By her new life she meant this. She never dreamed of keeping it secret. When she had told everyone else she telephoned Adrienne—who was reaching for the receiver in order to call her, having had the news that moment from a mutual friend. In twenty minutes they were in each other’s arms, laughing like schoolgirls. Xenia’s friend hadn’t found a new lover. “But, my God!” she cried, “how agreeable it is to live alone! Now, when Max is away, I read, I get asked to dinners, I’ve even gone dancing! I’m having the time of my life, and it’s all your doing! And Max—he’ll be so amused, so pleased!” He was. One of Xenia’s first presents was a case of champagne from Max with a note accepting her invitation to a party on Christmas Eve, wishing her and Utter a happy holiday, and thanking her (if he hadn’t already) for having arranged that, at his age, he should once again have a mistress whose favors he wasn’t asked to share with a younger man. Exquisite Max! His thumb and forefinger were orange with nicotine. One day at lunch a lower tooth, small and brown as a grain of rice, slid out of his mouth onto the plate. “Regard,” he sighed, holding it up; “is it not sinister to outlive one’s body?” It was decided he and Adrienne would be the child’s godparents.
The only people Xenia hadn’t told were the Tannings and the Buchanans. They had mysteriously dropped her, vanished from her life. Why, it hadn’t been a week ago that she received a card from Francis, a bare greeting but with a city address to which she promptly sent off an invitation to her party, and would send a rose. The same day came a call from Enid. “I’d been wondering,” she said in her tiniest, gayest voice, “if we were going to have Lily’s head for Christmas. That was Daddy’s idea. I think he’ll be disappointed if his present’s not under our tree.” Xenia was stunned. “Enid, I’ve called you time and time again,” she began passionately, truthfully also, “left message after message to say I needed another sitting with Lily, and that you should come and see the head before it was cast—” “Oh well, I’ve had my hands full,” said Enid, “with our new little friend born December first.” “Ah! what joy for you!” Xenia cried, relaxing all her defenses at the thought of motherhood. “Tell me, is it a boy or a girl?” It was a boy at last, named Tanning Burr after the firm. “So I guess,” Enid went on in the silence that greeted the latter detail, “it’s nobody’s fault about the sittings.” Xenia let it pass. An hour was found that conflicted with neither Lily’s piano lesson, nor her dancing-school, nor her ice-skating. “Actually,” Enid admitted, “I don’t see how she could have fitted it in before the holidays. She had her part to learn for her school’s Christmas play. They did Macbeth this year, it was really quite convincing.” An eerie giggle escaped her. Enid promised to call for Lily after the sitting, so that she could write to Jamaica about the finished head. “A rivederci!” she signed off in the sweet singsong she used for no matter what language.
Lily arrived on time, left at the door by her nursemaid.
“Come in, both of you!” cried Xenia.
“Thank you, Miss,” said the apple-cheeked Alice, “but there’s a special service at St. Patrick’s I’m hoping not to be late for.”
“Ah, then say a prayer for me,” Xenia smiled, waved her down the stairs. “Come in, Lily.”
The child put out a hand. “It’s nice to see you, Xenia.” Graciously she let herself be helped off with her “things,” a pale gray coat, fur-trimmed, with matching gloves and earmuffs of fur. She wore gray wool stockings with little red and white pom-poms at the top. “Lily, how you’ve grown!” Xenia couldn’t help exclaiming, finding her on the threshold less of puberty than of a precocious womanhood. “Would I have known you? You’re a big girl!”
“Isn’t it ridiculous?” replied Lily, pleased. “Actually, I won’t be eleven till next summer.” This came out with a deprecating wrinkle of her nose, borrowed from Enid. It showed that, while discussion of your age wasn’t especially well bred, she didn’t mind confiding in Xenia. The dressmaker’s form caught her eye; she had a good laugh over it. “I think your studio’s very attractive,” she declared. “May I look upstairs?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Xenia kept firm and cheerful. “Because I keep my secrets there,” she said. “I like this studio, too. It’s a kind of room one often finds in Europe.”
“I know. We’re going to Europe this Easter. To Rome.”
