Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  Francis let his eyes widen. He reluctantly calculated his own profit, saw the money swelling like a mushroom in a nightmare. The old man frowned and swallowed a very small white pill.

  “What is that?”

  “Nitroglycerine.”

  “Won’t you explode?”

  “It stops the pain in my chest.” A minute passed, then his face relaxed. “The important thing’s to check that first spasm of pain, before a chain reaction sets in. I don’t have any resistance, Francis.” He rose and slipped one thin leg into his trousers, leaning heavily on Louis Leroy.

  Mrs. Cheek came out of the bathroom in her slip, glowing. “God, that felt good! Aha, Benji! Caught you with your pants down! Who’s going to dress me?”

  Louis enacted a brief but expert scene, the recollection of some distant chore. As he withdrew, Mr. Tanning said, “We must try not to offend the pure in heart.”

  “Oh Francis isn’t shocked, are you, Francis?” Irene wriggled and smirked.

  “Certainly not,” he replied. “I’ve often helped my mother get dressed.”

  Mr. Tanning broke into silent laughter.

  “What’s the joke, Benji?” But she was never to know. Far off a door slammed; the sound of women’s voices reached them from the hall. Mrs. Cheek enjoyed a fleeting smile before exclaiming with concern, “Bad news! Guess Irene’s got to make herself decent!”

  She began a prolonged struggle with the green dress, during which the study door was heard to open. “Benjamin, we’ve had such a lovely afternoon! May I intrude?” The tones, ripe and British, were of a cultivation Francis had given up hope to hear at the Cottage. This then would be—what was her unlikely name?—Lady Good. When she appeared in the doorway, tall, gray-haired, gray-eyed, with her proud pleasant fifty-year-old face, Francis could judge how much it hadn’t been Irene’s kiss his father had expected on waking.

  “Prudence,” Mr. Tanning began.

  Her eyes had come to rest on Francis. “It’s only when he says that that I ask myself whether I’m being admonished or merely called by name.” She held out her hand. “I’m Prudence Good. I’m very pleased to meet you, Francis. Your being here will make all the difference for your father.”

  “I hope not,” said Mr. Tanning.

  Lady Good laughed uneasily. “Well, some of the difference, shall we say?”

  “Hello there, Prudy!” Irene called over her shoulder, finishing with a zipper. “How are you? I’m sick about not having seen you till now.”

  “I’m very well, Mrs. Cheek, thank you.”

  “Charlie and I were sunk when you didn’t come over yesterday.”

  “That was most kind of you, but as I don’t play cards I’d just have been in the way.”

  “Well, we missed you. How’s Jamaica? How’s Sir Edward?”

  “Why, he’s having the time of his life, isn’t he, Benjamin?”

  Irene sighed. “You’re so smart, Prudy, to leave him alone for a spell. Any man wants a little vacation now and then.”

  “Ah well, I daresay you’re much wiser in these matters. Yet I don’t know, or rather I do know, that I, poor silly creature, should never think of leaving my husband.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re both here!” gasped Mrs. Cheek, comically peering behind her.

  The rhythm of onlookers at a tennis match had been imposed upon father and son. This was a nice try of Irene’s, but her lob fell short of the net.

  “Yes, Benjamin very sweetly asked us.” Lady Good fingered a sea-green cushion. Addressing no one in particular, she slipped into a vague rapid babble, some British substitute for silent thinking. “As a matter of fact we left Kingston exactly a week ago today, didn’t we? Ned had a lovely holiday here, and set out this morning for two weeks in Washington. He has all kinds of men to talk to. Naturally he hated to go but he couldn’t possibly have afforded a pleasure trip. Poor Ned, one feels the entire welfare of the island rests on his shoulders.” Suddenly she looked up. “Francis, are you coming to Jamaica this winter? We long to have you with us!”

  Whatever her motive, he felt at once that she meant it; it made him like her then and there.

  Her words had a further effect. “It’s nearly six!” Mrs. Cheek exclaimed. “I can’t stay a moment longer!” She did, though, as if not knowing how to get away. The question in all four minds seemed to be whether or not she would kiss Mr. Tanning. Evidently she couldn’t risk it—yet how was she otherwise to leave? Would she just hang her head and slink out? Francis found her predicament strangely touching. How little her Benji had told her, and how much she had to feel her way! Seeing her then as no menace to anybody’s peace of mind, he’d stretched out a hand before he knew what he was up to.

  “Thank you for asking me tomorrow, Irene. I’m looking forward to it.”

