Auntie Mame

by Patrick Dennis

  “Fifth class at Chicago Boys’ Latin.”

  “Fifth class! Good heavens, aren’t you good enough for first class, child? You look bright enough to me!”

  With the patience of a ten-year-old I explained that the fifth class meant fifth grade.

  “Oh, and where are you supposed to be when you’re ten?”

  “In the fifth class, but I was only nine while I was in it.”

  “Then you mean that you are precocious?”

  “I beg your pardon?” I said.

  “Precocious, darling. Bright for your age. Ahead of yourself in school.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I was pre—what you said—all term long.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad, darling!” Auntie Mame trilled, writing something down on her pad. “We always were an intellectual family, although your father did everything possible to disguise the fact.”

  She returned to the will. “Now, your father says here that you’re to be sent to conservative schools—he would! Tell me, was this Latin affair conservative?”

  “I don’t quite know what you mean,” I said blushing.

  “Was it dull? Tiresome? Tedious? Stuffy?”

  “Yes, it was very stuffy.”

  “So like your father,” she sighed. “By the way, I know the most divine new school that a friend of mine is starting. Coeducational and completely revolutionary. All classes are held in the nude under ultraviolet ray. Not a repression left after the first semester. This man I know is absolutely au courant with everything that’s going on in Vienna—none of that dead-tired old Montessori system for him—and there’s lots of nonobjective art and eurhythmics and discussion groups—no books or anything like that. How I’d love to send you there. Really give your libido a good shaking up.”

  I hadn’t the faintest idea what she was talking about, but it sounded like a very unusual school, to say the least.

  A tender, faraway look came over her face. “I just wonder,” she said, “if it wouldn’t be a ra-ther good idea to look into Ralph’s school. Do you think you’ve got many repressions, dear?”

  I colored painfully. “I’m afraid I don’t understand a lot of the words you use, Auntie Mame.”

  “Oh, child, child,” she cried, and her feathery sleeves fluttered wildly across the bed, “what can be done about your vocabulary! Didn’t your father ever talk to you?”

  “Hardly ever,” I admitted.

  “My dear, a rich vocabulary is the true hallmark of every intellectual person. Here now”—she burrowed into the mess on her bedside table and brought forth another pad and pencil—“every time I say a word, or you hear a word, that you don’t understand, you write it down and I’ll tell you what it means. Then you memorize it and soon you’ll have a decent vocabulary. Oh, the adventure,” she cried ecstatically, “of molding a little new life!” She made another sweeping gesture that somehow went wrong because she knocked over the coffee pot and I immediately wrote down six new words which Auntie Mame said to scratch out and forget about.

  Then Auntie Mame studied the will some more.

  “As for being reimbursed by that trust company …”

  “How do you spell reim …”

  “Don’t interrupt! As for being reimbursed by the trust company, I’m perfectly willing and able to support you.” Her eyes narrowed and she fixed me with a piercing glance. “I suppose you’ve got some human adding machine who’s going to look after your money and tell me how you’re to be raised.”

  “You mean my trustee?”

  “Yes, child, what’s he like?”

  “Well, he wears a straw hat and glasses and lives in a place called Scarsdale and has a boy about my age and his name is Mr. Babcock.”

  “Scarsdale, wouldn’t you know it.” Auntie Mame wrote down “Knickerbocker Trust” and “Babcock.” “Well, I can see he’s going to be my own personal bête noir for the next eight years. I have the responsibility and he has the authority!”

  “That means black beast, doesn’t it?” It seemed a very exciting description for Mr. Babcock.

  “Darling!” she said brightly, and kissed me. “Your vocabulary is coming along marvelously. Perhaps we should speak nothing but French in the house.” She continued in English, however. “Well, I’ll tackle Babcock in my own good time. God knows you can learn more in ten minutes in my drawing room than you did in ten years with that father of yours. What a criminal way to raise a child!” She looked at her watch and fluttered her feathers. “Good heavens, I’ve got to do some shopping with Vera. Perhaps you’d like to come along. Besides, we know enough about each other for a start.” She looked at me in my suit of lightweight mourning. “For God’s sake, child, haven’t you got some clothes that don’t make you look like a sick crow?”

  I said I had.

