Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  They had met and married during the war. An uncle of Charlie’s, a one-star General and Mr. Tanning’s first cousin, had been having a friendship with Irene, at the time a truly pretty woman. She was so pretty, in fact, that the friendship passed for platonic. You didn’t want anyone to possess those clear tints and delicate ovals—not if you were Charlie Cheek, at least. Transferred to Washington, he had been asked to a large dinner at which his uncle (like himself, well on the road to alcoholism) had repeated a number of stories so obscene as to have been out of place in an officers’ barracks. In the course of these excruciating moments a gentle blush spread over Irene’s face and throat—a blush that Charlie, already charmed by her good looks, quite failed to interpret. He saw her offended by the turn the conversation had taken, when in truth Irene’s embarrassment came from having herself told the General a couple of the stories, and her fear that someone would read this fact in her eyes. But Charlie Cheek had been hooked by the gentle blush whose meaning he never fathomed and which, even if he’d been right, would have remained the only proof he was ever to receive of Irene’s refinement. You imagined how easily he had been driven, through the years, into a blind devotion—the blindness simulated whether the devotion was or not. He had actually stopped drinking for a time, in hopes of pleasing her. As for Irene, she lost all interest in her husband upon learning that he was poor, unambitious and (when sober) a bore—in each respect a far cry from his uncle. By the time he took to the bottle again, Irene couldn’t have cared less. She had long before resumed the only life for which she was fitted. Their marriage, as displayed to the world, was rooted in mendacity and ignorance of one another’s real nature. Furthermore, left to themselves, the Cheeks showed no mastery of the artifice that made life bearable for many unhappy couples. Charlie, for instance, had never learned to approach a point circuitously. “Irene,” he said when a brisk swelling of the sail caused their eyes to meet, “what was all that to-do last night, about some letter?”

  She let her face make leisurely transitions from blackness to bewilderment, bewilderment to recollection, recollection to wan amusement. “Oh,” she finally said, “that was just foolishness.”

  A minute or two went by. Charlie waved to a white man in the stern of a fishing-boat that passed them, quietly sputtering. The man waved back. He was strapped into his chair and held a giant rod. “But what was it all about?” repeated Charlie.

  “I’ve told you—nothing,” she answered without petulance, thus closing the incident until a few days later when it became clear that, contrary to Irene’s calculations, Mr. Tanning knew everything. On this future occasion out came her explanations and her petulance, both.

  An instant later Irene caught her breath. Not a hundred yards away a dolphin broke water, a large one, brilliantly colored. She had time to see that it was green, mostly, with yellow markings, and to be vaguely disturbed by the combination. Cries of excitement from the fishing-boat made her understand that this handsome fish had been hooked by the white man in the stern. Now his line was ripping through the water as the dolphin headed, or so it seemed to Irene, straight for her. For protection?—she drew back. She kept sight of it, shining, elongated, inches beneath the surface, but only a soft whistle from Charlie warned her of what came next. A dark fin had almost lazily approached; there followed an abrupt assault, then stillness; a wreath of red foam dispersed. Presently the man in the fishing-boat could be seen holding up the dolphin’s head, still hooked to his line, and mouthing words they couldn’t catch.

  “That’s one of the fastest fish in the sea,” said Charlie. “Shark couldn’t ever have got it if it hadn’t been hooked.”

  “Oh God,” Irene whispered, terrified. “Let’s go in, huh? I mean it! What if we turned over out here?”

  She saw him begin to laugh, protectively, his manhood renewed. You poor fish! thought Irene and smiled in spite of herself.

  Shortly before dark a delirium of leaves and pineapples glistened along each post of Mr. Tanning’s bed. Re-entering the room after accompanying the local doctor downstairs, Mrs. McBride stood gazing at the old man. He was out of pain but restive. The luminol hadn’t taken effect yet. “Think to yourself,” she told him in a lulling voice, “that your toes are going to sleep, then your feet, your ankles. Think that your calves and your knees and your thighs are relaxing and going to sleep. Say that your stomach is going to sleep, and your lungs and your heart. Get each part of your body to relax, and before you know it you’ll be fast, fast asleep.”

