There it stood.
The Cottage, so-called because of its mere dozen rooms, its shaggy swollen look, as of thatch copied in teak and slate, formed the fourth side of a vast unshadowed lawn. This had, to be sure, a rose-arbor in the center of it, and shrubbery—boxwood, hydrangea, laurel—that in time would mask the brick walls that enclosed it; even so, it couldn’t be thought of as a garden. Nobody used it. Nothing about it invited people in the house to stroll out beyond an elevated terrace that extended from the north porch. Indeed, no steps led down from this terrace to the lawn. The two levels were connected by a ha-ha—you had either to jump or, re-entering the house, come out another door. The lawn seemed therefore so much sheer space, watered clipped magnificent space, against which any person approaching the Cottage on foot would give the illusion of tarrying, of fumbling, pitched forward as if walking into a fierce wind. But once indoors he would understand, puzzled by an air of intimacy out of all proportion to the giant scale of the rooms, that the lawn had been used, that if the fruit were sour it could no longer be tasted as such after biting through the bitter green husk.
The sea glittered on the far side of the house. Also out of sight, down a narrow drive, four smaller buildings faced one another like card-players, over a square of gravel—a garage, a greenhouse, a cottage for servants, and one for the overflow of guests. Here Francis was to stay. He had just been staring up dazedly at the big house when a voice from inside called, “Mr. Francis goes to the guest-house, Louis, not here!”
A little apartment had been contrived. Louis Leroy ushered him proudly in, opening doors: bedroom and bathroom, a kitchen with beer on ice and the makings of snacks. For the present, Francis was to be the one occupant of the house.
The rooms smelled of fresh paint, the bed felt very soft, there were flowers everywhere. None of it was to Francis’s taste, really, but all that thought and effort absurdly touched him. He couldn’t help it. As a child he had wept to read a recipe for apple pie, a dish he hated. “What is it? What is it?” his nurse had cried when he came to her sobbing with the cookbook. And he couldn’t explain, nor could he now. It had something to do with the very idea of patiently choosing “small tart apples,” dotting them with butter, baking “till tender”—how could they resist such loving care? How could he, each time they were set, small, tender, full of love, before him, continue to gag at the first mouthful? Surely the rejection of love was wicked, even if it turned your stomach.
Still, wondered Francis looking straight into the eyes of a Royal Doulton fruit vendor, to what purpose had he developed a taste of his own, if not to tell that bit of rosy-cheeked porcelain how much he didn’t like her? But he couldn’t do it, he turned away. Something in him had grown mild and melting. The unpalatable means vanished into his sense of the motive behind them. He was wanted here.
He washed quickly, left Louis to unpack, and walked over to the Cottage. Up from the basement came the voices of maids. Entering, Francis caught what could have been the scent, lingering, transmuted, of all his younger entrances there.
Although the ocean room had been done over by Fern, and altered, he noticed, in the general reaction against her, what hadn’t altered were the clues to Mr. Tanning’s presence. They were three: illness, wealth, women. It had always been so.
A piece of knitting ornate but dreary, the work surely of a trained nurse, lay on the coffee-table next to a hypodermic, gauze-tipped, ready for use. This brought back from long ago the nights Mr. Tanning, then perfectly healthy, would elect to spend in the hospital, a patient subject to all regulations, for the luxury of an alcohol rub, a tranquil sleep, the cool voice of a nurse waking him early. He had mastered the mannerism of illness, like a prodigy too young to learn the brilliant lesson of the sonata he performs, though it will be at his fingertips when the time is ripe. We play with fire, his son thought.
For evidence of wealth he had just to look about, and for evidence of women as well, the two being here curiously intermingled. Not the small careful pile of bills and change, prominent against the pale leather of the desk—this stood for wealth on the same low rung as the nurse’s knitting, the raw symbol, the mere gender—but the room itself told, and in a high hushed voice, how it had been furnished by women, for women, would be in a little while (if Francis cared to sit and wait) positively furnished with women. What it had been furnished without, it all but blushed to confess, was any visible regard for expense. Bland satins, fruitwood and lacquer, massive peonies, English paintings of Childhood in its most handsome and least credible aspect, these things at once murmured their testimony, then, as it were, half-closed their lovely eyes and drummed their dainty fingers.
