Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  It was a shop filled with antiquities, which he and Jane had often visited together. They would squint at intaglios, coins, terra-cotta oil-lamps, fragments of pots and statuary, and at length, no purchase made, smile wistfully into the dim corner where the fat old proprietor sat, conveying to him that his things were very fine but, alas, very costly. They were rarely either, to Francis’s mind. But the game amused him.

  He played it, however, in a different spirit this afternoon. After greeting the old man and reassuring him that no harm had come to the Signorina, Francis bent over glass cases, peered up at shelves, in an almost fearful excitement. The objects seemed to have come alive, to be trembling with the possibility of his possessing them. By the end of a half-hour in which he had smoked three cigarettes, he asked if there was anything he hadn’t seen.

  The old man made a show of thought, then rose with a wheeze to open a cupboard behind him. Francis watched, elated. He felt in his bones that a treasure would appear.

  A big box was placed on the counter. “Since today you are alone,” said the old man craftily, and opened it. “Ecco, signore!”

  Inside, carelessly thrown together, were perhaps a hundred phalluses, of clay, of marble, some primitive—the old man chose one of these and held it high, croaking, “Etruscan! Votive!”—others (“Roman! Artistic!”) monumental and detailed, evidently chipped from sculpture under whichever Pope had been responsible for fig-leaves. Was it Urban? Or Innocent? Francis stared into the box, his mind blank. Then, coming to himself, “Ah no,” he said. “Questo non é interessante.”

  The shopkeeper courteously ignored this remark. What he had in mind, Francis explained in his clumsy Italian, was something small, precious, something that he might offer as a gift, yes, to the Signorina.

  Had the old man understood? What gift more precious? He might have been musing, as with a quizzical smile he made a third selection, this one winged and erect. “Porta fortuna!” he nodded, and Francis lost his temper.

  How exasperating, how Italian, the old man was! Porta fortuna, indeed!—the phrase served up in connection with any miserable accident. You had only to stumble and fall upon slimy cobblestones, or break a glass and have to pay for it, and up would come a crone or a smiling waiter to observe that the misfortune was sure to bring you good luck. Why, your own grandmother might die, or yourself, a little black bug of a priest shutting your eyes—from nowhere the dry voice would be heard: porta fortuna!

  “That ring, for instance,” Francis icily pointed it out, “please show it to me,” and shut his eyes until he felt it resting in his palm. It looked Greek, of soft gold, with an owl in relief, and very small, a child’s ring, found in the grave of a dead child. It barely fitted over the first joint of his third finger, and would not be dislodged, causing his hand to suggest a detail from some Renaissance portrait. “How much does it cost?”

  Being gold, and of the fourth century, it could be had—the old man calculated, dissembling his stupefaction, the sale by now certain—for no less than fifty thousand lire.

  “Here is forty thousand. Va bene?”

  “Ma, signore mio—!” A wheedling note, a rolling back of eyes.

  “Very well!” cried Francis, who loathed haggling but felt called upon to do it in Europe. He caught with pleasure the old man’s look of frustration, that of an actor whose finest scene has been struck from the script. Throwing down the five implausible bills, rose and umber with protraits of Dante, Francis added, “I am leaving at once for America!”

  What had passed in the shop seemed to have removed any alternative. He hurried out into the dazzling square.

  And in the taxi, and on the train to Naples, his back to fountain and cypress; throughout the nightmare of customs, squabble and tip; and before falling at last asleep in his gently rocking cabin, he found that it soothed him to study the ring. The hand that wore it lay relaxed all night under the coarse pillow, gathering up each dream of touching or rejecting that Francis, awake, tried not to entertain.

  3. “Run into the next room, dearest, and bring me a little cushion. Oh my, there I go! You couldn’t have been more than six, the day you said to me, ‘Mummy, running’s not so easy as you make it sound.’ Thank you, I’ll fix it. It goes in the small of my back. Oh, and while you’re up, if you wouldn’t mind emptying your ashtray—that’s a good boy.

