House Party

by Patrick Dennis

  In the interests of economy, a ballroom was omitted, but the central hall was made large enough to accommodate three or four hundred dancers with some degree of comfort. Encouraged by this saving, dear Papa had agreed to add a smoking room, billiard room and music room to the already scheduled drawing room, morning room, sitting room, dining room, reception room and library. These, along with a kitchen, pantry, laundry, servants' hall and a hot little conservatory, made up the first floor. At the end of the central hall, a massive staircase wound its ponderous but majestic way around a pipe organ to the second floor's labyrinthine corridors and twenty bedrooms. Above that were attics and store rooms and ten miserable cubicles for servants, sweltering beneath the shingled mansard roof.

  The relationship between dear Papa and his architect had been an exciting one, fraught with quick thrusts and Machiavellian betrayals, heavy with grudging compromises. Mr. Hunt had suggested walnut panelling for the major rooms; dear Papa held out for oak—bright gold, dead black and fumed. Dear Papa won. Mr. Hunt also urged dear Papa to buy a lot of genuine French antiques, and here dear Papa was forced to compromise. But for every one of Mr. Hunt's fauteuils dear Papa bought a Morris chair; for every Régence commode, a smoking stand; for every écritoire, a roll-top desk. As Mr. Hunt was fond of Aubusson tapestries, ormolu candelabra and marble statues, so was dear Papa fond of Tiffany glass, paintings of moose, and vases filled with peacock plumes. Only time was to prove that neither man's taste was infallible.

  But when Lily took over as chatelaine, she found that with the aid of paint, a crowbar and the Salvation Army, most of dear Pupa's mistakes could be removed. In its heyday, when her children were growing up, when her husband was alive, when money was coming in and not going out, the house had a kind of incredible charm. Mrs. Ames had a certain uncertain certainty in questions concerning what was right, what was wrong, what was good and what was bad. Under her supervision, the possible rooms had become beautiful, the impossible ones interesting, and all of them comfortable. Its charm was still evident, but like a weary beauty, past her prime, the house showed signs of loneliness and neglect. It was at its best with a crowd of people—under artificial light.

  "I suppose," Lily said to her sister as they reached the second floor, "that with Uncle Ned coming, we'll have to open the whole bachelors' wing. He said something about expecting his old suite again."

  "Oh, the bachelors’ wing! Lily, the sound of it is too terribly romantic for words. Remember when dear Papa was alive and these rooms were filled with our beaux down for the weekend. And Uncle Ned would always come up the drive in a beautiful carriage with two men on the box! And there were never less than twelve at table. La, but those days were fun—the swimming, the picnics, the croquet . . ."

  "Well, those days are gone forever, Violet. The world just isn't like that any longer." Mrs. Ames opened the door of Uncle Ned's suite. Ned Pruitt was dear Papa's younger brother. The two men had hated each other cordially, but dear Papa generously said that blood was thicker than water and that there'd always be a place under this very roof for his frivolous waste-wealth brother when his every penny had gone and he'd eaten and drunk himself into some fatal disease. Dear Papa had died at the age of fifty-five. Uncle Ned was now eighty-six and going stronger than ever.

  Lily struggled to open the windows. "These rooms are all right, I know. Nanny did them properly just this week. All they need is airing and some flowers."

  "Oh, let me arrange a pretty bouquet for dear Uncle Ned. And there's that big dressing room for his beautiful, beautiful clothes."

  "Violet, doesn't it sometimes strike you that Uncle Ned's clothes are a little silly in this day and age? What would people say if I were to go about in a hobble skirt and buttoned boots?"

  "Oh, but Uncle Ned wears them with such an air!"

  Uncle Ned's suite consisted of an oval sitting room, and octagonal bedroom, a large dressing room and bath, and a room for his valet. It was decorated somewhat more elegantly than most of the guest rooms because even though dear Papa had despised young Ned and his prodigal way of life, Ned's friendship with Edward VII, Lily Langtry, Harry Lehr, Kaiser Wilhelm and other august personalities of the period rather impressed dear Papa and led him to the wan hope of some day entertaining royalty in this very house, in which case Uncle Ned's famous friends could have these rooms and Ned could be housed up in the servants' quarters. Nothing had ever come of dear Papa's plan.

