Around the World With Auntie Mame

by Dennis, Patrick

  “What about Basil and your so-called Understanding? About the only thing that remains to understand is how you can keep out of a home for fallen women.”

  “Ah, poor child,” she said mysteriously, “what can you know of love?” Then she tittuped to the corridor and cooed, “Amadeo, chéri! Come and help me go over my financial statements.”

  Amadeo wasn’t very intellectual, but when it came to figures he made I.B.M. unnecessary. Having won him with her face, figure, clothes, and jewels, Auntie Mame now laid her cards on the table and gave him a fair picture of just how much dough Beau had left her. Amadeo lit up like a pinball machine and they spent all afternoon in the library poring over Auntie Mame’s nest egg. He was the only man I ever saw who could figure oil in millions on top of a desk and grope for a woman’s knee underneath it. I was so disgusted I left the room.

  I found myself alone with Amadeo before dinner that night and he was unaccustomedly cordial to me—uncomfortably so. He put an arm around my shoulder and called me “Son” twice.

  Dinner was horrible. No one spoke, except Auntie Mame and Amadeo, and every so often she’d squeal “Oh, let go!” and “No! Naughty!” Vera was the first to crack. She threw down her napkin—during salad—and slammed out of the room. The Hon. Basil followed, and then Lady Spavin took to her heels. I was about to leave them alone, too, when Auntie Mame looked earnestly down the table and said: “Please wait for me in my room, my little love. I have something important to say to you.”

  Mystified, I went up to her room and waited. After a long time she came in. Pausing dramatically at the open door she said, “Amadeo wants to marry me!”

  “Auntie Mame!” I whispered. “You’re joking!”

  “Joking?” she said, walking into the room. “Why should I joke? He’s found me extremely attractive—surely you could see that. He asked me in the library this afternoon and I . . .”

  “But, Vera . . .” I began.

  “Vera will just have to . . .”

  “Vera will just have to what?” a voice asked. We both looked up and there was Vera standing in the doorway. She was white and tense and she looked ghastly. “Vera will just have to what?” she repeated. She moved ominously toward Auntie Mame.

  “W-why, Vera, it’s just that Amadeo and I have . . .”

  “Lisssen,” Vera hissed. The elegant staginess had left her voice. “Amadeo is mine. I found him and I brought him here. He . . .”

  “Vera,” Auntie Mame said, “can’t you see by now that he doesn’t give a rap for you? He . . .”

  “He’s been dazzled by you and your dirty low-down tricks. He’s been swept off his feet by your diamonds and your money. You’ve bought him, but he doesn’t really love you. He loves . . .”

  “Vera! How can you buy a man with . . .”

  “Shut up!” Vera snarled. “You’ve broken poor Basil’s heart and you’ve tried to break mine. But you haven’t succeeded. Amadeo is mine. I’m going to marry him first thing in the morning. And what’s more, I’m going to get back at you for this if it’s the last thing I ever do.” She turned on her heel, went down the hall to her own room, slammed the door, and locked it.

  “Vera!” Auntie Mame cried, running after her. Then she turned, came back into her own room and shut the door. “She’s not going to marry Amadeo, not if I have to kill myself.” She turned to me. “Wait here and don’t let Vera out of her room. Use force, if necessary. I’ve got to get to Amadeo first.” She snatched up her bag and her coat and ran downstairs to the library.

  “Hey!” I called. But she was out of earshot. A few minutes later I heard the front door slam, a small explosion, and the roar of a car streaming down the driveway. Then there was silence. I watched Vera’s door until midnight. There wasn’t a thing stirring in the house, so I went to bed.

  The next morning I was awakened by what I briefly took to be the end of the world. There was a lot of screaming and shrieking from the lower part of the house and then I heard Vera’s heels clattering on the tile floor of the halls. She burst into my room and started vilifying me at the top of her lungs. She was so hysterical that I couldn’t make much of what she said except the word “gone,” which she repeated twenty or thirty times. She kept waving a sheet of paper in my face and shouting invective until Lady Spavin marched into the room and called for order. She took the paper away from Vera and read it. “Well,” she said briskly, “they’ve done what I was afraid they’d do. They’ve run off together.”

