Auntie Mame

by Patrick Dennis

  At this Agnes burst into a perfect torrent of tears. “Do stop that, Agnes!” Auntie Mame said. “It can’t be good for you or the baby. You’ll dehydrate yourself or something. As I was saying,” she continued to me, “here we are—a mysterious widow, her sister-in-law, and a servant, all registered at the Old Coolidge House until time for the, um, accouchement. Even if the townsfolk should notice us—and that’s highly improbable—there’s nothing to wonder about. We’re absolutely self-contained here. We have our meals sent up. The doctor drives up from Boston once a week. I have Ito to take messages to you and to drive us out for little airings. Agnes can take her walk—four full miles a day—every evening after dark. We have nothing to do but wait until her, uh, time. You see, with a little money and plenty of cagey planning, it all works out as easily as that.”

  “Well, gee, that’s just swell,” I said. “But couldn’t you have done all this just as well in a hotel suite in, say, Cleveland, or Milwaukee, or Dallas—far more interesting cities, and places where I’m not.”

  “Ah, but you see I do need you, my little love.”

  “But why, if you’re all this self-contained? What can I possibly do but get myself into a mess at school?”

  “You can do four things,” Auntie Mame said darkly.

  “What … are … they?” I asked. I didn’t like her tone.

  “First of all, I shall need you to run errands. There are ever so many things I’ll need and I assume there are things an expectant mother might need, too. You know this town. I don’t. What’s more, it would be dangerous for me to be seen …”

  “Dangerous for you to be seen?” I said. “If you went to St. Boniface Academy and got a demerit every time you scratched your ass, you’d know how dangerous it is to be seen in …”

  “Patrick! Your language! Think of the prenatal influence! Well, that’s the first thing. The second thing is shopping for me in Boston. The food here is deplorable—good for Agnes, of course, but awful for me. Ito can never be trusted in a strange city, so tomorrow you can take the car and drive into S. S. Pierce and get me a case of …”

  “I can’t drive your car. I don’t even have a license.”

  “But of course you can drive. I taught you myself. And if you drive carefully—as I certainly hope you would—nobody will even ask to see your license. I’ve never had one myself, and look at me.”

  “Auntie Mame! I want to graduate. They’ll kick me out so fast …”

  “Of course you want to graduate. Education’s a wonderful thing. Now, Number Three: I’ll need you to make up a fourth at bridge. I’m teaching Culbertson to Agnes. It does her good. Gives her something to think about.”

  “Something to think about?” Agnes moaned.

  “Be still, Agnes. Yes. And a very apt little pupil she is, too. Ito plays Sims—and not too badly if he’d only stop giggling, and concentrate. To fill a table, I shall need you.” She fitted a cigarette into her holder and drank delicately of her cognac. “But the most important service you can render …” She paused.

  “Wh-what’s that?” I asked suspiciously.

  “The most important duty I have in mind for you is to walk Agnes.”

  “To what?”

  “Walk Agnes. Four good miles every night after dark. Doctor says she must. She’s getting much too heavy. Agnes, poor silly, says that her feet hurt too much, but I say …”

  “Your feet would hurt too, if you’d walked all the way from Carmel, California, to …” Agnes burst into tears and fled clumsily to her bedroom.

  “Now see what you’ve done to her!” Auntie Mame snapped. “Oh, you’re all alike! Poor little Agnes! Walked all the way from California alone, and here you refuse to take her for a stroll in the evening.”

  I said, “Don’t you realize that this is just about the craziest thing you’ve ever tried to do? You’ve got all the money in the world. You could take Agnes to any nursing home and wait there with doctors and nurses to see that everything goes right. But do you do anything sensible? No! You drag her up to this godforsaken hole right under the noses of the school and Dwight Babcock junior. You know nothing about babies and I know even less, yet you expect me to break out of that prison and wait on you hand and foot: trips to Boston for pâté and truffles; a fourth at bridge; errands; and then walking poor Agnes like a poodle every …”

  “Paris,” Auntie Mame said. “Paris, Rome, London, Vienna, Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo, Venice …”

  I stopped my tirade. “B-but Auntie Mame, how can I get away from school? I’m watched like a …”

