Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  * * *

  THE BACK BAY Business College was a morose establishment in a once fine house on Dartmouth Street, now infested with tongue-tied girls who seemed always on the verge of tears under the persistent scoldings of the mistress, a vulpine woman in her forties who regarded herself as an educator. Had we been a little younger, I am sure Mrs. Hinkel would have rapped our bungling fingers with a ruler, for incompetence inspired in her the most ardent displeasure. At the very beginning, she had singled me out for especially lusty maledictions, insisting that I was wasting my money and her time, for I would never in a thousand years learn to operate a typewriter with any more skill than a dog. What aggrieved her the most in me was the “reach stroke” of my right fourth finger for which she held a marveling contempt: “Class, gather and observe! Observe the fantastic reach stroke Miss Marburg deludes herself into thinking is the proper reach stroke. Learn by this example if you ever hope to make an asterisk visible to the naked eye!” In other branches of my commercial education, I was somewhat abler, being at the top of the class in Business English (because I could immediately distinguish between the nominative and the subjective cases and because the subjunctive mood did not baffle me) and being known as a “good worker” in the shorthand class.

  The student body strikingly resembled the staff. They were all torpid and bird-like by turns and their humor consisted in such expressions as “I see, said the blind man,” and “Well, laugh, I thought I’d die.” I ate my lunch at a drug-store with five or six of my classmates who discussed silk stockings and serials in the Ladies’ Home Journal. They could talk for three quarters of an hour, without any waning of interest, about the confections peculiar to the Boylston Street Schrafft’s. The intimacy of the group (they referred to one another’s sisters by their given names and inquired after mothers and fathers and aunts) made me suppose that they were old friends and had gone to school together and I felt, therefore, that my exclusion from their talk was not my own fault. I learned in time, however, that they had never met before the first day of classes at what they jokingly called “dear old Back Bay.” The discovery made me feel immature and when I could, I avoided these womanly lunch hours, not through snobbery, but through a sense of maladjustment.

  I detested the business college, but at the same time it afforded me a contrast to the rest of my life without which I might have come to regard as habitual those things which gave me keen pleasure. I enjoyed the retreat I made each day from the gray plaster walls, the methodical accent of the typewriters, and Mrs. Hinkel’s dour face in which her acerbity was coagulated in a large, asymmetrical, nose. I went slowly through the Public Gardens at the hour of the exodus of the nursemaids who wheeled out the infant Cabots and the recalcitrant Chandlers. I crossed Charles Street and in traversing the asphalt boundary, entered dissimilar territory: the Common where orators and their satellites and their hecklers yelped and gestured with impotent passion. My own latchkey, fitted to the burnished lock of the white door, admitted me to the silent vestibule, in the dim light of which the mahogany tables, identical and facing one another, gleamed smoothly. Not a sound greeted me. As I pushed open the door to the empty drawing-room, I heard the crackling fire that had just been started. In another hour and a half, this room would be the scene of the comings and goings of Miss Pride’s callers whose voices were carried up the stairwell and into my room.

