Death, My Darling Daughters

by Jonathan Stagge

  We turned into the Hilton drive to see Rosalind and Perdita and another girl sitting on the lawn under an old sugar maple. Rosalind was sucking a piece of grass and reading out loud.

  When she saw us she waved lazily. “Hello, Dr. Westlake. Hello, Dawn. This is our Shakespeare hour. The Immortal Bard—so nourishing for the dear girls. It’s our favorite part of the day, matter of fact. Shakespeare’s the only dirty book we’re allowed to read. Listen.”

  She read sonorously:

  “Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed;

  Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse;

  And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses,

  Or paddling in your neck with his damn’d fingers…”

  Perdita, who had been watching us through her hair with the shy eyes of a deer ready to take flight, flushed and dropped her head so that the hair screened her face completely.

  Rosalind sighed. “I’m always shocking Perdita. She’s against sex. She believes in Love. The One Man, the One Kiss that seals the Eternal Bond.” Remembering presumably that introductions were in order, she nodded to the stranger.

  “Oh, by the way, Dr. Westlake, Dawn, this is Aunt Janie. Uncle George’s new wife.”

  The girl giggled and exclaimed in a voice which was distinctly southern and sufficiently feminine without its faint lisp. “Wosalind, you are tewwible. Calling me Aunt! It makes me feel so fwightfully old.”

  The young second Mrs. Hilton had risen and held out her hand to me, peering from big, shortsighted blue eyes. “Weally, it’s awful the way Wosalind teases.” She smiled one of those southern smiles straight from her femaleness at my maleness. “I’m so glad to meet you, Dr. Westlake. And, Dawn, honey…”

  While she crooned over my daughter, I found myself not surprised that the dour Nanny had taken exception to Janie Hilton. She was certainly not the sort of wife one expected for so revered and established a celebrity as Dr. George Hilton. Certainly, too, she did not conform to the orthodox Hilton pattern. Her scarlet nails, her luscious honey-chile make-up, and a crafty white sweater which aided rather than curbed the imagination, all cast serious doubts upon the plainness of her living. No high degree of thought was apparent, either, in her face, which was pretty and elementary enough to grace an advertisement for canned peaches.

  While Mrs. Hilton lisped through breathless sociabilities Rosalind regarded us both with sardonic amusement. Suddenly and rudely she interrupted her aunt to say:

  “You’re a feeble bully, Dr. Westlake. Nanny was up at the crack of dawn, mopping and dusting and polishing all the silver. She was so energetic she had another spell just after her ain Georgie and her puir Belle arrived. She’s back in bed.”

  That news did not surprise me. “I’d better go take a look at her.”

  “Oh no, you surely don’t have to bother, Doctor,” cooed Janie. “George went up to look at her himself and said she’s perfectly all wight.” She turned to Perdita. “Didn’t he, honey?”

  “I believe he did,” said Perdita, still rather pink.

  If the eminent Dr. Hilton was satisfied with the condition of his old nurse, I felt that the matter was more or less out of my hands.

  To be polite I said to Mrs. Hilton, “So you all arrived from Boston?”

  “In swarms. The house is simply cwawling with us, isn’t it, Wosalind?” Janie Hilton started counting cutely on her fingers. “Of course there’s Dr. and Mrs. Kenton-Oakes. And there’s me and George and Helena, my stepdaughter. That sounds awfully funny too, for I’m sure she’s much bigger than me, isn’t she, Wosalind?” She giggled again. “I snuck away from them all. It’s so much more fun weading Shakespeare with the girls.”

  Rosalind drawled: “Your inventory omitted Vic, Janie.”

  “Vic?” I queried.

  “Oh, Vic.” Janie Hilton tossed her childish chestnut hair. “He’s just George’s assistant.”

  “What a vast understatement.” Rosalind twisted around to her sister. “What is Vic really, Perdita?”

  If Perdita’s face had been pink before, it was tomato now.

  Rosalind sighed. “Vic, Dr. Westlake, is the Apollo Belvedere. Vic’s the wanton shepherd boy Diana seduced on Mount Whatever-it-was. Vic’s—oh, he’s the most lust-stirring man in the world. Helena moons for him all day, and the dear girls would sell their souls to have him paddling in their necks.”She paused. “So would Janie except she’s too Southern Belleish to admit it.”

