Auntie Mame

by Patrick Dennis

  Once again I lost sight of her when Lightning Rod plunged into a patch of woods, but Auntie Mame soon appeared again wearing something that looked like a laurel wreath and not even holding the reins.

  “Ah vow,” one of the more cultivated cousins screamed, “don’t she look like a verytibble Greek goddess!”

  “Landagoshen,” another one roared, “she ain’t even hangin’ on. If that don’t beat all!”

  Then she raced ahead again and disappeared from view.

  At last we bounded up to a big, flat plateau overlooking a wide expanse of low green meadow ending abruptly with a high floodwall that ran along the banks of the Savannah River. This was where the hunt must end, unless the poor fox could manage to scale the six-foot wall.

  By then the fox, the hounds, Van Buren Clay-Pickett, and Auntie Mame were so far ahead that there was no hope of ever catching up, although Beau and Sally Cato McDougall were in hot pursuit about a quarter of a mile behind. Suddenly Lightning Rod spurted ahead still faster and gave every appearance of trying to overtake Cousin Van Buren.

  “Ah cain’t unduhstand that Yankee-style huntin’,” one of the men shouted. “Mighty bad fo’m to pass the Mastuh.”

  “It ain’t huh fault,” another rider yelled. “That crazy McDougall hawse is runnin’ away with huh, that’s what!”

  “Gawdlmighty, yo’ right.”

  I wanted to shut my eyes tight, but the terrible fascination of the scene before me was too strong. When I opened them again Lightning Rod had not only passed the Master, but the hounds as well, and finally the fox. He was a matter of yards from the six-foot floodwall and still he tore onward.

  “Lawd, he’s goin’ to dash that damnyankee gal to death!”

  “Moultrie, Ah cain’t look!” the woman next to me screamed, and swooned in her saddle.

  With Auntie Mame still hanging on, Lightning Rod charged the floodwall. Suddenly his hoofs left the ground and he leaped for the wall, but it was too much for him. His mammoth chest struck the top and he fell back with a thump that could be heard all over Richmond County. Auntie Mame, however, kept right on going. She cleared the wall by a good four feet and disappeared behind it. There was a terrible splash, and then silence. Another woman swooned but nobody paid any attention. The rest of us raced pell-mell down to the meadow just in time to see Auntie Mame emerge from the Savannah River.

  Just then a rickety old Chevrolet bounced across the meadow and jolted to a stop. An apoplectic little man jumped out and jogged up to the cluster of panting horses. It was the county veterinarian. “Great day in the mawnin’,” he shouted, “I bin followin’ this pore little lady fo’ the last half houah. Most amazin’ feat of hawsemanship I evah did see. Why she wasn’t killed I nevah will know. Well, I thought I reckinized that hawse, an’ now Ah’m positive. It’s that crazy Lightning Rod belongs to Sally Cato McDougall.” His angry blue eyes sought out Sally Cato. “Sally Cato,” the vet screamed, “Ah tole you two yeahs ago that hawse was mad. Ah commanded you to have him shot!” He looked at Lightning Rod, sprawled in agony on the ground. “Now Ah guess Ah git to do the job mahself.” He pulled a .45 automatic out of his holster. “Sally Cato, it’s you Ah oughta be shootin’. To let anybody—even a soopub hawsewoman like this little lady heah—ride on that hawse is tantymount to muhduh. Yes, Ah said plain, premeditated muhduh. You oughta have yo’ name read outta every huntin’ pack in the who’ county.” With one shot he put the pathological Lightning Rod out of his misery and Auntie Mame burst into tears.

  Uncle Beau swept Auntie Mame up to his saddle and, dirty and wet and scratched as she was, he kept hugging her and kissing her and calling her his Little Yankee Valkyrie.

  The rest of the members were agog at the glory of Auntie Mame, and I noticed that they all seemed to find it desirable not to ride anywhere near Sally Cato as we all ambled back to the field where the pavilion was set up for the Hunt Breakfast. Once Sally Cato reined her horse over toward Uncle Beau’s. “Beau,” she said urgently, “if you’ll only let me explain …” But he gave her a terrible look and cantered ahead with his arms tenderly around Auntie Mame.