  Some afternoons, I stepped across the threshold and wandered about the drawing-room for a quarter of an hour, musing on how it would be when it was occupied by Miss Pride’s friends. At first I had thought of the room as altogether Victorian, but after a few investigations, I saw that its objects were disparate and that the only really Victorian part of the room was the bay-window, furnished with an uncushioned love-seat of some stony black wood, the arms carved and embossed and curled; the feet of a stunted lion had been calcified and grafted on to the slender ankles of the seat’s well-developed legs. On either side, stationed on the floor where presumably they got the morning light, were a variety of house-plants, no one of which laid claim to beauty. They were kept there and were replaced when they died (this happened rarely, their chief virtue being longevity) because they had been there forever just as a Pride or a tributary to the family had always lived in the house. Miss Pride detested them but would not have dreamed of having them removed; she was especially offended by one species which had large flat dusky leaves chased with pink striations. She did not know its name but called it after a kind of cookie it reminded her of, “Aunt Alice’s Birthday Trifle” which had figured in her childhood. Evidently some former owner of the house had been a Francophile and another had fancied Oriental handiwork, for upon the ormolu top of a tulip-wood commode there sat a golden Buddha and above him on the white New England wall hung two Japanese prints of long ladies, long herons, and long sprays of wistaria. Yet at the Buddha’s feet, as if to confirm the nationality of the commode, lay aimlessly an ivory-handled dagger of which the blade was inlaid with slate-blue fleur-de-lis. The sofas, high and stuffed with an inelastic substance, and the slipper chairs, low, velvety, resilient, had, like Aunt Alice’s Birthday Trifle, grown up with the house and their removal was unthinkable although even Miss Pride admitted that they were hideous. Cluttered and inarticulate as it was, I preferred this room to the library, for it was lighter, being at the front of the house and carpeted with a buff rug sprinkled with rich, blue flowers, and its anachronisms imparted to it an atmosphere of geniality as if each heir had accepted the vagaries of the one who preceded him with good will and added his own in the same spirit. The library, on the other hand, was a formidable, masculine province, dominated by Mr. Pride and by several umbrageous ancestral portraits. The furniture was plain, solid, useful. Miss Pride had told me that on Christmas Eve when the revelers and carolers thronged Beacon Hill and one’s door-bell rang a hundred times whether or not one had intended to hold open house, her father had read aloud to the servants from the Gospel according to Saint Matthew while in the drawing-room his daring wife, trembling with fear at her own importunity, served sillabub and lebkuchen to the visitors. In the library, too, President Eliot had been in the habit of spending two or three evenings a month playing chess with Mr. Pride. His daughter described to me one such evening, “My mother sent me down to ask Papa if they would have some Brazil nuts with their sherry. She was never content to let well enough alone. She was a regular doter. The gentlemen were in the midst of their game and my father, very much annoyed at the disturbance, put his finger to his lips and motioned to me not to move a step nearer the table. President Eliot looked up and through me; my father finished a play and said, ‘Sir, for your sake, I regret the brilliance of my rook’s performance, for it has won the game for me.’ ‘You apologized too soon, sir,’ said Mr. Eliot and bending forward with a smile like the Cheshire cat’s, he captured the rook and checkmated Papa. Then, without any further talk, they set up the men again and to my question would they like some Brazil nuts with their sherry, Papa curtly replied, ‘No.’ But President Eliot, without looking at me though he glared at my father, said, ‘Speak for yourself, Mr. Pride. I, for my part, would relish Brazil nuts as a reward for my triumph.’ ”

  After I had heard this story, I never went into the library without being intimidated by the ghosts of the scholarly chess-players, for their sturdy square table and the board and men remained beside the fireplace, and a decanter of sherry with two glasses stood waiting on a cabinet. At first I thought the preparations were a memorial, as important in the history of the family as the silver christening cups and the yachting trophies on display behind the glass doors of the cabinet, and that in time, when the house became a museum, a copper plate, attached to the table, would inform tourists that President Eliot had played chess there. But I was quite wrong: the table was in readiness for Miss Pride who, with a manual of famous gambits, worked through game after game by herself every Sunday morning before church, and the sherry, too, was kept there for her when, having defea
ted the white men with Philidor’s Defense, she took her own reward and, braced, went off to King’s Chapel. Occasionally she would play a game with one of her friends, but these trifling conquests took place in the upstairs sitting-room, for the namby-pamby stratagems of the amateurs would have desecrated the ivory and ebony men of the library who had been in the service of brilliant generals.

