Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  But in the Boston houses, she was remote from anything worldly or anything Occidental, and I, along with everyone else, was captivated afresh each time my eyes came to rest on her dexterously wrought face as, when a conversation was in progress into which she could not enter, her golden mask became immovable and the eyes showed her to be humble before her intellectual superiors while the proud arch of her neck showed that the nobility of her blood forebade her too free participation in the meaningless talk of people who were “without tea.” She was apparently the “real thing” and seeing her thus, I longed for Nathan to possess her forever as the reward for his generous overlooking of her faults. But the moment she dropped her “company manners” and exchanged a few words with me in private, I hoped that the affair would be swiftly over. The repugnance I sometimes felt for her (when she revealed herself as being so far from the “real thing”) was the kind one feels toward anything that is not true to its origin if its origin is admirable or attractive: the book that begins well and peters out in mawkishness, the picture which at first seems profound until, on further study, we find that it has only the virtue of brilliant draftsmanship. She used only as ornaments the Samurai code, her father’s gentlemanly pursuits of religion and art, and they were as removable as the flowers in her hair.

  Nathan, feeling that he was required to justify his love of her to me (rather, to himself, for he was sometimes agonized by the discrepancy between his vast love and its mean, elusive object) often denied that she was unchaste and stupid, not stating his denial with a negative but offering me instead instances of her talents which opposed and triumphed over her defects. He did not say, “She is not stupid,” but he said, “In some ways, she is very intelligent,” and as an illustration of her insight, he told me that she had once observed something in him he believed he had perfectly concealed. “No, really,” he said, “since I’m so generous with her, how could she know that I’m a miser?” I did not point out that the very energy of his generosity gave him away. Nor did he say that she was not promiscuous, but that she had been “misled.” At one time, he would declare that she was not a harlot because she had been in love with each of her bedfellows. At another time, in a fit of jealousy of all those unknown possessors of her, he said, “She has never been affected by any of it. I am quite sure this is the first time she has been in love.”

  In the past month, she had been required to go to so many séances (some of which I knew to be imaginary, to be, actually, the Countess’ Saturday. For some reason, probably a clever one, she had never told Nathan that she had been “taken up” by Boston.) and had broken so many appointments with him that he had become hollow-eyed with anxiety, unstrung with the suspicion that she had another lover. It was this, combined with their very evident enjoyment of one another, that made me think Kakosan and Morgan had at least entered upon the preliminaries of a love affair.

  2

  I had no more than let myself in at Hopestill’s unlocked door than I was confronted with the proof of my suspicion, and it resulted from an incident which, by one of those almost supernatural timings of chance, occurred within the same hour that Nathan, two miles away and across the river in Cambridge, made the same discovery, his evidence being but slightly different from mine. The hall, through the carelessness of a servant, was not lighted yet, although it was quite dark, so that I could not distinguish the two people standing at one side of the door, possibly in an embrace, possibly helping one another with their wraps, but I heard Kakosan’s high-pitched voice, suffused with childish laughter, cry, “Gacho, don’t!”, the name by which, it will be remembered, she called Nathan. And Harry Morgan said, “Okay, baby, but wait till I get you home.” I was shocked, not only by the frank implications of these elided remarks, and the foretokening in them of Nathan’s heartbreak, but also by the boldness of this love-play, a dozen feet from the drawing-room door. I concluded that they had already been to the party and had been relaxed by the cocktails. This, at any rate, was an advantage, for I should not now be obliged to talk with either of them. It would have been too much, I felt, if I had had to be omniscient witness to the antics of these two as well as of the McAllisters’. I hurried past them and as I went up the stairs, caught Kakosan’s terrified murmur, “That was Sonie Marburg!”