  “But I didn’t want you to know that I’d been ill. It was too pathetic in the first place, catching measles at my age. I still haven’t thought how it happened. I hadn’t been anywhere, I hadn’t kissed any children. No, if I felt you’d come back to New York on my account, well, I’d never have forgiven myself. I didn’t need you. And luckily you were so occupied with your own affairs that you thought nothing of those weeks in which I wasn’t up to writing more than a line. I know that sounds full of self-pity but it’s not meant that way. I’m honestly and truly glad that you weren’t worried. It’s a sign that we have a normal friendly relationship. Didn’t I write you, when you first went to Europe, the things Annette Woodruff said to me? ‘I just don’t understand,’ she said, ‘how you can let Francis go away like this. He’s all you have!’ Now there’s a woman with four children, all of them married, with families. She spends at least two months out of the year with each child. I’ve never wanted to be that kind of mother and I hope you’ll let me know the day you catch me at it. I said that to Annette. I said, ‘Francis is a grown man now, old enough to do as he thinks best. I will never interfere with his life. The only reward I want is the gratitude and respect I get from him, for knowing how to leave him absolutely alone.’

  “There’s a nice letter from Annette on the dresser. You can read it and tear it up before you go. I’ve answered it.

  “It’s perfectly true, at one time I did need you. I needed all the help I could get. And you helped me, way beyond your twelve years—I want you to believe that. You’ll remember also, I never kept you from visiting your father whenever you wished. It was your own sweetness, Son, that decided you to spend so much time with me. I did my best to make it easy for you. Did you once see me shed a tear, that whole time? And I know now that I was right, seeing how close you and your father have grown. He’s a very sick and a very unhappy man, Francis. He needs all the love you can give him. I forgave him long ago.

  “That life was never for me. People still stay, ‘Oh Vinnie, how can you bear living in this little hole, all alone, after those years in that beautiful house full of servants and friends?’ For the longest time nobody’d believe that I liked it. ‘At least move back to Savannah,’ they’d say, ‘where your friends are.’ And always wanting me to meet some charming new man. No thank you! If the finest man in the world proposed to me, I’d turn him down. I can read as late as I like, get up when I’m good and ready. There’s that little hot-plate in the pantry where I can cook rice or grits or an egg. You may not believe it, but I’ve found peace of mind more precious than riches. I feel sorry for Ben now, from the bottom of my heart.

  “You’d better prepare yourself for a great shock tomorrow, when you go out to the Cottage. He didn’t stop in town last month, on his way through, but I wrote you about the evening we had in the fall. Of course we went to Pavilion, and I doubt that he ate three mouthfuls. Oh, he got a little tight and started in on how he’d always love me. You know, the old story. I just smiled and squeezed his hand. You could see he was at the end of his strength. How he survived the winter I don’t know. He told Larry Buchanan years ago that he literally couldn’t bear up under the strain of a divorce from Fern. And now, just when you’d think he’d really settle down, want to live quietly and simply—suddenly there’s Irene Cheek and Natalie Bigelow and this new Englishwoman who latched onto him in Jamaica, all fussing over him, giving him that false flattery he thrives on! I thank God you’re not susceptible to it, Son. You’re one of the most level-headed people I know.

  “Why can’t people learn to face the truth? I didn’t have to let these gray streaks show. But believe me, if I began touc
hing them up, I’m the one who’d be fooled. Those other women are so pathetic!

  “Run along now, you have a lot to do. Give Daddy my love and have a nice long visit with him. Do get a haircut, as a favor to me, will you? And don’t worry. I’ll be on my feet in a day or two. I love my presents. And it’s,” she kissed him, “so wonderful to have you back. Wait! I put some lipstick on your chin. Bend down, I’ve a Kleenex right here.”

  These were a few of the things Francis’s mother said to him on the occasion of their first meeting in over two years. Glancing back from her bedroom door, he saw that she had already put on her glasses and reopened her book, squaring her shoulders as she began to read. It was a gesture he had forgotten, and it touched him as much as any she had made all afternoon.