  The contrast between the drawing-room and the library was not, of course, accidental. Their distinct gender dated from the time the house was built and the drawing-room was still the “withdrawing room” to which the ladies repaired after dinner. The curious thing to me was that Miss Pride, being without a master for her parties, played both rôles. One morning she asked me to fetch her an aspirin tablet for she had a headache as the result of “combining spirits.” The evening before she had been detained in the drawing-room by a boring nobody so long that when she finally arrived in the library to unlock the liquor cabinet for the gentlemen’s brandy and whiskey (she would never in the world have allowed her servants to perform this duty), they were quite languishing and the delay made them drink twice as much as they would have ordinarily, to her appreciable financial loss. And she, although she had already had her Cointreau with the ladies, was so loath to go back to the tiresome guest (she was one of those creatures who late in life had become domestic and on Thursdays experimented in the kitchen with such materials as junket and peanut butter, and on all the other days tired out her friends with forcing her barbarous receipts upon them) that she “took a breather” with the men.

  Each day, I saw the first tea guests arriving, for when the sun began to set, I took up my post at the window of my bedroom and did not leave it until the momentary yellow light just preceding darkness had made all the leaves of Pinckney Street declamatory. I longed to see from the outside these windows through which I looked, but I could not relinquish the prospect I had of Louisburg Square, its dead grass and dumpy statues enlivened by the rich light while the iron palings reasserted their dead, absorbent blackness. At this hour, the letter-slots and knockers blazed; the marble lintels seemed as cool and old as something from an ancient palace. Long and lean, the houses deepened into purple with the decline of the sun. Far up the street, forming the background to a pattern of golden elm leaves, was a bright blue door. From time to time, a man in a derby and a black Chesterfield would briskly cross the square to our house, and in a moment I would hear the door-bell. Or a chauffeur would hand out a lady from a gleaming automobile. Talk and laughter presently surged up the stairs.

  When the arc lights came on, I left the window and turned on the lamp beside my bed. My room sprang forth, enlarged, entirely changed by the light. The ceiling seemed immensely higher, the wide, polished doors as tall as a castle’s portals. Even my single bed with its lace counterpane and folded puff was more luxurious. To the left of my double windows was a massive, flat-topped writing desk with deep drawers on either side which had been filled with watermarked paper, yellow second sheets, onion skin and carbon paper. Its surface was furnished with silver tools: letter openers, penknives, scissors, boxes of paper clips and rubber bands, and postage stamps. In a small upper drawer, there was pale green stationery with our address embossed in small white letters. The typewriter on which I practiced my home-work had its own stand at the right corner of the desk so that I had only to turn my chair to be facing it.

  The joy my room gave me was, each day when I switched on the lamp, so intense that my being required its articulation and sometimes I could not see the deep mole-colored carpet and the silvery draperies at the windows for my tears. Again, the Breughel and the Vermeer and the Rembrandt prints, hanging on the ivory walls in double frames, could make me smile smugly. As large as a room, my clothes-closet was equipped with shelves for my expensive shoes, with padded hangers for my evening dresses, and with a ceiling light so that I could see to choose my costume. My bathroom was not adjoined but was down the hall a little way. Six thick, white towels, monogrammed “L P” hung about the gleaming tub. The medicine chest was filled with bottles of cologne, Miss Pride’s soap, with a tooth-powder made up by a Dartmouth Street pharmacist, and with cans of faintly scented talcum powder.

  On the left wall of my bedroom, near the fireplace, was a locked door leading to Hopestill Mather’s sitting-room. And the windows above my bathtub gave on to a shaft across which I could see the windows that corresponded to mine above her bathtub. It was not until I had been in the house ten days or more that I saw her apartment. A maid was preparing it for her return from Manchester, and as I passed through the hall, I stopped to ask the girl some needless question about my laundry. I saw that it was true, just as I had imagined it, that the room and the one beyond it to which the door stood ajar was carpeted with green. In the generous bay-window was a wine-colored chaise-longue. The fireplace was in the same position as the one in the drawing-room, and in Miss Pride’s room directly below this. Over it hung a portrait of Hopestill as a child. She wore a full-skirted white dress, ballet slippers, and a green hair ribbon in her red hair. It was so striking a likeness that I could hear her voice calling across the dining-room, “Waitress! Water, please.” On either side of the hearth were wing chairs upholstered in green and wine-red stripes. Beside each was a table underneath whose glass top showed bright Italian tiles and upon which stood cloisonné cigarette boxes, match-holders and ash-trays. Against the wall opposite the windows stood a delicate Victorian writing desk, flanked on either side by low shelves filled with books still wearing their glossy, gaudy jackets. Through the distant door, I caught sight of a mahogany highboy and the corner of a four-poster bed.

