Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  Larry cleared his throat. “Well, haven’t you? It certainly looked to us at home as if you were doing what you liked. Believe me, many’s the time I envied you. I like Europe, too.”

  “There’s another misunderstanding!” cried Francis. “Europe wasn’t the point. I was there in order not to be here! I hated Europe—it solved nothing. So here I am, back, trying to get at my life in another way. At least,” he said with conviction, “I’ve found what keeps me from solving things.”

  “Now, come on, Francis,” Larry gave a cajoling smile, “where’s your sense of humor? Show me one thing you can’t solve, and I’ll show you three that I can’t!”

  “Larry, I’m asking you a straight question,” said Francis grimly. “We needn’t go into my reasons.” But without pausing he proceeded to do just that. “What I hate is—I’ll say it again—the power I have, of walking in and out of situations. When I’m fed up with one place I can travel wherever I please. Instead of enduring and suffering the way other people do, I need only write a check.” Once more he thought of his father, the marriages, the loves stepped out of casually, like clothes. “One has to work for one’s life—” Francis broke off; he’d let himself in for it this time.

  Larry reminded him that any job, within reason, he cared to hold down at Tanning, Burr—

  “No, no, I was talking metaphorically,” Francis brushed it aside. “You should know I’d do anything before working here. That is,” he floundered, wanting to repair a possible tactlessness, “being the son of—” and then recalling, too late, that Larry himself was a member of the family. “To work anywhere, for me, wouldn’t be real. I shouldn’t need to do it, I’d be inventing a life—don’t you see, Larry?”

  He looked unconvinced and rather annoyed. “When you say,” he began in a metallic voice, “that you hate walking out of situations, what do you think you’re trying to do right now? That’s what I’d call running away from a problem.”

  It startled Francis. He saw at once the justice of the observation.

  “I don’t know and I don’t want to know,” continued Larry, profiting by his silence, “who put this notion in your head, but if you imagine for one moment that you can break the trusts established by your father, and from which your income and Enid’s derives, you’re greatly mistaken. Now, if all you want is to have your monthly check stopped, I can arrange that in no time flat.” He reached for one of four telephones on his desk.

  “No,” said Francis, “I meant stopping it at the source.”

  “Yes. Well, it’s legally impossible, the way the trusts are set up. The principal goes to Enid’s children and to your own, after your death. I hope that answers your question.”

  They stared narrowly at one another.

  “Thank you.” Francis stood up. “It does.” He paused, then asked, “Are you taking the train out this afternoon?” turning aside, for his cheeks burned as if he had received a mortal insult. “I’ll be going out sometime tomorrow, along with a very charming person, a sculptress ….” He felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “Sit down,” said Larry gently. “Forgive me if I lost my temper.”

  “It means I’m doomed,” Francis kept repeating, “I’m doomed never tobe real.”

  Larry was able to say a great deal, uninterrupted.

  He started by praising money, to whose honorable uses there was no end. Did Francis realize that, each year since coming into his fortune, he had drawn the merest fraction of the funds at his disposal? Why, he could do so much for himself, for others! He could build a house, a theater, start a magazine, encourage artists, musicians, scholars; he could collect things, paintings or furniture, subsidize scientific research, feed the hungry, clothe the naked—Benjamin Tanning’s children being, year after year, in a virtually unique position to bring comfort and happiness to thousands of people. And at a minimal cost to themselves, thanks to the tax set-up. There was also, Larry went on, letting his cigar go out, one’s own family. Francis would understand better, once he married and had children, the joy of making a home, of giving them every possible advantage, the pride he, Larry, would take in showing Lily Europe next year at Easter. He said it all in a husky down-to-earth voice. Had he been using colors for words Larry would have produced a naturalistic portrait of himself smiling over a checkbook, surrounded by family and pets. “Just think,” he urged Francis, “what your father did for you! Education, security—”

  It was true, thought Francis miserably, all true.

