Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  “You’re exaggerating!” protested Francis. He had never learned how to receive compliments.

  “Only the tiniest bit!”

  “Then all I can say is that it’s perfect nonsense.” He felt duty-bound to appear safe and dependable, a guest who will not violate the rules of hospitality. It was often as though he disliked being liked—which, however, wasn’t the case.

  “Ah, you’re too modest! Adrienne’s a darling.” Xenia let out a conspiratorial chuckle. “Anyhow, I’ve been consoling him. There’s something très fin in Tommy. He said at once that he would like to have you for a friend. So you see, you have only to choose!”

  “Between Tommy and Adrienne?” he laughed.

  “Or whoever you like!” It was all part of the joke. “After all, I know nothing about you, Francis. Women, boys? What do you like?”

  He saw in it, after his initial wave of stupefaction, but one more sign of the grotesque intimacy possible between them. A second later, he could even appreciate how nice she was, not to have conjectured behind his back. Her curiosity was so forthright, so—yes, so tender, that almost resignedly he heard himself telling Xenia what had never before crossed his lips. “I don’t like anybody. I mean,” foolishly smiling, “I don’t go to bed with anybody. I never have.”

  “But how extraordinary!” she gasped, biting her lip more, Francis imagined, to flatter him than because she really thought it so. Xenia had already shown that nothing surprised her. A light from below gleamed in her eye. “Not even with little friends in boarding-school?”

  “No.” He felt rather apologetic about it.

  “And never with a woman?”

  “Well, with a—woman I had to pay … once, long ago.”

  “I see.”

  Francis was touched by something that had come into her face. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” he said. “I don’t mind!” “Being American” meant, finally, the ring of truth in your voice at times when the truth could not be spoken.

  “Sorry, indeed!” Her lashes fluttered. The moment recovered its exquisite comedy. “I have the pride of my sex to consider. If it’s true, what you tell me, then I’m under an obligation to seduce you, that’s all!”

  He fought back a horrid misgiving. “You’re not serious!”

  “But I am!” cried Xenia. The lashes kept fluttering, though, and Francis knew better. Besides, his upbringing told him that sex could only be joked about, in conversation. His father’s stories bore out this impression.

  European dance music on the phonograph had somewhat brought the party to life. Adrienne came gaily towards them—“Francis dear!” removing her earrings, “dance with me!” He looked up, helpless, while Xenia, one hand raised, the other resting on his arm, pleaded the earnestness of their talk. As a matter of fact Francis was eager to pursue it. He wanted a chance to tell her that she hadn’t understood, that he was doomed—but would he be able to say it with a straight face?

  “You see, I’m profoundly intuitive by nature,” she went on as soon as Adrienne had left them alone, “but here are two things you’ve told me that I’d never have believed about you.”

  “Oh? What was the first thing?”

  “Why, in Rome—that you had money.”

  Quite so, thought Francis, twisting his ring: money, and that was why he was doomed.

  He did his best to call up the usual easy rhetoric of hurt and indignation. He squared his jaw, he clenched his fist. Foremost in every mind, there at the party, must have been his identification as the son of wealthy Benjamin Tanning—in every mind but his own. He had behaved, idiot, as if he hadn’t failed that morning in Larry’s office; as if, all evening, it was at him—fatherless, empty-handed, real—instead of at the golden image towering behind him, that Xenia’s friends had been smiling. He wanted badly to be angry with her for having represented him to them as a patron, for letting Tommy and Adrienne, from that first meeting in the customs shed—but he could carry it no further. He hadn’t managed to feel any of this.

  What Francis did feel was relief at having told Xenia his secret, both his secrets. He felt all unburdened. She seemed to understand him completely. Nothing was as difficult as he had fancied. Who could tell? Perhaps positive joys were involved with the having of money! Upon his finger, “Who can tell?” the little gold owl might have echoed, sagely. He thought of sending flowers to Adrienne, or to his mother. He looked forward to showing Xenia the Cottage. In the dark glass her profile shone. Briefly now, it could be seen as a pity that she didn’t seriously mean to seduce him; and yet how much wiser and nicer, Francis reflected, to keep such a person forever as a trusted friend, rather than to spoil everything the other way!

