Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  “You sound,” he said ingenuously, “as though you hadn’t seen one another for a very long time.”

  “Well, we haven’t!” exclaimed Enid, her eyes squeezed shut with amusement. “It’s been a whole week! We might as well not be living in the same country!”

  “I asked you to lunch the day before yesterday,” her father reminded her.

  “But you called up at eleven o’clock! We were leaving for the beach with a picnic, the twins and Lily and I.” Once again she seemed to appeal to Francis. “You just don’t disappoint little people that way, do you?”

  “If you remember,” said Mr. Tanning, “I suggested you bring the picnic over here. Grandpa has a beach in front of his house, too.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Enid, “I felt you had enough on your hands as it was, without the additional strain of three wild Indians.”

  “Oh I see.” Mr. Tanning swallowed a nitroglycerine pill. “You’ll soon come to realize,” he told Francis, “that your loving father sets an unsavory example for his grandchildren. We can only pray that they manage to live it down.”

  “You know that isn’t true, Daddy,” she said, her voice quieter and sadder now that she was indignant. Francis had a movement of tenderness. Enid, after all, lived far more than himself in the world of the Cottage; she played the game of kinship in a way that Francis, who tended to make up the rules as he went along, simply didn’t. Mostly he was touched by her having come to make peace alone, without Larry, trusting her brother—virtual stranger that he was—to see her through. “Sunday,” she was earnestly saying, “when you had us to meet the Goods, I told you I had a busy week ahead. Monday I went into town with Larry for the night. Tuesday—”

  “Say no more.” Mr. Tanning smiled wearily. “All is forgiven.”

  Enid gave a helpless laugh. “By the way,” she said after a bit, “I took the portrait to be restored. The little man thought it would take about three months. I said to him, ‘What is this, the season for slashed portraits?’”

  “Have you found out who did it?” asked Francis.

  “Oh dear,” their father sighed, rising.

  Did he have a pain? They were both alarmed. But no, he wanted only to wash his teeth. He tottered showily out of the room.

  Francis repeated his question. Had they found out who slashed the portrait?

  “Alas,” Enid giggled, “the culprit is still at large.”

  For no reason that he could tell she lowered her eyes. “It’s such a wild thing to have done,” he said encouragingly. “Who on earth would want to hurt you that much?”

  “Daddy’s theory,” she observed, avoiding her own, “is that somebody wanted to hurt him. He was very fond of the portrait.”

  “Does he still think Fern did it?”

  “She couldn’t have done it,” Enid flew to her defense, “unless she hired an assassin! She wasn’t in town. It happened on a Friday, the next day was Lily’s birthday. Not that that interesting fact,” she quickly added, her manner growing more and more social, “has anything to do with the case, but it’s one way I’m able to remember. Don’t you find you have funny little ways of remembering things?”

  By way of reply he swung round in his chair. Knowing that Enid suspected her, he had remembered the money Irene Cheek had left for Mr. Tanning. It was, of course, no longer on the desk. He felt sure that his father hadn’t picked it up.

  “You have the answer after all, I think,” he said. “There’s nothing a certain person wouldn’t do.”

  For the second time Enid refused to meet his eyes. Could she be hiding something? “Oh well,” she murmured, “the milk is spilled. We’ll never find out.”

  “I will!” Enid blinked. Francis chuckled at the idea of cross-questioning every woman who came to the Cottage. “I’m serious, though. I’ll find out, you wait and see!”

  But she didn’t enter into it. “Sweetie, it wouldn’t do any good, even if you were able …”

  “Nonsense! The scene of the crime is overrun with suspects!”

  “I mean, I don’t believe Daddy really wants to know. It would upset him so. He’d lie awake—”

  “Don’t you?”

  She looked puzzled. “With my headaches?”

  “No—don’t you want to know who did it?”

  “Oh, naturally I’m curious,” began Enid lightly. Then with a gentle, almost apologetic smile: “It’s funny, but no, I don’t really want to know.”

