Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

“I know.” Jane looked away. She wasn’t going to tell Francis about the letter she’d written meanwhile.

  “Perhaps Roger and your parents are planning a surprise wedding in Council Bluffs,” he offered after a solemn pause.

  “Ah me,” she broke into giggles, “I do love you.”

  “I love you too.” They felt at home in the lightness of it. Soon he was asking her again, “Isn’t it a relief, seriously, to be back where you belong?” But again she hesitated, as if without Roger she hadn’t much to belong to. Francis pursed his lips; he would tell her, later on, what he thought of Roger. He’d never liked irresponsible people. Picturing Roger at the age of fourteen, he saw him as a bully and a cheat with a heavy sneering look that wouldn’t yet have left his face. Francis quite understood why Jane carried no photograph of Roger, just as he would never understand why she was engaged to him. Probably there was some perverse physical attraction—in which case, however, she would have carried a photograph. More likely, she had seen in Roger her only chance.

  Along with his resentment of a perfect stranger Francis experienced a growing compassion for Jane. “Elle l’a voulu,” he tried to think, but it made no difference. Deserted, unwanted, wondering (while bravely painting her lips) what was to become of her, she showed at her very best—bereft but trustworthy. Francis admired women who didn’t weep and men who openly, like his father, did. Six months ago, perhaps, Jane would have wept. She was changing now, as if learning the rules of an intricate game.

  They played it by asking each other a hundred questions. He told her, in part, the story behind his little Greek ring, which she had pounced on and called a treasure. She described Xenia’s adventures during the crossing—one unbroken adventure, rather, of drowsing all day on deck and carousing all night on the first-class dance floor. Jane still didn’t really like Xenia, but supposed Mr. Tanning would. Oh, and Mrs. Cheek, how was she? Francis sketched in the developments, watching her grow more lively by the minute. “I really don’t care any more,” she said—it struck him as her most expert move thus far—“if Roger comes or not. You don’t believe me? All right, just wait—look what I have!” She plunged her hand into a crammed purse and brought out a flask half full of something colorless. “You may think it’s holy water,” Jane told him, “but taste it!” It was grappa. Without further ado they polished it off.

  “Why marry Roger?” said Francis. “Why not marry me?”

  “You’re not an art historian. We take vows not to marry outside the Field. Now where,” Jane turned from his amusement, “could that suitcase be?”

  “At least,” Francis pursued, “we can spend today together. You have nowhere to go immediately, have you?” He went on in great good humor. There were sights in the city that he had to show her—churches, ruins, the vast rectangular voids of sunlight and noise and dust which marked wherever you looked the disappearence of yet another landmark fifty years old. Why, he proposed gaily, he’d even take her to see his mother; she was over fifty and still standing, sound as a bell.

  Jane bit her lip. “I have no friends in New York, no place to stay.”

  “Neither do I.” This was true. Vinnie certainly had no room; he wouldn’t have stayed there if she had. And the three or four friends who did have couches—friends to whom Francis had announced his return by casual postcards from the Cottage—presented other problems. They had written him, during the past year, a kind of letter he hadn’t known how to answer. He was half in earnest when he blamed them for it—for lectures on laziness and not facing things. “So I’ll go to a hotel,” he shrugged, having pretended to Jane that he had already called his friends and failed to catch them at home.

  “It’s only Thursday,” she said. “Wouldn’t they be at work?”

  “At what?”

  “Don’t they have jobs?” Jane wondered. “All my friends do.”

  Francis looked uneasily away. “Well, most of mine don’t. And not,” he added, wishing to be scrupulous, “because they’re in my position. No, they paint, or write …. They live in lofts ….”

  “Oh,” said Jane, who had planned, with or without Roger, to have found at least a part-time job by mid-August. “And are you very fond of them?”

  “No, I can’t say that I am.” Upon which they stared with interest at one another. Things began to happen. Sprightly music sounded in the distance. Jane’s missing suitcase was delivered. The sticker had come unstuck, an old man in overalls explained; he had had to read the writing on the tag. They thanked him. Jane ran off and returned with a customs inspector, who cast hardly a glance at her luggage. She was free to go. Francis whistled for a porter. “But really, though,” he resumed, “can’t we please spend this lovely day together? We’ll get rooms in a hotel. It’ll be like Italy. We’ll go out and look around. I must buy clothes and a toothbrush. Would that amuse you? Are you listening?”

