Death, My Darling Daughters
Page 13
She smiled gratefully. “Oh, I do twy to be kind and nice, Dr. Westlake. I twy so hard. But whatever I do, it always seems to be wrong.” The sweater nuzzled against me, and she looked up again naïvely. “Sometimes I think I must be a tewwible person. Do you think so?”
She was so pretty and so hopelessly ill equipped to fend for herself in the Hilton milieu that I was sincerely touched. “Of course I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s just that being married to a Hilton’s rather—tough sledding.”
“You think so? Oh, so do I sometimes.” She tossed her girlish chestnut hair. “It’s so vewwy different from what I expected. I mean, George was so sweet to me in Miami, so gentle and considerate. I loved my father, and then he died. Having George was like having Daddy back. But then, after we were married, in Boston, well, I know he’s tewwibly busy and he’s so important and all. But, well, he’s so stern all the time.” Her lips trembled. “So stern and cold. He never takes me dancing or anything. And then he’s away so much, and Helena doesn’t like me. Oh, Dr. Westlake, it’s so lonely.”
I was moved by the trusting simplicity of anyone who could have married the bloodless Dr. Hilton in the hopes of having a warm, fulfilled life. Poor Janie, of all the dear girls under Hiltonian tutelage, her lot was probably the least endurable.
I was thinking of something encouraging to say when Dawn beat me to it.
In a high, precise voice she said: “I know what you should do if you’re lonely, Mrs. Hilton.”
Janie smiled at her. “What, honey? Get a little doggie?”
“No,” said my daughter sedately. “Get a lover.”
That remark was both embarrassing and silly. I could only assume that Dawn was trying to show off. Even so I was startled at the violence of Janie’s reaction. Most people would have laughed it off or glossed it over in some way. But Janie didn’t. In a voice breathy with confusion, she announced:
“We’d better huwwy. We’re late.”
Across the meadow aflame with devil’s-paintbrush, the others were visible milling around a rough lawn in front of the music room. Abandoning Dawn and me, Janie doubled her speed and started over the grass to the barn.
“Oh dear,” said Dawn, “was she mad?”
“I don’t blame her,” I said. “That was a heck of a stupid thing to say.”
“Was it?” Dawn sighed. “It’s so difficult to know what’s stupid and what isn’t. Lizzle didn’t think it was stupid.”
“Lisl?”
“She was the one who said it in the first place. She said that if she was married to Dr. Hilton she’d have a different lover every day of the week.”
I gulped.
My daughter turned her earnest gaze on me. “I asked her what she would do if she was married to you.”
“You did?” I stammered.
“And she thought and thought and then she said that if she was married to you she’d probably only have one lover.” Dawn peered at me hopefully. “You see, Daddy, that proves she likes you, doesn’t it?”
That was too much for me. Like Janie, the best thing I could think up to say was: “We’d better hurry. We’re late.”
A fire had been built in an open grill under a large rock beside the music room. When we reached it, everyone was centered around it. Dinner at the Lanchesters’, it seemed, was al fresco, a refinement of the vice-presidential picnic.
We were the last to arrive. The others were already being blustered into usefulness by Belle Kenton-Oakes and Mrs. Lanchester. I was eager to question Mrs. Kenton-Oakes about the tea-drinking episode, but this was obviously an unsuitable moment to get her alone. As I moved through the group, I was hailed by Dr. Lisl Stahl, who was squatting on the grass, peeling cucumbers and puffing smoke from a cigarette which drooped from her scarlet lips. She was still wearing the old slack suit I had seen her in that morning and, more than even, managed to look like an alert, showy rat.
“Ah, it ees Dr. vestlake. Gut.” She looked up at me, her eyes bright, her remarkable nose twitching inquisitively. “You sit with me and peel the vegetables. These Heeltons. They ask you to dinner. They make you the housemaid, yes?”
With Dawn’s words still ringing in my ear, I sat down somewhat awkwardly, took the cucumber from her, and submissively started to peel and slice it. Dr. Stahl showed a sudden, brisk interest in the results of the police analyses. When I told her how lethal the silver polish had proved to be, she shrugged and exclaimed:
“So. I read the detective stories from England. Always I vonder vy it ees the butler ees the murderer. Now I know. It ees the English silver polish. So deadly. Such a temptation, yes?”
