Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  “Not very,” I said, thinking as I did so that I had never seen a more Hebraic face than this one.

  “Well,” he said dully, “let’s change the subject.”

  I was surprised to find that Nathan was essentially unchanged but that my whole perception of him had altered. Where before I had seen formidable brashness, now I saw only a nervous arrogance which, at times headlong, was at other times so timorous that I had only to disagree in the mildest way to make him retract, apologize, abjectly humble himself. He began pontifically to talk of books as if he had forgotten that I could read, had, indeed, been instructed by him, and when I took exception to his enthusiasm for a writer whose short stories were then much in vogue and which had, he asserted, revolutionized the art, Nathan’s face expressed his amazement that I had even heard the writer’s name, then distrust of himself, and finally he said, “Of course! He’s a charlatan! Why didn’t I see that before?”

  When, in our conversation, he hit upon a poet whom I also admired, he was overjoyed; he fairly frolicked with our kinship, treating me with a connubial warmth, congratulating both of us on this marriage of minds. Our enthusiasms were, indeed, so commonplace that he would have lived in limitless polygamy if he had courted further. His transports would be over Shakespeare’s sonnets or Heine or Blake or Yeats whom he would come upon suddenly with as much surprise as a traveler who has been over a road many times will feel if, on one journey, he finds that a handsome new house has been built at the side of it since he last rode by. He told me that it was precisely because of his confusion that he had gone in for medieval studies. “Your taste doesn’t matter much there. You don’t have to commit yourself on whether you think The Agenbite of Inwyt is good or bad.”

  I asked him if he had ever gone back to the Communists. “No,” he said, “but I hate the upper classes more than ever. Harvard College for Boys teems with them. I am employed by one of them, as I told you, a party named Morgan. I have tutored him in German for two years and I bleed him of a great deal of money and learn twice as much German as he does. But this is the kind of thing he’ll do: we’ll be translating along—he’s a moron, of course—and he’ll stop suddenly and say, ‘Beg pardon, baby, I’ve got to make a phone call.’ He always calls me ‘baby.’ He will call the air line and say, ‘This is Morgan. I want a ticket on the five o’clock plane and I want to be booked through to Las Vegas. Put it on my charge account, will you?’ His charge account, mind you. We go on with the translation—and you couldn’t believe his illiteracy—and the telephone will ring. It will be a dame and Morgan will say, ‘Honey, I love you, I love you, but right this minute I’ve got to hop a plane for the Golden West. I’ll be back day after tomorrow. I’ve got ten drunks from Metro Goldwyn Mayer at my place and I’ve got to go out and police the joint.’ We start out again and maybe do one, maybe two paragraphs of Immensee and his door-bell rings. His butler (butler, I said) comes in and says there is a little lady outside. ‘Well, baby, let’s let the Hun go for today. I’ve got to lay this little lady before I hop a plane. Come around next Tuesday. Tell my man to fix you a drink.’ Need I assure you that I do not tell that fat, patronizing penguin that I want a drink?”

  With some effort, I brought out, “Do you ever see any of the little ladies?”

  “No. And I never want to. But I see their mink coats lying in the hall when I go out. And don’t think for a minute I feel the least bit sorry for them. I would rather go to a whore-house myself. But why should he be successful with women? He’s stupid and he subscribes to Esquire. Now I am extremely intelligent and once you get used to my face, I’m not really ugly. But do I have any success with women? Can I ever be sure of them? If I am sure of them, it’s because they’re too uninviting to be unfaithful and then they bore me to death. That middle-aged French baggage I told you about won’t stir from my door-step and she annoys me so much I could strangle her without the least remorse. But on the other hand I never have been so in love as I am with Kakosan Yoshida and I can’t trust her. She lies and deceives me and when I most want her she doesn’t show up. And that was the way it was with you. When I specifically wanted to do nothing else in the world but drink Budweiser draft with you at Red’s, you wouldn’t do it.”

  We had been sitting in the dark for sometime and now he turned on the lamp. He was as angry, I saw, as he had been on the way to the Brunsons’ house, but I was equally angry and rose to go. As I reached for my coat, he grasped my hand. “Don’t go,” he pleaded.

  “Oh, you make me sick,” I said.

  “I know it. I’m sorry. But please don’t go.”

