Auntie Mame

by Patrick Dennis

  During the fall term Auntie Mame wrote almost every day, except now she dictated most of her letters to Agnes Gooch. Each one was a paean of praise to her own literary talents. When Auntie Mame was too busy to write herself, Agnes Gooch took over and wrote abysmal letters about Auntie Mame’s career. She also crocheted an ecru dresser scarf for my room at school and sent a box of gritty fudge which her sister Edna had cooked.

  For all of Auntie Mame’s talk about her book, I’d never read a word of Buffalo Gal, subtitled The Personal History of a Modern George Sand, nor had anyone else. But around November a thick bundle of manuscript arrived. It was one of many copies of the book which the untiring Agnes Gooch had typed. No one could deny that Auntie Mame’s was a big book. It ran just shy of nine hundred typewritten pages, but no matter how much you loved her you could never say it was good. Although Auntie Mame was a fascinating talker, knew a lot of interesting people, and had excellent taste in her own reading, her prose style was that of a gifted amateur—a bit too florid, a bit too irresponsible, and often unconsciously funny. She had also been too scrupulous a reporter and told much more than was absolutely necessary about some of her dearest friends. So it didn’t take half an eye to see that, rich as she was, she would be a complete pauper after the libel suits started pouring in. All in all, Buffalo Gal, while interesting, was a lousy book. I was sitting down to write her a polite but dishonest letter of congratulation when a telegram arrived at St. Boniface. It said:

  COME HOME— I’M DYING

  AUNTIE MAME

  When I rushed into the house on Washington Square, Agnes Gooch, white-lipped and more pallid than ever, greeted me at the door. “Goodness, Patrick, I’m so glad you’ve come. Poor Mrs. Burnside has been calling for you for three days.” She looked at me balefully through her glasses and snuffled. “I haven’t even been home since Wednesday and my sister Edna has had to do all the housework and Mumsie …”

  “What’s the matter with Auntie Mame?” I demanded.

  “Oh, Patrick! Her book—her publisher’s rejected it!”

  “Is that all?”

  “Oh, but it’s serious. They’re up there now—Mr. Woolsey, her publisher, and her agent, Mrs. Bishop. They told me—in the strictest confidence—that they want to get her a ghost writer. Oh, she’s so hurt; and Mumsie and Edna and I thought the book was just lovely. So glamorous. The … the ghost man is coming any minute now. She’ll be so glad to have some loved one, like you, at her side in this crisis.”

  As I ran upstairs I could hear voices in Auntie Mame’s bedroom. They were all talking at once, but Auntie Mame was the loudest of all. “… and as for you, Mary Lord, what do you mean, my manuscript doesn’t ring true?”

  “Auntie Mame,” I said, “I’m home.”

  “Darling,” she cried from her bed, spreading her arms dramatically with a flutter of scalloped chiffon sleeves. “At last you’ve come to stand by me while these literary vultures pick at the poor bones of my life’s work. Sit by me here on the bed and let me draw from your young strength.”

  “Now, Mame, don’t you think you’re overstating the case?” Mary Lord Bishop said logically. Mrs. Bishop was trying to retain her impressive placidity, but it was a losing fight.

  “Now, Mame,” Mr. Woolsey said, “cursing Mary and me isn’t going to get Buffalo Gal written properly, or make it any more salable.” Mr. Woolsey, who was ordinarily both dapper and diplomatic, was beginning to show signs of strain. “Surely we three mature people can talk this out.”

  “Oh, yes,” Auntie Mame roared, “we can talk. Talk, talk, talk, that’s all you and Mary seem to be able to do. You talked me into writing this book, now you want to talk me out of it just because it happens to be work of serious literary consideration. Well, you can’t talk me out of my convictions, Lindsay Woolsey, and neither can anybody else who was born on Linwood Avenue with the rest of the Buffalo parvenus!”

  “But, Mame,” Mr. Woolsey wheedled, “we haven’t rejected Buffalo Gal. We simply feel that you need some outside help. We still think it’s a splendid idea.”

  “Oh yes, Lindsay,” Mrs. Bishop said nervously, “just short of being brilliant, but like so many ama—that is—new writers, Mame needs a little editorial assistance to guide her over the rough spots. And I feel that if we just had some experienced writer to put in a word here and there, do a little judicious cutting …”

  “Yes,” Mr. Woolsey said, “cutting is of the essence.”

