Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  They were gone then, the last. Miss Pride, still holding my arm, linked her other in the Admiral’s, and three abreast we went down the hall towards the library. “We’ll quickly get rid of Ichabod,” whispered Miss Pride, nodding in the direction of Reverend McAllister who was still absorbed in his book, “and then we three can have a nice talk.”

  “Right-o,” said the Admiral. “Ain’t it a pity my wife had to miss this! Why, Lucy, I haven’t had such a good time since I went dancing at the Country Club, unless it was a month ago when Rose Park gave the cocktail party for her Community Chest people. I’m gay as a lark. Aren’t you, Sonie?”

  “Oh, yes, sir!” I cried. Miss Pride released us both and after she had gently closed the door behind us, switched off the ceiling light. The sun had gone behind a cloud and the library was shadowy and cold. “There now,” she said. “It’s cozy. It’s just right to have this sort of dämmerung follow a wedding. It is the anti-climax to these affairs that I like most.”

  Chapter Six

  * * *

  PHILIP MCALLISTER, I was thinking, was one of those men in whom there lingers the perfectionism of childhood, who, when his stature was Lilliputian, saw the world as titanic, saw love centered in a goddess as a principle of salvation, as the meaning of that large, floating life, seeming so shapeless and so wonderful, like the shifting clouds of summer which veil and unveil the sun, that life he thought might vanish before he had sprung forth from his dwarfish body. We say of such people erroneously that they have never “grown up.” We should say instead that they grew up too quickly, skipping certain years and finding themselves flowering, alone, and in the snow, months before the spring. The phantom he had been pursuing all his life, and which he believed was at last entrapped in this girl whom he had loved intermittently for many years, had escaped him and the love with which he thought to imprison her had dematerialized, leaving him without love and without an object to try to love.

  I was coming from the Countess’ and was on my way to the young McAllisters’ house where they were having a cocktail party and I was going over, with distaste, the conversation I had just had with my earlier hostess. Having summoned me over the phone that morning to have luncheon with her, she began, the moment we had left the dining-room for the library, to state her object. It was nothing more than simply to satisfy her curiosity. For some months past, indeed, ever since Philip and Hopestill had come back from a wedding trip to Canada, everyone had been slightly or greatly (depending on the extent of his prejudices) shocked by the almost constant presence in their house of Harry Morgan. The Countess von Happel wanted to know what I thought of it. Had I any idea why such otherwise attractive people set loose upon their guests a person of such execrable manners, such unrelenting buffoonery? He was addicted to imitations and in the course of a single evening recently, the Countess declared, had “done” President Roo­sevelt at a cocktail party, Katharine Hepburn at a psychiatrist’s, a Negro on trial for murder, a priest confronted by Mae West. There was little to distinguish one from another and no one could understand how he could delude himself into thinking he had the least gift for mimicry. “If he’s as inexpert at architecture as he is at imitations,” remarked the Countess, “the Concord house will be a scandal.” The Concord house was already in a sense a scandal, for Hopestill and Morgan spent a great deal of time there, often without Philip and without any more chaperonage than that of the carpenter or the gardener.

  Did I believe, as some people did, that Philip was perhaps endeavoring to show Hopestill how detestable his predecessor was by forcing the man upon her, much in the way some mothers allow their children to eat their way into an indifference for candy? And was this newly announced pregnancy part of Philip’s plan to tame the wild creature who had lived amongst wolves so long that she had come to howl like them?

  I was disinclined to confide in the Countess my own opinion for she was a notorious gossip and was not above naming the sources of her tidbits, and so, to all her queries, I only replied, “Oh, I suppose he amuses them,” or “He’s not such a bad sort when he isn’t clowning.”

  But I was not to be let off so easily. The Countess, who enjoyed nothing so much as contemplating people’s motives, continued her anatomizing.

  “I cannot accept the attachment between Philip and Mr. Morgan as altogether genuine. And if he is trying to teach Hope a lesson, isn’t he a bit innocent? I mean, my dear Eu­phrysone, one can’t help hearing things. One hears of Mr. Morgan’s reputation.”

