Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  “So, I’ve called in a younger man, who’s had all the training I lack in these cases, for his opinion. I want you to talk to him, too—oh, not today,” he chuckled, seeing her stricken face, “but tomorrow, the day after, as soon as you feel stronger. By then, Dr. Sullivan will have had time to interview Francis.”

  “Am I to see Francis?” asked Vinnie feebly.

  “By all means. I’m taking you to him now. He’s conscious, but we’re keeping him under morphine. You stay with him as long as you like.” The doctor slapped his knee to show that he was a busy man. “I’m sure Ben would be pleased to see you, by the way.”

  “Ben? Wouldn’t he—?” she began, horrified.

  “Wouldn’t he what?”

  “Suspect, from my being here …?”

  “Then lie to him!” laughed the doctor, his bald brown head agleam. “Tell him you’re passing through town on your way to visit friends.”

  Vinnie stiffened. “I’m afraid I’m not very good at that.”

  “Suit yourself. Ben values your friendship, he’s told me how much. It’d do him good to see you. In two or three days, of course, we’ll have to tell him the whole story.”

  Vinnie closed her eyes. “I’d give anything to spare him this ghastly, ghastly shock. Does he have to know?” She knew he did. If nothing else, he’d see Francis’s scarred wrists. “I know, I know …” she said, and started wearily out ahead of Dr. Samuels.

  “One moment, Mrs. Tanning.” When she turned he was shaking his finger at her. “My dear lady, we don’t help those we love by hiding disagreeable things from them, any more than we help ourselves by refusing to face these things.”

  What haven’t I faced? Thought Vinnie, squaring her shoulders.

  The doctor kept right on. “I honestly don’t know why Ben isn’t as sick as he thinks, living in an atmosphere where people spare him, coddle him, treat him like the senile invalid he’s sure to become if this nonsense doesn’t stop. Believe you me, he’s strong enough in mind and body to cope with a far greater shock than this. I don’t know that it won’t do him good to cope with something real for a change. It might just lead him nearer to life.”

  These were ideas that Vinnie herself tried scrupulously to live by. But they left her uncheered, skeptical, even, of their relevance to the moment at hand. Something real! she thought wryly—real as a nightmare! She looked Dr. Samuels straight in the eye, as though she had found him out. He said no more, but beckoned her down two lengths of shining linoleum. Pausing in front of a door ajar, he expressed a final doubt. “Lady Good did tell you precisely what happened to your son?”

  “Yes, oh, yes!” said Vinnie, rapidly nodding.

  The doctor made the gesture of washing his hands. “It’s unlikely, I’m afraid, that he’ll be able to lead a normal life, in the fullest sense.”

  “Naturally, naturally!” she brought out with a sound like laughter. What on earth was he trying to say?

  “We’ll do all we can for him, though, Dr. Sullivan and I.” And with this the little doctor, to whose solicitude there were limits, bowed her into Francis’s room and went his way down the corridor.

  The room, dim and green, had an effect of underwater. A nurse floated up from her chair. In pantomime Vinnie asked her to resume her seat, indicating that she preferred a straight chair nearer the bed. Once sitting, she whispered, “Mrs. McBride?”

  “No,” the nurse smiled. “I’m Mrs. Fletcher.”

  Thus Vinnie had no alternative but to turn and look at her son.

  Her forehead puckered. Something wasn’t as she expected. Francis lay flat, facing away from her; his arms, bare from the elbows down, rested on the unnatural whiteness of the sheet. This was raised, a kind of tent beginning at his chest and obscuring the contours of his body. He seemed puzzled himself. Now and then he moaned or shook his head in a faint, disbelieving gesture. Vinnie wanted to take his hand, full of love, to tell him she was there and loved him, but whatever kept striking her as wrong prevented her. She gave the nurse a helpless look of inquiry: what was it? What was it? Mrs. Fletcher beamed back, advancing nevertheless in case something had gone amiss. Delicately she took Francis’s pulse. The tanned wrist drooped from her fingers. Where were the bandages? Vinnie nearly cried out. Instead she shut her eyes. Oh please! if he had slit his wrists, why weren’t they bandaged?

