Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  Then she climbed the narrow creaking stair. Before lying next to him, she sat on Tommy’s side of the bed, and stroked his damp dark hair. Without waking he snuggled closer. His mouth worked, but if there were words he wanted to speak, Xenia didn’t hear them.

  On learning she was pregnant she had gone into the nearest church and given thanks. Automatically she conferred upon her lover a godlike sweetness and power. He was the first to get her with child. When he proposed marriage she accepted without thinking. Under the crown! as the old woman said in Russia. More recently she had wondered if marriage would be quite the bliss she’d imagined. Bah! she would laugh, dismissing the thought—she was turning into an old woman herself!

  She had just forgotten what it was to live with somebody. Each day Tommy would leap out of bed, flailing his arms against the cold, turn on the electric heater, stumble downstairs, and start a pot of oatmeal. While this cooked he went to the piano. Five out of seven mornings the oatmeal boiled over. It took a half-hour to clean the stove. In two short months Xenia had come to listen with apprehension for the noise of saw and hammer—“I want to build things for you, Pussy,” he would say—and the vision it called up of fragile objects all through the studio moving, at every blow, a jerky centimeter closer to ruin on the tile floor. One afternoon he had repaired the radio. Xenia came and went, destroyed an old sculpture, began a new one, made a spaghetti sauce and left it simmering for dinner, wrote a letter or two—while Tommy crouched over the dismembered parts. On his face she recognized the squinty drugged look with which, on the streets, American youth gazed at the insides of automobiles, that long sexual reverie, fiddling with wires and plugs to find out “what makes her go.” The evenings were charming, he invented waltzes for her, they drank wine. Artists came by, whose talk recaptured cafés. By day, alas! she heard herself more and more adopt a tone long-suffering, without illusions. What was wrong with these American men? Why didn’t they grow up? She had already one child within her, did she need another for her husband? At first mortified by such thoughts, Xenia came to take them as signs of fatigue.

  She was so sleepy now, for instance, with strength only to disengage her hand from his, to stagger round the bed. She kicked off her mules and lay down, pulling a crazy quilt up to her chin. Domesticity. Domesticity was turning her into an old, old woman. And because she didn’t believe a word of it, she sent a ravishing secret smile up to the ceiling, dim and narrow—the whole balcony being not much wider than the bed itself.

  Before the party she managed to write a letter of sympathy to Lady Good.

  18. Alone among the canefields, Sir Edward’s widow was far from easy to woo. In vain Benjamin pointed out how docile a listener she had been before the tragedy. “Please,” she would reply, “I value your friendship. I should hate to lose it. I have so little, now.” Whereupon, like as not, she would sit down at the piano.

  If nothing else, Prudence was giving him a musical education. That he was tone-deaf, that he failed to identify even the catchiest tunes, mattered to neither. She played, he listened—or maybe only watched from the far side of her parlor with its parched ferns and wastes of dark wood, its cabinets of sorry ornaments. She wouldn’t stir from the house. Before long Benjamin was responding to her music; he had, poor man, little else to do at Canecrest. Haydn rattled him, Chopin left him tearful, Grieg sent him out of the room. One day he recognized in the andante of a Beethoven sonata his college anthem:

  “Yet, Mother, may thy sons e’er hail

  The crimson and the gray!”

  He sang in his throaty lifeless voice, only with the wildest modulations. Prudence had had to turn her head to keep him from supposing the song had made her smile.

  She didn’t coyly shield herself with music. It had become the one really noble alternative to speech. It lifted her—it lifted both of them, she fancied—to a vantage from which, schooled by truth and beauty, and forgoing all discussion, the heart saw how effortlessly it could give up a great number of things. Benjamin himself, for instance—she wouldn’t have him, she wouldn’t under any circumstances marry him. This was the message entrusted to, as it were, the highest whitest keys. “I have thought and thought,” she told him gently, for once putting it into words. To tell the truth, Prudence had thought hardly at all.

