Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  The end of a day’s shopping left Lily feverish, ecstatic. That first dinner at Alfredo’s had seemed a foretaste of Paradise. With lights switched off and special music playing, the mustachio’d old proprietor waltzed towards them, an omelet flaming blue in one hand, a solid-gold fork and spoon in the other. The surrounding diners, saintlike, their chins resting on white napkins, craned and cheered.

  The second dinner, that night, ended in disappointment. “Why, all the people here are Americans!” complained Lily, late in the meal.

  “I know, sweetie,” said her mother.

  “But you made us promise to bring you back here, Lily,” her father reminded her. “Which we’re very happy to do. Your mother and I, by ourselves, prefer a more authentic atmosphere—you know, candlelight and perhaps just one singer strolling from table to table with a guitar, instead of these fancy bands.” He sipped his wine. The musicians, not hearing him, began to play. “But it’s a pleasant occasion all the same, and if it helps teach our little girl the difference between average and top-notch, it won’t be wasted.”

  “The food’s still delicious,” said Enid, because Lily often needed to have what her father said interpreted. “We just think the restaurant has grown the least bit commercial over the years.”

  “That ring of Lily’s, for instance,” he went on, “may not have cost a thousand dollars (though Francis could damn well have afforded it if it had). It may not even have cost ten dollars. The point is, it’s old and interesting and probably the only one of its kind in the whole world. Some things can’t be measured by everyday standards.”

  “We mustn’t always think of the price,” put in Enid.

  “Hear what your mother says? Now, if you’ve made up your mind to sell the ring, we won’t stop you. Bear in mind, though, once it’s gone you’ll never be able to replace it.” He paused significantly, as if talking about something quite different, a carefree childhood or a first love. “All we ask, your mother and I, is that you spend the money intelligently. It’s never too early to develop taste. Learn the value of things. You might consider buying a few shares of a good, inexpensive stock. The money that gets thrown away in this family makes me see red.”

  Lily didn’t need her mother to interpret that remark. The day Xenia delivered her head, bronze set on a base of black marble, their murmurs of delight and wonder hadn’t outlasted the closing of elevator doors upon the sculptress. Then, silence in the living room, already dense with objects. “I don’t like it,” her father said, “not one bit, do you, Enid?” “It’s starker than I expected ….” “It’s the face of a sly scheming child, not Lily at all. Look, you can’t even see where her hair begins. I wouldn’t put it past that woman to have done this on purpose, to get back at us.” “Get back at us for what, Larry?” “For not being taken in by her continental charm. For not paying her in advance for the head of your father that Francis commissioned. Never deal with artists, Lily. They’re all spongers and ne’er-do-wells.” He paused, remembering, “But you saw the finished head!” “We did, didn’t we, sweetie? But it had been cast, and the light was bad. Besides, I told you, Francis was there. I don’t think we’d have noticed anything. Did you, my pearl?” “No,” said Lily. At such times, the way they kept appealing to her, Lily would feel like a hollow tree, one in which messages were left. “Well,” her father summed it up, “that’s another five thousand dollars down the drain. It makes me good and mad, doesn’t it you? What’ll we say to your father? By God, he ought to be told when he’s been taken for a sucker!” “He hasn’t been, Larry. Some people think very highly of Xenia’s work.” “Your mother’s always so sweet and open-minded, isn’t she, Lily? Next to her, I’m the bull in the china shop.” “Goodness me!” They decided to write Grandpa that his gift went so well in their apartment, they wanted to keep it there rather than in the country. This wasn’t entirely a lie. The head “went” into the hall closet. Lily would unwrap it now and then to see whether she was growing to resemble it. That, Xenia once told her, was what great art made you do.

  Ice tinkled in Enid’s glass. “Francis may see Lily without the ring,” she said.

  “I could tell him I lost it,” suggested Lily.

  “Tell him the truth,” said her father. “Francis doesn’t spare our feelings.”

  “All the more reason to spare his.” Lily and her mother exchanged smiles. Poor Uncle Francis had to be protected.

  “Cameriere!” Larry snapped his fingers. “Aspettiamo dieci minuti per le nostre rum omelets.”

