Auntie Mame

by Patrick Dennis

  “My—my name is Dennis,” I said, when I got over the shock of meeting her.

  “Oh, yes,” she said briskly, “you’re the new Maddox candidate. Come this way.” Before I could understand just what she’d said, I was upstairs above the saloon in a room overlooking Maddox Island’s only street. “Here you are,” she said. “If you don’t like this room be sure to let me know, because it’s the only one we have and Pop can rent it to someone else. Your bathroom is here. Dinner is whenever you want it and whatever you want, but I’d like to know now.”

  By then I was boiling mad. Okay, Big Red, I thought, now it’s my inning. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll dine here in my room and I’d like entrecôte à la Bordelaise, pommes soufflées, field salad, crème brûlée, and caffè espresso. I’d like it at eight, sharp,” I added nastily. To my surprise, she wrote it all down. “Here,” I said, holding out a fifty-cent piece.

  “No thanks,” she said. “If you feel like tipping, just put it in the box down on the bar. That’s a fund Pop and I keep for fishermen’s widows.” With that she was gone.

  I was fit to be tied. It was enough to get to Maddox Island, but to be parked in Mickey the Mick’s Saloon and Hotel, to be on my own in this ghost town for the whole night, to be patronized by Auntie Mame, to be kept from seeing the Maddox sisters, and then to be snubbed by Pegeen was too much. I tried to find fault with the room. I couldn’t. It was plain but spotless, with real Irish linen on the bed. The adjoining bath was also immaculate. Angrily, I threw myself down on the bed and fell asleep.

  On the stroke of eight my meal arrived.

  “Here’s your dinner,” Pegeen said, waking me. “You’d better eat it while it’s hot. And would you mind not lying on the bed with your shoes on. This isn’t the Mills Hotel.” With that she left me alone with the most delicious dinner I’d ever eaten—and exactly what I’d ordered. It had the effect of making me as ashamed as I’ve been in my life, and twice as furious.

  Later that night, desperate, I went down to the bar for a drink, partly out of loneliness, partly trying to make amends. Pegeen and her father were there with a couple of stray customers, but whenever I tried to strike up a conversation they cut me dead with their indifference. Seething mad, I went to bed around ten and found that my nap had made it impossible for me to sleep at all.

  The next day I got up, took a long time bathing and shaving, and dressed in my nattiest for lunch with the Maddox sisters. I looked at my watch; it was eleven o’clock. I sat down and read every word of a copy of Life—ads and all. Then I read it again. At a quarter of one I set off.

  Maddox Island was made up of about fifty natives, who lived there the year around, and about a hundred families with big rambling frame houses that they occupied during the summer. At the far end was a big, impressive place with “Maddox” chastely lettered on the gatepost. It was one of those old General Grant eyesores, bustling with towers and turrets, cupolas, lightning rods, and porches and balconies. Although rather seedy, it had obviously been some establishment in its youth.

  I trudged up the drive. As I neared the door, Auntie Mame appeared. “Darling boy! Here you are at last!” She was got up in a voile shirt and a pair of britches held up by a single suspender, which made her look like a kind of transvestite Huck Finn. “I’ve been up on the widow’s walk watching you with my glass.”

  “Glass of what?” I asked bitterly.

  “Oh, yes, drinks! I’ll call Ito.” With that she disappeared and remained invisible for the next half hour while I sat waspishly in a hammock trying to make sense out of an issue of Botteghe Oscure. I was in a real snit when she finally appeared, dressed for a royal garden party and bearing a silver tray that held a decanter of sherry and two glasses.

  We had one sherry, two sherries, three sherries while Auntie Mame gabbled glibly of Cabots and Lodges and Saltonstalls and Faneuils, and I raged silently. At last Ito announced lunch. When I saw that the table in the big old dining room was set for only two, my patience gave out. “Where in the hell are these Maddox girls?” I shouted.

  “Oh,” Auntie Mame said casually, “they’re lunching with the Lowells. I had to send my regrets since you …”

  “But when am I going to meet them?” I bellowed down the long table.

  “What’s the hurry, my little love? They wouldn’t be interested in you, anyhow.” She looked demurely into her mousse and the conversation came to an end.