  He tried it. She watched his lips form the words: “My toes are going to sleep, my feet—” Then he opened his eyes and started once more, as earlier, before the pains began, to show what was really bothering him. “Ring for Louis,” Mr. Tanning gasped. “I’m getting dressed. Has Mrs. Widman left? How long ago? Tell Marlborough to bring the car around. I’m going to Canecrest. I have to talk something over with Sir Edward. It can’t wait.”

  “Yes, yes, we’ll do that in a little while,” said Mrs. McBride soothingly. She wished the doctor were still at Weathersome, although his blue-black face, tilted in lamplight, had filled her with apprehension. “Think of pleasant things,” she continued, “like your lunch with Lady Good tomorrow. You’ll be having a new grandchild before long, think about that. Think about Francis’s visit. He’ be here within a month. Say to yourself, ‘My toes are going to sleep, my feet and my ankles …’” She had been told not to give him morphine except in an emergency.

  “My toes …” he began, but whimpered. Mrs. McBride saw his whole face tighten against a spasm of pain. In no time the blue and white stripes of the mattress were showing through the sheet his weak tears dampened. “It’s not the pain,” he tried to say. By then the needle glittered in her hand.

  “Mrs. McBride—”

  “Don’t tire yourself so!” she begged, near weeping herself. The worst was not to understand what had upset him. The new pills? Composing those cables? Mrs. Widman’s call?

  “Mrs. McBride, don’t give me morphine!” he cried as she withdrew the needle and dabbed his arm with alcohol. “Tell Marlborough to get the car ready.”

  “Yes, yes,” she hummed. “You’ll sleep a little now.”

  “I’ll be damned if I go to sleep. I’ve got something to talk over with Ned Good. I’d no more hurt either of them … Call Marlborough ….” Mrs. McBride kept crooning and stroking his hands until he stopped talking. Take Their Minds Off It, she had learned from a textbook on Grief. She rose at last and, as it was quite dark, pulled down the windowshades.

  “What did you do?” he asked drowsy.

  “Just pulled down the shades. Don’t worry.” He said no more. She tiptoed into the hall and dialed Mrs. Widman’s number. Mrs. Widman was out for dinner—well, that could wait. The nurse next called Lady Good, but in the middle of their conversation heard a cry from her patient. Saying, “I’ll phone you back,” Mrs. McBride hung up and hurried to his side. He was staring about, roused from a kind of waking nightmare which, over her protests, he insisted on recounting.

  He had been gazing (Mr. Tanning said) so intently at the window-shade that it presently seemed a field through which he was walking, a field or valley—the valley of the Shade. Looking down at his body, he had found it clothed in the uniform that, along with certain distant regular explosions, brought back the war in which he and his comrades took part. What comrades? He was walking alone, entirely so, through a field of golden flowers, daisies perhaps, or daffodils, flowers that grew only here. Stooping to examine one of them—and at the same time sensing the approach from far off of somebody else—he observed its slow and magical change into a golden butterfly. He held his breath, kneeling enchanted there, knowing every flower, as far around as he could see, transformed, fluttering. This, he was aware, had been foretold in a poem his mother had read and explained to him as a little boy. The poem told how caterpillars became butterflies, and butterflies in turn were changed into the flowers they loved best.

  Nervously he looked ov
er his shoulder. There was an approaching figure, but still so distant that he turned back to study the wonderful opening and shutting of wings before his eyes. A fearful notion now began to work on him—it was all backwards! The flower had changed into a butterfly, not, as his mother had promised, the other way around! How horrible if then—! and he might have been overheard, for the wings stopped moving, fell ever so slowly to earth, while what was left fattened and started crawling down the stripped stem. He got to his feet in a panic. The same change was taking place throughout the valley—countless thousands of caterpillars in the place of butterflies. All life had become a process of uncreation. One flower only, between his leggings, hadn’t changed. It was like his own child, or his own life, a small five-petaled golden blossom, slightly crushed. Save my life, he prayed. Drenched with the task ahead, he looked once more at the approaching figure.