  Her style of playing suffered. She was no longer out to please but to persuade. Breaks in rhythm, tentative runs and clumsy trills now marked her performance, like that of the gifted talker who, in order to prove his sincerity, begins to stammer, to search for words; fearing that what is fluent cannot be heartfelt, his lips are dry, he runs a hand through his hair. On one occasion Prudence had frozen on a dissonance, turned, risen exclaiming, “What’s in your mind, please, when you look at me that way?”

  “Which way?” Benjamin had asked, not taking his eyes from her.

  “That way. With that smug smile. As if you knew something.”

  “I don’t know anything, Prudence,” he sighed, all humbleness. She had said no more, had even checked an arch look lest he read into it meanings not intended. She understood for the twentieth time that her position was intolerable, yet could find neither will nor way to do anything about it.

  Irene Cheek, who had indirectly put her in this position, unwittingly got her out of it.

  Prudence was sitting, one brilliant afternoon in early January, deep in a Song without Words. She played with or without Benjamin, he being not the only one her music had to persuade. It was long past the hour of his usual visit—a good sign, by and large; either he had found something better to do, or the drive from Weathersome hadn’t seemed worth the trouble. In any case, he didn’t need her, and wasn’t self-sufficiency the first step towards a normal friendship? How exasperating he had been, during Francis’s brief stay, by coming nevertheless to sit with her, daily!—until for once she had broken her resolution and gone over to eat with them both, out of sheer annoyance. Thank Heaven he was learning at last!

  The cook came to ask if six o’clock would be too early for dinner. Prudence shrugged; she was never hungry. Besides, the girl no doubt wanted to meet an admirer. Her mistress’s fingers had discovered a forgotten phrase, five descending notes, like the most tender leavetaking—had Benjamin only been there to hear it—when, as in a passage from Carmen where an incitement to guilty pleasure is thwarted by the far-off bugle sounding retreat, she heard the familiar horn of Mr. Tanning’s Triumph. It sent her hurrying to receive him, still smoothing her hair in the doorway, and wondering why she felt so little disappointment at the sight of him.

  He looked spruce as ever, with a gay tie, a daisy in his lapel. But something was troubling him. He downed the better part of a drink—from the bottle she permitted him to keep there, as if Canecrest were a sort of private club. The creak of his rocking chair defined a silence. Elsewhere Marlborough could be heard striking up a conversation with the cook. It had the momentary effect of setting an example for Mr. Tanning. “Everyone hates to admit he’s been a damn fool,” he began by way of a stab at sociability. But he couldn’t sustain it, he fell silent again.

  At last he sees! thought Prudence.

  She nowadays was letting conscience determine nearly all behavior, not just her own. Thus there had been a guilty look on the cook’s face when she’d asked about dinner, a look that, more than any certain knowledge, required that a lover be waiting for her under the dark boughs of Prudence’s fixed idea. As for the look on Benjamin’s face, it came to her in a flash—the poor man had fallen out of love and was embarrassed over how to break it to her! Wishing to make it easy for him, she smiled warmly, “It took a long time, didn’t it?” and could feel, like sun on her shoulders, Ned’s downward, approving gaze.

  “I just can’t believe it,” said Benjamin.

  “It’s all for the best,” she assured him. “You’ll see.” That Prudence took most particular pains not to gloat over her success was something of a pity, considering what followed. Never again did she enjoy such an opportunity for gloat
ing.

  She let the subject drop, knowing Benjamin would return to it soon enough. All their conversation tended to be episodic. He had become no more capable of prolonged attention to one topic than a dog of sustaining his master’s gaze. Unfinished business haunted their talk—questions he’d never answered, bits of information or messages she hadn’t remembered to give him, “Oh, and in Zinnia’s letter,” she said now, going back some ten days, “she asked me please to inquire what you wanted done with the bust.”

  “What bust?”

  “Yours. The one Zinnia did of you. The sculpture.” Prudence watched him uneasily. He might have been hearing of it for the first time.

  “Those sittings took a lot out of me,” he finally remarked.

  “Well, the bust is finished now. It’s cast and she says everyone thinks it lovely, but where do you want it delivered?”

  “What am I going to do with it?” Benjamin grumbled. “I thought Francis wanted it.”

  “He commissioned it, but he meant you to have it.”