  “Wosalind!” The white sweater heaved with outraged femininity.

  Rosalind rolled over on the grass to face me and added rapturously: “And he’s wicked too. Really wicked. He seduces every woman he meets. Uncle George has forbidden any of us ever to be alone with him. Oh, that’s the man for me.”

  Perdita stammered: “Rosalind!”

  Her sister, suddenly bored with me, made a shoo-cat gesture. “Away, Doctor. You shouldn’t be here sporting with us in the shade. Go and make your obeisances to Mother. She’s being charmingly domestic in the kitchen.” She reached up a hand and dragged Dawn down on the grass next to her. “Dawn can stay with us and improve her mind.”

  Turning her back on me, she picked up the Shakespeare again. “Come on, Perdita. We’d better drop Hamlet because we’re coming to that ‘Go not to mine uncle’s bed’ part, and it might give Janie ideas. Let’s skip to Troilus and Cressida. There are some perfectly filthy parts in the second act.”

  I was dubious as to how much Dawn’s mind would be improved by Rosalind’s selections from Shakespeare, but my daughter was at an essentially incorruptible age and I was not seriously worried.

  Nodding a good-by to the still flustered Mrs. Hilton, I moved away.

  I knew the Lanchesters’ studied simplicity well enough now to realize that it was the accepted thing for guests to wander uninvited into the house. I skirted a clapboard wing and pushed through a screened back door into the large, old-fashioned kitchen.

  Mrs. Lanchester, exquisite and royal in a cool lilac dress and cotton stockings, was mixing mayonnaise and cold sliced potatoes in a salad bowl. With her were a decrepit old maid in uniform and two men. It was clear that Mrs. Lanchester expected her guests to be as charmingly domestic as she. One of her assistants, a large man who managed to look ambassadorial in blue jeans, was warming baked beans over an antique kitchen range. The other was poking tentatively at an electric toaster. He was a little man with a shiny bald head and mild eyes behind steel-rimmed spectacles. His white “cricket” shirt and gray trousers, baggy at the knees, marked him as an Englishman.

  When Mrs. Lanchester saw me she made a smiling moue at the mayonnaise on her fingers to indicate that she could not give me her hand.

  “How nice to see you again, Dr. Westlake.” She nodded toward the formidable personage at the range. “I would like you to meet my brother, George Hilton. And this”—she turned to the little man in spectacles—“is Dr. Richard Kenton-Oakes, my brother-in-law.”

  This was quite a moment. To me, a hard-working country practitioner, Dr. Hilton and Dr. Kenton-Oakes were surrounded in an impenetrable haze of glory. Their articles in the journals always made medical history, and they were both titans in the field of experimental therapeutics. Twenty-four hours ago I had never dreamed of meeting these two internationally famous figures. Certainly I had never expected to be fraternizing with them in a Kenmore kitchen.

  As his sister spoke, Dr. Hilton turned to me from the baked beans with a chilly smile. Dr. Kenton-Oakes peered through his spectacles, murmured, “How d’you do?” and then said to Mrs. Lanchester in a clipped, rather querulous voice:

  “Emily, my dear, these American English muffins are extremely weird. Does one cut them or put them in the toasting machine whole?”

  Mrs. Lanchester threw him an arch glance. “Richard, you’re such a helpless goose!”

  “I know I am, Emily. And you should be most grateful.” Dr. Kenton-Oakes arranged the spectacles on his nose. “If I had not been such a helpless goose, I never would have mar
ried Belle and you would have been in the uncomfortable position of having her on your hands as a most alarming spinster sister.”

  That was an unusual remark for a man to make about his wife. Mrs. Lanchester’s amused, almost malicious laugh surprised me too. Dr. Kenton-Oakes, obviously pleased at his own sally, puckered his little face in an impish grin.

  “I shall never forget Mr. Churchill’s first impression of Belle,” he murmured. “She spent several minutes telling him how to win the war. Later he told me a trifle wistfully that if we could have dropped her by parachute behind the German lines in 1940 we would never have lost the Low Countries.”

