Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  “Well!” said Miss Pride jocularly. “What a profound slumber you’ve just had.”

  Her niece stood beside her and both of them looked at me so curiously that I quickly said, “I was trying to remember a name.” I was still trembling from my shock and I wondered if my voice had betrayed me. What shall I do? my eyes inquired of Kurt. His elongated face was up-pointed, immobile, and alert. I answered myself, “I must find the room or I will be like Mamma and then Miss Pride will find out and lock me up!”

  Miss Pride said, “Hope tells me she wants you to stay here for dinner. I must be going on now.”

  “Oh, don’t go just yet, Auntie,” said Hopestill, her eyes wandering away from us as she sought her husband.

  “I must,” said her aunt. “I am behind in my political articles. Do you follow Mr. Roosevelt, Hopestill?”

  Hopestill, who prided herself on not reading the newspapers and who, at the moment, was too distracted to comprehend what Miss Pride was saying, replied, “I haven’t seen him in ages. I had dinner with him two years ago in a very muggy place in Cambridge. Surely he isn’t still at Harvard!”

  “Oh, no,” answered Miss Pride, winking at me. “He’s in Washington now.”

  “Really? As I recall, he was driving a banana-wagon that evening.”

  Disliking the prospect of having dinner alone with the McAllisters, I said to Miss Pride, “You said this morning, you know, that you wanted to do a little work this evening. Perhaps I should come along with you now.”

  “Oh, work is out of the question. Hopestill has made me quite tipsy. You stay here and enjoy yourself.”

  She turned away and Hopestill, leaning towards me, said in a whisper, “Why don’t you want to stay, Sonie?”

  “I didn’t say that,” I told her. “But the fact is that I wanted to make a telephone call. I . . .”

  “Go into Philip’s study if you like. You won’t be disturbed there. I especially want you to stay. That is, I’m afraid if you don’t, I’ll have to eat alone because Philip will obviously pass out before dinner.”

  I relished no better the thought of being alone with Hopestill. The Countess’ conversation, my knowledge of Kakosan and Morgan, and the visitation of the red room had combined to put me into an unsettled state which I knew only a normal evening with Miss Pride on Pinckney Street could cure. And, still, recollecting how her eyes had tracked me down, I was not sure of myself, felt I might suddenly cry out as she opened the Boston Evening Transcript or, more dreadful yet, the room might take me unawares again as it had done this afternoon and I would be obliged to explain my trance to her. Abruptly, I was stormed by a claustrophobia so violent that every element of the scene before me assumed the proportions of destroying force: there was no reason for this gathering, no reason for this elaborate amity amongst people whose civilization had pruned down their impulses to a set of manners which imperfectly concealed a dead indifference, no reason why I should be sitting here in this wealthy drawing-room when I, so far from being embourgeoised, could find pleasure only in the society of the dog, Kurt. I was alarmed by Philip who, damaged, loud, unrecognizable, was repeating anecdotes he had heard from Morgan and, to the even greater horror of his guests, was telling professional secrets about his own colleagues. Under what influence, wifely, personal, friendly, it was not known, he had, for some time past, seemed discontented with his profession. But he had not discussed it; people had only had a “feeling” that he was going through some crisis which would undoubtedly be happily resolved. Equally alarmed was I by Hopestill in whose eyes, strikingly like her aunt’s today, there was an insistent plea that I remain. She had selected me, I reasoned, because she was perhaps actually afraid to be alone with Philip and because I, of all the guests at the cocktail party, could be trusted not to carry my observations to the fastnesses of the Vincent and the Chilton Clubs.

  If anyone was in need, I thought, it was myself. It had been true, as I told Hopestill, that I wanted to make a telephone call. It was, though I did not specify this, to Nathan, or rather, to the janitor of his building who would occasionally understand (he was quite deaf) what I wanted and call my friend to the telephone. For I felt that I must see him at once, must make him understand fully where the apples came from, must impress upon him the necessity of my finding the red room. Moreover, I wanted to see, simply by looking at him, that he did not know who his rival was.

  And I did not want to telephone from Philip’s study. I had thought of a booth in a drug-store on a certain corner from which, and only from which, I had always put through my calls to Nathan, so that I had come to associate with his distant, often blurred voice, the wooden counter visible to me through the glass door of my little cell, where a pharmacist of Hellenic beauty stood as if guarding his rows of amber glass jars full of pills, his curly golden hair occupying the place of greatest light under the neon legend: “Prescriptions.” It was nearly always necessary, since several minutes elapsed from the time I got the janitor until I heard Nathan’s dazed “Hello”—these calls were even now a surprise to him—for me to deposit a second or third nickel in the slot. The young god, pushing aside a ciborium of nuxvomica, called, as I hurtled out of the box, “Here, I’ll change it for you,” having two nickels in exchange for my dime already waiting in his outspread hand. I had not time to thank him, for I was afraid my connection would be cut off, but when I had hung up and was leaving, expressed my gratitude and made a vague promise that it would not happen again. His large, heavily-lidded hazel eyes twinkled, either because he felt he was in on a secret (perhaps he thought that my parents would not allow me to see the person I was telephoning and that I was arranging a secret rendezvous) or else because he was amused by my absent-mindedness or by the loquacity which made all my calls cost double. He said: “I always have change back here any time you need it,” as if he had no wish to be deprived of the spectacle of my flurry. Once I had got Nathan immediately, for he was passing by the janitor’s door as the telephone rang, and the original coin I had deposited sufficed, my message being short. The pharmacist, who had been slowly doing up a package, glanced at me through the glass door from time to time and when I came out, rapidly produced two nickels from a box at the end of the counter. I thanked him but said I had finished and he exclaimed, “You didn’t get your party, then!” in a tone something like disappointment.