I became conscious of Mrs. Lanchester then. She was still obviously smoldering over the bad news that had disturbed her and the disaffection of her daughters, but it was plain that she was sufficiently recovered to feel the urge to claim her man. In a few moments she drifted to our side and, with an apologetic moue at Dr. Stahl, whisked me away. It was her claim that she needed someone to spread the butter or some Spartan substitute on slices of bread as she cut them. She did not need an assistant, of course. She was merely incapable of existing without a male at her feet.
Since I was stuck with her, I thought I would try to fox her into revealing what her disturbing news had been. I had no chance, however, for she was in a “dear father” mood and regaled me with anecdotes from her childhood whose object, it seemed, was to let me know what a fascinating little girl she had been and how infinitely preferred to her brother and sister by dear Messrs. Garfield, James, Clements—Mark Twain, you know—and Teddy Roosevelt, respectively.
At length the bread was all sliced and buttered; the cucumbers were all peeled by Vic, whom Dr. Stahl had shamelessly stolen from Dawn; and the inevitable Hilton baked beans had been warmed by Dr. Hilton himself.
Another Lanchester picnic, bouquet and all, had begun.
When the moment came for us to fill our plates, I escaped from Mrs. Lanchester and headed straight for Mrs. Kenton-Oakes. I was too late, however, for she had already gathered the three dear girls around her. By the time everyone was settled I found myself next to Dr. Kenton-Oakes.
Belle’s husband was nibbling at a piece of Lanchester lettuce distastefully.
“Good evening, Dr. Westlake.” He seemed genuinely pleased to see me. “Sit down. I am constantly amazed, are you not, at the New England passion for frugality. My brother-in-law, George, is a very wealthy man, and yet he seems to feel it almost indecent to provide his guests with food that is fit to eat. My wife is just the same.” He beamed toward Belle, who was shouting something unpleasant at Rosalind. “Belle, unhappily, is not a wealthy woman. By the terms of old Mr. Hilton’s singularly tiresome will, all the money went to her brother. But my means are adequate at least to provide a passable meal every now and then. Belle, however, like George and Emily, is incapable of giving gastronomic satisfaction to anyone more exacting than Henry Thoreau. It is not meanness on her part. It is just a very curious and, I’m afraid, a diseased state of mind, endemic, it seems, to New England.”
He paused, his mouth twitching in a smile of reminiscence. “I remember a most embarrassing occasion. The Duchess of Dunster dropped in for lunch one morning, and Belle served her a potato salad and some stewed prunes. The duchess, who is a very warmhearted creature, imagined we must be starving and sent a large hamper from Fortnum & Mason’s the next day. I must confess there were compensations. From that day on, whenever she had trouble with her neuritis, I always trebled my fees, and the duchess, who had never paid a bill in her life, always paid me regularly. I had become a pet charity, you see, and that appealed to her feudality.”
Dr. Kenton-Oakes’s tenderly malicious gossip about his wife flowed on, but I listened only halfheartedly. I was tom between anxiety as to what might happen and a growing conviction that nothing as violent as murder could possibly be festering behind the gentle placidity of this scene.
After we had consumed an elementary dessert of stewed plums and had performed ou
r various chores of cleaning up, Mrs. Lanchester announced that the time for music had arrived and shepherded us into the barn.
This was the first of the famous Lanchester musicales that I had attended. As a father, I felt an uneasy interest in whether my daughter would do herself justice as a violinist. Dawn seemed completely mistress of the situation, however, chattering with Dr. Stahl as music stands were clattered out and the non-performers, like myself, took up their positions on the various uncomfortable chairs and sofas which had been ranged in grim lines to face the raised platform at one end of the room.
I resumed my stalking of Mrs. Kenton-Oakes, but just as I was about to achieve her, Mrs. Lanchester, who was seated on a faded chartreuse love seat, caught my eye with one of her enchanting smiles and patted the upholstery next to her. At that very moment Mrs. Kenton-Oakes sat down squarely on a wooden chair isolated from all the others beside a large radio-recording machine on which, presumably, the more successful Hiltonian musical efforts were preserved in wax for posterity.
