Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  “Where will you put the head?” she asked Francis. “In your apartment?”

  “Oh, heavens no,” he replied. “I’m giving it to him, so where it goes is his problem.”

  Xenia drew herself up. “The only problem” she said, “is that it be properly displayed.”

  “Ah, you can trust him to do that,” grinned Francis.

  Lily’s head was no more successfully received. One drawback, Xenia tried to explain, lay in the color and texture of the wax, a glossy brown that, annihilating highlights and shadows alike, made the whole impossible to see except in profile. Besides, Lily had changed so, hadn’t she? Enid nodded, lips pursed. She then turned her lovely smile upon Xenia. “I’m at a loss for words,” she said. “It will be a lifelong joy.”

  Xenia knew perfectly that Enid meant no word of this. How could she? The head did look dreadful in wax. It was mortifying to be so patronized. By tomorrow, of course, Xenia’s own self-deceptions would have done their work. She would be boasting over the telephone: “Ah! La Buchanan adored the head! She said it would be a lifelong joy. No, naturally she can’t appreciate the workmanship, still it’s good to have such a heartfelt response.” For the present Xenia went behind a screen and swallowed a shot of rum. All her annoyance with the Buchanans and their ways returned. She had expected, also, some support from Francis. Wiping her mouth, she peered out. “Who would like a drink? Enid? Francis?”

  Enid refused. She and Lily would have to toddle along.

  “I’ll have one,” said Francis from beside the dressmaker’s form, whose stump he was idly caressing. “Aren’t you going to open your present, Lily?”

  “Now?”

  “Of course. We always open our presents on Christmas Eve. It leaves the Day free—” he stopped himself.

  When Xenia brought his drink they were bent over Lily’s gift.

  “Goodness me!” cried Enid. “Somebody has a very nice uncle!”

  “See if it fits,” Francis whispered.

  “Oh, Uncle Francis!” breathed Lily, her eyes ashine. “I’ve never had a ring.”

  Xenia saw that it was his little ring, with the gold owl.

  “I wore it for a while myself,” said Francis as if none of them had seen him do so. “It’s really a thing of great beauty. I fancied I’d lost it, but my poor mother turned out to have been keeping it for me, ever since Boston.” A faint smile preceded the last word, allowing Xenia to identify it as a synonym for his mysterious illness.

  Lily turned and turned the ring upon her finger. “Look,” she exclaimed all at once, “it bends!” and held it up for them to see. The ring did bend.

  “Be careful,” Francis warned her.

  “Pure gold will always bend,” said Xenia.

  “Pure gold is very soft and fragile,” Enid added.

  “I’d better not wear it,” the child murmured delicately, decisively.

  “Oh, it must be worn” said Francis with a yawn. “Things must be used. If they break, it can’t be helped. I’m bored by so many beautiful things under glass.” Lily looked unconvinced, but put the ring on, to please him. She struck Xenia as having lost most of her pleasure in it, upon learning how easily it could be damaged. Francis seemed, accordingly, to have lost interest in his niece, now that she had picked out the flaw in his gift, “I must start looking about for things,” he continued, sipping his drink. “There are too many bare walls and floors in my apartment, and naked bulbs on cords. I’ve noticed some crazy antique shops down the street. The other night, looking in a window, I saw what could only have been a tortoise-shell baby carriage. The trouble with something like that is, how to use it?”

  Was Francis spending his evenings down the street? In those bars? Xenia gave him a roguish look which he met blankly at first, then misinterpreted, adding, “Unless you’d like it for Christmas!” Already Enid was gathering up her purse and gloves.

  But Lily let out a squeal of recollection. “Mummy, you haven’t heard! Xenia’s going to have a baby!”

  It must have perplexed Enid to find herself, rather than Xenia, the sudden object of scrutiny. More likely, she didn’t even notice. In her innocence she let sound the cries of amazement and joy with which she never failed to greet such announcements. She took Xenia’s hands, she beamed into Xenia’s eyes. Xenia had her first, her only sense of the promptness and beauty of Enid’s warmth. It couldn’t last. “I have cobwebs in the old head,” she marveled, shaking it, “I honestly don’t think I ever knew you were married!”