  It was in that place where, creature of habit that I was, I wanted to make my engagement with Nathan. Superstitiously, I felt that if I telephoned from this house, its owners would be drawn into my maelstrom whereas the pharmacist could not since he knew nothing of me and I knew of him only his youth, his beauty, and his deep voice containing the vestiges of a Nova Scotian accent. I was afraid, moreover, that if I did not make the call and see Nathan tonight, my determination would wane and by morning would have perished altogether so that the day to which I opened my eyes would be identical to all other days save that the danger was nearer, but not near enough, in the bright sunlight streaming through my familiar windows, to make me remember clearly enough how terrified I had been by Miss Pride’s eyes.

  When Hopestill motioned toward my untouched glass and asked me if I did not like the cocktails, I realized with a start that I had been here only a few minutes. I drank quickly and guiltily, gave Kurt a parting caress and, at Hopestill’s injunction, set out to find the Admiral.

  Throughout the half hour that I exchanged quotations with Admiral Nephews and soberly discussed, with Frank Whitney, the horrors of Communism, listened attentively to a drunken middle-aged man whom I had never seen before who was writing a book on a subject which he did not divulge, one part of my mind was busily casting about for an excuse to leave before dinner. Why did I not now slip upstairs, get my coat, and leave without saying good-by, then go to the drug-store or directly to Cambridge? In reflecting on one’s own or in considering another’s frustrations, one sees them as unnecessary, forgetting that the amenities of society, arbitrar
y and often absurd, beset us at every turn and it is only in larger things that one’s will is really free. Thus we cannot, unless we have expert tact, or unless we are resigned to being called rude or erratic, turn from our door an unexpected visitor who arrives in the midst of a quarrel or an intimate conversation which we are loath to break off, or when we are at work. Yet, by suffering the intrusion, we accomplish nothing but ill, for our visitor senses that he is unwanted and does not understand why and we, on the other hand, are so displeased with him for not understanding that we fill our stilted, sporadic talk with little barbs, deeply offensive, so that when he leaves he may be resolving never to see us again. For there is, in the patois peculiar to the guest-host relationship, an ambiguity that penetrates to the very roots. Thus, the hostess who for the past hour has been grimacing with swallowed yawns, has, almost unconsciously, been emptying the ash-trays and collecting the glasses, begs us, when we get up to leave, not to go yet, that it is still early, that she wants another drink and cannot have it unless we stay. If we do remain, there eventually comes back to us, percolated through our mutual acquaintances, the remark she has made over the telephone the next morning, “So and So is very nice but someone should explain to him that there is a time beyond which one does not prolong a visit,” or, “Like all great talkers, he’s quite unaware of time. I was simply nodding in my chair and he didn’t notice at all for he was only conscious of the sound of his own voice.”

  Philip was studiously avoiding me, and while the last thing I wanted was to talk with him, I was disturbed by the way in which, whenever our eyes met, he seemed not to see me at all and, if he found himself by accident standing near me, he immediately moved away, sometimes in the midst of a conversation. Hopestill, on the contrary, was almost constantly at my side. Her voice became progressively louder, as if she were trying to drown out Philip.

  Guests were beginning to leave and there were only a dozen or so left in the drawing-room, loitering over a last cocktail. There came a general lull which was broken by Philip’s clear voice saying to a young woman, the wife of a colleague of his, “I can’t persuade Hope to go to Dr. Masters. She goes to a New York doctor just as she goes to a New York modiste. Fortunately our good friend Harry Morgan is decent enough to drive her down for her appointments.”

  As everyone knew, Hopestill was under the care of an obstetrician who served all the matrons of her circle, whose office was a few blocks from her house on Dartmouth Street. This very afternoon, she had been comparing notes with someone who had recently had a child and who declared that the process, under the supervision of Dr. Masters, was actually a pleasure. Hopestill had agreed warmly that she was devoted to him. Moreover, it was known that she had been only once to New York since her marriage and that time in the company of the Countess and Amy Brooks for the purpose of shopping and going to a Picasso exhibit. Yet, if she denied what her husband said, it would appear to the guests that she was in the habit of making trips either to New York or to some trysting place with Harry Morgan (Concord! thought the guests. Would she have the nerve?), using to her husband the excuse that she was visiting a doctor. Consequently, although the young woman with whom she had discussed Dr. Masters was still in the room, she said, laughing, “Oh, I only go to Dr. Ragsdale for good measure. I am quite loyal to Dr. Masters.” Dr. Ragsdale, evidently the first name that came to her, had been her psychiatrist.

