Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  Mr. Otis Whitney, who for the past few moments had been invisible, being blocked out by the Admiral’s bulk, stood up and implored, “Lincoln, if you’ve got your car, would you be so good as to drop me?” But Miss Pride pulled him by the coattails and said rather sharply, “You only just came, Otis. You haven’t told me a thing about Frank. Now do begin from the beginning. Where did he get that disgusting disease?”

  Hopestill excused herself from her aunt and Mrs. Frothingham and came to us. The doctor rose and, erect as he was because of his deformed back, gave the appearance of leaning forward. The hand he offered shook and the voice with which he greeted her was unnaturally high and diffident. He was not used to her yet, I thought, and his eyes had not accustomed themselves to her ferocious radiance. Oblivious to all save this ignited tulip, he raised his hand and touched her hair. I sighed without meaning to, as if the inhalation were the vehicle for this strange scene. The doctor introduced us and, sensible of my presence for the first time since he had heard the front door open, reinstated me as his friend. “Sonie will be glad you’ve arrived at last. She’s been here a month and this is her first public appearance.”

  “How do you do?” said the girl, smiling warmly at me. “I’m sure it’s been awfully dull for you, and I haven’t a doubt that Philip hasn’t lifted a finger to amuse you.”

  The doctor made the lame excuse that he had been busy, although, had he thought back, he would have known that I—who until this moment had not resented his neglect—could hardly swallow it since he had intimated that he had come to tea here several times when he expressed surprise that he had not seen me before. But I was more embarrassed by Hopestill’s scolding than he, feeling that he found me a bore or that he had avoided me because he pitied my misfortunes or dreaded my complaints.

  Hopestill looked restlessly about the room. “Five minutes of this sort of thing and I’m at the end of my tether. Don’t you think we should have cocktails?”

  There was a good deal of Miss Pride in her, I saw. Her eyes were similar, small and nacreous like painted ornaments. She had been allotted less than her share of flesh and it was as dry as paper, and so pale her mechanism seemed to run by something other than blood or else in her the blood was really blue. And her voice, which her cold spirit permitted to be merely tinged with cordiality, had the same metallic opacity, lacking resonance and melody but having instead a vast range of pitch.

  “I would be delighted,” said Philip. “But doesn’t your aunt belong to the school of thought of my sainted grandmother which holds you mustn’t drink for pleasure but for the sake of your appetite?”

  Hopestill smiled vaguely. “If they’re similar in that respect, they wouldn’t admit it, would they? Why, if Auntie knew that, she’d either turn teetotaller or dipsomaniac.”

  “Or else tell everyone that Grandma got the idea from her and was secretly an old soak.”

  “I need a drink.” She had been toying with the foliage as she sat on an ottoman. She was dismembering a spray of fern. “I hate this hair-like vegetation, don’t you, Miss Marburg? It fits though. My horse threw me twice today in the ring, in the mud. My trousers were ruined. I beat hell out of him. That I enjoyed.”

  A pained silence followed her confession of sadism. To consolidate our awkward triangle and to change the subject, I said, “I met your cousin and her two tall beaux this afternoon.” And then, because she seemed to think I had something more to say, I told her of the predicament I had been entangled in by Your Esteemed Uncle Arthur Hornblower. Her face, instead of reflecting the amusement I had expected, hardened against me and anger brightened the flare of her eyes. I learned my lesson in the silence that followed my joke’s collapse, but sick with humiliation, thought my experience would never benefit me, that this defender of her relatives whom she could not, nevertheless, abide, would refuse to have me any longer in the house. She looked away from me. “Have you heard the marvelous thing Uncle Arthur did? He changed his will last summer and left something like a hundred thousand to Vanzetti’s sister. Isn’t that really good of him?”

  The doctor, perhaps not realizing that her chief purpose had been to reproach me, said, “Why, what a turncoat you are! I thought you were the most rabid supporter of the Committee’s decision. Don’t tell me you’ve got some inside information about their innocence!”