  Hopestill’s drawing-room was so spacious that despite her many guests, it did not seem crowded. As Miss Pride said of the room, “It’s not the temperature but the color that makes one think of an ice-chest. The fire in that pallid hearth gives no more warmth than the ones in the theater made with flashlights and red tissue paper.” It was called the “blue room” in contradistinction to an even chillier chamber, “the white parlor.” The floor was carpeted in silvery blue; the graceful chairs and sofas were upholstered in gray satin and heavy blue curtains hid the violet panes in the bay-window at the far end of the room. Bare of pictures (“I can’t afford originals and one doesn’t have prints,” she had said), the white walls were striated with gray shadows, for the room was dimly lit by a single bulb under the blue-green shade of a Chinese lamp. There was, as the Countess complained, nothing to look at in the room, for Hopestill detested bric-a-brac, having had her fill of it in her life at her aunt’s and, influenced perhaps by her prejudice against the maidenhair ferns and Aunt Alice’s Birthday Trifle, did not even put flowers on the tables.

  “Oh, it’s California, very likely,” Miss Pride was saying to a youngish woman I had met before. “Most of them settle in the west, you know.”

  When Miss Pride spoke of “the west,” it was as if she said “somewhere.” It was not quite a void, but it was something stretching interminably behind one’s back. Yes, she replied to her friend, she had been “out” once, and had not the least desire to go again.

  “I dare say their rugged life and bad climate make the people hardy. But I must confess I find the Rocky Mountains quite hideous, quite lacking in style. They’re too much of a good thing, so to speak. Even if the landscape didn’t offend me, though, I couldn’t endure the place more than ten days at a time. There is a crackly feel in western speech that sets my teeth on edge.”

  Her friend had spent three months in Saint Louis and countered, “But you should go to the middle west if you want to hear really peculiar speech. Of course Saint Louis is neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring. I could not get the key to the city. Is it southern? Is it mid-western? Is it an imitation of a German industrial town? I don’t know. But I do know that their accent makes it almost impossible for an easterner to understand what they say. If someone told you, ‘I lived tin yars in Versales, Mazura,’ would you have the least idea that he meant, ‘I lived ten years in Versailles, Missouri’? By the way, isn’t Versailles an amusing name?” The woman, whose home was in New Canaan, pronounced “idea” with a clear final consonant.

  I was curiously soothed by this colloquy which was the first thing that came to my ears, for Miss Pride, no matter what scandals and disasters were perpetrated under her very nose, would never change. I assumed that she and her companion had been wondering where Kakosan’s father lived. Miss Pride’s announcement, “Most of them settle in the west, you know,” made the Japanese immigrants as remote and unconnected with the world in which she lived as if they had never left their native shores, and Kakosan Yoshida herself went up in thin air. So long as Miss Pride was here, I thought, I could face anything. I was comforted to see that while she disdained the tray of canapés held before her by a maid, she exchanged her empty glass for a full one when the butler came round, so that I knew she would stay a little longer at least.

  Feigning great interest in someone’s proposed walking tour through Brittany, and someone else’s plan to present Hopestill with a set of lawn bowls for her Concord house, and Edward Pingrey’s recent attack of bronchitis, I actually only heard Philip’s voice, superimposed upon all the others. He was not yet drunk, but he had reached a stage of animation which often just precedes almost hysterical excitement.
/>   “What so amuses Hope and Harry about my father,” I heard him say to Mr. Otis Whitney, a life-long friend of the Reverend McAllister, “is the titles of his books.” And he went off into a spasm of pointless laughter in which Mr. Whitney joined with only a pained smile. His father was well-known as a mountain climber and had written three small volumes called To the Jungfrau and Other Adventures, The Challenge of the Medicine Bow Range of the Rocky Mountains, and A Hymn to the Himalayas. The titles, of course, amused everyone. But what variety of madness was making Philip’s tongue wag on in so embarrassing a gaffe? One immediately pictured his wife and Morgan poking fun at his father while he indulgently looked on. It was no secret that Philip had no respect for him, but he had never expressed his contempt, had been friendly and even affectionate in his occasional little jokes about him. It sounded now as if his wife, through some obscure wile, had so corrupted him that neither taste nor common decency was left in this erstwhile dignified young man.