“Rome!” sighed Xenia, slipping into her old blue smock. She added absently, “Why? You’re not Catholics, are you?”
“Catholics!” her visitor gasped. “I should say not!”
“All right, sit here.” She patted the high-chair beneath the skylight. “We have an hour of good light, so you keep still as a mouse.” Cautiously she wheeled the stand into position. Lily’s waxen head teetered.
The real Lily made a face. “That isn’t me?”
So she was turning into that sort of little girl. Xenia shrugged, feeling no less good-humored because of it. “You haven’t changed so much, really,” she laughed, knowing presently as she began to squint at the two heads, the one alive, the other triumphantly not, that Lily had been right; she wasn’t the same person. A look was missing—the Tanning look. Enid had it, so did Francis, Benjamin too, at times: a look of being roused against one’s will. Xenia had seen it on her lover’s face also, a slackening of the lips, not a smile, as he nuzzled closer to her fragrant pillow. Lily, however, was wide awake.
“What did you mean,” she wanted to know, “about being a Catholic?”
Xenia explained that Rome held a unique interest for Catholics. Lily would surely see the crowds in front of St. Peter’s, the saint’s toes worn away, the Pope on his balcony.
The child looked skeptical. “Alice never told me that.”
“Didn’t your mother?”
“Mummy? What would she know about it?”
“She used to be a Catholic when she was your age.”
“That’s not true!” cried Lily, on guard against novelty. “How do you know?”
“Your grandfather told me,” Xenia said pleasantly.
For the next several minutes Lily sat as still as could be wished. “Daddy says,” she finally brought out, “that Rome’s the best place to have clothes made.”
Putting down her little curved stick with which she had been halfheartedly skimming the waxen mouth, Xenia said to herself, “No.” She saw no point in going on. Lily had turned into her mother’s image. The child’s head was finished.
They sat over tea—Xenia putting rum in hers—while Lily told about her baby brother. She made him sound like a yardstick to measure how far she herself had come. “He has eyelashes and teensy little fingernails—his whole hand isn’t as big as my thumb! Of course he can’t smile yet, he’s too little, but he knows me. Mummy says he’s going to look like me. Yesterday I held him while he had his bottle!”
Xenia’s eyebrows went up. “But a little baby should be fed by its mother,” she said in real concern, “not out of a bottle.”
“Oh no,” Lily corrected her. “Mother’s milk doesn’t supply half the nourishment a formula does.”
“Have another cookie,” said Xenia. “All this business of formulas has been disproved. Nothing takes the place of breast-feeding. I sound as if I knew all about it, but the fact is—” she gave an idiotic laugh; it was the irresistible topic—“I’m having a baby myself, and have had to read a hundred books.” A wave of her hand dismissed them all. “Each says something different, but what they do agree upon is that one must trust one’s natural instincts.” The hand came to rest on her bosom.
“You’re going to have a baby?”
“Isn’t it wonderful?”
“But you’re too old to have a baby!” the little girl pursued indignantly, seeking foothold on the glassy slopes of another’s behavior.
This had been Xenia’s own thought, that change of life was upon her; after all, she’d expected it for a number of years. Nevertheless she laughed, “How old do you think I am, Lily?”
“Forty?”
guessed Lily, looking away.
“Enchanting angel!” cried Xenia. “I shall be forty-six next birthday—there! That’s not so old to have a child. Your mother must be close to forty, no?”
Lily turned crimson. “I don’t know. Besides,” she went on, freely displaying the narrowness of her upbringing, “you’re not married! People can’t have babies without being married!”
They heard a muffled sneeze from the balcony.
“Somebody’s up there!”
“Only the Pope,” said Xenia in a gay loud voice.
The doorbell rang.
“You see, it’s somebody at the door.” She rose gratefully. “The acoustics are very strange in this room. I’ve had that happen before. It’ll be Enid, come to admire your head.” And Xenia threw the door wide open.
“Hello, hello!” cried the newcomer, shedding packages and enfolding her in a kiss. “Am I too late? Has Lily left?”
It was Francis.