  “But your friend is coming. Your beautiful Japanese lotus flower.”

  “She won’t come, and if she does, what good will it do me? I want to ask you a question, Sonie. Please sit down again and drink some more sherry or I’ll make you coffee if you’d rather. The thing is this, do you think it will work, my going to France this way? I mean, if I don’t marry Kakosan? I was joking when I said I might marry Andrée, she’s impossible. Do you think it would work if l went by myself?”

  I could not have answered his question even if I had had the time, for I did not know what it was he wanted except to live in Paris for a year and for that length of time to have a holiday from Mr. Morgan and his kind. At that moment there was a delicate triple knock on the door and Nathan rushed to unlock it and to admit his Japanese mistress, Kakosan Yoshida.

  “I can’t stay,” she said, remaining on the threshold so that, because the hall beyond her was dark, I could not tell what she looked like. I could see only that she was diminutive; the clear, dissonant notes of her voice were like a string of brilliant, hollow balls. “I cannot come in. I am sorry. You must not be angry, please. I promised to go to the séance. It can’t be done without me.”

  “But you promised three days ago to come tonight,” said Nathan.

  She hesitated a moment. “Yes, that’s true, I did. And I would rather stay with you. But they said they couldn’t make the séance work without me and so I have to go. Please understand.”

  “Let me go with you, then.”

  “Oh, but you said you hated things like that. You hate me to go to them. I told them this would be the last time I would come. You wouldn’t like to go.”

  “Yes, I would like to go,” said Nathan firmly. “Is it cold out? Should I wear a coat?”

  The high voice was desperate. “But you would hate it. It would be all right if just the real people were there. But riffraff is coming tonight. It’s not by invitation tonight. Please!”

  “That’s all the better. If there are a lot of people I can leave if I want without offending anyone. Is it cold out or not?”

  “Very well,” said the girl angrily, “I won’t go then. I told a lie. It’s not for everybody. It is very exclusive. They wouldn’t let you in. No, I won’t go. I will sit here with you. But first I must call and tell them I’m not coming.”

  “All right,” said Nathan. “You can use the janitor’s telephone.”

  “No, I must go to the drug-store anyway. I must buy something. I will be back in a little while.”

  Nathan sighed. “Go on to the séance if there is a séance. But come in and meet an old friend of mine, an old, and up to a point, faithful, friend.”

  “I am too faithful!” she cried. Then, “Oh,” she said as she saw me, “Why does he want me if he has company?”

  She tipped her little saffron face up to him and smiled. He could not resist her, although he knew that there was no séance, that she was going to meet another lover, and taking her small, lovely hand, he kissed the lacquered fingertips. As she stepped into the full light, she seemed unreal, less human than animal material fashioned in the image of figures of painting and sculpture and the ladies of poetry so that it was almost necessary to understand the ideal in Oriental art before one could truly appreciate how authentic her beauty was. I would say of my mother’s lips that the
y had the color of a rose, but of Kakosan I would have to say that her mouth was like a “mallow flower” for her loveliness was something so unfamiliar that the old words and metaphors would not do, and to say her lips were like a rose would be to say that they were beautiful but not to specify them as Oriental. She wore, under her incongruous American polo-coat, a dress of purple silk brocaded with gold. In the glowing blackness of her hair was pinned a white carnation, and on either hand she wore a jade ring. She was, with this costume, with her symmetrical, unblemished face, her tiny body as limber as a grass, something so conscious, so tastefully assembled that she was like a bejeweled ornament of incalculable worth. It was hard to imagine her in the arms of an Occidental man, harder still to imagine her as promiscuous as Nathan had implied she was and as I had gathered from her unskillful lie about the séance.