  We are instantly put on our guard by the effeminate man who, as if to dispel our suspicions, says, “You know, homosexuals interest me very much psychologically and I must confess I have a number of good friends among them whom I would like to have you meet,” or takes an even bolder stand and says, “I am so amused by the rumors I have heard about myself that I have been tempted to give people really something to talk about by having my hair curled and my fingernails painted” (so that we know, in the first instance, that if the homosexuals have admitted him to their minds which he is investigating in the interest of his hobby, they have as well admitted him to their arms, and in the second that curling his hair and painting his nails are probably what he will shortly do, but not for the reason that he has prepared us). Just so, the confidence that Philip placed in Harry Morgan made the astute Countess suspect that he did not trust him at all, that he was jealous of those New York days and New York evenings to which the young millionaire so casually referred, calling upon Hopestill to confirm the name of a restaurant or of a mutual friend.

  “Pretend you’re a European, darling! I love you! Don’t be shocked! Tell me, dear angel, if you don’t agree with this evil-minded old woman that Philip McAllister has some reason—don’t interrupt, Sonia—for being disappointed in that lovely bride of his? And . . . Come sit beside me. I don’t know where that Filipino child of mine is. And that he does not really adore her so much as he appears?”

  “I don’t follow you, Countess,” I said nervously.

  My friend pouted and then laughed. “Of course you don’t follow me, precious scamp, you’re a mile ahead of me.”

  I was by no means averse to gossip but I did not enjoy it with the Countess who, for some reason unknown to me, was reined in by no inhibitions when she spoke to me although I was certain that she was discreet with others. She seemed to be under the impression that my moral view had the same generous, continental latitude as hers. My disquietude, as I fumblingly put down my coffee cup, was transmitted to her and a small silence came between us, as precise as a picture hanging on a wall.

  The Countess went on, more gently. “Oh, I have not been nice at all! But you and I, Sonia, observe things other people don’t. Don’t we now? Wouldn’t you agree with me that probably you and I are the only people, besides the principals, of course, who know that Mr. Morgan was Hope’s friend before her marriage?”

  “Friend?” I repeated. “But of course they were friends.”

  “I use the word in its European sense, darling, as you perfectly well know.” She crossed the room to the bell-pull, and stood poised a moment, the light from the window enlivening her fair hair with brilliant undulations, her nose aloft. There was something at once so childish and so wise about her pose as well as about what she had just been saying that I smiled. She caught my smile, returned it, and said, “Don’t try to pretend any longer that you’re not a spy. You were spying on me just then. We will have some more coffee and something very special, a beautiful brandy.”

  Bit by bit, in the course of the afternoon, my hostess’ conjectures came out. Some she revised, others she left intact; I proffered nothing new, but I was forced, by the sheer weight of her intuition which had synthesized random elements into a composition as clear as a case history written in a book, to agree with her. I did not, however, know any ease even with the assistance of the crystal-clear brandy, for I felt somehow that simply by listening I was letting Hopestill’s cat out of t
he bag.

  Berthe von Happel, through the same sort of almost physical insight that Mamselle Thérèse had employed, had known from the beginning why Hopestill had suddenly decided to marry Philip. In another sort of society, her guess would probably have immediately occurred to anyone who did not believe that the girl was in love. But it would never have crossed the mind of, for example, Amy Brooks. Hopestill might be disliked, might be criticized for her inability to get on with her relatives-in-law, for her sharp and often cruel treatment of servants, for her bland disregard of charitable works, but no one would have dreamed of accusing her of so great a crime as the one she actually had committed and the one the Countess took matter-of-factly. For whatever else she was, Hopestill was a member of a society which did not countenance illegitimate children, which, in a sense, did not believe in them, just as the prim Victorian who is told for the first time of sodomy says with a firm scoff, “I never heard of it before. I don’t believe it. It’s merely a bit of obscene nonsense.” To be sure, shop-girls and servants frequently ruined their lives through such misdemeanors, but the people one lunched with and invited to dinner chose other means: dipsomania or betting on the horses. Bastardry was not acknowledged as a possible function of the upper classes. (I recalled, in a momentary flare of anger, how the first time I had met Philip McAllister, he had accused me of coming to him for an abortion.) But there had been a time, the Countess declared, when New England had not been so naïve, when sin was looked for in every stratum and duly punished.