  It was his turn to lower his eyes. For a long time Francis had dreamed of doing her some important service, of a day when, no longer able to sustain the rare buoyancy with which she went her way—revolving as it were on one toe—Enid would reach out for him to support her full weight. The moment seemed very close. The gravities she withstood, whatever form they took—headaches, committees, another child to bear, the nameless enemy near at hand—he had felt these things more than once during the past half hour threaten her balance. Francis went so far as to hold his breath. Would it be now that she broke down, her eyes brimming over, her head on his knee? He could imagine the very words stammered out: “I cannot bear my life … I’ve never let myself think … he doesn’t love me … so much depends on me ….” And he would be stroking her hair, whispering, “Let it go, let it go ….” He needed to know that Enid suffered, for proof that his own world was real. Still she gave no sign.

  “Did Daddy tell you he was going to Boston next month?” she presently asked.

  “What for?”

  “He’s found a wonderful doctor there, who treats his kind of heart ailment very successfully. If it works it’s meant to leave you entirely free from pain.”

  “How weird,” said Francis.

  “Daddy’s terribly excited over it. So am I. When you think of the years he’s suffered, with no hope at all …”

  “But would it really be wise?” Francis wondered after a moment. “I mean, doesn’t pain serve to warn him when he goes too far, physically or otherwise? You saw him take that pill just now, and then leave the room. I don’t think it was to wash his teeth at all, so much as to escape from a painful conversation.” He waited to make sure that Enid knew what he meant. “And don’t we all do that,” he pursued, “to greater or lesser degrees? We needn’t be as sensitive as he, but doesn’t pain teach us what we must avoid?”

  He saw it as applying marvelously to his sister. But Enid had a wider experience of the subject. “I’m afraid that it”—she wouldn’t in her modesty say “pain”—“teaches us what we can’t avoid.” And Francis knew she was right.

  “In a way, yes,” he said. “We can’t at least help others avoid it. We’re none of us magicians with ointments or heroes with lances. Look at him. He suffers in his mind from not being strong enough to do—what? To do the things he would suffer ten times as much from the physical strain of doing, now.”

  Enid hummed a single high note.

  “No, I think it’s fascinating,” Francis went on. “He knows what hurts him, but does knowing save him?” His eyes brightened to glimpse the purpler reaches of his thought. “Mightn’t the answer be that everything hurts him? Pretend he’s a bad example for Lily, call him a Casanova,” he lingered ironically over the word, “and presto! you’ve offended him. Admit that he’s no such thing, and you’ve made matters even worse. What do you do at his age? Whatever it is, it injures him! One sees what the Hindus were getting at when they said that all action was immoral. It is. It hurts me to talk as I do, it hurts you to listen!”

  He was by now very far afield, and as puzzled as Enid by the passion in his voice. What had happened to him? He felt all elated and nervous. She, however, knitted and nodded. Francis had a glimpse of the advantages that went with playing by the rules.

  So he let her off, fell silent; and yet a lie had been given not just to Enid but to the room they sat in, so rich with her ideas. He felt he had seen through her ceremony of blandness and taste; it wasn’t a ceremony because it concealed nothing, composed nothing, cost nothing. He decided t
hen and there that she had no other way of being. If she had, dear gentle creature, she might have given it a try. Her poise, as she smiled understandingly at Francis, became the wistful poise of a child, her mother’s hat drooping over her eyes, her feet lost in her mother’s shoes, pouring out colored water and making conversation. Equally with the ocean room, where each piece was so harmonious and so fine. It no longer appeared to Francis an emblem of the truly adult so much as a naive aspiration towards that state.

  Ah but in a certain light, how the room sustained Enid! How it sustained, against his will, himself! Even a real child entering there would have had to sit as Francis did, its little legs crossed, talking of the weather, refusing a second chocolate, charmed into forgetting the friends outside who waited to play leap-frog or “games” in a garage attic.