  “Nonsense, my little love,” she said airily, polishing off her drink. “Anybody can get out if he really wants to. Why, I hardly ever spent a night in the dormitory at Miss Rushaway’s, and at Smith I was out till all hours. I simply took the dressmaking form out of my closet, put it in my bed, and slid down the …”

  “I don’t happen to have a dressmaking form in my closet. I don’t even have a closet. Only old Junior Babcock spying on me and …”

  “Naples, Capri, Milan, Firenze—that’s Florence, dear—Deauville …”

  “Listen, Auntie Mame, I can’t even get into the hotel without showing a pass. You saw how the clerk …”

  “I’ve thought of that, too, Patrick. You see that coiled-up rope with the knots tied in it? No, over there by the window. Well, I discovered that that is the system of fire escape used in this provincial hostelry. You have only to whistle at my window and I’ll lower it for you so you can climb up. When you’re ready to leave …”

  “But it’s three stories!”

  “Wonderful for the arms and shoulders, darling.”

  “I’ve got so many demerits already that the corridor master is …”

  “Antwerp, Brussels, Ostend, Athens …”

  “Auntie Mame, I …”

  “Shall we say tomorrow, darling? Three o’clock, and don’t be late. Here, I’ll let down the rope for you.” She tripped daintily to the window.

  I perched gingerly on the sill and looked down. “By the way,” I said, “what names are you using here, in case I have to get in touch with you?”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “I’m glad you asked. For myself, I did a very clever thing. I cut my name from Burnside to Burns and used my maiden name as a first name. So I’m Mrs. Dennis Burns.”

  “And what’s Agnes?”

  “Agnes? Oh. Oh, yes darling. Well, when I registered I just couldn’t think of a name for her, so I wrote down the first thing that came to mind.”

  “What was that?”

  “It was Mrs. Patrick Dennis.”

  It took me a surprisingly short time to reach the ground.

  My next three weeks were hell. I lived like a conspirator at school and like a fugitive away from it. And getting away from St. Boniface was no cinch, either. Not only were there roll calls all day and bed checks all night, but there was a complex faculty spy ring and also something called the Student Patrol—a quasi-official body composed of the most unpopular boys at school, always eager to report the slightest infraction. A year at St. Boniface could prepare anyone for life in a police state.

  Junior Babcock was always around, too. We’d been roommates ever since my first day at St. B’s, not because we liked one another, but because his father, my trustee, wanted to keep tabs on me. He couldn’t have chosen a better informer than his own son. Junior was a toady and a bully and a prig; a coward and a tattletale and a cheat. He was prone to periodic sieges of conjunctivitis and to eternal acne. He smelled like a sour washcloth and he snored. But one thing I’ve got to say for old Junior is that he was a sound sleeper. It made sneaking out at night a good deal easier.

  My services to Auntie Mame worked themselves into something of a routine. I used to duck out every afternoon at three after getting another guy to answer for me at roll call on the track field. Then I’d go down to the hotel, climb the rope at Auntie Mame’s suite, and
run whatever errands she had. Twice a week I’d drive into Boston to do her heavy shopping. The car attracted about as much attention as a steam calliope, but I’d gone to the precaution of getting myself a disguise—a tweed jacket, a pork-pie hat, and a jazzbo tie from Filene’s basement—so at least I wouldn’t be spotted a mile away in the St. Boniface cap, blazer, and necktie. I added a pair of dark glasses, too. Auntie Mame said I looked too tatty for words and couldn’t I have gone to J. Press and bought something smart? But I managed to walk right past the headmaster’s wife without her noticing me.

  Auntie Mame was right about how easy it was to get out at night. There was a tree outside my window and all I had to do was wait for Junior’s asthmatic snore, get my “civilian” clothes from their hiding place, arrange a pillow to look like me in bed, and skedaddle.