  Had I never seen in Philip McAllister’s eyes the fanaticism of a Puritan? Had I never noticed how, at a dinner party, his flushed face did not turn when he spoke to someone but was kept tensely in an attitude that allowed him to keep a constant vigil on his wife, as if he were trying to read the thoughts in her deceitful head, or as if he wished to convey to her some message that would inform her he knew everything and forgave her nothing? Oh, to be sure, most people took this as a look of love. Indeed, the sole criticism of him was that he prolonged beyond the point of decency, his look of nuptial rapture and the vagueness which rendered him, in conversation, slightly stupid.

  It was true, as the Countess said, that in public his eyes, across the cerulean azure of which there passed a flare of hotter blue like the quick, staggering stab of sun to the heart of a diamond, never left his wife but studied her as the rapt ­jeweler studies a rare stone through the little magnifying glass enfolded in his eye. And while he watched her, he praised her to everyone within earshot: no one had her genius for dress, or her hair, or her enchanting voice in a high minor key, or had that pearly shining flesh in which only the mouth, the palest pink or, in some lights, faint lilac, broke the lily-like monotony. In these first months of her pregnancy when it had not yet made itself cumbersome, she had reached the pinnacle of her loveliness, like the forced flower, blossoming under glass and out of reach of the distractions of other flowers and the alteration of its color by the sun or by the shade. No less embarrassed than her guests was Hopestill whose protests only made her husband the more extravagant, the more hysterically flattering: “And her greatest charm of all is that she doesn’t know how charming she is!” he would cry.

  I told the Countess that I did not quite see the logic of her argument: if Philip was aware that he had been tricked, and if, as she maintained, he was a throw-back to early Puritanism, why did he not divorce her or punish her by depriving her of all society, or, at the very least, refuse to have Morgan in his house?

  “Oh, don’t think he wants anyone to know. He wants them to suspect, probably. But he can’t punish her openly, can’t divorce her—for I have no doubt he feels strongly about divorce—can’t burn a scarlet letter in her forehead. Darling, unconsciously he’s imitating Dante: Don’t you remember that the lovers’ punishment is to embrace forever?”

  I could not bear to listen to any more and got up. “I’m due at Hope’s house now,” I said, “though I’m sure I don’t know how I’ll face her.”

  And she replied, “Why, be that same inscrutable Euphrysone we know so well. You cannot fool me! You have known all along! I love you! Give Hope a kiss for me!” And she deposited a kiss on either cheek, one for myself and one for Hopestill which I did not propose to deliver.

  The Countess’ house, like her person, was overheated and over-fragrant, and it was a relief to be on the street. I idled, taking the longest way to Hopestill’s house, and finding an organ-grinder on Marlborough Street, I stopped to watch his monkey. I did not really attend the sad little dressed-up animal, but I put penny after penny into his leather hand and dreamily looked at him and at his soiled old master who could easily have been his father. The trees had been out for some time and although now, in the twilight, it was cold, there was a quality of spring in the air. I wished that I were in the country or that, at least, I might stay out of doors until it was quite dark, doing no more perhaps than paying the monkey for the windy tunes.

  I moved on. Undoubtedly the Countess was right. Philip’s disappointment had made him hate Hopestill. And his hatred, coupled with his atavistic, vindictive morality, prompted him to torture her, to batten himself upon the love of the two sated and now unwilling people. But simultaneously, as he caused them to remain at their revolting banquet, though they were gorged, caused them, like Paolo and Francesca, to embrace forever and be embraced by hell, he, as overseer must also be in hell, must see to it that they rendered him the true accounts, and did not embezzle from eternity one instant of relief.