  Not that he had been touched, to speak of. He lingered still in the daze of having arrived, of taxis, telephones, the enchanting summer city, the sickening costly hotel. Houses were being demolished. Women on street-corners were describing to one another their first experiences in Italian restaurants. Beyond all this, his customary response to his mother—and Francis marveled only at how soon he had felt it operate, once settled in the little needlepoint chair beside her chaise longue—was a silence no less marked than her own talkativeness. Both silence and talk, furthermore, hinted at states of mind not easily enlarged upon. Forbearance? Disillusion?—the words flickered and went out. And yet, on first sight of her, kissing her at the dim door, hadn’t he felt like talking? And hadn’t she listened? Her eyes followed him about the small room, her laugh met his own. Admiringly she caressed the scarves and gloves he had brought her. Francis had a pleasant sense of being too big for her bedroom, of ornaments rattling as he tramped about; and not till now, strolling down Madison Avenue, was he able even to put the question of how thirty months of enviable experience could have, in as many minutes, evaporated. It wasn’t right. There all at once he sat, as countless times before, bored, smoking, defacing the motto in her French ashtray—“Quise mari pour l’amour A bonnes nuits et mauvais jours”—while Mrs. Tanning talked.

  Her soft Southern voice, even if she had been speaking gibberish, would have declared, “I am the voice of a companionable, sensible, well-bred woman of fifty-one, without affectations or illusions. I have never been raised in anger or stilled by passion.” Despite traces of illness (she’d been “delicate” since Francis’s birth) her face confirmed these words, a face both sweet and ascetic, but wanting in subtlety. In her circle of friends, which had contracted over the years, she passed for the most knowing, the most fastidious, as well as the one with a degree of moral fortitude that sustained her through readings of “strong” novels in the modern manner, military memoirs, terse transatlantic reviews of current affairs. This same fortitude had allowed her, at dinners during the last war, darkly to predict a struggle of fifteen or twenty years, while every other woman at the table, to whom The White Cliffs of Dover stood for literature and Ernie Pyle for the unvarnished truth, could only murmur, saucer-eyed at Mrs. Tanning’s tough-mindedness, “Oh but surely, Vinnie, it can’t go on like this!” At which she would turn, faintly shrugging, to what might have been—and in those days of sacrifice frequently was—a smoking dish of entrails.

  Upon Xenia’s remark that he never spoke of his parents Francis had first felt a guilty twinge, then obliged her with several thousand words concerning his father. Concerning Vinnie, however, what was there for him to say? It didn’t help to remember that she had once been a beautiful young woman, giving herself up, with something more humorous than her present resignation, to the wearing of Paris dresses and oblong jewels. The dresses had long since been cut down for goddaughters; the jewels waited in a vault for Francis’s bride. This was but a bit of the baggage Mrs. Tanning had cast off, as on some lonely trek into high clear wastes. She hadn’t even wanted alimony. The major part of it accumulated unspent.

  In the eyes of others her life had been sown with sand, and Benjamin Tanning would at once have agreed repentantly that he had done it single-handed. But such a view took no account of Vinnie’s own will, which, in this or any matter, rose cool and tall from the insufficient ground. It was thus she could touch Francis, even with envy. Squaring her shoulders, opening her book, she had affected him as living on where life itself had ceased—or been so lived, so used, that nothing was left but the past and the vantage from which she saw it, perfect, remote, hers. Would a time ever come when he could mount his own tall pillar, subsist on honey and locusts, with not a pang of regret? The sky burned above him, he moved under rustling trees set in the pavement. Oh, to have lived!

  Such thoughts weren’t meant to be put into words. But what else to say about her? Well of course, she did leave him alone, and he was grateful. There was that much to say. Probably she loved him, too—would she otherwise show all that concern for his appearance, his untrimmed hair, the stain on his cuff, each little conscious irregularity? “You see!”—entering the barber-shop, he flung out his hand to an imaginary Xenia—“I don’t speak of her because I can’t! I begin talking like a child, I stop making sense!”

  4. The train was a scandal, its cars sooty and comfortless, no water in the toilets. It stopped repeatedly in full country for minutes at a time. Nobody knew why. Francis pictured the engine’s aged metal face turned aside in order to be sick along the tracks.

