Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  “You see,” her father was saying as he poured Campari into one glass, then whisky into another, “your grandfather’s an important man. Original. Successful. Thanks to him, you’ll be a wealthy young lady one of these days. Now let’s talk about something else.”

  Lily tucked one leg beneath her, trying not to look conscious of her good fortune. It tickled her to suppose that her father had changed the subject because she was too young for it. She watched him drink. His high coloring and the brilliant shades he liked in his shirts and ties—broad stripes of orange and olive against pink, or deep yellow checkered with black, brick reds, purples, apple greens—overpowered the pale settings contrived for them. In much the same way he acted upon Lily’s affections, making her feel agreeably small and innocent next to him. How fiercely, for example, his cigar glowed now! He had risen again at the end of a long moment’s silence, to say in a paralyzing voice: “God damn it, if you don’t know who did it, I do!”

  Both Lily and her mother managed to avoid his meaning.

  “The portrait, Enid,” he said crossly. “Hasn’t it occurred to you?”

  “That some particular person—?”

  “Of course!”

  She hummed a high soft note by way of showing reluctance. “No,” she said, “no, it hasn’t occurred to me.”

  Already he was rubbing his hands together. “Are we thinking of the same person? Are we?”

  But she made a funny, final movement, and set down her untasted glass.

  He stared, then cried, “And now you’ve got a headache!”

  “I’ve had a teensy one since being at the Cottage. Sweetie,” she turned to Lily, “see if there’s some hot coffee in the kitchen. It’s the first in weeks,” she added apologetically.

  “God damn it!” he shouted, striding about. “The smallness! The spitefulness!”

  Lily was holding her breath outside the door.

  “If you don’t know who did it, I do!” her father repeated at the top of his lungs. “Irene Cheek did it!”

  Cousin Irene! The tramp! Lily ran to fetch the coffee.

  Throughout supper she let the twins chatter. They were only six; poor little girls, their time was coming. Soberly she got into her pajamas, attended to teeth and prayers, let Alice put the medal under her pillow. Out went the light, but Lily lay, for hours perhaps, intensely wondering. Was Cousin Irene a misfit? Could portraits be slashed by grown-ups?—those stately eccentrics, cordial yet vacant, who wore bathing-suits but didn’t swim, who were always thirsty but never for water. Lily took for granted this coincidence of dullness and daring in their behavior, also its complete remoteness from her own. However, if something she had done could be blamed on Cousin Irene, either Cousin Irene wasn’t a real grown-up at all, or she, Lily, a little girl swept towards a whirlpool visible only to herself, had started turning into one. Her father’s having called Cousin Irene a tramp tended to support the former view. But her own common sense confirmed the latter.

  For instance: “What dress are you wearing to your party?” her mother had asked the other day.

  “My blue one?”

  “Sweetie, you’re getting too big for that. What’s wrong with your pretty new yellow one?”

  In the dark, Lily shook her head over the futility of it.

  She was forever being reminded, “You’re the oldest, Lily, we expect more of you.” Or, “My, what a big girl! This can’t be Lily!” As for dresses, who could put into words that sense of how they were constantly outgrown? Of how the wearer’s whole person had altered and elongated during the six weeks since last, in gray taffeta or blue, with velvet hair-ribbon and slippers of patent-leather, it had curtsied in dancing class or played Sinding while Mrs. Clement Younger and all her pupils’ parents nodded approval? No, change kept happening. Alice had stated that childhood ought to be the happiest part of your entire life, and here was Lily’s draining away like a lovely warm bath while she scrambled to replace the plug. With that, she sprang out of bed.

  A faint light shone under her parents’ door. Receiving no answer to her knock, she ventured in. The large room was done in tones of cream and sugar. On bright days, with only the dotted-swiss curtains drawn, it seemed the inside of a pearl. Lily’s advance through its present gloom could not be heard above her father’s distant thrashing in his tub. And her mother lay with shut eyes, her long hair loose, her profile, like that on a medal, rising in low relief against the pillow. Lily stifled a little sob.

  “Sweetie? Aren’t you asleep yet?”

  “Does it still hurt?”

  “It’s better lying down. I took my pill.”

  Lily touched the damp cheek unwillingly. “Is this where?”

  “No. Way inside.”