  Dr. Hilton must just have realized that I was the local doctor. Ignoring his brother-in-law’s pleasantries, he came over and started to talk about Nanny. He told me, confirming what his wife had already said, that he had run a professional eye over my patient and apologized with meticulous medical manners for what I might possibly consider a breach of professional etiquette. He agreed with my diagnosis and approved my therapy. Everything he said was both scrupulously polite and scrupulously correct, and yet something essentially patronizing in his bearing kept me from liking him. He concluded by insisting that, even though he was satisfied as to Nanny’s condition, I should take a look at the old lady myself.

  I did so and discovered her peacefully asleep. I felt her pulse, which was regular if a trifle weak. Her color was better than it had been yesterday too. The spirit lamp under her dazzlingly polished silver tea kettle was alight, indicating that the obstinate old Scotswoman was planning to ignore my advice against tea drinking just as she had flouted my instructions to remain in bed.

  Before I left I snuffed out the spirit lamp.

  On my return to the kitchen, I found preparations for the picnic complete. I reported on Nanny and started to help Mrs. Lanchester, and her two distinguished busboys put the food in wicker baskets.

  The baskets were neatly packed when the screen door from the garden burst open on a massively busted lady in a white cotton dress. Her gray hair was sensibly cut and jammed under a sensible English hat. Almost albino eyebrows gave her florid face a disconcerting, startled expression. In spite of her overbearing homeliness, however, there was something about her that grotesquely suggested Mrs. Lanchester.

  “What on earth have you all been doing?” Her accent was a little more British than if it had originated there. “You’ve been dawdling here for hours. I’ve sent Janie and the children on up to the Rock.”

  Mrs. Kenton-Oakes spoke in the voice of a woman who stood very little nonsense from life. I was beginning to understand the wistfulness of Winston Churchill.

  She swept past Dr. Kenton-Oakes to the table and prodded around in the baskets, disarranging everything until she hit upon the potato salad. Completely ignoring me, who stood less than a foot from her, she picked up a piece of cold potato and popped it in her mouth.

  “Much too much salt. You always deluge everything in salt, Emily. Hardly edible, I’d call it.” She swung around as she spoke, so that her nose almost touched mine. She backed away. “Good heavens. Who’s this?”

  Mrs. Lanchester made the introductions. Mrs. Kenton-Oakes received my name as if it were a faintly bad smell and continued her rapine of the baskets, knocking paper plates onto the floor, upsetting a bottle of catsup. When havoc was at its height, she lost interest in the food and turned to her husband.

  “Personally I think it’s absurd of Emily to give a picnic up at the Rock. The mosquitoes will be foul. Always were.”

  Almost meekly Mrs. Lanchester said: “There’s been remarkably few of them this summer, Belle dear.”

  “I doubt it.” Mrs. Kenton-Oakes grabbed a raw onion from the basket and chewed on it. “Bring some of that stuff you rub on, Richard.”

  “I have it in my pocket.” Dr. Kenton-Oakes peered at his wife over his spectacles. “If there are mosquitoes, however, I feel fairly sanguine, my dear, that they will not have the temerity to bite you.”

  Mrs. Kenton-Oakes seemed undecided as to whether or not this was a piece of nonsense that should be stood. She glared at her husband, made an ejaculation that sounded like “pouff” and said: “Oh, come on, all of you.” She turned to me. “You, Dr.—er—er—take this basket.”

  Meek as Nanny’s mousies, the beautiful Mrs. Lanchester, the famous Dr. Hilton, and the eminent Dr. Kenton-Oakes followed Belle’s ballooning figure out of the kitchen.

  I brought up the rear.

  The picnic was under way.

  III

  With the help of the decrepit maid I deposited the baskets in the waiting car. Mrs. Lanchester preferred to walk to the picnic grounds, and it was tacitly understood that I should accompany her. As the two doctors and Mrs. Kenton-Oakes drove away up a winding dirt trail, I reflected that Rosalind’s prophecy had been accurate. I was rapidly becoming Mrs. Lanchester’s current and genteel beau.

  As we started through the summer meadows behind the house toward the birch-sprinkled hillside, she kept her hand resting on my arm, half for support, half to emphasize her femininity. She spoke delightfully of her father and the cultured tranquillity of her Kenmore childhood.

  “Dr. Westlake, I want to put the clock back to those golden days—for the sake of the girls. I am afraid poor Perdita and Rosalind will never be beautiful.” Although she did not add “like me,” her gentle sigh implied it. “But I can at least give them an appreciation of beauty through the arts and”—she waved at a rather frowsy clump of black-eyed susans—“and this.”

