Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  Even at this mention of my mother and although she must have known that I was beside her, Miss Pride did not look at me. Her frown deepened; reluctantly she closed her magazine just as the only male guest of the Hotel, Mr. Brock, slipped quietly through two pots of fern, carrying with him a folding chair which he set down beside hers. What impressed me in that moment was that the frown, which had lasted two or three minutes, showed that she had known of his approach long before I either heard or saw him.

  “Good morning! I hope I am not disturbing you at your devotions?” The chuckle following his remark was not returned and Miss Pride only said, “Good morning.”

  Mr. Brock was a soft-spoken and scholarly old man who, although he had come from New York, called himself “a professional Bostonian.” He was the victim of a delusion which he propounded, whenever he had the opportunity, to myself, my mother, the Mexican gardener, Gonzales, to Mr. Hagethorn, to the waitresses. He believed that of all languages, only the English was capable of vulgarity, and he claimed that bad American books were transformed by translation into promising, if not brilliant, prose. He had made a collection of such translations, having E. P. Roe, for example, rendered into French and the Elsie Dinsmore books into Spanish. He had given my father his copy of Riders of the Purple Sage and my father, although he was totally indifferent to Mr. Brock’s thesis, so thoroughly enjoyed the book for its adventure that the old man danced for joy, sure that this was the proof of the pudding.

  Now he produced a leather-bound book from his brief-case and handing it to Miss Pride, said, “I sought you out to show you my latest find. This is Bob, Son of Battle in German or Old Bob, der graue hund von Kenmuir and it is enchanting. Would you care to read it?”

  “No, Mr. Brock, I would not,” said Miss Pride sternly. “I do not share your enthusiasm for foreign languages. And as for dog-books I had no use for them in my girlhood and feel quite sure I would find them even less to my taste now that I have passed beyond the age for juvenile literature.”

  He was not rebuffed. “I admire your linguistic singleness, Miss Pride, since in you I am sure it is the result of strong nationalistic convictions. Alas, we are not all by opinion or antecedents eligible for membership in the English Speaking Union.”

  “I am not a member of the English Speaking Union,” she returned. “But in any case your remark is, to use a foreign phrase, a non sequitur.”

  Mr. Brock, receiving the book which she extended, allowed his disappointment to show briefly in his foolish old face and then, catching sight of me, he cried, “Now here is someone whose father will appreciate the book.” In a voice a little lower but not intended to be inaudible to me, he added, “Did you realize that this child’s father is an educated man?”

  “I believe I haven’t had the pleasure of knowing him.” Miss Pride took me in, perhaps for the first time since I had been coming to the Hotel, and I felt that in her rapid but comprehensive examination of my face and person she had discerned everything about me, that she knew I had once broken my collarbone, that I did poorly in arithmetic and singing and well in reading, and that brushing my teeth had not yet become habitual with me.

  “Yes,” Mr. Brock went on, “Hermann Marburg, the Chichester cobbler, is an educated man. A graduate of the gymnasium of Würzburg, Germany, and, except for an ineffacable accent which I myself find appealing, has been completely bilingual since the age of eleven, and partially trilingual—his third language, of course, being French—since the age of fifteen.”

  Miss Pride did not seem impressed but rather than humiliate me, as I assumed, said nothing. “I have had several illuminating conversations with Mr. Marburg, sometimes in German, sometimes in English. I neglected to mention, by the way, that through his wife he has also picked up quite a considerable Russian vocabulary. Now a graduate of a gymnasium, Miss Pride, as you are perhaps not aware, is, if anything better educated than a candidate for an American baccalaureate degree. Yet the gymnasium is the counterpart of our preparatory school!”

  “What do they learn?” inquired Miss Pride, frankly dubious.

  “Having been something of a Latinist myself at Mr. Gree­nough’s, naturally I admire Mr. Marburg’s firm classical foundation. I must admit his Latin is less literary than ecclesiastical, for he was trained by the Franciscans, but it is, nevertheless, good, sound Latin. In addition he knows history. Oh, he knows his history well, Miss Pride! Roman and the French Revolution are his specialties. And then, although he’s a modest man, I have no doubt in the world he could put many of our Harvard men to shame in the field of philosophy. Literature he is not so keen on although he did drop the remark that he had at one time been a great admirer of Goethe. Now there is a man who has the perspicacity to see what I mean when I say that in his language Riders of the Purple Sage is a superb piece of craftsmanship.”

  Miss Pride had had enough. She rose and her face, shaded by the wide brim of her hat, represented the pure substance of scorn. “You will forgive me, Mr. Brock, for finding your crotchet fantastic. It is my cantankerous opinion, sir, that you do not believe this nonsense yourself, but that you wish to disguise your appetite for rubbish. Not to put too fine a point on it, how could you, without the aid of some such camouflage, indulge yourself in Elsie Dinsmore at the age of seventy-two?”

  Mortally wounded, he gave her a wan smile, “Your wit is all that it is said to be, ma’am.”

  Less coldly but with the same firmness she went on, “What interests me about this Mr. Marburg is, does he make his shoes well? Does he know that craft, Mr. Brock, as well as his Latin?”