“I realize I wasn’t asked until nine o’clock,” he said as he flopped into a chair, “but I’ve been around the corner at Natalie’s—you knew she was your neighbor?—and I’m on my way to Fern’s, after which I must drink with some people, thence to a solitary dinner with my poor mother—we always open our presents Christmas Eve, it keeps the Day free for debauchery. Anyhow it occurred to me I might give Lily her present now, as the shops are delivering the rest of her family’s things. At least they said they were. The only reliable messenger boy is, of course, oneself. Enid on the phone let fall that I’d find her here, so,” Francis got up and produced a small, carelessly wrapped box from the pocket of his Lodenmantel, “with love to my favorite niece—don’t spend it all at once!” Lily smiled shyly and held the box to her ear.
Only now he removed his coat. He was wearing evening clothes, though it was not yet three. “I’ve found an apartment in the Village,” he told them, “miles from here. So I said to myself, ‘What’s the point of dashing home to change? I’ll just wear my dinner jacket all day!”’ He laughed into their very eyes. Xenia waited in vain for any sign of illness. Francis was deeply tanned, with hair bleached by sun, so that he suggested a photographic negative of his old self. Perhaps he had gained weight. He spoke, too, in a new way, at once more mannered and more assured, never pausing for a word unless purposely, as a means of holding his listener. His waistcoat was of black brocade shot through with purple violets. The pump dangling from his toe sported a lining of scarlet. For studs he had two black pearls, and he wore the wing collar that hadn’t been in vogue since before the war.
“So tell me, tell me!” he said. “I feel I’ve been away forever. Tell me what’s new.” Then, while Xenia and Lily smiled helplessly at one another: “All right, don’t tell me. I know what you’d be saying, anyhow.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” replied Xenia, and winked at Lily. “I don’t think your uncle has any idea of my news.”
“Come off it, Mona Lisa,” said Francis blandly. “How naive can you get? There are no secrets in New York.” He fixed her with a slow appraising stare. “True, with that smock on, it’s rather hard to tell.”
Xenia threw up her hands. He knew! “But who could have told you?” she demanded, almost cross.
“And Lily’s news is: she has a baby brother, she’s going to Rome for Easter, and she’s fresh from a frantic success as Lady Macbeth.”
“I wasn’t Lady Macbeth! Who told you that?”
“Don’t be modest, child, it’s an extraordinary part. Actresses go through lives without a chance to play it.” Francis leapt to his feet and declaimed:
“Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here!”
He spun about in a way neither understood, as if to catch a certain expression on their faces. “Or that bit about dashing out the brains of the babe at her breast—it’s all so wild and up-to-date.” He sat down, this time on the sofa next to his father’s upturned bronze face. “Good heavens!” he cried, recognizing it.
It was wrong for him to happen on it like that. Xenia had planned to have it on a pedestal, with proper lighting, so that Francis’s first view would be of a serious, imposing piece. But there he sat, his hand brushing back and forth across the features, the way you tousle a child’s head or a dog’s. “Bring the head over here, Francis,” she told him. “You’ll see it in a better light.”
He obeyed, lifting it easily from the cushion where it lay, cradling it in the crook of his arm. “Attention!” warned Xenia, and only breathed when she saw the old man’s head placed where she had indicated. It stood now somewhat taller than Benjamin himself, while Francis continued his recitation:
“Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had not done it!”
“I had done it,” Lily interrupted. “You’ve got it wrong.”
Francis paused, suddenly perplexed. “Are you sure?”
“Yes—the King looks like her father and so she doesn’t do it, she makes Macbeth do it.”
“Of course,” said Francis. “Oh, it’s a fantastic scene, whichever way you look at it. Give me the daggers!” he cried, advancing upon Lily,
“the sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures; ‘tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed,
I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal,
For it must seem their guilt.
And then, scaring the audience out of its wits—the knocking!”
The doorbell rang.
Francis reacted with a stage shudder—“You see!”
“That’s only Mummy,” Lily said. She had watched his performance distrustfully. “I wasn’t Lady Macbeth either, I was only Fleance. I’m not old enough for one of the big parts.”