  “On the contrary, I’m perfectly sure and always will be sure that they were guilty, but that doesn’t mean Vanzetti’s sister was. And Uncle Arthur, after all, could be prompted simply by generosity, couldn’t he?”

  “No,” said the doctor with a smile. “But I say, about those drinks? Does she keep the makings in the library?”

  “We’ll have to have second best and that’s in the pantry. Look, there comes the Happel. What a pity she has just missed seeing Amy flanked on each side by a tall beau!”

  The scorn of her remark, far surpassing the acidity of mine, was deliberately aimed at me, and by it she gave me to understand that she was at liberty to say what she liked about her dowdy cousin, but that it would behoove any outsider to keep a civil tongue in his head. I was distressed when Dr. McAllister left us to confer with Miss Pride, for, since she had imposed upon my conversation a prohibition that applied to the only thing we had in common, that is, the guests, I had nothing to say to Hopestill. But she realized that it was her duty to select a subject for us and she gave me a sociable smile which only made me uncomfortable because it showed that she had now put me in my place and, confident that she would have no further trouble with me, could proceed.

  “Aunt Lucy’s house isn’t the gayest in the world, is it? Has she sent up Mercy to keep you company?”

  “Mercy?”

  “She’s my aunt’s cat. Since her last accouchement, she’s been rather peckish. Even so, I’m surprised Aunt Lucy hasn’t introduced you. Do you like our house?”

  I answered abstractedly, so overcome was I at the idea of Miss Pride’s cat. There was something perplexing and a little unpleasant in her concealment of it. (When, on the following morning at breakfast, I confronted her with my knowledge, saying that I would like to see Mercy, she said, “She is nervous. Perhaps in time she’ll be up to society again,” quite matter-of-factly as if the person in question were a friend for whom a long sea voyage had been too much. I said it was strange that I had never heard the cat cry. “Oh, no,” answered Miss Pride, “she’s not much of a talker. She’s well satisfied with her bedroom just off mine.”)

  “I’m sorry I must go on to New York so soon,” said Hope­still. “Tell me, do you think you’ll be able to stick it out?”

  “Stick it out?”

  “Yes, I mean it’s rather a grim prospect, I should think, to be shut up in this gloomy old house where the ghost of my blue-nosed grandpa walks every night. Or perhaps you have friends in Boston?”

  “A few,” I replied warily.

  “In that case, then, you won’t be lonely. Where are you from, by the way? Auntie told me, but I have a rotten memory.”

  “Chichester,” I said.

  “Oh, of course. I know nothing about the place. I haven’t been there since I was a very little girl.” She paused and looked closely into my face, and then went on, “Chichester has produced a very objectionable person by the name of Betty Brunson.”

  “I know her.”

  “She turns up on Christmas Eve, at places she’d never be invited, with an entourage of horrible boys from New York. She’s exactly like a guide and says, ‘Now this is typical of Boston,’ or ‘You’d never find this outside Massachusetts,’ and all in the world she’s pointing out is someone’s Cape Cod lighter or a Currier and Ives.”

  I was so panic-stricken at the thought that I might some time encounter Betty Brunson in Boston that I could make no comment. Hopestill gave me a second of her searching looks.

  “Have we met before?”

  “No,” I replied firmly.


  “Your face is so familiar. Were you at the Porcellian dance last spring?”

  “No. I’m sure we haven’t met. I would remember you.”

  “I couldn’t forget you. We have met, Miss Marburg. It was ages ago, wasn’t it?”

  Again I denied it. But she pursued. “Perhaps you were in Chichester one time, a hundred years ago, when I had a nasty meal with Aunt Lucy and Cousin Josie.”

  “Perhaps,” I grudgingly allowed.

  “Look here,” she said, “I must get this straight. Auntie has been so damned mysterious about you. I know you’re going to do the famous memoirs but what else? Are you somebody incognito? As they say, scratch a Russian waitress and you find an archduchess. I suppose it works the other way too, scratch an archduchess and you find an upstairs maid.”