  Wouldn’t it help, he brooded, to leap up, cry out, smash something? But the room met his eye so trustingly; it was easier to do violence to himself. As if casually he brought his knuckle down upon his knee, once, twice, again and again, feeling the pain that made at last the beautiful room unreal, Enid unreal, and gave Mr. Tanning, when he paused frowning on the threshold, an air of patiently putting up with a good deal of nonsense. “There’s not one really comfortable chair in the whole damn house,” he had remarked during dinner. “They’re all either too narrow or too low.”

  Francis hoped his father would never say this to Enid. She was so easily upset.

  For a time the old man stood behind her, stroking her hair. The rhythm recalled words: Let it go, let it go—“In April, 1929,” Mr. Tanning began, “I convinced Howie Burr to send out a circular I’d written myself, warning all the firm’s customers, here and abroad, that in our opinion the stock market was in a most precarious state. Things were sky high. None of our competitors could understand why in hell we were prepared to lose so much business. But it made sense to the President of the United States; he wrote me a personal letter. I’ll get you a copy of it for your scrapbook, Francis, if you like. The recommendations we made were very simple ….”

  Francis swallowed a yawn.

  At eleven o’clock Mrs. Bigelow and Lady Good joined them.

  “Benjamin, I wished for you!” the latter exclaimed. “We’ve seen such a lovely film, all about the friendship between a crippled boy and an English sheepdog. It brought tears to my eyes.” She took it upon herself—while Natalie conveyed in pantomime that it was no good taking her to the movies, she couldn’t see a thing—to tell the whole plot, like a bedtime story.

  “Oh, Lily would like that,” said Enid at one point. “She’s been badgering me for a turtle.”

  The others said nothing at all. Mr. Tanning’s eyes never left the speaker’s face until, with a slight drop of his head, he fell asleep.

  They smiled at one another and at him. “Poor little fellow,” said Natalie. “All tuckered out.”

  “Has it stopped raining?” Enid wondered. Nobody could be sure.

  “How one hears the sound of the sea,” Lady Good breathed.

  In silence they let it speak to them, not knowing what else to do. Natalie drew her finger along the leg of the coffee-table, and held it up pensively; they saw it was black with dust.

  Francis got to his feet and stole out. He paused by the hall mirror, whispering, “I’m tired, too.” When he returned with Mrs. McBride the women looked up gratefully.

  “Gracious!” said the nurse. “Do you know what time it is? I’ve let him stay up a whole half-hour later than usual, because tonight was an occasion.” Mr. Tanning stirred and woke. “I want you to be good now and come along with me. We know what happened last night. That’s why you’ve been so tired today.”

  “Yes, my love,” he groaned. Did he always say that, on waking? It was amusing enough, but soon the old man, worn out, rose to do as he’d been told. He kissed each of them goodnight, solemnly. “I leave,” he told Francis, “the seraglio in your hands.”

  “What’s the keeper of a seraglio called?” mused Natalie aloud.

  “A unique,” said Francis. This met with laughter.

  “Benjamin,” said Lady Good, “you don’t mean me to go to Irene’s tomorrow?”

  “Why not come to us?”

  “That’s very dear of you, Enid. I’d infinitely rather.”

  “I like the way you call her Irene,” said Francis, “after taking such pains not to, this afternoon.”

  “Ah well,” Lady Good said, memorably, “I daresay she’d love being called Irene to her face and Mrs. Cheek behind her back. But there are those with whom one tends to reverse normal procedure.”

  “Miaow!” put in Mr. Tanning from the door.

  “I’m sorry, Benjamin, but I’m used to speaking out.”

  “Prudence, you can do as you like about tomorrow,” he said. “I’d be happier if you were along, but I’m just selfish.”

  Lady Good pursed her lips. “Very well, I shall go to Ire—pardon me, to Mrs. Cheek’s, But only because you wish it.”

