Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  He replied, “No, no. It’s a case of ‘east is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet.’ ”

  I was to learn that the Admiral could not get through a day without using at least one quotation and that because he had given up reading poetry some ten years before and now took his entire supply from Bartlett’s, half the time his tags had nothing to do with the context of the conversation. But he was known in Miss Pride’s circle as having a colorful and individual speech, the flavor of which derived partly from his literary allusions and partly from his use of polite address which, to ladies, included “Fräulein,” “Señora,” “Madame,” as well as “Ma’am,” “Miss,” and “Madam.”

  I thought Miss Pride must find his gabbling ludicrous and I was astonished when she came up to us and greeted him most affectionately: “Lincoln Nephews, you’re too old to be flirting with this young lady. Now tell me what you’ve been up to. Evelyn Frothingham just told me you had been to a dance at the Country Club. What an old beau you are!”

  “I was and I had a thumping good time. So often the Country Club is stodgy, but this time, ma’am, it was superb. Why, Lucy, I tripped the light fantastic until two o’clock in the morning.”

  I could not think what criterion of stodginess old Lincoln had set up, any better than I could imagine him “tripping the light fantastic,” since all three words were so peculiarly inapplicable to his embonpoint. It gave me great pleasure to hear of “the Country Club,” “the Chilton Club,” and “St. Botolph,” as though I were peeping through the windows of those chaste establishments where, in the libraries and the ballrooms and the parlors, the thoroughbreds of Back Bay and Beacon Hill were engaged in fashionable diversions, the nature of which was still unknown to me, though I pictured the Admiral nursing a breather of brandy in the company of his pink-faced and bald coevals, while Miss Pride and members of her “reading circle” traced genealogies over their tea. On the Saturday before this, when Miss Pride was lunching at the Chilton Club, I had received a telephone message from her which obliged me to go round there to deliver her calling cards which she had left behind. When the door had closed upon me and I was actually on the premises of this sanctum sanctorum, I could not have been more stirred if it had been the residence of queens and princesses, though I saw only the vestibule with its cloak booth, presided over by a matronly woman in spectacles and a starched white cap and apron who, with her cultivated speech and her remote manner, could have been a member of the club herself. Through the half-open door directly in front of me and at the end of the hall, I saw the edge of a dining-table and a thick gray rug and half a portrait of a lady. From the room issued talk and laughter so that I knew the ladies were still at lunch and I would not, therefore, be allowed to hand Miss Pride her cards, but must entrust them to the custodian of the wraps. A waiter, as distinguished in his swallowtails as an ambassador and having a foreign accent, said he would have someone remind Miss Pride in “Meesis Saltonstall’s party” that a parcel was waiting for her, and he went off to elect a responsible member of his staff to bear these tidings to my mistress. Afterwards, as I walked home along Commonwealth Avenue where the bright early afternoon sun displayed to their advantage the genuine and the false violet windowpanes, I chose the houses where she might go that afternoon to drop her card when Mrs. Saltonstall’s party, like a courtly banquet, had been adjourned. Until then she would be inaccessible to everyone but those whose lineage entitled them to push open the door in the Chilton Club and pass between the portals into the dining-room.

  Miss Pride and Admiral Nephews briefly and malevolently discussed the Evelyn Frothingham who had informed Miss Pride of her friend’s revels and was, I gathered, still in the room and possibly within earshot. Miss Pride said she was resembling a toad more closely each day and the Admiral agreed, adding that her model was an especially unsightly specimen. Having demolished the poor woman, they proceeded then to what I soon discovered was the favorite topic of their generation in Boston: namely, the Irish politicians who had “taken over” the city, and were an even greater menace in Cambridge. Today Miss Pride had the openers: she had heard that afternoon that a young lawyer, distinguished for his illustrious family connections, for his irreproachable court record, for his manners and his charm, had suddenly taken it into his head to campaign for the mayor of Cambridge, and had been seen, only the night before, at a roadhouse near Weston in the company of six Irish politicians. And the same unnamed source had informed her that far from being ill at ease in their midst, the renegade from the Republican party whose name was Carew or Carey, I could not tell which, was in his element, was actually the ring-leader and was so disheveled from drinking and shouting and lolling about that he was barely recognizable.