  Full of trust, he stood up. “Come, let’s dance. Only I warn you, I’m a terrible dancer.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” she said after two minutes on the floor. “Terrible.” Leaning on his arm, Xenia hobbled to a chair, made room for him at her feet, and began asking one of the Counts about rejuvenation.

  Francis closed his eyes, smiling. Now that he had confessed to Xenia both his wealth and his sexual inexperience, he saw her morally bound never to take advantage of either.

  10. Xenia was installed in the guest house, down the hall from Francis.

  “I think you’ll be safe there,” Mr. Tanning told her dryly, at the end of her first evening among them.

  “I hope not!” she tossed over her shoulder, causing him to shake with laughter. God damn, there was a woman!

  Actually, no alternative to the guest-house could be found, short of putting her up at the Inn. During Francis’s two nights in New York the Cottage had seen drastic changes. “It just goes to show,” he sighed, deadpan, to Enid, “a constant watch must be kept. I shan’t risk running off again.” Sir Edward Good had returned from Washington. Mr. Tanning’s new doctor, Samuels by name, had flown down from Boston for an indefinite stay. Then Mrs. McBride had to move in with Natalie, to the discomfort of each, because the only remaining bedroom had been turned over to one Miss Tagliaferro. She was the last straw: a tall angelic blonde freelance writer whom Irene Cheek had hired—with or without Mr. Tanning’s consent, nobody could say—to write his biography.

  “I can’t bear to think,” Francis imagined Irene saying, “of all those wonderful, wonderful stories lost to the world. Besides, Lover-cousin, you’re a pretty important fella!”

  Brother and sister wrung their hands over it for a full hour.

  “I do believe,” Enid declared from the depths of a fringed hammock, “there’s no limit to Daddy’s vanity. It’s kind of pathetic.”

  “I have the funniest feeling,” said Francis, “of competing with Irene. As though we were each backing a candidate. This is a clever stroke of Irene’s. It flatters him, as you say, but more important, by throwing him together with a gorgeous number, it shows him that Irene hasn’t a jealous bone in her body.”

  “Miss Tagliaferro’s no slouch,” Enid agreed.

  Francis raised a finger. “True. But neither is she a match for Xenia. Younger perhaps; prettier perhaps—but not a match. It’s Irene who’s pathetic,” he smiled. “She fails every time; she simply can’t recognize quality. Oh, Miss Tagliaferro’s not bad, but Xenia’s so much better, don’t you think?”

  “Artistically?”

  “Well, that too. Miss Tagliaferro’s a hack. She’ll tire him out talking and there’ll be nothing to show for it but an unreadable book, as bad as that portrait at the office. Whereas if Xenia wears him out, not that she will, the result—”

  “—will be something worth the effort!” Enid knew just what he meant. Across the lawn they saw Lily ambling towards them, consulting a daisy as to whether she was loved. Enid gave her half brother a funny half-apologetic laugh. “I think Xenia’s a very entertaining person,” she went on enthusiastically. “So does Lily, don’t you, sweetie?”

  “Oh definitely,” said Lily. “So does Grandpa.”

  “Hmmm,” said Enid.

  “I suspect,” Franc
is told them, “that Grandpa plans to commission a head of Lily.”

  Lily exchanged a surprised look with her mother. A slow smile of vanity—inherited from Mr. Tanning?—overcame the child’s truly quite lovely face. “Mercy me,” Enid blinked, “the little Buchannibals are the last to hear …” but Francis could see how the news pleased her. She took it as a sign from her father that Lily was being correctly brought up.

  Francis, himself pleased, had taken it as a compliment to Xenia. “And then she should do one of you, Enid!” he laughed, playing with the fringes that partly hid her now that he was on his feet. “You’d find it so much more durable than a painting! We know what happens to paintings, don’t we, Lily?”

  But when he tried to put his arm about her the little girl ducked out of his reach.

