Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  “I won’t go anywhere if that tart is going along,” Hopestill was saying. “Really, Harry! And you’re drunk.”

  “Let’s not anybody quarrel,” he replied amicably. “You had at least five or six drinks too many in the club car, sweetheart, you can’t fool Harry. And how come you weren’t on the train you told me to meet?”

  “I got off at Back Bay,” she said shortly.

  It was as though we had come into a moving picture halfway through and because we did not know the beginning of the plot, could not adjust this scene to the foregoing action. Philip McAllister, standing witness to the intimate tiff, looked suddenly faint. “Excuse me,” he murmured and backed away. For the second time, he told Frank Whitney and me about the skull-fracture case, of whose fatal termination he had learned over the telephone just after he had left our house at tea time. “Let me show you,” he said, taking a pencil and envelope out of his pocket, “what it was in the x-ray reading that deceived me,” and he began to draw a skull, but his hand trembled so, either from his surprise at Hopestill’s almost domestic shrewishness with Morgan whom she had pretended to know only casually, or from a relapse into his earlier shock, that the outline was pinked like a valentine. Above his insistent explanation, I could hear the others talking and I was so intent on their conversation that from the doctor I learned only that the skull might be likened to an egg, which, broken on one side, might break simultaneously on the other, that his patient, struck on the temple had “sustained” an occipital fracture which he had misread as merely the widening of a suture line.

  The Babbitts and Mr. Morgan had grouped themselves about the chess-table and seeing the men set up on the board, in readiness for Miss Pride’s Sunday maneuvers, remarked that this was the final touch which proved that they had strayed into a club. To create the illusion that it was a commercial club, they put the board and pieces on the floor and set up in their place the bottle of whiskey to which they freely helped themselves. Hopestill, who had been standing by the fire gazing abstractedly into the spurting logs, joined them when they threatened to put ice down her back if she didn’t, and they sat, the four of them, round the little table, at play, as if they were in a night-club and had grown bored with their surroundings so that they had turned to their own private jokes and gossip for entertainment.

  I interrupted the medical monologue. “Listen, Philip,” I said, “this makes me nervous. What if Miss Pride should come in?”

  “What if she should? Hope is her own mistress, isn’t she?” he replied touchily.

  “But such strange people,” I said. Both young men stared coldly at me and I flushed.

  “Helen Babbitt is Hope’s cousin,” said Mr. Whitney solemnly. “I must admit, though, that they are an unattractive lot.”

  Philip agreed with a laugh and turning to me forgivingly, he explained that Mrs. Babbitt had been a Miss Brooks and therefore related both to Hopestill and, by marriage, to the Countess, and while no one had ever liked her, for she was a fool and had not worn stockings to her wedding, people forgot this and came to believe that the interloper from New Jersey had made her into what she was. Admiral Nephews had remarked to her, “Madam, thou art mated to a clown,” and ever afterwards it was the universal opinion that Mr. Babbitt had had the weight to drag her down. They came to Boston at Thanksgiving and Christmas to the great suffering of Mrs. Babbitt’s family who were, ironically enough, related in several different ways to the Cabots.

  “I suppose it’s natural enough Hope’s taken up with them,” said Whitney. “She’s probably lonely in New York.”

  “I would say the contrary,” returned Philip drily. “I’ve concluded that Sonie is right: Miss Lucy would have epilepsy if she came in here now. I’ll see what I can do.” And he called across the room to the group at the chess-table, “Don’t you think it’s time we went on to dinner?”

  “Why, doctor, what a childish idea,” said Mr. Morgan, “we are just beginning our apéritif. It’s my party and I name the hour. By the way, doesn’t the Somerset Club serve meals?” He went back to his conversation, dismissing the interruption.