  If any act was ever designed to drive a man mad, it was Auntie Mame as the New England gentlewoman. She left me at the table with port, a stale cigar, a fly—and she retired to the drawing room. When I joined her—about three minutes later—she gave me a copy of Walden to read aloud while she did needlework! There was absolutely no contact with her until she pricked her finger and said a short but most unladylike word. I put down the book and was just about to let her have it when a trio of mellifluous voices was heard from the porch.

  Whatever I was going to say to Auntie Mame escaped me when the three Maddox sisters came into the room. They stood in the doorway in their white dresses as though they were waiting for Sargent to paint them. As a matter of fact, my principal recollection of the three sisters that summer is not as individuals but always grouped—and artistically—like all their photographs. But the photographs, though magnificent, didn’t begin to capture their beauty. The blue-black hair, the black-blue eyes, the noli me tangere perfection of flesh and limb were beyond the camera’s eye.

  “Oh, there you are, dahlings,” Auntie Mame said airily as I struggled to my feet. “Margot, Miranda, Melissa—my neh-view, Petrick.” I tried to speak, but just at that moment the three of them swept a deep curtsy in my direction, as though I might have been Charles II. The speed and grace of their beautifully anachronistic gesture stunned me so that I toppled back into my chair.

  “Drunk!” Auntie Mame muttered, and quickly absorbed the three beauties in New England-type conversation.

  Luckily, the household hadn’t been invited to dine with Governor Winthrop or John Alden or Boss Curley that evening, so Auntie Mame begged me to have dinner there—but not before I went back and changed into black tie. Pegeen shot a pitying glance as I came down the stairs at Mickey the Mick’s in my dinner clothes, and the natives whistled when I trudged along the dusty road in broad daylight and patent leather pumps, but I didn’t much care. The thought of getting back to Auntie Mame and her seminary of goddesses was enough.

  Again that night I was left with the port while Auntie Mame herded her swans into the drawing room, and at ten o’clock I was summarily dismissed, but not before I discovered that each of the Maddox girls was not only a beauty but a brain and a distinct individual in her own right. Margot was the literary one and spoke elegantly and eloquently of Kafka. Miranda painted and took photographs. Melissa knew everything about music. I wasn’t drunk—you couldn’t be on what Auntie Mame was serving that summer—but I felt drunk as I hit the sack at Mickey the Mick’s. Margot, Miranda, Melissa, I thought; Melissa, Miranda, and Margot. With visions of these sirens spinning around in my brain, I drifted off to sleep.

  After the ice was broken, I was permitted to return to the Maddox house fairly regularly, but Auntie Mame was a stern duenna and the three sisters were apparently much in demand among the scions of great Boston families summering at Maddox Island. And even when I did get asked to the house, I was under the constant chaperonage of Auntie Mame. The girls were encouraged—not that they needed much encouragement—to follow their special pursuits each and every morning. Life at the Maddox house, although unusual, was fairly routine. The days were spent on the beach discussing intellectual matters such as the Japanese theater, English madrigals, the sculpture of Henry Moore, the importance of metallic thread in contemporary fabrics, the unpublished works of Joe Gould, the interesting patterns created by batik dyeing, the weird beauty of phthisic Mexican voices, Katina Paxinou reading Electra, the costume designs of a ten-year-old girl in a Rhode Isl
and reformatory, and praising one another’s talents. Miranda painted in the manner of Eugene Berman—“Mame at the Mausoleum,” “Margot in Mourning”—and took photographs in the manner of Cecil Beaton—“Mame Among the Candles,” “Melissa Morte,” and “Mame and Margot as Naiads.” (Auntie Mame’s hair stank of seaweed for some days after that study and it turned out very badly.) Miranda asked me to pose as a sleeping faun, a Florentine page boy, a Spartan runner, and several other things in some old yard goods and hairpieces she’d found kicking around the attic, all of which embarrassed me.

