Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  “Now for you, angel,” she said, “Mamselle Thérèse would sew for next to nothing, but for them, the price is in the hundreds, sometimes in the thousands. It is an art, ne c’est pas? Wouldn’t they pay ten thousand for a picture by Rousseau? Then why shouldn’t they pay ten thousand for a dress by Chanel? Mainbocher? Mamselle Thérèse don’t kid herself. She knows she isn’t in that class yet, but she works slow and sure like a mole. Five years from now Mamselle Thérèse will be in the movies like Adrian.”

  Her ruling passion was business, and she could see nothing except in terms of its commercial value. Thus, when she learned that I had gone to a secretarial school, she said, “You must keep your eyes open and when the time comes, rush in and nab yourself a plum. Mamselle Thérèse’s advice to a young girl like you that has a good head on her shoulders is: be a secretary to a big-time lawyer. There’s the money! There’s the prestige! I’m telling you. What good are you doing yourself fooling around up here with that vieille furie when you could be on Fifth Avenue, New York? Mamselle Thérèse has a girl-friend working at Number One, Wall Street, on the thirty-fourth floor and she makes fifty dollars a week. I’m telling you.”

  She talked ceaselessly in a hoarse whisper as if we were two business men making a slightly shady deal. Often she worked arithmetic problems with the tip of her finger on the polished table, so obsessed with the imposing figures of her last year’s state and federal income taxes that she did not leave off even when I warned her that her nails would scratch the finish. It was of no matter to her that I contributed nothing to the conversation but answered only with a monosyllable or a forced smile when she put such a rhetorical question to me as “Does Mamselle Thérèse know all the answers in the business world?” Her chief ambition was to receive a commission from visiting royalty; it deeply thrilled her to imagine some queen or princess finding, after she disembarked, that she had not brought enough evening gowns: “ ‘I must run right to Mamselle Thérèse. She will make me a chose merveilleuse for the White House ball.’ Wouldn’t Mamselle Thérèse be knocked off the Christmas tree?” Sometimes, impassioned by the memory of a gown that Mainbocher had executed for some foreign personage or by the contemplation of vast sums of money owed her by her “élite clientele” she would pursue me to my room, having given a peremptory order to Ethel as we left the dining-room, to bring our coffee to the third floor.

  Occasionally, out of self-defense, I would deliver her a little lecture, on how much I liked the town of Concord and its environs or on the splendor of the Countess’ Saturdays, but Mamselle could attend nothing of what I said and the moment I paused, she burst in with a raging river of facts and figures to obliterate completely my little trickle of talk.

  But she was not, as she seemed, out of touch with human affairs. She was not especially interested in them, but nothing escaped her shrewd French eye. Believing me to be Miss Pride’s secretary and nothing more, she spoke unguardedly of the household. “Mon dieu, that bridegroom! Angel, he is a fool, I’m telling you. Mamselle Thérèse don’t need to make his acquaintance to know that like she knows the palm of her own hand. She only has to contact the fiancée, ne c’est pas? That rich renarde.”

  “Why do you say she is a renarde?” I asked.

  “You can tell by the eyes. They are sub-zero. You know? It is on her part a mariage de convenance.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Because they haven’t slept together. And how does Mamselle Thérèse know that?” She tapped her forehead. “Par intuition.”

  “But perhaps it is a mariage de convenance on his part too?” I suggested.

  “Maybe. Yes, maybe. It is a cold place, this Boston. He marries her because she is rich, beautiful, what-not. Because a doctor should have a wife. She marries him because she is enceinte, ne c’est pas.”

  I should have laughed and denied the charge, but I was so astounded at the woman’s wizardry that I could not gather my wits together for a moment and when I did, knowing that her conviction was not only right but that I could in no way shake her from it, I said, “You may be right, but I beg you to say nothing to anyone. It would kill Miss Pride.”

  Mamselle Thérèse was offended. “Why should Mamselle Thérèse gossip? She is here for the money. She don’t care a damn about the mariage. Angel, it is a dirty business and not for me. This little up-and-coming couturière stays single, I’m telling you. Plenty of boyfriends and not a husband. Don’t mix business with pleasure, angel. So why should she interfere with someone else’s mariage? Mamselle Thérèse won’t talk to the interested parties. She is interested only in the money from the interested parties.”

  We were sitting in my room at the time of this conversation and it was rather late, perhaps eleven o’clock. Both Miss Pride and Hopestill had gone out for the evening. Presently we heard light footsteps coming up the last flight of stairs and Hopestill’s door was opened. Evidently she had come back to get something for in ten minutes, she went out again and back down the stairs. Mamselle Thérèse, not so much through the fear of being overheard as through boredom with the subject, dropped it instantly on hearing the footsteps and began telling me about a new costume she had designed for nuns which would be at once more sanitary and more beautiful than their present ones. She had interviewed innumerable Mother Superiors and had written to various bishops and to the secretary of the Archbishop of New York. As she had what is aptly known as “total recall,” she repeated verbatim each conversation, each letter, and each reply, all of which seemed, on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities, to be stubbornly hostile to her proposition.

