If Nathan had been listening to me as I told him what I had come for, if he had heard me taking off, layer by layer, the wrappings of my jewel, I might have lost it forever. To my own ears, my revelation sounded banal, my terror was flaccid, unimportant, trumped-up. And I was surprised that I could not make him see what I so clearly saw myself: this churchly, peaceable hallucination. I had reached the end of my account and said, “I want to find the room, you see.” But I was not really conscious of this need which, until now, had seemed so urgent, and when Nathan said, “I’m sorry. I haven’t been listening. What did you say?” I was comforted that I had not, after all, admitted a trespasser. I returned to his immediate and frenzied world, feeling wise, mature, and safe.
3
In the spring, the young McAllisters opened their Concord house where they spent week-ends. Frequently they entertained and their country parties were more successful than those they had had in town, not only because there were more things to do—Hopestill, although she could not participate herself, organized horseback parties by moonlight, fitted up a badminton court with lights, arranged half a dozen other diversions that appealed to her guests, and gained for her the reputation of being a highly resourceful hostess—but also because Harry Morgan was no longer in evidence and Philip had for all practical purposes become once more the person everyone had liked and admired.
Guests, approaching the house at night, were deceived by its size. Under the influence of the darkness, out of which the ell loomed suddenly, incandescent between the blooming apple trees, it seemed of manorial proportions. The impression, actually false, was strengthened by the landscape. On two sides, there was a wide sweep of lawn bounded by low stone walls in the shadows of which grew violets and lilies-of-the-valley. At the back was a grove of pines, the entrance to which had been cleared into a precise avenue where I sometimes took a walk in the early morning, relishing the blackened trunks of the pruned trees and the rich brown of the resilient needles out of which, here and there, a shell-pink mushroom thrust its tender cap.
It was not the house itself that had been renovated in Harry Morgan’s startling manner, but a smaller building which had formerly been Philip’s grandfather’s study. No one, not even the older McAllisters, could complain that there was anything amiss in the main house. The room into which one entered was ancient, stiff, yet withal charming. The wide, thickly knotted boards of the original floors were darkened to a rich red-brown. The dresses of some of the ladies and the hides of some of the hounds in the narrative wallpaper had faded from red to the color of a wine stain and from yellow to a sandy pallor. At one end of the room was a long fireplace whose white mantel was laden with pewter plates and tankards and, at either end, ivy cascading from amber bottles. It was not a room for casual lounging. The hostility to comfort seemed to have been intentional and every article of furniture had been designed to punish the flesh: the high-backed, cane-bottomed chairs, the cruel, three-cornered “roundabouts,” the cherry settle, as harsh as a pew. But the eye was pleased by the pure white doors and by two corner cupboards facing one another at the far end of the room which showed, through leaded panes, old red china, silver goblets and a flurry of bibelots.
It had been a shock, on the night of the housewarming, to go from this eighteenth century parlor to the “studio.” It was like the transition from one extreme of temperature to its opposite. The studio was a box in two stories, the lower one being given over to one large room, at the end of which was a completely outfitted bar, curved and equipped with a chromium foot-rail and high maple stools upholstered in red leather. On either side, French doors opened out, on one side to a path leading to the open slype between the main part of the house and the ell, on the other, to the pine grove. The new, waxed floor was bare. Here and there, scattered about its long expanse, were massive leather chairs of an obtuse structure, but one which afforded great bodily comfort. For tables, slabs of flawed plate glass with a greenish tinge lay on iron frames. Sofas, chairs, tables, bookshelves were low as if the people meant to use them had shrunk from a normal stature but had, at the same time, become uncommonly wide. The tall, thin guests, engulfed in the cavernous chairs, had seemed fragile and undernourished, no match for the thick, pint-sized and blood-red glasses out of which they drank.
