Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  Gone were the responsibilities, the rivalries, the riddles of life at the Cottage. They tottered down to dinner in a daze of freedom. With no pressure upon them to talk, how beautifully they did without it! Once Mr. Tanning said, “Please explain to me how a freshly grilled lamb chop can be served stone cold.” But he was addressing the headwaiter, it couldn’t fairly be called conversation. The rest of the time they conveyed their extreme self-satisfaction in dumb show, sighing and smiling and smacking their lips. The warmth that made Francis’s skin tingle, was it fever or family feeling?

  After dinner he and Lady Good escorted the old man to the hospital. He would sleep there, take more tests on the morrow, and join them for, as he put it, a last supper. Francis bit his lip; he had already arranged to dine with Jane Westlake. “Bring her along, Sonny,” his father smiled ever so sweetly, “I’d love to meet her.” “Francis and I have a date to look at pictures tomorrow,” Lady Good murmured. Once again all three exchanged adoring glances.

  She added mildly, as Louis headed back to the hotel, “This is my last week in America, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know,” said Francis.

  “Well, it is. So hush, there’s nothing more to say.”

  Her mildness was that of some remembered childhood, Paul et Virginie or a Song of Innocence. It brimmed with a romance that excited no scruple. Lady Good might have been painted by Burne-Jones in color-of-thought robes, holding out to her lover a grail of forbearance and otherworldly comfort. Straightway Francis perceived that she had stayed on for the sole purpose of this gentler renunciation, before following her husband. It wasn’t she who had been corrupted by the Cottage, so much as Francis himself by Xenia’s Mediterranean view of things. In his heart he confessed to Prudence that he had doubted her, and begged her pardon. If only all women loved as wisely as she!

  They drank Mrs. McBride’s hot milk, then parted for the night. “I’ll be right in this middle bedroom,” said the nurse, “so just call if you need me. I wonder if you still haven’t a touch of fever,” she added, feeling Francis’s cheek.

  “I think it’s just that I’m already asleep,” he smiled.

  Morning found him hot and exhausted by dreams. But he had swallowed aspirin and guided Lady Good dutifully among the old masters. Planning to see the remaining galleries after lunch, they groped their way now out of the blinding noon into some dim ice-cold restaurant, Italian as it soon appeared, sank into a booth and ordered tall glasses of ale. “Would ravioli be light?” she wondered, resolving in the same breath to try eggplant. Then, with foam on her lip and elbows on the table, she started in. Last night there may have been nothing more to say. Today there was plenty.

  Francis saw that she wouldn’t be dissuaded. “What’s so moving about Poussin,” he had begun hopefully, “is the way he never insists on things.” Lady Good was far from taking the hint. “I might as well admit that I’m at my wits’ end,” was all the response he got.

  “I frankly don’t understand him,” she went on. “I fail to see what he gives or what he gets. Had we not come away yesterday, my private opinion is that he would have collapsed. All those people, not one of whom he can abide! And yet he welcomes them, listens to them, lets them sap his strength—why?”

  “He likes people. He forgets that he doesn’t like those people,” said Francis, covering a yawn.

  “Is that it?” she wondered.

  “The firm still means a lot to him. Most of those men were partners.”

  Lady Good sneered. “Partners! Why,” speaking with renewed force, “why has Charlie Cheek taken to drink? I’d always thought it fatal for a reformed alcoholic to touch even a drop of liquor.”

  “Probably Irene put him up to it. Let’s see, what would her plot be? Oh of course,” Francis brightened to think how plausible it sounded, “she means to have him die of drink. Then she can marry her favorite fella.”

  “She could as easily get a divorce. More easily, I daresay.”

  “All right. Then she means him not to die, but to turn back into a hopeless lush. He’ll be her Cross. Benji will think: That girl has guts. The old flame will burst from the ashes.”

  Lady Good looked dubious.

  “Don’t you agree?”

  “Finish this for me, like a dear.” She pushed her glass of ale towards him, seeing that his own was empty. “I’d forgot it makes me sick. No, I think it’s because Charlie loves her.”

  “Perfect!” Francis clapped his hands. “He loves her enough to start drinking for the sake of her plot, at the risk of his health, his life!”

  “No, Francis.” She covered her eyes for a second. “Charlie loves Irene and her conduct makes him unhappy. When you love somebody—” She broke off.