  “… But, of course, to remain entirely anonymous; just to be in the background to lend a …”

  “So!” Auntie Mame bellowed, “now I’m to undergo the final humiliation. Now I’m to have a ghost writer—some unspeakable little hack to twist and distort the meaning and the ethos of my life.”

  “Mame,” Mrs. Bishop said patiently, “it wouldn’t be a ghost writer. He’d be more of an editor …”

  “A sort of literary adviser, wouldn’t you say, Mary?”

  “Who?” Auntie Mame asked viciously.

  “Well, Elizabeth and I know of a particularly capable young man who’s done quite a lot of this work and he could do a perfectly grand job of reworking your book. I saw him the other day and showed him your manuscript and Mr. O’Bannion thought that your material was captivating.”

  “He did?” Auntie Mame said, coming out of her sulk.

  “Yes indeed. He said you had one of the most astonishing capacities for invention he’d ever seen.”

  “Really?” Auntie Mame said. “What did you say his name was?”

  “It’s Brian O’Bannion. He’s a …”

  “Oh, God deliver me!” Auntie Mame moaned. “I can see him now—one of those beery, loose-mouthed Irish tenors, with a lot of quaint repartee.”

  “Now, that’s not fair, Mame,” Mrs. Bishop said stolidly. “As a matter of fact, he’s a very good poet. He wrote that volume called The Wounded Tulip for …”

  “Probably pansy,” Auntie Mame muttered.

  “And besides, Mame, he’s done a great deal of this work before, he knows the market, and he has a great feeling for …”

  “Well, if you think I’m going to have some moon-eyed, epicene versifier messing up my memoirs with a lot of miserable Irish wit you’re just crazy. I’d rather take my book and flush it down the toilet than undergo the ennui and mortification of …”

  Miss Gooch’s shapeless shape appeared at the bedroom door. “Mr. O’Bannion is here, Mrs. Burnside.” We all looked up, and there stood Brian O’Bannion.

  Auntie Mame let out a short, breathless little gasp. From what she had been saying, I’d expected a little, low-comedy Irishman; a sort of funny-paper Jiggs out of Lady Gregory. Instead, Brian O’Bannion was what is known as White Irish. He was about thirty, tall, and very thin. He had white, white skin and hair as black as coal, short and very curly. His eyes were turquoise blue, rimmed with thick black eyelashes, and the second I saw them I thought of a Siamese tomcat. He was got up awfully tweedily in homespun, with big suede patches at the elbows and a dirty trench coat thrown over one shoulder. He shifted his weight gracefully in the doorway and gave Auntie Mame a slow, sad smile displaying a fine set of choppers, while his intense blue eyes reached out—in a manner of speaking—and caressed her.

  Auntie Mame swallowed, her hands fidgeted with the bodice of her bed sacque. She smiled charmingly and said, “Do come in, Mr. O’Bannion. We were just talking about you.”

  Mr. O’Bannion walked—or perhaps a better word would be slunk—into the room, and I thought of a cat stalking some sort of prey. While Mary Lord Bishop was introducing her agency’s property around, Auntie Mame snatched feverishly for her compact, took a reassuring glance, and then said graciously: “Do sit down right here where I can see you, Mr. O’Bannion. It’s so awfully kind of you—a really renowned pao-wet—to lend a hand with my childish little scribblings.” He gave her the old hot eye again and she cleared her throat nervously. “
Tell me,” she said, her smile matching his, “do you think that you and I can ever get anyplace? With the book, I mean.”

  Mr. O’Bannion turned on the soft, sad smile once more and said in his deep, mellifluous voice, “I know that you and I are going to create something wonderful.”

  That afternoon I was sent back to St. Boniface with the report that Auntie Mame was recovering nicely.

  I hardly heard a word from Auntie Mame for the next month and when I did, it seemed that the word was always Brian. “… Brian and I have just been for a brisk tramp over the moors of Oyster Bay. Like Brian, I always do my best thinking in the crisp, clean out of doors …” or “… it’s past midnight and Brian and I have just been sitting around the fire reading Yeats and watching the smoke curl up from his pipe …” or “… worked like a beaver today. Being with Brian has given me a new interpretation of my entire girlhood. I can’t tell you what it means having a man around the place after all these months with that dreary Agnes.” Even at a distance I began to get the idea.

