“And may I ask where ye think ye’re takin’ us, my good man?” Norah shrieked at the driver.
“Where you said: Three Beekman Place.”
“Glory, it looks no better than a Dublin slum,” she wailed. But when the taxi drove into Beekman Place she was somewhat relieved. “Pretty little spot,” she said with just a hint of patronage. The cab stopped in front of a big building that looked exactly like all the buildings on Lake Shore Drive or Sheridan Road or Astor Street in Chicago.
“Not half so grand as the Edgewater Beach,” Norah sniffed with a certain Midwestern loyalty. “Jump out, darling, and be careful ye don’t muss yer hair.”
The doorman looked us over with more than casual interest and said coldly that we were to go to the sixth floor.
“Come along, Paddy,” Norah said, “and mind yer manners with yer Auntie Mame. She’s a very elly-gant lady.”
In the elevator I took one last quick look at the picture of my aunt, just so I’d remember her face. I wondered if she’d wear a rose and a Spanish shawl. The elevator door opened. We stepped out. The door slid closed and we were alone.
“Motheragod, the halls of hell!” Norah cried.
We stood in a vestibule which was painted pitch black. The only light came from the yellow eyes of a weird pagan god with two heads and eight arms sitting on a teakwood stand. Straight ahead of us was a scarlet door. It didn’t look like the sort of place where a Spanish lady lived. In fact, it didn’t look like the sort of place where anybody lived.
Even though I was ten years old, I took Norah’s hand.
“Oh, but don’t it look like the ladies’ rest room in the Oriental The-ay-ter,” Norah breathed.
Norah pressed the bell gingerly. The door swung open and she let out a faint little scream. “God love us, a Chinese!”
A tiny Japanese houseman, hardly bigger than I was, stood smirking in the doorway. “You want?” he said.
In a faint, humble voice Norah said, “I’m Miss, that is, I’m Norah Muldoon bringin’ young Mist-her Dennis to his aunt.”
The little Japanese jumped back like a mechanical doll. “Must be mistake. No want little boy today.”
“But,” Norah said with a pitiable bleat of desperation, “I sent the wire mesel—myself—sayin’ we’d arrive at six o’clock today, the first of July.”
“Not important,” the little Japanese said with a shrug of superb Eastern indifference. “Boy here, house here, Madame here. Madame having affair now. No matter. You come in. You wait. I fetch.”
“Do you think we ought to?” I whispered to Norah. I took one more look at the black walls and the idol and squeezed her rough old hand. It was trembling worse than my own.
“You come in. You wait,” the Japanese said with a sinister smirk. “You come in,” he repeated. The effect was hypnotic.
On leaden feet we advanced into the foyer of the apartment. It was, in its dazzling way, even more terrifying than the black entry hall. The walls were painted an intense orange. A huge, bronze Japanese lantern cast a bilious light through its yellow parchment panes. On either side of the foyer was a great archway masked by tall paper screens, and behind them a lot of people were making a lot of noise.
The Japanese gestured toward a long low bench. It was the only piece of furniture in the room. “You sit,” he hissed. “I fetch Madame. Sit.”
There was a big parchment tapestry hanging behind the bench. It depicted a Japanese man disemboweling himself with a samurai sword.
“You sit,” the houseman repeated with a giggle, and disappeared beyond one of the paper screens.
“Heathenish,” Norah whispered. Her joints cracked painfully as she lowered her bulk onto the bench. “What could yer poor father be thinkin’ of?” The roar behind the screen grew louder and there was a crash of glass. I gripped Norah.
Our knowledge of Oriental fleshpots had been strictly limited to what we’d seen in the movies—hideous tortures, innocent virgins drugged and sold into a life worse than death along the Yangtze, bloody tong wars—but Hollywood had made pretty clear what happened when East and West met.
“Paddy,” Norah cried suddenly, “we’ve been tricked into a opium den to be killed or worse. We’ve got to get outta here.” She started to rise, pulling me with her, and then sank back to the bench with a defeated moan.