  "And, Lily," Mrs. Clendenning cried from the bedroom, "would you just look at this—an autographed picture of Marie of Roumania. Dear Uncle Ned must have left it behind when he was out here two years ago. Isn't . . ."

  "That's very interesting, Violet, but he has so many pictures of dead people I'm sure he's never missed this one. Now see that the windows are open in there and don't dawdle. We've got a lot to do today." Moving back to the hall, Mrs. Ames said, "I think well put Felicia's young man right here in the blue room."

  "In the blue room, Lily?" Mrs. Clendenning cried. "I'd so hoped we could put Mr. Burgess in the Venetian room: those lovely silvery walls and that beautiful big bed. Pope Clement XIII once slept in it. And poor Felicia is so . . ."

  "The Venetian room indeed! There's a wet spot on one lovely silvery wall as big as your bottom. It's so damp you could raise orchids in there. And as for that bed, it feels as though Pope Clement were still in it. Won't any of you ever realize that this house has gone to rack and . . ."

  "But, Lily, you could have all that fixed. I know a little decorator who does . . ."

  Mrs. Ames turned her blazing eyes on her sister. "Have it fixed? I can't even afford to have my hair fixed. Felicia's Mr. Burgess can just pig it in the blue room. If it was good enough for Theodore Roosevelt it's quite good enough for . . ."

  "Oh, Lily," Mrs. Clendenning said, opening the door of the blue room, "let's not bicker today. It's going to be a lovely, lovely weekend! I know it is. Just like it always was. Just as it was when we were girls."

  Silently the two sisters went about opening up rooms in the bachelors' wing—Uncle Ned's suite, the blue room for John Burgess, the red room for the gentleman who was coming out with Katherine Ames, the green room for the young man who was visiting Eleanor Ames.

  "You'll do the flowers for the men?" Mrs. Ames asked.

  "Oh, I'd love to, Lily!" Mrs. Clendenning gushed.

  "Good. Use up the peonies first. They're beginning to die anyhow."

  "I always feel so sad when the peonies start to go."

  "Don't, Violet. The weeds come to take their place. Now, where shall we put this Miss Devine? Someplace nice, I think. She's Paul's friend. I'd thought of the French room, but of course Felicia's in there."

  "Why not the rose room across from Felicia, Lily? That's sweet."

  "But it's right next to Felicia's children. I'm sure they'd disturb Miss Devine."

  "Nonsense, Lily, they're as good as gold and as quiet as mice. Why, Fraulein was saying to me just yesterday . . ."

  A shrill scream and a burst of voluble German in the second person interrupted Mrs. Clendenning's euphemistic description of her grandchildren.

  "I think I hear one of your golden mice right now, Violet," Mrs. Ames said.

  “Heavens,” Violet cried. She ran to the end of the corridor and threw open the window. "Yoo hoo! Yoo hoo! Emily! Robin! Here I am, darlings! No, look up here. Here's Granny! Emily, darling, stop pummeling your brother so. That's not nice. Emily! Fraulein, will you stop her! Darlings, stop that this minute and Granny will give you something."

  Mrs. Ames was of two minds about her sister's grandchildren. She felt that they were neglected by their mother, spoiled by their grandmother, and badly raised by their fraulein. Mrs. Ames thought that little Emily Choate was a sneak and a bully and as selfish as her mother. Little Robin Choate was, in her opinion, a whiner and sniveler and a thorough-going coward. Yet she envied Violet for having grandchildren and wished that she herself might have some to spoil just as outrageously as Violet did.

&nb
sp; Mrs. Clendenning's scene at the window subsided and she returned, flushed with pleasure to her sister's side. "Oh, the darlings! Carefree young spirits! It's a pity none of your children ever married, Lily."

  "Isn't it!" Mrs. Ames said rather more sharply than she had meant to. "Now if you'll just see to the rose room for Miss Devine, I'll make sure that the children's rooms are aired."

  "Oh, do please hush, Lily. You'll wake Felicia."

  "Wake Felicia? I don't know how a corpse could sleep with you shrieking out of the window that way. Besides, I should think she'd want to get up. It's eleven o'clock."

  "But, Lily, poor Felicia needs her rest. She's exhausted."

  "Exhausted from what? She did nothing but lie on the beach all day yesterday and play solitaire with herself after dinner."

  "I meant emotionally exhausted, Lily. This divorce has dealt her a cruel blow." Violet punctuated her remark with a look of wise martyrdom.

