquisite comedy, and it was on this threshold, delicately poised between a comic and a tragic sense of it, she had f
irst become aware of her friendship for Lucien Grey.

  The chance and change of circumstance! Would her own personal tragedy have gathered to such a climax if she had not been seated next to Lucien on that particular Easter Sunday? Well, she concluded, very likely yes, what with those long summers he always spent at The Towers, each of them addicted as they were to scrutiny and observation, and their being thrown together among that gallery of characters. It was not only his sympathy but his sensing what a show it was, that exhibition of family obtuseness, that had made her feel for him such an ecstasy of gratitude—appreciation.

  This exalted young man whom even Grandmother Foster held in such high esteem that she found it necessary whenever she spoke of him to say his name twice over, had all at once become a close companion, the two of them by some magic distillation of their qualities capable of passing signals, exchanging messages. How he had assisted her in her enjoyment of the human comedy, confirming her in a knowledge of something she had somehow from the very start seemed so intuitively to know—that there were no frontiers at all between the realm of laughter and the realm of tears. It was only necessary to meet his gaze, set up an interchange, a conversation which the very lack of speech converted into code, tossing the amusement back and forth between them, lifting the shoulders, and sometimes during those interminable midday dinners flicking little crumbs of bread across the table, and wanting desperately as she had on many an occasion to overturn the tumblers, to smash the china, to upset the general pomp and ceremony with a series of loud guffaws, saying as they often did between them, “Oh, really now, you do not mean to say so. We’ve heard all this a hundred times before.” And watching Grandfather Foster as they might have watched a little monkey on a string, wishing that he would go to any length in his absurdities so they could appreciate the show the more, and always conscious of her grandmother, not unaware that there was something here more than a little frightening, as though she might at any instant come down upon their irreverence with some appalling reprimand, for she always seemed, with all her money and set round with these fine exhibits and displays, to have God upon her side; a presence to be feared, never letting anything escape her, and mistrusting the new relationship—her entering into cahoots with Lucien Grey.

  To think of Lucien was always to think of those summers at The Towers. How clearly that incredible house of her grandfather’s comes back to her. Shingled and clapboarded, perched up behind the hills and hollows of the dunes, with lawns in front of it and the blue ocean stretching off to meet the paler blue of the horizon, it stood, an architectural cross between the Kremlin and a cuckoo clock, adorned with towers and turrets, verandas, balconies, pavilions, the whole monstrous and elaborate structure painted various shades of green and yellow.

  The rooms so full of voices, people long since dead, crossing the thresholds, leaving upon her as they passed the impact of their characters and eccentricities. Pretty rooms they were, frivolous and elegant, and filled with a prevailing pinkness, blueness, as of roses, hydrangeas, cupids generously distributed—flowery chintzes, Dresden ornaments, fresh-cut flowers, baskets upheld by cupids, little love seats, whatnots, shepherds, shepherdesses so gaily juxtaposed, and always the pleasant smell of sea and sand and honeysuckle freshly blown about.

  The days were filled with people, arriving, departing. Festivities repeated themselves year after year to form one pattern in the memory; what with the garden parties, the tennis parties, her grandmother’s afternoons at home, they seemed to merge into a single shifting panorama, the color and the movement all creating in her the same interior vibration and response. How vividly she visualized, how sharply she responded to it all again, those incredible green lawns, the flower beds, planted with ageratum, geranium and portulaca in the shape of anchors, hearts and half moons, set neatly in the grass, cannas waving from the borders and pink petunias fluttering above veranda rails, ladies carrying colored parasols, dressed in flowered hats and ruffled dresses, strolling about engaged in conversation, dappled with sun and shade, and gentlemen whose white ducks and flannels shone as bright as bright, passing refreshments, assisting in the general elegance. The movement, the voices, the cries and laughter, the ships and clouds and whitecaps, and the ocean breezes intermingling, wandering about in the deep recesses of her heart, accentuating that sense she carried with her of summer and the sea and heightening her excitement at the knowledge that among these alien people there was one voice, one face, one presence.

  The only variation in the inward drama as the years progressed had been that increasing certainty she had that Lucien had made himself the guardian of her sensibilities. Being one of them himself, belonging to their world, how curious it was that he had been able to share her appreciation of those personalities, to watch them with her as though the two of them were nefarious spectators at a fascinating and continuous drama, the grandparents sharing the honors of the principals in the incredible performance.