  “I’m listening,” said Jane, gazing backwards. They had started to follow their porter the length of the dim resounding pier.

  “It’s so strange, so good to see you. I feel—”

  “No, Francis!” she broke in sharply; he saw a face no longer familiar—“this isn’t Rome, let’s not pretend! Here you have people who put claims on you. I want to say that you don’t need to be nice to me. Our friendship is too important, it mustn’t become a burden to you.”

  “Burden?” Francis smiled in amazement. She seemed to be struggling so, just when he had never felt more confident. “You’re wrong.” He stopped in his tracks, discovering the truth as he spoke it. “I feel I can talk to you, I feel really at ease. I think I’m tired of grown-ups. I’ve been with them so much, I understand them so little. I seem to have to protect them from one another. Don’t ask me why. Anyhow, a day like this comes as a blessing.”

  Jane blinked and blushed and brightened. She took his arm and, whispering, “Thank you,” put herself gently in his care. The oddest part of their walking, then, down the long pier into their day, kept on being the way Francis, who felt as never before that he didn’t know where he was, that he had no point of reference, felt also as never before a calm, a sure-ness about—well, about whatever he might be up to. It was as if Innocence and Experience had each, slyly, sweetly, put on the other’s clothes. By sundown he would have fallen in love with Jane, just like that.

  But she gave a cry, there on the very threshold of the city.

  Roger. She had seen, among the faces behind the barrier, Roger. “Oh Francis,” she gasped, “tell me what to do!”

  “Are you crazy?” he laughed. “Your problems are solved! Now don’t feel that you need to be nice to me!” He was pleased to have thought of echoing her own words. It made the game end in something closer to a draw.

  Jane faced him, but for no more than an instant before rushing onward into her young man’s arms. Taking his time over joining them, Francis observed with a certain amusement that Roger Massey had a pleasant intelligent face, neither brutal nor stupid. Jane was sure to be very happy with him.

  She had done well to have her blood-test on the ship. For now they could be married the next day, at City Hall. Roger, it emerged, had formed a plan to fit any set of circumstances.

  They would leave immediately after the ceremony, for Cambridge, where he had a lead on an apartment. Time was short. He had this job teaching summer school near Hartford—a friend was taking his classes today and tomorrow. No, there wasn’t room for Jane at the school, but weekends were better than nothing, and think how rich they’d be by September! He kissed her happily on the brow. To Francis he was extremely cordial. “You’ll be our witness tomorrow, I hope?” Francis said he would be delighted. There was no evidence, and indeed no feeling, of rivalry on either side.

  Jane could not stop crying. Francis understood the shock of it for her; however, in respect to the tears that streamed down her pink cheeks, whether they were of joy or of some private dismay, he refused for the time being to consider. Nor did he ask himself what might have happened if Roger hadn’t shown
up. After all, it was on Roger’s shoulder that she wept, while Francis, hailing a taxi, tipping the porter, lapsed with relief into common helpfulness.

  8. From his hotel that afternoon, exhausted by shopping, Francis telephoned Larry Buchanan. They made an appointment for the next day, down at the office. He wanted to discuss an idea that had begun to tantalize him, one to which the formal setting of walnut and leather, fifty floors above the street, would be wholly appropriate.

  He then called his mother and accepted her invitation to share a “pickup” supper. When, in the course of this, Francis outlined the day ahead of him, Mrs. Tanning guessed he’d already heard the splendid news about Larry.

  “I don’t think so. What news?”

  “How do you expect to keep up with things,” she sighed, “if you won’t read the paper?” Not asking whether he wanted it, she transferred her untasted sandwich to Francis’s plate, plugged in the electric coffeepot, and read the article aloud.

  It announced that Tanning, Burr, “the largest and most progressive, if not the only firm of its kind in the world,” would henceforth be known as Tanning, Burr and Buchanan, in recognition of Larry’s accomplishments. Simultaneously, two more offices were being opened, one in Oregon, one in Rangoon. “All that expansion is Larry’s doing,” Vinnie added approvingly.

