Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  “Oh, yes, I remember. For a long time I thought her name was ‘Mather’ and wondered if she were a relative of Hopestill’s. I did not inquire. I don’t understand why you should have been late on account of her, though. She’s simply the kind of fright one stares through if one’s in a hurry, ain’t she?” In a sense, she had forgotten who I was and that I could not possibly have cut Mrs. Prather. I went on to tell her of my conversation with the stupid but kindly old soul who believed I had become a prostitute. Miss Pride was vexed, not because of Mrs. Prather’s delusion, but because I had spoken unguardedly in front of the maid. She rebuked me while the girl was still in the room. Upon her mischievous Irish face appeared a grin of malicious pleasure, so that I knew the scene would be reproduced in the cellar as soon as we had left the dining-room. “For a moment I couldn’t place Mrs. Prather,” she said. “But now I recall that she is a woman of great breeding, and if she thought you were pursuing the oldest profession as it were, she probably had good reason. I have often warned you, as you can’t deny, that the excessive rouge you use on your lips is far from good taste. And I should remind you that in scorning Mrs. Prather’s offer to recommend you as an upstairs maid may, in time, prove to be the greatest folly. If I were you, I would not be at all sure that I would not end up as an upstairs maid or even as a ‘useful’ servant.”

  She had never spoken so harshly before. In my agitation I took far more meat than I could use and it occupied so much space on my plate that when Emma came round with the vegetables I had to push it to one side and in doing so pushed it off onto the table altogether. Miss Pride, whose avian eyes had not rested for a moment in their barrage of killing looks on me, said, “Oh, my soul! Emma, bring a clean mat for Miss Marburg.” The girl, nearly overcome, rushed to the pantry and banged the door shut, there, as I imagined, to giggle at my bungling. But when she returned with a clean napkin, the scolding was over and Miss Pride was genially telling me of her morning which she had spent with her Cambridge friend, the widow of the Harvard professor, in the Concord burying ground.

  “And that reminds me that Philip McAllister called this afternoon and said that his grandmother would like to have you and Hopestill come to tea tomorrow. He’ll drive you up. If you have time, do take a stroll through Sleepy Hollow. But don’t put it off until after tea. Laura McAllister is such a chatterbox you won’t get away before dinnertime.” (Later that evening, she said, “When I spoke of Mrs. McAllister l didn’t mean anything unfriendly by calling her a chatterbox. She’s a charming woman, and it would displease me to hear that you had repeated what I said.” With an antediluvian notion that marriages could still be made by families rather than by individuals, she was anxious to stay on the right side of Philip’s grandmother.)

  The account of her day amongst the graves alleviated only the suffering she had inflicted by humiliating me in the presence of a servant, but the other suffering that came from the fear that this was to be only the first of such occasions lingered as a dull but obtrusive ache. And because it was a symptom common to many diseases, there was no way immediately to identify it. It was inchoate fear, the first sign of all those irascible emotions that include hatred, contempt, despair, and so on. And after dinner, as we sat for an hour, according to our custom in the upstairs sitting-room and twice Miss Pride corrected my pronunciation of a word in the article I was reading to her from Harper’s Magazine, the pain became acute for a moment and when it had gone I felt the vague nausea that accompanies shock.

  We did not have our coffee until I had finished reading, at eighty-thirty. It came up then on the dumb-waiter and Miss Pride established herself behind The Boston Evening Transcript while I filled the cups and brought a bottle of Benedictine from a closet in the “office.” My mistress was proud of saying that she took no medicines but “vinous and spiritous liquors” which she called “the medicaments of Nature,” and while she drank very little at a time, she had a glass of something at regular intervals throughout the day: at eleven in the mornings of week-days, she had a glass of port, but on Sundays, after her chess game, she had dry sherry. Before luncheon and dinner, she had two glasses of sherry and in the evening with her coffee a liqueur or a measure of rum which she took neat. The best of her liquor was kept in the den just off the upstairs sitting-room, and this was reserved for her own use. Less excellent whiskeys, brandies, liqueurs, and wines were kept in the library and given to guests when she entertained formally. The pantry and the cellar were stocked for the rank and file with domestic dry wines, low-priced Bourbon, and gallon jars of gin. I was not invited to pour myself a glass of Benedictine, but invariably she said, as she folded the newspaper but continued to read it and as I handed her the tiny green bowl on a thin gold stem, “Perhaps you’d like a glass of sherry. I won’t offer you any of this, for I’m sure you wouldn’t care for it, and it’s so dear I can’t allow it to be wasted.”

