Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  Here the speaker choked on a swallow of champagne. He took his time coughing. The floor was his, nobody would interrupt.

  “I only hope,” he said, then spat very noisily into an immaculate handkerchief, “that my children never regret not taking the many opportunities I’ve given them to know me.”

  A queer silence ensued. Mrs. Cheek looked enigmatic. Francis had his hands squeezed by Lady Good. “Remember that he’s sick, my dear,” she breathed. Enid, across the terrace, bowed her head and was the sixth to weep. But Mr. Tanning simply refused to be at fault in front of so large a crowd. Peering about innocently, he went on with his speech.

  “The first departing friend I should like to pay my compliments to is that gentleman planter, manufacturer of molasses, Minister and Right Hand to his Excellency the Governor-General of Jamaica, and the luckiest man in the whole world”—this with a comic leer in Prudence’s direction, while adopting the tone of a barker introducing a freak. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Sir Edward Good!”

  Applause. Lady Good caught her breath, “Honestly, the impudence of Benjamin!” but laughed a bit in spite of herself. He hadn’t, at least, brought up her departure.

  “Ned is what I call a truly good sport,” continued Mr. Tanning, a fresh frog in his throat. “Let’s drink to him.”

  He spoke as if he had just won Lady Good from her husband in some friendly tournament. Glances were exchanged over the champagne. But she seemed not to mind. That she didn’t was further proof, to Francis, of her moral decline. Ten days earlier she would have left her place and swept proudly to her room.

  “And now,” Benjamin was saying, “my most affectionate blessings on a fair and charming friend whose stay is over. I’ve enjoyed every minute spent in her company, and trust she will forgive and forget all but the sunlit hours at the Cottage.”

  “Is he referring to poor Natalie?” gasped Lady Good. “I do feel that’s rather rubbing it in!”

  “Wait and see,” Francis told her, amused. He noticed, however, that Natalie herself wore a look of grim attention. Had no one else heard about Miss Tagliaferro?

  “But the old poop’s not what he used to be.” Mr. Tanning shook his head. “Paresis is slowly settling in.”

  “You’ll have to prove it to us!” Mrs. Gresham heckled.

  “My one regret,” he said, ignoring her, “is that this departing guest and I have been unable to complete the ambitious project outlined before either of us had had the chance—in my case I should say the privilege—of knowing the other.”

  As it sank in, “Oh, so Zinnia’s leaving!” marveled Lady Good.

  “Why no, of course not,” Francis laughed, forgetting that he would have welcomed this piece of news. But gazes had begun to converge upon Xenia from the many who shared Lady Good’s misapprehension. Xenia herself, during a vivid instant, half rose from her chair, one hand at her throat, pale with the imagined humiliation she had received.

  Once again, the little drama his words caused played itself out unnoticed by Mr. Tanning. And of course, after all the fuss, it was only a question of poor Miss Tagliaferro. She stood up now, tried to convey that the privilege had been hers. By then who cared? The speeches were over in a sudden flurry of drinking, though Mr. Tanning had the puzzled air of one with much left to say. “I could have gone on talking all night,” he told Francis later, in Boston. “There I was headed for the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and not a damn soul wanted to hear about it. Oh dear,” he sighed comically, “I hope you’ll always be able to laugh at yourself, Sonny.”

  The dinner was a great success. Even Irene withheld her venom. Miss Tagliaferro’s dismissal seemed a trivial matter next to the retreat of the Goods. That was the victory over which, all evening, Irene glittered and gloated, not having heard yet what in her narrow-mindedness she wouldn’t have believed—that Prudence expected to stay on. Not return to Jamaica when your husband had been summoned by the Governor-General? Fat chance! Why, the Governor-General was a far bigger catch than Benji Tanning!

  Xenia, when Francis looked again, was ruddy and laughing, her glass raised. But he was longest to see her in her hunted aspect of a moment before. Granted she did nothing that wasn’t theater, her fear, though another might have shown it less fluently and more convincingly, had been real. In a flash she had known herself shamed, her career threatened, her status as an alien—who knew?—remarked upon to some personage both able and eager to order her out of the country. As a citizen Francis couldn’t imagine how careful foreigners had to be. “Our phones are tapped,” she would nod over his protests, “our letters read. In any crisis we call each other up and say, ‘Isn’t it a lovely day? Let’s take a walk in the Park!’”