  “Well, put them on if you’re coming with me, and don’t forget your vocabulary pad.” Obediently I made for the door.

  “By the way, child,” she said. Once more her eyes had that penetrating look.

  “Yes, Auntie Mame?”

  “Did your father ever say anything—that is, tell you anything—about me before he died?”

  Norah had told me that all liars went straight to hell, so I gulped and blurted out, “He only said that you were a very peculiar woman and to be left in your hands was a fate he wouldn’t wish a dog but beggars can’t be choosers and you’re my only living relative.”

  There was a quiet gasp. “That bastard,” she said evenly.

  I reached for my vocabulary pad.

  “That word, dear, was bastard,” she said sweetly. “It’s spelled b-a-s-t-a-r-d, and it means your late father! Now get out of here and get dressed!”

  I spent that first summer in New York trotting around after Auntie Mame with my vocabulary pad, having Little Morning Chats every afternoon, and being seen and not heard at her literary teas, salons, and cocktail parties.

  They used a lot of new words, too, and I acquired quite a vocabulary by the end of summer. I still have some of the vocabulary sheets of odd information picked up at Auntie Mame’s soirees. One, dated July 14, 1929, features such random terms as: Bastille Day, Lesbian, Hotsy-Totsy Club, gang war, Id, daiquiri—although I didn’t spell it properly—relativity, free love, Oedipus complex—another one I misspelled—mobile, stinko—and from here on my spelling went wild—narcissistic, Biarritz, psychoneurotic, Shönberg, and nymphomaniac. Auntie Mame explained all the words she thought I ought to know and then made me put them into sentences which I practiced with Ito, while he did his Japanese flower arrangements and giggled.

  My advancement that summer of 1929, if not exactly what Every Parent’s Magazine would recommend, was remarkable. By the end of July I knew how to mix what Mr. Woollcott called a “Lucullan little martini” and I had learned not to be frightened by Auntie Mame’s most astonishing friends.

  Auntie Mame’s days were spent in a perpetual whirl of shopping, entertaining, going to other people’s parties, being fitted for the outlandish clothes of the day—and hers were even more so—going to the theater and to the little experimental plays that opened and shut like clams all over New York, being taken to dinner by a series of intellectual gentlemen, and traipsing through galleries of incomprehensible pictures and statues. But with all of her hectic, empty life, she still had plenty of time to devote to me. I was dragged along to most of the exhibitions, the shopping forays with her friend Vera, and to whatever functions Auntie Mame thought would be Suitable, Stimulating, or Enlightening for a child of ten. That covered a wide range.

  Actually, Auntie Mame and I learned to love one another in as brief and painless a period as possible. That her amazing personality would attract me, just as it had seduced thousands of others, was a foregone conclusion. Her helter-skelter charm was, after all, notorious, and she was also the first real Family I ever knew. But that she could care at all for an insignificant, uninteresting boy of ten was a consta
nt source of surprise and delight and mystification to me. Yet she did, and I’ve always thought that for all of her popularity, her interests, her constant comings and goings, she was probably a little lonely, too. Her critics have said that I was simply a new lump of clay for her to shape, stretch, mold, and pummel to her heart’s content, and it is true that Auntie Mame could never resist meddling with other people’s lives. She still had a stanch, undependable dependability. For both of us it was love, and the experience was unique.

  However, a storm cloud, in the shape of my trustee, soon lowered over our idyl. Auntie Mame and I were having one of our Little Morning Chats. She was feeling very maternal that day, reading me selected passages from A Farewell to Arms, when a special delivery letter from the Knickerbocker Trust Company shattered our tranquil hour with Hemingway.

  In the letter Mr. Babcock said that he had so wanted to get together with us, but business etc. etc. and then he and his family always went to Maine for the hottest part of etc. etc. and had just returned when his son underwent a serious siege of tonsillitis during which the doctor etc. etc. but now that things were once again etc. etc. and there was so much to discuss about Master Patrick’s etc. etc. wouldn’t it be nice if Miss Dennis would bring young Mr. Dennis out to Scarsdale for a real old-fashioned etc. etc. ending early so that the boys could get a decent night’s sleep etc. etc. the trains that ran from Grand Central Station, while not the most comfortable, etc. etc., and would Auntie Mame confirm the date.