  In spite of the objections one might make to his appearance or to his manner, whether one saw at once that he was crude or unscrupulous—for, although dissipation had obscured the sharpness of his face, a certain cunning remained in the eyes which did not look directly into other eyes—or whether he offended one’s intellectual principles, there was about the young millionaire something so magnetic that exposure to the same air he breathed was similar in its effect to a love-philter. I had thought, in the first minutes of my admittedly enraptured regard of him, when my mind, operating simultaneously on two levels saw him on one as irresistible and on the other as repellent, that the sensuality manifest in his face was the forerunner of the corruption into which Dr. Galbraith had helplessly sunk. But presently I revised the prophecy that in twenty years he would be as damned a soul as the old doctor. For while he was sentimental—this was apparent from his slang, that badge by which we recognize the members of an egotistical and tenderly self-indulgent order—he was also shrewd, noncommittal, and even tonight when he was drunk, constantly on guard against involving himself with Hopestill, with Philip, in a sense, with this very room.

  There are some people whom we know at first glance will never marry. How we know, I cannot say, but we know as surely as we know that other people have taken a dislike to us at the moment of our presentation to them. Harry Morgan was such a man. What appealed then so strongly to me that it was only with an effort of will that I was able to look away from him was the challenge flung down by his self-sufficiency, which could not but rouse in any woman the desire to conquer him, and I felt a revival of that light-headedness—anticipatory, perhaps, it had been—in which I had descended the top two flights of stairs.

  Hopestill, handing him a pair of ice-tongs, said something we could not hear and he replied, whispering in her ear as he put an assured arm about her shoulders. She lingered beside him the briefest time and then moved away. There was a look of outrage on her face, but not that he had been familiar amongst strangers, rather that he had with such facility, such untroubled certainty of where he stood with her, communicated to all of us: “I can take you or leave you alone,” for his gesture had been at once possessive and indifferent.

  I doubt if Philip or Frank Whitney discerned the agitation into which Morgan sent the three women in the room, for even Mrs. Babbitt, although she was obviously accustomed to him, looked at him worshipfully. Neither of the men could have sensed the source of his charm since it required the intuitive simplicity with which a woman perceives in a man the very embodiment of temptation. This is one of the mysteries of their sex by which men are infuriated for, being unable to solve it, they believe it to be a hoax: “Why, So and So is a perfect bounder. What can you see in him?” they ask of the women who can only reply, “I can’t explain it.”

  “Listen, Harry,” said Mr. Babbitt, “I want you to sing that song Miss Nanny Brewster taught you. You’ll love it, Hope. It’s funny as hell the way Harry does it.”

  “I’m not interested and I don’t want to hear it. I think it’s time we went on to dinner.”

  But Mr. Morgan had already risen to perform. He moved unsteadily across the room and stood before the Governor Winthrop and in a moment began to sing. Above his strange head, like a moon at half eclipse, Miss Pride’s father stared at the trophy case. His loosely clenched hand rested on a table at his side as if he were about to make it into a fist and pound. The wavering Long Islander sang with a tuneless, distended insolence, rolling his eyes and suddenly closing them as, stopping dead in his song, he stroked imaginary female hips of extraordinary dimensions. The Babbitts, half in tears with laughter, kept filling his glass with straight whiskey, for at the end of each line, by way of punctuation, he drained off what he had. The lewdness came chiefly from his pantomime and his catarrhal voice, for the words that issued from
his boneless face were only:

  I love to go swimmin’

  With bow-legged women

  And dive between their legs.

  “Isn’t he a scream?” shrieked Mrs. Babbitt.

  Frank Whitney was pale. “Let’s get him out, McAllister. He’s drunk as a catfish.” He started towards the offender, but Hopestill, who without trying to stop the song, had been gazing up at her grandfather as if supplicating him either to forgive this indignity or to put a stop to it, raised her hand in an apostolic gesture which said, “He has asylum here.”

  “He’s perfectly all right, Frank,” she said. “He’s only gay. He inherited two million dollars yesterday and he has every right to sing if he wants to.”

  “Repeat refrain!” cried Mr. Babbitt, covering his face with his hands while his thorax hopped convulsively like a jumping bean. Mr. Morgan obliged him and the words traveled slowly through his nose.

