Death, My Darling Daughters

by Jonathan Stagge

  Her sense of her own inadequacy was so all-pervasive that she had to hover anxiously while I tasted my cocktail, and, even when I said it was excellent, she looked grateful and said:

  “Oh, you’re just being polite.”

  Although I liked Lorie, I was never comfortable with her. And that day the realization that she had to act hostess in place of her mother made her doubly nervous. We chatted clumsily and inevitably about Ernesta. Parties were never the same without Mother, Lorie said. She only hoped people wouldn’t be too bored, but Mother had written from New York and specially insisted that the picnic be held. She had even sent a five-pound jar of caviar. Wasn’t it too bad for everyone that Ernesta hadn’t been able to get back for the week end?

  It was a relief to hear Phoebe Stone’s light, bantering voice behind me, exclaiming:

  “I think it’s wonderful Ernesta couldn’t get back. I’ve celebrated by not changing my dress, although I’ve been up to my knees in sheep manure all afternoon. It’s such a treat to be slovenly for a change. Hello, Lorie dear. Hello, Dr. Westlake. Hello, Dawn.”

  Ernesta’s older sister, who had lived in Skipton ever since her widowhood twenty years before and who had been Ernesta’s original reason for joining the community when her own immensely wealthy husband had died in Palm Beach, pattered across the terrace, her small feet encased in grimy sneakers. She was short and dumpy, and her graying hair, above mischievous gypsy eyes, was as disheveled as her faded garden dress, but somehow, as always, she managed to look authentically and unselfconsciously aristocratic.

  “Lorie dear, give me a martini—quick. That dreadful climb! I can’t imagine why Ernesta chooses to live on a pinnacle. It must be the Valkyrie in her.”

  As Lorie handed her a glass, Phoebe gave me a friendly, faintly mocking smile. “How respectable you look, Doctor, in that handsome gray suit. Wait till you see Caleb. When he heard Ernesta wasn’t back, he refused to put on any clothes at all. Just his swimming trunks and an old T-shirt. Really, this is almost like the old days. Where is he, by the way? He came with me. Caleb? Where are? … Oh, there you are.”

  Her young son had appeared loping silently around the far corner of the terrace. Without greeting anyone, he went to the table and poured himself a cocktail. Caleb Stone had only been back from the Pacific war zone a month or so, and the skin of his muscular bare arms and legs was still golden brown from atabrine. Tall, straight, and blond, he was a sturdier, masculine edition of Lorie. In fact they were so much alike that he might have been her twin, instead of her cousin. He had the same social clumsiness too, except that in his case it seemed more like surliness. Village gossip ascribed his broodiness and sudden bitter sarcasms to some sort of battle psychosis, for he had fought with the Marines in their bloodiest campaigns and had been hospitalized a long time before he was discharged. I didn’t know how true this rumor was. But I did know that Phoebe, although she never admitted it, was worried about him.

  I could tell she was worried now from the quick, unobtrusive glance she threw at him. I could tell Lorie was worried too. Love Drummond, who was the village Walter Winchell, had informed me that Lorie had been in love with Caleb ever since she was a kid. I didn’t know how true this rumor was either. But there was a curious tone, half tender, half shy, in her voice as she said:

  “Hello, Caleb. Been working on your map today?”

  Caleb glanced at her darkly, a blond lock flopping over his tanned forehead, and grunted some inaudible reply.

  Phoebe said, too brightly: “Caleb dear, I’ve been apologizing for your nakedness.”

  He grunted again. It wasn’t until he saw Dawn that he came to life. His face suddenly lit up with a sweet, gentle smile. He squatted down on the brick floor of the terrace next to her and started chattering. Soon he pulled a couple of dice from the pocket of his blue swimming shorts, and the two of them launched into a crap game for immense and hypothetical stakes.

  Phoebe seemed delighted at the change in her son’s mood. She dropped down on a chair, gazing affectionately at the pastoral view of Skipton, and began to regale Lorie and me with the details of her afternoon in her herbaceous beds. She was still talking simple, country talk when adult voices, mingled with shrill children’s voices, sounded behind us. She glanced over her shoulder and then called to Caleb.

  “The dice, dear. Put them away. It’s Dr. Jessup, Love, and the Double Threat. Dr. Jessup would have a fit if he found you teaching Dawn the Devil’s practices.”