  This was ridiculous. “Become a citizen, if you feel that way,” he had said. Really, Kafka had done untold harm.

  “No thank you!” Xenia replied, sunny and prompt as when speaking of marrying Mr. Tanning. “I value my freedom!”

  The deeper assumption behind her panic, Francis saw with a movement of impatience that sent him up from his chair, away from the popping corks and down to the loud dark beach, the deeper assumption was that he and Benjamin were capable of dismissing her from the Cottage, coldly, without warning. “How can she be so stupid?” he said aloud to the powerful wind that nearly always rose at night, down by the shore. “She knows us, knows that we’re not monsters. Why must she act as if we were? It’s ridiculous—we’re so gentle, really, so full of trust and readiness to love ….”

  At which point he remembered Natalie, and how she had been dismissed from the Cottage—coldly, yes, and without warning—that very day. He gave a little helpless laugh. Could he turn nowhere without stumbling upon the power to harm? And was it Benjamin’s power or his own? Just then Francis couldn’t see that it made much difference.

  He faced full into the wind that came now mixed with light rain or spray, as if power were learning how to weep over itself. The sand was damp and firm; wherever he stepped a meager zodiac of phosphorescence glimmered about his shoe. The harder he trod, the brighter it spread, greenish, before fading. Tiny creatures, Francis thought, waiting for the blow to fall, in order to shine.

  The terrace, distant under festive awnings, might have been a stage viewed from the last row of a huge dark theater. Could it be raining back there, also?

  Calmer than he had felt all day, Francis tried to look back on his awakening with Xenia.

  He could not have said, at first, that he was awake. A brilliance lay upon his closed eyes like a mask, as if it was very early in the day, or as if, already, fall had come. More clearly than he had ever seen them he imagined leaves scarlet and gold whirling across lawns, across beaches into the pearly churning of an autumn surf.

  The noise of the sea had first suggested that he wasn’t in his own room. Which room faced the sea? Benjamin’s room? Well and good, he all but murmured, then he would play at being Benjamin, and rolled over. At once against his shoulder was a softness, something that, if touched at all, would scarcely have been felt, so far did the concept of Shape lie beneath vaguer notions, warmth, fragrance, tint, thrown like veils over the sleeping figure. Against his shoulder and now against his cheek. He would not open his eyes. I’m not Benjamin, he tried to think; but the body remained beside him, veiled in its warmth.

  Whereupon Francis woke fully.

  He understood that he was in Xenia’s room and in Xenia’s bed and that he had drunkenly made love to her during the night. Horrified, he recalled her mouth against his neck and chest, her fingernails along his thighs, things she had uttered in a number of languages. What he couldn’t bear was the suspicion that it had been, for both of them, an hour more gratifying than not. This suspicion, easily enough quelled, nevertheless lent violence to his ensuing thoughts.

  He suffered then two rapid hallucinations. Frozen outside the shut pantry door, he heard Xenia’s laughter, followed by his father’s mocking chuckle: “Well, I’ll be damned!” Next it seemed to Francis that he was gazin
g into his mother’s eyes as into a couple of spun-sugar Easter eggs. Deep within the pupils a flowery scene of forgiveness was acted out. Growing tinier and tinier, “What did I do?” he piped, and let go of the needle. “Whatever you do, I shall love you,” she replied, blood welling from her forefinger and staining her embroidery.

  Worst of all, that sense of commitment! Francis pictured the years ahead as a succession of intimate French meals ordered by Xenia and served beneath pink lanterns. While he listened in silence, she would make one interesting energetic remark after another. He felt drained by a fierce languor. Only then did he count the dangers—blood, pleasure, peril in the dark, an endless falling. His lips formed words: the vampire, the vampire.

  Opening his eyes he met her own, the somewhat blurred eyes of middle age, whites tinged with ivory, a milky blue fleck upon one iris. A golden braid lay uncoiled; but its roots were somber. The more I see, he told himself, the less I shall have to feel. However his glance wavered perilously. Nothing had foretold that she would still be naked.

  “Eh bien, darling,” said Xenia on a friendly note, “do you hate me now?”