  Philip smiled innocently across the room at her and said, “Why didn’t you tell me you were seeing Dr. Masters, darling? I would have been greatly relieved to know that the product was not to be labeled ‘made in New York.’ ”

  The guests stared in hopeless embarrassment, full of pity for this naïve cuckold and regretful that he was so trusting of his wife that he had all but published her shocking subterfuges, and full of indignation that he had reached such a state of mind that his social sensitivity had been completely dulled. Specific pregnancies were not and never had been openly discussed in so loud a voice.

  I waited for no more but left the room and went directly upstairs. As I picked up my coat from Hopestill’s bed, I heard women talking in the dressing room adjoining. “Isn’t there something in the Hippocratic oath he’s disobeying?” said one. “He has the taste, thank fortune, to mention no names, but, for example, there’s only one person he could have meant when he was ridiculing plastic surgery. It’s frightening to see how high and mighty he is.” “I’ve never particularly cared for him,” said another, “but I find him quite impossible now. And of course Hope has such strange notions. I dare say she picked them up in New York.” “New York won’t hurt a flea if it’s a good flea,” returned the first. “Mother says it’s a question of blood. ‘By their fruits shall ye know them,’ says Mother.” “Everyone was devoted to Mrs. Mather, you know, although I’ve heard she was a neurasthenic. And of course her father! No wonder Hope is what she is.”

  I was surprised by this comment on Miss Pride’s dead sister for it was like the statement of the anti-Semitic, “To be sure I have known Jews whom I’ve liked. I was very fond of So and So, for instance, though even in him, you must admit, the objectionable characteristics of his race were not completely obliterated.” Summary pronouncements upon personalities are common to people in society who, looking upon families as units almost as disjunct as nations, acquire a prejudice against or an affection for one member, make a declaration of war against or an alliance with the whole but make certain reservations in either case, in order to appear fair. In a moment, I overheard the first voice remark, “Miss Pride has always been rather underhanded, Mother says. It’s perfectly absurd, at her age, to continue to regard Admiral Nephews as her beau especially when poor Mrs. Nephews is confined to her bed most of the time.”

  My departure, observed by no one, gave me a feeling of security, and painful as it might be to try to explain my dilemma to Nathan, I looked forward with pleasure to this evening which I would spend in his grubby rooms. On the way out, I bought a bottle of Liebfraumilch which came, green and dripping, out of an ice-chest, and, to take home later to Miss Pride, a bunch of mountain laurel which came, I was told by the vendor, from West Virginia. The jade-green leaves and the pink flowers like little bonbon cups made me think of Kakosan and her father’s garden and the garden that Nathan had promised, in the delirium of his rapture, to build for her in some distant time and space, a castle in Spain, a vine-covered cottage, that shrine which varies according to the experience of the lovers, but is an essential of love’s culture.

  He had been trying for the last hour to telephone me and as I came through the murky basement, ducking under the obese pipes of the furnace that stretched out like the arms of an octopus, I found him emerging from the janitor’s flat where he had been making one last attempt to reach me. I knew that he was in severe distress for it had been agreed at the beginning that he was never to call me at Miss Pride’s. He told me tonelessly as his baffled eyes roved my face as if he half hoped to find there what he had lost, that two hours before, he had gone, by appointment, to Morgan’s apartment to give him a lesson and had found that he was not there. But there was a note for him which the butler went to fetch. As he waited in the hall, he saw lying on the table a copy of the book, Der Traum der Roten Kammer, identical to the one Kakosan had given him. He could not decide whether to go away at once, leaving it untouched, maddened with uncertainty, or to probe its pages for evidence of her guilt, for marks, inscriptions, a chance slip of paper. He concluded that he must know, once and for all. First he opened it and smelled the pages which gave off, just as his did, a fragrance of her favorite scent (he had given her a flagon of it only a short time before), for it was her romantic habit to spray her letters and gifts. And then, upon the flyleaf, written with the curlicues of penmanship she effected only in notes to intimate friends, was the same girlish, warm-hearted endorsement that appeared in his—and both in red ink—“For dearest Gacho from his Hototogisu.” He had then torn a page from his notebook and written to
Morgan that the pressure of examinations would prevent him from giving any more lessons.

  Somewhere the block-flute which we often heard gave out a waggish excerpt from The Well-Tempered Clavichord. The surface of our cool, golden wine was marred by floating bits of cork. Nathan’s face was three-quarters turned towards me and his birthmark looked like a shadow. I was conscious of these things in terms of a painting. They were a flat surface with only a representation of dimensions and I projected them into Paris, pretending that we were there and presently would go out for a pernod at the café Nathan had always said he would visit first, the Closerie des Lilas. Or I imagined us wandering through the crooked streets and over the bridges of Würzburg where, at any moment, we might pass my father or jostle the elbow of my cousin Peter. Or I was in Heidelberg and the block-flute became the song of a foreign bird entering through the windows of my ruby room.