  An hour after the tea guests had gone, I would join Miss Pride in the upstairs sitting-room where we had a glass of sherry and a light conversation, after which we went down to dinner. Sometimes she repeated an anecdote she had heard during the day or summarized a colloquy that had struck her fancy. Usually, though, she questioned me about my attitudes, interspersing her interrogation with pointers on conduct. One Friday night she requested me to come downstairs at tea time the following afternoon to be, as she said, “broken in,” an unfortunate phrase since it was also the one she used in speaking of servants whom she had trained. I was never, she admonished me, to regard myself as a servant. But at this phase of my career, when I had learned little more at the commercial school than which were the “home keys” on the typewriter, she could not truthfully call me her secretary. Moreover, being a woman completely sufficient unto herself, she could not introduce me as her “companion” without discrediting herself or making her friends suspect that her eyesight was failing. Nor could she pretend that I was a distant relative or the daughter of an old friend who until now had been in boarding school in Switzerland, for it would take no more than one conversation for anyone to know that I had no connections with Boston and therefore none with herself. What I was, in point of fact, was her “case” or her “project” or whatever the word was that was then in fashion to describe the beneficiary of that allotment in a rich woman’s budget called “Miscellany.” But wishing to spare my feelings (and also because practicing charity under one’s roof was seldom “done” unless the recipient was the orphan of a friend or relative who had been left with no money), she did not fancy my presentation in these terms. At first, it had been her intention to keep me imprisoned while she tutored me in etiquette and until I was able to operate a typewriter, but this plan soon appeared impracticable owing to the fact that my residence in the house had leaked out, presumably through the servants.

  She had hit upon a solution at last. Until I should be qualified as a secretary and until she saw fit to admit publicly that she was going to write her memoirs, she gave me to understand that I was to offer no unsolicited information, but if I were pressed I was to say, quite truthfully, that I was studying to become the amanuensis of a writer whose name I was not at liberty to give, that she and I had met through Dr. McAllister and she had invited me to share her house which, in H
opestill’s absence, would be too lonely even for her. I was permitted to say I was from Chichester but almost all the rest of my background was to be obliterated from my memory. Quite understandably she did not want it known that my mother was in an asylum. No more did I. There was little danger of the fact coming to light, for the summer residents of Chichester did not move in Miss Pride’s circles nor anywhere near them, and the only link presenting any danger was Dr. Barker, who not only had a bad memory for names but was also opposed to gossip and would certainly never dream of repeating anything so banal as his sister’s report of Chichester’s insane woman.

  Having set the hour for my début in her drawing-room, Miss Pride went on frankly to clarify her plans for me. I say “frankly,” but the word is inexact, for her confessions were so subtly put and she displayed so ambiguous a wit that it was only after I had left her and had gone to my own room after dinner that I realized how stark had been her projection of the future. She was mortally afraid of growing old; if she were to dodder into half-crazed and ludicrous senility, as both her father and her mother had done, she wanted a caretaker to silence her, to dissuade her from both the crabbed and the maudlin antics of old age. She feared blindness (she, whose eyes at seventy had never been fitted with glasses) and dreaded being deprived of reading and of walking. “I don’t fancy taking up phonograph records to amuse me at my age,” she said scornfully. She was not sure I was the right custodian for her; that, only time could tell, but she wished me to consider whether I should like to think of myself as permanently installed in her house, and she implied that I would not be forgotten in her will. I was grateful and happy at the prospect, even though it was impossible for me to imagine her so changed as to need the services of what amounted to a nursemaid. I told her that and she replied grimly, “My dear, we’re all fools before we’re fetched by the pale rider.”