  “Oh I see.”

  The discussion ended there. A week later, were Prudence to bring it up, he would most likely claim that he had explicitly directed her to have the bust sent out to the Cottage.

  Remembered from the eve of their trip to Boston, the not-quite-finished clay head had given out the essence of Benjamin. She wondered, though, how much resemblance would show now, since the change in him. This in itself was no fixed thing. Every few weeks, depending on the pills he took, his face would shrink or bloat up, a weary blankness settling there, his speech blurring or brightening. Then, following a transfusion, would come days of absolute gaiety. Prudence couldn’t any longer be sure of the real Benjamin—he had disappeared into a dozen illusory effects, like a maze of mirrors. If only she could ask somebody about it, a doctor or a minister. She had tried once to question Benjamin himself, choosing, however, one of his most exuberant days. He had asked what in the hell she was talking about.

  At times he, too, would speak of the change, but in terms so variable as not to enlighten her at all. He did so now, starting with a dull baffled sigh. “Prudence, I don’t have any more heart pain. I’ve had just three bad nights since I left the States. That’s wonderful, don’t you think?”

  “I do indeed!” she declared, not for the first time. “Dr. Samuels is a most brilliant man.”

  “Isn’t he!” agreed Benjamin. “Think of being free from pain, after ten solid years of suffering. He cares how I feel, too. By God, I think he’s the finest doctor I’ve ever known.” He looked up. “My father was a doctor. Did you know that?”

  “You’ve told me about him. He must have been a splendid man.”

  “He was. I used to ride in his buggy. The roads weren’t paved in those days—little country roads. My last attack was two months ago, Prudence. Do you remember?”

  Her throat contracted. It had been the day of Ned’s accident.

  Lifting his hand like a blind man, Benjamin let it softly explore his features, the forehead, the eyes, the puffy cheeks. “I don’t get the same fun out of life,” he produced at length.

  Prudence clasped her hands. “Ah, my dear—” she might risk calling him that, since henceforth they were to be friends; the phrase, furthermore, came so naturally—“my dear, we can’t expect fun every day of the week.” Her face tingled innocently with the pleasure of speaking from bitter recent experience.

  “Vinnie used to make remarks like that,” said Benjamin, “and for all I know, still does.”

  “Yes, she’s not the ordinary silly woman.”

  He seemed not to hear. “If I hadn’t been taking thyroid extract,” he informed her, “I’d have turned into a cretin. Did you know that? My mind would have stopped working, I’d probably not be much”—here he startled her by winking—“of a Casanova. See how puffy my face is? That means the dose needs adjusting. It’s no fun being dependent on pills and nurses. Nobody cares. I wish you’d known my mother. I just hate people to treat me like a damn fool.”

  There he was back, almost, where he had started on his arrival. Prudence leaned forward, with much to praise in his acceptance of her greater wisdom. “I can’t tell you how this eases my mind, Benjamin dear. How could I ever treat you as a fool?”

  He stared at her. “You couldn’t. That’s one reason I love you, Prudence.” The old man drained his glass, belched, and explained. “I’ve just come from Irene’s.”

  “Oh!” said Prudence, mortified. So their relationship hadn’t even been bothering him! She sank back, close to tears, and let him tell his story.

  He hadn’t met Irene face to face since the matter of the letters. They had talked on the telephone, Prudence knew, at least twice: first when Benjamin called to ask, politely, how soon she intended to give the letters back. Oh, she had protested, she meant to give them back at once, but there’d been an inconvenience, the rumor of a prowler in her neighborhood, so that all her valuables had been taken from the house and put in safekeeping. Where? In Kingston, at a certain bank. Their second conversation took place after Benjamin’s discovery, through a simple question put in the right quarter, that Irene had lied—she had nothing in that bank, not even money. So he called again. She was pleasant and cool, enough to make Prudence’s face burn, hearing about it. Benjamin felt he was expected to make a cash offer for the letters.

  This stunned him. For weeks he did nothing more about it. If he spoke of that second conversation it was in a tone of disbelief: could he have heard aright? Was it possible for such malice to lie behind all that tenderness? Prudence tried not to wonder precisely what tenderness of Irene’s he had in mind. Something kept her from pressing him for details. Not once did Benjamin see a connection between Irene’s vindictiveness and that of certain other women he had discarded.

