Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  She rose herself, divining that he had put himself in mind of Francis. Francis! “Oh, Benjamin,” she said.

  Why hadn’t she seen? If he blamed himself for that, how she knew now what was in his heart!—and how blameless he was!

  Prudence drew herself erect. Her guilt was a different story. One day, a letter had been made public; the next day, Ned … Incapable of seriously viewing these two events as cause and effect—for Ned had known what Benjamin meant to her—Prudence all the same censured the friends who took the liberty of viewing them otherwise.

  To be at fault sustained her. She became an expert on innuendo. Xenia’s letter, though touching, carried impertinent overtones. The way Ned was spoken of, the hope expressed that the New Year would bring “all the happiness she deserved,” convicted Xenia of recommending the easy way out. Prudence had shrugged. It amounted, basically, to a defect of sensibility. She had seen it before among continental women—continental but themselves incontinent. Nevertheless, she slept badly.

  Waking one night, she had found her bedroom ablaze with—was it moonlight? No; the sugar cane was burning in a neighborhood field that had once belonged to the house. They hadn’t been offered a fair price, and so had ordered the crop destroyed. For a while at her window she had watched little figures, black against the conflagration, run back and forth, shouting, controlling it. When she turned it was to see her own room in a light so strange, so devastating, that everything, a mosquito asleep on a black dangling cord, chintz coming untacked from the wobbly vanity, the iron bedsteads painted pale blue, came at her as never before, neither beautiful nor ugly, common nor rare, but there. Fantastically, the whole room quivered under the nearby glare.

  Now, seeing her life, the way she spent these empty days, in the light of Benjamin’s unhappiness, she was left with an uneasy feeling. There were so many lights in which to look at things, sunlight, moonlight, Francis, Ned, Irene, tolerance, fear …. It was unthinkable that they should all flatter. Even more, that they should all condemn.

  “Oh, Benjamin!” she said again. He turned obediently.

  Grief was one thing, guilt another. She set out to prove to him that he wasn’t to blame for what Francis had done. How little it helped, at first! How little it helped her, in the weeks that followed, to practice what she’d made up her mind to preach! For a while it seemed to mean the death of her moral self; Prudence wasn’t ready for the lesson of her own innocence. But for Benjamin’s sake a beginning had to be made.

  She didn’t accept him the next time he proposed marriage. The time after that, however, in April, she did.

  19. On the first day of spring many thermometers approached zero. Though Jane had walked only from the corner she felt chilled to the bone. A buzzer let her in; she hurried for the door she supposed was his, but voices from behind it made her hesitate. It opened, however, without her knocking. “Come in, come in, how are you?” said Francis, kissing her numb cheek. “What’s this, ball gown and toothbrush? Put it down anywhere. Take off your coat. Well then,” he resumed in a bored voice, “I’ll expect a call from you before six-fifteen. Va bene?”

  “Are you talking to me?” squeaked Jane, whose eyes were still streaming from the cold outside. A watery cluster of crystal baubles lit the dim entrance. Presently she made out a fine old mirror doubling a profusion of magnolia leaves. She reached to stroke one; it grated dryly against her hand. Francis hadn’t perhaps caught her question. Where was he? His voice reached her:

  “Then it’s settled. You have your ticket. We’ll meet in the box. I particularly hope you won’t be late. And if by any chance you should get away in time to join us for dinner, don’t hesitate to call. Why not say you’ll call in any case? Hmm?”

  Someone replied with a brief murmur.

  “Oh, wait!” cried Francis, reappearing. “You said you had no black tie. Take one of mine!” He paused long enough to wink at Jane and gesture for her to have patience. “Marcello, come meet Jane!” he called over his shoulder as he vanished down a corridor she hadn’t noticed before. Turning, she saw in the mirror the reflection of a slender, lowering young man who an instant later rounded a corner to stand before her.

  “Hello, I’m Jane Massey.” She put out a hand. To her surprise he expertly kissed it, whispering a surname of which she could identify only the melody. “Ma Lei è italiano!” she concluded brightly.

  “I speak, however, English by preference.” His accent was good, but he’d looked taller in the mirror.

  “Have you been in America long?”

