At the call for cocktails, the Group came running from all directions. Auntie Mame was particularly expansive that evening and almost forced the drinks on her guests. “Have another glass, Natasha, do . . . Can I tempt you, Comrade? . . . Oh, don’t you love the lavendar hour! I could just sit here and drink martinis forever.” Oddly enough, though, she wasn’t drinking anything. “Oh, come, now, Sid, just half and you, too, Ralph.” The cocktail hour lasted from five until well after nine and Auntie Mame found it necessary to mix a fifth gallon of martinis.
By the time dinner was announced, the English girl and Dr. Whipple had to be helped to the table, but that only added to the general jollity. Dinner was magnificent. It started out with fresh fruit marinated in vodka and passed on to the chickens basted in wine. In fact, something alcoholic seemed to be added to everything except the rolls and butter. Enormous rams’ horns of Ateni wine, which Auntie Mame had produced from some mysterious source, flowed throughout the meal. The climax was a great flaming bowl of fruit which looked delicious, but as I was about to give myself a generous helping, Mrs. Johnson grabbed my wrist and said darkly, “don’t you touch none of that stuff, honey.”
There was a sodden quality about the Group after the brandied coffee was served, but Auntie Mame supervised the revelry like a games mistress. “Come along now, Comrades, no fair slowing down, Matushka’s birthday comes but once a year! On to the Meeting Hall for dancing and more drinks! Matushka means dear little mother, Patrick.”
It was quite a bachannale. Auntie Mame’s homemade whiskey proved to be the final touch for many of the guests. Desmond McLush collapsed while he was singing Tiptoe Through the Tulips with one of the school teachers. Masha passed out in mid-arabesque and Soso threw up into his balalaika. But those who were still conscious cheerfully put their less fortunate comrades to bed and capered back to join the fun.
Even Mrs. Johnson left the dirty dishes on the table and came in to watch. Ralph sang Button Up Your Overcoat, but of all the Group, Auntie Mame seemed to be the gayest and when I finally went upstairs to bed, she was being tossed up in a blanket by Sid and the two merchant mariners.
Because of the party downstairs it took me a long time to get to sleep. Whenever I drowsed, I’d be awakened by a shriek of hilarity and, every now and then, there’d be a dull thud from someplace in the house. At last I dozed off, but it didn’t seem that I’d been asleep for a minute when I heard a cautious scratching noise outside my door. Auntie Mame whispered, “Patrick. Patrick, darling, wake up. Put on your clothes and don’t make a sound.”
“B-but, why?”
“Don’t bother Auntie with a lot of questions, now. We’re going to take a little ride. Hurry and be still.”
I scrambled into my shorts and shirt and wedged my feet into some shoes. Auntie Mame took my hand. “Now, come with me and don’t make any noise,” she whispered. “We don’t want to disturb anyone, do we?” Good old Auntie Mame, I thought, always so considerate of others.
In the hall Mrs. Johnson’s dark figure loomed solidly. She was wearing her hat and coat and carried a satchel. Her kids, Carver and Aida, were with her too.
“All ready, Mrs. Johnson?” Auntie Mame whispered. “Have you got your passports?”
“Yes.”
“Very well, follow me. Watch out for the stairs and don’t make a sound.” We tiptoed behind her single file. The loose step just above the landing creaked eerily and a soft groan came from Boris’s room. I jumped.
“Don’t worry about him tonight,” Auntie Mame said authoritatively. “Just follow me.”
We reached the downstairs hall. A candle guttered in the Meeting Room and I could see a lot of bodies stretched out in abandoned positions. “Shhh,” Auntie Mame warned. “Now, quickly, out to the bus.” She hurried forward. Suddenly there was an awful noise that sounded like Ooof and Auntie Mame sprawled flat.
In the dim light, I could see Natasha lying supine with Auntie Mame next to her on the floor.
“Wha’ th’ hell, Comrade,” Natasha said thickly, dazedly shaking her head.
“Oh, Natasha, Comrade,” Auntie Mame breathed weakly, “it’s you!” She laughed nervously. “Here, Comrade,” Auntie Mame said, reaching for a half-filled glass. “I just wanted to give you another drink. Mustn’t let the party die, you know,” she added wildly.
“Arishe ye prishners of shtarvation,” Natasha croaked. She emptied the glass in one gulp and fell back again to the floor with a soft thump.