  “I’m sorry.

  “I think I’ll survive.”

  “For today, I mean.”

  Her mother’s eyes opened, though Lily could see that the effort hurt her. “I am too.” She smiled. “Go to sleep now. Dream about tomorrow. You’re having a magician, did you know?”

  “Don’t try to talk,” said Lily consolingly; clearly she wasn’t going to be consoled.

  From the bathroom came a blurred, guttural sound—her father’s throat being cleared. “Oh,” her mother said, as if just then reminded of the fact, “we spoke to Grandpa in the West Indies. He’ll be up here the end of this month, for the summer.”

  “Did you tell him about the portrait?”

  “Yes. He took it very well.” Whatever that meant. Unexpectedly, her whole face quivered.

  Lily took her hand. Once Enid had been somebody’s little girl. Indeed, she seemed, just now again, to have gone all hurt and helpless, with great fringed eyes that shut like a doll’s. She hadn’t even power to send Lily back to bed, but lay, her wrist surrendered to a gentle stroking, and neither, at that particular moment, certain which was mother and which child.

  2. Francis Tanning received Enid’s letter in Rome.

  Before collecting their mail he and Jane had just “discovered” San Giovanni Decollato, and were full of the crazy frescoes in the refectory. Fancy watching a decapitation while you ate! They planned to have everybody go see that, and so bring about an unwilling recognition, by the cross-eyed monk who kept the gate, of an attrazione turistica within his precincts.

  They sat now on the rim of the Piazza di Spagna fountain, their bare legs hanging in dazzling water, and as he glanced through Enid’s thin blue pages, “Oh melodrama!” exclaimed Francis. “No thank you! Not if that’s the sort of thing I’m going back for! You go back, Jane, you marry your young man! I’m glad I listened to the tiny voice that said not to book passage!”

  Jane blinked. “Non riesco a capire—”

  So he showed her the letter, rereading it over her shoulder and from time to time—for she never kept it straight—distinguishing among his father’s wives: Enid’s mother, then his own, finally Fern. “Or rather not finally, it now appears,” he said, rolling back his frayed shorts, actually trousers he’d trimmed himself, to get more sun.

  Enid dwelt mostly upon Mr. Tanning’s response in the matter of the portrait. He hadn’t taken it well at all. Reading between her cautious lines, Francis marveled at the old man’s egoism. He had assumed from the first that the blow was aimed not at Enid but at himself. And by Fern. It hurt him to admit that a person with whom he’d lived intimately for so many years was capable of this cruel spiteful act. When Larry, having already ascertained from three sources that Fern was indeed in New York, had grabbed the phone and tried to express his own suspicions, Mr. Tanning had blown up. Irene Cheek was a fine straightforward woman. Nobody’s on God’s earth liked to be snubbed and talked about as if she were dirt under the Buchanans’ spotless feet. Then to pretend that Irene—! The wires to Jamaica had crackled and buzzed as he ranted. What about the dinner party Larry and Enid, deaf to his entreaties, had declined to give in honor of the Cheeks, the previous summer? What about the Cheeks having taken him into their bungalow in Jamaica, the previous wint
er, at great inconvenience to themselves, but knowing he wasn’t physically up to the season at Hobe Sound with Fern? What about the transformation Irene had wrought in Cousin Charlie, who had been the town drunk before she married him? On and on. “Now there are rumors,” Enid’s letter said, “of Daddy’s wanting to marry Irene.”

  “There you are!” cried Francis, gesticulating cynically in the warm light. “Why can’t Larry and Enid be nice to Irene, instead of driving her to Reno? Wait and see—she’ll be the fourth wife if they don’t take care!”

  “Think of wives outnumbering children,” said Jane.

  “Think of each wife lasting thirteen years.”

  She did, and called it creepy. As an art-historian Jane appreciated these formal touches, but her inner life—or whatever went on beneath her healthy sunburned face and black curls straining against combs—was a chaos. Or so Francis assumed. They spent hours together every day.