  The door to the library flung open and crashed against the paneling. Miss Pride, dressed for dinner in garnets and black silk, stood on the threshold appraising the terrain. The first to speak was Harry Morgan who, going towards her with the sober countenance that appears in certain stages of drunkenness, said, “Mrs. Mather, I presume?” Miss Pride’s enameled lenses suddenly could focus only on distant objects. She looked at me and said, “The letters, Sonie, which you promised to mail,” and held them out. Mr. Morgan’s rejected paw faltered uncertainly to his side.

  “Good evening, Helen.” She addressed Mrs. Babbitt frigidly.

  “Good evening, Cousin Lucy,” said Mr. Babbitt, bounding toward her, “I’m glad to see you.” Miss Pride did not share his pleasure but glared straight through his head as if the gimlets of her eyes could puncture the optic nerve. She came to me with the letters. “Hello, Frank. Is Mary coming on for the holidays?” and as she took his hand, she gave me the bunch of envelopes and adroitly, so that no one could see, she pinched the fleshy part of my thumb between two fingernails so hard that I nearly cried out with pain.

  For half a minute she stood there while Frank Whitney gave her news of his family. She did not release my thumb until he was finished and then she said, “I must go this minute. Hope­still, bring Frank when you and Philip come to the Countess’. I know Berthe will be delighted.”

  “We’re all coming, Auntie,” said Hopestill. “This is Mr. Morgan, Aunt Lucy,”

  “Good evening, sir,” said Miss Pride and glanced up at the portrait of her father. “Papa looks en prise. Do set his men up again, Philip.” And she left the room. The only proof I had that she had been angry were the two white crescent marks on my thumb made, in her rage at something with which I had no connection, in the way one hurls a teacup to the floor because the contents of a letter have infuriated him.

  “Waiter, bring me my bill,” said Mr. Morgan with a foolish grin. “And cancel my membership in the Somerset. The bouncer gives me the creeps. Are you coming, baby?”

  “No,” said Hopestill. “Before you go, Harry, will you apologize to all of us?”

  “Now I suggest,” said Mrs. Babbitt in the voice of a peacemaker, “that Harry and John and I all go eat dinner by ourselves and let the ladies and gentlemen alone. Nobody’s mad now but if we don’t go right along everybody will be dreadfully mad except me.”

  “I won’t be mad,” pouted Mr. Babbitt. “And Olga won’t be mad, will you, Olga?”

  “Well, I’m damned,” said Mr. Morgan, using his hands as binoculars and directing them towards me. “Is that Olga? Troika-ho, Olga!”

  They left, Mrs. Babbitt’s giggles leaving a wake behind. If I had been able to speak, I would have been profane, would have used every blasphemous and scatalogical oath I knew to tell Hopestill how I was affected by the knowledge that I had been the object of amused discussion. Olga! Her malice was so rich, so inventive that even now, exposed by the babblings of her drunken friends, she tried to hoodwink me. “I don’t think Sonie looks all that Slavic, do you, Frank?”

  The evening lay in ruins. My disappointments, my humiliation, and my scorn bustled through the branches of my nerves, created a tic here and a tingling there, an ache in my skull and fever in my eyeballs.

  Mr. Whitney touched my arm. “Will you have dinner with me?” he asked.

  Hopestill smiled. “Give the poor child a stout drink,” she said. “She isn’t used to the lower classes.”

  “Oh, I’ll have a lot to drink,” I said, and she and Philip laughed. They had forgotten us already before we had even reached the threshold. Hopestill was saying, “Well, darling, I’ve come home to stay. Aren’t you glad?”

  As soon as I could I left the Countess’ salon and got my cape, but as I was starting down the hall towards the stairs someone laid his hand on my shoulder and I turned to find myself the captive of Mr. Pingrey. He said, “Sonia, Amy is in a tiz over your cutting her. You come straight along with me, you baggage. Mr. Hornblower is here and you have to meet him. He’s just been telling the most delicious thing about Mr. Roosevelt. Did you know that the name is really Rosenfeld?” I was in no frame of mind to meet Your Esteemed Uncle Arthur Hornblower and told Mr. Pingrey that Miss Pride had asked me to run home to fetch something for her.