A pair of pyramidal green vases stood on the mantelpiece and, with their insistent geometry, influenced the tulips springing from them to resemble also a “new idea” so that they did not belong to the world of nature but to that of mathematical design. There was a card table in whose four legs were inserted wedge-shaped shelves to hold the drinks of the players; a pair of crystal andirons for the remodeled fire-place which, as Philip had once said, looked no more like a fire-place than did Mr. Otis Whitney, and which he referred to as “the antrum.” It was a low, square hole overhung by a vast rectangular marble shelf. A fire there could be tended, Miss Pride said, only by a dwarf and even he would be in danger of dashing his brains out. On the hearth stood a sandstone carving which represented three plump women in a happy embrace and was entitled “Breadline.”
The Reverend McAllister, leading his mother about the room, had been less distressed by the bar than he had been by three pen and ink drawings which hung over a bookshelf and which produced an optical illusion: from one point of view they seemed to be illustrations of the myths of Venus and Adonis, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Narcissus, but by a slight change of focus, one saw that their subject was phallic, an assemblage of genitalia in coy half-ambush behind fronds, lotus flowers, and broad leaves of palmettos. The pictures had been a present from one of Hopestill’s former friends on Joy Street, and although she was quite aware of their intention, if someone gasped and whispered in an appalled hiss that she evidently did not know what they were, she replied, “You’re not the first person to tell me that, and I’m beginning to think there really is something ambiguous about them, though for the life of me I can’t see it.” It was quite true: she had seen the symbols in her first glance but had thereafter refused to let her eyes see anything but Orpheus holding his lute and Adonis lying in Venus’ arms. As the latter, they were wholly without distinction, so that people thought either Hopestill’s taste had gone terribly downhill or else that she was lying. As the clergyman stood before them, a dark blush stole upward from his stiff collar and he exclaimed to his mother, “I seem to be seeing things!” The old lady fetched her lorgnette from her handbag and moved up close to the pictures, although her son made an abortive attempt to stop her. She turned away, ferreting Hopestill out to kill her with a look, made particularly baleful by its filtration through her haughty instrument. Afterwards she was heard to say, “I shall never go into poor Edward’s renovated library again. It gives me the same feeling of distress that I would have if the Old Manse were turned into a Howard Johnson.” Miss Pride, refusing to acknowledge Harry Morgan’s authorship of the changes, said of it, “Berthe von Happel, for all her eccentric notions about decorating an interior in Massachusetts, could not have produced that monstrosity. I do believe that children are born with a mental disease these days.” And the Countess, looking with frank horror upon a kidney-shaped writing desk with a bakelite top and two chromium legs, one obese, the other as thin as a rail, murmured to me, “I dream! There has not yet been devised a machine to make anything so out of the question as this.”
It struck me that the studio was a rarefied extension of that state of mind which had sent Hopestill to Dr. Ragsdale’s consulting room. It was the demonstration, in meaningless shapes, in dislocated structure, of the rebellion to which she had become addicted without volition. Rather, the volition had existed in the beginning as a defense against her aunt, but it had now evaporated. What had taken place between her and Philip after their cocktail party, I never guessed, but none of us saw Harry Morgan again, and from that time forward, Hopestill was altered. It was difficult to say exactly what was changed in her except her appearance. She seemed to have gone beyond fear and beyond
rebellion, beyond, indeed, all feeling and to exist automatically. Perhaps she had surrendered completely to Philip’s hatred and had allowed her physical being to share in her moral disintegration. The demolition of her beauty was, everyone thought, merely temporary. After her child was born, her skin would regain its luster and her eyes their animation; she would be as brilliantly organized as she had been before. I wondered, though, if she would ever again be beautiful, and I thought that perhaps what we had seen as beauty had not been beauty at all but another quality, an emotional or intellectual force so powerful that it actually appeared in her person.
It will be remembered that when I was a little girl, I thought Miss Pride was beautiful. Later on, I did not call her that, but neither did I call her ugly. It was that my feeling had changed: from admiration of her carriage and her clothes, I had progressed to love of her. If by saying “she is beautiful,” we mean something more (as I must have meant even as a child), we mean this as a commentary on our relationship with her, we have actually said, “my gaze is freighted with feeling and my love has urged this face to resemble my sweet memory of it.” And that “feeling,” like the catalyst which remains stable, must remedy, through its unchanging agency, the imperfections of what we see. Conversely, when we hate, our hearts can deceive our senses so that we find hideous what has beauty inseparably in it. In this way I, at the time I had said Miss Pride was beautiful, had simultaneously said that my mother was ugly or else that her beauty was something gone bad.