  “—freedom to travel, power. Think of the love and pride he felt. The money your father gave you represents years of work and daily decisions made. It’s been his life and his genius, Francis.” At this point Larry dropped his second unexpected remark of the morning. “If Ben had heard the things you’ve said to me here and now, I honestly think it would have broken his heart.”

  Francis sat up and uncovered his eyes. He couldn’t tell how far Larry saw, but it was further than he had seen himself. As for Mr. Tanning, his photograph gazed straight at the Statue of Liberty.

  Was that why Francis had come?—for he was suddenly beyond constructing a more likely motive—to break the sick old man’s heart? Less to strip himself of power than to prove how powerful he could be? He found that he was staring fixedly at Larry’s mutilated hand. What did he know of violence, he, Francis? Nothing—yet it was possible, all the same, that he had resorted to it.

  Frightened now, he rose. “All right, Larry. Thanks for letting me bother you.” He didn’t want to be late for the wedding.

  “Now listen,” Larry said, looking relieved. “Not one boy in ten has your brains and ability. Did I say ten? A hundred would be nearer the truth. Naturally if you were a stupid slob you’d be unfit to manage your own affairs. Nobody’s asking you to do that in the first place; that’s my job. But you’re a damned bright guy—I know, I’ve seen your college record—and I want to say before you go that if you ever have any pet project you want my advice on, I’ll be not only delighted but truly flattered to do everything I can.”

  With which Larry relighted his cigar and guided Francis through the outer office, towards the elevators. He took, Francis felt in a kind of anguish, unnecessary pains to introduce him to every humming young woman or prosperous oldster encountered on their way. All were impressed, wanted to know was Francis going to work for the firm. Some remembered him from long ago and sent regards to his mother; one of these wept. At last he was down on the street. The whole idea had been hopeless, he would know better next time. Next time?

  Next time what? He was still asking himself twenty minutes later, while watching, in a sickly pink room full of artificial sunlight and the sound of an unctuous voice, the marriage of Roger (whom he saw as a perfect stranger) to Jane (whom perhaps he knew too well); then wondered, as they kissed, how long it would be before they decided to have a child, and whether the child would grow up to be happy and strong or lonely and sickly, or whether indeed the child would live at all.

  9. The party for Xenia took place on upper Fifth Avenue in a penthouse paid for by a wealthy lover of Adrienne’s. Only a few days each month did this person spend in town—days on which Tommy Utter would withdraw to a cold-water flat ten miles distant, in the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge. When the lover left, back he moved. He worked at an ancient concert grand from six in the morning until two in the afternoon, the hour his mistress left her bed and began to think about lunch.

  “Let’s hope the lover never finds out,” said Francis.

  “But he knows!” cried Xenia. “Of course he knows! Adrienne would never dream of hiding it from the sweet old man. She hasn’t told Tommy that he knows, however.”

  “Why not?”

  “Ah, he’d be furious, he wouldn’t understand. But Max thinks it’s wonderful for her to have a young lover. He says, ‘J’en aurais un moi-même, sij’étais pédéraste!’”

  “Is he French?” was all Francis found to say.

  “No, he’s a Pole.”

  “Oh dear, every
thing’s so easy for you Europeans!”

  “What do you mean?” his companion laughed. But he saw that she knew. Xenia was by far the most striking woman present, as well as being, curiously enough, the youngest. There had been, furthermore, a moment in which Francis, glancing about at the male guests, felt himself positively the oldest of these. He wasn’t; three or four gentlemen who looked like gigolos and turned out to be Counts—one, even, a Prince—were much in evidence with their powerful tanned profiles and gray curls thick above their ears, kissing hands and refusing drinks. The rest, however, were very young men, as young, that is, as the women who outnumbered them were ripe. You had a sense of several “Judgments of Paris” being simultaneously acted out. Also unlike the women, most of the young men were American, Tommy’s friends.