“Thank God,” Auntie Mame breathed. Then that old look came over her face. “And this seems like a good time to recapture one of my barbaric symbols of a dead civilization.” Deftly she removed the rose quartz bracelet from Natasha’s limp wrist and popped it onto her own arm. “Now, follow me and quickly.”
The Johnson kids and I hopped nimbly over Natasha’s body, but I heard another sickening noise as Mrs. Johnson carefully planted her two hundred pounds on Natasha’s stomach, waited there for an instant, stepped off and then followed me out of the house.
The motor of the second-hand bus was purring and we sat on the peeling old seats. “Is everyone ready?” Auntie Mame asked. Then she said, “oh, my God, my sables!”
“You don’t worry,” Ito said. It was the first time I’d known of his presence. “Baggage all packed and upstairs. Also very nice picnic lunch to eat. We have chicken on way to Turkey!” This sent him into perfect gales of giggling.
“Shhhh,” Auntie Mame said. “Not a sound.”
Just then the door flew open. “Mame! Mame Comrade! What are you, ah, doing? Where are you . . . Mame! Wait!”
“Oh, my God,” she said. “It’s Euclid Whipple!”
“To hell with him,” I said.
“To hell with him is right,” Auntie Mame said. “Step on it, Mr. Johnson.”
“Mame! Stop!” Dr. Whipple shouted. “Our plan. Our farm. Our dream! Comrades! Boris! Stop her!”
A shot rang out.
“Oh, my God,” Auntie Mame moaned. “Now they’ll catch us and who knows what will . . .”
“Not gonna get us Mrs. Burnside,” Mr. Johnson chuckled as he swung the bus into the road. “They’s no gas in the truck. I syphoned it all out. If they wants any gas they’ll have to walk ten miles into Psplat to git it. An’ then they’ll have to pay for it.”
We drove all night along the treacherous mountain roads of Georgia, heading straight for the Turkish border. By the time we’d gone ten miles, Auntie Mame stopped trembling. By the time we’d driven ten more, she became quite chatty. “Oh, Comrades,” she trilled, “don’t you feel just like one of those old Romanov aristocrats fleeing the revolution? I keep thinking of those thrilling stories Count Orlofsky used to tell about escaping from St. Petersburg in a boxcar!”
A bus that’s too old for Picadilly isn’t necessarily the best vehicle for the Caucasus Mountains. The roads got worse and worse, steeper and steeper. Once we all had to get out and walk while Mr. Johnson coaxed the lumbering old double-decker up a steep incline.
Morning came and we were still far from Turkey. The gas was running low. We all stopped talking and simply concentrated on the road ahead, praying that we might make it. In the early afternoon, by dint of not only getting out and walking, but also by pushing, we got the bus to the summit of a huge hill. Directly below us lay the frontier. A wooden gate stretched across the road and some unfriendly looking members of the Red Army patrolled the customs house.
“Thank God we’ve made it!” Auntie Mame cried. “We’re all American citizens and we have our passports. They can’t stop us now. Climb aboard, everyone! Next stop Turkey.”
How right she was. We all got back into the bus and Mr. Johnson released the brake. “Think of all those divine Bosphorus cigarettes we can get,” Auntie Mame said as the bus began rolling down the hill. “Better than Melachrinos, really. Um, Mr. Johnson, must we go quite so fast? I mean we’re almost . . .”
“Can’t help it. The brakes gave out!”
“Oh, for Gawd’s sake,”
Mrs. Johnson wailed.
Faster and faster we rolled downward upon the frontier. The Russian soldiers went through a smart little military routine right out in the road ahead of us. One of them gestured and shouted something that was probably, “halt or I’ll shoot.”
“Can’t you stop this damned thing, Mr. Johnson? I mean it’s only a formality. They simply . . . Eeeeee!”
With a crash and a splintering of rotten wood, we burst through the barricade. A shot was fired and there was a tinkle of glass from one of the rear windows. We were all of us on the floor, except for Mr. Johnson who was flattened over the steering wheel. A second shot rang out and still we kept on going.
I looked up just in time to see the gates of the Turkish frontier ahead of us. Some Turkish soldiers were running around hysterically. There was another crash and we were in Turkey. More shots rang out and finally the bus stopped.
