Around the World With Auntie Mame

by Dennis, Patrick

“Yes, Auntie Mame,” I said. “It’s Basil— and Vera.”

  “Oh, the darling!” She flew to the door and flung it open. “Darling, darling, Basil!” Auntie Mame cried. “I knew you’d come!”

  “Mame!” Vera shouted. “Darling!” She threw her arms around Auntie Mame and kissed her.

  I had the feeling that Auntie Mame would much rather be in the Hon. Basil’s arms, but she still felt guilty about her friend Vera.

  “Oh, Vera! Have you found it in your heart to forgive me?”

  “Yais, Mame, yais. Oh, Amadeo was so wrong for me. And it took you to make me see what was right. Now I do and I’m eternally grateful.”

  “Good, Vera,” Auntie Mame said heartily. “I hoped you’d see the light.”

  “Oh, I have,” Vera said, beaming up at Basil. “And, Mame, darling, I do want you two to be happy.”

  “I’m sure we will be,” Auntie Mame said, also smiling at Basil.

  Basil blushed brick red.

  “Ah, Mame,” Vera said with a sweeping gesture, “do kiss Basil—to please me.” Auntie Mame obliged with great ardor and the Hon. Basil blushed even more. “My dear,” Vera gushed on, “when Basil and I found that note, I thought my heart would break. And his, too. But Basil understood.”

  “Naturally,” Auntie Mame said.

  “And you know the old saying, darling, ‘Two lonely hearts beating as one. . . .’ So Basil and I simply slipped off to Paris and we were joined in a sweet little civil ceremony at the Georges Cinq. Auntie Griselda was my only attendant.”

  Auntie Mame’s jaw fell.

  “But,” Vera continued, “when all those telegrams started arriving, we knew that you must want us to come and dance at your wedding. And here we are, just an old married couple, Captain and Mrs. Basil Fitz-Hugh.”

  “Well, don’t start dancing just yet,” Auntie Mame said slowly.

  “We were going to Bad Gastein for our honeymoon,” Vera said, “but you came first, my oldest and dearest friend. Besides, I wanted to give you an opportunity to be one of the original investors in this divine play I’m going to do for Freddie Lonsdale next fall. So I said to Basil . . . Mame, you look so pale. Can I get you something? Where’s Amadeo?”

  “Amadeo is in Spain,” I said.

  “In Spain?” Vera cried. “But Mame, darling, when will the wedding take place?”

  “The wedding will take place,” Auntie Mame said, “as soon as Amadeo finds another chump of a rich woman—a woman with too many dollars, not enough sense, and no best friend to save her.”

  Auntie Mame and a Family Affair

  “SO AFTER YOU SWAM AND SUNNED ON THE BASQUE Coast what did you do?” Pegeen asked, eying me suspiciously.

  “Why, nothing much. We went on to Italy.”

  “Where in Italy?”

  “Venice mostly.”

  “I’ll bet Venice! I can just see that old phony now, the life and soul of every down-and-out old countess and duke in the International Set.”

  “Pegeen, how can you talk that way? We did no such thing at all. Auntie Mame took a house in Venice and we led a very quiet, cultural life—just the family.”

  “Family?”

  “Yes. Family. Just a sweet old cousin from down South who dropped in for a visit. In fact, my dear, he was so tiresome I won’t even bother telling you about it.”

  DISAPPOINTED IN LOVE, Auntie Mame developed a certain soft, sweet piety. She spoke a good deal of God and the Hereafter and even went round to Berkeley Square for a brief fling with the Oxford Movement. The Oxford Group loved Auntie Mame, but Auntie Mame didn’t love it. She found the proceedings “much too modern and intellectual” and “totally lacking in the mystery and pageantry of the older sects.” So she decided to quit England and go straight to the source—Italy—reeking of l’Ame Perdu and armed with her Book of Common Prayer, although she regretted as we passed through Rome that it wasn’t available in a Douay version.

  Venice had a certain ecclesiastical splendor that appealed mightily to Auntie Mame, and it took her no time at all to establish herself as the Pearl of the Adriatic. She leased a pink Palladian palazzo right on the Grand Canal—all very nice if you didn’t mind the terrible dampness or the faint odor of garbage that wafted up from the lapping waters. The house featured some imitation Veronese frescoes, a genuine Bronzino portrait, some so-so Canalettos, and quite a lot of rococo furniture.