  Tonight, drowsy with the rich wine, out of touch with Miss Pride since she never spoke once she had begun to read the financial page, I felt simultaneously dissatisfied and proud. The dissatisfaction I erroneously (and perhaps intentionally) set down to the sherry, the effect of which had been to usher in a memory of the beer my father had used to pour into my soup. I conjured up his youthful face, so like that of Herr Speyer, and wondered at its incongruity in this rich woman’s parlor, and felt that I had betrayed him since my own presence here was no longer incongruous. It was as if I had supplied his attributes, plagiarizing those my creator had conferred upon me; or, conversely, that I was the chimera, the reflection in the flawed looking glass, the misquoted doctrine, and he the paradigm. His presence became as palpable as that of Miss Pride. The du of Herr Speyer’s remark, that intimate address, lay like a ghostly hand upon my cheek. Like a pilgrim, used to sleeping out of doors and claustrophobic in a house, I inhaled jerkily as if the air within this silent, genteel room were poisonous to my lungs, as though, if I could, I would escape the carnivorous flowers and come again among the harmless edelweiss my father’s fancies had picked for me as I sat hearing his stories in the shop in Chichester.

  I rose. “I believe I’ll change and take a little walk, Miss Pride.”

  She did not look up. “I hurt your feelings at dinner, did I not?” But there was nothing in her voice to indicate whether she were sorry or if she intended me to apologize for my milk-sop sensitiveness.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I’ve told you not to call me ‘ma’am.’ ‘Sir’ is all very well, but ‘ma’am’ I cannot tolerate. You mustn’t take me seriously when I’m crotchety. I wouldn’t let you be an upstairs maid for a dowager duchess, let alone for one of Mrs. Prather’s hypochondriac friends. No, indeed, I don’t intend to turn you out. Stick by me, Sonie, won’t you, and put up with my flip tongue? My father used to tell me I wouldn’t have a friend in the world by the time I was thirty. Perhaps he was right and the only reason people come to see me is that they’re after the rum cakes on my tea-table.”

  “Really, Miss Pride,” I protested, “I wasn’t in the least offended. I thought perhaps you had been annoyed by something earlier and were just out of sorts a little.”

  “You guessed it perfectly. Now don’t put a false construction on this, for on second thoughts I realized that I was quite wrong. I was annoyed by the way Philip McAllister asked for you on the telephone this afternoon. I had the disagreeable feeling that if you had answered, he would have asked you to meet him for tea, and I said to myself, ‘Surely that child can’t be having rendezvous with Philip who is virtually Hopestill’s fiancé.’ ”

  Until now she had been talking to me behind the rustling screen of the Transcript, but now she lowered it and as I earnestly denied that I had seen Philip at all except in her own drawing-room, I winced at the firm set of her jaw and the suspicious, narrowed eyes. Though what I said was true, I did not feel that I had been absolved of my guilt, but that she was reading my mind in which my sporadic infatuation with the doctor was t
rying in vain to flutter out of reach of her superhuman intuition. Her gaze was like a magnet that drew towards it my will-less secret. Five minutes before, I had not been conscious of my love which, at best, when I was not with him, was like the exhilaration the novice feels from drinking, not like the somnolent pleasure of the addict. But now I felt feverish and giddy. Thus, the innocent man on trial, under the skillful bombardment of the prosecution grows hot and quivers and finds his voice distant and shrill as if a subtler faculty than his conscious mind has been besieged and he is no longer sure that he did not commit the crime.

  “Poor girl,” said Miss Pride, “it’s not easy for you. You’re homesick, I expect, not lovesick. I’m not up on my psychology, as Hope would say. Tell me, did you meet any interesting young people at Berthe’s today?”

  I told her of Gerhardt Preis whom she had met and had not cared for. “When I was your age, I deplored race prejudice. To my dear, single-minded Papa’s chagrin, I used to seek out your Israels and Rachels, the bigger the nose the better. But at last I admitted to myself that I was just like everyone else. I didn’t get on with them . . . their aggressiveness distressed me in public and their money mania at last got the better of my idealism. Now, while I say ‘live and let live’ I must confess I sympathize with that particular of Hitler’s program. Did you meet anyone else?”