Mrs. Kenton-Oakes tugged some knitting from a small bag at her large waist and began to click her needles. Defeated once more, I moved meekly to Mrs. Lanchester’s side and squeezed myself into enforced intimacy with her on the love seat.
Mrs. Lanchester, at her most Sargent, murmured: “Ah, Doctor, is it not pleasant to be able to peel off the little tiresomenesses of the day like stockings and to wade in the serenity of Mozart and Haydn? So cooling, so refreshing, like a lovely brook.”
As I coped with that remark to the best of my ability, my eye fell on Dr. Hilton. Apparently he was not playing in the first number. He sat hand in hand with Helena on a couch beneath the mantel on which stood a highly ornamental and inappropriate ormolu clock, an obvious reject from the Commonwealth Avenue mansion. Janie was curled like a patient little dog at their feet. Vic and Dr. Kenton-Oakes, both of them clearly not waders in the clear brook of Mozart and Haydn, were seated as far away from the platform as possible, whispering rather furtively to each other.
Meanwhile Lisl Stahl had organized the four players on the platform. Dawn sat on her left, her violin in her lap. Opposite them, sulky and silent, Rosalind and Perdita clutched their viola and cello respectively.
Dr. Stahl had distributed the sheets of music. When the instruments had been twanged into tune, the toxicologist-violinist turned to the assembled company, glared at us as if we were rats ripe for the extermination chamber, and announced:
“Also, first we play from Mozart the C-major Quartet. The Dissonant Quartet.” She swung round, lifted her bow, and tapped her foot.
They were off.
As the music filled that large silent room, my paternal suspense for Dawn was changed into smugness. Being unmusical, I could not tell how artistic my daughter’s performance was, but, shiny-nosed and intense, she managed to run neck and neck with Dr. Stahl. In sharp contrast, Perdita and Rosalind, their tongues twisted around their lower lips, played with the flustered breathlessness of Alice trying to keep up with the Red Queen.
Although the players, with the exception of Dr. Stahl, were frankly amateur, the music was listened to with a reverence that was almost holy. This, I realized, was due solely to Mrs. Lanchester. The high priestess of the cult of Benjamin Hilton and Art was leaning toward me, her shoulder gently touching mine, her eyes half closed as if, as she undoubtedly was, she was savoring the “bouquet” of Mozart and finding it good to the last drop. But, although her eyes were closed, there wasn’t a person in the room who hadn’t arranged his or her face exactly the way Mrs. Lanchester would want it to be.
I had never before been given so impressive a proof of the forcefulness of Mrs. Lanchester’s personality. I knew the dear girls were loathing every bar they ground out. I knew Dr. Stahl despised playing with such inferior talent. I knew almost everyone in the room would rather have been somewhere else. But Emily Lanchester, without employing either her sister’s bossiness or her brother’s lordliness, was able to intimidate them all into posing as music lovers.
The first quartet progressed successfully except for one appalling moment when Hamish, incensed perhaps by the Dissonance in the piece’s title, burst into a frenzied bout of howling. A nervous giggle sounded from Janie. Mrs. Lanchester’s eyelids flickered ominously. I rushed to put Hamish outside, and order was duly restored.
When the quartet was finished, Mrs. Lanchester permitted herself, after a pretty show of reluctance, to be persuaded to play with the quartet. She chose Schubert’s Forellan Quintet and, when she was seated at the piano, she looked fragrant and fragile as a rose pressed in a prayer book. She played, however, with a formidable speed and vigor which proved much too much for her daughters. After a succession of dreadful squawks and wheezes, both of them collapsed in the third movement.
With a sweetness that only just concealed her extreme irritation, Mrs. Lanchester chided them and started the movement again. But their morale was completely gone, and finally Mrs. Lanchester abandoned the composition and the platform in dudgeon.