  “I know,” said Francis. “I take it as the worst possible sign. Everything nowadays is doomed to depersonalization. The bigger you get, the more inevitable it is.”

  “You’ve never been fond of Larry.”

  “That’s not fair. I like Larry very much as a person. I can’t get excited over what he stands for.”

  By “Larry as a person” Francis meant the following anecdote.

  Larry had spent the last eight months of the war in a small Japanese prison camp in China. As senior officer among the prisoners, he felt responsible for the morale of perhaps a thousand men. They put up with the predictable amount of bad food, cruelty, cold, illness, death; but as the spring advanced, their rations, far from improving, shrank to a diet of spoiled rice or maggots in weak broth. More men were dying than ever during the winter. Once a month a General inspected the camp. On one occasion, as the General was passing within earshot, a certain professor of Oriental languages, the fellow-prisoner closest to Larry’s age, had called out a petition for food and medical care. By way of answer the man spent two days with no nourishment at all. Afterwards, talking to Larry, he recalled from his studies a more drastic way of presenting a petition. It was a custom centuries old; he couldn’t vouch for its success now. But before the General’s next visit Larry had memorized the simplest words for hunger and sickness.

  It happened in a clearing on a hillside, where the General had come upon a group of them gathering and chopping kindling. Four guards accompanied him, a delicate pear-shaped man past middle age. The pale sun yellowed his face and uniform. “We are hungry! We are sick!” cried Larry in Japanese. The General spoke to a guard, who started up the slope. Larry ran for an ax, so small as to be useless for anything else, and placing his hand on a stump deftly chopped off the tip of his little finger. Blood spurted onto his quilted sleeve. Crying the words again, he ran a few steps forward. Then he flung what he had amputated into the General’s face. The General stared, burst into tears, and embraced Larry like a brother. From that time till the end of the war the prisoners lived comparatively well.

  Whenever Francis remembered his brother-in-law’s hand he felt a shudder of admiration for this strange poetic gesture.

  “What Larry stood for” was a different matter.

  One of Benjamin Tanning’s staunchest beliefs, as well as the basis for the firm’s most successful advertising campaigns, was in the need to do business with the man in the street, the small investor, the small independent manufacturer, Mr. and Mrs. Potential American (or South American or Indonesian) Purchaser of anything from an aspirin to a shipload of anthracite. Every day hundreds of thousands learned from newspapers all over the globe that, however modest their means or projects, they would find courteous prompt attention at any of Tanning, Burr’s ninety-nine world-wide offices.

  Well, now there were a hundred and one. Francis shook his head sadly, ironically. He acknowledged, under pressure from his mother, that the firm would have expanded with or without Larry Buchanan. Try and stop it! Banking, chemicals, shipping, underwriting—what didn’t it do? What didn’t it overdo? The whole trend was towards the disproportionate, the inhuman, the unreal. No firm founded in with a capital of six thousand dollars—

  “Eight thousand.” Mrs. Tanning respected facts.

  —and presently taking in six hundred million a year—

  “That’s gross you’re talking about now.” She had often viewed with apprehension Francis’s grasp of these matters. He could remember figures, now and then, but never their significance.

  No firm, he had had to raise his voice, with a hundred and one offices and seventy-two living partners could expect its entire personnel to abide by principles set down, years and years ago, for an organization totally different in scope and influence. “Do you think the Constitution has anything to do with America’s government today?” he threw out cynically, having once heard the phrase on Xenia’s lips. The firm was in the same position. Francis saw what his father meant by saying it burned him up to be treated like an old poop. Not Larry, if Vinnie cared, but a score of “aggressive younger men” toadied and picked up the check, patted his back, and, once it was turned, consulted their own ambitions. The Boy Scout virtues would still be inscribed on the escutcheon of Mr. Tanning’s firm; nevertheless, for some of the second generation, these had become meaningless luxuries.

  Many a meaningful one, the next morning, confronted Francis as he stepped out of the elevator.