  Auntie Mame also hired a private gondola and four strapping Venetians to make it go, but she was sick with disappointment when she learned that all the gondolas in Venice had to be black. She made up for it by designing the gondoliers’ costumes—I use the word advisedly—herself. They were black and pink with long, fluttering pink streamers on the hats, and they caused a distressing number of low, lewd whistles when Auntie Mame’s men rowed past the other gondoliers. In fact, they got into so many fist fights proving their masculinity to less spectacularly dressed oarsmen that Auntie Mame’s gondola often looked more like the emergency ward at Bellevue than the regal barge it was supposed to be. However, Auntie Mame cheerfully applied liniment to bruised jaws and beefsteak to black eyes, doubled their salaries, and threw in a sort of homemade workmen’s compensation policy to keep her boat afloat.

  The proper background created, Auntie Mame then set about finding suitable society to keep her amused during her indefinite stay in Venice. Find it she did one humid afternoon when her gondoliers, rakish in pink and studded with Band-Aids, were skimming homeward along the surface of a narrow back alleyway. I wasn’t paying much attention to anything besides the old crates and orange rinds bobbing on the murky water when I was interrupted from my daydreaming by loud cries of “Stae!” and “Po’pe!”

  “Would you look at that big ostentatious gondola right out in the middle of . . .” Auntie Mame cried, rising to her feet.

  I was just able to see a gigantic regatta-sized craft with six gondoliers in bright blue bearing down on us. Then there was a loud impact that sent Auntie Mame over backward into my lap. When we scrambled to our feet, fists were flying and a large blonde—in the same shade of blue as her six gondoliers— was shrieking something in Italian that sounded like “Give ’em hell!”

  Auntie Mame got to her feet again and cried, “Boys! Now, boys, you stop that this minute!” No one paid the slightest attention to her. Auntie Mame shook her fist at the woman in blue and yelled, “If you’d just tell your reckless gondoliers to stay on the right side of the . . . Why, Bella!”

  “Mame!” the woman cried. In a flutter of blue skirts she was in our boat and in Auntie Mame’s arms. They embraced warmly and then the blonde screamed something in Italian so electrifying that all the gondoliers stopped fighting and crossed themselves.

  “Patrick, my little love,” Auntie Mame said, “this is one of my oldest friends in all the world—one of my playmates from Buffalo, Bella Shuttleworth!”

  Fifteen minutes later we were having cocktails in Bella’s palazzo , just a bit upstream from Auntie Mame’s, while the pink gondoliers and the blue gondoliers, parked, so to speak, out in front, jabbered amicably about the vagaries of American employers.

  Bella Shuttleworth was one of those old Buffalo girls—I had heard Auntie Mame mention her often while recalling her childhood on Delaware Avenue—who felt that she had more to give Buffalo than Buffalo was able to absorb. So, like Auntie Mame, she had cleared out as early as possible to come to more pleasant terms with life in places like New York City and Paris and Cannes and Venice. Bella had married an Italian marquis whose title was almost as attractive to her as her fortune was to him. Alas, he was not able to keep pace with Bella and he died before so much as a platinum cigarette case had changed hands, leaving Bella a marchesa, the chatelaine of his leaking palazzo, and even richer than she’d been when she left Buffalo. By now Bella Shuttleworth was more Venetian than the doges. She spoke both Italian and Venetian with a lusty fluency that would have horrified the headmistress of Miss Rushaway’s School. Rather plain and pudgy to begin with, she had
turned into a perfect dumpling of a middle-aged woman, her hair the color and consistency of spun sugar, and everything she wore dyed a blue that was midway between a robin’s egg and a baby’s bonnet. While at first glance—and even second—Bella may have looked like someone’s cook got up for a Hibernian Outing, she was witty and jolly and created quite a stir in Venetian society. Auntie Mame could hardly have found a better patroness to guide her through the dark waterways of Venice.

  And so Auntie Mame settled happily into the faintly foolish social whirl that Bella dominated. Every morning the pink gondoliers and the Bella-blue gondoliers set out in a vivid armada in search of new dresses at Capellini’s or lunch at the Taverna La Fenice or even out to the Lido, where Bella displayed her rotund little figure, shamelessly contained in a frilly blue bathing suit plus a lot of pearls and diamonds. Within a week Auntie Mame was the heart and soul of a sort of international set made up of titles, artists, writers, and rich dilettantes, who liked nothing better than to be entertained in Auntie Mame’s damp dining room and to banquet her and Bella in their equally moist houses and apartments.

