Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  “At least,” rejoined the old lady, staring hard at Miss Pride. “Why, I dare say that less than half of Boston has had a chance to congratulate them. My dear Lucy, you have outdone yourself!”

  Miss Pride smiled pleasantly and turned to the Admiral. “I haven’t even thanked you, Lincoln, for contributing to the occasion, but I’m angry with you for not wearing your decorations.”

  “Not with mufti, ma’am. Not me, thank you!” returned her friend, beaming all over his pink face in gratitude for her mention of his medals.

  Old Mrs. McAllister, determined to find one barb at least to pierce Miss Pride’s composure, at this said, “How did Arthur Hornblower feel about it?”

  But she did not fell Miss Pride who retorted, “I expect he breathed a sigh of relief when he knew he wouldn’t have to perform in that church. You know his objection is not to the Romish atmosphere but to the English. He’s a great Anglophobe.”

  “Oh, I’m quite aware of that,” said Mrs. McAllister with considerable asperity. “We’ve had several disputes. I tell him he’s provincial, he tells me I’m a snob and we get nowhere.”

  “You would have quarreled with Papa, Sarah. I have always been glad that he died before war was declared because, since he liked neither France nor England, I have no doubt he would have made himself talked about in Boston. Oh, I don’t mean to imply that he would not have supported the Allies whole-heartedly as far as the United States was concerned, but he would have turned a cold shoulder on England, I’m sure. His sister, my aunt Josephine, had what Papa called ‘the hebetude’ to marry a baronet and to be called henceforth ‘Lady Fulke.’ It was the name, even more than her large and totally inconvenient country establishment, that struck Papa so ridiculous. And I recollect that at the time I was presented at court and we were perforce staying with my aunt and my uncle Geoffrey, Papa consistently introduced her as ‘Mrs. Faneuil’ or ‘Mrs. Fuller,’ being unable to bring himself to say ‘Lady’ or to utter a name so peculiar as ‘Fulke.’ But I remember, also, that my sainted father was worsted on one such occasion by Mr. Henry James who turned to an English woman and said, ‘One may forget other names, but Faneuil Hall is always on the tip of the tongue.’ Papa was no backwoodsman: he blushed to the roots of his hair and never returned to England again or permitted the names of Mr. James and Sir and Lady Fulke to be spoken in his presence.”

  “Ha! Ha!” laughed the Admiral who was well-known himself as an Anglophile. “Lucy, you’re a real raconteur!” But old Mrs. McAllister, pretending that she had not heard the story, groped for my hand which she pressed as she said, “My dear, do find Amy Brooks for me!”

  As I went in search of Hope’s cousin, the Countess, fragrant as a whole garden, came towards me with outspread arms, bumping everyone who stood in her way, among them the easily terrified Mr. Otis Whitney who immediately fled through the drawing-room in the direction of the door and was not seen again. She had nothing to tell me of any more consequence than that she loved me and that I was not to wear anything ever again but the same shade of green that I had on today and that if I did not come to hear the “Scarlatti I’ve dismembered, dismembered, my angel,” at her next Friday, her heart would be broken into a thousand pieces. As she embraced me at our leavetaking—she had of course given me a welcoming hug and had let me go for only about a minute—she dropped her effusive tone and spoke as if we were contemporaries: “I’m not pleased, Sonie! I’m much distraught. I’ve been talking with a young man who has given me a real fright. You . . .”

  But she could not finish for, to my great vexation, we were interrupted by one of the girls who came to the Fridays. Martha Dole was a large, plain bluestocking whose embonpoint was apportioned helter-skelter so that the thin, rectilinear legs did not harmonize with the bossy torso and likewise the long, willowy neck was inadequate support for the full-blown Norman face. She, like the other young ladies, had always shown me great cordiality in the Countess’ presence, and had two or three times sent me tickets to the theater or to concerts with which, to be sure, she had parted because she could not use them herself but which were accompanied by a flattering note which told me I was more deserving than she to hear the music or to see the play. Only three nights before, I had gone, thanks to her generosity, to see Hamlet, but this had not prevented her, on the following day, from becoming suddenly so engrossed in her companions that she did not see me, even though I passed directly in front of her, when I entered the cocktail lounge of the Parker House to keep an appointment with Nathan and Kakosan. Yet, her first remark to me this afternoon was, “Who was that lovely girl, Japanese, Chinese, whatever she was, that I saw you with the other day?”