  His face going sulky, Caleb slipped the dice into his pocket as two identical small boys with vivid red hair and neat green play suits, which obviously would not be neat for long, hurtled onto the porch and, running to Caleb and Dawn, started to scramble all over them.

  “I’m a war hero,” screamed one. “Bing-bing-bing … you’re a Jap and you’re dead.”

  “Bing-bing-bing,” screamed the other, aiming indiscriminately with an imaginary tommy gun.

  One of them rushed to the table and grabbed at the cocktail shaker.

  “I wanna cocktail. I wanna cocktail.”

  The other put small hands on wabbly knees and, reeling around the porch, shouted: “I’m drunk. I’m stinking, dirty drunk.”

  Lorie stared at their depredations hopelessly, murmuring: “Oh dear, if only Mother were here! She could cope with them.”

  For once she was not overpraising her mother. Ernesta was indeed the only person in Skipton with any ability to subdue the exuberances of the White twins who were two sharp thorns in the community flesh and in particular the flesh of Miss Love Drummond, who was their aunt. Love Drummond was one of those spinsters who constantly do good to others in order to experience the subsequent delights of reminding them how kind she had been. For this reason, presumably, she had consented to take Bobby and Billy for the summer, since their parents were unable to leave New York. This time she had certainly been hoist with her own petard, for no amount of self-glorification as a martyr could compensate for the havoc the twins had wrought in her exquisitely neat cottage and every other part of Skipton.

  As she appeared on the terrace with the Reverend Jessup, Love Drummond gazed at her nephews with a despair to which was added a certain malicious satisfaction that it was Ernesta’s house and not her own which was being currently beaten up. Bobby had overturned two chairs and was tearing the heads off the flowers in one of the Italian urns. Billy was retching and pretending to throw up as a result of his drunken debauch.

  “Billy,” said Love faintly. “Bobby.”

  “Aw, old fat Lovey-Dovey,” shouted Bobby.

  “Old fat Lovey-Dovey. Old fat Lovey-Dovey,” jeered Billy and went back to his sham vomiting.

  With a hopeless shrug Love Drummond went to Lorie. “I wish I could have left them at home, Lorie. But I didn’t dare. Already today they’ve broken half my Staffordshire china and tried to hang the cat.”

  Her thin mouth winced at the memory. She was tall and heavy in the hips, with sharp eyes behind shell-rimmed glasses.

  “Don’t worry,” said Lorie. “They can’t do much damage out here on the terrace, and soon we’ll all be up at the picnic grounds eating. Food always quiets them.”

  “I hope so.” Love Drummond grabbed the cocktail Lorie handed her and sank into a chair. “Sometimes I wish my dear sister had passed away in childbed.”

  “Come, Miss Drummond,” murmured the Reverend Jessup, who had rather stiffly refused Lorie’s proffered cocktail. “They are just lively youngsters, that’s all. Lively youngsters.”

  “Lively youngsters,” screamed Bobby.

  “Lively youngsters,” screamed Billy, grinning fiendishly under his devil-red hair and pinching Dawn.

  “Aw, don’t pinch Dawn. She’s my girl,” yelled Bobby.

  “Bobby loves Dawn. Bobby loves Dawn. Nyah.” The twins hurled themselves at each other and tussled for a few violent moments. Then, to everyone’s intense relief, Bobby thought he saw a rabbit on the sloping lawn, and the two of them rushed precariously off in purs
uit.

  Phoebe Stone watched them disappear. “Maybe they’ll break their necks,” she said hopefully.

  “I’m afraid not,” groaned Love. “They bear a charmed life.”

  “Really, ladies. Such unchristian sentiments.” The Reverend Jessup, who never forgot his responsibilities as the community’s spiritual guide, permitted a disapproving frown to wrinkle his knobby intellectual forehead and, with an obvious effort to change the conversation, turned heavily to Lorie. “Saturday evening certainly seems strange without your dear mother, Lorie. Such a forceful personality.”

  “Yes.” Lorie flushed. I knew she was taking Dr. Jessup’s innocent remark as a veiled hint that she herself was an unforceful character. “I feel awfully lost without her.”

  “What’s she doing in New York anyway?” snapped Love Drummond.

  “Gadding,” said Phoebe. “Just gadding. Lorie dear, who else are we waiting for?”