  The Admiral had a counter: another man, of Mr. Carew’s (or Carey’s) generation and kidney had recently, to curry favor with these same Irish politicians of Cambridge, been overheard panegyrizing the Roman Catholic Church in the presence of certain notorious gossips who were sure to spread the word. “What would our great grandfathers have thought if they had known Boston was to become a Popish stronghold?” said Miss Pride, appalled at this “case.”

  “Well,” replied the Admiral, “I don’t know the answer to that one as I never had the pleasure of knowing my great grandfather. But I know that my grandfather would have said aplenty in strong words, ma’am, after the ladies had retired. My grandfather, you know, used to be acquainted with Matthew Arnold’s mother, and when he learned that she turned all the pictures to the wall Sunday, when he came back from Oxford and had children of his own, he did the same thing. He was an exceedingly pious man and I dassen’t imagine the way he would have scored the Catholics. In those days, of course, they hadn’t become a problem. The old order changeth.”

  I stopped listening to the conversation, and while I was still digesting the fact that Admiral Nephews’ grandfather had known Matthew Arnold’s mother, I heard a sharp-faced, diminutive woman, who was sitting near-by, say to a young man, “Oh, a man and his books are quite separate things I think. I never knew anyone more charming and affectionate than Henry James and he was always one of my dearest friends, but I can’t abide his books.”

  I could not evaluate accurately the aspects of this select world: whether the personal connection of these people with the immortals, or their poised arrogance in regard to such issues as the contemptible political machine of Boston, or their stylish language, or their blueblooded ugliness was the more impressive. The roots of Miss Pride’s guests were so deep and tough that I thought they were eternal, and the word “decadent” that Dr. McAllister, a traitor to his intended destiny, had used so often in speaking of Boston when he was trying to depress my expectations, was misleading. Decay must come from within and I could imagine nothing but an external calamity, a social revolution that could eradicate this solid society. Perhaps that was the aim of the ultra-montane newcomers. It was not, I concluded, that what they said and the judgments they passed were of any profundity or of any insight (on the contrary, they often sprang from a primitive and passionate ignorance of the opinions of the rest of the world but which, despite their egotism, contained a measure of self-distrust) but that the manner of these pilgrims’ heirs was so fearless and direct that one was not struck with their fatuity. The woman who had been fond of Henry James spoke, a little later on, to the woman I identified as Mrs. Frothingham (she was, as her critics had described her, a reptilian, puckered, misshapen person), of her opinion of people who experimented with flowers. “Really, I do feel,” she said, “that this craving for a tulipe noire is ridiculous. It debases nature.” I believed her implicitly, though this was a subject I had never before pondered. Immediately thereafter I was won to the side of her adversary who, with as forthright a tone, rejoined, “I can’t agree, of course. One might just as well say that formal gardens are a debasement of nature. Or that grapefruit is.”

  “I think grapefruit is. I don’t care for it at all.”r />
  “But not formal gardens?” inquired Mrs. Frothingham drily.

  “Ah, you have me there, you clever woman,” laughed Henry James’ friend, and I gathered that she had a formal garden. “I’ll ‘bone up’ on that poser as my little Stephen says and tell you my answer Thursday at Sarah Cushman’s.”

  “Shall you be there too?” said the other in surprise.

  “Certainly. We have declared a most just armistice. I dare say it’s in our blood, and no doubt we’ll be far more battle-scarred than we are now before we die. But for the time being the white flag is up.”

