Auntie Mame

by Patrick Dennis

The waiter said, “Does your aunt know you’re out?”

  “Really,” I said, “Miss Gooch is my aunt’s Alice B. Toklas.”

  “Certainly, my good man,” Agnes giggled, “don’t be ridic.” Then she wrinkled up her nose and added, “You’re cute.” I had just strength enough left to order Agnes another drink.

  “I don’t know so awfully much about liquor and most of it tastes like medicine to silly old me, but this girl—Phyllis—at the Prudential used to tell me about the Pink Whiskers cocktails her boy friend ordered for her. He was in hardware. Anyhoo, the name sounded so cute I just thought I’d try one.”

  The second Pink Whiskers arrived and the waiter had hardly set the glass down before Agnes had emptied it. It seemed to me that her friend Phyllis should also have told her that when drinking, it’s endurance, not speed, that counts.

  “Goodness, I feel so gay and light and young and happy I could just dance!” Then she said “Hotcha!” again.

  “Agnes,” I said quickly, “I don’t think the Algonquin has an orchestra.”

  “I’m just going to see a man about a dog,” Agnes shrilled. Then she leaned over and bit my ear. “Be a peacherino and gemme another Pink Whiskers.”

  I was so shaken by the Jekyll and Hyde transformation in Miss Gooch that I was only able to tap the bell and ask for another Pink Whiskers. The waiter looked at me sternly and said: “If it wasn’t fer yer aunt, I wouldn’t serve that dame no more. They’re the worst kind, them schoolteacher ones.”

  Agnes returned almost sooner than I wanted her to, her nose now a solid blue-white from a determined application of powder. “You’re cute,” she said as she settled on the divan.

  In a frenzy, I tried to change the subject. “Tell me, Agnes,” I said, “how’s the book coming? When do you think Auntie Mame and Brian’ll be finished?”

  She took off her glasses and banged them on the table so hard that I looked down surreptitiously to see if she had broken them. “Lisssen,” she snarled, “if you were locked in a room with Brian would you be in any hurry to get out!”

  I fought down the impulse to say, “For God’s sake, yes.”

  She snorted and pulled off her orange tam-o’-shanter, then she stared up at me long and hard. Her eyes, instead of being colorless, were a deep, glorious gray and they were enormous. Her hair had come a trifle loose, and even with her blue matte-finish nose planted defiantly in the middle of her sallow face, she was—just for a moment—almost beautiful. “Lissenamee, Mrs. Burnside can’t take her eyes off of Brian. It’s disgusting. It’s awful. Why, she’s old enough to be his mother …”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that,” I began loyally.

  “And … and oh, I love him so-o-o-o!” Agnes collapsed into noisy sobs, stopping just long enough to say, “Gemme another Prink Whiskeys.” Then she tottered back to the powder room.

  The trip home was a nightmare. Agnes was all over me, moaning, “Brian, Brian, Brian, I love you, I want you.”

  “Want I should take yez to a ho-tel, buddy?” the driver asked as we reached Fifth Avenue.

  “Yes, yes, for God’s sake, yes!” Miss Gooch moaned.

  “You go where I told you!” I roared at the driver.

  Then Agnes got a hammer lock on me and dragged me down to the seat with her. I’d recently been the recipient of a pretty definitive kiss, delivered by a torrid brunette from Miss Walker’s, but Agnes’ alma mater, the Lillian Rose Dowdey Institute of Applied Business Technique, apparently offered things in its curriculum that made Miss Walker’s girls seem dim by comparison. I don’t know where, or if, Miss Gooch learned to make love, but she certainly had some advanced ideas.

  I carried Agnes into Auntie Mame’s house and up to the guest room where she slept whenever she stayed in town.

  With a good deal of tugging, and with several of her loving stitches giving, I removed the mustard wool dress and dumped her on the bed, unlaced the health oxfords, and took off her glasses. Her hair looked quite pretty when it fell loosely onto the pillow. As a matter of fact, I’d never noticed before, but Agnes had a damned good figure. She lay there in the lamplight absolutely gassed, but not half bad; then she opened her beautiful eyes and blinked. “Take me,” she moaned as I pulled the comforter up over her, “take me, Brian, for God’s sake, take me.”

  I was breakfasting alone the next morning when Agnes crept in. I didn’t have to ask her how she felt.