A regular Japanese doll of a woman had strolled into the foyer. Her hair was bobbed very short with straight bangs above her slanting brows; a long robe of embroidered golden silk floated out behind her. Her feet were thrust into tiny gold slippers twinkling with jewels, and jade and ivory bracelets clattered on her arms. She had the longest fingernails I’d ever seen, each lacquered a delicate green. An almost endless bamboo cigarette holder hung languidly from her bright red mouth. Somehow, she looked strangely familiar.
She glanced at Norah and me with an expression of bemused surprise. “Oh,” she said, “the man at Private Procurement didn’t tell me you were bringing a child as well. No matter. He looks like a nice boy. If he misbehaves we can always toss him out into the river.” She laughed, but we didn’t. “I suppose you know what’s expected of you—just a little light slavery around the place, and of course Thursdays you’ll be left to your own devices.”
Norah stared at her, wide-eyed. Her mouth hung open.
“You’re a little late, you know,” the Oriental lady said. “I really wanted you in time to serve this mob,” she gestured to where all the noise was coming from. “But it doesn’t really matter. If you have no things with you, I suppose I can get you fitted out into something suitable.” She moved on toward the noise. “You just wait here, I’ll have Ito show you to your quarters. Ito! Ito!” she called, and swept out of the room.
“Motheragod, did you hear what she said—all them words! One of them regular Chinese singsing girls, she was. Whatever can we do, Paddy, whatever can we do?”
A sinister-looking couple strode across the foyer. The man looked like a woman, and the woman, except for her tweed skirt, was almost a perfect Ramon Novarro. He said, “I suppose you know they’re sending poor Miriam out to the Coast.”
The woman said, “Well, God knows, if they want her killed professionally, they’ve shipped the poor bitch to the right place.” She laughed nastily and they disappeared beyond the opposite screen.
Norah’s eyes popped and so did mine. The noise grew louder and louder. Suddenly a piercing scream rent the air. Both of us jumped. A woman’s voice rose hysterically above the roar. “Oh, Aleck! Stop it, please! You’re slaying me!” There was a great bellow of laughter and then another shrill scream. Norah clutched my arm and held it tight. Two men appeared from behind a screen. One of them had a bright red beard. Between them they were carrying a woman all dressed in black, her head thrown back, her eyes closed, her long hair trailing on the floor behind her. Norah gulped. “Poor Edna,” one of the men said. “Well, I don’t feel so damned sorry for her,” the man with the beard said. “I told her just this afternoon, I said, ‘Edna, you’re writing your own death warrant drinking all that poison at lunch. You’ll be cold as a mackerel by seven o’clock.’ And here she is, passed out.” Norah crossed herself.
There was another scream and a roar of insane laughter. The little Japanese darted out from behind a screen and scampered across the foyer. He was carrying a big knife. Norah moaned.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, preserve us,” she prayed. “Save this little orphan and I from slaughter and worse at the hands of these Chinese cutthroats.” She began to mumble a long ardent prayer so incoherently that I got only a few words like White Slavery and Shanghai and Bloody Murder.
The woman-man and man-woman crossed the foyer again.
“… And of course, Death Comes for the Archbishop,” he was saying. “Have you ever experienced a sensation quite so exciting?”
“Glorious God,” Norah cried, “is nothing nor no one safe in this sink of sin!”
There was another scream and the hysterical voice cried, “Aleck, don’t! It’s just plain mur-der!”
“This is enough,” Norah cried, grasping my hand and pulling me up. “We’ve got to get out of this nest of thieves and slayers while we’ve still a breath in our bodies. Better to die preservin’ me virtue than let the Chinee sell us into slavery. Come on, Paddy, we’ll run fer it and may the Good Lord help us.” With remarkable agility she sprang toward the door dragging me behind her.
“Stop, please.” We were transfixed. It was the little Japanese, grinning ludicrously and still holding the knife. “Madame no find you?”