  “Here they come, Sir!” cried the waiter, and the lights went out and the music played. Gasps of wonder rose from the diners. “We should have ordered that,” somebody said enviously in the dark.

  Lily felt duty-bound to clean her plate. She didn’t see the omelet again till nearly midnight, when Enid had her stick a toothbrush down her throat.

  The next morning they went to the Vatican.

  Soberly attired, gloved and veiled, they presented their invitation to one stately functionary after another. Each waved them—down a corridor, up a stair, through a packed antechamber—a degree nearer to His Holiness. The Pope was very nice, Enid had been saying in the taxi, to want to give them a Special Audience. “Oh well,” Larry had replied, “where would the Catholic Church be in Italy without American dollars to fight Communism?” Lily understood her mother’s gentle smile. They had speculated next upon the length of the interview, whether they wouldn’t be received in the Pope’s den, over a glass of unsanctified wine. Their high spirits, as the Buchanans left the taxi, made even the Swiss Guard smile.

  They had reached the end of their quest. “You will please wait in this room,” said a handsome, grizzled man in morning clothes.

  “I’m so thrilled I can’t stand it!” whispered Enid. “And to think we don’t even believe it!”

  Again, Lily knew better.

  Larry looked about. “Does everyone in here get the Special Audience?” he asked a passing official.

  “That is correct.”

  “Then what’s an ordinary audience?”

  “In the first room you entered,” the man explained, “five hundred people are waiting for a regular audience.”

  “Oh I see,” said Larry in a voice his father-in-law often used.

  The Buchanans spent a half-hour studying the room—whose walls, Lily observed, were only painted to look like marble—and a group that might have illustrated one of her United Nations storybooks: little children, hand in hand, Swedish, Chinese, Liberian, every color and creed. They lined the room, sixty all told, no longer children, to be sure, nor—except for one sari and three tailored suits of tweed, worn with low heels—in native costume. The range of feature and complexion made up for this. There were a Siamese nun and a Samoan priest, the latter weighted down with medals and rosaries. “Why is that?” Lily inquired.

  Enid didn’t know. “Why does that little priest have all those rosaries?” she asked her neighbor.

  “Why, to be blessed!” said the woman, Irish like Alice. “Everything you’re wearing or carrying gets blessed by the Holy Father.”

  “Oh my goodness!” breathed Enid involuntarily.

  At that moment the Pope made his entrance. The crowd knelt, then at a signal rose.

  Among the first in line, the Buchanans could scarcely get to their feet before having to kneel again, as instructed, and kiss the Pope’s huge ring. Lily watched her father do this, half-expecting his conversion then and there. When her own turn came she grasped the Pope’s fingers, squeezed her eyes tight shut, and aimed for the ring with her lips. Unaccountably, she missed. She felt it graze her chin—too late! Her pursed mouth had already made contact with the Pope’s dry cool flesh. Mortified, she stood up and faced him, a white old man with glasses.

  He spoke. “A little girl going to school?”

  Lily just stared.

  The Pope repeated his question in a mild automatic voice.

  “Oh,” she finally answered, “to school? Yes.” S
he could see that he knew everything about her. He knew about the ring, her ring, burning beneath her glove. Dared she sell it after his blessing? He raised two fingers. Lily steeled herself.

  “A special blessing on you and all your dear ones,” the Pope murmured with a look of complicity. The child’s jaw dropped. He hadn’t mentioned what she was wearing! Then he moved on to Enid.

  A major-domo lost no time in ushering out those whose audiences were over. Below in the Piazza, Enid complained that she hadn’t had a good look at the Pope. “Boopsie Gresham met him,” she recalled, “when he was still a Cardinal. He used to go to East Hampton for weekends. People said he was terribly attractive.”

  “Well, we’ve done it and I’m glad,” Larry said, first clearing his throat. “The times we’ve been in Rome and never seen the Pope. You’ll remember today all your life, Lily.”

  “I know.” Lily had been feeling the papal blessing at work, much like her mother’s wonder drugs, upon all her sins. Deceits and disobediences, soon she’d be cured of them, incapable of them!