  Nevertheless each had warned the other that, back in America, they would most likely not be friends at all. Francis would settle in New York, Jane would marry her childhood sweetheart, now a graduate student at Harvard, and since neither of them really enjoyed traveling, that would be that. The great topic between them was less their love of monuments than their dislike of Italy, of Italians, of the Americans who pretended to feel at home there. They agreed vigorously as to the unreality of any given Italian. “Nothing but gesture and vanity,” Francis would say, “like a trip through a progressive school. Italians have never understood the difference between expression and self-expression. They have no feelings because they’re forever showing them off. Such people are unreal. No wonder they produced Pirandello.”

  “The men think of nothing but sex,” said Jane.

  “And they’re utter failures in bed.”

  “You don’t say!”

  “So Xenia tells me,” he hastened to add.

  “Speriamo!” She often lapsed into Italian, not so much from ostentation as to poke fun at those who spoke nothing else.

  Alessandro Allori kept Jane in Italy. She had dutifully covered half the country in search of his work, and Francis once or twice, having nothing better to do, went along. Whenever you passed a chapel without bothering to look at the dull dark unstarred painting above the altar, you were like as not neglecting an Allori. Francis had watched his friend, during a Sunday Mass in Pesaro, interrupt the Elevation by crossing in front of it—bareheaded in dirndl and sandals, her arms full of notebooks—on the heels of a corrupt sacristan whose genuflection she dared not imitate, only to find herself examining something truly awful, worse than Allori, a scuola d’Ignoto. Allori was awful enough, but what could she do? All the interesting painters had been snapped up by her colleagues. Still, when the Caravaggio wave was over, people would look about for new figures to rediscover. Jane took the view that Allori’s very unlikeliness gave him a certain advantage.

  What kept Francis in Italy? A hunch that he would be asked this question on his return had helped him dawdle there all through the winter and spring.

  Jane handed back the letter. “But who is Irene, really?”

  Cousin Irene? Stretching in the sun, he felt hungry and wondered if he could do justice to Mrs. Cheek. After what Enid had written, could anyone? She looked, he began, like a lady golfer, tanned, with small eyes. She was actually a cousin of the Tannings—at least her husband was—but the connection, and for that matter the Cheeks themselves, had played no part in Francis’s consciousness until the winter before he came to Europe. They turned up, as if from nowhere, in Hobe Sound—Irene and Charlie and two beagles, these last going directly into a kennel because Fern wouldn’t have them in the house. Francis understood that; the house was new, all marble with oyster-white carpeting—very Fern. Even the grass outside felt like paper and rustled dryly underfoot. To go on, Irene had brought her hostess a kind of Guatemalan fiesta dress, purple and orange, one that couldn’t have been worn as a joke—not at any rate by Fern, although Irene turned up for dinner that night in flesh-colored slacks and a silk T-shirt on which one of the beagles had been painted with a slipper in its mouth. Mr. Tanning did his best to make up for Fern’s remoteness, Fern herself grew wild with jealousy, one thing led to another. “Mind you,” Francis finished, “I like Fern. She’s extremely fond of me. For that matter, she was extremely fond of him.”

  “Then why—?”

  “He divorced her. None of the wives ever dreamed of divorcing him. One thing, of course, that’s accomplished by divorcing them is,” he paused, unable for an instant to recall the point he wanted made, “well, that before long they’re on such splendid terms. They start having lunches alone with him, sometimes even dinners, laughing and crying over old times, burying the hatchet. Naturally none of them ever remarries. They get cases of champagne at Christmas and on birthdays more or less undemanding pieces of jewelry. The poor man can’t bear to fail with people.”

  Reading in Jane’s expression that his tone was baffling, he searched her dark glasses for a clue. There was this about Francis: he had little sense of how he sounded or looked. Years went by before he accepted that his voice had changed. And, while a good head taller than his father, taller even than Larry Buchanan by a few inches, he invariably saw himself as littler than anyone else—children and dwarfs aside. He squinted now, but the green lens gave back only a tiny greenish handsomeness with teeth that, straightened in childhood, had reverted to some glinting disorder of their own. It did no good to know that in Jane’s eyes he was handsome. He had to ask outright what her smile meant.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just that you can be so patronizing.”

  “Towards whom? Towards Irene?”

  “Forget it.”