  What an astonishing pair they were! To think of them was to see them large as life and perfectly satisfied with themselves. How their presences assailed her even now. Her grandfather’s elegance was simply beyond description. Even his mourning could not diminish it. When she encountered him first he affected, she remembered, broad black cravats adorned to strike the official note of grief with a large black pearl. He was small and dapper, and all this smartness and perfection assisted by the fragrance of eau de cologne and expensive soaps and pomades gave him a little breeze of his own which he wafted before him as he hurried here and there. His white hair sprang back from his head, framing to their very best advantage those fine features, that perfectly exquisite white mustache and the large dark eyes, the eyebrows impressively black were startling indeed—theatrical. Despite his mourning he was tuned to the enjoyment of life. What a lot of antic tricks and jokes he had, sticking his fingers in his ears and wagging them in a most alarming manner, and how he used to boo at her from behind closed doors and portieres. She had never been able to tell whether his exuberance or her grandmother’s severity had been the more difficult to endure. The ordeal of sitting beside her grandmother in church was something to remember. Those Sunday clothes, that clean starched smell she had, the immaculate summer dresses without a spot or crease or stain, her little hats trimmed with such restraint and yet looking as though they’d cost a great deal of money, and the white gloves, so tight on the stout hands. There she’d sit, her hands folded in her lap, communing with God, never moving until some change in the service necessitated her standing up or falling upon her knees. Very pious she was, believing so implicitly that God was with her in all she did and said, and that towards the rich and the wellborn He extended His particular benevolence. How long she remained upon her knees, and when she’d got to her feet again, there was that look upon her marble countenance as though she were now doubly fortified in her belief in God and her own opinions.

  Then there was Cousin Cecilia Ware, the ubiquitous poor relative, always managing to say the right thing at just the proper moment, “Yes, Cousin Amelia; yes, Cousin Horace”—making herself useful and somehow or other managing to keep herself so young and fresh and fashionable. Her outings with Grandfather Foster were, the weather allowing, a regular feature of those summer afternoons. She could see them starting off together as clearly as though the lively tableau were going on before her eyes.

  Under the brightly painted porte cochere, the high, the brightly painted phaeton, the impatient horses, the small footman holding them in check. Then suddenly her grandfather making his appearance in spotless white, a flower in his buttonhole, his hat cocked a bit to one side, mounting to the driver’s seat, putting on his gloves, taking up the reins, while Cecilia Ware clambered up to sit beside him, seated herself, opened her parasol, and the little footman, with the agility of an acrobat, jumped into the rumble as the horses reared and bolted off, adjusted himself to his precarious perch, crossed his arms upon his breast.

  There on the sunny veranda stood her grandmother,
her hand raised against the light, watching the animated spectacle. Laced and hooked and buttoned into her well-fitting costume as tightly as her emotions were packed into her breast, her face in some queer way resembled her figure. No betraying emotions save that look she had of paying strict attention to every detail. She noted with satisfaction that the footman’s breeches were well chalked, his boots well shined, that the horses were in prime condition. She approved the cut of Grandfather’s coat, his way of handling the reins, she approved even of Cecilia, who bore herself in a manner that befitted her position.

  She was well aware of the sentiments they entertained for each other, but she did not allow this to disturb her. Cecilia assisted her with her lists and made herself useful in many necessary ways; besides, she knew on which side of the loaf her bread was buttered. As for her little husband, if he wished to have an affair of the heart, much better to have it carried on right here beneath her eyes than in regions farther afield. She knew him to a T. He would never cross a single line she chalked for him. Moreover, he was always a perfect gentleman, an ornament to society. She regarded him, by and large, as the most elegant of all her appointments and accessories.

  How Cecilia loved those drives, sitting there beside her dashing relative, fully conscious of the splendid appearance they presented to the world. It was not only the public show. She enjoyed his confidences, saying “Poor dear Cousin Horace,” and making all those pretty sounds of condolence and acquiescence. She thought he was a creature of the deepest feeling, and as he had just such a notion of himself, his sensibility, his great capacity for suffering, no wonder they were never at a loss for sentimental conversation.