Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  So that what went on in the pantry lent an air of purpose and accomplishment to the entire household. Where once you had had a sensation of drifting at loose ends, of each day’s being, if anything, rather less meaningful than the previous one, now you had tangible proof to the contrary. The head of elephant-colored clay underwent daily a cautious process of refinement. Bit by bit it grew into some ideal definition of the master of the house, consequently of the house itself and of the life contained therein. It was an image around which clustered unending reveries.

  “Appearances are nothing,” said Xenia. “I must show what he is really like, inside.” Larry and Enid nodded, uneasily, but Lily couldn’t be torn away. Still as a mouse she sat till nearly suppertime, watching Xenia work.

  Before long the head had acquired a character. It wore a surprisingly lyric expression, almost elegiac. Much as the donor of an altarpiece used to be painted kneeling within sight of the Cross, perpetually devout—though in the flesh drowsing, sinning, dying—so the old man’s nostalgia for the past, for powers and loves lost, became abstracted, fixed in the worked clay to a point where (it seemed to Francis) his living face had been left that much freer to shine with goatish humor. Or did it just shame Mr. Tanning to have been seen so poetically? For like a little boy he did his utmost to dispel the impression.

  Each morning at eleven he would show up at the pantry door, leaning heavily on Louis Leroy’s arm. Xenia, who began work two hours earlier, would look up and chortle over some truly absurd piece of clothing the old man would have on—a French sailor’s hat, or a tailcoat worn with plaid flannel shorts, or a hand-painted necktie on which, clad in three sequins, a naked redhead pranced. Eyes popping from his head, mouth foolishly ajar, he next would shuffle nearer and nearer until his nose was but a few inches from Xenia’s bosom. At this he would gape as if hypnotized; then, shaking his head in parody of one who wakes on the brink of a precipice, stagger, paw the air, reel backwards calling upon onlookers to marvel at his narrow escape. “Out! Out!” Xenia would cry to Francis and Louis. And the sitting would begin.

  At half past twelve Mr. Tanning would emerge, looking tired. He found the sessions harder than he’d bargained for. Xenia did make him sit in a chair, a high chair at that; she did ask him to hold still, and once when he complained she had him feel the water on her knee, warm and wobbly, telling him not to be a baby—if she could stand it so could he. “It’s the only way to deal with him,” she told Francis. “He likes people who talk straight out. I’m doing him a world of good!” Certainly, for several nights in a row, Mr. Tanning had slept like a child.

  After lunch Francis and Xenia would seek each other out, to compare notes.

  “I wonder if you know,” she said earnestly on one of the first days, “how he loves you, how he thinks about you. All morning he talked—”

  “Why?” Francis interrupted. “Why, when I do nothing whatever to please him?”

  “Exactly! That’s the child no parent can resist!”

  He let this pass. “The son he really’d have liked is Larry Buchanan. He works for the firm, he gives him grandchildren—”

  “Yes, yes,” said Xenia, bored with having to explain the obvious, “every old man wants someone to carry on for him. But he’s already told me about Larry Buchanan. The man works himself like a lunatic; he wants to die of heart trouble just like Ben. Your father’s worried sick about Enid and her headaches. And he’s right—why shouldn’t she have them? While her husband’s busy modeling himself upon his father-in-law!”

  “He sees all that?” Francis marveled.

  “Ben? Of course! Do you think he’s blind? It’s true,” Xenia mused, “Enid was raised a Catholic. That explains a lot.”

  He could only stare openmouthed.

  “Yes! Harriet’s Catholic—didn’t you know? Your sister was a Protestant convert at fifteen. She didn’t like the questions the priest asked her!” And Xenia roared with laughter while Francis’s amazement underwent a set of modulations towards melancholy.

  Xenia then said, “Ben’s worried about you, too. He asked me if there was anything he could do.”

  “About me?”

  She nodded.

  Francis couldn’t have explained the sadness that had come over him. “Why can’t he say these things to me?” he finally brought out.

  “Ah,” explained Xenia, justly, “think a moment: what do you ever say to him?”