  Taken off my guard by her unconsciously shrewd guess, I made a slip of the tongue which, had her attention not at that moment been diverted, would have let her know instantly all she needed to know about me, for I said, “No, ma’am, I’m not either of those.”

  “Look, Philip has seduced my aunt. What a perfect butler posture! There—I’ve shocked you.” She laid her hand on my arm. “So sorry.”

  The girl was aboriginal and had eaten the whole apple. A pagan priestess in her yellow vestments, she moved her supple arms and torso as if in an abortive dance, turning now to the infatuated doctor who was bringing the drinks like sacrificial libations, and now to me, her face a plastic substance that alternately showed derision or aggrieved boredom, or, if she had a moment before glanced at her aunt, a profound and muddled rebellion. In order to lower the tone of our conversation I said, “Do you sketch, Miss Mather?”

  “No. Neither do I write nor take part in amateur theatricals. But I am literate. I’m what my long-suffering aunt calls ‘advanced.’ ”

  My question had been a happy one and she talked for some time, even after we had been interrupted by the arrival of the drinks, with a real enthusiasm which made me think she had, after all, some sort of inner life and that her interest in dress and horses was no more than a trifling avocation. She had recently “discovered” psychology and now felt she had wasted her whole life on trivialities. “The pious doctor calls me heathen because I believe in dreams and the anima mundi. You know, don’t you, that identical twins have been known to have the exact same thought at the same moment even though they have been miles apart?”

  The moment she had excitedly uttered the statement, her interest vanished. She sighed and said through a vapor of ennui, “Of course that sort of thing is trimming. What I’m interested in is the good of psychology, that is, the advertised good: no one, they tell me, needs to be neurotic.”

  “I quite agree. I wish you would tell that to your friend Pope,” said the Countess von Happel who, with another woman, crowded into our little recess. Hopestill introduced me to the large, fragrant Viennese and to the other, Mrs. Choate. The Countess, speaking to her friend and to me, explained, “Pope is a surrealist, ladies, but I call him a fool. Hope, he brought me a gouache called ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ though it was just a great gray study of nothing at all. If you turned it upside down, you got a sort of feeling that a goose was squatting on a picket fence. I asked him why on earth he had picked the title and he said that the rhythm matched the ‘color cadences’ but, my dears, there was no color in it!” Fashionably dressed and set with colossal jewels, the Countess reached across to squeeze Hope’s hand and with an equine laugh cried, “Admit it’s a damned fraud.”

  “Oh, Berthe, don’t let’s have that all over again. You know I’m quite able to see the virtue of your Davids and Rembrandts and Bellinis. You just judge them and modern painting on different psychological levels.”

  “That’s the fraud! Psychological levels indeed! But, darling, let me tell you the rest of the story about Mr. Pope. He came to my last Friday wearing bathing trunks, galoshes, a figured waistcoat and an enormous tam-o’-shanter. Naturally we ignored him. We’re not amused by such clowns, at least not in a small music room.”

  “He was pulling your leg,” said Hope.

  “Well, my soul, don’t you suppose I knew that? But he got no satisfaction out of his performance and he’s ruined himself so far as I’m concerned. I shouldn’t dream of letting him come again. Annaliese Speyer was quite faint when she saw him. Really, she was! I had to send for aromatics.”

  The Countess resembled photographs I had seen of Empress Augusta Victoria. Blond bangs, arranged beneath a little green velvet hat, imperfectly concealed a high, wide forehead which, as the conventional sign of intelligence, was enhanced by a pair of large blue eyes, half-closed with a superciliousness which also infected the well-shaped, slightly curving mouth. Dominating the whole was a noble nose, too large, but soundly and handsomely built, and that this eminent organ, in which all the pomp of her history was centralized, might be displayed to its fullest advantage, she carried her head at a backward tilt. Less fine than the elevated nose but more commanding was the Germanic bosom of which the velvet covering was like the hull of some fictitious fruit. The voice, initiated in some other region, traveled through the buried core and was flavored with a stout sweetness as though her words were sopped in rich, old wine. I should have guessed that she had been a singer from the massive bust, the voice, and the carriage. I did not, but she told me. She took the cocktail I handed to her and with her free arm encircled my waist so that I was gently drawn to her.