  “G-goodness,” she said, “I really must apologize for my behavior last evening. I think I must of eaten something that didn’t agree with me. Tell me, did I do anything—say anything—last night that wasn’t, uh, ladylike?”

  Just to show her that chivalry wasn’t quite dead I said, “Believe me, Agnes, you were perfectly fine.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad.” Then she excused herself quickly.

  Brian arrived about eleven, and Auntie Mame came bounding down the stairs dressed vaguely like Sherlock Holmes in a hound’s-tooth checked suit and a great Inverness cape. “Hoop-la!” she caroled, “off to break in the new car. It’s going to be ever so jolly! Patrick, my little love, be an angel and ask Ito if our hamper is ready.”

  The day was damp and the cold was severe. “Are you going out in that open car on a day like this?” I asked.

  “But of course, darling! A good brisk tramp over the moors really makes the blood sing in one’s veins. You know, we Celts are hardy!”

  Shivering slightly, I watched Auntie Mame and Brian drive off. Then I went upstairs to suggest an ice bag to Miss Gooch.

  I was dressing to go to a dance when Auntie Mame and Brian got home. Auntie Mame looked terribly flushed. She didn’t seem to have benefited much from her tramp across the moors, and she sat huddled by the fire drinking hot Irish whisky. Her eyes were unnaturally bright, and when I bent down to kiss her good-by her face felt as though it were in flames.

  The next day Auntie Mame was confined to her bed with what the doctor described as a cold so bad that it was almost pneumonia.

  Poor Auntie Mame was a sight. Her face was swollen to about twice its size. Her eyes ran piteously. Her nose was crimson, and every sentence was punctuated by violent spasms of coughing and sneezing. For two days she lay in bed and moaned while Miss Gooch hovered in attendance.

  Brian came to the house every morning, but Auntie Mame refused to let him see her. “I can’t let him up here, Agnes,” she’d moan, woefully surveying her red nose and sneezing. She sneezed again, took another incredulous look at her reflection, and rolled over in her big gold bed.

  Agnes scampered around the house running errands, making phone calls, attending the croup kettle in Auntie Mame’s room. Down in the library Brian made a weak stab at writing a bit of Buffalo Gal, but most of the time he paced the floor. He reminded me of nothing so much as a stud who’d been locked into a box stall all winter. Meals with Brian and Miss Gooch were a terrible ordeal. Every day she was a little sallower, a little more elegantly kittenish; and every day he fidgeted more and more, until I was on the verge of dosing his soup with saltpeter, like the cook did at St. Boniface.

  Auntie Mame was getting better, but the doctor demanded that she stay in bed for at least another week. This put her in a fury, however, since she’d been looking forward to the big New Year’s Eve party which her publisher was giving.

  “Oh, Patrick, darling,” she fumed, “what have I done to deserve a fate so cruel? Here I’ve been planning to go to Lindsay’s for months and now I can’t. Really, I’m so mad I could just cry. It’s my right to be at Lindsay’s. After all, I am one of his authors. Important people from the whole world of letters will be there to meet me, to discuss my book—and where will I be? I’ll be right here in bed with my Kleenex and croup kettle. And Brian was looking forward to it so.”

  “Well, can’t Brian go alone?”

  “Oh, the poor darling’s so shy, he wouldn’t have any fun at all without me to guide him around.” I wasn’t
so sure.

  “Gee, Auntie Mame, that’s too bad,” I said, and went downstairs to where Brian was practically pawing a hole through the drawing-room carpet, ignoring Miss Gooch who sat seductively on the sofa, her eyelashes fluttering behind her spectacles.

  The day of Lindsay Woolsey’s New Year’s Eve party arrived to find Auntie Mame still confined to bed.

  To make matters even worse, her agent telephoned about lunchtime and said that she certainly hoped Auntie Mame and Brian would be at the party that night because a very important producer from MGM had evinced great interest in Buffalo Gal and she simply knew that Auntie Mame could charm him into an outright sale—preferably sight unseen.

  Auntie Mame wailed: “Oh, Mary, how too ghastly. I can’t. How really dreadful!”

  There was some more spluttering over the phone and then Auntie Mame said: “But, Mary, I couldn’t send dear Brian alone. In the first place, he’s terribly shy, and then the poor lamb is so innocent! He has none of my business acumen. He’d be lost.”