  Hearing the nurse say, “Fine and dandy,” and the squeak of her shoes as she resumed her seat, Vinnie felt sick again. A sweet sterile smell was more powerful here than in the corridor. Too proud to ask, she let the question sound and sound: what had he done? What had he done?

  A memory of the last scene of Lucia di Lammermoor allowed her presently to visualize the deed. A dagger had been held high during an exquisite burst of song, then plunged into the tenor’s breast. Earlier, the heroine had gone altogether out of her mind.

  Something real for a change—those were the doctor’s words.

  Having for so many years cultivated an impersonal, an international idea of disaster, Vinnie had to rediscover private grief. Storms were brewing the world over. One day the bomb would be dropped and that would be the end of everything. Meanwhile, the mermaid walked on knives.

  A minute before, Francis had been her flesh and blood. It hurt now to know that the life he’d tried to take was his own, no more hers than his way of going about it. The flesh injured and the blood shed were his. The mystery of his act profoundly shook her.

  Later, she did stop by Ben’s room.

  Seeing her coming, Lady Good rose from an armchair placed in the doorway and drew her out of earshot. “Where are you staying tonight, my dear?” Vinnie hadn’t thought. “Then do take Mrs. McBride’s room at the hotel! She was saying, it’s a crime for it to go begging. And I’d be there, should you want company”

  Vinnie was touched. “Thank you,” she whispered. “I’ll need somebody.”

  Then Lady Good, after announcing the visitor, withdrew.

  “What a nice surprise!” warbled Mrs. McBride, to whom it was no surprise at all. “Why, I’d know you anywhere, Mrs. Tanning—Francis has your eyes. Sit down! Aren’t we pleased!”

  There Vinnie was, her legs crossed, talking gaily from the threshold to a Ben indistinguishable in the shade of the room.

  “Of course Francis had told me you’d be in Boston, but I hadn’t remembered the exact date. Then when Annette Woodruff (she always asks after you) wrote me to join her for a week on the Cape where she’s visiting young Dan and his wife, I had a few hours between trains and on a hunch caught Francis at the Ritz. He told me the name of the hospital, which I’d just been scatterbrained enough to forget.” Lie upon lie dropped like snakes and toads from her lips; Vinnie was past caring.

  “Prudence said Francis was sick today,” Ben croaked.

  “Our throat’s beginning to hurt a little,” said Mrs. McBride.

  “Then hush! Don’t talk. Yes,” Vinnie went on, “I stopped in to see him. He caught a freak summer cold, and you’re not to worry. I declare, I hate to see you lying in bed. That was Lady Good who left when I came in? She’s really very striking, with such a sweet face. You know, I haven’t always approved your taste in women!” She laughed and paused for breath. “Oh, Francis keeps me informed about the goings-on at the Cottage. I hope it’s not as lively as it sounds!”

  “Well, I call it the pace that kills!” said Mrs. McBride, to whom Vinnie had appealed.

  “Francis is a fine boy, Vinnie,” Ben struggled to say, “but he’s not happy, is he?”

  “Oh, now!” exclaimed the nurse on a scolding note.

  “Isn’t he?” Vinnie wondered, all lightness, but recalling how Ben, thirteen years before, in his efforts to obtain custody of Francis, had declared her, in print, unfit to raise the child—a purely legal maneuver, yet it had rankled and still did. She considered her possible belated thrust. “No,” she could say, “except that Francis spends all his time at the Cottage. Mightn’t that have some bearing, Ben, on his unhappiness?” Ah, but
the time for recriminations was over. Years, also, had passed since the summers she would pack Francis off for a week with his father, saying, “Now remember, dearest, to be on your best behavior. Your every gesture and word reflects on me.” Vinnie felt so tired suddenly. “All I know,” she said aloud, “is that he loves being with you, and that makes me happy, Ben, honestly it does.” They peered through the dim air seeking each other’s eyes. She began to make out Ben’s face now; it was puffy, old, not a face she knew. By then she had fallen silent. She could hear the sick man fighting for his breath.