  With relief I spoke of Mr. Garvin—relief because I did not share Miss Pride’s prejudice and while neither did I feel strongly partisan towards Jews, the subject always embarrassed me because, not being able to detect Hebraic blood at once except in a most obvious face, I was afraid that someone’s toes were being trod on. And even here in Miss Pride’s sitting-room where there was no one to be offended (unless I myself were partly Jewish, a not unlikely possibility), I disliked the openness of the attack because, by my ambiguous silence I was no doubt giving her the impression that I subscribed to her view, and later on, when a Jew was present, she might call upon me to confirm some anti-Semitic statement.

  She was inordinately interested in what I told her of Mr. Garvin because, through my desire to hasten from the Jewish question, I exaggerated the scraps of information I had gathered about him through his conversation with Preis, and told her that he was a student of Japanese even though I had been corrected by the boy himself. “What a small world we have,” said Miss Pride, beaming with pleasure. “To think that one of your first acquaintances in Boston should have the same inspiration that my father had. Perhaps he would like to look over the books here. Is he a presentable young man or is he one of those brainy people, like Hope’s artists who don’t wash very well?” On the contrary, I told her, Garvin was, if anything, overwashed. His tanned, freshly shaved face had been as clean as a baby’s; his dark blue suit and his white shirt, his blue cashmere tie and matching socks were so fresh from the cleaner and the laundress that he could have posed, with no subsequent touching-up on the part of the photographer, for an advertisement of Miss Pride’s White Cloud soap. “And what is his background?” she asked me next, but I could not satisfy her. “Berthe will know, I suppose. We might ask him to dine with us some evening. I don’t want to deprive you of all society, you know, but at the same time I don’t want you to drift away from me.”

  “Oh, I can assure you,” I laughed, “that Mr. Garvin and I didn’t strike up an acquaintance at all.” Actually I did hope that I would see the young man again but only because I was inquisitive to know what sort of friends Nathan had.

  “The Countess gave me a surprising piece of news. She says you’re sharp as a tack on the subject of French literature. How in the world did you come by that?”

  “She’s quite mistaken. I know nothing about it . . . I . . .”

  Miss Pride rolled her eyes in a way that was at once so omniscient and so repulsive that I had to look away from her. “You’re quite right, my dear child, most of us are credulous geese. To be candid with you, I’d rather have you like this than have you be a real but bumptious intellectual.”

  “Like this?” I repeated, feeling that I ought to defend myself.

  “I said most of us are credulous geese. But I know what you know. All I ask is that you don’t take your game seriously.”

  I saw nothing for it but to confess that I had, indeed, been bluffing at the Countess’ and to my relief she dropped the subject.

  “Am I right in assuming that this restlessness of yours—this wanting to go for a walk in the middle of the night—is just that same homesickness we were talking about earlier? And that you’re not growing tired of your life here?”

  I assured her that I had no different ambitions than to keep her company, but there flashed across my mind, set off by her uncertainty of me, a sense of power over her that allowed me to make a private reservation. I would stay with her so long as she upheld her part of the bargain and did not deprive me of my freedom in those hours which were not dedicated to her. For it had occurred to me that as she grew older she might become more demanding of my time. Indeed, she had prepared me for that in our conversation the night before my first tea-party when she had said, “I don’t want you to make up your mind yet, for you may find me too exacting. It will not be my fault, for I pride myself on respecting other people’s privacy in their leisure hours, but it will be the fault of senility, that wretched Mr. Hyde I shall become in my last days.” I had then disbelieved her completely, even though a few days later, I heard Hopestill say to someone, “Auntie is so improvident in her choice of fixed ideas. She surely will dodder into crabbed old age if she keeps thinking of it.”

  Tonight, like a subterranean river, a senile complaint slipped through her words and it did not, at last, seem unlikely that in a while the undertone would become the minor key in which were played the jeremiads of those whose only future is eternity.

  Laughing, when she spoke of the humiliating possibility of a wheel chair, I said, “Miss Pride, you should bone up on those Thibetans who claim they know how to live two centuries or so.” I was recalling a photograph I had seen in a newspaper of a Hindu, said to have been born in 1786, making him a century and a half old. The broad, bald skull had looked like a death’s-head and the drooping eyes had been tenantless, mere vacant openings in round pits of black shadows. The long dark lips were stretched in a hideous grimace, not of scorn for the photographer but of a corrupt delight in the pyrrhic victory of flesh over time. The caption had read, “Says He Will Live Till 2000 or After.”