  Evidently they had been discussing the renovations of the Concord house and the Reverend McAllister’s name had come up in this connection, for Mr. Whitney, putting his glass on the mantel and murmuring that he must be going on, said, “I shall want to see the place when it’s done.”

  “Oh, it will be a gem, I can tell you, Mr. Whitney!” cried Philip. “You should see the fire-place Morgan has designed. It doesn’t look any more like a fire-place than you do.”

  I hoped that others were not, like myself, concentrating on the over-pattern of our host’s voice. When Mr. Whitney had excused himself, Philip moved on to another group and repeated the reason why Hopestill and Harry Morgan were so amused by his father. Alcohol flings back, almost illimitably, the boundaries of humor so that we can find uproarious things which our poor sober friends miss altogether. It is necessary, if the joke is really good and really should be shared, to repeat it time and again until finally it penetrates those solemn skulls. Philip had for the third time cried out the names of his father’s books. “I had never realized how terribly funny they were until Harry Morgan and Hopestill pointed it out!” Hopestill, detaching herself from Amy Brooks and two other earnest girls, came swiftly to her husband’s side and slipping her arm through his, said, “Darling, Admiral Nephews wants to talk to you. Do rescue the poor old lamb. He’s over there, you see, with Mr. James who’s boring him to death.” Perhaps, in one of those flashes of sobriety that intermittently punctuate the state of drunkenness, he realized that he had gone far enough and he obediently followed his wife, pausing to speak to me and to say, in an undertone, “Is there something up between Morgan and your Japanese friend? I shouldn’t like that at all. I’ll talk to you about it later.”

  I could keep my mind on nothing that was said to me and I moved with my cocktail to the fire-place where Hopestill’s powerful dog, a Doberman, lay on the hearth, lifting his muzzle to me as I approached. Kurt had once belonged to Herr Speyer, the German who had mistaken me for his daughter as I waited in the lobby on my first musical Friday. When he left the country, he gave Kurt to the Countess who, having three dogs already, had handed him over to Hopestill. Despite his savage appearance, he was gentle and welcomed the advances of strangers who could not fail to be impressed by his gleaming black coat and his sharp, intelligent face. I never saw him without being reminded of his owner and the encounter with him that had given me so keen and so long-echoing a pleasure.

  I sat down to contemplate the play of the flames on the short black hair and in the wise eyes that were now amber and now jet, and to restore the Nordic face that I had seen that day through the flittering shadows from the sconces and the voice, overlaid as by a filigree, by the music that descended to us from the room above. “Here, boy,” I said, patting my knee. The dog wagged the stump from which his tail had been amputated, lifted his head to me, but did not get up. I wheedled a moment longer, then said, “Kurt! Kommst du!” and he bounded to me to put his forepaws on my lap, his shorn hind-end prancing. I was deeply attached to the affable animal who, though he bore only this resemblance to them, that is, that he could not talk, inspired me with the same joy—best known in memory—that certain things in nature did, and, in particular, through association with Herr Speyer, the August day when my father and I had seen the plover. Frequently Hopestill, who knew I was fond of Kurt, asked me to take him walking. We would hurtle down Clarendon Street to the esplanade and race along the river-bank. His strength and grace were communicated to me through the leash by which I restrained him and I was exhilarated with the swimming speed he demanded of me. Suddenly he would stop, listening. A growl would purr in his throat, but the bark it heralded did not come and instead, he would turn his head towards me, his companionable eyes informing me that he would not desert me after all for the excitement he had heard or smelled, far off, and we would resume our run.