  She sat down on the couch beside me and handed Nathan a parcel elaborately wrapped in white tissue paper and tied with pink ribbons. “It was to take my place,” she said. “I found it in the store and thought you would read it tonight while I went to the séance. Do you know the spirits?” she asked, turning to me. I replied that I did not, and she informed me that I had missed half my life by not becoming acquainted with the supernatural. She told me that she had not only heard spirit voices imparting news of the other world, but had also been witness to the unaided peregrinations of chairs and tables and vases of flowers and, on one occasion, to the levitation by will alone of one of the sitters. “A year ago, my uncle, the tea-merchant, spoke to me. He died in Kobe three years before. He told me I must not marry according to my father’s choice. I am a Samurai daughter. How can I disobey my father?” She laughed. There was in her laugh something controlled and artful as if it were part of a song. “He should be happy at what my uncle said, shouldn’t he?” and she pointed her finger at Nathan who was undoing the ridiculous pink bows on her present. “What would my father say,” she whispered to me, “if he knew I had a beau like him? In a place like this? I call him Gacho. It means ‘goose.’ ”

  “And I call her ‘hototogisu’ which means ‘cuckoo,’ ” said Nathan bitterly. He had succeeded in removing the wrapper from the parcel and he withdrew a book. “Oh, thanks,” he said, “I’ve wanted to read it.” And he put it down on his desk.

  “Now I must go,” said Kakosan. “I am so obliged to meet you, Miss Marburg. Will you please go to the movies with me sometimes? Do you love the movies?” I said I had no burning passion for them, but I would be delighted to go to a matinée some day.

  “Let’s wait until the Garbo comes. I love the Garbo best of all. If I were not a Japanese girl, I would most like to be a Swedish girl.”

  As Nathan accompanied her to the outer door, I went to the desk, looking for the prospectus from Heidelberg. The book which Kakosan had brought was lying face down and I picked it up, curious to know what kind of writer she would choose to keep her lover company while she was deceiving him. The title was in German: Der Traum der Roten Kammer. The cream-­colored binding was decorated with a black torii between whose posts lay several scarlet flowers; beyond the gate three cedar trees were visible. Although it had been in the shelves with all the others in my imaginary room, and I had only seen the back, I had known exactly how the front panel would look! When I heard Nathan’s footsteps returning down the hall, I dropped the book suddenly as if I had done something shameful. But between the time I heard him and his entrance, the room appeared to me. This time, three positive things happened. I wondered if there were more rooms down the hall from mine and if the buildings forming the court had a continuous passageway. Simultaneously a German word, Gesäusel, came into my mind and I seemed to stand in the doorway of the room, remarking the onomatapoeia of the word which meant “murmuring.” Moreover, I recognized the writing desk as Louisa May Alcott’s, on display in the Alcott house in Concord which old Mrs. McAllister had taken me one day to see. Upon this desk and under glass, I thought, had been Miss Alcott’s diary, opened to pages of small, unreadable writing with the coppery look of aged ink. The town, from the windows of this room, eternally dead amongst its elegant trees, had seemed grandly harmless, and the glassed-in meditations of the gentlewoman were like a last testament begun at birth, like a happy, lifelong requiescat, and I remembered feeling as if I were in a different century. My lame and wattled companion, smelling of some faint, old-fashioned scent, had said to me, “Do you like the room? It is what I call a gentle place.” But Louisa May Alcott’s was not my room and we had not gone there at sunset, but in the early afternoon. Philip and Hopestill had driven to Walden Pond after luncheon to watch the skating, and Mrs. McAllister had said to me, “We mustn’t stay in on this golden day. Let me take you to the Alcott House. It is closed for the winter, but the caretaker will let me in.” And we had gone out in the pure yellow light of the winter afternoon.

  Nathan touched my arm. “A trance?” he asked me. “Isn’t it revolting the way I let her lie to me? I should have told her never to come back again or else I should have beaten her to death. And that book! Do you see what it is? A Japanese novel translated into German. Can you tie that for a pure waste of time?”

  But for me, it was not a pure waste of time. His words were but a slightly altered version of what Mr. Whitney had said as we stood last night in Miss Pride’s library and he had taken down a book from the shelves. I did not remember having looked at it at all. I was weak with relief that I had seen another copy like Nathan’s, and I began to laugh. It was a deep, interior, physical laughter, as beyond my control as hiccoughs, the kind that afflicts children in grammar school who bend their little shaking bodies forward and hide their heads in their folded arms and want to stop but cannot even when the teacher reprimands them.

  “But it’s not funny!” cried Nathan.

  I could only splutter a reply, and after a time when I was quiet, I explained to him that I had not been amused by anything, that I was only nervous, probably from all our drinking the night before and the dressing-down I had got from Miss Pride. He looked down at me contemptuously. “Nervous, is it? You’re more fashionable even than I thought. I suppose you are being psycho-analyzed.”