  Adrienne’s salon, though elegantly proportioned, had the bare unfurnished look of a makeshift dwelling soon to be boarded up. On entering, Francis had admired an Empire mirror shaped like a lyre. “How odd you should pick that out!” his hostess marveled. “I’ve been keeping it for a dear friend who wishes, I think, to part with it.”

  Red wine flowed. Later, Tommy played gems from his opera.

  It made a difference, Tommy’s opera. Knowing it was to be produced kept the group around him from being dismissed, too casually, as trivial or corrupt. Whatever he was, the gangling gauche handsome young musician, he wasn’t an amateur. Neither, as yet, had he been ruined by his charm. Francis took to him at once. He attributed to Tommy a childlike unconcern for whatever other people did or felt. The idea of wearing, to an evening party, corduroys and a gray unraveling sweater! I could never carry it that far, admitted Francis with a sigh. How long, indeed, could Tommy get away with it? Already in his music Francis thought he detected an ease that hadn’t been earned. “France will appreciate that,” nodded Xenia at the end of a strangely lifeless passage.

  “D’ailleurs, c’est tout ce qu’ily a de plus français!” This gave Francis a clue to Tommy’s difficulty.

  “He ought to be left alone and allowed to be American,” he told her, deliberately sententious.

  “Chauvinist!”

  They were sitting in a window-seat at the far end of the room, overlooking lights in the Park, sparse and romantic, below.

  “What do you mean, ‘being American’?” Xenia presently asked.

  It had to do, he tried to say, with not taking the easy way out, with not being glib, well mannered, probably depraved—casting about, his eyes met the sinister gaze of a Count. Xenia had begun throatily to laugh.

  “I never dreamed you were such a Puritan, Francis—you who have lived there! Oh the neuroses of Americans! Of course there’s depravity in Europe, there’s depravity all over the world. But,” pointedly, “those who are shocked by it are the ones I suspect of being drawn to it.”

  “I am not shocked by it,” Francis declared, blushing, in the tone of a prim old man.

  “Besides,” resumed Xenia after a pause during which the piano had become very suave indeed, “of what does this ‘depravity’ consist? The student with his petite amie? The femme de trente ans with her lover? The whore who goes to Mass? Voyons! Everywhere there is discretion and nowhere is there guilt. A woman hates her husband? Bon! She kills him with a kitchen-knife and the judge sympathizes. No, it’s here that sex is really messy. Just look at your American man—brutal, stupid, completely inexperienced; you get him in bed (God forbid!) and all he thinks is to sfogarsi as quickly as possible—e basta! Well, that’s thanks to your famous American mothers. In France, now,” she shrugged, “a mother says to one of her intimate friends, ‘Look, ma chère, Jean-Pierre has turned fifteen, he’s getting a bit restless, I was wondering if it interested you to …’ Nine times out of ten the friend is enchanted to be of service and there are no more problems! While here—I’m sorry to say it, but I’ve reached the conclusion that the single exception among American men is the homosexual, who at least knows how to enjoy himself in bed. But my God! The effort to get him there!” She gestured widely about the room, her eyelids agleam. “You can see for yourself!”

  Although he didn’t dare think what she meant, Francis was determined not to bat an eye. He gave Xenia his blandest smile.

  “What have I done,” she went on, inscrutable, “to deserve such a fate?”

  His silence had to be broken. “It seems to me,” Francis reminded her, pleased to have thought of something, “that you were complaining of the same thing in Italy.”

  “Oh, Italians are the worst lovers in the world!”

  “But then who does satisfy you?”

  “Nobody!” she cried promptly, incorrigibly, and burst again into laughter. “See how easily you’ve found me out? I have nothing to hide—nobody has ever been able to satisfy me!”

  These words removed Francis’s last trace of nervousness with Xenia. She was extravagant, grotesque, of a reality far beyond the mere plausible surfaces arrived at by others. He felt he could tell her anything.

  A shout of delight announced the arrival of Greta Stempel-Ross, the contralto. “Now there is a vampire,” whispered Xenia before rising to greet her. The singer was a big woman, simple and friendly. Bits of Tommy’s opera had been written specially for her. “Buona sera! Wie gent’s?” she said, and shook hands all around.