  Not expecting help from this quarter, Mrs. Cheek stared at him out of a still deeper daze. Francis might have been a figure dashing from the sidelines to return the last impossible ball; he spoiled the game but he covered her defeat. For a moment it seemed that she would even kiss him. “Splendid, Francis,” she said, “see you then”—adding in a confidential undertone, “Try to get your father to come early.”

  “Goodbye,” said Mr. Tanning jovially.

  And out she went.

  Nobody gloated. Mr. Tanning poured himself another drink.

  “I had such a lovely afternoon,” said Lady Good at length. “Natalie and I did the shops. My, they have lovely things. I saw one dress I’d die for, except that I’d never have an occasion to wear it. Then I drove her to the Yacht Club for tea. Did you have a nice nap, Benjamin dear?”

  There came over Francis a beautiful sense of leisure and spaciousness. Above all, he felt he’d had a hand in bringing it to pass. Slowly revolving the small gold ring on his finger, he smiled to remember (and smiled to think how this had slipped his mind at the time) Vinnie’s reaction to it. She had, on seeing the ring, let out a little groan of distaste. How could he? It looked so eccentric, a child’s ring, the way he wore it, couldn’t he have it made larger? And please would he not wear it to his father’s house, for her sake? Yes, and precisely then his feeling of stifling boredom had arisen. “You were wrong,” he wanted absurdly to tell her, “it doesn’t matter here, one way or the other, we are all eccentrics here, it’s what keeps us likable.” Outside a light wind ruffled the dune-grass, the sea beyond had turned rose and silver. He felt at peace for the first time since his return to America.

  The best was yet to come. “Well, I shall leave you two alone,” said Lady Good. “Francis musn’t think you have a lot of silly women in your hair. Natalie and I have received instructions, Francis, to dine elsewhere this evening. I shall get my first taste of the Inn.”

  “I don’t envy you,” said Mr. Tanning. “Where’s your new dress?”

  “What new dress? The one I saw in the village? I presume it’s still in the shop-window.”

  “And why, pray?”

  “Well, as I said, Benjamin, I’d have no occasion to wear it. Besides, it was probably much too dear.”

  “Oh I see.” The old man winked at Francis. “She’s already forgotten what color it was.”

  “It was a mass of blue and gray and white chiffon,” Lady Good rapturously began, “cut rather low in back with a—oh, you’re making fun of me, Benjamin! What sort of woman will Francis take me for?” She had at last understood that Mr. Tanning was about to offer to buy her the dress. “I know what’s in your mind and I’ll not have it! Just because, whilst you were napping, I innocently amused myself on Main Street, I will not be put in this position. My answer is a pleasant but firm ‘No thank you!’” She finished with a toss of her head, looking highly pleased.

  “Sit down,” said Mr. Tanning. She did so. “Would you mind telling me what you’re talking about?”

  Realizing then that he hadn’t after all made the offer, Lady Good blushed and stammered. Her confusion, which knew no bounds, was so direct a result of the threat to her pride that Francis,
no less than his father, found her irresistible.

  “Never fear, my love,” Mr. Tanning grinned. “Heaven will protect the working girl.”

  “Oh Francis,” she sighed, “what are we to do? I fear we have to get along, in order to please your father. But now that you’ve seen the hopeless creature I am, I can’t blame you for thinking what you will of me. Shall we even be able to talk about books, I wonder? You look like the sort of person who prefers Eliot to Christopher Fry.”

  “I do,” said Francis. “So that I imagine,” he nodded towards his father, “we’ll have to talk about him. That ought to please everybody concerned.”

  This was the happiest stroke. It set Benjamin to beaming. Lady Good got up and kissed them both, awkwardly, tenderly. All three appeared to feel a bit flattered and safe.

  5. “What am I supposed to do with this?” inquired Mr. Tanning. A silver pillbox had been set beside his coffee-cup.

  Louis Leroy broke into a little shuffling dance. “Miss McBride, she gave them to me. May be she wants you to swallow them?” He showed surprise when this answer proved acceptable, and reluctantly left them alone in the dim curtained dining room, with sea sounds in their ears.

  “I wonder what Louis thinks of us,” said Francis.

  Mr. Tanning swallowed two red pills before telling an illustrative story. His answers to many questions took the form of parables. The young man saw himself as a neophyte listening to some expert ancient.