  “Just Renton Forbes and the Raynors.”

  “Oh dear, that frightful Raynor woman. If she’s coming you’d better give me another martini, Lorie.” She held out her empty glass. “I wonder what she’ll be wearing this time.”

  “A diving bell, probably,” said Love. “Or nothing at all. She might as well be Lady Godiva, she’s been everything else.”

  Phoebe giggled. “That’s a good idea. I must remember to suggest it to her.”

  The ladies launched into their favorite Skipton sport of discussing Mabel Raynor. Since Ernesta herself was too powerful to attack, Mabel Raynor made an ideal substitute for malice, and, although I had only met her a couple of times at Ernesta’s picnics, I felt she was a legitimate butt. Living with an adoring husband who was convinced of her genius, she wrote long and earnestly pornographic novels under the pseudonym Avril Lane. Small and dainty and fortyish, she thought of herself as small, dainty, and nineteen, dressed with fantastic affectation and giggled in and out of butterfly flirtations with any man foolish enough to take her at her own evaluation.

  Soon she arrived, one little arm linked through her husband, George Raynor’s, and the other through that of Renton Forbes. Avril usually managed an entrance with at least two men, and by a subtle feminine smile also managed to convey, quite erroneously, that the man who wasn’t her husband was her current lover. Once we had all been given time to see the tableau and interpret it the way she wanted it interpreted, she disengaged herself from the men with a little silvery laugh and ran toward Lorie.

  “Lorie darling, we are naughtinesses to be late, but that bad Renton just sat and sat and chatted on our porch so that we lost all sense of time.”

  Avril—she preferred to be called Avril rather than Mabel—dressed, as she admitted laughingly, to suit her mood. Today she was wearing an Austrian peasant costume with a flaring embroidered skirt. I couldn’t guess her mood. Maybe she was feeling like the heroine of the Sorrows of Werther or maybe Gretchen in Faust. In any case, the mood was a roguish one. She had tied a blue ribbon in her rather too auburn hair and pirouetted, letting the skirt swirl around her.

  “Such fun. But what a sadness without dear Ernesta! Good evening, Phoebe dear and sweet Love and Dr. Jessup—and Caleb.”

  At the sight of Caleb’s bare, golden-brown legs, a predatory gleam came in her eye and she tripped toward him, holding out both her hands. Over her shoulder she called to Lorie:

  “Lorie dear, you’re going to bring your guitar to the picnic, aren’t you? We must have some of those enchanting ballads of yours.”

  Lorie looked awkward. “We’ll see.”

  “Yes, dear,” said Phoebe. “You must. You know you love to sing, and you sing so well. Besides,” she added with her faint malice, “it’s one thing Ernesta can’t do.”

  Renton Forbes was watching Phoebe, his handsome, high-colored face grinning amusement. The last of the Forbeses, who had been the leading family of Skipton for generations, Renton at forty-odd was the community’s most eligible if impecunious bachelor. He lived alone in the large, decaying Forbes mansion and existed charmingly and shiftlessly on the slender remains of the Forbes income. Recently, not without competition from Avril, Ernesta had made him her tame beau.

  “So, Phoebe,” he said, “when Ernesta’s away you poison her child’s mind against her.” He smiled at Lorie as he took a martini. “Just exactly what is Ernesta up to in New York anyway?”

  “Gadding,” said Love Drummond, her spectacles glinting as she watched Avril curl girlishly in a chair by Caleb’s side.

  “You should know Ernesta by now, Renton,” said Phoebe. “She claims she can’t bear to leave her dear old sleepy Skipton, but she’d go stark raving mad if she couldn’t get to New York once in a while. She pretended she had to go to pick up her jade that’s being restrung at Tiffany’s, but Tiffany’s is perfectly rich enough to pack the necklace in a box and mail it to her.”

  Renton was still smiling at Lorie. “I bet you got a firm, motherly letter with instructions about the picnic, didn’t you?”

  Lorie smiled back at him, a charming smile that made her face suddenly lovely. “Matter of fact I did. She sent caviar too. A five-pound jar.”

  “Caviar!” exclaimed Love. “Why not peacock’s tongues?”