  “That’s what I said,” said Lily.

  Xenia held her head high. “You’re right, I’m not,” she suavely declared. “Not yet, that is.”

  A soft sound escaped from Enid. She searched her compact mirror for something other than her face.

  “But I’ve had a recent proposal of marriage,” pursued Xenia, “which I’m almost ready to accept.”

  Her “almost” had its effect. All three leaned forward. The compact shut with a snap.

  “I mean,” she finished, “it’s so crucially important for a child, here in America.”

  “I couldn’t agree more!” Enid’s head fell to one side, nodding reflectively. She rose and chanted, “Mais je pense qu’il n’est pas bon de mentionner ces choses devant les petites personnes,” ending with a mild apologetic smile, or grimace, that showed she couldn’t help being old-fashioned and straitlaced. “One feels so well, though, so alive!” she kept on, feeling behind her for her coat. “I hardly had a single headache the whole time I was sitting on the nestino. Your system manufactures ACTH, which doctors are using now to treat headaches. I think that’s interesting, don’t you? I just can’t go along with the little people who say babies are headaches—mine still haven’t come back!”

  Enid’s manner was so perfect, so like the sway and tinkle of a delicate timepiece, enameled, gilded, surmounted by some goddess in whose lap children played, that Xenia had already imagined the moment carried off with a minimum of embarrassment when Francis intervened. He took his sister’s elbow and guided her with comic solicitude to the door. He kissed her cheek, he pinched her chin. “Emia colpa, sorellina,” he said gravely. “But we mustn’t work too hard, must we? The Lily of the field will give us lessons in sophistication.”

  And Lily, who a half-hour before hadn’t believed that children could be born out of wedlock, now peered up at them precociously. “Don’t ask me!” she exclaimed. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about!”

  “You see?” Francis laughed.

  Xenia’s face started to tingle. In just such dulcet syllables as Enid used to say goodbye, clocks struck an end to the Age of Reason. Francis might have spared her that.

  Each, nevertheless, cried, “Merry Christmas!” twice, with handshakes or kisses, whereupon Enid and Lily would have left, had not a thick voice echoed, “Merry Christmas!” from high behind them. Through the sailcloth curtains Tommy Utter’s head appeared, handsome, flushed, and disheveled. He was really thirty-two, but looked nineteen just then. “Oh,” he said stupidly. “I’ve been asleep. Who’s that? Francis? Hello, Francis.”

  Francis raised his empty glass in greeting.

  “My fiancé, Mr. Utter,” said Xenia with Russian ballet gestures. “Mrs. Buchanan and her daughter, Lily.”

  “We’ve been hearing such intriguing news,” said Enid, her voice all silvery. “I gather congratulations are in order!”

  “Oh … it was nothing!” grinned the young man, ducking his head. Everyone’s eyes wavered a bit. Then the door closed upon the visitors.

  Xenia leaned heavily against it. “Are you feeling better?” she asked Tommy.

  “I don’t know, Pussy. Not too good, I guess.”

  “Go back to sleep, then.”

  “All right.” He waved and withdrew his head.

  To be exposed to such a scene, on Christmas Eve—ouf! Xenia fell onto the sofa. “Francis, Francis,” she sighed, handing him her glass to fill, “I never thought, the day I got your cable on the ship, that I�
�d be put through so much. Thank God I’m strong!” She broke into a great jolly laugh, because it was all preposterous as well as shameful. “Oh, these people! What do they think art is? What do they think human life is? On the one hand they treat me like a rug merchant, on the other like a whore!”

  “I thought Enid did all right, considering,” Francis shrugged.

  “I’m proud to be an artist, I’m proud to be bearing Tommy’s child. But when I went by subway to ask Larry Buchanan for money, do you know how I was received? Like dirt, like shit! I couldn’t believe my ears.”

  Francis raised his hand. “Please,” he said. “I do sympathize, but I can’t be responsible for your difficulties with my family.”