  “Oh, I have no idea. I never discuss business with him.”

  Miss Pride was looking at my feet, shod in a pair of white moccasins which my father had made. I was ashamed that they were so dirty and that my socks were ragged. She turned at the announcement of luncheon, but I did not fail to hear her say to Mr. Brock as they crossed the lobby, “I gather that he knows his business and has little of it.”

  After Audrey, the headwaitress, and I had set the tables for dinner, I went upstairs with Miss Pride’s fresh towels. The corridor was quiet, for all the guests were napping. I could hear, through the wall by Miss Pride’s bed, the faint popping of air in Mrs. McKenzie’s nose as she slept deeply. Immediately I took my post at the windows and in about a quarter of an hour, I saw Miss Pride go down the wooden stairs of the porch, pinching the hand-rail with her gloved fingers. Then she waited on the lawn for her high, black limousine. Once I had seen in it vases for flowers on the sides, hanging like pictures in a house. I believed she had other decorative furnishings in the back seat as, perhaps, a needlepoint footstool and a writing board. What if she even had a tea table and at a suitable hour and place, ordered the car to be stopped and then served herself tea! I would dwell on this enchanting thought sometimes as long as half an hour, seeing with an overwhelming happiness the actual seeds of the strawberry jam.

  Here came the car! Slipping round the corner of the Hotel, its long black snout caught the rays of the sun which shot fitfully into my eyes. It stopped and Mac, the chauffeur, stepped out. He was a thin, sharp, silvery young man who, in his gray livery, looked like an upright rat. He suffered from some strange distemper that caused his feet to swell, but though the valetudinarians of the veranda perpetually foretold Miss Pride’s doom when the man while driving should die at the wheel (for they were enough acquainted with his symptoms to know that foot swelling indicated a rheumatic heart for which there was no cure), she kept him on and about twice a week was handed into the car by his lean, gray paws which, since they went out and withdrew so quickly, seemed to abhor their contact with the desiccated elbow that they briefly cupped.

  “Well, Mac,” came her voice, “I trust we are all in order. I must run in to Pinckney Street today.”

  So that was the name of it: Pinckney Street. I repeated the words to myself and the house where she lived all winter now seemed less strange because it
was not merely in Boston but was in a specific street with a specific number of houses. Henceforth my daydreams would not begin with the vague condition, “When I live in Boston with Miss Pride,” but with, “When I live on Pinckney Street.”

  “Oh, but before we go,” she said, her foot on the running board, “I want you to take me to the shoemaker here. A Mr. Marburg.”

  The car drove off and I sank into the chair at the writing desk, faint with a conflict. For the joy I felt in Miss Pride’s going to call on my father was scotched by my shame of our shabby shop, my father’s untidiness, and my mother’s loquacity. Nor did I know whether she was seeking him out as Mr. Brock did, because he was educated, or if she was going to him on business, to have him half-sole her Ground Grippers. If her intention were the latter, now, at this very moment, I must relinquish my ambition to be her young and well-beloved friend.

  The letter to her niece was gone from the writing desk and in its place was one addressed to herself and postmarked London. I was less moved by the foreign stamp and the strange, thin paper of the envelope than I was by what next caught my eye: it was my own name, Marburg, written on a memorandum pad together with the legends: “Call Breckenridge at three” and “flue in the upstairs sitting-room.” That meant, then, that there was also a downstairs sitting-room so that the house was surely big enough to accommodate me as well as Hopestill Mather and Miss Pride. Perhaps even now she was saying to my father that although she realized he was a good man and well educated, she believed he owed it to me to give me a better home which she herself was willing to provide.

  While I was meditating, I was interrupted by Mrs. McKen­zie. She took very short naps and I heard her suffocated scream. I was afraid she might sense my presence in the room next to hers and summon me to eat a lemon drop or send me to the village to fetch her a bottle of Moxie. I tiptoed out of the room and through the Hotel and then stood in the back yard hesitating. For I could not decide whether to go directly home and present myself in the shop where the interview would probably take place—unless my mother’s curiosity were aroused at the sight of the black car and she insisted that they sit in the kitchen—or to go down to the Point and wait there until it should be over, passing the time in watching the sailboats and the barges going out from Boston harbor. But as I debated, I saw two old ladies round the corner of the Hotel with walking sticks and parasols, and I heard one of them say, “It’s not far. The view is gorgeous and at this time of day, we’ll have the whole Point to ourselves.”

  In order that my mother might not intercept me, I took the road on the bay side of the peninsula, approaching the shop from the rear. I stood on tiptoe outside the window and I saw, enveloped in the shadows, Miss Pride seated primly on a stool beside the wheels and shoe stands, while my father knelt, taking the measurements of her right foot. This foot, short and narrow, wore a tan silk stocking with heavy cotton reinforcements at the toe and heel, and I was momentarily shocked at the sight, for I had assumed that every article of her clothing, down to her underwear, would be black.

  “I understand that you are a friend of one of my fellow-lodgers, Mr. Brock,” she was saying.

  “He comes sometimes. He is a scholar, I suppose.”