If Europe had taught Francis to dislike a Royal Doulton apple woman, it had taught him also the extreme fineness of all that confronted him here. He recognized the little oil sketch, a view of a floating child, by an artist whose clownish name had struck him at the age of six. Of course, he ruefully smiled, it would have to have been Tiepolo.
Turning, he made out, through a window oily with the salt air, a figure sitting on the south terrace, which overlooked the sea. At this moment the nurse came in.
“Oh,” she exclaimed, “you must be Francis! We’re certainly glad to see you! I’m Mrs. McBride.” They shook hands. Gray-haired, motherly, if not downright grandmotherly, she wore a little starched cap. He felt at once her willingness to talk throughout the better part of a sleepless night. “I must say I’d have known you anywhere. You’re so like your father. Besides, he’s shown me photographs. That one of you wrestling with the snake, remember? He talks about you all the time. I said to him this morning, ‘I’m afraid to meet your son, Mr. Tanning. If he’s as intelligent as you say, he’s going to think me an awful dumbbell.’”
“How is he?”
“Oh, we have our ups and downs. Last night,” she lowered her voice, “he didn’t sleep too well, so I’ve let him nap longer this afternoon. I was going now to wake him and give him his shot.”
“This is the pace that kills, all right,” said Francis, immediately flushing as his own words reached him. He had hoped to have outgrown the way, in his father’s house, his speech became awkward and corrupt, like that of the Italian seeking to ingratiate himself through a command of American idiom.
Mrs. McBride, however, smiled with delight. “I’ve said the very same words to him a hundred times. Oh, I can see you’re on my side. He’ll listen to you. Do you know,” she said, picking up the hypodermic, “he gave me all the stamps from your letters, for Mary Ann; that’s my seventeen-year-old daughter”—a bit too old, thought Francis, to be collecting stamps—“and what a pity, she was here last week for a little visit with me. How she’d have loved hearing about your trip! She studies French in school, it’s her favorite subject. Remind me,” she finished with a special smile, her thought now painfully clear, “to show you her photo.”
“I will. Who’s that on the terrace?”
“Probably Mrs. Bigelow. No, she went into the village.”
“I’d heard she was here.”
“Yes, poor soul.”
“Poor soul?”
“Well, she can hardly see. She has cataracts. Lady Good took her shopping, she can’t go anywhere by herself. Oh, that would be Mrs. Cheek on the terrace. She likes to wash her hair in that fancy shower your father has. Come with me, I’m going to wake him now.”
He followed her into the hall, a bit dazed by the amount she had managed to convey, unsolicited. She led him on tiptoe through Mr. Tanning’s study and quietly opened the bedroom door. “He’s still asleep,” she whispered.
Francis looked over her shoulder. In the full light of afternoon his father lay, a black mask shielding his eyes, one hand on his heart. The big fourposter had been replaced years ago by a narrow hospital bed whose cranks and hinges kept the old man in a half-sitting position, like invalids in opera. The bedclothes seemed undisturbed, he slept so gently. His lips were parted. He wore a stocking on his head.
As
they watched, Mr. Tanning cleared his throat. “The show must go on,” he mumbled to his audience.
“Well, it looks like we’ve had a nice sleep,” said Mrs. McBride, advancing. “Are you ready for a pleasant surprise?”
“Yes, my love.” He pursed his lips to indicate, with fine economy of movement, what sort of surprise would be acceptable. Francis laughed aloud, delighted.
“Is that my stalwart son? Welcome to the seraglio.” Francis bent to kiss him but Mr. Tanning shifted slightly. His son’s lips touched the mask instead of the brown wrinkled cheek. “I haven’t been too well, Francis,” he went on. “I had another mild stroke last month, which seems to have affected my eyes. They’re sensitive to sudden changes of light.”
“They’re clearing up very nicely,” said Mrs. McBride, swabbing his arm with alcohol.
“I tried to play a rubber of bridge yesterday. I couldn’t see the damn cards.” The needle went in. “Ouch! Mrs. McBride—”
“Now that’s a new needle, Mr. Tanning!”