Now it was not only Hopestill’s illness that made me think she had always been ugly. There was a force at play in my altered perceptions that was subtler and stronger than that which had come from my expanding knowledge of beauty, or that gradual repudiation of childhood criteria, or that vision, enriched by maturity, which allows one to speak of “types of beauty.” Rather, it was that I had slowly come of age in knowledge of her and of her milieu into which I had willed myself. What marked the advent of my adulthood was a moment when I, standing in the doorway of the studio, saw her lying bare-footed on the couch. She was alone and Kurt lay on the floor beside her. Her small, bony feet were busily prehensile, spryly fiddling with the cushions, the toes opening and shutting like a cat’s claws, the arch bowed tightly. I thought of her green slippers and how I had longed to be Hopestill or a girl just like her. Now, receiving her greeting, hearing her barren voice, I thought, “Why, it is her life that is ugly and has been from the beginning.”
“What shall I do, Miss Pride?” I asked.
She deliberated the chess-board, not my question, and replied, “And how do you feel about it? Do you think she will be cured?”
I told her my opinion and then I waited, my heart palpitating at the sight of her as in her green beaver hat and black suit, whose nocturnal sobriety was relieved only by the white collar of her mannish shirt, she moved the men across the board. I knew that today after church, she was to have luncheon at the house of a Coolidge and that the guest of honor was to be a Mrs. Roosevelt, née Cabot. “Thunder!” she said suddenly. “I’ve made a mistake. You’ve rattled me and it’s all spoiled. Well, Sonia, I would regret parting company with you, my dear girl, for I find your services useful and your manners steadily improve. I suppose there are other establishments besides the one your mother is in now? Of a different character where one would pay her keep. At any rate, I shall investigate.”
She had set the men up to begin again and was referring to her manual, holding it at arm’s length in the far-sightedness of age which she would admit to no one but me. I believed I was dismissed and turned to go, but she said, without taking her eyes from the diagram she was following, “Sonia, let us say for the sake of argument that I do agree to set your mother up in a private sanitarium: What returns will you make to me?”
Thinking that she wanted to know how I would repay the money, I replied, “I don’t know what I can do for many years, Miss Pride. But perhaps I could set her up myself. I don’t spend what you give me, you know.”
She squinted in my direction. “My dear child, the pin money I give you wouldn’t go very far in one of those places. Mind you, I know all about them. They’re run by bloodsuckers and don’t be told anything different. Mrs. Eppington’s oldest daughter, who is named something remarkable like Margarine, though of course it isn’t that, married a Russian who went quite mad and was sent off to one of those fashionable bedlams at a ruinous cost that led her eventually to opening a little tea-room in Newport, where all you could get for love or money, was some horrid red soup and salads made of Bartlett pears. Not that the marriage wouldn’t have been absurd anyway. They had an apartment facing Washington Square, furnished as we don’t furnish apartments in Boston, with couches that became beds and a bar in a closet, and I believe he had an icon, though he wasn’t that sort of Russian. But I wander. No, Sonie, returns of that sort are not what I have in mind.”
I started to speak, to assure her that I would not leave her. But she held up her hand for silence.