  Sure enough, within a week’s time, there were two heads in progress at the Cottage. Xenia had made her studio out of a small but skylit pantry, up to which food was sent by dumbwaiter from the kitchen. Doors were shut while she worked, and the heads shrouded, at other times, in moist cloths which, however, she was always cheerfully undoing in order to get opinions of her work. “It’s not to be believed,” she said to Francis, “how that flatters people!” And it did. Louis Leroy and the maids moaned softly, rolled their eyes. Even Mrs. Cheek, once appealed to as a connoisseur—“You can tell me,” Xenia had whispered, “if I’m catching the spirit”—stood back, squinting, and approved.

  Xenia had made an undoubtedly favorable first impression.

  The evening of her arrival, at a dinner table paralyzed as usual by the general wish to be selfless and gay for Mr. Tanning’s sake, she had dared to speak of politics and art (she had studied with the great Zyozcy, now in exile); also to whisper so long in Dr. Samuels’s ear that Mr. Tanning had had to interrupt them, humorously: “What’s going on down there?” They were talking about him, replied Xenia, and was straightway forgiven. She looked her best, handsomely erect, smacking her lips and crossing her knife and fork upon her plate. At her breast something glittered, starlike but false. It was wonderful how, having discovered that Natalie and Miss Tagliaferro were the least significant guests, she took pains to treat them with particular courtesy. Xenia, that is, was doing as thousands of continental women had done at dinners since girlhood. But at the Cottage it all seemed very refreshing.

  “What do you think of her?” Francis soon found occasion to ask his father.

  “I like her, Francis,” he said, dabbing his eye. “She’s so simple and straightforward.” Upon which Francis looked sharply at the old man. Xenia simple? Xenia straightforward? Well, perhaps so; certainly Mr. Tanning meant it without irony. After all, only her air of reveling in straightforwardness had made Francis question her.

  She had another admirer in Sir Edward Good.

  “I can’t think when I’ve seen Ned talk to a woman,” his wife marveled. “He thinks the average female most frightfully silly, as I daresay she is; yet he seems quite under the spell of your friend Zinnia.”

  If Lady Good’s husband surprised her, he surprised Francis even more. During their mornings on the beach Prudence had given him such an earful about her “duty to Ned,” her “obligations as a wife,” had said so much about respect and so little about love, that Francis, on finally seeing Sir Edward, taller than she had implied, also fairer and younger and more affable, couldn’t help wondering at her standards. For Sir Edward was the kind of man Francis, growing up, would have liked for a father. Correct and well informed, given neither to wrath nor to self-pity, companionable, safe. He had read Auden but preferred Bridges. You could not imagine him deliberately placing a burden upon another person. “Yes, that’s so,” Lady Good nodded thoughtfully. “And I ask myself if you don’t remind me of him, Francis, at times.”

  “Thank you!”

  “Because, I mean,” she drained her coffee-cup, “you take it all upon yourself.”

  “And you think one shouldn’t?”

  “Oh, I don’t go that far,” she murmured, looking towards Sir Edward. “If one must, one must. Good heavens, he’s laughing now. Miss Grosz is a real tonic. Benjamin’s going to enjoy his sittings.”

  “That’s the idea,” said Francis merrily. “We must keep him out of trouble.”

  Lady Good’s smile went bleak. Was she the jealous type? Francis had his first glimpse of disagreeable possibilities.

  Nevertheless, alone with Xenia, on their starlit way to the guesthouse, he reassured her. All of them had liked her.

  “Even your father?”

  He told her what Mr. Tanning had said.

  Her relief was considerable. “Ah, what a dear sweet man that is!” she exclaimed tenderly, almost sadly. “He has the soul of a child, but also,” brightening, “a real tête de lion which I assure you is going to be fantastically difficult. His expression changes every second! Already I wonder how I can finish in two weeks.”

  “Take as long as you like.” Francis profited by the dark to make a magnanimous gesture. “Your being here is the best thing in the world for me!”

  You don’t know what you’ve done for me,” she said and, as they were parting for the night, kissed him roundly on both cheeks.

  Oh yes, he trusted her completely.

  By the following week, of course, when the head of Lily—“A Renaissance page! A jewel of a head!”—had been spoken for, there was no further talk about the length of Xenia’s stay.