“I don’t give a good God damn what it is. There’s no reason on earth for me to feel such pain. I told you to throw out all those needles and get new ones. It makes me so mad I don’t know what to do.”
“There, there,” she sang. “Now we’ll get the oil.”
“I must inherit it from you,” said Francis. “I can’t stand sharp things in me.” He wished to be obliging. Actually, he had never minded hypodermics.
The nurse fetched a flask of warm scented oil from the bathroom and, folding back a corner of the covers, poured into her palm a few drops with which she began to massage Mr. Tanning’s feet. Swollen and darkened by a complicated tracery of tiny blood-vessels, they looked deprived of any life but the one stroked into them by her gleaming hands. “My circulation is no good, Francis,” the old man explained drowsily.
“It takes him a while to wake up,” murmured Mrs. McBride. Presently she anointed her patient’s hands.
Francis looked on spellbound. There was an atmosphere of helpless old age in the room, of impotent wrath, slumbers, tears, things he had never so vividly before connected with his father. He had of course known him old and sick, but not to this degree. Perhaps the “mild stroke” hadn’t been mild at all—yet wouldn’t the old man, in that event, have been removed to a hospital? Was it simply a matter of his having aged three years since Francis’s last sight of him? What other changes were there? A new nurse, the riddance of Fern—surely that was all to the good …. He scanned the photographs on the bureau, a question slowly forming in his mind, when the floor creaked and there on the threshold, older and more haggard than the glamorous likeness from which Francis turned to see her, stood Irene Cheek.
“Why, look who’s here!” exclaimed Mrs. McBride with brisk emphasis. Francis got up to greet the visitor. But a gesture imposed silence. Her lips compressed, her eyes aglitter, she stole towards the bed and bestowed a lingering kiss upon its drowsing occupant.
Francis wound his watch.
“‘I arise from sweet dreams of thee,’” Mr. Tanning tried to say. The words were muffled by her mouth.
“The shower’s all ready, Mrs. Cheek.”
She straightened herself. “Thanks, Bridie, I’ll go right in. You sleep well, Lover-cousin?” Her voice was soft and slurred.
“Yes, thank you.” Mr. Tanning removed his eyeshade. “Irene, you know my boy, Francis.”
“Sure I do. Hello, Francis.” She showed him that she not only had, as he’d told Jane, small eyes, but small teeth as well. Worn down, he supposed, by use. Her dress was Kelly green. A gold tennis racket, with rubies set in the handle and a pearl ball, hung round her neck. “Are you here for long?”
“For a couple of weeks at least.”
“Good! Then we’ll see you tomorrow. You’ll bring him, won’t you, Benji?”
“Yes, Irene.”
He sounded tired and cross. Mrs. Cheek glanced appealingly at the others. “Everything O.K.?”
“No,” said Mr. Tanning.
“Oh I know what’s bothering you!” she cried, her face clearing. “Your bridge winnings! Right? Well, I left the money right on the desk in the ocean room. Twenty-two dollars and fifty cents. Your father’s a real whiz at bridge. Said he couldn’t see the cards, but he piled up the score.”
“I’d be very happy, Irene, if you used that money towards something you wanted. I mean that. I’ve got everything I want.”
She shot her friend a provocative smile. “Everything?” And when he didn’t respond she continued gaily, “The money’s on the desk, in any case. You come early tomorrow? Bishop said he would.”
“For God’s sake, Irene, go in the damn shower and let me get up!”
“Temper, temper!” she laughed. “He’s got the finest shower on the East Coast, Francis.” Whereupon she vanished into the bathroom and began to sing above the roar of water.
“Next time,” said Mr. Tanning, “I promise to obey orders.”
Mrs. McBride chuckled and went out.
“What do you mean?” asked Francis.
“Mrs. McBride said, ‘Look who’s here!’ She said it in words of one syllable. And I didn’t look. If I was punished it was my own fault.”
“It didn’t seem to me you were being punished,” observed Francis. “Or had you expected someone else?”
For the first time that afternoon Mr. Tanning smiled, broadly, enigmatically. “My own kind understanding son,” he drawled.