  But the soliloquy, which lasted for half an hour after Hope left the house, did not prevent me from hearing through the wall which separated our rooms, the soft collapse of the girl’s body on the chaise longue and a sob, stifled at once as though she had pressed her face into a pillow. The sound would probably have escaped me if I had not heard it before and had not come to expect it as the expression, in a sense, of the reason for her visit to her room during the evening. Almost every night when there were dinner guests, she came up two or three times, and usually I heard that secret, frustrated outburst like a checked curse. On such evenings, she might stay as long as a quarter of an hour and hearing her footsteps back and forth across the carpet, muted so that I could not be sure if I really heard them or only felt the vibrations of the floor, I sat at my typewriter unable to strike a key, embarrassed because she must have heard the clatter of the machine which stopped as her door-knob turned.

  I could not immunize myself to her misery and pitied her for whatever punishment her conscience was meting out to her. I was impelled to go in to her in the way one may start, hearing a human cry in the night and think it is someone lost or hurt and in need of help. Beside a warm fire in a light room, an impression of the night’s cold and darkness superimposes itself upon the altruistic impulse, and one rationalizes, says the cry comes from the throat of a drunk or of a cat that can sound like a woman or even that it is the lure of a thief. I would wait until I heard her going down the stairs again and then I would shrug my shoulders with a resolute indifference and say aloud, “It’s her affair, not mine.”

  Before my brother was born, I could not bear to have my mother speak of miscarriages and of “the pains” because I was sure that pain must be much more terrible to other people than to myself. And when Miss Pride reproved the Gonzales boy for stealing her soap to carve his little Virgin, I would have been glad to exchange places with him in order not to see the shame in his downcast face and the limp arms hanging at his sides, the palms of his hands turned out in broken-hearted supplication. And now while I did not minimize the discomfiture of my own position and spent a good part of every day in sorrowing over my unjust luck and even thought that in the end, my lot was much the worse, I felt that I was somehow better equipped to endure than Hopestill. She, the frail sheep lost from the herd, could not find her way back nor could she make he
r way alone. She knew already, as these flights to the privacy of her room showed, that she could not carry it off, for even if the discovery of her deception were long postponed or never made at all or made only by a few people who would not blame her or, if they did, would keep silent, she had nevertheless ruined herself in the only milieu for which she was trained. She had ruined herself even though there might never be suspicions or rumors, for she would never be sure that she was not suspected: she would hear the most innocent remark as a double entendre, the most amiable question as put with an ulterior design. It was possible, too, I thought, that after the secret gratitude to Philip for unknowingly saving her from disgrace had expired, she would commence to hate him, as the impoverished libertine, her father, had hated his martyred wife whose rich dowry had provided him with the means for his philanderings.

  Long before this, Hopestill had damaged herself, though not irremediably, by her connections with “the Bohemians.” She had occasionally brought young men, who let their beards grow and who dressed most unusually, to the houses of her friends and her aunt’s friends, exhibiting them like trained poodles. Unconventional and explosive, they alarmed the hostesses whose disapproval could not find its exact target and fired nervously upon all sides. The poverty of these barbarians was thought to be an intentional and Communistic affront; they were believed to be practitioners of free love, companionate marriage, and atheism; their painting or their writing was eyed with distrust as revolutionary or satirical. The Boston hostess, finding herself at the mercy of a novelist (she had not heard of him and therefore could not tell if he was a satirist or not) guarded her words against the escape of a stupid or a typical remark, yet most typically, most stupidly, said, “I hope you won’t put me in one of your novels.”

  It would have been tolerable, everyone thought (according to the Countess, my faithful informant), if Hope had been content merely to bring her friends to parties for, despite their appearance, they behaved usually quite well. It was that Hope had given herself such insufferable airs, sprinkling her talk with the cryptograms of literary critics, explaining, unbidden, the meanings of abstruse poems. She had painstakingly studied out an erudite essay on “psychical distance” the year before and for several months judged thereby every book, painting, play, or movie that came up. But as someone remarked—someone who probably had never heard of the esthetic principle she used so boldly—she shot only at sitting birds, and she was openly laughed at when she was heard to say to Amy Brooks, “The trouble with your Oyster House pastel is the figure in the fore-ground, which is under-distanced. He is simply too much the pitiable bum. He actually brings tears to one’s eyes, and that won’t do.”

  To be sure, she was over her “intellectual” phase and no longer carried marinated herring to the obscure studios. But she had not become any more manageable. Exactly what she was doing in New York no one knew. Indeed, no one knew her address beyond the vague fact that it was “in the fifties.” When someone said to her, “I wish you’d look up my friend so and so. She has a charming place on the Park and I know you’d find her amusing,” Hope replied with a warm smile, “It’s terribly sweet of you. Of course one never does anything one wants in New York, but do give me her address anyhow.” Only once had anyone seen her and that only by chance. A Miss Bradley, an elderly spinster, idling away an hour between appointments in Central Park, had come on Hopestill staring raptly at the sea lions who were being fed. “Oh, aren’t they beautiful?” the girl had cried. “Oh, aren’t they wondrous! Oh, if only I had seen them when I was a child. You know, Miss Bradley, that Aunt Lucy never let me go to the zoo.” Miss Bradley, reporting this uninhibited speech to Amy Brooks, said, “I expected her to give me a lecture on child psychology, but she spared me and we had a very pleasant little chat.”