  Two winters before, Mr. Tanning and his valet had arrived in Jamaica to find no room for Louis in the Cheeks’ bungalow. Irene’s butler recommended a small hotel in Kingston, from which to commute by bus. Later, a rooming-house down the road from the Cheeks advertised a vacancy, but Louis had by then learned to enjoy town living. Mr. Tanning laughed and shook his head. “The hotel wasn’t a hotel at all. At least Mr. Leroy had been such a distinguished guest that the proprietress hadn’t even been charging him for his room.”

  “So he didn’t move?”

  “Oh yes, he moved.”

  Francis lit a cigarette from the candle in front of him. Was there a point to the story?

  Finally Mr. Tanning went on. “A month passed and I moved, too. I moved because the Cheeks’ house wasn’t big enough. But I told Irene that Louis Leroy had set me an example I was ashamed not to follow. By God, I didn’t think she’d ever forgive me!”

  Francis thought it was very funny, and said so.

  “I thought it was funny, too,” Mr. Tanning said, “but the Buchanans didn’t. They’re highly sensitive. They don’t want their daughters to grow up believing Grandpa was a Casanova.”

  It seemed to Francis, who had been thinking how nice that the old man could talk as if still capable of amorous exploits, nicer yet of Enid and Larry to take them seriously. Not for a moment did he suppose they were really to be taken so; Francis’s idea of physical love was a violent one, a matter of anguish, lies, recriminations.

  The idea needed to be distinguished from that of mere sex, which was after all what Mr. Tanning talked about, at merry length. He seldom talked about his wives. These, presumably, he had loved, deeply but cheerlessly, while turning, banal as it sounded, to other women for companionsip and fun. To Natalie Bigelow, for instance, whose presence before dinner, curled on the sofa between Francis and Lady Good, spoke louder than any word of her host’s. Longer than anybody she had been younger than anybody. Even now just the faintest puckering of her wonderful unimpaired face, the contours stippled rather than etched, her over-intricate hair and its unlikely tint, the small searching movements of her head and hands, hinted that of her threescore years and ten, sixty would not come again. She lived like a churchmouse in a closet on Lexington Avenue. It was too divine, she whispered, to be back at the Cottage; she wouldn’t leave till Ben threw her out. She asked so little and it meant so much—breakfast on a tray, a cocktail before dinner, the blessed certainty of dinner itself. What Ben asked, it appeared, was simply that she be there, lovely and going blind, to acknowledge his own long easy loyalty to the good times they’d had. Natalie had outlasted Vinnie and Fern. Had she known Benjamin that early in life, she would have outlasted Harriet, too. From this a lot could be deduced about her, even more about the wives.

  Mr. Tanning sipped his coffee and began yet another story. “Harriet was in New Jersey one summer with Enid. I’d spend the week in town with Howie Burr at an apartment he shared with one Warren Durdee.”

  “That’s the man I met in Rome!” Francis interrupted. “He said he was a friend of yours.”

  “I’m surprised to hear it. We couldn’t stand the sight of each other. He was younger than Howie or me and the biggest stuffed shirt on Wall Street. Whenever we’d bring a couple of girls up to the apartment half the fun was to lay them on Warren’s bed. Howie and I developed this system. We’d get home from the office and sleep five hours or so, then shave, put on dinner-jackets, and go out on the town. By that hour every pretty girl in New York had had all she could eat or drink, and was bored to hell with her escort—some rich old poop who could hardly keep his eyes open. Like your loving father now. We’d go to the bar and lay bets on the ones we could make. Howie lost a lot of money both ways, on the ones I made and the ones he didn’t. God damn,” Mr. Tanning shook with laughter, “one night Paul Whittaker (who became President of Southwestern Stores) drove Howie and me and these three girls out to somebody’s vacant cottage in Rye. Along about the fourth bottle of champagne Howie’s girl said she was going to bed. Alone. There were just two bedrooms in the house. She took one, Paul and his girl took the other, so I—”

  Louis had reappeared. Mrs. Buchanan had driven over, wanting to know could she see them.

  “Tell her we’ll be right there.” Mr. Tanning’s mood had broken. He stared now into the candle-flame wooed by a reeling moth; his eyes filled with tears. “Francis,” he said, “the first time I was unfaithful to your mother I went home and cried all night long.”

  “Don’t tell me things like that!” Francis spoke before he knew what he was saying. These were things he wanted to know. “I mean,” he added quickly, “unless it helps you to say them, or …”

  “It doesn’t help me to say them.”

  “I’ve come, I mean, so much to feel that she must have been a difficult person, even then.” Francis, blowing out both candles, faltered in the gloom. “That, having thought always of you as the one at fault …” But his words still moved in advance of his thinking; he couldn’t go on.