  Miss Pride smiled. They were both silent as he removed her other shoe and began to measure the left foot. I wondered what she thought of this large shaggy man who always looked unkempt and would have even if he had fastidiously groomed himself. He was the opposite, in this respect, of my mother who never looked dirty or untidy though she was both, and to a far greater degree than he. He was a tall man and the muscles of his youth had not yet been overlaid by flesh, but, at thirty-three, had begun to sag a little as though they were preparing themselves for a permanent relaxation. His thick, yellow hair looked like a palm thatch and now, as he bent over and it fell forward from his skull, I felt that I could lift up a flap of it and clip it at a single root like the midrib of a leaf. His face was broad and red and its hollows were scooped out cleanly so that, although it was full, the shape of the skeleton was clearly visible. His chin was cleft and his lips, whose usual attitude was one of curving downward, were quiet and contemplative and seemed not to belong to the chilled blue eyes which were those of a decisive man. Today, because of the heat, he was dressed like a boy and when he stood up to get something from the work table which required him to turn in my direction, I saw to my embarrassment that his white, short-sleeved shirt was torn at the shoulder, revealing a segment of skin, browned by the sun on the days he had gone bathing. His hair seemed fairer than usual and at the temples it was almost white.

  Miss Pride, who had been leaning over his bent back, withdrew as he stood up, and she said, “I expect a good pair of shoes, Mr. Marburg. Your price is steep, but I have every confidence in German workmanship,”

  He did not rise to her compliment but gave only the smile which politeness demanded. I fairly danced with impatience in the sand at his unresponsive face and at the impudence which had made him charge her a high price when he should, I thought, have done the work free and presented her as a gift the finest pair of shoes he could make. Ah, if she had come to call on me, not my father, how I would have entertained her! I would have made her a pot of tea and run to the village for a lemon and half a dozen jellied doughnuts. And I would have listened carefully to every word she said and nodded my head in constant agreement as she talked.

  Although she saw that he was disinclined to talk (he could so easily, with the opening she had given him, explain that he had not always been a poor, shabby man, but that in Germany, he had been of a well-to-do family), she persevered. “You learned your trade in Germany, did you not?”

  “Oh, yes!” In his voice, there was an impulsive note which, combined with my sudden apprehension of a half-empty whiskey bottle on the shelf over the door, alarmed me, and I was afraid that he might begin to calendar, not the events of his past life, but its errors. For when he had been drinking, he became neither rebellious nor self-pitying as did my mother, but he brooded, morosely accusing himself of heartless infidelities to the traditions of the Catholic church, of his family, and of his country. My mother believed herself to be persecuted by everyone she had ever known—with the exception of Luibka, myself, and a few neighbor women—but he knew, and was powerless to rectify the fault, that all his torture came from his own flabby will which swung him like a pendulum between apathy and fretful indecision. I could see through the clouded windowpane that he was preoccupied with some tangential thought as he wrote down the specifications of Miss Pride’s feet in his notebook, and I was in mortal terror that he was going to tell her how long it had been since his last confession. When he did speak again, it was not in self-accusation, but it was from a point far removed from her question.

  He said, “But even so, they don’t know good shoes from bad here.”

  “If by ‘here’ you mean Chichester,” returned Miss Pride, “I’m certain you’re right. And while they might know skill when they saw it, these poor fishermen could not pay for it. But I beg to differ with you if by ‘here’ you mean something larger. Don’t you think, Mr. Marburg, that in Boston, we know the real thing?”

  The light which flickered in my father’s face was quickly extinguished. “It’s too late for that,” he said.

  “You are an obdurate man, sir. My father used to liken your countrymen to our own Puritans. Therein, he said, lay the greatness of the nation. I must confess Papa and I never saw eye to eye on your ‘greatness’ for even as a young lady, I was displeased with your romancing and your ‘earth-spirit’ but I can see that some of you are hard-headed. If you were not, how could you work so cleverly?” She paused, watching my father closely as though she were waiting for a reply or a confirmation, but neither was forthcoming. She went on. “If you came to Boston, you would be out of the doldrums. I recollect the governess to the child of one of my friends. When she came, poor Fräulein Ströck, she was timorous and wistful, for she
had been for some time in an establishment in the middle west where her gifts—a little too Prussian for my liking—were not appreciated in the least. But she had not been with us, with Boston, that is, for a month before she had blossomed into what she had been born to be, a first-rate disciplinarian. I believe you will find we have our feet on the ground and that we need no divining rods to find our treasures.”

  My father, no more than I, did not know what to make of her lecture. Had I been inside with them, I would have inquired how many children were under Miss Ströck’s charge or why it was that she was too Prussian to please Miss Pride entirely. My disappointment in my father’s indifference and in the gesture he made of passing his hand before his face as if he were befogged, was converted into anger as I realized that he did not intend to make any sort of comment at all. Surely he, a grown-up man with an education so proudly advertised by Mr. Brock, could select something out of that subtle speech as a point of departure! How stupid and contrary of him not to ask, at least, if Miss Pride had ever been to Germany. Why, I, a little girl, could do that much!