  “Wh-who?” I asked. Then I realized it was a silly question.

  “Who?” Vera screamed. “Who, but that dirty, double-crossing . . .”

  “Leave the room, Vera,” Lady Spavin said, pushing her out. “I’m afraid, child, that your mad aunt and Amadeo Armadillo have gone to Gretna Green.”

  “Greta who?” I said, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

  “It’s just an expression, child. Now get up and get dressed.”

  DOWNSTAIRS THE PLACE WAS LIKE A WAILING WALL. Vera had more or less composed herself and wept steadily into a lace handkerchief. The Hon. Basil paced up and down working his jaw and cracking his knuckles. Lady Spavin was playing patience. There was no question about it, Auntie Mame and Amadeo had fled in the night, leaving only an incoherent note written by Amadeo—I always suspected he was illiterate— and no forwarding address.

  I was so sick and depressed to think that Auntie Mame had fallen into her own trap that I went upstairs and packed. I was also nearly broke and there didn’t seem much of anyplace to go except to Auntie Mame’s big, empty house in London. By hocking my wrist watch I had just enough to pay for third-class tickets back to England. The compartment on the train was stifling and I was jammed in between two Spanish refugee women—each with a baby. I had no money for food and I was feeling a little giddy when I changed trains at Paris. A glimpse at the headlines of the English-language papers made me feel even worse. The Continental Daily Mail had:

  FORTUNE HUNTER FLEES

  WITH WEALTHY WIDOW

  Somewhat less staid, the Paris Herald wrote:

  MADCAP (MILLIONS) MAME MISSING

  KIDNAP PLOT FEARED

  After that I went to the lavatory to be good and sick and I remained sick all the way across the Channel.

  It was early morning when I got to Grosvenor Square. The house looked dark and empty and there were a lot of reporters milling around in front. So I went around to the mews and cut through the garden. The house had been officially closed and the servants were all gone, the chandeliers hung in big baize bags, and there were ghostly looking dust sheets over all the furniture. I hadn’t eaten for two days and I hoped—without much conviction—that there might just be something down in the kitchen to keep me from starving to death.

  I felt my way down to the big basement kitchen and groped for a light switch. A tremulous voice said, “P-put your hands up or I’ll fire.”

  “Auntie Mame,” I said, “it’s Patrick.”

  “Oh, thank God you’ve come, my little love,” she said. The lights went on and I saw her huddled at the big kitchen table. She was wearing a woolen robe and, for some reason, a chinchilla cape. “Have a cup of coffee,” she said bleakly. “It’s awfully stale and not very good. I made it myself. I have to do everything myself. The servants are all gone and all those reporters out in front keep ringing the bell and calling on the telephone. Oh!” A tear trickled down her cheek.

  “Can’t your husband send the reporters away?” I asked.

  “My what?”

  “Your husband!” I said, speaking louder than necessary, as though she were simple.

  “Beauregard has been dead for years,” she said coldly. “Have you taken leave of your senses, child?”

  “But aren’t you married to Amadeo Armadillo?”

  “Certainly not!” she snapped.

  “Well, are you, um, living in, ah, sin?” I asked.

  “Really! I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head. If you think—”

  “B
ut where is Amadeo?” I asked desperately.

  “I’m sure I couldn’t tell you,” she said haughtily, “but if my calculations are anywhere near right he should be on his second day of basic training with the fighting forces of Republican Spain.”

  “Where did you leave him, Auntie Mame?”

  “When last seen, Amadeo was locked in the toilet of a chartered plane.” Then she looked at her wrist watch. “I expect that by now he’s doing about-faces and all that sort of thing. His feet must hurt dreadfully if he’s still wearing those patent-leather pumps.”

  “But who locked Amadeo in a toilet? What are you . . .”

  “I did,” she said with simple eloquence.

  “But why did Amadeo want to join the Spanish army?” I said.

  “Amadeo! Amadeo! Amadeo! Can’t you ever talk about anybody but him? Don’t you care what happened to me? The rigors I’ve endured?”

  “Well, sure, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “But I thought you and Amadeo ran off together.”

  “As indeed we did. Didn’t you read his note?”