“Look here, sir,” Norah said with desperate valor. “I’m only a poor old woman, but I’m prepared to buy me way out. I got money with me, although I may not look it. Lots of money. Five thousand dollars besides all me life’s savin’s. Surely you could let the child and I escape for that. We done no wrong.”
“Oh, no,” he said with an inscrutable smile. “Not right. I fetch Madame. Madame very anxious have little boy in house.”
“The vileness!” Norah moaned.
The Japanese doll woman reappeared. “Ito,” she said, “I’ve been hunting all over for you. This is the new cook and I want you to …”
“No, Missy Dennis,” he said, waggling his finger, “no new cook. New cook in kitchen. This your little boy.”
“But no!” she squealed. “Then you must be Norah Muldoon!”
“Yessum,” Norah breathed, too spent to find voice.
“But why didn’t you tell me you were coming today? I’d never have been giving this party.”
“Mum, I wired you …”
“Yes, but you said July first. Tomorrow. This is the thirty-first of June.”
Norah shook her head balefully. “No, mum, ’tis the first, God curse the evil day.”
The tinselly laugh rang out, “But that’s ridiculous! Everyone knows “Thirty days hath September, April, June and …’ My God!” There was a moment’s silence. “But darling,” she said dramatically, “I’m your Auntie Mame!” She put her arms around me and kissed me, and I knew I was safe.
Once inside Auntie Mame’s cavernous living room, which looked a lot like the night club scenery in Our Dancing Daughters, we were relieved to see that it was just full of a lot of people who looked like regular men and women. Well, perhaps not quite like regular men and women, but there were no wicked Orientals except my Auntie Mame, who had given up being Spanish and started being Japanese.
There were people sitting on the low Japanese divans, standing out on the terrace, and looking at the dirty river through the big window. They were all talking and drinking. My Auntie Mame kissed me a great deal and introduced me to a lot of strangers, a Mr. Benchley, who was very nice, a Mr. Woollcott, who wasn’t, a Miss Charles, and a good many others.
She kept saying, “This is my brother’s son and now he’s going to be my little boy.”
Auntie Mame said to Circulate for a little while and then I could go to bed. She said that she was terribly sorry that she’d made such a stupid mistake about the date and that now she had to meet a lot of people for dinner at The Aquarium. I thought it was a strange place to eat, but to be polite I asked her if it was going to be a fish dinner and everyone shouted with laughter.
She said it was just a Speak in the Fifties and I pretended to understand.
Norah took my hand and we Circulated, but I didn’t get into any conversations with the people. They all used funny words, like “batik” and “Freud” and “inferiority complex” and “abstraction.” One lady with red hair said that she spent an hour a day on the Couch with her doctor and that he charged her twenty-five dollars every time she came. Norah led me to another part of the room.
The little Japanese man gave Norah a glass and said it was right off the boat and Norah said she wasn’t used to spirits—even though she was always telling me about seeing ghosts and haunts—but this time she’d take a drop of the creature. She seemed to be feeling very happy all of a sudden. And in a little while she asked Ito to give her another Nip.
Pretty soon the people started to leave. One group of people said they were going to see good old Texas that night and they’d have to get there early if they were going to be let in. I’d always thought Texas was quite a long way from New York.
There were some people still standing out in the hall talking about things I didn’t understand, like Lysistrata and Netsuke and lapis lazuli and a Karl Marx, who I thought might be some relation to Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo. Then Auntie Mame came out in a yellow evening dress like Bessie Love wore in The Broadway Melody. It was very short in front and very long in back and she didn’t look Japanese any more.
“Good night, my darling,” she said, giving me a kiss. “We’ll have a long talk in the morning—but not too early.” The door closed behind her and the apartment was silent.
The Japanese houseman took my hand gently. “You hungry. You come supper now,” he said kindly. “You maybe want to go bathroom first, little boy?”
I went hot and then cold as the terrible realization came over me.
“I, I already have,” I wailed, looking with horrible dismay at the dark stain spreading across my new suit of lightweight mourning.
Chapter Two
and the Children’s Hour
This article in the Digest goes on to say how the New England spinster, totally unused to children, grows to love the foundling who’s been dumped on her doorstep. And more than growing to love him, she gets pretty het up about child care and child psychology and that sort of thing.