  Miss Gooch took to writing me on her own hook, too. She kept saying that Auntie Mame’s memoirs, in collaboration with Brian, were coming very slowly, but what little had been written was simply enthralling. She was a little less effusive about Auntie Mame, but she had only praise for Mr. O’Bannion. Goodness, she couldn’t wait for my Christmas holidays, when she and Auntie Mame and dear Mr. O’Bannion and I would all be together to make up a jolly foursome. At what, she didn’t say. I had the feeling that I could wait a long time, but Christmas eventually arrived.

  “Missy Burnside out with Irishman, but Missy Foureyes upstairs,” Ito said as he let me into the house.

  Miss Gooch was indeed upstairs, and I found her sobbing over a copy of Brian’s book of poems, The Wounded Tulip. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Goodness,” she said, dropping The Wounded Tulip and stumbling out of her chair, “I didn’t think you’d be arriving so early.” She sniffled horridly. “Pardon me, please, I seem to of mislaid my hankie.”

  I gave her my own. “Here,” I said. “Blow.”

  “Thank you very much. I hope you’ll forgive my silly show of emotion, but Bri—Mr. O’Bannion’s—poems are all so be-yuty-ful that I …”

  I heard the front door close downstairs and Auntie Mame’s voice call, “Darling, are you home?”

  I could see that a change had come over Auntie Mame as I trotted down the stairs. She’d had her second-best mink coat made into a reversible: Irish homespun on the outside, mink inside. She was wearing a homespun suit, good stout brogues, and a six-foot-long Eton scarf. She reeked of peat bogs.

  “What are you got up as?” I said blankly.

  “Oh, Brian and I have been out tramping the moors, thinking.” Brian gave me the glad eye and sad smile. He was wearing gray tweed, the first Tattersall waistcoat I’d seen off the stage, and a Trinity College (Dublin) tie. “Awf’ly glad to see you agayne, Paddy.”

  “Well, time for tea, darlings,” Auntie Mame sang.

  Brian slithered off to the bathroom. Then she turned to me and kissed me. “Oh, my little love, it’s so good to have you home for Christmas; to have you here when Auntie Mame is so busy, so creative, so productive, so utterly, utterly happy!”

  I felt kind of embarrassed and I said: “How’s the book?”

  “Oh, darling,” Auntie Mame said, “I feel that I’ve learned so much in these few weeks with Brian. I was the veriest amateur, who thought that one should rush at the muse. But now I find that writing is truly a deep and exquisite experience.”

  “How much have you got done?”

  “Nearly twenty pages.”

  “Only twenty pages?” I said.

  “Really, Patrick,” Auntie Mame said, “you know nothing of the true creative process. Ninety-nine per cent of the work is in the thinking, and dear Brian has brought my brain alive!”

  “Oh?”

  “Yesss, darling.” She lowered her voice. “And, Patrick, I want you to get to know Brian. To know him as I do—or almost as I do. You like him, don’t you? And, darling,” she said, kissing the top of my head, “if he should ever mention age—that is, ask you how old … well, you know, tell him I’m thirty-five and you’re twelve. Isn’t he virile?” Auntie Mame whispered, clutching my arm as he came back into the room. The picture was getting clearer.

  Tea that day and dinner following were unusual events, to say the least. It was interesting and a little horrible to watch Auntie Mame and Agnes Gooch make such asses of themselves over Brian. Agnes, her sallow skin, her lank, lackluster hair, her rimless glasses, her baggy bouclé knit dress in just the wrong shade of blue, the vulgar exactitude of her speech, was pathetic as the poor, plain little typist mooning over a handsome man ten years her senior. While Auntie Mame, the perfection of her flesh, her beautifully coiffed head, her magnificent figure, her glowing eyes, her flawless clothes with all the right jewels, her casual, lighthearted charm, was ludicrous as the rich, elaborate, aging belle mooning over a handsome man ten years her junior.