  “A few months only. I’m staying with friends uptown. I’m due there now,” and Marcello consulted a gold wristwatch, frowning to show it had been recently acquired. His pale gray suit, also, was not cut in the Italian style. “You seem cold,” he went on, intercepting Jane’s glance, his voice now tinged with irony. “You must let Francis brew you a cup of hot tea. His tea is extraordinary. It is bought in one special shop. How is your tea-shop called, Francis?” But Francis, who had joined them, was unsmiling.

  “Keep this.” He handed his friend a black bow-tie. “I have two others.”

  “Thank you, I shall be able to afford one of my own,” replied Marcello. “I borrow yours only because the day is too cold for shopping.”

  Francis winked at Jane a second time. “He’s trying to make an impression on you, my sweet. Ah well,” he sighed, his hand on the doorknob. “And you’ll phone about dinner?”

  Marcello kept silent.

  “The opera starts at eight-thirty, sharp. We’ll see you there in any event.”

  Jane, looking anywhere but at them, caught in the mirror a gleam from the Italian. Intended for her? He bowed to Francis, “Senz’ altro, mio signore,”—mimicking the servile phrase and intonation of a headwaiter. Until he’d left she didn’t trust herself to turn.

  “Marcello’s from Parma,” Francis said. He ushered her around the corner and up two steps. “Come into my parlor, do you like it? Downstairs,” he indicated a spiral stair across the wide room, “is the library—where you’ll be sleeping—also the kitchen, the dining-room, and a minute garden in ruins. If you ever run across an old weatherbeaten sphinx, wire me, won’t you? Like those in the Villa Sciarra. Well,” he said in the tone of one reverting to his main topic, “it appears the thing nowadays, to have an Italian friend. I said to myself, ‘Who are you not to follow suit?’ Let’s hope the others are less difficult than Marcello. Oh but Jane, something so unbelievable has come from this! Don’t let me tell you now, don’t let me spill it out. We’ll sit you down, we’ll give you a cup of very good China tea. The kettle’s singing already, with its breast against a thorn. Then, once you’re fortified, I’ll tell you all!” As he started down the stair Francis followed her gaze to a low lacquer table. “That’s a clue to the mystery,” he called, vanishing—“ever tried it?”

  What Jane saw wasn’t, as she might have supposed from his words, a rack of opium pipes, but a smooth wooden board on which had been printed the alphabet, the Arabic numerals, and the words YES and NO. At the top was the likeness of a female face, Oriental in spirit, lit from beneath: she peered down into a crystal ball wherein misty letters had materialized. They spelled OUIJA. So that was the secret, Jane smiled, put in mind of a widowed aunt who’d lifted tables, consulted mediums, and the like. Jane had never before seen a Ouija board.

  Scattered about, on the table, on the floor, as well as on the retour d’Egypte couch where Francis had motioned her to sit, lay pages of foolscap covered with childish characters. Of two chairs drawn up one was occupied by a mirror in the shape of a lyre. It sat, much like a person, erect and gleaming, surveying the high dim room.

  The room!—how on earth to take it in? Looking aloft for guidance, Jane saw a great brass chandelier, eighteen-branched, whose candles had burned to their last inch; a bit later, stroking the satin bolster, her hand encountered a congealed dribble of wax. Behind her, on the wall, hung a Flemish tapestry, all but the crimsons and greens faded to a dusty buff.
It depicted one of those big senseless scenes, the Marriage of Fame and Chastity, or whatever—since her marriage Jane had grown awfully vague about allegory. A harpsichord stood below, across whose painted case, cutting in half a settecento landscape, a length of peacock-blue brocade had been thrown. Upon this lay a tattered roll of music, an ivory flute, and some five or six lemons whose fragrance Jane captured by thinking hard about it. Many white petals, edged with brown, had drifted among these objects. The bare rose stalk leaned from a goblet; discolorations within the glass showed how full of water it once had been. The room astonished her—it aimed so high and had lapsed into such a negligence. She didn’t mean the witty disorder copied from Dutch painting; she meant the stains, the squashed, dusty cushions, the hearth strewn with cigarette butts and fragments of glass and china. Austrian blinds hanging the length of the tall windows let in a weak light, a … sorrowful light—Jane smiled to think how the word would sound in her next letter to Roger, and felt grateful all at once that he wasn’t there. She could hear him now, remarking on things, beginning to laugh as he felt more at ease. Worse, he would have started her laughing, when to Jane’s mind the room evoked feelings almost inexpressible. But Roger had no taste for the ambiguous.