  Back at Francis’s bedside, Vinnie stared and stared at his bare throat, his smooth wrists. Mercifully, the wound wouldn’t be visible, wherever it was. Her gaze shifted. She froze.

  He had turned towards her a face whose open eyes, though unseeing, expressed wonder and joy. It came over Vinnie that he knew, that nothing short of realizing what he had done could have produced the look on Francis’s face.

  PART TWO

  16. Autumn made slight difference to the Island. If rain fell, it fell for a mere hour after midnight, so that each day dawned upon a landscape fresh and springing, of pliant hilltops, palm-crested, of pale-green fields of young sugar cane around which gray roads cut to the sea. Every few miles, even inland where the hills gave way to cliffs and gorges, you might happen on a ruined wall, its plaster, whose washes of pink or ivory had long ago vanished, broken off in places to reveal dry, rounded stones. Nearer, on roads and in fields, the Negroes would be dressed in pale colors, grays, whites, bleached yellows and blues. It was always a shock for the newcomer to see how often their faces, hands and feet seemed the only really dark tones in an entire perspective. The Island was that ethereal. At twilight, along the beaches, following the famous Green Flash perceptible for the split second in which the sun disappears, a haunting grisaille might translate the scene. You noticed the long pine-needles against a sky less lemon-tinted, by now, than wholly without color. Beyond a few feet of beach, traversed perhaps by a black dog or a woman with a cloth about her head—but both of a blackness so powerfully textured as to recall an episode in some early film, made before anybody had learned to control the intensity of an image—the water stretched, smooth, opalescent. Three or four sailboats might be lying at anchor, their masts at three or four different angles, rocking quietly in silhouette. Occasionally in the early evening a formal garden annexed to one of the more imposing plantation houses was floodlit, for an hour of almost violent artifice. The sky would still retain some greenish natural light, but below, the reds alone, the scarlets and purples that colored nearly every flower that didn’t grow wild, were gaudy enough to withstand those great shafts of light, passing through palm leaves like X-rays. The lamps were fastened to the ends of a flimsily built gallery which you counted on being blown off by a hurricane. As the guests moved indoors a servant would be picking up a tipped-over highball glass from beside the lily pond. The lights had served their purpose. At night you could see nothing. There seemed never to be light near by. Only from the crevices of great trees—eucalyptus, breadfruit, the manchineel that in a rainstorm was known to drip a painful irritant onto the skin of a person, white or black, taking refuge beneath it—came the chirp and squeak of small creatures. The Island at these moments struck you as having taken in more darkness than it could possibly endure. Which was perhaps why, by mid-morning, it had an air of having exhaled every last trace of it. Even the Negroes’ skins would be shining then with a moisture which reflected the surrounding pallors.

  Ah, and how easily you went to pot in the tropics!

  This thought entered the minds of at least two white women, one fair November morning.

  Mrs. McBride phrased it without reservations, flinging herself into a rattan rocker and flipping the pages of her log. Twelve miles from Weathersome, towards Savanna-la-Mar, it made up Irene Cheek’s first waking reflection; but she put it to herself with an ambiguous smile, as if not at all sure it was a bad thing, to go easily to pot. Her little eyes blinked at alternating stripes of darkness and gold across her body. “Charlie,” she growled, “I’m a tiger.” But she might have known he’d have been up and out hours ago, sailing.