  Auntie Mame moaned, handed me the letter, and rang for a whisky sour. “Oh, my darling,” she cried, “here’s the death knell. That trustee! I can see it as plainly as I see you—a hideous scheme to dominate and thwart my every plan for you.” I wrote “dominate” and “thwart” on my pad and then assured her that Mr. Babcock was really a very nice, quiet little man.

  “Oh, child,” she howled, “they’re always the worst, those mice. Uriah Heeps, every one of them.”

  According to her lifetime habit, Auntie Mame put on a little half-hour show of histrionics and then settled back and decided to face the situation. Using her Cultured Voice, she telephoned Mr. Babcock and told him that we’d both be thrilled to dine with his family in Scarsdale the following day, and not to bother with meeting us at the station, as we’d motor. She was ever so refined. Then she called up her best friend, Vera, and told her to drop everything and come over fast.

  Auntie Mame’s friend Vera was a famous actress from Pittsburgh who spoke with such Mayfair elegance that you could barely understand a word she said. She didn’t like children and the reverse was equally true, but as Auntie Mame had invested in her new play, Vera was civil to me.

  Vera arrived in a cloud of white fox furs and then she and Auntie Mame enacted another charade of despair. Finally Vera, who was the more levelheaded, got down to business. She called Ito for a bottle of brandy and more or less took over.

  “My dear,” Vera said, “you mustn’t let yourself get out of hand. You’re being ut-terly hysterical. Now, take a sip of this and calm down while I tell you a few things. In the first place, you have nothing to fear. You have looks, breeding, intelligence, culture, money, position—everything. It’s simply that you may be a lit-tle flamboyant for Scarsdale. But, darling, it’s simply a matter of toning yourself down—temporarily. Now, when I played Lady Esme in Summer Folly …”

  “Summer Folly,” Auntie Mame shrieked, “well, this is my summer folly and all you can do is talk about your triumphs! What am I to do?” She nibbled at her gilded nails.

  “As I was saying, de-ah,” Vera said haughtily, “when I was playing Lady Esme, all of my clothes were done by Chanel, and she said to me, ‘Chérie’ (she always called me chérie), ‘Chérie,’ she said, ‘clothes make the mood, the personality—everything.’ And she was right. You remember in the last act when I come down the stairs just after Cedric shoots himself? Well, I wanted to wear black, but Chanel said, ‘Chérie, for that you wear gray. A gray day, a gray mood, a gray dress with perhaps just a suggestion of sables.’ My dear, I’ll never forget what Brooks Atkinson said about that costume. Why, it lifted that turkey right into a class with Shakespeare.”

  Any discussion of clothing always won Auntie Mame’s undivided attention and she brightened immediately. “Yes, Vera,” she said slowly, “you’re so right. I see it now: that little gray kimono outfit with the scarlet embroidery and perhaps a blood-red camellia over each …”

  “Mame, dear,” Vera said tactfully, “I wasn’t speaking of a Japanese costume for this, this ordeal. It must be a different you in Scarsdale—something like Jane Cowl. I thought more along the lines of a simple dress. Something soft and genteel—with everything else black. You know, de-ah, sorrowful, but not strictly mourning, and very conservative. It gives a trustee confidence.”

  Auntie Mame was dubious, but interested, and as the brandy—allegedly smuggled off the Ile de France—sank lower and lower in its bottle, Vera’s poignant pictures of the respectable little maiden aunt reached even more celestial heights. Auntie Mame had a flair for drama, and eventually the two women were routing through her vast wardrobe as happy as girls.

  While I read aloud from a book of Elinor Wylie poems called Angels and Earthly Creatures and kept Vera’s brandy glass filled, an old gray chiffon negligee was transformed into a suitably somber costume, which, with Vera’s big black hat, filmily veiled, and a jet necklace, gave Auntie Mame the proper air of delicate despondency. Vera also unearthed an old switch which Auntie Mame had once worn to a Beaux Arts ball. Braided, it made a restrained but unsteady coronet on Auntie Mame’s bobbed head. About six o’clock the costume was complete, then Vera made me a little black arm band, polished off the last drop of brandy, and collapsed.