  Her success with men could be understood. Among the women at the Cottage Lady Good’s hesitation might have prevailed, had not each of them discovered that Xenia brought something to the life there. Lady Good herself, starved for intellectual nourishment; and Miss Tagliaferro, rereading her notes in the sun, feeling unwanted; Natalie with her fancy dark glasses, terrified of collisions; Mrs. McBride, too, whom no one else had patience to hear rattle on about her daughter; even the servants, of whose families Xenia had informed herself during the first days—each was left a bit warmed and embraced by her passing greeting. And when the occasion permitted there would be intimate hours, mid-afternoon or late at night, in the course of which thoughts that had probably never been uttered at the Cottage, secrets amorous or biological or both, were exchanged between her and some member of the seraglio. She had a remedy for everything. There stretched behind her the vast Middle European tradition of a loyalty to her sex that was no mere matter of beauty-parlor gossip or any collective prideful sense of superiority to men; indeed, it rested squarely on an acceptance of woman’s secondary place in society, and had to do with the subtlest campaigns, deceptions, philters. Xenia never minded being personal. Also, she was interested in life.

  She never minded being impersonal, either, and this, more than the rest, explained her novelty. Enid’s description of her as “a very entertaining person” carried with it a melancholy irony. Life at the Cottage, whatever its other attractions, was seldom entertaining. You weren’t expected to be serious or witty or to have formed a friendship or to have read a book. All that was for a rainy day that never came. Meanwhile the Queen Anne shelves, packed with beautiful sets and trash thirty years old, faced glassily out to sea, mute reminders of the worst that could befall you. Lady Good’s moments at the piano caused embarrassment, for she played well; only when it emerged that she wasn’t hurt if you talked during it was her music applauded. You had no recourse to formal or abstract conversation. It wasn’t enough to speak of yesterday’s electrical storm; it had to have provoked dreams of skyscrapers, whirlpools—symbols barely disguised but mulled over and over (“Now what could that possibly mean?”) by the company at large. The talk was confined for the most part to events of the previous twenty-four hours: a dress seen in a shop window, Benjamin’s good appetite at lunch, any hopeful international event. You frequently pretended to have “just got round to seeing” one of last winter’s movies or plays in order to be able to discuss it. But Xenia entertained. Enid had chosen the word carefully; she would never have called Xenia attractive.

  Mr. Tanning,
accordingly, hung upon the everyday chatter like the slow-witted student for whose sake the whole class is held back, and didn’t value Xenia’s efforts to raise the tone. One evening, when Miss Tagliaferro’s eyes were shining over Paris before the war, over many an elbow Xenia had rubbed with artists and statesmen, Mr. Tanning let out a low groan.

  “Are you feeling poorly, Benjamin dear?” Lady Good asked.

  “No,” he said. “But I’m bored.”

  After a silence Sir Edward proposed a rubber of bridge.

  And yet he would talk about the past for hours on end, thought Francis angrily. A day later, hearing Xenia tell the old man the story of her mother in German prisons during the war, and seeing tears in his eyes, he understood the difference. Mr. Tanning had worshipped his own mother; therefore Xenia’s words moved him easily. As usual, the subjective was his only touchstone.

  Although Xenia had hated and feared her mother, she knew how to tell a story. In this she resembled Mr. Tanning, many of whose boyhood exploits—the burning bridge, the cave, the time at bat with bases loaded—had haunting literary overtones. Miss Tagliaferro jotted them down doubtfully, but Xenia called them exquisite—“no, I’m serious, it’s Americana, c’est du vrai folklore!” Thus, with a trace of the charlatan on both sides, they got along famously.

  Even if Lady Good hadn’t liked Xenia, she would have had to approve. Dr. Samuels had said that the best of all medicines was for Mr. Tanning to enjoy himself—any way he pleased.

  She had an involuntary start. “Any way?”

  “Any way,” declared the wise little doctor with a look that made her blush. Francis had laughed aloud—poor Prudence, couldn’t she see that her leg was being pulled? He knew what his father was capable of. Why would a doctor be at the Cottage if Mr. Tanning had nothing wrong with him?

  But Lady Good had gazed out to sea. “I’m very glad,” she breathed, “for Benjamin’s sake.” And on another occasion, to Francis, as they passed the shut pantry door: “He needs all the affection he can get.”