  “But I thought the two of you were getting married.”

  “I marry a greaseball like Amadeo when I have a man of Basil’s stature on his way to me at this very moment? Don’t be ridiculous!”

  “Auntie Mame, I just don’t understand.”

  “Well, if you’d only stop interrupting, I’d tell you. Oh, how little you know of the pioneer woman’s trials and tribulations, you crossing the Continent in a deluxe railway carriage.”

  “So begin,” I said.

  “Well,” Auntie Mame said, “I just knew that it was no good showing up Amadeo as the louse he is when he was always on hand to lure poor Vera back into his web. So I decided that the only thing to do was to elope with him and get him a good long distance from Biarritz. I didn’t want to do it, but when Vera threatened to fling herself at his feet, I realized it had to be done. And a pretty penny it cost, too.”

  “Including those canary diamond studs and cuff links,” I said hotly.

  “Oh, those! They were just some yellow glass things that I ripped off an old tennis dress and threw into a Cartier box. He won’t find that out until he tries to hock them, which should be about now.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “I’m trying to. So, when Vera said that she was going to marry Amadeo the very next morning, I dashed downstairs to Pinchbottom—oh, Patrick, darling, that Amadeo’s a pincher, too; a real menace. And I said, ‘Fly with me!’ And then I gave him a check for a hundred thousand dollars. . . .”

  “A hundred thou . . .”

  “To be signed when we said, ‘I do.’ Then I got Ito to drive us out to the airport and all the time I kept plying Amadeo with brandy. Oh, Patrick, that man can drink as well as pinch. I pumped enough brandy into him to fill a swimming pool and of course his nasty hands were all over me. Well, the only plane that was around was a private one that belonged to this darling Danish flier, and so I chartered it. I said to the pilot, ‘What’s the most godforsaken place you know?’ and he said, ‘Brönderslev, Denmark, madam. Where I come from.’ So then I said, ‘Wouldn’t you like to go home for a little visit?’ and he said, ‘Not on your life, madam.’ But I gave him a lot more money and he was very charming after that.”

  “I’ll bet he was,” I said.

  “Of course Amadeo thought I was taking him to Paris, and he was pretty drunk by then, anyhow. Well, it was a terrible flight. The weather was simply unbelievable and I was almost beside myself, what with being tossed around from cloud to cloud and that repugnant Amadeo pawing me. Well, I’d planned to get off at Paris and just let Amadeo keep on going north. But that awful man simply would not pass out. You can imagine how I felt when I heard we were over Germany—and here Amadeo was still conscious. To make matters even worse, he’d finished all the brandy and was howling for more.”

  “So what did you do, Auntie Mame?”

  “Well, happily I had a bottle of Nuit de Noël in my purse— thirty bucks an ounce, if you please—so I just emptied it into a paper cup and gave it to Amadeo.”

  “Did he drink it?”

  “Like a fish. And the perfume seemed to turn the trick. He grew deathly pale and just made it to the rest room.”

  “What then?”

  “Then I locked him in.”

  “But how did you . . .”

  “Stop interrupting. Well, I went up to the pilot’s little sort of driver’s seat and said that Amadeo was sick and did the pilot think he could do any tricks that would make him sicker. You know, sort of arouse Amadeo’s gastric juices. Well, that adorable Dane did things with a plane that I didn’t know were possible. First he wrote my name and then he wrote his own. His name, by the way, was Jørgen Årup Hansen and he even flew back to put in all those diagonals and accent marks that Danes will use. Then he gave me a liverwurst sandwich.”

  “What about Amadeo?”

  “Oh, by that time he was long lost to song and flight. But then the awful thing happened.”

  “What was that?”

  “Well, we heard over the radio that the weather was so bad up north that we’d have to turn back. We were just about over Munich by then and the fog was so dense that landing was impossible. So Jørgen said, ‘How about going back to Paris?’ Because he’d always wanted to see Paris with a beautiful woman, he said. Wasn’t that sweet? Oh, don’t worry, darling, it means nothing. He was years younger than I am, albeit most attractive. Well, I was sorely tempted, but I knew that if Amadeo was in a big, convenient place like Paris with lots of planes and trains and telephones, he could get back to poor Vera in no time at all. So I said no. Then Jørgen said that I’d have to make up my mind pretty soon because the only reason he’d come to Biarritz was that he was going to enlist in the Spanish Republican Army, plane and all, even if he couldn’t speak a word of Spanish.”