  “As you see, it’s been days since the woman came to clean. I’d phone her if I knew her name,” said Francis, returning from below with the tea tray. A soiled white cat followed him. “My, what a treat to have you here! I hope you don’t take cream. So tell me, tell me,” he genially added as he handed her a blue-and-gold cup marked with a crown surmounting the letter M.

  “Would that be for Massey?” asked Jane, admiring it.

  “No, who—ah, tell me about Roger. He’s a soldier? An officer?”

  She hesitated. She knew her letter hadn’t gone astray, for he had telephoned at once, as though reminded of her for the first time in years. “You’re really alone in that wicked town? Look, you must come down here Saturday without fail, there’s to be a gala at the opera.” Then, when she objected that she couldn’t afford it: “Nonsense, I’ve plenty of room for you!” and the next day Jane received a check for her train fare. It brought back with a sweet pang their Italian travels. She stopped minding having had only a card or two from him since the dreadful night in August. He was her dear unpredictable Francis and she wanted to see him. Now, face to face with him, she tried to rephrase her letter, making it sound spontaneous and offhand. No, Roger’s training had barely begun. Friends had been pulling strings in hopes of getting him deferred, but had wangled no more than a few months’ delay. No one could say why he’d been called up now, married, his thesis near completion—it was the Army’s way. At present he would probably be up to his waist in mud, somewhere in Louisiana.

  “Are you planning to join him?” asked Francis absently.

  “In the mud?” Jane giggled. No, not till he had some permanent assignment. Who knew, with his languages he might be sent to Europe? In the meantime she was making all the money she could. She’d even begun taking in typing, to fill up her evenings.

  “But then you’re very lonely!” he exclaimed in surprise.

  How strange he was! “Of course I’m lonely!”

  “Apart from that, though,” said Francis, “all’s well with you?”

  “Apart from that,” Jane permitted herself a note of sarcasm, “I couldn’t be happier.” She wrinkled her nose over the teacup.

  Francis didn’t notice. One reason their talk hadn’t brought them closer was the fleeting look of disinterest, of having been interrupted, that kept crossing his face. As she watched he leaned forward, lifted a sheet of paper from the floor and held it loosely upside down, not to appear to be reading it. He was, however; Jane could see his eyes move under almost closed lids. He felt her glance, looked up. “Oh Jane, forgive me,” he said in real dismay. “But what’s happened has changed my whole life, and now—” Francis broke off, shaking his head and smiling in a new odd way that affected only half of his face. The cat, who had also been watching him closely, leaped into his lap. He drained his cup and began to tell her about it.

  “You understand,” he said, “I’ve never had the slightest interest in any of this rot. Whether the word comes from a medium or from the Mormon Temple or from the Pope himself, I’ve never in my life supposed that death brings anything but total annihilation. It’s always made me the least bit nervous to hear people talk about the ‘other world’ or the ‘life of the soul’—as if such phrases really had meaning. Once or twice before, I’d amused myself with this,” he nodded at the Ouija board, “but nothing came of it. It depends so much, you know, on who your partner is. Oh, I did once speak to a young German engineer, drowned in the Indian Ocean sixty years ago; and once, briefly, to someone who said he was Beau Brummell, but wouldn’t answer a single question. ‘Tut, tut, young man!’ was the most I could get from him. That class of spirit is so petulant, full of warnings and obscure directives, or given to repeating childish syllables until you want to throw the tea-cup across the room. In the light of what Meno has told me, those are the voices that merely echo one’s own subconscious preoccupations.” At the sound of a faint ringing Francis stiffened. “It’s nothing,” he said presently, “just the phone in the next apartment.”

  Jane was beginning to feel gooseflesh. “Go on,” she whispered. “Who is Meno?”