  The next day she took up Mr. Tanning’s entrance into the pantry, the shuffling and the ogling. “What interests me is that, so far as I’ve seen, he treats every woman alike. Even l’Anglaise with whom he’s meant to be so much in love.”

  “That’s just his dirty mind,” said Francis.

  “Ah no!” Xenia shook her head vehemently. “Ben does not have a dirty mind! Of course he thinks constantly about sex, like every good American. But he thinks about it,” she melted, grew wistful, “in such a sweet pure way, like a boy! Il neconnaît qu’une seule position, je vous assure. Between ourselves, he’s scared to death of sex.”

  “Precisely!” Francis was jubilant. “And he dresses up like a clown so that nobody will make a mistake and take him seriously!”

  “What else can he do at his age?” said Xenia with a shrug. “All he needs is for me to unbutton my smock, crying, ‘Take me! I’m yours!’—and he’d be frightened out of his wits, le pauvre!”

  This struck Francis as wildly funny.

  But a day later Xenia said, “No. We’re wrong about him. I’ve been prejudiced by your view, and you’re not altogether right. He’s neither as old nor as sick as people like to think.” Her eyes were sparkling.

  What had happened was that Mr. Tanning had naughtily refused to pose that morning, until Xenia let him kiss her on the mouth. “But, mon Dieu!” she exclaimed to Francis. “I tell you, he must have been a fantastic lover in his day! A kiss so passionate—!” Clearly, nothing had so pleased her in a long while.

  It also pleased Francis. “You see? You may turn into my next stepmother, after all!”

  Seeing that he meant it, Xenia drew herself up. “Ah no. That, my dear, is out of the question.”

  “But why?”

  He looked so puzzled that she laughed—“I see now,” coquettishly, “it’s all along as a mother that you’ve wanted me!” And as he gazed mutely down the beach, “Voyons, Francis,” she cried, “contradict me! Il faut avoir de l’esprit! That’s the trouble with all of you. Ben’s a sweet dear good man, and what’s more, he’s a real man, but—married to him? Giving up my freedom to lead this life? Why, I should die of boredom!”

  “You once told me you were never bored,” said Francis reproachfully.

  “I must have meant,” Xenia replied, throwing her cigarette into the sea, “that I hadn’t yet lived at the Cottage.”

  Up to then, Francis had tried to discount his own boredom as purely subjective. But if Xenia felt it too, if life at the Cottage was really dull—why, dull was what it stopped being, then and there. Backed by her authority, finding himself on the right track, he gave in and confessed that he was fascinated.

  More and more he saw things through Xenia’s eyes.

  She explained his father to him—supplied him, rather, with attitudes. “Laugh when he tells you his adventures with women!” or, “Be interested when he talks business. The figures aren’t important, but ah! the way his mind works, that’s what you can appreciate!” Another day she said, “He calls me now the female Casanova. That’s why we get on so beautifully. We talk man to man about our conquests.” This was true; Mr. Tanning had already told Francis how Xenia had wanted to know which women, of them all, had given him the keenest satisfaction. The old man willingly described a certain affair he had had forty years ago. “And what was her specialty in bed?” pursued Xenia, all healthy curiosity; then: “Oh yes? What a small world! That’s my specialty, too!” So they had roared with laughter like two bachelors.

  On the subject of Lily Xenia had plenty to say. “What a tragic littl
e girl! Her parents expect her to be perfect, but no matter how she tries nothing she does is good enough. She told me these things, very gravely, while making a little statue of her mother. Now, that’s the child who needs the confessional! She has nowhere to go for forgiveness. Already there’s something neurotic in Lily, something cold that craves warmth ….” On and on, with light defining touches, as deft as any worked in clay, she revealed to Francis the figures he lived among.

  How much everyone seemed to have told her! Natalie’s menopause, Sir Edward’s impotence, Miss Tagliaferro’s abortion—Xenia knew about each in detail and passed it on casually to Francis, who was flabbergasted. These new insights floated beneath his eyelids like dazzling afterimages decked with which the person concerned became grotesquely vivid and alive. “Yes, yes, of course, it’s what had to be,” he would murmur after the first shock. “How fascinating, Xenia! To think that Sir Edward, so strong, so civilized—yes, I see it now!” Perspiration, like some thought made visible, glistened faintly on his brow. Oh, the experience of others! Francis had come to picture it wound within them like reels of film, a moving X-ray, various, serious, never episodic, plumbing the flux wherein he floundered, down to the shelf of rock below. In short, something inaccessible. With the result that what Xenia told him no more influenced Francis’s daily behavior towards his father or Enid or Sir Edward than his knowledge of the swarming life contained in a drop of water kept him from thinking pure the glassfuls he drank when thirsty.