  “I should hope not!” she exclaimed. “Do you think I want to see Boston turned into a hive of Customs Houses and aeroplanes replacing automobiles? No, thank you. I don’t fancy myself rocketing about in the air with Mac at the controls. A century is too long for anyone to live. To go beyond that is my idea of anticipating Judgment Day. Tomorrow afternoon at Mrs. McAllister’s, you will possibly meet a Mr. Childreth who is the oldest living graduate of Harvard College. He was of the class of ’67. Although he still has his own teeth—they’re no beauties, however—he has quite lost his reason and reads books written for children. It always strikes me as ironical that on Commencement Day he marches at the head of the Harvard procession when he barely knows his A.B.C.’s.”

  “But you won’t be like that, Miss Pride.”

  “I’m not at all sure. If I am, though, I hope you’ll have the goodness to lock me up. Even my father, a most sensible man, got notions toward the end. He confused me with my sister Charity and believed that neither of us was his daughter but that our surname was Fleet. ‘Charity Fleet,’ he would say to me, ‘I want you to take my green bag which is full of peanuts and go feed the squirrels in the Common.’ He had never fed a squirrel in his life, and until he was in his dotage always referred to them as ‘the Common rodents.’ And of course his bag hadn’t so much as a peanut shell in it, but only his rice-paper books.”

  She fell silent, thinking perhaps of her father, and I started toward the door to leave her to her reverie, but she looked up. “I don’t
know how I started on that digression. We were talking about your friends, or rather, your friends-to-be. I dare say it isn’t my place to say this as it’s the duty of one’s mother, but since yours is not accessible, I must look upon myself as your guardian. To put it bluntly, Sonia, you don’t consider marrying, do you?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose I’ve never thought much about it. Perhaps I shall want to after . . . that is, when I’m older.”

  “But, my dear child, don’t you see? Hasn’t Dr. McAllister ever discussed the matter with you? I think it’s a pity he’s your doctor. He’s a perfect scamp in many ways and has always been a heart-breaker, but that’s beside the point. He ought at least to guide you, knowing what he does.”

  “Do you mean that I shouldn’t marry because of my bad heredity? Because, why, yes, he has talked to me about it and has told me I shouldn’t think of such things.” This was not quite true. He had one time compared me to himself and had said our misfortunes could be turned to good account if we looked upon them as symbols, perhaps of original sin or of mortality, like Dr. Galbraith’s memento mori. However, this had been in one of his religious moods when he was gathering all manner of disparate elements into his train of thought. He had never actually spoken to me of marriage and I, who seldom thought of it, had not solicited his advice.

  “Times change. Nowadays children aren’t spanked, don’t learn Latin, don’t respect their elders. And I haven’t a doubt it’s thought old-fashioned to be wary of insanity in the family. But, Sonie, there have been two instances of it in your lifetime, very close to you. I must say it would give me pause.”

  Had Miss Pride been able at that moment to read my mind, she would have been convinced that my mother’s idiosyncrasies were already cropping up in me, for as I listened to her, I lost my identity. I was invaded by the strange feeling that I was not myself, or rather, that this was a phantom of myself, projected into Boston by my real being, still in Chichester. I had had this sort of experience before: in the winter just past when the days were at their shortest, I had waked once at four o’clock but had had no way of knowing whether it was four in the morning or four in the afternoon. Even though my mother was still asleep beside me and though no sounds of life came from outdoors, I concluded that it was afternoon, that we had slept through the whole day, and I rose in haste, ashamed of my sloth. As I shook down the stove, live coals fell into the ash box and I knew that it was morning or no fire would be left. Although I was wide awake, I had the sudden feeling that I was still in bed and that the person or the thing that held the cold stove shaker was not a dreamed-up aspect of myself but was a clever imitation. It was not so much Miss Pride’s wounding, though perhaps sensible, counsel that made me take refuge in this fantasy—for I suppose the psychologists would say that my lapse was in effect an “escape from reality”—as it was that it did not seem to be the first time she had spoken thus. On one level, that of my conscious memory, I knew that this scene had not been played before, but on a secondary plane, her speech, down to the very syntax of her sentences, was so familiar that I knew, or thought I knew, exactly what was coming next. And for that short space, I believed that I was in my bed at home, enacting a daydream. The fact that restored me—in itself absurd, far from conclusive, but nevertheless as quick-acting as the cock’s crow that hurtles ghosts and goblins back to hell—was the chiming of the clock on the mantelpiece marking ten. Or rather, I heard only the tenth stroke but knew that I had heard all the others as well and that Miss Pride’s “Times change” had been uttered just as the first note sounded.