  The Hunt Breakfast was sensational. No one could talk of anything but Auntie Mame’s magnificent seat. She was christened “Mame, the Huntress,” and everyone toasted her time after time as the greatest horsewoman ever to grace Richmond County. Auntie Mame got awfully high on bourbon, but when I finally had a chance to get near her, she held me tight and whispered: “Patrick, darling, tell me, am I still alive? I got my thigh stuck so tight in that sidesaddle thing I thought I never would fall off.”

  Cousin Van Buren Clay-Pickett had leaped to the top of the buffet to propose another hunt on the following Sunday when a Western Union boy shambled in with a telegram for Auntie Mame. It read:

  IMPERATIVE YOU RETURN NEW YORK

  IMMEDIATELY TO JUDGE INTERNATIONAL

  HORSE SHOW STOP A DEVOTED FAN INSISTS

  THE COMMITTEE

  “Oh, dear,” Auntie Mame cried petulantly, hastily gulping down a full tumbler of bourbon. “What a bore. But I suppose we must go back North. Onward and upward, always, you know, to new triumphs on the turf.”

  Chapter Five

  Lady of Letters

  Nor was the Unforgettable Character without literary talent. The article points out that she used to write short little pieces about herself and her everyday life just for fun. She’d show them to her friends and maybe once in a while even let the local weekly publish one. These little essays, I understand, were perfect masterpieces. In fact, they were so good that publishers were coming up from New York by the carload pleading for a chance to put some of the old girl’s work into print.

  Personally, I don’t think that’s much to brag about when you consider that Auntie Mame had a publisher and an agent and a secretary before she even put a word on paper.

  Auntie Mame’s literary career was undertaken more in the way of therapy to bring herself out of the terrible depression she felt as a widow. Her nuptial bliss as Mrs. Beauregard Burnside might have lasted forever, if only Uncle Beau had.

  Beau was charming, virile, handsome, and rich. He was also generous to a fault. On their first anniversary, Uncle Beau bought Auntie Mame a number of little keepsakes to celebrate the occasion: a big Rolls-Royce, a sable coat, an uncut emerald ring, and a big old mansion on Washington Square to house all the furniture she’d been buying. But the day of their housewarming—just thirteen months after they were married—Uncle Beau met a poetic end. He was kicked in the head by a horse in Central Park. In an hour he was dead.

  Auntie Mame was insane with grief. She wept and fainted all through the funeral and the ensuing winter. Eventually she stopped fainting and just wept. She was interested in nothing—not even the fact that she was the ninth-richest widow in New York—except her considerable sadness. Finally her old chum Vera Charles took pity on her.

  Vera had struck gold, matrimonially, in England when she married the Honorable Basil Fitz-Hugh. The Hon. Basil was not only rich, he was literary. He even knew Virginia Woolf. Anyhow, Vera decided that a complete change was what Auntie Mame needed. She packed her off to Europe and kept her there for more than two years while I was shunted by Mr. Babcock between St. Boniface and a sordid summer camp.

  But no one can mourn forever, least of all Auntie Mame. Eventually she came home with some stylish widow’s weeds, a lot of signed photographs of European authors—all of whom had helped to dry her tears—and a restless yearning for a New Outlet.

  I was sixteen and discovered that I’d suddenly shot up to a full six feet. None of my St. Boniface uniforms fitted me, and so I spent the last of my days of summer freedom standing on a tailor’s block having all my old slacks and blazers let down enough to spare my public the sight of as much calf and forearm as possible. When the alterations were completed I had less than a week to spend before the chapel bells of St. Boniface would call me back to another year of macaroni an
d demerits, and I was kind of hoping that Auntie Mame would make an occasion of it and take me to the theater and do some of the other things that were fun. I was wrong.

  When I let myself into her big house on Washington Square, I heard a brisk voice say: “The Ladies’ Home Journal wouldn’t print an episode like that in a million years, Mrs. Burnside.”

  I tiptoed into the living room and saw Auntie Mame sitting there in a severe black suit, a martini in one hand and a big pair of horn-rimmed spectacles in the other. She had a lot of papers on her lap and she was talking to two women I’d never seen before. “Of course it’s a natural for Hollywood,” she was saying. “I thought it might be right for Claudette or maybe Irene, but now I’ve decided to play it myself. After all, if I can’t be myself, who can?”