  By that afternoon, in fact, her motives had grown so pure that Lily went ahead and sold the ring.

  Enid took her first to a fancy jeweler. Lily gaped at diamonds and emeralds, coveting them not for herself—the Pope had stopped all that—but for her loveliest of mothers. Meanwhile, a polite clerk was expressing regret; they did not buy old gold. A second shop directed them to a dealer in antiquities, right in the Piazza di Spagna.

  Inside, a fat old man wheezed. It wasn’t a shop in which you’d have thought to buy anything. It seemed to specialize in the old, the dusty, the unbeautiful. Lily looked around and saw nothing whole: a head of veined marble with a nose missing; a shelf of terra-cotta fragments, here a foot, there a face. The old shopkeeper encouraged his clients with a toothless grin. Their own faces expressed both disgust and assurance. They had come to the right place.

  Lily watched her mother produce the ring, watched the dreadful old man’s eyebrows go up and down, once only. “Beh!” he said finally. “Facciamo dieci mille lire.” Enid turned.

  “What he’ll give us comes to about fifteen dollars, sweetie. I really do think that’s too little.” She then told the shopkeeper as much, in a language closer to birdsong than to speech. It wasn’t her ring, but the ring of the little girl, the figluola, the ragazzina—who all the while listened spellbound to her mother bartering with the terrible old man.

  He threw out his hands. He was poor! There was no market for old jewelry. “Sono vecchio,” he croaked, “vecchio, Signora!” He would be dead, in his grave, before a customer came along for such a ring.

  Enid thanked him, wrapped it in Kleenex, and turned to go. They would find another shop, she said cheerfully, seeing Lily’s bewilderment. When the shopkeeper called her back, she winked once slyly, as though she had known he was going to.

  Out of pure curiosity—what price did the Signora have in mind?

  The Signora pursed her lips. Oh, she hadn’t really thought—forty, fifty thousand lire seemed reasonable. Lily had to hide a giggle; she was learning how in Italy you named a price much higher than you expected to get, but the funny part was to see her mother do it as coolly as any native.

  It even amused the shopkeeper. He clapped his hands and laughed a fine dry laugh. He made the gesture of wiping his eyes, then begged her pardon. “Scusi, Signora” but he couldn’t help it, it was to laugh, that a ring so small should sell itself for a price so big. However—he held up two fingers, like the Pope—seeing that the ring belonged to the Signorina, he would make a special price—fifteen thousand!

  “Take it, take it!” Lily wanted to say, chilled by the old man’s smile and fear lest the sale never be completed. But Enid had already picked up the ring, pleasantly shaking her head. “Special prices are as bad as Special Audiences,” she said out of the corner of her mouth.

  What then did the Signora want! Money?—impossible! The shopkeeper’s rolling eyes took in silk, fur, fine leather, a ruby-and-pearl brooch. A sweep of his arm showed how poor, by contrast, his own treasures were. On the floor near the counter Lily saw a cardboard box full of fragments, marble, clay, some still caked with dirt, fingers and things broken from old statues. How funny! What would anyone want with them? Then, recalling her father’s missing finger, she decently averted her eyes from the box.

  “Sweetie, he’s offering you twenty thousand. I think that’s fair, don’t you?” Lily looked up. The old man was holding out two big bills, pink and gold, one clean, the other filthy—standing for that half of the price he would pay only under pressure. The ring had already disappeared.

  “Va bene, Signorina?”

  Lily nodded.

  “Take the money, sweetie. What do you say to the nice man?”

  “Grazie…?”

  “Grazie a Lei, Signorina!” the shopkeeper returned, wheezing and bowing. They had reached the door when he called them back. “Un momento!” He lifted from a cabinet, with reverent flutterings of his hand, an intaglio mounted in pale gold, blood-red as he held it to the light. It showed the profile of a fattish young man. “Bello, eh?”

  They considered it briefly, out of politeness, then, thanking him once more, left the shop.

  “He must have thought we were either blind or cuckoo,” said Enid. “I don’t call something bello when it’s cracked clean through. Without that silver band it would have fallen apart!”

