Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  “Not quite five.”

  “Does this interest you?”

  By then Jane wasn’t sure, and said so. “I don’t see,” she tried to explain, “how it helps those of us who’re still living.”

  “My God!” cried Francis. “It does everything! Listen: there is another world. Each of us here on earth is looked after, cared for by an individual spirit, a patron as Meno calls it. Think how much this changes! Our lives are not ends but means! The soul begins as an insect, an animal, pig, dog, cat. The cat sees in the dark, sits on the wall, waiting to become human. The soul does become human at last, is helped through one incarnation after another until found worthy of the first of the other world’s nine stages. Once that happens, the patron moves to a higher stage, and you become a patron!” He was standing up now, the cat displaced, clasping and unclasping his hands. “Far below on earth a tiny savage soul is born, in Naples or the Brazilian jungle. It is yours to care for and lead towards wisdom. Meno has told me all this. He’s told me about everybody, who their patrons are, how many lives they’ve had. Your patron, for instance, is Pilar Mendoza, dead in Granada in. You were first born, I seem to recall, in, and have had some forty incarnations since then—usually dying in infancy because, your patrons tells Meno, you do not take to life. But there’s hope. One or two more lives may release you from earth. My father has many lives ahead of him. Vinnie’s patron complains that she has stubbornly refused to advance herself for the last three hundred years. Xenia, on the other hand—”

  “What about you?” interposed Jane. “Is Meno your patron?”

  “Not at all. Meno is Patrick’s patron,” he said with decision.

  “Patrick?”

  “Don’t you remember? The boy we first talked to, who was burned to death?” Francis reached for his notebook and read: “He is of a weak if not animal mentality which will not soon be allowed release. Did you know, by the way,” Francis broke off, “that Xenia’s having a baby?”

  “Why no!” cried Jane, flabbergasted.

  “Well, she is, sometime in June.” But he didn’t enlarge upon the topic, reverting instead to her earlier question. “My patron is a Hindu mystic with an unpronounceable name. My present incarnation is my twelfth and last.” With these words an involuntary half-smile flickered across Francis’s face. It occurred to her that the spirits had made a snob of him.

  “Your last?” she echoed.

  “Yes. I shall be going to Stage One.” He walked away.

  “And you believe that?”

  Francis struck a note on the harpischord. A tone, dry and vital, sang through the air, surprising Jane, who hadn’t supposed so elegant an instrument to be in working order. When he turned back, the smile embraced many things. “I believe all of it,” he replied. “I’ve even given up my analyst. I tell you, this other world is real!”

  She couldn’t doubt it; his face shone, his voice rang clear and full of life. Gone were its mute stranglings and cold monotone whereby, in proportion to the seriousness of his talk, Francis had often struck Jane as disclaiming responsibility for anything he might happen to say. Now, clearly, he had dumped the whole burden in Meno’s lap. It left him free to snap his fingers blithely at history, at human reason. “Things that once upset me dreadfully,” he was telling her, “simply don’t concern me any more. Furniture, for instance. Look at this room. I’ve spent thousands of dollars. There was to have been something magical in fine old things, that would have helped me be. Now, I could give them all away, and probably shall. You never had a wedding present from me, did you? Pick out whatever you like—I mean it.” He took her hand. “I feel warmly towards people for the first time in my life. I need no defenses. I’m like a philosopher in his bath; all the hatred, all the fear has been let out of me, as by an opened vein, painlessly. Sometimes,” Francis laughed, letting go her hand, “I don’t even know what I’m saying, I who used to weigh every word! Remember our talk? It’s happened, Jane, I’m afloat! I can’t imagine fearing death. I can’t imagine wanting anything—what I’ve been given’s enough. Listen!”

  The telephone was ringing; he rushed into the hall. “Oh, Xenia—” Jane heard him say, his voice suddenly listless.

  She set about powdering her nose, using her own small mirror in preference to the one in front of her. It embarrassed her not to be sharing his excitement. What had he meant by their talk in Cambridge? Who had been afloat—himself? Herself?—and what did being afloat mean? She felt dull, confused, open to the perils of talking or thinking metaphorically. For relief she got to her feet, wandered out of the mirror’s range, his voice only a murmur from the hall. At the window Jane held aside the blind and gazed down into his garden: dead ivy and dirty snow the unseasonable cold wouldn’t let melt. Francis, Francis, she sighed. She had loved him, loved him still, but hadn’t foreseen his garden bringing tears to her eyes. Tears? Not quite; a sting, a tiny smart. That would have to do for the present. Already, from the hall, Jane could hear Francis shift into the mode of farewells. He would come back in; there would be more talk, drinks, changing of clothes, dinner, a taxi …. If honest-to-goodness-weeping lay in store for her, and Jane couldn’t at all be certain that it did, the long evening had first to be lived through. Poor me, she thought, marveling at a world—had it once been her own?—where the heart had time for its troubles and joys, where importunate feelings were cradled to sleep like children; you could look down on them sweetly breathing, with tears or smiles upon their faces.