  At last I am beginning to live, thought Francis nevertheless, content at his oracle’s feet.

  Ignorant of women, he could grow vastly sentimental over them. He read into Enid’s little history proof of an intense inner life, and divined the vestiges of Rome in her recourse to ceremonial forms. Xenia, it went without saying, drank from purer springs, deeper sources than his own. She had found the emerald in the fire and the water in the emerald. She was intimate, as befitted the Ewig-Weibliche, with river, tree, the night, the underworld. She read minds, she consulted the stars; she was both promise and key, and it might have been the secret vaults of nature she would unlock for him, so dumbly did Francis listen and assent.

  Even when she discussed her own love life (she had long been attracted follement to Tommy Utter; were it not for her friendship with Adrienne, etc., etc.) he felt he was witnessing as never before the workings of a human soul. Lemons and prunes, such were the other women Francis had listened to; Xenia was his first mango. “I learn from you!” he told her with shining eyes.

  And on one terrible morning, bitterly, “I’ve learned enough, thank you.”

  It was a questionable statement, but for the rest of that day he would neither speak to her nor meet her eye, except inadvertently—you might say, out of habit.

  11. He woke that morning in Xenia’s bed.

  It was the Wednesday of her third week at the Cottage. Mr. Tanning had begun to wonder how much longer the sittings would go on. He wanted to leave for Boston by the following Monday, and had understood that both Lily’s head and his own would be finished before then. But Xenia had been dropping remarks about what a restless sitter the old man was, and how Enid only let Lily pose for an hour a day. “I work slowly,” she complained. “You can’t ask an artist to meet a deadline.”

  “Then why did you say it would be done in two weeks?” said Francis. “Or that he wouldn’t have to sit still? You assured me he could smoke, move about—”

  “Ah,” Xenia answered jauntily, “if I’d made it sound too difficult, he’d never have agreed to pose. Then where would I be? It’s not a hobby for me, Francis, it’s my career!”

  At the time he had laughed and seen her point. But their conversation came back to him on the particular terrible day, and left him trembling with anger. How must he, how must all the Tannings have appeared to her! As great soft stupid things, from whom you had only to reach out and take? Who parted wordlessly with their wealth, their time, their very selves? If this had been her view, thought Francis, his eyes narrowed to slits, then she had made a bad mistake. Those were possessions to be fiercely guarded. Xenia, of course, had been accepted at first. In the community you accepted everybody at first. People were so hemmed in by their own sort that a stranger couldn’t get close to them, who hadn’t been passed on by at least one trusted friend. And naturally, Francis argued, no one at the Cottage would have suspected the visitor he introduced. How dare she have used him! Not that alone, but to have talked as if his father were a strong man, able to pose as rigorously as she desired … His thoughts raced on unchecked.

  A large dinner had been planned. Four or five of Mr. Tanning’s partners and their wives were driving out from the city. There were to be thirty guests at small tables on the south terrace overlooking the sea. Since early morning maids had hurried back and forth through the ocean room, carrying dresses to be ironed. A huge box for Lady Good lay unclaimed in the entrance hall. Loretta the cook had three assistants. Sir Edward was off playing golf with Dr. Samuels. Natalie Bigelow, rising at eight for the first time in as many years, had revised the menu, approved the selection of china and linen, helped arrange centerpieces, and by eleven, exhausted, telephoned for a cab to take her to the hairdresser. She promised she would eat a sandwich there, but didn’t.