  “Difficulties! I’ve never—”

  “Something’s changed in me,” he continued. “I will no longer endure an atmosphere of quarrels and conflicts. I’ve forgotten what the different political parties stand for—not that I ever knew. I refuse to wear myself out trying to meet other people’s terms. Life’s too short. It’s time for people to start meeting mine, for a change.”

  Xenia’s eyes narrowed. The light had dimmed; it conferred upon things a kind of glowing Flemish gentleness, in which colors reached beyond their given limits. Against a mustard-gold cushion she watched her friend’s foot swing back and forth in its sheer black sock and gleaming slipper. It was odious to make allowances for those one loved. But Francis had been ill, she couldn’t now doubt that. She had trusted, despite the strain under which she’d last seen him, that their earlier, their real relationship might be preserved. However, if something else was in the stars—bon! Her mind performed the first of several melancholy revisions that would in time cause her to treat him as a virtually new person. In this altering light she perceived that he, like Lily, had lost the Tanning look, the look—how had she defined it?—of being roused against his will. Indeed, gazing at him, Xenia found it easy to wonder if he would ever again do anything against his will. He was smiling through the smoke of a cigarette, pleased to see his first warning taken. How was she not to have taken it? Her path had been strewn with sagging boards and wobbly railings; nowadays a glance told her where it was no longer safe to apply pressure.

  “Your mother’s been ill?” she asked politely, exhaling some smoke of her own.

  “Vinnie’s always ill,” he said. “I broke the machine when I was born.”

  She obliged herself not to respond. “Then tell me, how did you find Ben?” she went on in the same pleasant tone.

  Francis rolled his eyes upward. “The madness that goes on in that house! I couldn’t take it, I left after four days.”

  “Didn’t the atomic cocktail work?”

  “Work! He’s a new man! Nobody gets a minute’s peace. He did have one bad spell—weeks before I got there—since which time he’s bloomed. One wakes to the music of idling motors. He’s forever leaping into cars and careening through canefields. I went with him once and, I must say, didn’t feel specially wanted. It’s all glands and drugs, of course—not the real him at all.”

  “It sounds marvelous,” said Xenia, wondering what drugs her companion took.

  “Oh, there are drawbacks,” Francis pursued, somewhat nasally. “It’s true he’s out of pain, but his mind’s not as clear as it used to be. If I were Dr. Samuels I’d be a wee bit embarrassed. Yet it doesn’t seem to bother anyone else.”

  “Does he go to see Irene?”

  “Not often. I suspect not at all.”

  “And l’affaire. Good?”

  Francis stared. “You haven’t heard? No, I suppose you wouldn’t have. Sir Edward’s dead.”

  “Sir Edward! No!” Xenia felt her throat contract. So that had been what Enid meant. She tried to say something. The charming, cultivated man with whom she had talked, even danced—“How is it possible?” she babbled. “He wasn’t old.”

  “Fifty-four,” said Francis. “It happened a number of weeks ago. A cart jammed with Negroes turned into the road. It was twilight. He headed his car into a deep ditch. His neck was broken, or something.”

  “Good God!” There were tears in Xenia’s eyes. She couldn’t say which more unnerved her, the news or Francis’s way of telling it. “I shall write Prudence,” she whispered, “if you leave her address.” The vision of a fine florid man, face down in mud, rose before her. And of course, no children. “Poor woman, she’ll be all alone.”

  “On the contrary,” smiled Francis, who had taken out his pen and was balancing a strip of paper upon his wallet. “Benjamin has all but moved in with her. I wouldn’t know, myself, whether to write a letter of condolence or one of congratulation.”

  Xenia struck the sofa with her hand. An indignant dust swirled and glinted in the dim air. “No more, Francis, if you please! I won’t hear you talk so about those poor lonely people. I can’t stand callousness in any form!”

  Various expressions crossed his face. He set Lady Good’s address on the arm of his chair, and seemed on the point of rising to go. Instead, he looked about the studio, never once at Xenia, and, drawing from his wallet another strip of paper, began to write upon it. He presently held it out to her, saying tonelessly, “I don’t know what you need for Christmas. Please take this, and don’t be cross with me.” The check was for two hundred dollars.