  “At the Parker House, do you mean?” I asked experimentally, watching her face to see what degree of confusion would be recorded there. If there was any, it was too infinitesimal to be measured, and she said, “Was it at the Parker House? Yes, of course, that’s right. She was exquisite! We were all quite enchanted and I was greatly set up to be able to say that even though I didn’t know her, I did at least know her companion. She looked as though she had stepped out of a fairy tale. You would have fallen in love with her, Berthe!”

  The Countess gave me an indulgent spanking. “What do you mean, you wicked creature, keeping all of this from me? No, no evasions! I want to know all about her. Oh, such a betrayal!”

  I explained that Kakosan was a stenographer in some firm, the exact nature of which I had never determined, for she always referred mysteriously to “the commodity” which might have been anything from ink to corsets. I told them also that she was the daughter of a nobleman in exile, a cultivated patriarchal gentleman who preserved all the customs of his country and his class, writing hokku, painting water-colors of the Yanagawa from his faithful memory of it, sitting beside his pool in the American duplicate of his garden in Kyushu, in contemplation of the Zen-Buddha to whom, each day, he paid his ceremonial respects in the tea-house. As I observed the mounting interest in the Countess’ face, I regretted I had made Nathan’s mistress sound so interesting for I had no wish to bring her to the salon. My reason was that I could not trust her to exercise any restraint in her conversation. The several times that I had seen her (in my exile, I had welcomed her invitations to the movies), she had been naïve enough to tell me, when we had stopped at Schrafft’s for raspberry frappés, about her lovers previous to Nathan whose attentions she described with a thoroughness that made me blush. I had no reason to suppose that she would be less candid with the Countess and the Boston girls.

  “But she sounds charming!” cried the Countess. “Just imagine a real Samurai daughter simply at large in Boston! I’ve never heard anything so exotic! I command you to bring her to hear the Scarlatti on Friday, and if you do not, Euphrysone, I’ll think up some really humiliating punishment for you. I’ll make you spend a whole evening with Kalenkoff playing omber!”

  I agreed, with misgivings, to bring Kakosan, and started to take leave of the Countess to go in search of Amy when Mrs. Hornblower approached us and halted me with an upraised and trembling hand. Gently with a dreamy, timid smile on her face—entirely out of keeping with her reputation of being a firebrand in political discussions, of being a sly one, and possibly engaged in subversive activities on the behalf of the Third Reich and Mussolini, having long since lost her interest in Sacco and Vanzetti—she said, “Lucy Pride told me where I’d find you. Someone told me you were acquainted with a young lady whose address I’m very anxious to get hold of. I mean the little Japanese girl, Miss Yoshida, or, rather, I should say, Yoshidasan without the ‘Miss,’ shouldn’t I?”

  “Ah, it’s an epidemic!” cried Miss Martha Dole. “Imagine Sonie being in the key position!”

  I told Mrs. Hornblower that I did not know Kakosan’s address but that I should be glad to give her a message as I often saw her in Cambridge. “I’m getting up a benefit party for the Rebels in Spain, and I want her to come, partly for decoration, partly
because I suspect that she’s a sympathizer. Wouldn’t you like to come too? Or don’t you believe in Franco?” I had no strong feelings for either party in the Spanish Revolution and agreed with Miss Pride who said, “When the pot calls the kettle black, I shan’t back either one.”

  “No, I can’t say that I do think Franco’s right,” I said, and the Countess, a rabid Loyalist supporter, squeezed my arm and said to Miss Pride’s cousin, “Sonie and I would be driving ambulances if we could, wouldn’t we, darling?” This was not in the least true. The Countess supported “causes” solely in her drawing-room and the drawing-rooms of her friends, and I, for my part, was too ignorant of world affairs to be anything but apathetic towards them.

  “What a pity,” said Mrs. Hornblower. “I have not found many recruits here. Countess, have you stolen everyone for yourself?” And turning to me, she said, “I had thought that you . . . your name, you know, such echt deutsch . . . might be of our persuasion. De gustibus non est disputandum.” She moved off murmuring half to herself, “So few people are willing to take the long view, the Weltanschauung. But the time will come.” These words, proceeding from a face so venerable and harmless, gave me such an unaccountable fright that for a moment I stood looking after her, and what occurred to me as she was swallowed up by a crowd of people in the doorway was that perhaps my father, if he had gone back to Würzburg, had become a Nazi.