  One morning when we were alone together on the beach, Miranda gave my torso (which isn’t bad to this day, if I do say so myself) an encouraging glance and said, “Would you think me terribly jay if I asked you to pose naked for me? You see, I can never afford a model and …”

  I was so stunned and the pulse in my diaphragm was beating so hard as I gazed, nonplused, into Miranda’s lovely face that I couldn’t speak. But just as I reached for the drawstring on my trunks, Auntie Mame’s face appeared above the dunes, cheek by jowl with the faces of Margot and Melissa.

  “Of course he will, darling!” Auntie Mame cried. “Go on, my little love, shuck off those shorts! You’re nice and slim, and posing for Miranda will be perfectly all right with the rest of us here to watch.”

  A bolt of lightning couldn’t have surprised me more. Strangled with rage and embarrassment, I stomped off to put on all my clothes while Auntie Mame, in the manner of Boston’s Mrs. Gardiner, called out things about the beauty of the human body.

  Melissa composed music—very modern and atonal music, I believe, although the old Beckstein piano in the music room was so badly out of tune that I could never be certain. One night, after I’d toyed with my port beyond human endurance, I heard the piano thumping and rattling in the music room and went there instead of to the drawing room. Melissa was at the keyboard alone, lighted beatifically by candles. She was so beautiful that I gasped audibly. She looked up and treated me to a ravishing smile. “This is something I dashed off today,” she said in her heavenly, husky voice. “Would you turn the pages for me, please?”

  I crossed the room like a zombie. The music sounded as though it were written for the Kabuki Theater, but gazing, as I was, at Melissa’s magnificent shoulders, her arms, her poitrine, she could have been playing “Jingle Bells” for all it mattered to me.

  “Now, please,” she whispered.

  Trembling, I bent down, about to lay siege to her lovely throat, when the door burst open. “Here you are!” Auntie Mame cried. She was flanked by Margot and Miranda. “Splendid! Just in time for a little concert. Play on, Melissa!” The lights flashed on and I was stuck at the piano turning pages until well after twelve.

  Margot could read and write. She knew everything about Existentialism and Sartre and Kafka. Bursting with desire, I used to watch her floating out to the grape arbor in a fluttery white dress (those girls always wore white) with a stack of yellow-bound French books, yellow paper, and yellow pencils. My heart leaped with admiration. But just try to get her alone!

  One evening I did. Auntie Mame could be heard in the kitchen voicing her opinion about some sauce. Melissa and Miranda were still dressing. Practically slobbering, I followed Margot to the arbor.

  “Oh!” she said in her wonderful, wonderful voice. “You startled me!”

  As she didn’t sound a bit startled, I took heart. “Writing?” I asked idiotically.

  “Oh, not really,” Margot said with a look that doubled me over. “I’m just doing a silly little monograph on Kafka, but it’s hard because I’m writing it in French and in villanelles.” Razzumatazz, I thought. “But, of course, I’ll never find a publisher,” she added sadly.

  “Well, golly,” I said, “it just so happens that this guy I went to school with has a job at the Harbinger Press—they’re very high-toned, you know.” I was sparring for time. “Let me take a look. My French is kind of weak, but maybe you and I—and this old pal, naturally—could have lunch and …” I shoved in beside her and flung an arm over her shoulders. I was so desperate after a week of being kept at arm’s length from any of these beautiful temptresses that I was all set to try the tactless attack everybody used to make on poor old Sal, who had come to our advertising agency from Raymond College and was sleeping with the copy chief, two clients, a sculptor on Jane Street, her fiancé, me, and the Standing Army.

  With some restraint, I contained myself. “Listen, Margot … Ouch!” I swatted at a mosquito.

  “Here we are! Just in time!” Auntie Mame marched into the arbor, armed with a spray gun and flanked by Miranda and Melissa. She sprayed so thoroughly that it nearly killed me. Then she plunked herself down and made me read aloud from Margot’s manuscript in my St. Boniface French until the dinner was almost ruined.

  Frustrated and frustrating as these occasions were with the beautiful Maddox sisters, I was never allowed to spend very much time on the premises, which Auntie Mame rented from them. There were numbers of noons and afternoons and evenings when Auntie Mame gave me to understand that the sisters had been invited out to meet far more illustrious men, and that I could fritter my time away as I pleased. That enraged me. It enraged me because it meant that there was nothing to do but stay upstairs at Mickey the Mick’s Saloon and Hotel and eat the magnificent food that Pegeen cooked and served.