  He would be glad to. Such matters weren’t for Jane to judge; he felt it in all kindness. Despite her modest emancipation, despite Allori and sandals and a medical student named Bruno, she came from a plain Midwestern household in which no painting had ever been hung, let alone mutilated, and divorce, a thing unknown, could blacken cousins two states removed. The world of the Tannings, Jane’s parents would have agreed, was a dungheap. And it did no good to know that in her eyes Francis had grown up out of it like a rose, until her world, by contrast, seemed as dull and artless as her way of talking. (She said “mere” for mirror, “Yurp” for Europe, “broke” for baroque—or “barrack,” as he himself sounded it.) It did no good to guess that she adored him. He preferred to pass for a celibate, to tell his tale with an air of dry comedy. They were sitting after all like cut flowers, up to their calves in the purest water.

  He had a polite afterthought. “Did you get anything interesting?”

  “A postcard from Roger. He’s going to meet the ship.”

  “A postcard only!” Francis took it from her. On one side was a sepia photograph of an empty restaurant. A motto read: Escape into the Reality of Fine Food. The other side bore a few scrawled lines. “I never believe things written on postcards,” said Francis.

  “Neither do I.”

  “You’d think he’d have more to say.”

  “That was our understanding about this year.”

  Francis shrugged. He found incomprehensible that Jane should risk her marriage for a trip abroad. She hadn’t needed to accept the grant from the Foundation. As for her “understanding” with Roger, it left both free to do as they wished, form what attachments they chose. Jane didn’t even carry his snapshot. “I guess I’m old-fashioned,” he sighed. “Will you really get married?”

  “Why not?” she returned, out of her brown study.

  He handed back the postcard. “Shall we have lunch, then?”

  Outside the trattoria they came upon Xenia Grosz in the act of dismissing, with a yawn and a nod of her golden head, a ferociously handsome young man. She watched him mount his motor-scooter and bounce away over the cobblestones. “Hopelessly in love,” she laughed. “Come, I’m starving. I see you’ve taken my advice and eat here now. It’s the best food in Rome, and the cheapest.”<
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  Francis and Jane had eaten there—in fact they had met there—long before Xenia’s appearance on the scene. But this was Xenia’s way, and for that matter Xenia’s scene, there being no corner of the Old World in which she hadn’t abundantly lived, as a tiny child, a girl, a young woman, as whatever she might now be in respect to age. It was simpler to forget that she had any.

  They followed her to a central table, close to the cool splashing of water. Xenia took one swift glance upward to make sure the light, filtering through vine-leaves, was flattering to her, then another about the crowded garden in search of friends. “Ah!” she exclaimed, “Mr. Durdee is eating here with his wife. He’s a very rich American, but quite intelligent, who has just ordered one of my pieces—the abstract torso, only big, to go by his pool. And in pink granite instead of marble.” She caught his eye and waved. “I told him if he wanted real Italian food to come here. Cameriere! Today you’re my guests. We’ll celebrate.”

  As they downed their first liter of Frascati, a half-dozen people stopped at the table to kiss Xenia’s hand, slap her bare brown shoulder, exchange a joke in French or Italian. They were all artists, all more or less political: a communist sculptor and his wife, who wove; a film-director who could not return to France—the figures blurred after a bit. Francis knew that Xenia, because she liked him, took for granted that he, too, was “creative.” He had soon given up trying to contradict her. “You Americans,” she would laugh, “with your modesty and your guilt!” So he ended by letting her see him as a liberal, a writer (though he scarcely now wrote letters) struggling, young, living the vie de Bohéme in a high bare frugal room. He had such a room, but not from necessity. He had wanted the cold tile floors and the smelly stove. The bareness appealed to him, like that of the straight razor he affected; it made him seem more real. Accordingly he found Xenia’s view of him far more soothing than that held by Jane, to whom he had confided the worst.

  Still, he couldn’t shake the sense of his own imposture. There had been evenings out under the stars with Xenia and her friends, drinking the cheap white wine for which each had so scrupulously put down his pittance, when Francis could only sit—while they joked and waved their arms and criticized America—smiling but silent, lest a false move betray him. The truth, Francis had come to suspect, was that they didn’t care one way or the other; he wouldn’t be sitting there if he hadn’t wanted to, and as long as he claimed no attention they would pay him none. All but Xenia. “You’re so mysterious,” she would chuckle, licking her lips, “I like that!”—never guessing his secret, although she kept a studio in New York and had dealt, by her own confession, with the rich.