  There was some more gabbling and then Auntie Mame said: “No, Mary, that’s out of the question. I tell you, I don’t know any unattached women, at least not the sort of woman I’d trust.”

  Mrs. Bishop talked some more and then Auntie Mame said: “Mary, the whole problem is insoluble. I just don’t know any single woman I could get now at the eleventh hour. You’ll simply have to …”

  I don’t know to this day quite what got into me, but seeing poor Agnes sitting on the chaise longue crocheting an antimacassar and looking sad and virtuous, I had a sudden inspiration. “What about Miss Gooch, Auntie Mame?” I asked.

  “Don’t be facetious,” Auntie Mame said. Then she glanced at Agnes. It was the kind of look a nervous mother gives to a nursemaid she’s just engaged to handle a problem child—a look of relieved approval. “Just a minute, Mary,” Auntie Mame said into the mouthpiece. Then she turned to Agnes. “Agnes, dear, what are your plans for this evening?”

  “Oh, goodness, Mrs. Burnside, nothing much I guess. On New Year’s Eve Mumsie and Edna and I usually have ginger ale and some of Edna’s brownies, then we tune in the radio and hear the New Year being celebrated in one of the big hotels in New York and then an hour later in Chicago and then in Denver and finally at the Cocoanut Grove in California. Why, last year Gary Cooper …”

  “I have other plans for you this year. Hello, Mary, don’t worry. My secretary can go for me.”

  “Oh, goodness, I simply couldn’t!” Agnes cried. “The only thing I have to wear is my old peach organdie and I just wouldn’t have the time to make anything now and …”

  “That may be all to the good, Agnes,” Auntie Mame said. “I have tons of things you could squeeze into. Mary, victory is ours! Agnes can shepherd Brian around. With a little fixing up Agnes will be adequate. I’m sending them to the theater first, but they’ll be there about eleven … Happy New Year to you, too. Good-by.” She hung up.

  “Agnes,” Auntie Mame said, fixing her with a beady eye, “put down that tatting and come here. We haven’t a second to lose.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Burnside, I simply couldn’t ever …”

  “Agnes, take off your clothes.”

  “But, Mrs. Burnside, Patrick is …”

  “Would you ladies like me to leave?” I asked.

  “Certainly not. On a project like this, I want all the help I can get. Besides, I need a man’s critical eye to guide me when it comes to creating a new Agnes. Don’t be such a goose, Agnes, shell out of that serge sack and be quick about it.”

  Miss Gooch timidly removed her dark blue dress.

  “A little broad in the beam, perhaps,” Auntie Mame said with the critical tone of a horse trader, “but nothing that a good girdle can’t fix. Heavens, Agnes, you do have a bust. Where on earth have you been keeping it all these months? Now, go to my dressing room and open the third door and we’ll see what sort of evening thing will do the most for you.”

  Miss Gooch trudged virginally across the room in her white slip and her orthopedic shoes and returned with an armload of brilliant evening dresses.

  “Put down that red one this instant, Agnes!” Auntie Mame said from the depths of her Kleenex. “You’re supposed to dominate it. No, dear, that lime green makes you look like a jaundice case. I think we’d better stick to black; nobody ever got into any trouble with it. Here, that one, that good, tight, form-fitting Patou velvet. You have a nice little figure, Agnes—with a bit of trussing here and there—and there’s no reason to be ashamed of it. Here, just wriggle into this. Patrick, for God’s sake, child, fasten her up the back. Where’s your gallantry?”

  Even with her plain white slip showing over the top of the black velvet evening dress, Agnes looked pretty good, if you didn’t notice her face and her hair. She did have a form.

  “Yes,” Auntie Mame said authoritatively, lighting a Kool. “That’s it. That’s the dress. Now take it off and have a bath. Mercy, girl, I do wish we could do something to wake up your skin. A good physic would work wonders. However, it’s a little late in the day to try anything so drastic. But go into my bathroom and you’ll see a jar of Lydia van Rensselaer Skin-Glo. Simply slather it over yourself. It may sting for awhile but it’s worth the agony. Patrick, go run Agnes a good hot tub and dump in a lot of van Rensselaer Oil of Orchid. And Agnes, for God’s sake, shave under your arms. You look like King Kong.”