  A remarkable hour followed. Francis began to see what he would never before have suspected—that Lady Good was mistress of many moods, that in her blunt Anglo-Saxon way she could play the Serpent of old Nile as well as Xenia. Better than Xenia, he soon decided, because less artfully. She rambled on, now earnest, now resigned, now positively incoherent. Her subject, often at two or three removes, seemed to be Benjamin’s bewildering attachments to other women—or was it his neglect of Prudence herself? What could she do but return to Jamaica? She refused to be made a laughingstock—not that she cared in the slightest what a bunch of silly women thought. A moment later she revealed that Benjamin’s feeling had no bearing on the main issue, that of her duty to Sir Edward. She waxed sententious. Marriage brought with it distinct obligations. For over twenty-five years the Goods had shared a life rich in intellectual exchange and mutual respect. Ned had his molasses factory, she had her books. The life had taught her—as the kind of book she cared for hadn’t—that marriage was no solution. The majority of her married friends would have gone much further, as human beings, without it. One wasn’t meant to live shut up with a member of the opposite sex. Among the London fogs Lady Good would have thrown herself into the packed career of a bluestocking. But among breadfruit and sugar cane, those passionate climes, the only white woman for ten miles, with moreover nothing but contempt for the other colonial wives, it seemed natural that she had cultivated, alone at her piano, a longing for variety and romance. Hence Benjamin. The rub was that she hadn’t been the only one so honored. Complaining? No. What right had she to complain, considering how little he had had in return for all his—here Prudence threw down her napkin. She wasn’t Irene, wasn’t going to endanger that quarter century of companionable esteem, not on your life, no! and that was why she had made up her mind to go home. That was exactly why, she concluded with a look of pleased surprise, as when a game of patience comes out unexpectedly. Had Francis done eating? Lady Good drained her coffee cup, feeling up to anything, even a second look at the Boston Museum.

  His first reaction was to be entertained. Later, though still entertained, Francis found himself growing more and more depressed. What’s wrong with me? He kept wondering. The complexities of his father’s world and his father’s women had absorbed him in the past. They seemed now, however, on the point of no longer doing so. Together with something close to fear, Francis felt a real resentment of the way his companion summoned him back, step by step, from the simplifying half-lights in which she had shown herself the day before. He had loved that dim ikon of her, wisely renouncing. He had loved even more Benjamin’s air of acquiescence to it, of final willingness to admit that the last love of a long life was soon to take leave of him. But today brought to light nothing renunciatory about Lady Good. Like all the others, she gazed at Francis from the very heart of her dilemma. “You have played the child long enough,” she might have been saying. “Please to remember you are a grown man, one who must reasonably be expected to witness without flinching the moral crisis of a grown woman.” He scowled at the ruins of his gorgonzola. If such were the thrills and chills of maturity—! Signaling to their waiter, he tried to reason with himself. She wasn’t like the others. She was kinder, finer—Francis reached for the essential point to be made b
ut it kept eluding him. They were on their feet, weaving through tables in the cold gloom they had so swiftly grown used to, before it came to him. She was unlike the others because nothing sexual entered into her feelings for Benjamin. Yes; that made sense. Reassured, he smiled, although a bit mechanically. Outside the sun broke on them like a wave.

  For Lady Good had waited for the brilliant racket of the street to deflect what he knew to be her most pointed words.

  “A thing I wish you’d decide for me,” she said in the tone of one who must choose between crumpets and cake, “is whether or not I should go to bed with Benjamin.”

  Francis gave a little start, more like a twitch, the relic of some old disorder. He put a hand to his hot cheek. Quite so, he tried to think, one mustn’t neglect that side of it. But hadn’t he always known the truth? Wasn’t it—going to bed with Benjamin—for all of them, the side? What else explained cocktails, silk dresses, flowers in the ocean room? Here now was Lady Good impeccably giving him the clue to her charade. He might have known. Still, he wanted to be polite, and caught her eye with a glare of nervous interest.

  “Oh, it’s not a matter of satisfying him physically,” she sang out as they paused on a curb. “I’m certain I could do that. But there’s so much else to consider.”

  Francis thought of his father’s body, so feeble, so veined and scarred. “I’d always imagined he wasn’t well enough.”