  She turned on me her luminous, intensely personal gaze. “Perdita has always been most satisfactory, but Rosalind—It is hard, is it not, in this day and age to keep one’s children free from the taint of vulgarity? Particularly in America.”

  My ventured remark that a little American vulgarity might be a good thing did not go down at all well. A frown pleated the white damask of her forehead.

  “Sometimes I feel I am the only Hilton left to preserve that great heritage of simplicity. Poor Belle was never very sensitive. And George—well, George, I must confess, disappointed me grievously when he married such—shall we say, such a frilly little girl? It was a trip to Florida for his health. A great mistake, I’m afraid. In Miami.” The pressure of her hand on my sleeve was increased slightly to hint that, although the others had deserted her, I surely was still her ally. “Dr. Westlake, you and I must do our best to see that Richard and George with their medical shop talk do not spoil the bouquet of my picnic.”

  I regret to say I was less interested in the bouquet of her picnic than in the prospect of hearing something of Dr. Hilton’s and Dr. Kenton-Oakes’s shop talk. I found myself wondering exactly what this carefully informal meeting between the two doctors portended. In spite of the family atmosphere which Mrs. Lanchester was at such pains to cultivate, it was obvious that the British Government had not flown the Kenton-Oakeses across the Atlantic merely to attend a picnic. Something really exciting in the field of medicine must be afoot. Something very confidential too. For, if extreme secrecy were not required, it would certainly have been more efficient to hold the conference either at the Arkwright Laboratory or at Dr. Hilton’s Boston office.

  A sensation of something dangerously important in the air, coupled with memories of Nanny’s cryptic forebodings, brought a faint uneasiness that marred for me the bland serenity of the evening. As we reached the wooded hillside, even Mrs. Lanchester’s musical voice seemed momentarily ominous.

  But that curious mood passed almost as soon as it had come. We strolled up a woodland trail smelling of hemlock and splashed with evening sunlight. A sudden twist in the path revealed a broad clearing in the evergreens. A large dark rock lay in its center, and the whole glade was fringed with a breath-taking pink-and-white foam of mountain laurel.

  Mrs. Lanchester’s nostrils dilated at the loveliness of the scene. “This is Indian Rock, my father’s pride and joy. It is the only place in America that dear Uncle Henry—Henry James was always Uncle Henry to us
children—would ever admit was as beautiful as England.”

  It was indeed a spot completely unspoiled by the “vulgarizing” influence of the twentieth century, and the group of picnickers, basking and bustling in the dappled shade, might almost have stepped out of the Benjamin Hilton epoch. Dr. Hilton and Dr. Kenton-Oakes and Janie were spreading the food on a plaid automobile rug under the bossy supervision of Aunt Belle. The young group was less energetic. Rosalind, Perdita, Dawn, and a fourth girl, presumably Dr. Hilton’s daughter Helena, were all grouped enthusiastically around a young man who sprawled with apparent boredom at the base of the rock. He was wearing a pair of corduroy pants and a red hunter’s shirt which added a vivid Venetian touch to this very New England fête champêtre.

  Mrs. Lanchester’s alert blue eyes hardened as they rested upon the young man with whom the “dear girls” were so obviously not being “shy and difficult.” In a voice that, for her, was almost shrill, she called: “Rosalind, Perdita, why aren’t you helping your aunt?”

  As the dear girls padded obediently off, Mrs. Lanchester beckoned the young man over, murmured with some austerity: “Dr. Westlake, I don’t believe you know Dr. Roberts,” and rustled after her daughters.

  The moment I set eyes on Victor Roberts, I saw that Rosalind’s rhapsodic description had not been an exaggeration. The young doctor was the best-looking man I had ever seen. His face with its Grecian lines and its black eyes, liquid behind smudgy black lashes, would have been too beautiful if it had not been for the muscular throat that supported it and his frank, easy smile. There was a swagger to his husky athlete’s body, and everything about him from his strong legs to his unruly black hair suggested a full-blooded, animal virility.

  If his performance with women lived up to his promise, I could understand why Dr. Hilton had vetoed him as a tête-à-tête companion for the girls.