Up to then Xenia would never have thought it possible to be soothed by the presence of Enid Buchanan. “Hello, my pearls!” she sang out on the threshold, and it was like a cool hand upon her hostess’s brow. “Why, look who’s here! How are you, sweetie?” She kissed her brother on both cheeks. “Don’t you look well! How was the tripolino? Listen to me!” she giggled apologetically, letting Xenia take her coat. “All the Buchannibals are learning Italian like things possessed!”
Enid looked lovely, svelte, pink, chic. She had almost a boy’s figure. She gave no evidence of having borne a child within the month. Bottle-feeding had its advantages. Whereas I, thought Xenia but with more pride than envy, will look like a pig for a year!
“I did,” Francis was saying, “but my poor mother came down with something local and had to fly home after a week.”
Enid clicked her tongue. “So I heard.”
“It was purely psychosomatic. I’d persuaded her to go on to Jamaica with me and in less than six hours she had a fever. She’s just not ready for a full life. I stayed right on. I lay in the sun and stared at the sea and read Shakespeare all day, as Lily can vouch. I’ve never felt better in my life. You must go there. The natives are so beautiful as not to be believed.”
“Where, Francis?” Xenia asked out of habit, forgetting that she was getting her fill of beauty right there in New York.
“Haiti, where I’ve been,” he replied, as though she ought to have known. “Wait till you hear my new French accent.”
“Don’t forget,” she let a hurt note sound in her voice, “I’ve had no word from you these many months.”
“Neither have I!” Enid sent Xenia a twinkle of sympathy. “And no word from Daddy—not even an acknowledgment of his first grandson—since the cable about Sir Edward. Poor Lady Good! Did you get to Jamaica, then?”
“Sir Edward?” Xenia tried to ask, but the talk swept by her.
“Did I not!” cried Francis. “My new English accent ought to have told you that.”
Enid hummed her high note. “I see we must have a chattino soon.”
A look of curiosity settled on her face like a mask. It showed how desperately Enid wanted to hear, yet how resolutely she would let the chance go
by—would indeed force it to go by—should Francis start bringing them up to date on Mr. Tanning’s love life. What nonsense, thought Xenia; she’d hear all the dirt from Francis later, why not now? Enid’s way of turning aside, of murmuring to Lily, “And how’s my tiny pearl?” brought back things both Francis and his father had said. The Buchanans were prudes. They lived in terror lest their offspring be corrupted by the old man’s sexual excess—by anyone’s, for that matter. Xenia wondered briefly whether Enid would thank her for having discussed her pregnancy with Lily. She had already seen Enid’s eye rest on the dressmaker’s form with the same look she might have cast a nude photograph of Xenia (there were in fact several upstairs) had one been set out on the mantel. The artist tossed her head. These absurd Americans, what did she care? She simply couldn’t take them seriously.
They had gathered about Mr. Tanning’s head. It shone dimly in the weakening light, the patina at once rose and brown. How she had toiled over that! At Xenia’s insistence the old Italian at the foundry kept swabbing the raw bronze with acids, igniting them, quenching them, beginning again until the right effect had been secured. She took pains to tell these things to Enid and Francis; she wouldn’t have troubled herself for the ordinary client, le cochon de payant who’d have been just as pleased, more so perhaps, by a surface of the brightest vulgarest green. Xenia knew as she spoke that she was falsifying her motives, that plain pride in her work, rather than love for the Tannings, was responsible for the fineness of the results. But the rich needed flattery even more than artists. Unhappily she gave them, at times such as this, so little credit for intelligence that she failed altogether to connect what she said that afternoon with the way Enid was henceforth to let it be known among her friends that Xenia had a wee touch of the sycophant about her and, in the last analysis, lacked professional pride.
As it was, Xenia waited in vain for any understanding of her effort to show on their faces. They made, after a bit, the agreeable, easy remarks characteristic of the pig who paid. Daddy looked young; Daddy looked spiritual; Grandpa looked tired. It was hopeless. They hadn’t felt the features shaping beneath their fingers, hadn’t seen flames dart—blue, amber, green—from the whole head, or heard the awful hiss as it was doused with water. These experiences might have helped them distinguish the particular human face from the face made by art.
Collected Novels and Plays Page 22