  “It appears now that he is. Didn’t Dr. Samuels say he was? And if Irene—” but she stopped herself. “I’ve wondered, too,” she smiled, “if I mightn’t simply be afraid of that, of his no longer caring for me, Benjamin I mean, were I once to let it reach that stage. Is it really what he wants? I can’t think that it is. But then, I’m not a man, I don’t know.”

  Had she appealed to his own experience? “Perhaps,” said Francis, “he’s afraid not to want it.”

  Lady Good stiffened. “If he didn’t, you mean, his life would be over? Is that his criterion—potency? Is it yours?”

  “Isn’t it everybody’s?” Francis ventured, though surely her question had been rhetorical. She kept right on talking, at any rate.

  “Then there’s the whole thing of what I owe to Ned. Would it be fair to him? He’s been so wonderfully understanding up to now. Dear Francis,” breaking in on herself, “I seem to be caught in a squirrel run. What a trial for you! You must think me very silly. But I’m not like those other women, I can’t treat things lightly.”

  “Oh look!” he exclaimed in spite of himself, squinting at a yellow poster. “A revival of Intolerance”. But it had taken place the previous month.

  “You’re right, of course,” Lady Good sighed, “it’s not your decision. You can’t help me.”

  Francis blushed. He wished she hadn’t found this out.

  “I think you’re wrong about his not caring for you,” he said. “Whatever happens, he’s tremendously loyal. Just look at all the others, the women at the Cottage, the wives! He’s loved them and he’s loyal. They may be the death of him, but he’s loyal.”

  “Then I am selfish,” said Lady Good, “in not wanting to be the death of him.”

  “He’s even loyal to Irene!”

  “Precisely.” Her voice reached him over water. Francis looked at her, impressed. Then, without warning, she laughed. “You’ve helped me make my decision after all.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked with excitement. “Your mind’s made up?”

  Whereupon she laughed again, and took his arm.

  It was amazing. He had never admired her more. Throughout the dreadful avowal she had kept a truly breathtaking dignity. If Prudence had been the heroine of a novel he would have fallen in love with her on the spot. As it was, however, Francis had already begun to distinguish between her perfect form and what she had managed to convey with it. From then on, he knew, they would have less and less to say to one another. The knowledge left him melancholy, as though he was the renouncing figure. Then, after a bit, he felt in his heart that he was bored with her.

  “Of course, I believe in a hopeless passion,” he threw out as he led her up the steps of the Museum.

  But this was going too far. She gave him a stern gray twinkle. “I wish I thought you did, Francis.”

  Back inside, they started through the Persian and Indian rooms. These being empty, Lady Good, soon baffled by the calligraphy on a blue tile, took up her topic afresh.

  “I honestly don’t see what Irene gets out of it.”

  “Nothing at present,” he murmured distantly.

  “I beg your pardon, dear?”

  “Nothing at present, I said.”

  “I know one thing, I should never be so insensitive. At the first sign of any loss of interest in me, I should hastily withdraw.” It was then, at last, that Lady Good must have felt something of the sort in her listener, for she said no more.

  So they walked, neither together nor as yet very far apart, and did not speak, unless to remark upon the glaze of a pot, the curl of a lip suggesting at once laughter and tears, the great gods of porous stone, seated or dancing, their flesh like folds of lava. There was a distance between these figures and Francis which did not shrink as he approached them.

  It wasn’t, he knew, the shimmering glass—wherein Lady Good’s movements were reflected from the far side of the room—that kept him from a nicer apprehension of the picture beneath. Something in the picture itself, a perfection that it had, or an understanding of its subject that he didn’t, put him off.

  He had stopped to examine a miniature of Krishna among the milkmaids. They smiled up at the slate blue god, eight or ten damsels. Behind a wall palms rose; behind these, princely terraces. A yellow-and-black sun with a man’s face looked down on it all.

  Were they dancing? What did it mean? Francis felt that his brow was burning. I have caught some terrible disease, he thought.