  "I see," Lily said. "Now if you'll just attend to the rose room—very quietly, of course—I'll look after the children's old rooms."

  Mrs. Ames always felt a kind of sadness whenever she went through the rooms where her four children had grown up. These bedrooms were so empty and lonely now, yet she could still feel the presence of her young. Mrs. Ames was glad that her children had flown the nest. She kept telling herself that. She wanted them to have lives of their own—not to cling to her. But when she went through their bedrooms the four of them seemed so far away.

  Eleanor Ames was the youngest and her room was nearest the old nursery where Nanny could keep an eye out for her. Elly's room was—well, it was just impossible, that was the only word for it. Even when it was tidy, as it was now, it was still a mess. It was us irrepressibly Elly as ever, strewn with snapshots of friends, with half-begun collections of fossils and butterflies and coins and matchbooks. Elly's old doll, once a ravishing princess from the Nain Bleu, still sprawled on the bed, her rose complexion pitted and battered, her flowing tresses cropped like a convict's. One arm dangling loosely from her chamois torso; a golden slipper forever lost. On the wall were moth-eaten old pennants from boarding school, camp and college. There was still a nasty spot on the carpet left by the reeking old stray dog smuggled in by Elly in defiance of parental law. The closet was an eyesore.

  How different Katherine's room was; neat, orderly, almost prim. There was a place for everything and everything in its place. Kathy's books were arranged alphabetically by author. The clothes Kathy left in the country hung in military precision in a closet, redolent of sachet. Kathy had four sets of slipcovers and curtains for summer, fall, winter and spring. She had made them all herself and they fit flawlessly. Kathy's room was so snug, so homey that Mrs. Ames felt almost uncomfortable in it. It made her conscious of her own shortcomings as a housewife. "It's a perfect room," she said aloud, "perfect for a bride—or for an old maid."

  Paul was quartered directly across the hall from Kathy and whenever the two were in the house together they were inseparable. Sometimes Mrs. Ames would find Paul in his sister's room. Brother and sister sitting silently. Kathy never sat in Paul's room, however, because there was no place to sit there. Paul's room was like a monk's cell. It was painted white and faced north. It contained a narrow bed, a chest of drawers, a drawing table and stool. The only ornament in the room was a framed drawing of a country house, said to be available to the common man at a price well under twenty thousand dollars. Paul had done the drawing during his last year at Yale Architectural School and it had won him a prize and also a job.

  Well, there was nothing wrong with Paul's room, just as there had been nothing wrong with Kathy's. Mrs. Ames had known that before she even entered them. Now she went into her favorite room. It was Bryan's.

  Mrs. Ames felt a little tingle of pleasure as she stood in the doorway. Mrs. Ames liked things to be right and Bryan's room was the rightest she had ever seen. Bryan had chosen this room himself. It was the largest bedroom in the house. He had chosen the furniture for it, too, picking the loveliest pieces she owned. He had chosen mostly English furniture—the Adam writing table, the Sheraton wardrobe, the Chippendale dwarf chest, the pair of Queen Anne wing chairs. There was a lovely, faded Persian rug on the floor, a pair of Georgian urns, a Copley portrait of a long-dead Pruitt above the mantel. The room was perfect without looking interior-decorated, and like Bryan, it was welcoming and masculine and correct.

  Mrs. Ames felt a motion at her elbow and jumped slightly. "Oh! Oh, Nanny, you did give me a start."

  "Oh, I'm sorry Mrs. Ames," Nanny said. "I was just doin’ up the children's rooms and I noticed that the sheets I put on Mr. Bryan's bed was wearing a little thin. So I said to meself: ‘I'll just switch them with Mr. Paul's, which will be all right with him for he never notices them de-tails. Whereas,’ I said, ‘everything's got to be just so for Mr. Bryan.' And now, if you'll just pardon me, mum, I'll finish up with Bryan's room and go out and watch the men settin' up the fireworks display."

  "Very well, Nanny, and . . . What fireworks display?"

  "Why, Mrs. Ames, all them gigantic fireworks Mrs. Clendenning ordered. There's two men out behind the rose garden settin’ them up now, and . . ."

  "Violet!" Mrs. Ames roared. "Violet Clendenning, come here this instant!" Mrs. Ames strode down the hall to where her sister was plumping lace pillows on the chaise longue in the rose room.