  At mealtimes I’d try to pick a fight with Pegeen, but she always said one wonderfully squelching thing and marched out, leaving me gasping for a reply. Later at night, when I’d regained control, I’d go down to the bar and try to strike up some kind of conversation with Pegeen or her father. No soap. Mr. and Miss Ryan kept carefully to themselves. Still later, writhing with passion for any one of the Maddox sisters, I’d go down to the beach and try to calm myself in the Maine waters, which were well below zero. All that ever accomplished was chilblains and a stern warning from the local constable about indecent exposure.

  On the tenth day I was at my wit’s end. I got up at six and chewed my nails until I was fairly sure that Auntie Mame was awake. At eleven I forced an entrance into her bedroom, snatched off her sleep mask, and shook her to consciousness.

  “Patrick, my little love,” she said, batting her eyes, “you shouldn’t be here. The girls …”

  “The girls are out in their lousy sailboat,” I said. “If one of them was here do you think I’d be in your room?”

  “Flatterer!”

  “Listen, Auntie Mame, this is driving me crazy. Do you all have to go around like the Army backfield? Can’t one of you ever break away long enough for a guy to …”

  “Darling, what are you talking about?”

  “You know damned good and well what I’m taking about. You’ve been sitting on Margot and Miranda and Melissa like a setting hen ever since you went to Mexico. You’re the one who thought up this marriage business, and now every time I see one of them alone for five seconds, you and the rest of the Four Horsemen plunge in and …”

  “Marriage?” Auntie Mame said with a pretty flutter and a fake wide-eyed stare. “Why, whoever put such a notion in your …”

  “Oh, come off it, you big ham! Now, when are you going to give me a chance to see just one of those girls alone?”

  “Tch, what a shame, darling. If only I’d known you were interested, we might have asked you to lunch today. Unfortunately, the girls are all going to the Sears’ clambake. A pity! I thought you knew the Sears boys. They …”

  “I don’t know one damned soul on this island and you know it!”

  “La, my little love, this all comes as such a shock. I had no idea that you were capable of any feeling—let alone an emotion as deep as …”

  “Oh, shut up!”

  Then she fixed me with a burning look. “Which one?”

  Well, I was so stunned for a second that I couldn’t distinguish one Maddox from another. “Margot,” I gulped.

  “Very well, darling,�
� she said briskly. “I’ll arrange a little private interview for you and Margot this very afternoon. What time?”

  “Right after the Lodges’ clambake.”

  “The Cabots, darling. Shall we say two-thirty?”

  I was too stunned to do anything but nod.

  I got to the Maddox place at two sharp. With a lot of talk about lobster pots and searching for buried treasure, Auntie Mame, Melissa, and Miranda put on their big Mexican straw hats and set off for an outing. With them gone, the silence was most impressive. I threw some pebbles up at Margot’s window in one of the towers, and pretty soon she opened it and smiled down. “Is that you, Patrick? I was just in the middle of the most interesting article on Sartre. It seems that …”

  “Why don’t you leave Sartre up there and come down to me?”

  “All right,” she said, and disappeared. In a couple of minutes she was downstairs, her mouth freshly touched up and looking very beautiful in a white dress. “Where are Mame and the girls?”

  “Oh, they’ve gone off,” I said.

  “And not asked us?” Margot said. “Well, I like their nerve!”

  “We could go on a little expedition of our own,” I said. “Maybe you’d like a sail?”

  “Well, of course I would, but I can’t understand my sisters’ running off without a word to me. We do everything together—we always have.”

  “My God, you were all at a clambake together just now. Can’t any one of you …”

  “I haven’t been to a clambake for years,” she said. “We were just hoping that you’d come and …”

  That was all I needed. I put my arms around her and kissed her so hard that she had to stop talking. When I was through, I said, “Do you know that this is the first time since I got here that you and I have been alone?”

  “Y-yes, I guess it is …” she began. Then I heard Ito giggle from the pantry. I grabbed Margot’s arm and dragged her down to the beach. Once we were away from everybody it was easy as pie. Half an hour later everything was arranged.