  Lily led her mother across the Piazza, made her promise to wait at the corner, and started down a street towards a shop she remembered. That morning, waking, it had come to her, what to buy with the money. It was the perfect thing.

  It was still the perfect thing twenty minutes later when, back at the Eden, flushed and happy, Lily found a cleared surface on which to set it down. The box was three feet long, and heavy. “I simply cannot bear this excitement!” said Enid, bug-eyed.

  “Then open it!” cried Lily.

  “Don’t you want to wait till Daddy’s awake from his siesta?”

  “No, it’s for you!”

  “For me?” Enid had been about to take off her hat, but stopped. “Oh, my goodness!”

  “So open it!”

  It seemed to Lily that her mother took an exaggerated time to undo the string, the shiny white paper, finally to lift the lid, beginning to coo as she folded aside layer after layer of tissue. At the end, however, she stepped back, as genuinely surprised as Lily could have hoped.

  “Why, Lily! Of all the … oh!”

  Not trusting herself to say more, Enid lifted it from the box and stood it upright facing the window. The late sun did wonders for the figure, richened the whites and pinks, the powder blues, woke all kinds of sparklings within the glass jewel of the crown. Though not the largest, it had been to Lily’s mind the loveliest Virgin in the shop. She’d chosen it from a rainbow thicket of plaster images. Significantly, no knives protruded from its breast. All that, its soft forgiving smile conveyed, was over and done with.

  “Mummy, Mummy, didn’t you guess? Where will you put it? In your bedroom?”

  Enid found her tongue. “I can’t decide now, sweetie, I’ll have to think ….”

  Maybe in time they could build a chapel around it!

  The little girl easily imagined, in her mother’s heart, the sweet relief of having brought to light something that had been overlooked or hidden for so many years. Often all you needed was a way of doing this. And she had thought of it, she alone! Also, the Virgin was whole, not cracked across or chipped. Lily remembered her father’s lecture in the restaurant. I’m developing taste, she thought radiantly, I’m learning the value of things!

  Enid meanwhile had removed her hat. “Tell me,” she begged, “how you ever dreamed up such an original present.”

  Original? “But I know!” said Lily. “You never told me, but I found out. Couldn’t I be a Catholic, too? I already have a little medal at home, that Alice gave me …. I wanted to be like you, that’s all—it’s the truth, Mummy!”

 
For at the mention of Alice an indecipherable look had crossed her mother’s face. Then the explanations began. From that moment on, Lily’s happiness in her deed shrank and soured.

  The following afternoon, Thursday, when her parents carried the Virgin back to the shop, Lily was blushing for her babyishness. Fortunately they seemed to understand this. At least the matter was never brought up again. When they took her to spend the refunded money, neither her father nor her mother made a single suggestion. All by herself Lily chose what she wanted, a stunning leather purse with a shoulder strap and ornamental brass clasp, a Roman scarf, and the most exquisite doll—a Spanish Seèorita wearing a mantilla of real lace. By then, of course, everything had changed. Lily had even begun to rehearse a conversation with Francis, years hence. “Yes, I sold the ring,” she would say, crossing her legs in some wonderful way she’d have learned, “I sold the ring, but only after the Pope had blessed it.” She practiced the remark aloud, with different inflections, getting it to sound very clever and wise.

  The three Buchanans had decided Wednesday before dinner that the Virgin was to be returned—“even if they won’t give back the money,” said Larry. In the course of a long adult hour—she supposed it was adult because they allowed her a splash of Campari with water and ice—Lily quite forgot why she had picked out the statue, the real reason, not just what she’d told her mother. The room was too thick with other revelations. Listening, awed, to “what we believe,” to “what our faith says about Mary,” and “our Episcopalian attitude towards confession,” Lily forgot Alice. She even forgot that she’d heard it all before in Sunday School, till they reminded her. She peered down unsuspected vistas. Her mother had been right to leave the Catholic Church. Confession was a private matter. And here were Lily’s own parents sharing the secret substance of their lives with her, as if at last finding her worthy.

  “We think you’re one of the most attractive people we know,” said Enid. “We like being with you.”