  Martha Dole, espying an old friend, left us and the moment she was gone, I said to the Countess, “You were telling me about Harry Morgan.”

  “But he told me something extraordinary! Something too really strange! Don’t misunderstand: I like him although he’s rather racy in his language. I’m only wondering how everyone will take it.”

  “Take what, my dear Countess?” I cried with impatience.

  “Oh, it’s probably nothing at all. It’s only that he told me that Philip has asked him to take charge of doing over the Concord house, and it only struck me odd because of the way Mrs. McAllister feels about the place. And of course, no one knows him. D’you understand me, Sonie?”

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “But what I don’t understand is why Philip asked him. He hasn’t known him for longer than a month.”

  “Precisely!” said the Countess with a wink and then, perceiving that her stepdaughter was at her side, added, “It is precisely as you say: a ‘four-square’ sonata, as tedious as a wooden block.”

  Having delivered to Amy the message from Mrs. McAllister, I made my way into the drawing-room where the crowd was beginning to thin. Hopestill beckoned to me. “Go up with me, will you, Sonie?” she whispered. I glanced towards her maid-of-honor and she said impatiently, “I’ve arranged that, don’t worry.” Philip’s face was fixed in a smile that revealed his teeth which were so regular and white they looked almost false. The adjective “sanitary” flashed across my mind as I took in his clear, intellectual eyes, his fair hair, his meticulously cared-for person, and in that moment, I preferred his bride upon whose cheek there was a light streak of dirt and who was frankly exhausted and was making no attempts to conceal the fact. I told her that I would meet her in her room and she left when she had said something to Philip who, looking at me as if he had never seen me before, formally shook my hand, not altering his grin in the least. I laughed uneasily and said, “I’ve already congratulated you once, don’t you remember?” and he replied, “How stingy you are! Can’t you congratulate a man twice on the happiest day of his life?” But there was in his voice a note of such staggering unhappiness, so taut an irony that I could make only a feeble rejoinder, told him I must hurry up to Hopestill, that I wished him all the happiness, that I . . .

  Hopestill had flung her bouquet down the stairwell, but one flower, limp and ragged at the edges, was caught in the pointed cuff of her wedding dress. She was waiting in her sitting-room for me and she could have been waiting ten years, she had changed so much. The structure of her face was loose, as if the sagging muscles had weakened the mortised bones. There was a starched pallor on her thin lips, a narrow canniness in her eyes, and the skin, in the brief time since I had seen her in the church, had lost that shimmer which had seemed to be touched by the moon rather than the sun, to have been inoculated by the spring rather than the summer, was ashen now, darkening to a bruised blue beneath her eyes. She had had a drink and when I came in, put down her glass. There was a newly opened bottle of whiskey on the table near where she stood.

  “By God, he can wait for me!” she cried. “I’ll go down when I’m God damned good and ready.” And she sank into one of the wing-chairs and poured herself another drink.

  “It was a very nice wedding,” I said.

  “Lock the door, Sonie. I won’t have any of them coming in here! I won’t! I wish I were dead!”

  I locked the door as she ordered me and reluctantly returned. She directed me to sit down opposite her and she said, “I really mean it: I wish I were dead. Now if I were you, I wouldn’t wish that, but strictly sotto voce, strictly entre nous I wouldn’t predict what you’ll be feeling if you go on living with Aunt Lucy for another two years.”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s not quite the same thing. It’s not the same at all, Hope.”

  “Listen to me, you child, you baby, you innocent little girl: the time will come when you see through that woman and know her for the bitch she is. It’s that she’s got to have power. All of us do here: we are obsessed by it. Philip is. I am. As soon as Aunt Lucy saw she couldn’t control me—up to a point she could because she was my guardian and doled out my money nickel by nickel—she got a cat! That’s the vile perverted thing she did! And kept the cat locked up in a storeroom deodorized by pine-scent! Oh, she fed Mercy well: the best tinned salmon, the finest kidneys, the richest milk, and every now and again the ‘Persian fat lady,’ as she was revoltingly referred to, was allowed to come down and purr for Aunt Sarah and Uncle Arthur and Admiral Nephews. Until, mind you, she had a chance to perpetuate her species and have four hybrid kittens and then she was permanently incarcerated.”