  At nine the next morning—the Middle of the Night, as she called it—Auntie Mame was already up, looking ill and pale. The apartment was silent except for an occasional moan from the bedroom Vera occupied. In the kitchen, Ito was putting up an enormous luncheon hamper of cucumber sandwiches, champagne, and almond cake. Out on Beekman Place, Auntie Mame’s Mercedes-Benz glittered ominously. It took Auntie Mame the better part of two hours to get into her weeds but she said she wanted to look right and, although it was about ninety that day, she wore her sable scarf, remembering Vera’s sensation as Lady Esme.

  In 1929 it took little more than half an hour to get to Scarsdale by train, but Auntie Mame could never adjust herself to the precise demands of railroads. So the big Mercedes rolled out of Beekman Place just eight hours before we were expected, which was probably all to the good since Ito was a peripatetic driver at best, and none of us had any idea of where or what Scarsdale was. Auntie Mame sat tensely in back fingering her ill-moored coronet and twitching her sables. Every so often she’d grasp my hand and murmur, “Oh, my little love, whatever are we to do?” Although the car was big, the tonneau was pretty crowded with the two of us, the picnic hamper, the iced buckets of champagne, a number of assorted road maps—mostly for other parts of the country—a fur lap robe, a volume of verse tenderly inscribed to Auntie Mame by Sara Teasdale, and my vocabulary pad.

  Ito, who had even less sense of direction than Auntie Mame, drove first to Long Island, then into New Jersey, and finally got on the right scent. After a long luncheon in Larchmont and a little confusion in Rye, Ito got the car headed once more toward our goal and we arrived in Scarsdale at half past three. “Oh, God,” Auntie Mame moaned, “three hours early!” We spent the rest of the afternoon at a Tom Mix movie which Ito and I liked, although Auntie Mame said it was disgusting what sort of stuff was crammed down the throats of the people and the government should sponsor films of cultural structure.

  On the tick of six-thirty we arrived at the Babcocks’ house. It was a half-timbered affair built in a style that Auntie Mame called “pseudo-Tudor.” But she looked very subdued.

  The Babcocks weren’t a stimulating family. Their son, Dwight junior, wore glasses and looked just like a Mr. Babcock wh
o’d been shrunk in the laundry. Mrs. Babcock wore glasses, too, and talked to Auntie Mame about gardening and home canning and child psychology.

  Auntie Mame mentioned Freud once and then thought better of it. The rest of her conversation with Mrs. Babcock was confined to vapid Yeses and Noes and Oh, Reallys.

  Dwight junior showed me his collection of dead butterflies and told me all about his tonsils and the keen times he was going to have at St. Boniface boarding school.

  Mr. Babcock said Um a lot. Lemonade was served, and finally their maid announced dinner.

  It was stifling in the Babcocks’ English-style dining room, and the dinner of overdone roast lamb, mashed potatoes, squash, beets, and lima beans—after Ito’s delicate Eastern cuisine—hit my stomach like a lump of cement. During one of the many lulls, Auntie Mame got the bit between her teeth and delivered a long and remarkably learned lecture on architecture of the Tudor period, which was a fascinating discourse except that it pointed up every detail of the Babcocks’ room as a counterfeit. However, Auntie Mame was very charming and acted like the sort you’d trust a child with.

  During the molded salad, Mrs. Babcock talked about the theater and how she simply idolized Vera Charles. Not heeding the glance of warning, I said that Vera was Auntie Mame’s best friend and was probably asleep at the apartment that very moment. Mrs. Babcock was transported. “What a wonderful, dignified woman she must be,” she said. “How I’d love to meet her!”

  After dinner Mrs. Babcock and Dwight junior, who had undoubtedly been carefully rehearsed, said that they were just going to run off to the movies, Tom Mix was playing. Auntie Mame gagged but she rose graciously and thanked her hostess almost too warmly for such a lovely meal. The son gave me a dank handshake and said he’d be seeing me. I hoped not.

  When we were alone, Mr. Babcock cleared his throat and said he believed we’d have Our Little Talk now and we’d go into the Den so the maid couldn’t snoop. The Den sounded very interesting but it was just a little room full of books on banking and even hotter than the other rooms had been.