  “Our familiar—the spirit who first communicated with us, oh, some three weeks ago. We’d sat down casually one evening and were being bored to tears by a cretin named Patrick, a G.I. who’d recently burned to a crisp in a warehouse, when all at once the cup began to move so firmly, so swiftly—”

  “Without your touching it?”

  “No, no, of course one has to touch it ….” He floundered for an instant, having lost contact with his own excitement. “And out came these messages. We could hardly get them on paper—long, splendidly formed sentences. Well, judge for yourself!” Francis reached past Jane to draw from under the papers that littered the couch a notebook bound in limp red leather. “I’ve transcribed it all here, along with our questions,” he said, flipping through what she estimated to be some fifty pages of fine script. How much time it must have taken him! “Here, for instance, Meno sketches in his family background: My father,” Francis read aloud, “was a highly educated slave from Rhodes, whom Tiberius took to Judea, there accidentally exposing him to the teachings of a 12-year-old child. Who was that? We asked. Christ. But for him I should have had a brother. He drove my father from my mother’s bed. Christ did? Yes. How old were you then? An infant. When did you die? In 38 according to your calendar. I was put to death by Caligula for having loved his sister Drusilla. Did she love you? O yes. We were secretly married. We met often in an underwater cave, luminous and blue. You mean the Blue Grotto? Of course. It wasn’t till then,” said Francis, looking up, “that I remembered Tiberius kept his court on Capri. Then Meno asked: That island we were prisoners on, is it still beautiful? We told him it was, mentioned the scenery, the tourists. He kept saying Ah! as if terribly pleased. Well, I shan’t read the whole record, but he goes on and on. Oh, it’s very charming right here,” Francis said, stopping at a later page, “about Drusilla: I was given her as a slave. We swam together in that blue water. I showed her shells and she looked at them. This was the first lesson in love. Her first lesson? Hers and mine. Was she younger? 5 years. Poor sweet ruined Drusilla. Why ruined? Caligula made love to her. It was not his fault. His mother had done the same to him, giving him Spanish powder before her ladies. She said, ‘What the Emperor enjoys, so shall I.’ Meaning Tiberius? Of course. Some say this caused Caligula’s epilepsy.”

  “Mercy!” breathed Jane, thinking what Council Bluffs would say to such a story. On sitting down with Francis she had been startled by certain changes in his appearance—his heaviness, the faint weblike lines at the corners of his eyes. These now seemed trifling next to the changes implied by his new preoccupation. Did he mean her to believe all that?

  “And, my dear, the o
rgies that went on—six or seven people of any age or sex in a bath of warm perfumed oil, followed by one of cold white wine! Marcello couldn’t hear enough about those.”

  “Marcello does this with you?”

  “Yes, of course.” Francis stared at her as though it were something she ought to have understood from the beginning.

  “Well,” Jane asked after a moment, “have you checked what he tells you? Is it historically true?”

  “I haven’t checked, no. I’d say offhand, if there were any discrepancy, it would be on the part of history.”

  Jane gulped. Was he serious?

  “Meno has hinted that history’s very shaky. What’s more,” Francis lowered his voice confidentially, “he gets a little put out if we try to test him. Once I asked, was there any way of seeing him? The answer came in one word: Die. But then he said if each of us would sit back to back holding mirrors he’d be able to see us. So there we were, Marcello with the big hall mirror in his lap, I with this one.” Francis smiled into the lyre-shaped mirror across from them. “At first we were laughing like idiots, then something went wrong. I felt seasick from so many reflections rocking back and forth. Marcello thought he saw a third figure in the room. Later Meno told us he’d seen himself for the first time in nearly two centuries. Then it had been in the mirrors at Versailles. He was the rage there for several seasons. What do you look like?” read Francis, finding the place. “As I did at. A beautiful youth. What color are your eyes? Gold brown. A poem to me began—no, you have no Latin. I will supply a French translation:

  ‘Chat d’or,

  Tigre que j’adore,

  Imprisonné au cæur impérial …’

  The rest is really too risqué. Still, we draw up a mirror for Meno whenever we can. He loves that. He saw me drinking milk once, and called me a peasant. But calmad,” he said, for Jane had glanced apprehensively towards the mirror, “it’s only when both Marcello and I are in view that he’s able to watch. Heavens, what time is it?”