  Only for Harry Morgan did I have no pity at all. The Countess, while she had deplored him, had seemed to accord him a measure of sympathy as the victim of Philip’s persecution, although she could not deny my charge that he was in no way bound to accept invitations to Hopestill’s house. There was one reason and I suspected two why he continued to come. The first was simply that he was a snob and had no intention of cutting himself off from the one house where he was welcome; he was a climber and would have given a good deal to be “in” as he was in other parts of the country. A fortune, he had discovered, was not the open sesame in Boston that it was elsewhere and he had once observed to me with a sort of bitter wonder that he could count on the fingers of one hand the débuts he had been invited to in this “city of the dead, this town where human life is at a premium.” But there was, I thought, another reason why he did not refuse to come to the McAllisters’ dinner parties and that was the new addition to Hopestill’s gatherings (and the Countess’, too, for that matter), that is, Kakosan Yoshida. Whether they saw one another anywhere save on Commonwealth Avenue, I could not tell, nor did I know if their friendship had progressed beyond the raillery they engaged in over cocktails, but I had perceived that they nearly always separated themselves from the rest of us before dinner and, by the time the highballs were served, had drifted to the sofa at the end of the drawing-room farthest from the fire-place. What they talked of, I could not dream, for I was sure that Kakosan had not told her new friend that she was acquainted with his tutor. Certainly, I had not told Nathan of any of this. He would have been maddened with jealousy if he had known that they were ever in the same room.

  Kakosan had been an immediate success on the first Friday she had gone to the Countess’. Her conduct, of which I had been uncharitably dubious, was exemplary and her beauty, set off by a yellow satin dress embroidered with white flowers and a white carnation in her hair, distracted everyone so much from the music that the Countess was a little reserved in her conversation afterwards and we left rather earlier than usual. But Berthe von Happel bore no one a grudge and in a very short time she appeared at the Fridays and the Saturdays as often as I did. Likewise, she was taken up by Hopestill, and even Miss Pride, on one occasion, invited her to tea, though she confessed afterwards to me that she “found it a very pretty head but uncommonly empty.”

  If I had not let it be known that Kakosan was a typist, no one would have suspected that she had any other occupation than that of arrangi
ng flowers in a bowl or playing jackstones in a garden complete with torii and tea-house. For she was one of those people who have the enviable knack of keeping their addresses a dark secret without appearing to hide anything, of answering ambiguously or not at all questions about activities, backgrounds, preferences, antipathies. If someone said to her, “Where did you live before you came here?” she would reply, “My father, you see, has copied his villa on the Yanagawa. You should see it! He is a great gardener. And how sorry he is he cannot have the tsubaki in this country he loved so much in his beautiful homeland. Do you know what it is? It is red like fire and sometimes it blooms in the snow. But he has some of the Japanese flowers, you know, wistaria and cherry trees and iris. He has to have flowers, of course, for he is a Zen-Buddhist and must decorate his tea-house. And do you know that even though it never snows where his villa is, just as soon as winter comes, he covers the lanterns with straw mats as he used to do in Kyushu?” A persistent busybody, charmed with this information but nevertheless determined to know whether the villa was in California or Florida or Louisiana, might say, “Where did you say he has his villa?” As if she had not heard the inquiry, she would go on, “Oh, yes, and he has two red pines which he sprays twice a year, for it is the custom to remove every single dead needle.” This was a side of Kakosan that I never saw when she was with Nathan or when she and I made our expeditions to the movies. With us, she talked only of her chief interests which were the “spirits,” film stars, and some disreputable young men with whom she often conversed in the Common on her way home from work on a subject she called “nationals” and which we translated roughly as “politics.” Or she would tell us the little adventures that took place in her office which sounded so remarkably like those I had heard from my classmates at the Back Bay Business College that I automatically envisaged Mrs. Hinkel as I listened to her.