  Rooms had been reserved at the Inn for the oncoming guests. Among them was a couple named Underwood whom Mr. Tanning felt he had treated coldly of late. He had these periodic spells of remorse whereby some forgotten friend was summoned, made much of, his wife flirted with—given, in fine, what Vinnie Tanning still liked to call the works. For in the years that followed his first heart attack the old man had seen less and less of people like the Underwoods. Possibly they were quieter and nicer than most of his business friends, and had hesitated, knowing him unwell, to press themselves upon him uninvited. Possibly, too, they had lives of their own, which couldn’t really be said of the Maxons, the Feuermans, or Wally Link, each time a crowd of them showed up seldom expected and never fed.

  At half past eleven Mr. Tanning, dressed in a flannel robe with his hair in a stocking, peered round the pantry door. Where was Xenia?

  “She’s on her way over,” said Francis. “Did you sleep well?” He himself was still haggard from the scene he had just had with her.

  “No, I didn’t. Dr. Samuels had to get up in the middle of the night. I’m not going to pose today, anyhow. I want to save my strength for this God-damn dinner. Now where in hell is Louis Leroy?”

  “Right here, Mr. Tanning, Sir,” said a cheerful voice.

  “Louis,” he continued on a single expressionless note, “Mrs. McBride will sleep on the couch in my study tonight. Have someone pack a suitcase for Mrs. Bigelow. She’ll be staying over at the Inn. I want Mr. and Mrs. Underwood to have that room.”

  The valet bowed and started off.

  “Wait,” said Mr. Tanning. “Kindly tell me what this is doing here.” It was the package for Lady Good. It might have been the coffin of a friend, he studied it so mournfully. Then he turned his back, swallowed a nitroglycerine pill, and headed for the ocean room. Francis, not quite exchanging an apologetic smile with Louis, followed.

  Seated at the desk, Lady Good looked up from her letter. “Good morning, Benjamin darling. Did you have a lovely sleep? Good morning, Francis dear.”

  She was wearing shorts. The old man stared at her inscrutably.

  “Why, what’s the matter?” she asked, but in such a way that Francis knew that she knew.

  Mr. Tanning resorted to a fake British accent. “There is a parcel for Her Ladyship in the vestibule.”

  “Yes, I saw it,” Lady Good smiled, “but there must be some mistake, Benjamin. I’ve ordered nothing from that shop.”

  “Oh dear,” he moaned, rolling a mournful eye to heaven, “I never met a girl with so little curiosity.”

  “What is he talking about, Francis?” She returned to her letter long enough to underline a phrase. “Why I should open a box that doesn’t belong to me I can’t f
or a moment understand. Doubtless some other poor woman is waiting most impatiently for it, whilst it just sits there. I’d best ring up the shop.” On which she rose.

  Francis was appalled. Had she behaved like this from the start, and had he learned from Xenia how to see through such displays? Why, Prudence was no better than Irene!

  The box contained, of course, the evening gown she had admired some weeks before. Mr. Tanning had bought it in connivance with Natalie—a matter of measurements surreptitiously taken, even a pair of Lady Good’s shoes stolen in order to have matching slippers made. To all of this she had lent herself, if you could believe her, in absolute innocence. Francis did believe her; he liked her too much not to. But watching her blink and protest and finally gasp, scarlet with pleasure, over the open box, he had a glimmering of the truth. Luxury was at work upon her. Softened by days in the sun, nights on smooth clean sheets in a bed she hadn’t had to make herself, growing used to roasts and chops and, above all, used to the devotion of their provider, Prudence found less and less occasion to recall her life in Jamaica. Moreover, along with the routine of that life, she relaxed her grasp of the ethical system that had kept it useful and noble rather than flatly exhausting.

  Well, she was only human. Even as high-minded a woman as Vinnie Tanning had eaten and drunk and dressed in keeping with the opulence of the Cottage. Still, Francis wished Lady Good had shown more fortitude.

  He wondered if she wasn’t, in her heart of hearts, sickeningly conscious of the change at work. She might have been reproaching him for having deserted her in favor of Xenia. She hadn’t bothered lately to invite him on walks along the beach. Those mornings Francis had accompanied her he found her listless, distracted. He suspected now that Prudence had responded to a distraction of his own, had seen that he was in no state to help her. The sobs of an hour before rose in his throat. Why was it to him that everyone turned?