  At last he descended, perspiring, stickers fluttering showily from his suitcases onto the humble platform. A high sweet voice called his name, and there was Enid. How lovely of her to come to the station, thought Francis and said so, kissing her. But he hadn’t foreseen the touch of gray in her hair—how old was she? thirty-four? thirty-six? Her face looked tired, too, for all its rose and tan against lavender linen. Well, she was pregnant; that explained a lot.

  “I couldn’t miss my baby brother’s homecoming!” she declared. “How well you look! Lily, would you have known your uncle?”

  “This can’t be Lily!” he thought of saying, having heard it often enough himself.

  The child gave him a stricken smile.

  “How well you look, Enid!”

  “Me? I’m an old bag!” Her laugh ran up and down a tiny scale. “Now, my pearl,” she continued, “that we’ve got the credit for meeting you, I must break the grim news.”

  “There’s Daddy!” cried Lily, and ran towards him.

  Had Larry been on the train? Was that Enid’s grim news? “I wish I’d known,” said Francis, genuinely dismayed. He had had something important to talk over with his brother-in-law. Still wondering, and with his mouth open to ask who, since Enid was meeting Larry, had come to meet him, Francis caught sight of his father’s colored valet, Louis Leroy. The latter, bald, beaming, cap in hand—Louis Quinze, Leroy Soleil, such names did justice to his exquisite good humor—trotted up with words of welcome. Then Lily returned, followed by Larry laughing, “Well I’ll be damned! When you weren’t in the Pullman I assumed you’d missed the train!”

  Had there been a Pullman? “You see,” Francis told them, bravely grinning, “I’ve got so used to traveling third class. It’s the one way to know a country.”

  He waited for them to laugh, but Enid only reached for Lily’s hand—protectively? “What are we going to do about your uncle?” she marveled. “He’s just too Bohemian for words!”

  “And you know this country,” Lily reminded him.

  “That’s all right, Francis, you do what you want. I always say, though,” said Larry, not quite accurately—it was Mr. Tanning who often said it—“there’s no such thing as a bargain. Not when you’re traveling, or eating, or buying clothes.”

  Louis Leroy said nothing. However, taking up Francis’s suitcases, he started a movement towards “his” pearl-gray limousine.

  Francis’s remark had been so much his kind of joke that the Buchanans’ responses perplexed him. It occurred to him that, just as in Europe he had more and more taken for granted their kinship with him, they might have developed a real uncertainty as to his place in a
ny world of theirs. Well, there was always the bond of blood. But as he squirmed a bit under their tactful scrutiny, he felt a hesitation about even the bond of blood. He hoped he wouldn’t have to test it too soon; he didn’t want it snapping in his face like old string.

  From the car window he asked when he would see them again.

  “Whenever you like,” said Enid promptly. “We have no special plans. Tonight you’ll be having dinner with Daddy, won’t you? Tomorrow, let me see—you go to the Cheeks for cocktails ….”

  “Perhaps I’ll see you there?”

  “Don’t count on it,” said Larry.

  “No,” Enid added, “the little Buchannibals have turned into homebodies. Give me a ring in the morning, sweetie, and let me know when you’re free.”

  “All right …”

  He must have looked mystified. “Oh, you have a lot of surprises in store for you, Francis my lad!” shouted Larry as the huge engine started. All three Buchanans were left behind, waving.

  “What does he mean?” asked Francis. But Louis Leroy, though visibly tickled by any word addressed to him, didn’t lend himself to soundings of this sort. The effect was less of discretion than of simple deference; Louis had never learned, or had modestly forgotten, how to make his own view of things noteworthy. He shifted the talk to the weather, to Francis’s health. He sped past many a landmark, supposing rightly—if he supposed at all—that his passenger’s curiosity would be caught up by them, old familiar sights, the Common, the cannon, the plaque commemorating three centuries of peaceful village life. Further on, the monstrous shingled houses began, and the glorious trees. The car slowed down, passed between two columns capped with beasts bearing shields, and at the end of a winding gravel drive stopped. Francis let himself be helped out, the wiser for Louis’s illustration of how things were done in his father’s house.