Getting out of bed, ringing for Louis to help him dress, pouring and downing a shot of whisky from a decanter on the bureau, he slowly dispelled, or at least complicated, Francis’s early impression. Helpless old age, by countless small touches, was transformed into something approaching a parody of itself. The slumped shoulder, the wisp of white hair disarrayed had to be reconciled to the roguish rolling of eyes, a stagger and groan that smacked of the footlights, as he leaned on his valet’s arm. Mr. Tanning had furthermore a face that would have made the fortune of any actor. Frank, earnest, noble in repose, it was kept from plain tiresome fineness by being always on the verge of some unlikely humor, mischief or doltishness or greed; and would fall at times into a subjectivity so stricken, so elegiac, that you thought of a schoolboy deep in a Life of Chatterton and wondered, as before each new aspect, if you hadn’t finally hit upon the man’s real face.
Next to such mobility whatever likeness Mrs. McBride had found between Francis’s rather stiff face and his father’s disappeared. Probably it could only have been seen in a photograph.
Mr. Tanning said quietly, “I’ve missed you more than I can say.”
Francis trembled. How much he needed to learn!
The years in which to acquire from his father an image of mature behavior had passed Francis by, taking this opportunity with them. He had spent them under his mother’s roof. The long trousers, his first pair cut from the cloth of superior poise, had been tried on, as it were, with no mirror handy. She thought he looked well enough; he was forever made to feel his responsibilities as “man of the house.” He emptied ashtrays and mixed drinks. He sat at the head of her table while she told of conflicts in which he took no part. As it happened, he never did take part in them. After a month in the army Francis caught cold, was discovered to have chronic low blood-pressure. They sent him home. Once again he sat in the needlepoint chair until he simply couldn’t bear it another day. His “condition” left him as mysteriously as it had come; he went back to college. Vinnie moved into an even smaller apartment; he fled to Europe. He had begun to see more and more of his father, but by then Mr. Tanning was already an invalid.
Well, something could be learned even now. Picking a name at random, Francis asked, “Who is this Bishop Irene spoke of?”
“He’s the President of Bishop Petroleum,” said Mr. Tanning.
So long a pause followed this remark that Francis was casting about for another topic when his father, who had stopped to watch Louis Leroy tie his shoelaces, continued. “He’s one of the finest men
I’ve ever met, decent and honest. He’s a Mormon. Bishop’s his title as well as his name. He’s also a very clever businessman.”
“A special friend of Irene’s?”
“So she says.” But Mr. Tanning wasn’t to be coaxed out on a tangent. “Tanning, Burr financed about sixty per cent of the company. That’s my own foresight, Francis. Nobody else had much faith in the deal. The way things look now, we can’t possibly make less than ten million dollars over the next year and a half.” Another pause, then: “Last year I asked Larry Buchanan to fly out to Alberta and submit a report on the place to me. His report—when he got round to it—was very thorough and very lukewarm. You can’t run a business from a distance, Francis. It just burns me up to be treated like an old poop. The next thing I hear is that Mister Buchanan has bought, for the account of his loving wife, twenty-four thousand shares at sixty cents. Plus ten thousand for your account. By the time the good word got passed to me the stock was selling at a dollar and twelve cents. Every God-damn member of the family was in on the deal except me.”
“But you said you financed the company,” Francis ventured.
“The firm financed the company. The firm’s profit goes …” He proceeded to explain where it went, but Francis, while knowing the meaning of nearly every word his father used, could make no sense out of them. This didn’t annoy him. High finance was by nature dull and inscrutable. As for politics—! Here Francis actually smiled. Mr. Tanning, in years gone by, had been a great one for unfolding the Herald Tribune, gasping, turning purple, striking the arm of his chair over some bill that, though it had reached the Senate, was destined, in the fullness of time, not to be passed.
“I’m not complaining,” he finished, misunderstanding Francis’s smile. “I guess we all like to feel sorry for ourselves, don’t we? I’ve managed to overlook the fact that Bishop Petroleum closed last night at three and seven-eighths.”
Collected Novels and Plays Page 5