  In hundreds of small neat spaces Mrs. McBride had registered, four times a day, her patient’s temperature and pulse. Every seven pages came a set of graphs to which she had painstakingly transferred these findings and others. She looked with pride at one that showed the drop in Mr. Tanning’s nitroglycerine consumption over the last month and a half, from as many as forty grains a day to only three grains in two weeks. Yes, he had been Restored to Health. And it wasn’t a miracle, the way all his friends claimed, so much as the result of Good and Devoted Care. Which, however, he would get no Benefit from so long as he insisted on abusing his Reprieve from Pain. Down the right-hand margin of every other page ran a column headed, “Remarks.” Mrs. McBride checked a dry laugh. An entirely blank notebook wouldn’t hold the remarks she felt like making about this case. Nearly three years of her life—she reckoned them with an uneasy glance upward, a direction from which spiders were apt to drop—had passed in an environment foreign to what she could no longer even think of as her tastes, they’d been so seldom consulted. Now of late her Professional Status was being ignored. She wondered if Mr. Tanning had any conception of the responsibility placed on her shoulders. Couldn’t he have seen that her duty was to forbid him—in the pleasantest way she knew, with an arch laugh and a wag of her finger—to drink the Martini Louis Leroy brought? Before noon, what was more. There’d been no call for him to come back at her, sipping it, with: “Mrs. McBride, have you stopped to think that you annoy the hell out of me?” It had sent her upstairs, smarting. In the log she wrote, “Most irritable and Disobedient. Insisted on Cocktail before lunch.” Oh, it had been quite a different story in the Hospital, those first two days, with his throat puffed out like a bullfrog’s. All he’d wanted then was to have his feet rubbed and his hand held. His eyes had followed her about the room, just like a sick little boy who Needs his Mother. Whereas now—Mrs. McBride compressed her lips. She rose, peered anxiously down onto the lawn. Two red birds were screaming at a metallic black one. His chair was empty, the glass on its side in a flowerbed. She exhaled sharply and started back downstairs.

  Irene couldn’t figure out how somebody who drank as much as Charlie Cheek woke up morning after morning so bright and chipper. It contributed to her picture of him as an easygoing meathead. One thing for sure—he lacked whatever inside her skull unremittingly ached and throbbed. It took brains to be sensitive, she guessed. Catching sight of something green and yellow trailing off a chair, Irene slapped a hand across her eyes; she had conjured up the image of herself wearing it the night before, a short polka-dot dress with the motto Live it up! Live it up! Live it up! embroidered all the way around the hips. What had caused her to laugh so wildly, there on the terrace? A second later the steel band struck up another calypso:

  When I see belly meat

  I don’ want nothing more to eat.…

  “Oh, it’s the ‘Belly Lick!’” she remembered exclaiming. “That’s my favorite!” As the Lord Regaler, whose band it was, well knew. She had thrown him her widest smile. Somebody had taken her in his arms then, and around she’d spun, skimming the uneven flagstones, head fallen far, far back in order to see, upside down, the rows of black figures watching from behind the barbed wire where her property ended. There must have been two hundred of them, keeping soft time with the music, letting; escape an occasional laugh, muffled, brief, yet always controlled so as to send a ghostly black finger up and down the inside of her thighs. A dim feature of Irene’s moral landscape had come to be this emotion of twirling, one of two or three dozen white women watched by those hundreds that wholly blotted out the sea’s shining. They lived in revolting shacks along the coast. By day she could observe them through the jalousies, or from behind Look under the manchineels. Their torsos, emerging from the milky-blue water, were often of a grace and color that left her mout
h dry. Those nights she had the Lord Regaler—and he cost so absurdly little!—the shoe was on the other foot. They were invisible, their eyes fixed on her, a white woman behaving as only a white woman can, a bit drunk in evening clothes, insolent and, in manner, approachable to a degree no proud man (she fancied) could tolerate; it didn’t matter what side of the barbed wire he was on. “Oh Christ!” she muttered, remembering now what had come next. The letter. She’d run to fetch it in her room—yes, the bureau drawer was still open—then returned to the party, waving it over her head. The gesture, though florid, seemed right. It was as if Irene, bored with performing merely for blacks, had been inspired to display, in a circle of her own race, her mastery of a conduct utterly devoid of the ethical fiber prized, to hear some of them talk, even above their color. “Oh Christ!” she said again, beginning to laugh. “Well, you devil, you’ve done it this time!” she scolded, but couldn’t keep a straight face. Irene had always considered herself so lovable that she failed to see how anybody might hold a grudge against her, now or ever.