  “Certainly not,” I rejoined with some annoyance. “You want to know too much.”

  “I assure you that I have not the slightest interest in knowing why you laughed. If you are a giggler, more’s the pity. It is particularly offensive when it comes late in life.”

  I wrapped my muffler about my neck, resolving not to come back again. Although a little earlier I had wished to explain why I had not drunk beer with him at Red’s, I now wished only to expunge him and the memory of him from my mind. But, as often in the past, he disarmed me. He sat at his desk, his birthmark hidden by his hand and regarded me with a piteous entreaty. “Did you really mean it when you said you would go to the movies with her?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Probably not. It seems very unimportant.”

  “You could help me if you only would. If you could convince me that she’s a bitch, possibly I could eventually break off.”

  “I’m not interested, and now I’ve got to go home.”

  “I’ll be lonely if you go. Will you come back again next Sunday?”

  “No,” I told him. “You’re too rude.”

  “You can’t hate a cat for killing a bird because it’s the cat’s nature, and you can’t get sore at me for being rude because that’s my nature. Please, Sonia!”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll try once more. It will be a little later next Sunday, I expect.” We shook hands and said good-by with an exaggerated warmth.

  I walked quickly between the banks of snow which lighted the streets like moonlight. A few doors from Nathan’s building, I heard someone playing a recorder and I paused for a minute to listen. It was a tender, doleful tune like some Irish lamentation. The bold blood rushed to my face and fingertips. I passed on and peered into the uncurtained ground-floor rooms of students,
for no other purpose than to see that they were all clean and comfortable, all unlike Nathan’s and unlike my red room.

  The room had been a little random daydream which I could have again, or it was like a lengthened déjà vue, that evasive quasi-memory which is a sort of unlearned knowledge of the soul. I could, I knew, in time, name in its real place each object in the room, and I felt confident that even after my vivisection, the room would accomplish again its impeccable synthesis, a fused and incomprehensible entity. It was a sanctuary and its tenant was my spirit, changing my hot blood to cool ichor and my pain to ease. Under my own merciful auspices, I had made for myself a tamed-down sitting-room in a dead, a voiceless, city where no one could trespass, for I was the founder, the governor, the only citizen.

  Chapter Five

  * * *

  THE DRESSMAKER who had been imported from New York to make Hopestill’s trousseau was known by her trade name, Mamselle Thérèse, which she herself always substituted for the nominative case of the first person singular pronoun, as though she were her own interpreter. “Mamselle Thérèse does not touch the potatoes,” she said on her first evening to Ethel who frankly tittered. She said to me, “Mamselle Thérèse goes to a night-club twice a week in New York,” by which I understood she wanted me to supply her with the Boston equivalent of this diversion, but I did not respond as she had hoped and thereafter she made no more such overtures but amused herself (and presumably me) in designing costumes which she said would “bring out” my personality. She spoke of Chanel, Lilly Daché, Mainbocher as if they were Brahms, Bach, Mozart, or Plato, Descartes, and Hegel. “Daché composed a superb number for an archduchess last month, a really revolutionary turban. People were simply swept off their feet.” Like the bald barber recommending a hair restorer, like the dentist whose teeth are false, Mamselle Thérèse dressed most frumpishly. She wore a strange assemblage of seedy garments, too large for her spare, nimble frame, out-of-date, soiled, frayed, reminding me of the hand-me-downs that two or three times a year the Brunsons’ Boston relatives sent them to be given to me. And it was not only that the little modiste had clothed herself out of a rag bag, but that she had very bad taste, burdening herself like a fancy-woman with gimcracks from the five and ten cent stores: wooden brooches in the unreasonable shape of a Scotty dog or of an ice-skate or of a Dutch shoe or of a football; enameled beetles or dragonflies or cobras made of tin, with blinding rhinestone eyes; earrings in the shape of oak-leaves or candlesticks; and with any costume, upon her right arm, she wore nine thin silver bracelets which she clanked interminably. Her shabbiness could not be explained by poverty, for she had a flourishing business, and the expensive dresses of her two assistants who had been lodged in a house on Joy Street, suggested that she could afford to be generous in their salaries. She was charging Miss Pride a shocking price for this assignment, as I knew from the estimate she had handed in on the day she arrived. She spoke quite openly of this as “a good thing.”