  They gazed in bewilderment at one another.

  Once years before, at dinner with his father, Francis had tasted mangoes for the first time. “What delicious mangoes!” he recalled exclaiming affectedly. And Mr. Tanning had replied with a smile, “How would you know?” It seemed to apply now. “Tell me, tell me then!” the young man might have cried, wondering at the same time, miserably, what he needed to hear. Some word of reassurance, yes, some sign from the one who had lived so much, to show that life was no prerogative of his own—that it might equally be the road he, Francis, traveled. Just at this point, however, behind every clear look and guileless anecdote, he felt his father saying, “Show me your life, first, the way I show you mine. How else can I give you my view of it?” Ah, but what life to show? He had chattered about Jane and Allori, impressions of landscape, comic mishaps, fatigues. Was this all he could produce, the poor furniture of his two dozen years? No piece of it had met with an acknowledgment of value. Mr. Tanning’s vacant pauses seemed rather to overflow with misgivings as to what could be said in the face of such poverty.

  “… I begin to see, I mean,” Francis tried to find his way, “the part she must have played, the part she may still be playing. Does that make sense? Did you ever feel something of that in her, a remoteness?” He rose from his chair. “A self-sufficiency?”

  Mr. Tanning had waited for him to finish. “It’s a mistake to simplify,” he said.

  Francis took it as a clue. “The first time, then, it wasn’t with Natalie?”

>   “No, it wasn’t. I don’t know why it wasn’t, except that your mother had always suspected Natalie in particular. I was very fond of Natalie, she’d had a hard time. One day Vinnie found a letter from her, a perfectly innocent, lovely letter. Women can be really cruel when they have an easy victim.”

  “I’m glad she’s here with you,” said Francis, his fingers on the table, looking deep into its smooth dark. “Shall we go to Enid?”

  Mr. Tanning smiled gently. “Don’t you think it’s strange that you and I should be so lonely? I’ve been lonely all my life, and I think you will be, Sonny. I guess we’re just made that way.”

  “It’s a mistake to simplify,” said Francis, hoping that his father would laugh. He didn’t.

  Enid was waiting in the ocean room.

  Her call would have been the most ordinary thing in the world, except that from the outset she created, in spite of herself, a complex impression. She rose with her lilting laugh to kiss them, then at once returned to her chair in innocent confusion, as if remembering how carefully she was dressed, how scented and combed, a pink tourmaline at her throat, and wanting them suddenly not to notice. She threw round her shoulders a light “daytime” sweater, she pulled knitting out of a bag—some tiny garment all rose and white—but the easy effect failed, proved merely the lengths she would go in order to play it simple. “I don’t feel I need to be so formal,” Enid began, after explaining that Larry was dead tired from his week at the office. “If I’ve peeked in at the wrong moment, just say the word.”

  Mr. Tanning cleared his throat. “I’d rather see you than anybody I know, Enid. You ought to have learned that by now.”

  “Mercy me!” she cried, her eyes shining. “Such complimentary remarks! Actually,” she went on, “we’d hoped to coax everybody over tomorrow afternoon, but when I talked to Natalie this morning she said you were already engaged.”

  “It’s no mystery,” said her father. “We’ve been asked to the Cheeks’ tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Yes, Natalie told me.” Enid was very gay about it. She chatted on and on, mostly to Francis, never dropping a stitch. What had been his favorite restaurant in Rome and did he know of a good tailor there (she and Larry were thinking of a trip next Easter) and weren’t the Italian people cheerful attractive little souls? Outside it had begun to rain. Wasn’t it cozy, the three of them sitting together? And what did Francis think of the changes she’d made at the Cottage? Why, it looked lovely, he said—and was startled to see her blush with pleasure. So he went on, beyond plain sociability, to praise as much as he could, the grouping of chairs, the texture of fabrics. He felt himself going too far, but Enid drank it in, nodding agreement, pointing out things he might have missed. The ocean room, she confessed, still needed thought. Well, he was sweet to say so, but it did. And she was thinking, yes indeed, she had schemes up her sleeve! Francis had the oddest notion of being appealed to, all unconsciously on her part—Enid had never in her life entertained an ulterior motive. From time to time, however, she interrupted herself to ask Mr. Tanning if she’d remembered to tell him how many thousands of dollars her committee had raised for the Hospital, or whom she’d run into on the street the other day, or what progress Lily had made with her tennis lessons. Until at last Francis guessed what the matter was.