  “Well, Mrs. Burnside, I wouldn’t think too far into the future,” the small redheaded woman said nervously.

  “No, Mame,” the other woman said. “Elizabeth’s right. You really ought to get something down on paper first to show your publishers. Film sales, serial rights—that sort of thing would naturally have to wait.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that, my dears,” Auntie Mame sang. “My secretary is upstairs already typing the …”

  I tiptoed out of the room.

  Upstairs I went into what had always been my room. The place, never too neat during my tenancy, was a sight. There were a lot of steel filing cabinets along the walls, two big desks, three telephones, piles of reference books, and papers strewn everywhere. A Dictaphone was squeaking and a harried-looking woman was banging away on a typewriter. I skulked out and went into Auntie Mame’s sitting room. It wasn’t much better. There were old dance programs, stacks of photographs, back issues of the Buffalo Evening News piled on every surface. Here and there were slips of foolscap with notes that said things like “Tell about night-club raid” and “mention Dr. Cornell and Daddy’s gout.” I lit one of Auntie Mame’s cigarettes and sat down, totally mystified. Then I heard the front door open. Auntie Mame was saying, “Well, ta-ta, my dears. Back to my écritoire and the midnight oil that gutters low! I’ll call you in the morning, Mary. We old Buffalo girls must stick together, mustn’t we? A bientôt!” The front door closed and I saw the two women collapse into a taxicab.

  In a moment there was a pretty commotion going on in what had been my bedroom. “Well, Agnes, dear,” Auntie Mame was saying, “how did it go?”

  “Oh, ever so nicely, I’m sure, Mrs. Burnside. I’ve never been employed in such lovely surroundings before and the work is ever so in-ter-esting. Goodness, when I worked at the Prudential Insurance Company we had nothing to type but long legal forms, and Miss Montgomery, she was the supervisor, was always looking over a girl’s shoulder and the class of help they had in the stenographic pool was just awful, and …”

  “That’s nice, Agnes,” Auntie Mame interrupted. “And did the cook give you a decent luncheon?”

  “Oh, goodness, yes, Mrs. Burnside. We had consommé soup and a gigot of lamb and little petits pois peas and …”

  “How divine, dear. Now, I’ll have Ito drive you home.”

  “Oh, but Mrs….”

  “Not another word, Agnes dear, simply cover the typewriter and Ito will whisk you to Kew Gardens. Now, put on some lipstick and be off!”

  “Goodness, Mrs. Burnside, Mumsie would die if I painted.”

  “Well, be that as it may. You’ve done a grand day’s work. Now go home.” Auntie Mame burst into the sitting room and threw her arms around me. “Darling, darling boy! Oh, the feverish excitement of the creative career! I’m driving myself too hard, of course, but I love it.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “Why, darling, my book. What else?”

  “What book? Who are all these strange women?”

  Just then the young woman I’d seen at the typewriter looked timidly in at the door. “Well, I’ll be saying good night, now.”

  “Oh, Agnes dear, do come in and meet my nephew. I expect you already know about him, since you were working on that chapter this afternoon.”

  “Goodness, is he the one you found in the basket on your doorstep, Mrs. Burnside?” My mouth fell open.

  “The very one, dear. Patrick, I want you to meet my secretary, my right hand, my severest critic—my Alice B. Toklas. Miss Gooch—dear Agnes—this is nephew Patrick.”

  “Very pleased to meet you, I’m sure,” Miss Gooch said, bobbing a little curtsy. I was almost too stunned by what I’d just heard to take much notice of Miss Gooch, and as a matter of record, there wasn’t much to notice. Miss Gooch was one of those women who could be anywhere between fifteen and fifty and nobody would care. She had colorless hair, colorless skin, and colorless eyes. She wore rimless glasses and an outsized white angora beret. The rest of her costume consisted of a blue knit jumper, a salmon-colored rayon blouse with balloon sleeves, rayon stockings, and orthopedic oxfords.

  “How do you do?” I said.