  “Oh, that’s not the reason,” I said, determined to defend Miss Pride.

  “Hush! Let me finish. But a pussy-cat wasn’t enough, and now she’s got you, and she intends to have the time of her life with you because you’re helpless. You’re dependent on her. No matter what gaffe you make, if you get drunk and use obscene words in front of Mrs. Frothingham, Aunt Lucy will find some way to keep you.”

  “I am not property!” I cried, angry with Hopestill and at the same time perturbed.

  “Well, dear, that’s beside the point. All of this is beside the point. I’ll have a drink if you’ll pour it for me, please, and tell you what isn’t beside the point.” I filled our two glasses. I was muzzy and out-of-sorts with this oblique diatribe. “What isn’t beside the point,” she continued, “is that all I’ve accomplished today, all I’ve accomplished in my whole life, is that I’ve transferred myself from one martinet to another.”

  “You didn’t have to marry him.”

  She got to her feet and glared at me. “I’m sure I don’t know why I’ve taken you into my confidence, and you can jolly well forget this. Now I’m going to dress.”

  The crowd had thinned considerably when I went down. In the vestibule, I heard a woman remark, “I wouldn’t mind if my income were cut to fifteen thousand. I’d just go out to my farm for the whole year.” And another voice replied, “Of course it wouldn’t go hard with you, Augusta. Why, you have a fortune in your roses if you’d only do something about it.” Augusta, whom I immediately knew to be the aunt Philip had visited when he drove me to Wolfburg from Chichester, laughed heartily. “That’s what my nephew tells me, but he’s a pipe-dreamer. I’m so glad that at least one of his pipe-dreams has come true. Hope is the sweetest girl in Boston, I’ve always felt.”

  “Wasn’t it strange,” said the Countess to Miss Pride, “that Mrs. Hornblower brought her present with her?”


  “I didn’t know she did,” said Miss Pride. “It was peculiar enough of her to come in an evening dress.”

  “That’s not all. She unwrapped it herself as well, and what do you suppose it was? A dozen perfectly horrid souvenir coffee spoons.”

  “My dear!”

  Hopestill was coming down the stairs and in her carefully composed face there was no sign of the fright and anger that had made her burst out to me in her room. She joined Philip at the door and they went out, sped on by the uproar of the guests who had lingered.

  “At any rate,” Miss Pride was saying at my elbow, “I haven’t lost this one,” and she slipped her arm through mine. Through the sleeve of her black suit, I felt her bone on my flesh like a steel wand or, as she bent it into a hook, like a thin, inflexible staple. “And now,” she went on to the Admiral, “now I’m going back to my memoirs.”

  The Admiral smiled radiantly. “When is this celebrated volume to be finished?”

  Miss Pride returned his smile. “I dare say it will be years. At least that’s what I intend, for I want something to occupy me so that I won’t get foolish, and to occupy Sonie so she won’t forsake me. Am I selfish?”

  “No, ma’am. You’re the most generous woman in Boston.” He bowed deeply and then said to me, “And you, Mademoiselle, are the luckiest.”

  It was with a sort of sudden desperation that I saw that the drawing-room was empty and that the accommodators were taking down the extra tables in the dining-room and that through the open door to the library only Reverend McAllister was visible, holding open in his hands a large dark green book which I knew was a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.Voices still came from the upstairs sitting-room, but presently a little group of people appeared at the head of the stairs and as they came down in a gust of talk, I could tell that even that room was empty now for Ethel, who had evidently been waiting for her chance, crossed the hall and went in with a tray to pick up the glasses that had been carelessly left there by the sight-seers. I wished to detain these last few guests but they were saying good-by. Gratuitously they told their hostess where they were going: to the matinee of Richard II, to the Country Club for ice-skating, to Brookline to shop at Best’s. Amy Brooks and Mr. Pingrey, shy with one another because Amy had caught Hopestill’s bouquet which she clutched tightly against her quivering breast, shaken with silent giggles, passed by me without a word because they could not see me or hear me though I called out to them, “Oh, don’t go yet!” Their only thought was to get through the door and away, by themselves. They hastily told Miss Pride good-by and Amy screamed, “It was lovely! I caught the bouquet, Cousin Lucy! Edward and I are going to Agassiz! I am going to do the glass flowers in pastels for Mrs. McAllister!”