  The only thing that made me feel kind of bad was Mr. Pugh. He was master for our corridor and he was the only man at St. B’s who gave even a faint impression of liking kids or teaching. He was a long, lanky, old-maidish man of about forty with an Adam’s apple as big as a duck egg and a passion for poetry and music and art and nature and children. Well, I guess I haven’t made him sound very attractive, but he was a hell of a nice guy in a prim sort of way. He was kind and understanding and gentle and quiet and he never gave us demerits except when he absolutely had to. I knew that if they caught me, poor old Pugh would be in hot water too. Still, family loyalty—and a trip to Europe—came first.

  Well, at night I’d get down to the Old Coolidge House around ten and whistle under the window. That was the signal for Agnes to put on her hiking shoes and take her walk. Agnes was never the best company in the world, even when she just talked about her mother’s arthritis and her sister Edna and Kew Gardens and the insurance company. Now she could only discuss how she’d been wronged, how she was branded with the scarlet A, how the innocent little soul beneath her heart—Agnes’ term—would bear the bar sinister, how Brian O’Bannion was no gentleman—something of an understatement, I thought—and how her feet hurt. Once or twice I had to drag poor old Agnes into the bushes when I saw masters from the school en route to the local whorehouse or the bar of the hotel, but by and large our walks were noteworthy only for their boredom.

  Once back at the hotel, I’d shin up the rope and we’d all play bridge—or try to play bridge while Agnes whimpered and Ito giggled and counted much too heavily on the psychic bid. Auntie Mame also kept a well-stocked bar within easy reach of the bridge table—so festive, she said—although she was the only one who drank anything.

  I’d be dismissed about two in the morning to let myself down the rope, trudge back to school, scale the wall, climb the tree, and get to bed. As all of St. Boniface Academy rose at six for cold showers and calisthenics, I was existing on a maximum of three hours’ sleep a night. More than once I dozed off in classes and got ten demerits and a lecture about Playing the Game. But you can get used to anything, and visions of being out of St. B’s forever and spending the summer in Europe were like Benzedrine to me.

  After a couple of weeks of being away from school more than I was in it, with nothing worse happening than falling asleep over Virgil, I began to see how easy it all was and to regret not having lived a richer, fuller life during my years at St. B’s. My luck had held out so well that I even started getting a little careless. On the night I bid and made a grand slam, doubled, redoubled, and vulnerable, it was after four when I got back to school. I was so dog-tired that I didn’t even bother to hide my disguise under the mattress, and when I woke up at the six o’clock bell, what should I see but Junior Babcock, in his dirty old flannelette pajamas, squinting down incredulously at my tweed jacket and my jazzbo tie.

  “Wh-where’d you get those?” he asked.

  “Where did I get what?” I asked.

  “Those clothes. It’s fifty demerits for being improperly dressed. You oughta know that …”

  With a flick of the hand, I swept Junior’s glasses off the night table and tossed them under the bed. “For God’s sake, put on your specs, Juny old man,” I said. “You’re seeing things.”

  By the time he’d found his glasses, my disguise was back under the mattress and my St. Boniface blazer was in its place. “Gee, Junior,” I said, once his pale eyes were focused from behind the thick lenses, “I’m kind of worried about you. You’re having visions. Maybe you ought to stop by the infirmary and let the doc look you over.”

  Junior wasn’t very bright, but on the other hand, he was no fool. He gave me kind of a fishy look and went off to his cold shower. I saw then that I’d have to be a little more cautious.

  But that night I should have called it quits. It was a beautiful spring evening—all stars and a moon as bright as day and the crickets going hell for leather in the meadows. It was too beautiful a night to be wasting on a girl like Agnes, who was well into her ninth month, but duty was duty. I was trudging grimly up the road, with Agnes holding my arm and waddling along in a garish cerise maternity dress trimmed with a dusty cluster of artificial calla lilies when I heard the unmistakable roar of the headmaster’s car.

  Everybody in Apathy could recognize the Nashcan a mile away. Dr. Cheevey, the headmaster at St. B’s, had bought the Nash in 1926, and he was much too tight to turn it in on a new car or even to invest in a little professional consultation. Instead, he let us work off demerits by washing the car and keeping its motor in tune, so that after ten years of student care, the Nash sounded more like a threshing machine than a car.

  Agnes and I were just coming to a bend in the road when I heard the Nashcan coming, and from the racket it was making, it was coming pretty fast. “Sorry, Agnes,” I said, “but we’ve got to get out of sight.”