  It was that of an old woman dragging behind her a huge oxygen tent. This was to save him. Sunlight fell on her upturned face, she shouted words he couldn’t hear. Looking down, he saw with horror a fat gray caterpillar at the base of his flower and, forgetting that it must on no condition be uprooted, seized the blossom, held it tightly. The stem had snapped. Now the oxygen tent was very near. In the instant before it parted to receive him, he thought he recognized the old woman. Mother? He whispered timidly. Inside he found violence, churning, a stifling blackness. The flower’s petals, luminous through his fist, began slowly to separate. “It’s no good!” he tried to tell his mother. “Stop! It’s not doing any good!”—as something cold, fat and soft, a worm finally, fastened onto his wrist.

  It had only been Mrs. McBride’s finger, counting his pulse. When he was able to speak he tried to tell her about it.

  “You mustn’t tire yourself,” she kept saying. “I’ve just talked to Lady Good. She says you’re not to worry. She’ll be up to see you in the morning. Now you go to sleep. Say to yourself, ‘My feet are going to sleep, my legs and thighs are going to sleep ….’” She paused until his lips began to move, dutifully. “‘My stomach is going to sleep, then my heart, my shoulders and arms. My fingers, my neck, my tongue. My eyes and my brain are fast asleep.’”

  Mr. Tanning’s eyes flew open. “Marlborough,” he said. “The car. Ned …”

  “Now hush!” said Mrs. McBride, remembering only then what Lady Good had told her. “There’s no use fretting about going to see Sir Edward—he hasn’t even come home for supper, that’s what Lady Good said five minutes ago on the phone. She’s had no words from him, she’s waiting supper for him—a nice baked fish drying out. So there! Even if you went you wouldn’t find him!”

  Before she had finished he was asleep. Her heart went out to his white hair in need of brushing, his wide gentle mouth ajar. Mrs. McBride thanked heaven for having recollected that bit about Sir Edward. Nothing remained now to bother the old man. The voices of nocturnal creatures entered the room, bringing her to herself. She straightened her cap in the bureau mirror. “And you,” she scolded, catching her own eye, “you haven’t had anything to eat, either! That’s a fine way to Keep up our Strength! I’ve got enough on my hands without having to watch over you!”

  17. Up North—“back home where things happened,” as Mrs. McBride, overlooking many a drama on the Island, would say in letters to her daughter—winter came early. The first snow fell in mid-November. By Christmas most people suffered an odd delusion of the holidays’ having already slipped by. An atmosphere prevailed of hasty, shamefaced preparation. Wreaths are hung, which surely had been taken down just a few weeks before; at the last minute you wrapped your own belongings as presents, for lack of others; invitations went out to a holiday eggnog that seemed already to have occurred.

  Xenia, the morning before Christmas, was a complacent exception. Upon the big worktable under her skylight, half-empty cups, spilled sugar, ashes, all bespoke leisure. She sat licking her lip over the last of three dozen letters to friends, each to be accompanied by a single white rose and explaining that, hélas! she could afford to send only this, a rose, but that it carried thoughts and prayers more numerous than its petals. The violet ink streamed from her pen like tears of happiness. When the last of three dozen envelopes had been addressed in her pointed heartfelt hand, she gathered them up, cried, “I’m going round the block! Do you want anything?”—waited a moment for an answer that didn’t come, then cautiously descended the steep stairs to the street.

  In one direction Lexington Avenue still claimed a certain wan gentility; clients from Park and Fifth, she had reasoned, wouldn’t mind crossing it. In the other lay a Third Avenue frankly Bohemian. Here were shops crammed with blackamoors, Tiffany glass, papier-mâche chairs, wicker beds; here were disreputable bars into whose windows bewildered old Irishmen (their patrons for forty years) peered at youths in fishnet pullovers, velvet gondoliers’ slippers from Venice—supposed to have been given as gifts, slightly used, by their original wearers, rather than paid for in the shop behind the Danieli—summer suits of mattress-ticking, winter suits of homespun. In such a neighborhood Xenia had found a studio. It saved her life. She was no longer welcome at Adrienne’s.

  On aching feet she rounded the block. The day was lifeless, damp, her beaver coat weighed on her shoulders, but she was so happy! She flirted with the young Greek who managed the corner flower shop until he had to be coaxed into accepting money for his thirty-six roses. Oh, Xenia had rapidly become, in her own words, the favorite of these good simple people. From whom, by the way, to hide anything was impossible. Only yesterday the patronne of her little bakery had asked, “How goes the cold of Monsieur? Better?”