  There were, as foreseen, walnut and leather; also soft carpets and mammoth free-form glass receptacles for something grander than his own extinguished cigarette. Spread over one wall of the vast foyer, a mural depicted in restful colors an idealized Main Street quite taken up by every chain store that Tanning, Burr had helped to finance. From a wharf at the end of the street two company ships, laden with tractors, belched smoke of an unearthly purity. The mural had been added since Francis’s last visit to the office. So had an oil painting of Mr. Tanning, done from a photograph but bearing little resemblance to him. In one corner a World War II Honor Roll rested on an easel. A breezy booklet, entitled Bread on the Waters and published by the firm, caught his eye; it was his for the taking.

  A note more telling yet was struck, there where the foyer joined the hall, by a parade of men and women connected with the firm. Back and forth they went, young people in shirtsleeves, in summer dresses and ballet slippers, tanned executives, one or two youthful old ladies with haircuts, a single sheet of paper in hand. This, to be sure, was the Partners’ Floor, a glassy maze of air-cooled suites and breathtaking harbor views. Here conferences were held, statements issued to the press, clients large and small made welcome by two attractive hostesses in uniform. Few needed or cared to travel, by private elevator, the forty-odd stories down to what Mr. Tanning humorously called the Sweatshop. It covered three whole floors: mail room, cable room, printing press, first-aid station, a mile of metal brains keeping track of not merely their own operators but also workers in neighboring cells—the sales-by-telephone team, insurance or tax experts, research men, advertising men and their secretaries, all no doubt stooping and wan, ill-nourished, temperamental. Somebody had to be, Francis argued; for the denizens of the Partners’ Floor were nothing of the sort. Each might have been picked for that look of healthy good nature, of clear-eyed dedication likely to be seen on faces in Utopia.

  They made Francis glad he’d come. It was time some meek stand be taken against the system. With over an hour before meeting Jane and Roger at City Hall, he gave his name to a dazzled young woman.

  At first Larry was all graciousness. He himself ushered Francis into his office. Framed upon the gleaming desk Enid, the
children, and Mr. Tanning smiled. The closing of doors set up a rich hush. Francis refused a cigar and naively began to speak his mind.

  He sensed within three minutes that Larry assumed he had come to ask for a job. The older man nodded encouragingly; sooner or later, he seemed to say, we all discover the wisdom of settling down, toeing the line; and while, frankly, he still had qualms about the Tanning heir, the name counted more, in any long view, than the personality ….

  Reflections which presently gave way to cold disbelief.

  Did Francis know what he was talking about?

  The young man had managed to explain, with a faint stammer, that he wished to consult Larry in his capacity of trustee of the Tanning children’s accounts. He wished to know if it would be possible to get rid of his money.

  “What money?” Larry had asked, uncertain, lighting his cigar and glancing at the time.

  “My own—what I have. My share of things—”

  For some reason Larry remained very patient. Francis, who had half-expected him to lean across the desk and slap his face, took heart. Earlier he had tried to rehearse a few of the points to be made—that it was a considered decision, that none of the family should take it as an affront, but that he simply couldn’t bear any longer the burdens of fortune. Now, once Francis had begun to mouth these platitudes, he understood just how false they rang. For a frightful moment he nearly broke down. “I don’t know why I’m here,” he all but said, “I have no reason for asking what I ask,” until, to his own surprise, his way shown perhaps by the pale dawn of irritation in his listener, a crackle of leather or flash of gold at the cuff, Francis found words to convey some part of his feeling: “What I mean is, I don’t want the power that goes with money. It’s a crippling power; whoever uses it is at the mercy of it. No freedom goes with it. One’s forever being watched and plotted against, or else protected from the very things that don’t do harm! One’s never in a position to find out what’s real and what isn’t—with the result that nothings real, nothing in the whole world is real!” He was remembering his father at Irene’s, hemmed in by calculating women. The poor old man had been rich too long. Wherever he went, something in his appearance would distinguish him, would cause the woman who put her arms about him to do so, in spite of herself, first because of the fineness of his linen, the fragrance of his cologne, the meal they had enjoyed—and only to a lesser degree, if at all, because he was handsome and amusing, or lonely and in need of her. To Francis it seemed a monstrous wrong. Better to form no friendships whatsoever. “I’ve wanted,” he said, “to be free, to really have a chance at life.”