“If I undertake to support your mother as well as yourself, I shall be doing it with no thought of being paid back. I must repeat—although I am sure you return my devotion—that this is, I know, not much of a life for a girl your age. You have your moods, as we all do in our youth, our sentimental dreams of adventure, our fancied love affairs. Here, I’ve moved the rook too far.” She changed the man’s position. “You’re unusually steady to be sure. I have only had inklings of a certain restiveness at times. I had it, for example, one evening not long ago, when you brought me that charming mountain laurel.” She paused and glanced up at me. “Sonia, my father, a blunt man, but one who husbanded his words, brought me up in the belief that silence was the ideal policy, that honesty was next best, and that falsehood should be reserved for state occasions. For example, the only lie I ever heard him tell was to Mr. Charles Francis Adams’ secretary who, under the impression that Papa was Mr. Stanley Pride, Consul General of Madrid, asked him to renew his acquaintance with the Secretary of the Navy at a dinner party at the Yacht Club. Papa said, ‘I shall be delighted to renew my acquaintance with Mr. Adams.’ He claimed that this was an equivocation rather than a direct lie, for he did not say Mr. Charles Francis Adams, and he could have meant Mr. Richard Chilton Adams or Mr. Archibald Revere Adams, two perfectly bona fide Adamses with whom he lunched every day at the Harvard Club. But silence, silence was what Papa chiefly counseled, and while I have so far as possible followed his precept, I must confess that there are times when you are a little too silent. Sometimes I cannot compass you. You become a cipher. I am afraid you will disappear altogether, vanish utterly. On that evening, for example, that you brought me the mountain laurel, I had the feeling while we talked that you were paying no attention to what you said. I did not ask you where you had been, though I had heard from Hopestill that you had not stayed for dinner, and I do not ask you now. But, my dear child, I cannot live with an image of you! If you are troubled by something, I implore you to let me know.”
“That night,” I said, “I had had too many cocktails at Hopestill’s.”
“I’m not entirely satisfied with that, but we shall let it go. You will keep me company, help me with my little book in the twilight of my life? You will not go away from Boston?”
“But I have no intention of going away from Boston!” I cried.
She drew her game to a close and glancing up at the clock which indicated twenty minutes before eleven, she waved her hand toward the cabinet where I went to pour out her sherry. I noticed that her hand shook; she seemed to shrink as I watched and her hand, curled into a trembling, beseeching cup, was like a beggar’s, asking for alms. It was not the sherry that she reached out to seize, but it was myself. Putting the glass down beside the chess-board, she extended her old claw to me. “Agree!” she cried. “Agree never to leave me until I die!” She smiled, but the terror of death was in her yellow eyes and in her voice, and although I took the proffered hand and smiled back at
her, my whole soul retreated from her in the appalled vision of her awful dependence, her hideous cowardice. “Agree!” she was crying.
“I agree,” I said, but my voice was unnatural and I could feel perspiration collecting on my upper lip.
“I thought you wouldn’t fail me. Poor Hope failed me but I dare say it was partly my fault. Lord, I must get to church! I wish you could hear our new Reverend Jackson, from New Jersey, oddly enough, but he preaches admirably. Good-by.” And she went from the room, her martial tread echoing with a decreasing resonance down the corridor until the diminuendo ceased with the opening and closing of the outer door. Ethel peered into the library to announce that Mac was ready.
On the way to Wolfburg, I was fretful, then scolded myself for my directionless discontent. My problem had been solved, and I could ask for nothing more. It was perhaps only the spring air that made me suddenly wanderlustig. Perhaps it was Nathan’s preparations to leave for Paris that inspired me with thoughts of leaving Boston. He had often told me that he had money enough to pay my passage. I envied him his mobility; my double servitude, that to my mother and to Miss Pride, lay heavy on me, and now, since our conversation in the library this morning, the die was cast. I could not, morally, disappear. Just before we reached the asylum, I regained control of myself, said I loved my mother and I loved Miss Pride and Boston and that nothing could ever shake me from my resolve to live the rest of my life exactly as I was living it now.
My mother had been over her illness for some time, and as I waited in the corridor, I determined to outdo myself in tenderness and to tell her, if she was in despair, that she was to be moved soon to a house that she would like. One by one the visitors were summoned to the doctors’ cells and I saw them then going off to the reception room, their hands full of flowers or fruit or magazines. And presently I was quite alone save for the tireless, ethereal voice warbling for Dr. Finkelstein and Dr. Short. A doctor crossed the hall and seeing me, said, “You aren’t Miss Marburg, are you? Well, then, will you just step this way a moment?” We went into “my” doctor’s office and my escort put his arm about my shoulder in a paternal affability. Another doctor besides mine was sitting on the window-ledge.
Boston Adventure Page 57