  And, best of all, Auntie Mame found not one, but two, most eligible beaux. Both were tall, handsome, single, and rich. Auntie Mame was naturally nervous about having another fortune hunter crawl out of the woodwork, but Bella, who knew to the last lira every income in Venice, was perfectly able to reassure her as to both suitors. One was a dashing, dark Italian princeling named Marcantonio della Cetera. The other contender for our girl’s hand was a blond Swedish viking named Alex Falk. Between the two of them, Auntie Mame rarely had a free moment—not that she had ever wanted many free moments. I could tell that Auntie Mame’s broken heart was well on the mend. In fact, Auntie Mame was so far out of the dumps that she was hell-bent on giving a big party, which was geared to come at the height of the season.

  Auntie Mame and Bella decided to give the party together, and they settled down to solve such knotty problems as: 1) what sort of party it was to be; 2) which five hundred lucky people were to be invited; and 3) in whose house it was to be held.

  The final plans were being drawn up on Bella’s balcony one sweltering afternoon when people with better sense were all napping behind closed blinds. I stretched sweatily out in a deck chair and tried to read Death in Venice while Auntie Mame and her old school chum haggled over the final details and swilled down a good deal more gin than seemed wise. What with the intense heat beating down on my skull and the genial bickerings of the ladies bleating into my ears, I didn’t absorb very much of the book. What I did get, aside from a mild heat stroke, was that it was to be a period ball and that the period was to be, after a lot of discussion, Renaissance. The costumes were to be neither Auntie Mame’s pink nor Bella blue, but black and white. Bella said this would be easier on the Life photographers, because surely Life would want to come to the party. There were to be fireworks in both pink and blue, and they tossed a coin to see in which house it would be given. Auntie Mame won.

  The guest list presented a serious problem. Auntie Mame said, “No fascists, darling, absolutely none.” Then Bella said, “For Christ’s sake, ducky, it’s a fascist country!” Then Auntie Mame said that if Bella was going to ask a lot of fascists, she was going to invite some Ethiopians. Bella said, “That was last year, ducky, but go ahead and ask all the Ethiopians you know.” Auntie Mame didn’t know any. After that the list was made up in a spirit of friendly compromise. Auntie Mame said that she could not invite Count and Countess Ciano because of political reasons. However, she decided that it was all right to ask the antique redhead who was the mistress of the deposed Kaiser Wilhelm, because the kaiser was practically dead—as was the mistress—and was no immediate international threat. You can see why I didn’t get much reading done.

  The sun had sunk in a big red ball and the gin had sunk to a pitiful little drop in the bottom of the bottle before the girls had threshed out their problems. By the time I helped Bella to her bedroom and steered Auntie Mame down to her gondola, it was almost dusk.

  But plenty more was to happen that day. The bobbing gondola had barely scraped the mossy steps of our house when an excited servant rushed out and cried, “Signora Burnside. Come quickly, Signor Burnside is here!”

  Auntie Mame’s hand flew to her heart and she said, “M-mister Burnside?” Then she got control of herself and said, “Impossible.” But she looked pale and stricken and had to be helped out of the gondola.

  Auntie Mame’s husband, Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside, had been dead for three years, and since I had Viewed the Remains—if that’s the correct term—and had watched Uncle Beau’s outsized casket lowered into the red earth of Peckerwood, his plantation in Georgia, there was little doubt in my mind that he was as dead as an old light bulb. Once inside, though, even I wasn’t too sure.

  When we got into the house the loggia was dim and empty. “Well, where is he?” Auntie Mame said. Then a voice—exactly Uncle Beau’s voice—said, “Mame? Mame, honey, here Ah am.”

  I looked upward among the artificial Veronese frescoes, depicting a lot of trompe l’oeil people leaning over both genuine and painted balustrades and there was a real-life, moving Uncle Beau. Auntie Mame looked up, too. “B-Beau?” she said. Her knees sagged and she turned the color of alabaster.

  “Course it ain’t Beau, Mame honey,” the Uncle Beau-man said. “Beau’s daid. It’s Cousin Elmore.”

  “Oh,” Auntie Mame said, regaining her strength somewhat. “P-please come down.”

  We went into one of the rooms off the loggia and Auntie Mame poured herself a tremendous drink. She’d downed half of it by the time Elmore Burnside made his entrance. The similarities between Elmore Jefferson Davis Burnside and Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside were amazing, but only at a distance. For the differences were equally amazing, and I often felt that, uncanny as the resemblance could be, Cousin Elmore was only a cheap imitation of Uncle Beau, hastily put out to please a less discriminating market.