  “What do you mean?” he mumbled, wishing to be polite, but slipping nervously out of bed before he had time to wonder whether or not he was supposed to kiss her. “Excuse me, I must go to the …”

  “Turn around,” she said.

  Again not thinking, he obeyed.

  “Tu es très beau” whispered Xenia after a pause. “Come back when you’re through.”

  In the bathroom he stared despairingly at his reflection, looking for clues. Why couldn’t he hide in the little damp room forever? He had not the least desire to make water but, feeling that this was expected of him, wasted over a minute in a vain attempt. Finally, on a table littered with tubes, jellies, implements Francis had never dreamed existed—certain of which, however, showed signs of all too recent use—he noticed a plain rubber syringe. This he filled from the faucet, then squirted the contents gingerly into the toilet bowl. He gave a sigh of relief; it was an adequate trompe l’oreille. When he had replaced the syringe and washed his hands he looked about for something to wear. “Just so she won’t get ideas,” he said softly. But every last towel lay wet and trampled underfoot, thus limiting his choice to a frilled white nylon negligee. It was on the tight side, surprisingly—how monumental Xenia seemed without it!—but he kept it on. Anything was preferable to nakedness.

  His own clothes lay here and there on the floor. Before long he would be free to change into them. But the negligee gave him, during the interview that followed, a comforting sense of not being quite real.

  “So,” said Xenia roguishly, pulling the sheet up over her breasts, “it’s going to be that kind of affair!”

  Not to appear a prude, Francis sat on the edge of the bed. “What kind?”

  “The Rosenkavalier kind, of dressing up in your mistress’s boudoir. Once in a while it can be very amusing.”

  Francis turned pale. Was she his mistress? Was it going to be an affair? She sounded so authoritative, he dared not doubt her. “Do I look funny?” he managed to croak.

  Now Xenia had begun to understand, but only barely. A silence grew and grew. “My dear,” she said at the end of it, “I’ve spent far too many years in analysis to think that you look funny.”

  “You think then that I’m sick,” he concluded, trying to sound indifferent, but his heart pounding.

  “You sound,” she laughed, “like a guilty child with his mother”—in a tone that indeed was very like his mother’s. “Please realize I’m your friend, Francis. If last night was a mistake, or if this morning you think it was, then no harm’s done, is there?” She kept up her sickroom gaiety to the end. “We can still have a normal friendly relationship, can’t we?”

  The phrase was not fortunate. He had to strain to speak. “Can we?” he said, adding an apologetic grin that showed, for all his power to withstand her, he was only a little boy.

  The first look of real distress crossed Xenia’s face. “How old are you, Francis?” She raised herself and lit a cigarette. “Twenty-five?”

  “Not yet,” he protested, “not till October.”

  “But why be so helpless?” she broke out. “Do you imagine you’re not a good lover? Voyons! It worked between us, you know!”

  He knew. “If only you wouldn’t talk about it,” he said slowly through his teeth.

  By now the room was brimming with sunlight. Xenia held out her hand, which he took, ever wishing to oblige, and drew Francis into a kiss—dry, reassuring, maternal. He endured it awkwardly. “Do you want to go to your room?” she sighed at length, releasing him. “Is that it?”

  He began to tremble then like a child being sent from the dinner-table, as much afraid to leave as to stay.

  “Tell me!” She grasped his wrist. “Can you give no thought to anyone but yourself? Was it such a terrible experience, Francis?”

  The justice of the reproach together with its overtone of weary irony—which, had he been less frightened, might have persuaded Francis that he was but one in a series of disappointments—stung him into sobs.

  His fear was of what she might do to him, now that he’d shown himself unable to give what she asked. “You have no right, no right at all!” he kept saying as he shuddered on the edge of the bed, in his white gown, like a bride.

  In time the degree of his emotion became his principal source of fear. Why didn’t it end? Although the drop was slight, and he could glimpse calm waters beyond, still he clung and clung to the brink, letting the unguessed power break over him.

  He heard Xenia say, “Get dressed now, why don’t you?” and felt the mattress shift as she got out of bed. It annoyed him to picture her washing her face, smoothing away with lotions the wrinkles he had caused, finally bestowing upon the mirror a long wry shrug, a roll of the eyes to heaven while painting her lips. What did Xenia, what did any foreigner care for innocence or its corruption?