  Forbes said: “I got a letter too, Lorie. Very bossy, of course. I was to remember to take my vitamin pills and be sure not to be late for the picnic and to act as host if you needed help.” He sighed. “I dread the day when those walkie-talkie radio sets are released to the public. Your mother’ll keep us dialed in to her twenty-four hours a day.”

  Phoebe glanced at Avril’s husband, who was standing forgotten in a corner watching his wife and Caleb with dark, hurt eyes.

  “Lorie dear, give poor George a cocktail. He looks so gloomy.”

  With an effort George Raynor managed a smile and joined us. He was large and rather handsome in a soft dark way. He was also quite a few years younger than his wife. I was sorry for the poor guy because he was besottedly in love with Avril and, I was sure, suffered the torments of the damned when she looked at another man, which was practically always.

  Lorie gave him a martini. He took it gratefully, as if it were particularly gracious of her to include him—an attitude he had developed from years of picking up the crumbs from Avril’s table.

  “Thanks, Lorie.”

  For the next twenty minutes Lorie’s guests settled down to chat and drink their cocktails while the soft evening sunlight splashed gold on the village of Skipton below us and a rather ominous ink-blue cloud started to bank above the mountains. During my short stay in Skipton I had thought that the importance of Ernesta Bray as social leader had, if anything, been exaggerated. Now that she was absent I began to realize just how much the amiable sociabilities of the community depended on her. The same people who sat on this terrace every Saturday evening were sitting there tonight, but the atmosphere, without Ernesta, was different. Avril was flirting outrageously with Caleb, to the obvious discomfort of George Raynor and Lorie. That was something Ernesta would not have allowed. Renton Forbes was drinking too many cocktails. That was something else that Ernesta would not have allowed. Dr. Jessup was being more stuffy and parsonical than usual. And Phoebe and Love Drummond, usually friendly rivals, were squabbling with genuine heat about the respective merits of their dahlias. The party needed Ernesta’s warm, infectious laugh and her unfailing talent for bringing out the most attractive side of her guests. It was going sour.

  The crosscurrents of bad temper had become almost marked enough to be embarrassing when the White twins suddenly appeared from the woods that edged the lawn and rushed toward us, their red heads gleaming like bonfires.

  “I wanna eat,” yelled Billy, catapulting across Avril into Caleb’s lap.

  “I wanna eat,” echoed Bobby. “I wanna eat.”

  He crossed to Dawn, for whom he had developed a mawkish and precocious passion, put his arm around her neck and started whispering in her ear. Then simultaneously both he and Billy saw the picnic baskets and made a di
ve for them, dragging Dawn along.

  “Oh dear,” said Lorie.

  “Billy, Bobby,” called Love without her heart in it. “Don’t touch those baskets.”

  “It’s no use,” said Phoebe. “No human agency’s going to stop them. We might as well give up and get going to the picnic ground. George, Renton, go save the baskets before they get at the caviar.”

  George Raynor and Renton Forbes pulled the protesting twins off the baskets. Lorie, being agitatedly social, shepherded the rest of us off the terrace and, slipping away, returned with her guitar in a black case.

  It was then that Phoebe voiced the first definite manifesto of revolt against Ernesta’s absentee rule. Turning to Lorie, she said:

  “Secretly I’m terribly bored with that fancy picnic ground Ernesta’s landscape gardener made. Remember the old rock up by the sawmill where we used to picnic when you and Caleb were children? Why don’t we eat up there for a change?”

  Lorie looked blank and began: “But in her letter Mother said to be sure …”

  “Pooh, we let your mother regulate us all too much. Don’t you think it would be nice to picnic by the sawmill, Love?”

  Love Drummond said gloomily: “Nothing’s going to be nice with the twins along.”

  “Don’t be defeated, Love. Come on, Lorie. It’ll be fun.”

  “All right, Aunt Phoebe,” said Lorie.

  Phoebe called: “Everyone, we’re changing the picnic place. We’re going up to the rock by the old sawmill.”

  The White twins running ahead with bloodcurdling Indian war whoops, the party started along the quiet, sylvan track which wound up the mountain behind the house.

  Dawn, who had primly disentangled herself from the amorous Bobby, brought up the rear with me.

  On an exuberant impulse she started to sing:

  “I’ll sing you one-O,

  Green grow the rushes-O.

  What is your one-O?”

  She broke off and glanced at me. “Daddy?”