  Uncle Beau had been the best of the Burnsides. I know that isn’t saying much, considering the rest of his awful family, who had all been horrid to Auntie Mame when Uncle Beau married her. But now, with Uncle Beau dead and buried, they were all beholden to Auntie Mame for every nickel they got. A person less generous and forgiving—the word “saintly” comes to mind, but I reject it—might easily have let the whole lot of them languish in the county almshouse, which was too good for most of the Burnsides. But not Auntie Mame. As Uncle Beau’s sole heir she doled out generous allowances to all the hangers-on in the family and even kept her flatulent old termagant of a mother-in-law wallowing in laxatives and luxury at Peckerwood. By tacit agreement, Auntie Mame and her in-laws kept to their own sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, corresponding only at Christmas, when each of them sent her a tacky greeting card and when she mailed each of them a fat check. But Cousin Elmore was one Burnside we had never met before and he also occupied a unique position in that distinguished old family in that he was the only one of a hundred and some close relatives who worked for a living and wasn’t on the family payroll.

  I knew that Auntie Mame had never really got over Uncle Beau, for all of her flirtations since widowhood, but I also knew that if the superficial similarities between Beauregard Burnside and Elmore Burnside had stunned me, they must have done even more to Auntie Mame, who, even cold sober, was slightly nearsighted and too vain to wear glasses except when there was something she had to see.

  But after the initial surprise had worn off, the dissimilarities grew ever more obvious, to me at least. Cousin Elmore was almost as tall as Uncle Beau, but where Beau had been what I believe is called a Big Man, Elmore was gross; blubber replacing muscle. Beauregard had had a Southern accent— naturally—but it was more or less under control. Cousin Elmore sounded just like an End Man. While Uncle Beau had had an absolute genius for making money, he never mentioned it or business. Cousin Elmore rarely talked of anything else, except sex. The first thing he said, after soundly kissing Auntie Mam
e, was “Ah travel in ladies’ undahway-ah,” an unsettling statement that instantly had my gaze fastened on his open sport shirt to see if I could catch sight of a lacy camisole peeping out among the pineapples, hula girls, and hair.

  And that brings up the subject of clothing. Uncle Beau always looked like a million dollars, not because he had millions in the bank, but because he had billions in taste. He was the kind of man who could have appeared in a fig leaf and still been faultlessly dressed. Not so Cousin Elmore. Elmore Burnside was wrinkle-prone, a pattern pushover, and color-crazed to the point of dementia. He reveled in green gabardine, in bright blue tweed, in chocolate browns, damson plums, and pearl grays. His shirts all had very virile brand names like Cowboy Casual, Rogue, Buccaneer, He-Man Haberdashery, and Sir Sportsman, but they all ran to the pansiest of colors— the more the merrier—in frightfully gay prints, and he wore them all hanging outside his trousers as though he might be just the tiniest bit pregnant.

  Some nights when I have trouble sleeping, I find myself looking back upon Cousin Elmore’s considerable wardrobe and trying to pick out just which items impressed me—or depressed me—the most. There were, for example, his shoes. He had dozens of pairs, for Cousin Elmore often confessed— without even being pressed—to foot trouble. The shoes, too, often had manly names such as Lothario Loafer, Bronco Brogue, Robin Hood, Kadet Kasual, and Mr. Metatarsal, but when you came right down to them, they all squeaked like castrati. Elmore favored two—or even three—tones of gray calf; woven straw and fabric mesh; boxed or pointed toes, and more eyelets and perforations per square inch than seemed possible. His socks, however, were always white.

  Or could it have been Elmore’s jewelry? He loved big studs and links of simulated—Elmore wittily called them “stimulated”—rubies and sapphires; great gobs of garbage gold, intricately machine-stamped; beaten silver and wondrously wrought glass. His fingers and lapels always glittered with an impressive array of lodge rings and emblems, worn interchangeably because Elmore was quite a joiner and hadn’t nearly enough digits to display the spoils of his good fellowship. Nor were any of Elmore’s neckties complete without a golf club, an eight ball, a skull with crossed bones, or a scotty—brutally hanged from a silver link chain—to hold them in place. Naturally he had all the latest fads in key chains, lighters, souvenir cigarette cases, fountain pens, and automatic pencils.