  The slow minutes passed. Much as Francis hated to admit it, the worst was over. He sat, however, eyes shut, perplexed as to how one decently retreats from shows of intense feeling. Sunlight fell hot upon his bare feet, the robe hung sweet and cool against his ribs. Mortified, he knew himself utterly without thought, and on the verge of sleep.

  At the sound of a brisk cough his eyes opened. There was Xenia seated across from him, fully dressed, a little black book in her lap. Ignoring his weak smile, she began at top speed:

  “This has been a profound shock to me, Francis, I hope you realize. I doubt that another woman could ever compose herself sufficiently to say what I am about to say now. I blame myself for the entire situation. I ought to have understood, from observing your father’s milieu and your own mixed responses to it, what your sexual problem would consist of. I didn’t mean to say sexual, for it seems to me that you have no sexual problem to speak of; rather the barriers, the emotional walls that have grown up within you. No wonder, with all the open talk about sex in this house, and all the nonsense that surrounds any attempt to live it out, no wonder—”

  Francis had raised his hand helplessly, unable to take in more than the fact of Xenia’s agitation—for which, in the bargain, he saw no reason.

  At once she was on her knees beside him. “Listen!” she cried, fixing him with wet and anguished eyes. “I know you’ll never hear it from me! You’re set against whatever I say now. But let me help you, I beg you! You’ve saved my life, Francis! You helped me to work, you brought me these commissions when I had nobody to turn to! Relieve my conscience—read this little book! You’re intelligent, you’ll understand that it has nothing to do with religion.” She pressed it into his hand, Modern Man’s Quest for a Mother by Mother Ann Veronica of the Buffalo Ursulines. “And one thing more—go to an analyst! Talk it over, find out what he thinks!”

  She had made up her mind that Francis was feeling certain things. He studied her with pity, spitefully pleased to prove her wrong. For just then he felt nothing—nothing, that is, but
that he was stronger than Xenia. He would never again learn about life from her.

  Off and on during the whole long day he attained these reaches of mindless calm, only to discover that a hairsbreadth divided his emptiest smiles from a need to weep uncontrollably. Now, stumbling late along the beach towards the Cottage, Francis was truly tired. The spray and wind had sent people into the ocean room. By her dress he recognized Xenia and somebody else pausing at one window with a man who might or might not have been Benjamin. It didn’t matter. Francis had resolved well in advance not to join them. He felt like a ghost, haunting his father’s house. But it was all unreal. The whole crowd wavered like ghosts through the beautiful trusting room.

  12. The next several days Francis spent in bed with what Mrs. McBride called a bug. Only when he saw that she and Benjamin and Lady Good would be off to Boston without him did he pull himself together in time to take his place, though still not well, in the car. Louis Leroy circled the gravel drive, waving regally to Loretta and the maids—a wave his master copied for the bleak remainder of his seraglio, Enid, Lily, Xenia, where they stood in the doorway. Mrs. Cheek had made a point of telephoning to say she wouldn’t be on hand. “That’s your tough luck, baby!” the old man told her jovially.

  What joy to be away! At last they could be natural with one another. To prove as much, they ate hard-boiled eggs and cookies on the ferry across the Sound. Prudence had brought a scarf for her hair, Benjamin wore dark glasses, Francis unbuttoned his cuffs. They were clearly taking their cue from any of a dozen little family groups—father, mother, child—sitting or romping about the deck, younger in years but not in spirit. And they tossed their crumpled wax paper overboard with the best.

  With their arrival in Boston, the vacation seemed really to have begun. They gawked at a gilded dome. Nobody spoke in sentences. “Those trees” wondered Mrs. McBride as though she had spent her life in a slum, “so green!” “Benjamin! Swans!” cried Lady Good, clapping her hands. He nodded happily. At the hotel a pink-and-gold suite awaited them. They ordered highballs. The young waiter switched on the television set without even being asked. For a blissful spell they stared at the screen, lively but dimmed by daylight. Every so often they turned for sustenance to the great green Common that all but sang up to them, “Come on down! You’re nice simple folks like the rest of us! Everybody’s welcome here!”