  “We all wish it,” said Francis.

  “Oh dear,” Mr. Tanning mumbled, taking his nurse’s arm. “Off to the Casbah.” Francis had to smile to think that, after so much innuendo, it was with plain old Mrs. McBride that Casanova retired. But he found it funnier yet, the way she, before leading him off, cast a backward glance, all starch and common sense, to reassure them of her own propriety. He might talk of casbahs, she conveyed, but they needn’t worry, that was as far as it would go.

  The evening had ended. Before dispersing, Enid to her car, Lady Good and Natalie to their rooms, each in turn told Francis how glad she was that he’d come home. “Everything’s all right now,” Lady Good even said, quite as if still talking of a sheepdog.

  He followed Enid out into the drive, asking, “Do you think now that Irene means anything to him?”

  “I don’t know what I think,” she said cheerfully, no longer visible in the gusty dark.

  “But you had been alarmed. Your last letter said that Irene—or hadn’t you known then about Lady Good?”

  “I’d never heard her name until last week. Things are too mysterious for words.”

  “You understand of course that it’s she who will save him from Irene.” Enid was silent. “And don’t start wondering who’s going to save him from Lady Good. I can tell that’s in your mind.”

  She gave her little gasp of a laugh. “You’ll do that? Oh my goodness!”

  Francis had meant simply that Lady Good was someone from whom nobody needed to be saved. Enid drove off, nevertheless, leaving him to reflect upon the increasingly lucid part he had been given to play at the Cottage.

  6. In the community, that is among the people you knew, there were various assumptions about places. The most widespread was that whoever summered here kept a second, in some cases a third, residence elsewhere. It went without saying that one of these would be very large and handsome; a place in town sugared the pill of a too modest place in the country, and so forth. Some few conformed excessively. The Buchanans, for instance, moved between two large handsome places. They kept a house here and a triplex in New York, both of which—unlike the structurally so blatant Cottage—were perfection. This got said by somebody once a week at least: “Enid’s place is perfection.” But you had to be the right sort to get away with it—just as in another set of assumptions, those by which husbands and wives took mistresses and lovers as naturally as they moved from one house to the next, there would always be a few couples (again, like the Buchanans) whose faithfulness to one another either refreshed or exasperated. The Buchanans’ refreshed, for they were not only rich but attractive. This was the key word. It allowed them, by and large, to do as they pleased.

  Irene and Charlie Cheek, however, were not the right sort. He had been known to drink both too much and, of late, too little to be attractive. Still, you had known his family (if indeed you weren’t part of it), and he did love to sail. Irene’s position was graver. Before and after her marriage she had been on the jolliest terms with a numbe
r of rich older men (whom you knew and liked)—friendships that, like others of their kind, would have been shrugged off, but for one damning circumstance. The Cheeks themselves weren’t rich. They had, to be sure, their two places, one here, one in Jamaica. But Irene made the mistake of pretending, in whichever of the two she found herself, that this was their simple summer (or winter) lodging, while the other house was, oh, quite a different matter, grand, serious, well staffed. It cut ice for a time. Then certain friends with whom she no longer put on certain airs, like Mr. Tanning or the Governor-General of the Island, having visited the other house, praised in all innocence, but to her enemies, its unpretentiousness. Overnight her stock went down. She was seen wearing the same dress too often. When she appeared in a new one you wanted to know who had given it to her, and why. You took for granted that her interest in Mr. Tanning was of the most mercenary order. It had even been whispered that her husband was party to the plot, that if Irene succeeded in marrying Mr. Tanning, Cousin Charlie would have only to wait till the old man died, then take her back and live at the Cottage happily every after. “Poor Ben,” people said, “when will he see that it’s not him she cares for?”—which was the purest slander. Irene didn’t much care for anybody, rich or poor. Either security or imagination was needed in order to care for others; Irene lacked both.