  "Just a moment, Lily dear, I do think a pouf in a lovely sort of mauve would be . . ."

  "What's this I hear about fireworks?"

  "Oh, Lily, I wanted to surprise you . . .”

  "You certainly have!"

  "It's to be my treat. I just got to thinking about the lovely pyrotechnic displays dear Papa used to have over the Fourth and so I just drove over to Bellport to this man who manufactures them and went hog wild over his catalogue. It's going to be divine! We'll have rockets and shooting stars and aerial bombs and girandoles and Catherine wheels and the Niagara Falls . . ."

  "Violet, you really have lost your mind!"

  "And I did want to buy President and Mrs. Eisenhower in amber light, but it takes six men to get them started and they're said to burn out very quickly. So I chose a golden eagle instead. Oh, Lily, the Fourth's going to be just like it always was!"

  "Well, I give up!" Felicia Clendenning Choate gasped as she struggled to a sitting position in the big gold bed in the French room. "It's bad enough to have to spend the livelong summer out in this mausoleum, but what with Robin and Emily screaming all morning and that dreary kraut screaming at them, and Mummy screaming at all of them, and Aunt Lily screaming at Mummy, you can't close an eye!" She poked a cigarette in her mouth and lit it. A bit of live ash fell to the sheet and burned a tiny black hole. "Damn," Felicia growled.

  She reached out and grasped the copy of Vogue which was always at her side. The issue was two months old, but Felicia looked tit it every morning before awakening, every night before retiring, and several times in between. The magazine opened automatically to the full-page photograph of Felicia herself. Although she knew the caption by heart, she read it carefully again.

  Mrs. Clendenning Choate, the former Felicia Clendenning, wears Balenciaga's bouffant ballgown of marvelously murky milkglass coloured peau de soie, spiked with a bold, bold bow of cerise—a perfect foil for her alabaster skin, her ebony hair. Busy Mrs. Choate devotes her time to her children, Robin and Emily; to charity; and to planning perfect little suppers for six in her boîte du bijou of a house in Gracie Square.

  Felicia closed the magazine and blew a cloud of smoke up toward the ceiling. How she hated being stuck out here in Pruitt's Landing with Fraulein and the children and Mummy making a perfect ass of herself twenty-four hours a day! Well, that was just one unpleasant facet of Felicia's life.

  She thought of the Vogue picture again. Mrs. Clendenning Choate. Mrs, Clendenning Choate, indeed. God damn it, I could have been Lady Choate if only everything hadn't been against me.

  Life, Felicia thought, certainly was a lo
use. Even her wedding to an R.A.F. flier got messed up because his leave was canceled and the ceremony had to be performed in City Hall in two minutes flat with no reception at all. The whole affair had been just about as chic as a shotgun wedding. C'est la guerre, indeed!

  But there was more to marriage than just a wedding. Felicia had followed her husband, like a proper war bride, and how had that worked out? Miserably. Four years in ghastly places like Nassau and Bermuda with a lot of frumpy R.A.F. wives knitting balaclavas.

  And after the war, when it was all over, when Felicia had enough money of her own—not to mention Michael's miserable pittance—to live in London with some degree of style, had they done it? No! Here Felicia had dreamed of a trim little Regency house in Mayfair, where Uncle Ned could introduce her to the really smart set. But had she spent so much as a fortnight in London in all the years she was married? She had not! Instead, Michael buried her at his family's place in a chilly provincial county where nobody talked about anything but foals and babies and the only social event was the annual horse show.

  No, life in the Stately Homes of England with your name in Burke's Peerage wasn't all it was cracked up to be. And what breeders those dismal Choates were—never happy unless their wives and mares were pregnant. There'd been a number of scenes about Felicia's having children and finally Michael had tricked her into producing an heir to the title. Then Felicia really put her foot down. Heir to the title! That was a laugh! Felicia thought of the visiting cards she had ordered as a bride:

  Captain, The Honourable Michael and Mrs. Choate

  There had been words with Cartier's about the rightness of this, but Felicia had been firm. Then when it was engraved, in discreet shaded roman, for all the world to see—hinting of distinction and the day when Michael would succeed to the earldom—Michael had tossed the whole lot into the fire. "But my poor darling," he had said, "it's the worst possible form. You never put your honourable on a card. You don't even say it."