  Francis’s major reservation about Xenia and his father had been the sittings themselves, whether they mightn’t exhaust the old man. But she had quickly set his mind at rest: there was no need for a sitter to “sit” in any strict sense; he could walk about, smoke, talk—she needed to see the head in many moods. As for the number of sittings, an hour or so each day for two weeks would bring the head to a point where she could work on it alone. If necessary, a few finishing touches, that fall in New York—Xenia made it sound very easy, very expert. More and more she struck Francis as the perfect companion for his father. “I feel I know exactly how to behave with him,” she had said; “I shall be as I am by nature, open and sincere.” “And rather soft and womanly,” suggested Francis. “Oh that, of course!” she chortled. This much had been agreed on earlier, along with what train to take the next day. Then, from his hotel room late that afternoon, Francis called his father. The old man, his voice mild and dull with distance, said he would be glad to see them. He was glad also that the sittings weren’t to be strenuous, because he had passed a whole night of pain. Mrs. McBride had phoned and phoned to get the oxygen tank refilled; it was plain luck that he hadn’t choked to death. “I don’t understand that,” Francis had said, unsure, really, of what he meant. “Neither do I,” his father replied. After an intolerable pause, “Well then,” said Francis, “we’ll—” but breaking off politely because Mr. Tanning was trying to say something, “excuse me? I didn’t hear …” “Nothing, Sonny, I’ll see you tomorrow,” and his father hung up, leaving Francis alone in the senseless colorless room. His clothes were strewn here and there. A new French novel lay facesdown on a stool next to the tepid bath he had drawn.

  It was odd. He liked French novels, and said so to Adrienne when she caught him examining her little shelf of books; he liked anything French except—abruptly laughing, he saw no reason to spare her feelings—French people. Ah, but did he then like people at all? She countered fairly enough, her face taking on a lively interest to show that bluntness pleased her. “Besides,” Adrienne confessed before long, “I’m not very fond of them myself. I’m three-quarters Russian, you know.” One finger with a red jewel swept back an orange lock from her brow. “Now talk to me about yourself.”

  This made for a most agreeable hour.

  Later, trying to rationalize it, he saw to what degree his elation stemmed from the failure that morning, at Larry’s office. Such a failure seemed final. Francis had done all he could; henceforth he would have to face his doom philosophically. Fully aware that he was doomed—he’d said so first to Larry—it nevertheless kept coming over him while he talked, while Adrienne nodded, replied, beckoned within earshot this one or that, how much he de
served their attention. How natural, suddenly, to talk, since she had asked, about himself—to draw his own conclusions and to take, above all, his own sweet time! He felt he knew more than his listeners, more about books and music, more even about Europe. In the heat of a sentence he wondered if he weren’t illustrating his earlier point. “Being American” meant, along with what he had told Xenia, having grown up assuming Vincent Youmans to be better than Ravel, but so unquestioningly that to assume the opposite never implied any simple evolution of taste; rather, a stand taken against dark forces. It made a real difference. Just as Mr. Tanning’s nearness to death conferred an urgency upon his pettiest anecdotes, so Francis’s exhilaration over the stand he had taken, regardless of failure, made everything he said sound right. He caught confirmatory glances. He didn’t forget that he was doomed; so was his father, so were they all. And he smiled the more broadly for the amusing, the delightful sensation of being doomed and not minding, doomed and, well, truly exuberant, doomed and unable to think why or to what.

  After midnight people sat about in a sociable daze while Mme Stempel-Ross sang Serbian folk songs, unaccompanied. Presently Xenia tiptoed to Francis’s side and led him back to their window seat.

  “I can’t begin to tell you what a success you’ve made!” she hissed, flushed with some success of her own. “Adrienne has fallen in love with you, literally. I’ve been watching, so has Tommy. He’s madly jealous.”