  “I just know you two are going to be the warmest of friends,” Auntie Mame said. “Well, run along, Agnes. A demain!”

  “Good-by, now,” Miss Gooch said and disappeared.

  “You know, my little love, that that poor child—she’s just nineteen—not only types like an angel and takes shorthand at I-don’t-know-how-many thousands of words a minute, but she’s also the sole support of an arthritic mother and a crippled sister.”

  “You don’t say,” I said. Then I turned and faced her. “What’s all this about finding me in a basket?”

  “Oh, darling, you know we writers must occasionally stretch a point to heighten the dramatic situation. So I just said that you were left in a basket at the door of my cottage.”

  “I was ten years old and you were living in a little cottage on Beekman Place. Now, what is this thing you’re writing? Who were those women? What do you need an Alice B. Toklas for?”

  “Oh, my little love,” Auntie Mame said, stretching out on the chaise longue, “I wanted to keep it as a surprise for you until you saw my name at the very top of the best-seller list, but now I may as well confess. I’m writing my memoirs.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Well, I’ve had a ve-ry interesting life, and as Lindsay—that’s my publisher—said to me just the other day when Mary Lord Bishop and I were in signing the contract …”

  “Lindsay who?”

  “Lindsay Woolsey. He wishes to publish my work. Oh, my little love, I can’t tell you what fate has done for me!”

  “What has it done?”

  “Well, last week I was going along Madison Avenue and I saw a face that looked ever so familiar, and just as I was saying to myself, ‘That looks exactly like Bella Shuttleworth from Delaware Avenue in Buffalo,’ this face said to me, ‘Aren’t you Mame Dennis from Delaware Avenue in Buffalo?’ Well, we threw our arms around each other like long-lost friends—which indeed we were—and dashed into the Plaza for a drink. Well, we got talking about the old days of the Delaware Avenue Irregulars and the jolly rousts we used to have at Miss Rushaway’s School out near Soldier’s Place and one thing and another—la, those gay old days in Buffalo!—and Bella said Wouldn’t it be fun if she were to give a dinner party for the old Buffalo crowd who were here in town. So she did. My, but Bella’s put on weight!”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Well, she gave a very nice dinner. Saddle of mutton. Tough. And she had Mary Lord Bishop—you saw her here today—who’s a very important literary agent, and Lindsay Woolsey and his wife—she was a mousy little thing from around Colonial Circle—and a few others. Bella tried to get Kit Cornell, but she had a bad cold and couldn’t come, malheureusement. Well, it was a terribly gay evening, and I suppose I did have an awful lot to drink, but I got to telling Lindsay all about what I’d been doing since I left Buffalo and he was ever so amused and all of a sudden he said, ‘Mame, why don’t you write a book?’ And then Mary Lord Bishop said, ‘W
hy, yes, why don’t you?’ So I simply thought, Well, why the hell not? Then we all got to talking about it and the high old times we used to have with the boys in the Saturn Club and Lindsay Woolsey said, ‘Mame, you could absolutely put Buffalo on the map!’ And Mary Lord Bishop said that even if it was already on the map, any book I wrote would be terribly unusual and she’d be happy to represent me as an agent. So the three of us put our heads together and decided to call it Buffalo Gal. Isn’t that cute?”

  “Cunning.”

  “Well, I’ve only been at it for a couple of days, but you saw how enthused Mary and Elizabeth were this afternoon. My life in the magazines, the newspapers, as a movie, and translated in God-knows-how-many foreign languages.”

  “That certainly will be exciting,” I said.

  “Exciting! Oh, darling, I can hardly breathe, I’m so thrilled. Now I must dress.”

  I could hear Auntie Mame’s voice singing “Buffalo Gal, won’t you step out tonight, step out tonight, step out tonight,” and I knew that she was launched on a new endeavor.

  During the last days I spent at home I worked so hard for Auntie Mame’s literary career that St. Boniface—prayers and all—began to look pretty good. She kept Miss Gooch and me hopping every minute. She made me go to the Public Library to do historical research, and when I asked her if she remembered President McKinley’s assassination during the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition she ordered me out of the room. I was almost happy to return to St. Boniface for another year of school.