  I was intrigued by this feud, so publicly alluded to, and was disappointed when later on I learned that the two warriors were sisters. Mrs. Frothingham and her friend, having shelved their differences on flowers and grapefruit, now exchanged views and reminiscences, having in their retinue a regiment of names as they traversed miles of drawing-rooms, summer residences, and the parks of foreign cities, dignifying the most trifling detail with a judicious and clear-voiced appraisal that made life and the world singularly leveled down and homogeneous. The small, sharp woman hated the new Pompeii for the same reasons (though these reasons were not stated, were, she said, “self-evident” so that I, who could not discover them, felt stupid) that she hated tulipes noires and grapefruit. Mrs. Frothingham maintained that these same mysterious reasons, which she readily apprehended and despised, were meaningless and that exactly the opposite was, in each case, true.

  3

  I rose, intending to make my way to the bay-window and try covertly to close it for I was suffering acutely from the cold. Miss Pride detained me. “I want you to talk with Amy Brooks, who is over there by the fire. She’s about your age and a very suitable person.”

  “She’s literary, ain’t she?” asked the Admiral.

  “No, she paints. But she’s about Miss Marburg’s age.”

  She indicated a person whom I had noticed before and had taken to be about forty-five. Now I subtracted a few years, but could not believe she was any less than thirty-eight. She had been in conversation with a stout old woman who now got up and was about to leave. I heard her, in parting, say, “I wish I had been half so clever as you when I was your age, Amy. You must come to me soon and bring some of the thingumabobs you were telling me about.” With this, refusing assistance though she was very lame, she began a labored journey with her cane towards Miss Pride, and as I observed her, waiting a moment out of respect for her age before I took her place beside Amy Brooks, I recollected a scene that each fall repeated itself in Chichester. In the afternoon, it had rained, but the air had cleared by evening. As I walked home from the Hotel after dark, ahead of me I heard the steady, three-legged walk of old ladies with sticks over the wet gravel road, and voices, strangely sweetened by the waves or by my distance from them, deliberating the further necessity for umbrellas, even though they did not stray far from the veranda and could immediately have got to shelter if the rain began again. Children of the village, playing Run Sheep Run, passed me and overtook the strollers, scampered through the weak circle that the flashlight of one cast on the ground, and ran on, giggling.

  I stood aside to let the old lady, who was dressed in mourning, pass. She gazed at me with dreamy, half-blind eyes and gave me a smile, the sincerity and sweetness of which momentarily disrobed her of the concealments of age and revealed her as she once had been. “How d’you do?” she said. “I know all about you, my dear.” But before I could reply, she had taken the Admiral’s arm and was being eased into a chair beside Miss Pride.

  My appointed interlocutor was ruinously plain, wanting both an adequate nose and chin, but having, for compensation, large square glossy teeth and hyperthyroid eyes. She was small and nervous and given to giggling as well as to sudden fits of seriousness when her whole organism tensed to apparently agonizing statements like, “I have been reading Eugene O’Neill!” or “Last week I went to T Wharf and spent an afternoon sketching!” Then for a few seconds she would stare at me with her high, blue, mammiform eyes.

  I said, “Were you sketching boats?”

  “Yes! All kinds. Even a dear little Chinese junk! Not from China, of course. It belongs to some arty people, I think, but that doesn’t keep it from being cunning, does it? Do you sketch?” I regretted that I did not. “Oh, but you should! There’s really nothing like the satisfaction it gives one. Don’t you think one ought to have an outlet? I do! I think it’s so important these days, especially. I don’t pretend to be an artist, you know!” She was visited again, distractingly, by giggles which delayed her. She continued, “I mean, I think it’s so necessary to be in touch with art, don’t you?”

  I supposed that it was, but I could not expatiate for I was tongue-tied before this ebullient spinster whose upbringing had taught her to say the most platitudinous things to a complete stranger but to say them so firmly and courteously that they sounded indisputable. Her zest—she said in a few minutes that the reason she sketched was that she wished people to know what she thought of life—was a consistent style, plagiarized and monotonous and eminently respectable.