  13. What odd ideas people had of how to act when first married! Jane’s was to pretend it hadn’t happened, that she had hardly reached the age of fraternity pins and high-school yearbooks. She skipped off the elevator, shrieked, kissed Francis smartly as if still vague about the possible meaning of kisses, then peered up and down the carpeted hall with the wariness of one fresh from the farm, who’d heard what went on in hotels. He had to admit she looked the part in her pale lilac dress, virginal, high-throated, puff-sleeved, a matching ribbon wound in her black curls. She wore less lipstick than before, and no nail polish. It was well he had asked her up for a drink in their sitting room—she’d get little more than lemonade in the bar downstairs. As against her battered appearance on the pier in New York, the effect today was of a really extraordinary youngness. It wasn’t only an effect, either; she was young, younger than Francis had ever known her.

  What with an hour’s nap, more aspirin, the knowledge of a cocktail already poured, he was feeling better when Jane arrived. A moment before he had carried two brimming glasses to where his father and Lady Good sat on the loveseat, holding hands. The day at the hospital had worn Mr. Tanning out—not so much the tests as the waiting, the sense of being ignored for long minutes at a time. That he was old and ill had been put to him strongly enough by his mere presence there, seated on a table, wrapped in a starched smock. At such times a great deal of attention was needed to ward off the foretaste of pain and death. And there hadn’t been, Benjamin told them ruefully, a single sexy nurse.

  “Well, Francis’s friend is bound to be most attractive,” said Lady Good, her glass dribbling.

  “Then there was this smart aleck of a young doctor,” Benjamin went on. “Do you know what he wanted to do? He has a theory about deadening the nerve that connects the heart and the brain. He uses a needle six inches long, inserted just over the collarbone. I tried to ask him how he could be sure of hitting the nerve. ‘Oh Mr. Tanning,’ he said, ‘don’t worry about that—that’s my business!’ ‘The hell it is,’ I said. I just didn’t like the sound of it, Francis. The old poop’s been deadened enough in his day.”

>   The telephone rang, announcing their guest.

  Of course, when Francis brought her in, he couldn’t think of her married name. Jane herself took a few seconds to produce it. Both of them seemed to have forgotten not only Roger Massey but the whole nature of his connection with Jane.

  “What’s this?” cried Mr. Tanning. “Married? Do my old ears deceive me?”

  “Four weeks Friday,” confessed Jane. “Isn’t it crazy?”

  Crazy or not, the old man said, her husband would be a pretty lucky fellow. Where was he, by the way? In Connecticut? Teaching? While Jane catalogued etchings at Harvard? “Oh I see,” he drawled with a comic look of not seeing that sent her into enchanted giggles. “And are you going to invite me up to look at the etchings?” he pursued. “Or is that what all the boys say?”

  “No,” Jane said demurely. “You’re the very first.”

  “Oh I am?” The old man peered round at Francis. “What’s wrong with you, my stalwart son?”

  Lady Good sent Francis a secret smile, to find Benjamin so full of fun. But for Francis the fun soon took on a darker aspect. “Here I understood I was going to meet my future daughter-in-law,” Mr. Tanning was telling Jane almost petulantly, “and who shows up but an old married woman like you!”

  “Is it that you have an exclusive claim over old married women?” said Lady Good.

  “Oh dear …” He shook his head and wiped his eye with exaggerated self-pity. His shaky hand held out an empty glass. Jane was laughing away, a bit uncontrollably. Francis tried to do the same, but his mouth hurt from the effort. Clearly enough Mr. Tanning’s day at the hospital had set him, bored and with sterile odors in his nostrils, to thinking about grandchildren, not Lily and the twins, rather a child who should bear his own name, Francis’s child. He filled his father’s glass in a kind of anguish, guessing more and more. Because he trusted no one else to tell him the truth, he shrank from meeting Benjamin’s eye. He feared reading then and there the old man’s knowledge that such a child would never be—a knowledge that might have come upon him at any time during the past years or the past minutes, watching Francis and Jane together. It wasn’t just that Jane was married. No, what Benjamin would be wanting was to see his son behave as men did behave with a pretty woman—whether she was married, or one’s mother, or one’s daughter. This Francis knew he had never learned to do. So that his fate was clear … was it? He wondered; there would be no child? The thought affected him in the strangest possible way. Not for months did Francis recall that instant, or begin to understand his emotion. Right then, he needed something to hold on to. He reached for his glass. Mr. Tanning raised his own, still thinking of the morrow. “Let it not be said,” he sighed, “that the condemned man met his destiny uncheered.”