  Now that she had made the full circuit and had returned to the starting point, she was generally forgiven all her past peculiarities, and there was universal rejoicing in Miss Pride’s circle that the marriage, prophesied for so long, was at last to come off. In my exile, I was obliged to rely entirely on the Countess for my information, and she assured me that both Philip and Hopestill were ecstatic, that it made her quite giddy herself just to be in the same room with them. Hope, she said, had never looked so well or so handsome.

  I would have been glad to believe the Countess, but I could not because of that testimony of Hopestill’s misery that I heard nearly every night. As soon as her footsteps had died away, I would give in to a vicarious fear that set me trembling and, suddenly cold, would go to the fire to warm myself. I would muse into the brilliant coals and shut my eyes. The inner wall of my lids retained the clarified red of the flames like the surface of one of those freakish hot pools in certain places where minerals behave in a fanciful way. Willfully I would force myself downward through a red wind until the door to my imagined room was opened and I stood upon its threshold. Recently I had identified the lobster-claw letter opener as belonging to a very aged woman who lived in Chichester and had rendered some service to my mother when I was about five years old, so that we went to call on her one afternoon at tea time. I had been given the letter opener to play with and I was horrified by it, but I was bashful and did not want to be rude to the kind old lady, and so I had twirled the agate sphere and stroked the reptilian claws until I was nearly sick and had to refuse the hot cocoa which had been made especially for me. Still, the aged woman’s room was not my room. I remembered distinctly that she received us in her bedroom because there were no fires in the rest of the house and that the spool bed had been covered with a blue and white quilt with a design of five-pointed stars and crescent moons, and that I had sat on an ottoman covered with scarlet oilcloth and that the tea things had been on an old-fashioned washstand through the half open door of which had been visible a chamber-pot with pale roses painted on the side.

  My memories of rooms where I had been were delineated with the perfection of detail of truthful photographs. I saw Miss Pride’s room at the Hotel as it had been one day after a windy rainstorm. A cherub pillow had been by the open window and one of the castles was dark with dampness; an elm leaf was flattened against the screen, and a letter which had been on the sill had been blown to the floor. One day I recognized the unlabeled bottle of red wine. It had been in the Countess’ music room one afternoon, late, when I had gone there to listen to some records and had been alone. I had tasted the wine, but it had gone sour and I concluded that it had been removed from the cabinet to be taken downstairs but had been forgotten.

  My visits to the red room were infrequent. Though I was convinced that there was no harm in it, that it was, if anything, an achievement of will that should be envied and applauded by other people who had not so sure a refuge, I was, at the same time, loath to make my seclusion there a habit. I entered it only (rather, I stood upon the threshold, for I was never actually in the room and could not visualize myself taking a book out of the shelves or sitting at the desk) when I felt that I could not withstand the onslaught of worry or of loneliness. Whenever I realized that Sunday was approaching and I must go again to see my mother and probably to have another conversation with the doctor, whenever Miss Pride reminded me that I was in disgrace, and whenever I came to think of Hopestill, then I would turn to my ghost of a sanctuary as I might turn to a drug.

  When there were no guests but Hopestill and Miss Pride had gone out and Mamselle Thérèse was in her own room working at her sketches of a renovated nun, the stillness of the house unnerved me and if by chance there was a wind lamenting in the trees of Louisburg Square, my heart was plucked quickly like a taut gut. It was not that I feared sneak-thieves or murderers or Kakosan’s spirits, nor did I feel, at this particular time, the watchful eyes of people who thought I might repeat my mother’s pattern. It was a fear I could describe only approximately as a fear of myself. It was not a new experience. Sometimes in Chichester, I had taken care of children in the evenings at a lonely house almost at the Point. An old, one-
eyed Airedale kept me company, snoozing on the sofa. Abruptly he would waken and lift his head, pointing his nose toward the door, and then, assured that there was nothing outside after all, he would look at me with his one intelligent eye. This look, so companionable and preternaturally wise, frightened me more than his attention to the door, beyond which he had sensed the lurking of some unknown thing: I was afraid the dog would speak. This droll idea, of brief duration, was but the envelope for another fear: the fear of my own mind which had conceived so awful a possibility. Like the motorist through dense fog at night who has proof of only himself, his automobile, and the road, and must accept a priori the fact that the rest of the world has not been dematerialized, I could not demonstrate the external authorship of myself and the dog nor our independence of one another. What proof had I that the dog was not the creation of my own mind and being such might, if I willed it, speak to me; conversely, what proof was there that I was not the dog’s idea, evolved in those mysterious, perhaps Olympian, brains behind the obtuse snout? What broke my ghastly reverie was the registration of sound on my mind, the footsteps of some later walker, or the rustle of a bed above me as one of the children turned in his sleep. I argued that since my mind had been altogether on the dog, it could not have produced a noise in the distance. My hearing re-established my spatial relation to the outer world’s complexities and immediately thereafter my judgments were restored.