  Sorrowfully from Miss Pride and admiringly from Dr. McAllister, I had heard that Hopestill Mather filled her leisure time with none of the mild artistic enterprises commonly undertaken by young ladies who had been “out” for sometime, the water colors, the humorous poetry, the informal essays, the sculpturing in plasticine, the rendition of Chopin. Yet, although she had repudiated the conventional patois and honestly acknowledging that she had not even the mildest of gifts, her opinions were by no means poles apart from those of Miss Brooks as I realized, recalling the doctor’s further comments. For I had been told that Hope did not want to “lose touch” with art and desired to be one of its patronesses. Dr. McAllister’s irony came to me only now, for I had not perceived that this innocently overbearing notion was not unique in the girl I had set out to dislike. Art, to the Misses Brooks and Mather, was a custom: one “kept up” with the newspapers and fashions, was on the alert for word of engagements, marriages, births, débuts, and similarly, one did not like to “lose touch” with art.

  Miss Brooks informed me that her stepmother, the Countess von Happel, had done a great deal towards bringing good exhibits to Boston. “Don’t you think Europeans have more feeling for art than we do?” she said. “My stepmother is Viennese. She may be here later on today.” Nor had the Countess neglected contemporary artists, struggling in Boston and New York; she visited their studios and hung their paintings in her dining-room and very often sold one, for a small sum, to a guest who admired it. “It might be only fifteen dollars, but you know even fifteen dollars will give an artist a lift. Oh, I think it’s wonderful the way they keep on in their horrid little studios!” “They,” a grubby and deserving species, sounded like prisoners serving a term for a felony they had not committed, to whom a gift of cigarettes or chocolate bars meant a new lease on life. I said I had heard Hopestill Mather was another good Samaritan, interested in the artist’s welfare, though no doubt not on such a grand scale.

  “Well, with Hope, it’s different,” said Miss Brooks. “She’s more Bohemian about it. I mean, Hope is almost more interested in the artists themselves than in their work. You know! She’s interested in people. We call her the ‘psychologist.’ She wants to find out what makes an artist and not what an artist makes. It all depends on one’s point of view. Now the Countess is a great admirer of Van Gogh, but she doesn’t care a bit for all those scandalous stories about his ear and so on. But how Hope loves them! Art is my stepmother’s life, art,” she added, “and dinner parties.” This last was offered with a freshet of giggles which I took to mean that the Countess’ predilection for dinner parties was of notorious proportions.

  This girl, so inferior to my ideal conception of a Bostonian, and yet, with all her cordiality, so aloof, unwilling even to inquire what my business might be in that drawing-room (For how could she have failed to sense immedia
tely that I was an outsider?) had, when she began to speak of Hopestill Mather, changed her tone from nervousness to calm, as if she were held in check by a powerful emotion which had put a stop to the vertigo of her introspection and had made her temporarily critical. I said, “Do you know Miss Mather well?”

  “Oh, of course,” she replied. “She’s my cousin.”

  In the course of that day, I discovered a Bostonian general principle: namely, that everyone was related to everyone else, or if blood kinship did not obtain, something else almost as binding did; people had gone to dancing school together or their fathers had been law-partners or their mothers had been Red Cross nurses in the same village in France. But this kinship, even that of blood (perhaps actually it was true more of this than of the other kind) was so taken for granted that it was almost uninteresting. It was important to know who had married into what family and who were the forebears of the bride and groom and whether the bride’s mother were the Martha Endicott who had gone to Winsor School with Priscilla Bradley but had married into Philadelphia. All of this was of vital concern, but half the time, the performers of that drama, coiled about itself innumerable times, were known most vaguely to their commentators. And the relation of twigs to the trees had become so complicated that no one could straighten it out immediately: the whole rigamarole must be gone through each time. Cousins were not appreciably more kindred than friends, and friends never knew when they would discover that they were really cousins, the fact being established only by an accidental remark dropped by a former Bostonian, who now lived in London, and relayed home in a casual letter by her visitor. Thus, Miss Pride had not told me that Amy Brooks was Hopestill Mather’s cousin and Miss Brooks herself had supplied me with the information almost as an afterthought, really only to explain why she knew Hopestill as if their being cousins (since obviously they were not friends) was the only thing that would induce them to know one another.