  She bought cottage cheese from a Pole and small gummed stars, gold and silver, from a Virginian. Before long she was back upstairs, braids agleam, cheeks aglow, calling, “C’est moi!”

  A narrow staircase led to sleeping quarters from which somebody could look down or not, depending on whether curtains or sailcloth, the length of the balcony, were parted or drawn. The big room had style, with its skylight and lanterns, its ferns, basil, avocado seeds splitting and sprouting; sculpture, too—some finished pieces (a watchful shape in gray marble, a spiraling shape like a root in brass); others in plaster, shrouded or uncomfortably prone on the tile floor; also a shelf of tentative forms in clay, most of which she knew would never outgrow the meager, expressionless gestures of dolls. On a plaster-encrusted stand the head of Lily Buchanan gleamed dully in brown wax. The little girl was coming after lunch to have one last look taken at her, before Xenia sent her head to the foundry. Mr. Tanning’s head, already cast in bronze, lay on the sofa, gazing upward.

  Two objects in particular drew smiles from her. The first was an old-fashioned dressmaker’s form, an undulating torso covered in black muslin. Xenia had lugged it up from the street, brushed it off and set it on a low pedestal in the center of the room, which it could now be said to dominate. In the tubular wire cage beneath the upholstered thighs she had hung Christmas ornaments. These revolved on threads of varying length, a gay cosmography, bringing to mind as well those circles filled with text and connected by lines to points on an anatomical drawing of, say, the glandular system. (Xenia had had a lover from Danzig who thought of nothing but glands. “Marry a woman,” he would harangue, “who is not a virgin, preferably a woman who has had a child—so that her whole endocrine system you have seen in action once!”) The dressmaker’s form, with its imaginary glands, was Xenia’s Christmas tree. She had to step over a number of packages, gifts to her, to get to it, chuckling to herself as she pasted her little stars in extravagant clusters across the black breasts and belly. Already from the neck’s neatly sewn stump a jet of plumes and baubles rose, as if in memory of some guillotined courtesan. All this Xenia deftly associated—thanks to eight years in analysis—with what she’d begun to speak of as her old life.

  The second object she smiled at was an upright piano.

  Her affair with Tommy Utter had started hard upon her exile from the Cottage. “Figures-toi,” Xenia to
ld anyone who would listen at that time, “I thought I was in their house as a guest, as an internationally known artist, and here I am kicked out, sent from the door like a fournisseur de tapis! I have no studio, no place to go, no money and no prospect of getting it because le fils Tanning, who commissioned the head of his father, is in the hospital at death’s door. I am ruined!” She had to humiliate herself by a trip—a subway trip, she was so poor—down to the offices of Tanning, Burr and Buchanan. “I was received,” she said afterwards, “like dirt, like shit, by le gendre Buchanan. I put the whole case before him, that Francis (whose affairs he handles) owed me this money. He said, ‘Has the head been delivered?’ ‘How can the head be delivered,’ I said very politely, ‘when I have no studio in which to put on the finishing touches, thanks to having been invited to leave the Cottage?’ ‘Well, if the head hasn’t been delivered—’ he kept repeating, exactly like Salome—der Kopf, der Kopf, der Kopf, des Jochanaans!” Here Xenia, transported, would mimic the snarl and hiss of Strauss’s heroine, eyes ablaze with indignation over the snub from Larry.

  Adrienne and Tommy, and of course Max, had taken her in. They were friends whose like you didn’t often see. Tommy had just received a thousand dollars from the foundation that commissioned his opera, the première of which was scheduled now for late March. Half of this money he put at Xenia’s disposal on her return in a taxi, speechless with fury, from Larry Buchanan’s office. She burst into tears and fell in love with Tommy. From then on, as her astrologist had predicted, good fortune came her way.

  Once her conscience had been relieved by a few terrible scenes with Adrienne, Xenia realized that she was wildly happy. Forgotten were the Tannings, the Buchanans. A check came from Francis. Within the same week she found her studio and discovered that she was pregnant.