  Now Nathan and I, dreaming of Germany, had borrowed from libraries innumerable of those travel books which are written with a missionary’s zeal, quick to report slighting comments on their darlings in order to refute them. Amongst these enraptured Valentines to Baden towns, we had found one that was full of photographs, from long study of which we had come to feel familiar with the walks, the bridges, the castle gardens, the cafés, the parks, the University of Heidelberg. As I walked with Kurt (born in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and intended, with his siblings, for a career on the Munich police force), I imagined that I was on the north bank of the Neckar River, proceeding towards the suburb of Handschusheim, the hills rising to my right, while to my left, across the river, I could see the mansard roofs of the old University and the spire of the Cathedral of the Holy Ghost. Just as in Chichester, I used to fancy Miss Pride’s house in the shadow of the State House dome, so, taking the cathedral spire (the locum tenens being Eliot House across the Charles) as my landmark, I placed my red room somewhere to the left of it. Unless he was too impatient, I persuaded Kurt to stop awhile and I sat down on a stone bench. I ran my hand along the space between his pointed ears and like a child speaking to a doll, I told him about the room which had now acquired a locality, which was Heidelberg, a town plucked at random, and a temporal dimension which, owing to the peculiar light that stained the windows, was specified as autumn. At some change in the tone of my voice, the dog, hoping that we would move on again, would part his jaws in a grin, and I would say, “Ja, Kurt, Ja, Kurt!” and then take pity on the imploring tilt of his head and the little whine that sounded like a puppy’s.

  “Doch, ist’s so spät?” I said to Kurt who was nuzzling my hand with his busy nose. I repeated the sentence in imitation of his former master and as I did so, tried to hear my accent which Nathan declared was more Russian than German. Experimenting a third time, I heard my mother’s voice and experienced the now familiar sensation that it was actually she who was speaking. Instantaneously, upon my image of her which accompanied the sound of her voice through my lips, she vanished like the will-o’-the-wisp and what stood before me was the red room. The apparition had never been quite like this before: through the windows, instead of merely other windows and sleeping cats upon the sills, I saw, framed by soiled and motionless curtains, in a flat opposite me, a real face but one which I could not see clearly since it appeared to be obscured by a sort of mist. It was an old woman’s face whose eyes seemed to be urged from their sockets a little, staring at me with malevolent fixity. The mistiness evaporated: Miss Pride was there, in the flat across the courtyard and the sunset had changed the color of her olive hat.

  When I vainly tried to see not the room but Hopestill’s bare white walls and gray chairs, when I strained to hear the voices of her guests and could not, I knew that my game had got out of control and that Miss Pride had found me out in my retreat and was judging me a lunatic. It occurred to me with a terror that elevated me to an unimaginable height, that the only remedy for my obsession was a desperate one: that I must find the room in the real world before the real world intruded, as Miss Pride’s face was doing now and conf
used me to the point of madness. For at this moment—and it was only a moment that I was conscious of her scrutiny—I was seized with a madness that was like an intense pain and was something outside myself, a violent force which urged my footsteps for the first time across the threshold onto the threadbare carpet with its faint green design. The knowledge that something external had precipitated my entrance was confused by a vertiginous and inarticulate emotion and for the present, I could not name the frenzy that had threatened but had not yet gained entrance. Despite the agitation into which the watchful eyes had flung me, I thought I sat serenely at the writing desk and sometimes smiled and other times rubbed my forehead with the tips of my fingers and then turned in my chair to examine the books on the nearest shelves. I noticed that the chair was exactly the right height, made so by a cushion. I was proud of my medical manuscript so beautifully preserved. The voice of my remembering self, roused from its sleep, said, “It was on Dr. Galbraith’s desk the day you went to get him for Ivan.” But my peace did not last. As Miss Pride’s face moved closer, leaning out the window, her eyes pursued me and I whirled like a spinning top, whisking from corner to corner, fleeing them. I was strung out long like a bright wire that ended in brittle rays of copper, shining and pointed and raw. The eyes, like a surgeon’s knives, were urged into my brain. The edges of the knives screamed like sirens; their sound curled in thin circles round my hot, pink brains. I crouched in a corner of the room, down behind the bookcases, safe, I thought. But I was plucked up by the burning yellow flares that went in a direct path like a sure blade. Miss Pride blinked her eyes. The room vanished. I had not moved but I felt an overwhelming tranquillity as if my brain were healed again, was sealed and rounded and impervious, was like a loaded, seamless ball, my hidden and wonderfully perfect pearl.