  I didn’t see much of Auntie Mame that season, but she was hell-bent that I should see a lot of Brian. She practically threw us together—against my will and, I’m certain, against his. One day she made him take me for a brisk hike in Central Park while she had her hair done. The day was memorable only for its discomfiture, Brian’s herringbone tweeds, and the fact that he literally licked his chops when he came across a prettyish nursemaid wheeling a baby carriage near Seventieth Street. Another day Auntie Mame decided that Brian and I should revel in one another’s company amidst the medieval splendor of the Cloisters. The afternoon was dismal. My feet hurt, the Cloisters smelled just like the locker room at St. Boniface Academy, and Brian, instead of admiring the delicately painted virgins from obscure Italian convents, was slobbering after two rather garishly touched-up virgins from Hunter College who eluded him—with appreciative giggles—among the sarcophagi of the twelfth century. I got some hint as to Brian’s extraordinary appeal, but as women can never understand what men see in their more widely sought-after sisters, neither could I explain what Brian had to offer. Not only did he weigh under a hundred and fifty pounds, but he was also a lecher, a cheat, a liar, and, what is still worse, a colossal bore.

  The rest of my vacation was passed in the equally uninspiring company of Miss Agnes Gooch, who said three times a day: “Goodness, isn’t it amazing how a year goes by! Why, it seems only yesterday that Mumsie and Edna and I were undoing our Christmas things—we always save the ribbons and press them out for next year—and here it is again!”

  Christmas was very merry and Auntie Mame outdid herself at being Irish—or at least North of Ireland. Yule logs burned in every fireplace until it got so hot that we had to open all the windows. Brian slunk in, all Glenurquhart plaid, and Agnes took the subway in from Kew Gardens, after a beautiful Christmas morning with Mumsie and Edna. She was radiant in a dress she’d made herself of a particularly taxing shade of mustard wool with beadwork over the bosom, and she brought gifts of her own manufacture for each of us. She gave me a scarf she’d knitted in St. Boniface Academy colors, and she presented Auntie Mame with a bed jacket of eau de Nil angora. For Brian she had worked a pair of carpet slippers in petit point with shamrocks and his initials, and he rewarded her with such a devastating smile that her knees buckled.

  Auntie Mame gave Agnes a kiss, a plain white envelope, and a length of green homespun, which, considering the handiwork Agnes had just brought forth, was a terrible mistake.

  Auntie Mame gave Brian a kiss, a plain white envelope—thicker than Agnes’—and a beautiful Bentley two-seater which stood low and rakish at the curb outside. He was too stunned even to smile.

  She gave me a kiss, a plain white envelope, two of the tweediest jackets ever created, a pair of stout brogues so heavy that I could hardly lift them from the floor, a Tattersall waistcoat, and a box of seven pipes marked “Sunday,” “Monday,” �
�Tuesday,” “Wednesday,” “Thursday,” “Friday,” and “Saturday.” In short, everything I needed, except a Bentley car, to be a junior Brian O’Bannion.

  Brian gave each of us an autographed copy of The Wounded Tulip. Then we all had a heavy dinner and Auntie Mame said she thought it would be just divine if I were to take Agnes to the Radio City Music Hall to see a rousing good film and that lovely, lovely Christmas pageant of the Nativity.

  Although I vastly preferred Agnes to Brian, I found her wholesome garrulousness just as tiring as his unhealthy silence. Still, she meant well, which was more than one could say of him. All the way uptown in the taxi Agnes jabbered away about goodness, what a sweet, dear man Brian was, and how she’d just love to take him home to Mumsie and Edna and put some meat on his bones; and goodness, what a lovely, lovely Christmas it had been and didn’t I think that a White Christmas was ever so much healthier because the snow laid all the germs.

  Because it was Christmas I walked Agnes down to the Algonquin for a drink after the show. Agnes was favorably impressed with the rather fusty stateliness of the Algonquin lounge and she was also pleased to see that the patrons merely sat about in armchairs and sofas to do their drinking. “Goodness,” she said, “it’s so refined. Just like a lovely home instead of some tavrun.” She told me three times how strict Mumsie was about liquor and made me promise to buy her some Sen-Sen to munch going home to Kew Gardens. Then she ordered something called a Pink Whiskers, which made the waiter blanch.

  Her drink looked kind of nasty to me, but she sipped it ostentatiously, still wearing her gloves and with a great crooking of her little finger, and pronounced it extremely refreshing. She belched softly and said something mystifying about the Gay White Way and the Four Hundred.

  My mind was a thousand miles away, but I was suddenly snapped back to life when Agnes slammed her empty glass down and shrieked: “Oh, baby, that sets me on fire! Let’s have another!” Then, for some unaccountable reason, she added: “Hotcha!”