When the time comes for him to be sent to school, Miss Unforgettable has some serious differences with the village board of education and their methods. The truant officer is after the kid night and day, but the sweet little spinster holds out and single-handedly brings about sweeping reforms in the school system.
Well, I don’t think that’s so much. Auntie Mame had some pretty original ideas on psychology and education herself.
Looking back on Auntie Mame as the razzle-dazzle butterfly she was in 1929, I can see that she must have been just as terrified at the prospect of rearing a totally strange ten-year-old boy as I was when I first stumbled large-eyed and frightened into the Oriental splendor of her Beekman Place apartment. But Auntie Mame was never one to admit defeat. There was a kind of up-and-at-’em spirit of a speak-easy Girl Scout to my aunt. And although her ideas on child raising may have been considered a trifle unorthodox—as, indeed, were all her ideas on anything—Auntie Mame’s unique system worked well enough in its casual way.
Our first interview took place at one o’clock in the afternoon in Auntie Mame’s big bedroom on my second day in New York. I felt unknown, unloved, unwanted, and awfully lonesome wandering listlessly around the big duplex, with only Norah for company. Ito, the little Japanese houseman, gave me a good lunch and giggled quite a lot, but otherwise there was no message from him. By one o’clock I was feeling desperate enough to read Bible Heroes Every Child Should Know—Old Testament when Ito came into my room and said, “You see Madame now.”
Auntie Mame received me in her bedroom on the second floor. It was a vast chamber with black walls, a white carpet, and a gold ceiling. The only furnishings were an enormous gold bed up on a platform and a night table. Such a room might have depressed most people, but not Auntie Mame. She was as cheerful as a bird. In fact she looked rather like a bird in her bed jacket made of pink ostrich feathers. She was reading Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs and smoking Melachrino cigarettes through a long amber holder.
“Good morning, my little love,” she sang. “Come over here and kiss your Auntie Mame, but gently, dear, Auntie feels fierce.” I kissed her as gently as I knew how. “That was sweet, dear, you’ll make some lucky woman very happy someday. Now sit down here on Auntie’s bed—but easily now, dear—and we’ll have a little morning chat. Get to know one another.”
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br /> Morning, I soon discovered, was one o’clock for Auntie Mame. Early Morning was eleven, and the Middle of the Night was nine.
“Don’t you love this pearly part of the day!” she said with a sweeping gesture, scattering a lot of ashes over the black satin sheets.
“Now, darling,” she said, “we’ve got to discover a lot of things about each other. I’ve never had a little boy around the place before, and ooops, here’s breakfast.
“Now, let’s see,” she said brightly. She groped around among the mare’s nest of papers on her bedside table and dredged up a copy of my father’s will, which she had embellished with a lot of telephone numbers and a random shopping list or two. She also plucked out a pad of yellow foolscap and a big black pencil. “Well, I’m your guardian. We both know that, so there’s no need of much discussion there. Now, your father says you’re to be reared as a Protestant. I’ve no objection to that, I’m sure, although it does seem a shame that you should be deprived of the exquisite mysteries of some of the Eastern religions. However, your father always was a stick-in-the-mud about some things. Not that I mean to speak ill of my own brother. Where did you go to church, darling?”
“The Fourth Presbyterian,” I said uncomfortably.
“My God, child, do you mean to sit there and tell me that there are four Presbyterian churches in a place like Chicago! Well, no matter. I suppose we can hunt up some sort of Presbyterian church nearby.” Her eyes rolled dramatically toward the gold ceiling. “I don’t suppose your father would mind too much if I introduced you to Monsignor Malarky, he’s such a darling; so cultivated, and eyes like sapphires! He’s coming here for cocktails one day next week but I’ll make him promise not to talk shop with you.”
Auntie Mame got back to business and the will. “Well, that takes care of your religious upbringing. Now school. Just whereabouts are you in school, dear?”
Auntie Mame Page 2