  “Oh, stuff!” said Mr. Pingrey, flapping his hands limply in my face. “You’re a perfect imp sometimes. Very well, but I will absolutely disown you if you don’t meet him when you come back. Do you realize that he knows everyone of importance? Gandhi, Mussolini, Hitler, Trotsky, the Lord knows who. He’s the most literate person here by far.”

  I felt this to be a slight exaggeration, but said I had not been aware that the Countess’ parties were intended to be the meeting ground of minds.

  “Well!” he gasped. “Frankly I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why on earth would one come otherwise?”

  “Why, to drink,” I said.

  Mr. Pingrey did not drink or smoke, making his abstention from alcohol, tobacco, and highly seasoned food a fetish as obstinate as a vice. He put his hand to his heart as if he had been wounded there and might, after his valedictory, topple over dead at my feet. “I cannot, I simply cannot understand this transformation in you.” His eyes, similar to Amy Brooks’ (both of them were victims of excessive thyroid secretions, a bond which strengthened their friendship, I am sure, and played a strong part in their marriage and their subsequent production of two children with the same glandular vagary), bulged forth as he bent his ruddy face down towards mine to gaze upon the frog which, before the gods had been provoked to wrath, had been a charming maiden.

  “Then go on to your . . . punch bowl!” he cried, and stepped aside to let me pass. Had I lingered a few minutes longer, he would have used such words as “wassail” and “negus” and “sack” to show that his acquaintance with alcohol was purely literary. Once, at an informal luncheon, he had inquired of his hostess if her servants made the mead themselves. “Mead? What is that?” she asked. He indicated the glasses of Chablis. “Oh,” said the lady, who did not like him and was also vain of her learning, “No, my athelings have lost the receipt. This is a simple grape concoction made by the Christians in Gaul.”

  I was halfway down the stairs when he leaned over the bannister and implored, “Do meet Mr. Hornblower. He wants us all to come to tea at his house tomorrow. He’s terribly anxious to meet you and says he will be ever so interested to hear your political conflicts—I told him, you see, that you were half Russian and half German.”

  As the next day was Sunday, I could not go. “I will be away tomorrow,” I told him.

  “Oh, but you must come,” he protested urgently, “because Mrs. Hornblower will be there too!” as though, if it were a rare thing to meet Mr. Hornblower it was an even rarer one to meet his wife. I repeated my refusal and Mr. Pingrey withdrew his head but not before he had stuck out his tongue at me like a peckish child and flung out, “Crosspatch!”

&
nbsp; I had gained the outer hall when the door to the dining-room opened and the chauffeur shot past me like someone on a surf-board. He was carried along over the carpet by the leashed Doberman and the boxer to whom he applied, under his breath, the word “bitches” with venomous accuracy. Through the door I could see the supper table with its dishes arranged as tastefully as if they had been bouquets of flowers and were to serve no purpose other than ornament. The Countess had been planning this for months, ordering the strangest of the foods through importers, scouring Boston and New York for the finest Liebfraumilch and Niersteiner and champagne, herself supervising the decanting of the sweet wines and the liqueurs, and living through each step of the lengthy preparation of the daube glacé as if upon the proper contents of the bags of herbs depended her social success.

  I had hoped to find the Countess here alone so that I could make my excuses to her, and I was annoyed to see that she was not in the room at all, but that wandering back and forth before the table were Baron Kalenkoff and a Jewish brain surgeon who were making hearty meals of the daube, the cucumbers in sour cream, the herring and salmon and caviar, the cheeses, olives, salads. Every now and again they abandoned the table only to repair to the side-board where the wines were cooling. The two accommodators, hired for the evening, and the Alsatian waitresses stared stonily at the carnage, stood near-by the gormandizers waiting to pounce upon the empty dishes and bear them away to the dumb-waiter to be, if possible, replaced.