  “You make me think of a pupil I once had in Vienna. Do you like Schubert?” I said I could not distinguish one composer from another and that I much regretted my bad ear. “Well, then, we’ll train that ear. No one in Boston has a better gramophone or more gramophone records than I. You come to see me always.”

  The word “gramophone” misled me: I imagined a small box with a black enameled horn, shaped like a morning glory. Such an instrument had been kept in a far corner of the lobby at the Hotel Barstow, and occasionally in the afternoon when the guests had had their naps and had gone out for a brief “constitutional,” I put on “Der Tannenbaum” or “Ich Liebe Dich” or “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes” sung in a sad, rippling tremulo which brought tears to my eyes. I told the Countess I was grateful, but this was a lie: her loving gesture, though it was only a part of her patronizing, impersonal manner, had made me think of my mother and had returned me directly, by no détours of specific memory, to the horror of womanly affection which I thought I had outgrown. As in a long moment when I rested against the firm pouch of her bust and inhaled the odor of lilac, as fresh and springlike as if it came from the living bloom, and my only thought was how best to disengage myself from her embrace, Dr. McAllister, from across the room where he had taken a cocktail to Miss Pride and Mr. Whitney, shot me a look of warning or disapproval and simultaneously I felt the Countess’ strong arm tighten about my waist. Before my mind’s eye, like the immobile tableau of a dream, she and I appeared in this fond attitude, alone, before the sorrowing tin morning-glory in a dim, overheated room. I said in haste, “But I’m not often free. I’m studying stenography and my classes last all day!”

  She let me go and laughing on one rich, contralto note, chided me, “Go on then, dissembler! You don’t regret a bit that you can’t tell Bach from Offenbach.”

  Everyone laughed at her play on words. Miss Pride smiled and said to me, “You mustn’t miss an opportunity like that, Sonia. Not everyone is admitted to that famous salon.” Horribly embarrassed by my blunder as well as by my egotistical assumption that this resplendent personage had an ulterior motive in her cuddling, I protested, and the hearty woman, speeding me on with a resounding smack on my backside, forgave and engaged me to come two weeks hence to a Kaffeeklatsch where I would find other people “in the same boat” with myself.

  Miss Pride at last released Mr. Whitney, who for the past half hour had been fussing on the very edge of the sofa, so anxious to return to the hospital bed
side of his son to congratulate him on the good tidings he had received from Dr. McAllister. He had, being at the end of his patience and ready to scream with vexation, finally risen and squeaked like a schoolboy, “Lucy, I have to go!” Clutching his hat, which he had refused to give up when he came in, in the hope that he would be able to make a flying visit, he dashed from the room. Miss Pride left her post and came over to speak to the Countess.

  “I hoped you would come in,” she said. “I rang you up earlier to make sure, but you weren’t home. I have a bit of news for you. You know what I mean. I had a telephone call from New York this morning.”

  “Indeed!” cried the Countess and a flush of excitement illuminated her already well-lighted face. “Well, darling, can’t we step over there?”

  They moved off arm in arm toward the tulip-wood commode and stood there talking gravely for some time. I thought it singular that these two should have a secret. Hopestill, perhaps sensing my curiosity, enlightened me. Both of them, being shrewd business women, were in the habit of exchanging tips on the stock market, but did so out of earshot of everyone else, partly because they knew their passion for finance (which they had managed to dissociate from “cash” and “money” and approached as a pure science) would be considered in bad taste, and partly because they were frankly unwilling to share with anyone else the precious information that their Wall Street brokers periodically hissed over the wires. They were subscribers to the daily forecast of the Dow-Jones averages and to Barrons, and when they met, if it were at a dinner party, in Stearn’s department store, or in Mrs. Gardner’s palace, they instantly locked arms and conversed in whispers, comparing notes on the vagaries of the Greyhound Bus Company, like doctors consulting on a difficult case.