  “I was greeted by the lady of the house,” he now began—and, depressed as he was, he couldn’t let “house” go by without a weary leer—“dressed in a big red beach towel and nothing else. She said her masseur had just left. I said that’s what she could tell her husband, but Irene didn’t laugh. She escorted me—oh, very formally—past a dinner-table set for at least twenty people. I’ll be damned if I know what fun she gets out of those big dinners. They knock me for a loop. The garden was looking like hell, too. She’s had freak winds all winter long, blowing soot from Ned’s molasses factory. It’s all over the chairs. We couldn’t sit down till the butler came with towels, buttoning up his uniform, I happened to notice.” Benjamin winked for what it was worth. “It sticks to the leaves. Irene said some days they can’t even swim, the soot lies so thick on the water. By damn!” he exclaimed, breaking into a great grin, “I wouldn’t put it past your sainted husband to have a hand in the whole business, would you?”

  Ned plaguing the Cheeks with soot? To her own dismay Prudence laughed, before glaring sadly off.

  “I won’t bore you with the whole story. I asked her for the letters. She said she didn’t have them. I told her she was lying. Do you know what she did? She looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘You always did have brains, Benji.’ It made me so mad I wanted to cry. I said something mean then. I reminded her of a trust-fund I’d set up in her name two years ago. I said it was still possible to revoke that. It wasn’t like me to do something like that, was it? I don’t know what I’m like any more, to tell the truth. My appetite’s no good. I feel sluggish and stupid. I don’t know …” He followed his tangent a step further. “All my heart pain has stopped ….”

  “Did you set up a trust-fund for Irene?”

  He gave her an unashamed look. “Yes, Prudence. And she’s still welcome to it. I don’t want the money. Charlie and Irene were very kind to me in the past. I can’t forget that.”

  Prudence lowered her eyes. How fine he was, how honorable! Did she truly expect to resist him? She made a motion towards the piano.

  “Before I left, Charlie came home. Irene had to dress, but asked why we didn’t sit there, the two of us, under the machineels wit
h the soot floating down. Maybe she was being funny. She said we ought to wait for the Green Flash, when the sun goes down. It’s famous. You can only see it in the Caribbean, she said.”

  “Also in the Indian Ocean,” Prudence added.

  “Oh, you’ve heard about it? Well, I didn’t know what she was trying to say. It made me mad. I was absolutely sure Charlie Cheek didn’t know the first God-damn thing about those letters. His father and I grew up together, went to Officers’ Training School together. And right then Irene made a long face and told him I’d come to ask for the letters back. Her own husband! He gave me the nicest smile you’ve ever seen, called me Cousin Ben, and said he hoped our little misunderstanding’ would be settled soon. Can you beat that? A woman with so little pride she could tell her husband a thing like that!” He gazed out the darkening window. “Enid always suspected Irene of mutilating her portrait. By God, I’ll just bet she did!”

  “Benjamin, dear—”

  “What’s in a woman like that? I wish you’d tell me if you know.”

  And yet, Prudence marveled, he wanted Irene to keep the trust-fund. How he must have blamed himself for the failure of their friendship!

  “Another thing,” said Benjamin. “She told me Orson Bishop had advised her to sell her shares of Bishop Petroleum. Now, I know that’s a damn lie. His own company! Furthermore, I gave her those securities. You’d expect her to have asked my advice, wouldn’t you? I don’t know what that kind of behavior means. It’s like cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

  Prudence, eyes downcast, frowned at his idiom. The moment, surely, had passed in which to look for returns from his philanthropy. While if what couldn’t be understood about Irene was no more than her giving up of a useful connection—! But an odd noise came from Benjamin. She looked up to see him stare about once, blankly. As if those last words had touched a spring, his puffed face appeared somehow to deflate. He brushed the drooping flower from his buttonhole. “It’s no good,” she thought she heard him mumble. Was he crying? Rather than have her watching, he made an effort and stood up.