Her eyes were sparkling as she rejoined me on the love seat. “Really, Dr. Westlake, sometimes I despair of the girls. For years and years I have drilled and drilled and drilled them, but they won’t improve. They don’t seem to want to try.”
I toyed with the idea of suggesting that, since the dear girls were not musical, they might be allowed to do something for which they were more suited. But, remembering the scene with Rosalind’s sweater, I decided to hold my peace.
Meanwhile Dr. Hilton, upon whom inspiration had presumably descended, had left his daughter’s side and had climbed onto the platform. Sorting through the pile of music on the piano, he consulted Dr. Stahl, who whispered to Dawn to step down and handed music to Perdita and Rosalind.
Dr. Hilton removed a fancy silver flute from the case and called to Mrs. Lanchester:
“We have decided on K 285 Mozart, dear.”
“Very well,” said Mrs. Lanchester stiffly.
Dawn had scrambled down and had found a place at my feet. On the platform Rosalind and Perdita were still obviously unstrung, while Dr. Stahl was only too clearly bored with the whole thing. I did not expect the K 285 Mozart (whatever it was) to get a very stirring performance.
And I was right. The strings started off in shaky collaboration. During the first measures, in which he did not take part, Dr. Hilton stood in front of his stand, concentrating ferociously, scowling when one of his nieces made a sour note and counting precise rhythm with one foot. There is something essentially gay and frivolous about a flute, and the gaiety and frivolity did not go with Dr. Hilton’s personality. The sight of him, stiff and pompous, holding the flute and studying his music as if it were an abstruse chemical formula, was faintly ludicrous.
Eventually his entrance came. As he raised the flute to his thin lips, a particularly bloodcurdling squeak came from Perdita’s cello. She flushed and dropped her head so that the spaniel hair hid her profile. But Dr. Hilton’s cold eye was on her as his lips and the flute made contact and the first woodsy notes trilled from the instrument’s silver mouth.
Suddenly it occurred to me that this was one of the tamest moments I had ever experienced. A stuffy man tootling on a flute while a bevy of dowdy Victorian females played a ladylike accompaniment. What could be more colorless, respectable, and dim? And this, really, was all that the great cultural legend of the Hilton family amounted to. I saw it shorn of the glamor with which Mrs. Lanchester managed so artfully to clothe it. I began to suspect that the august Benjamin Hilton had been nothing but an old fogy bumbling around the skirts of the Arts while Mrs. Lanchester’s revival of her father’s pattern of life was an even paler imitation. This then was the goal for which the dear girls had been so severely regimented—to play chamber music badly in an atmosphere of sanctimonious ancestor worship.
As the flute rippled on, I was thinking only of the lemonade tameness of it all. It was the sheer force of contrast that made the thing which came next so particularly horrible.
Instinctively I jumped to my feet. A clamor of anxious chatter sounded from the audience. Dr. Hilton gasped again raspingly and, as Dr. Stahl took a step toward him, a violent spasm wrenched his body, doubling him up and sending him writhing to the floor. As he fell, he struck his music stand and it toppled after him.
I have only a blurred impression of what happened next. As I ran from Mrs. Lanchester’s love seat toward the platform, I remember Perdita loosening her grip on the cello and letting it lumber sideways. I remember Janie Hilton’s sweater bobbing past me, remember her little frightened cry. But most clearly I remember Helena Hilton. Dr. Hilton’s daughter was the first of the listeners to reach the platform. She pushed past Dr. Stahl like someone possessed and flung herself down at her father’s side. Her face was contorted with terror. Her voice shouted in a hysterical scream:
“He’s dead. Daddy’s dead.”
Almost at that moment I reached the prostrate man. With Dr. Stahl at my side, I bent over him and saw in a kind of panic that Helena was right. If Dr. Hilton was not dead, he was at least beyond any medical aid.
No one was saying anything now and, in the strange, awed hush, I distinctly heard the tiny, musical chime of the ormolu clock on the mantel.
It was as I dropped to my knees by Helena that I became conscious of Rosalind. Mrs. Lanchester’s younger daughter, still clutching her viola, had stepped toward the body sprawled in front of me. Her face, as she stared down, was gray as cigarette ash.