With all the airs and graces of the Empress of Russia, Auntie Mame minced to the rear of the old London bus and descended. And she really managed to look more as though she were going to a court ball than to Fortnum and Mason’s. “How do you do,” she said to the furious looking Turkish officer who awaited her. “I am Mrs. Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside. This is my passport and these are my comrades. That is to say, my friends.”
Auntie Mame and the Middle Eastern Powder Keg
“I JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND IT,” PEGEEN SAID. “How could a woman like your aunt go to a place so near Nazi Germany without getting into a lot of trouble?”
“Very simply,” I said. “Finesse. Diplomacy. Tact. Call it what you like. Why, you should have seen her in the Middle East.”
“In the Middle East?”
“Yes.”
“What, pray, was that ‘jewel of many facets’ studying in the Middle East?”
“Racial relations.”
“Well, having just heard more about that than I care to— that dismal Mrs. Rawlings down the street just called asking us to sign some new zoning petition—I’d rather not hear about your aunt and some Middle Eastern powder keg.”
“Good,” I said.
AUNTIE MAME HAD AN immediate affinity for the Middle East. Having lived like a pig in the Tyrol, she was delighted to see a section where you could live like potentates on only a modest outlay of cash.
She made her majestic way down the Danube, lingering in Budapest for refurbishing, cased the Dalmatian Coast, and then set sail for Egypt, touching upon the Isles of Greece.
The Rolls was waiting at Alexandria, and by the time the car was speeding down the long straight desert road joining Alexandria and Cairo, Auntie Mame was quite her old self again.
“Ah, my little love, Egypt,” she said, patting my hand. “So modern and so chic, yet still seething with that indefinable mystery that has been here since the Ptolemys.” She lighted a Fuad Premier Doré. They were terribly strong cigarettes and smelled of camel dung, but they were not without a certain glamour if your lungs were up to them. “And so cosmopolitan, darling! Where else could one see English, French, Greeks, Italians, Turks, Egyptians all gathered at the same dinner party?”
“Washington, D.C.,” I suggested. “Mind if I put the window down a bit?”
“Of course, dear Alex—that’s Alexandria, my little love—is fun in a strictly European sort of way, but now down to the big, beating heart of Egypt—Cairo! Le Caire! And don’t worry, Patrick, I know all the ropes. Your Uncle Beau and I were here on our, honeymoon. And you and I are going to go native. There’s going to be nothing touristy about us. We’ll stay at Shepheard’s; I have guest cards to the Ghezira Sporting Club and the Turf Club. The food at Les Ambassadeurs is superb, and, thank God, they’ve got a branch of Elizabeth Arden. We’re simply going to see how real Egyptians live. Not so fast, Ito,” she called through the speaking tube.
AUNTIE MAME WENT NATIVE TO THE EXTENT OF wearing a lot of kohl around her eyes. She bought quite a lot of exotic jewelry—the most exotic of which was a wide gold bracelet which she shoved up above her elbow, where it stayed until it was sawed off at Tiffany’s some years later. But except for trips to Elizabeth Arden and to restaurants and clubs that were just like any restaurants and clubs in any other big city, she stayed mostly on the veranda at Shepheard’s drinking Suffering Bastards (a rude contraction of a lethal hangover mixture originally called Suffering Bar Steward), fanning herself, complaining of the heat, and moaning about what a fool she’d been at whichever party the night before.
But one day, after an extremely rough evening at an Anglo-American gathering out at Garden City, Auntie Mame decided that she’d had quite enough partying and that the time had come to go native. “We’re off to the pyramids, my little love,” she said, gulping down her third Suffering Bastard and signaling to the steward for a refill. “If we are to come to know this land we must know it from its very roots. All those years, all those dynasties . . . Merci,” she said to the barman, slipping her drink off the tray.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll talk to the dragoman about getting us some sort of guide. What time do you . . .”
“Guide?” Auntie Mame said, as though I’d used a word in Swahili. “We’re not going tourist class. I’ve been here before and I’m perfectly capable of showing you the monuments of ancient Egypt without some hissing little wog snatching at my elbow. Just tell Ito to bring the car around while I go upstairs to change. Addition, s’il vous plait!”
“Okay, lady,” the barman said.