  She wanted to refuse it. But wouldn’t he then, in the state he was in, get up and go for good? Really, Francis had developed a genius for the disconcerting. Xenia made her second mental reservation and decided to accept the check. One had to be strong to know when to be weak. “I thought for a moment I was being bribed,” she laughed, after thanking him, “but I now feel it comes in friendship.” Besides, she explained, until after the première of Tommy’s opera, they had to live on a shoestring. They couldn’t even afford to get married.

  “You’re honestly getting married!” marveled Francis. “I don’t see you married, somehow.”

  Everybody said this. How little they understood. “It’s what we all need, Francis,” she beamed, her lashes fluttering. “You should have saved your little gold ring for a pretty jeune fille.” Half of his mouth smiled. “No,” he said, “I wanted Lily to have it. It’s a child’s ring. I certainly have no further need of it. My brainpicker—whom entre nous I don’t need either, but the family feels better about me—says I no longer see myself as a child. And I daresay he’s right.”

  “Your what?” Xenia had understood hardly a word of his speech.

  “My brainpicker. My analyst.”

  “You’re in analysis! Ah, I’m so relieved!” The news momentarily explained all his oddities. Xenia knew how patients behaved during the first months of treatment. “Tell me what else he says,” she begged, leaning forward and licking her lips. It was a topic she adored.

  Francis made a face. “Oh, crazy things like: ‘Go ahead and wear women’s clothes if you want!’ or: ‘There’s absolutely nothing you can’t do!’ I keep saying, ‘Come off it, Sigmund—there’s plenty I can’t do!’”

  “He’s not a Freudian?” said Xenia in alarm.

  “I don’t know,” he replied, all at once weary. “Good Lord, I must be off. It’s nearly four.”

  “Where do you go?”

  “To Fern’s. She leaves for Hobe Sound next week. My onetime stepmother,” he added, seeing Xenia’s blank face. He stood up.

  “You still see her?”

  “Oh,” Francis grinned, “I sometimes think I see everybody.”

  They stood in the open doorway, holding hands. “This Christmas I am so poor,” said Xenia, “I cannot give presents. But I have sent you a rose, Francis, with a note that says what I think you must know.”

  “A rose?” he echoed, his voice suddenly very high and soft. “Really, a rose? Why, Xenia, how sweet, how—!” He shuddered once almost imperceptibly, from head to toe.

  She squeezed his hand. “We still have things to say to one another, don’t we?”

  Francis looked away. “One thing,” he blurted out, “I want so much to know, th
at’s so important to me now—” Again he broke off, waiting, it seemed; then, “You know what it is.”

  “No. Tell me what it is.”

  His lips quivered. “About the child,” he began, staring now into her eyes, “you’re quite sure—you were quite sure when you said—it’s Tommy’s child?”

  Amused, vexed, touched, she hesitated, his concern at last clear, trying to make out what he wanted to be told. A minute earlier, Xenia would have been tempted to pay him back in his own coin, to reply, “My dear Francis, do you suppose children are conceived on nights like that? One needs love, something you have not learned to feel; and trust, which you have not yet learned to inspire.” But now she felt so sorry for him. People would always have to think how to act in his presence. He had grown, moreover, before her very eyes, so tender, so defenseless, the way she remembered him from Rome and the early days at the Cottage. The spark of love hadn’t been put out, it waited for someone’s breath. Perhaps all he needed was to believe that he had fathered a child. Yes, thought Xenia, exactly that. She reached out and let her hand rest against his cheek.

  “Cher ami,” she said, choosing her words slowly, “you must never worry about that, now promise me.”

  His eyes glistened wide. Lifting her other hand, he softly kissed it.

  “I’ll see you this evening?” asked Xenia, and patted his cheek to ease him on his way.

  “Of course!” Halfway downstairs he turned around to wave.

  She closed the door. What an afternoon. Somebody had brushed a star from her black torso. Xenia picked it up and pasted it back, whispering, “Voilà, ma belle” In a month or so, when Francis was more himself, she would confess her deception and they would laugh over it.

  Passing the head of Lily Buchanan, she stuck out her tongue.