  I could hear Agnes whimpering with the pain of the Skin-Glo in the bathroom, but except for yelling “Shut up, Agnes,” Auntie Mame paid no attention.

  Eventually Agnes emerged, glowing like a red-hot rivet. She’d forgotten her glasses.

  “Why, Agnes,” Auntie Mame cried delightedly, “you have lovely eyes! Just leave those glasses off—forever.”

  “But I can’t see anything with my right eye, Mrs. Burnside, and …”

  “Look out of the left one. Oh, wouldn’t I love to cut that hair!”

  “Oh, Mrs. Burnside, I can sit on my hair!”

  “What a ridiculous thing for anyone to do. Well, if you won’t let me cut it, you won’t. But we could make it interesting. Come here, dear. Will you hold still!”

  The project took more than six hours, and Agnes whined and whimpered with every pat of the powder puff, with every tweak of the eyebrow tweezers and every stroke of the mascara brush.

  It was nearly eight when the transformation was complete. Agnes stood tall and stately, if a little unsteadily, in Auntie Mame’s high-heeled slippers. She kept squinting incredulously into the mirror, and even though she couldn’t see her reflection very well, both Auntie Mame and I told her several times that she was a stunner. “Now, Agnes,” Auntie Mame said, “you look divine. Really svelte. So when you get there I don’t want you to act the ingenue. Try to be soignée. Don’t tell them you live in Kew Gardens, don’t tell them about Mumsie and Edna—sterling women though they undoubtedly are. In fact, talk just as little as possible. Mary Lord Bishop will do the talking, that’s what she gets her commission for. You just try to look stylish and intelligent, and every time the MGM man asks you a question about my book—our book—you tell him it’s simply wonderful and bound to become a classic; which it is. All you really have to do is to look after Brian.”

  At the mention of Brian’s name I felt my stomach drop.

  “Auntie Mame,” I spluttered, “maybe it would be better if you let Mrs. Bishop handle the movie man alone. After all, New Year’s Eve means a lot to Mrs. Gooch and Edna, and you and Brian and I could play records right here and …”

  “Have you taken leave of your senses, child?” Auntie Mame said indulgently. “It’s vital to Brian’s career and mine that he go out among important lit’ry figures. That’s what Agnes is for: to take care of Brian when I can’t. Besides, this is your idea.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Burnside,” Agnes wailed, “I just can’t do it. I’m so nervous already I’m about to break out in press-peration.”

&nb
sp; “Not in my evening dress you’re not, Agnes Gooch. What you need is a little something to calm your nerves. Patrick, bring up some champagne. It’ll do us all good.”

  My blood ran cold. “Auntie Mame, do you really think we ought to have anything to drink? Agnes …”

  “Well, you’re certainly becoming frugal of my champagne, I must say. Do as I tell you and none of your impudence.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Burnside, I really don’t think I should dr …”

  “Auntie Mame,” I cried, “if Agnes doesn’t want a drink …”

  “Just pretend it’s medicine, Agnes. It will relax you.”

  Although Auntie Mame was rarely guilty of understatement, she’d really pulled off a classic.

  To give poor Miss Gooch her due, she sipped the first glass of champagne as though it were hemlock and said something tiresome about the bubbles tickling her nose. But my heart sank when Auntie Mame insisted that she drink another.

  Just then I heard the doorbell ring, and looking out of the window, I saw Brian’s elegant new Bentley.

  “Oh, Agnes,” Auntie Mame cried girlishly, “let’s give Mr. O’Bannion a big surprise. He still thinks I’m going to the party, but Patrick will announce you and you’ll come sweeping in. Quick, go hide in my dressing room. And here, take a glass of champagne in with you.”

  I felt I was witnessing the fall of Western civilization.

  All men look their best in white tie, but Brian was really something. When he saw Auntie Mame propped up decorously in her gold bed, his Siamese cat eyes glowed with a hunger that made me a little sick.

  “But—but the theater … the party?” he said. “Aren’t you ready?”

  “Oh, Brian, darling,” Auntie Mame pouted, “the doctor won’t let me go, so I’m sending a substitute.”

  “A substitute?” he said. “Who?”

  “Oh,” Auntie Mame cried, going all over kittenish, “someone you know—a very nice girl. It’s Agnes!”

  “Not … not Agnes?” The tomcat eyes stopped glowing and he looked like he’d just been stabbed.