Half an hour later Auntie Mame emerged from Shepheard’s in what I suppose was a smart desert costume. It consisted of a white linen bush jacket, a divided skirt, boots, and a pith helmet draped with about thirty yards of tangerine chiffon veiling. The effect was somewhere between Osa Johnson and Agnes Ayres, and it was devastating. “Come along, Patrick,” she said, giving her boot a brisk thwack with her riding crop. She got into the Rolls, with a fluttering of veils, and we were off.
Business was far from brisk out at the pyramids, and we were besieged by guides and dragomen, one of whom offered me not only a tour of the tombs, but a Turkish carpet, a diamond ring, erotic photographs, hashish, his beautiful sister, and, finally, himself.
“Yallah!” Auntie Mame said, with a fine display of Arabic. “Shoo! All of you. We’re going by ourselves.” Then she picked out two camels—a white one named Fatima for herself and for me a kind of moth-eaten brindle old beast with horrible breath. It was named Badia.
“Hey,” I said, struggling up to the summit of Badia, “have you ever ridden one of these things before?”
“Dozens of times, my little love,” Auntie Mame said, perching elegantly on Fatima’s saddled hump. “It may make you a little seasick at first, but it’s quite easy and they’re as gentle as lambs. Ito,” she called, “follow us with the picnic things.” She gave Fatima a smart crack with her crop and we started rocking and rolling down a sandy desert pathway with Ito giggling in the car behind us.
“Isn’t this divine, darling!” Auntie Mame called over her shoulder. “I feel just like Cleopatra. No wonder they call these marvelous animals the ships of the desert.”
“No wonder,” I said, feeling kind of squeamish from the oceanic undulations of my camel. “I wish I’d brought the Mother Sills seasick remedy.”
“Nonsense, my little love. ‘When in Rome . . .’ ”
“I wish we were in Rome,” I said.
“Oh, don’t be such a stick, Patrick. Isn’t the desert beautiful?”
“Not particularly,” I said, wondering if I were going to throw up.
“We’ll ride on until we find some sort of lovely oasis and then stop for lunch. Is Ito still with us?”
I turned around and gave Ito a sick grin. He was giggling so hard he could barely steer the car. He waved to me, and then it happened: Ito’s elbow struck the horn. It went off with a terrible blast. Both camels stopped dead and reared into the air. I was thrown flat onto my back, and Ito put on the brakes just short of flattening me. I picked myself up from the sand in time
to see Auntie Mame and Fatima bounding over a hill. “Stop!” I heard Auntie Mame cry. Then she yelled, “ ’Hom’d el Allah!” which, I believe, means Son of Allah and is the Moslem equivalent of “Jesus!” It could only have offended Fatima, for she went still faster and disappeared entirely from sight.
“After her!” I shouted to Ito, jumping into the seat beside him. Terrified, Ito stepped on the gas. The big black car bounded off the road and into the sand. We went about fifty feet and then the Rolls got stuck. Inspired by Fatima’s independent spirit, my camel bolted in the opposite direction.
And there we were, alone on the desert and up to the running boards in sand. By the time I scrambled up to the roof of the car to see if there was any sight of Auntie Mame and Fatima, the flapping orange veils were only a vivid, moving speck on the horizon.
For the next forty-eight hours a hundred dragomen, the camel patrol, and a small airplane searched for Auntie Mame and Fatima. She was found two days later and three-quarters of the way to Memphis, suffering from exposure. Fatima was never seen again.
Auntie Mame languished in the hospital for a week, hovering—as she described it—between life and death. Her physician, however, said that she was perfectly fine and had picked up a beautiful coat of tan. He said that all she really needed was a few weeks of rest in a pleasant climate, and even went so far as to lend her his own villa in the mountains of Lebanon.
Except that her nose was still peeling, Auntie Mame was the perfect picture of the fabulous invalid as the Rolls followed the Mediterranean coast up through Palestine toward Syria. In Tel Aviv, Auntie Mame was able to force down a couple of blintzes and a cold beer. Then she moaned softly—and belched once—all the way to Lebanon. At Tyre she peered wanly out of the window and sighed, “ ‘Lo, all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre’ ” (Kipling, I believe), and fell back onto the cushions. Tyre wasn’t much to look at. Sidon was somewhat more prepossessing, and Auntie Mame allowed as how she’d just try a cigarette. In Beirut she asked for her make-up case and a few simple jewels.
Around the World With Auntie Mame Page 22