  While Agnes whined about her condition, I helped her gallantly down into the ditch. Then I prepared to take the leap myself, just as the headmaster’s car was rounding the bend. But somehow I lost my footing and fell headlong down the embankment. I landed on something soft, and there was an awful sound of “Oooooof!” just as the Nashcan roared past.

  “Agnes!” I said, terrified. “Are you all right? Have I hurt you?”

  “You haven’t hurt me at all, Patrick,” she whined. “I’m over here by the culvert, and goodness, I’ve been hurt so much that it wouldn’t matter if I lived or died. That Brian, luring me away and …”

  “Patrick!” a voice gasped. “Patrick Dennis!”

  I looked beneath me on the ground, and there was Mr. Pugh.

  “Mister Pugh!” I gasped. Then I added inanely, “What are you doing here?”

  He was in such a state of shock that he even started to answer. “Why, Patrick, boy, there’s a swamp nearby where a certain kind of night blooming …” Then he stopped. “And what,” he said, “are you doing here?”

  I halfway hoped to bluff it out. What with knocking the wind out of him, scattering his binoculars, his bird log, his Guide to the Wildflowers of New England, his flashlight, and his thermos of cocoa, and also having caught him where he shouldn’t have been, I thought I had a fifty-fifty chance. “Gee, Mr. Pugh,” I began, “it was such a lovely night and I’m so fond of birds that I hoped maybe I could see a Baltimore oriole, or …”

  “Oh, Patrick, do help me. I’m so frightened,” Agnes whimpered.

  Mr. Pugh shot Agnes a look, standing there in the bright moonlight twice as big as life. Then he looked coldly at me. “And who is this?”

  “Oh, that? Why, that’s, uh, just Agnes. Yes, um, she’s my aunt’s Alice B. Toklas and I was just …”

  “I,” Agnes said clearly, “am Mrs. Patrick Dennis.”

  Well, I wouldn’t want to relive that night again if you gave me Europe. Mr. Pugh scrambled out of the ditch and walked Agnes and me back to the hotel in jig time. Agnes kept protesting that she was supposed to walk four miles with me and that we hadn’t done more than one and a half. I kept protesting that things weren’t what they seemed and I pleaded with Agnes to come off i
t and admit who she really was. But Agnes had been too well coached by Auntie Mame, and she also wouldn’t have given her own name away for anything. “My name is Mrs. Patrick Dennis,” she kept saying doggedly.

  “She isn’t, Mr. Pugh,” I said. “That isn’t her name at all. I’m not married to her. I’m never going to be. I’m not married to anybody. I just happened to …”

  He gave me a devastating look as Agnes skittered into the hotel and then he took me firmly by the arm and led me back to school. I spent most of the rest of the night in his room trying to make him believe me. I’ll admit that the true story, told word for word, wasn’t a very plausible one, but by five in the morning, if Mr. Pugh hadn’t entirely revised his opinion that I was a no-good despoiler of innocent virgins, he at least had given up trying to shake my testimony. He gave me some cocoa from his thermos, said he wouldn’t say anything about it yet, and saw me to my room.

  I felt like a zombie in school the next day, but at three I was raring to get into town and have a little council of war with Auntie Mame. The last class of the day was English Poetry of the XIX Century, which Mr. Pugh taught. The bell had just rung, releasing us to the playing fields of St. Boniface, when Mr. Pugh asked me to stay after class.

  “Now, young man,” Mr. Pugh said, “you and I are going into town to see this mysterious relative of yours, as well as the unfortunate young woman who may or may not be your wife and the mother of your child.”

  “But, Mr. Pugh …” I began desperately.

  “Come,” he said firmly.

  Auntie Mame was a very dynamic woman. Everybody said so. She could be charm itself, and there was almost no occasion to which she felt unable to rise. But she did like to have a little preparation and time to throw herself wholeheartedly into whatever role she was planning to play. Knowing this, I wanted to warn her of what was coming. On the way down the road I even said, “Suppose I stop in here at the hash wagon and call my aunt, Mr. Pugh. She can order tea or something for us.”