  “Auntie Mame,” I said, “you didn’t . . .”

  “I did,” she said. “I said to Jørgen, ‘Isn’t that a coincidence, my dear. I just happen to have a gentleman locked in the toilet who speaks fluent Spanish and I see no reason why you shouldn’t be buddies through the whole civil war. You can do the flying and Amadeo will do the talking,’ I said.”

  “You mean that you had Amadeo shanghaied into the Spanish Republican Army?”

  “In a word, yes. Jørgen said he had just enough fuel left to get to Barcelona. And I said could he assure me that Amadeo would be in the thick of things down there. Jørgen said he could guarantee it. So I said that was divine and I’d send Jør-gen a food package every week. And then I said, ‘But what about me?’ and Jørgen said I could either go to Barcelona or jump.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I jumped.”

  “You jumped with a parachute, Auntie Mame?”

  “I would hardly have jumped without one,” she said coldly. “Jørgen strapped me into this rig and told me how to count to ten and then to pull the string. And that is just what I did.”

  “Gee. Where did you land?”

  “On my rear end, I’m sorry to say.”

  “No, I mean what country?”

  “Oh, in Germany, just south of Munich, although I swore that I’d never go there as long as that Hitler is . . .”

  “Gosh, after that I’ll bet it was easy,” I said admiringly.

  “Easy? I was dragged halfway to Austria before I could get that damned parachute off my back. Since then I’ve traveled by oxcart, hayrack, motorcycle, car, truck, milk wagon, train, plane, and bus. And every inch of the way in a georgette dinner dress—most inappropriate for travel. But you must admit that I got rid of Amadeo Armadillo. I wonder if the army will make a man of him? I don’t suppose so, do you?”

  “Where’s Ito?”

  “He’s driving the car back. I told him to follow the Atlantic Ocean until he got to Calais. He’ll be along any day now, if only he didn’t get it headed the wrong way and end up in Spain, too.”

 
“Well, Auntie Mame,” I said, “now all your problems are solved.”

  “All save one,” she said. “Basil. Tell me, darling, how was poor Basil?”

  “Well, he seemed a little out of sorts to me,” I said, not wanting Auntie Mame to know how terribly hurt he had been.

  “Ah, but my little love, he’s coming to me. I know he is. I’ve called Villa Dolorosa a dozen times trying to reach him. He’s not there. Everyone’s left. But he’ll find me. I’ve left a trail.”

  “I’ll bet you have,” I said.

  “Yes, I’ve sent telegrams to all his clubs, to Birdcage Walk, to the Palace. Never fear, he’ll find me.”

  “But do you still think he’ll want to? I mean, he thinks you’ve eloped with Amadeo Armadillo and . . .”

  “Basil and I have an Understanding,” Auntie Mame said. “And as for poor Vera, I’ll bet she’s thanking me right now for what I’ve done for her.”

  We moved to the drawing room, and I started pulling the dust sheets off the furniture.

  Peering through the draperies she said, “Thank God those reporters are thinning out.” They were, too. The house looked so empty from the front that I guess they gave up hope of catching Auntie Mame.

  The telephone rang and Auntie Mame raced to answer it. “Hello!” she said in her brightest voice. “No, this is not the lady who washes . . . Oh, go to hell!” She hung up and came back snarling about practical jokers. “I did so hope it would be Basil,” she sighed. She sat down and lighted a cigarette, but I could see that her hand was trembling. The telephone rang again. “It’s been like this ever since I got back,” she said, “and it’s never dear Basil.” She got up and answered. “No,” she roared, “I don’t want to make a statement to the London Daily Worker!” She stomped back in and threw herself on the sofa. “Communists!” she muttered.

  Then the doorbell rang.

  “Don’t answer it!” Auntie Mame warned. “Peep out first and see if it’s a reporter. If it is . . .”

  “My God!” I said, letting the curtain fall.

  “Is it Basil?”