  Francis returned depressed, the cat in his arms.

  “That was Xenia. I’d called her earlier, you see, when there was still a question—” Breaking off enigmatically, he suggested they have drinks. When he had brought them he started in on Meno again, but in a tired, matter-of-fact voice. “You see, he told us last night that Patrick is ready to be reborn. What happens at that point is that Meno, as patron, looks about for a mother five to seven months along. To his ears she makes the sound of a cow mooing, then he knows she’s ripe. He slips the little soul into her womb, and ecco! there’s your reincarnation. Well, it was late, we were worn out. I didn’t think of Xenia till this afternoon. It seemed so right! Not that, at her age, she mightn’t be a vile mother, but I mean, I’d always be around to keep an eye on the child. Now doesn’t that sound logical to you?”

  Jane widened her eyes and wrinkled her brow. Was she being dense? Ought she to know who had fathered the child? Not, surely, Mr. Tanning! But the old man on the subject of Xenia spoke in her memory—“like eating goose or venison,” had been his phrase. This interesting suspicion kept Jane from making more of her curiosity.

  “Well, whether it does or not,” said Francis, pouting, “it did to me. But Marcello was furious. I had to beg him particularly to come. He’d planned something else after lunch. You see how it is. He’s been in New York long enough to pick and choose. All of a sudden he has scores of ‘charming friends.’ Don’t ask me where he meets them. I could count on one hand the number of charming people I know. And I’m yet to meet any of his—but enough of that!” Francis began to laugh, “I daresay he’s ashamed of them, they’re probably not charming in the least! How would he know?” Francis shook with the amusement of it—how like his father he was—then, controlling himself: “Marcello adores Xenia, that’s the point. He says I’m arranging for her to bear a weak-minded child—when it’s obvious, if once Patrick’s born into a decent environment, he won’t be weak-minded. But Marcello says it’s all a stupid joke and he’s sick of it. What can I do? Being Italian and Catholic, he doesn’t think. You saw the face he was making. I’d been reasoning with him for an hour.”

  Jane cast about for something soothing. “Perhaps he’ll come round,” she said.

  “Perhaps. But it struck me just now—what if he doesn’t come round, what if I’m never able to get through to Meno again?”

  Twilight had fallen. The cat stirred in his lap. “Darling Pussy,” he said, staring intently into its face, “soon you’re going to turn into a person. You�
��re going to bear the burden of abstract thought!” The cat looked away in alarm, squirmed, escaped his grasp and scuttled into the hall. Francis lit a few candles, his eyes glittering.

  “What if Xenia’s child already has a soul?” said Jane.

  Well then, of course, he replied tonelessly, it wouldn’t matter. They sipped their drinks in silence. Somewhere a clock coughed and struck six. “Jane,” he said, “we’ll dress in a minute, and I promise not to say another word on the subject. But would you try it with me? For a little while only? Perhaps it would work between us, so that it wouldn’t have to be always with Marcello. I need to find that out, so if …” His voice trailed off. He was looking at her so shyly, as if honestly expecting her to refuse. Why, he was a child!

  They composed themselves now in an ambiguous light, partly that of the candles, partly the last cold glow of the March afternoon. Francis with a napkin wiped Jane’s teacup dry and placed it upside down on the board. “These are my last two cups,” he told her without regret. “Meno has broken the others.” Jane recognized their fragments on the hearth; it seemed that nothing was too good for Meno. Following Francis’s instructions, she rested three fingers gingerly on the bottom of the cup. She watched him send one slow look into the mirror, as though gazing once about a room before switching off the light; he then closed his eyes.

  “First I call his number,” Francis whispered. “Eight-five-seven, eight-five-seven … Meno, are you there? We want to speak to you, Jane and I … are you there?” The cup quivered once. “Yes, yes!” he exclaimed. “Go on! Meno, was that you?” Jane feared, but didn’t say so, that she alone had made the cup move. Already the unfamiliar position of her arm, balanced limply forward, the wrist lax, in the manner (she supposed) of some great keyboard artist, had started a dull ache in her shoulder. She wanted to change hands, but shrank from asking Francis if she might, he’d grown so eloquent. “Meno, Meno,” he was begging, “we are here, we are waiting, come to us!… Can you see us? Can you hear us?… It is of the greatest importance that you give some sign. We may otherwise never again communicate!… Meno, there’s so much you haven’t told me, so many ways you can help me …. Come, speak! if not for my sake, for Patrick’s … Can you hear? Listen, I can help you, I’ve thought of a mother for Patrick!…” In this way Francis talked on, a suppliant. He gave Xenia’s name, he even apologized for her age. He promised extravagantly to look after the child. The cup remained motionless. “It’s no good,” he finally shrugged, letting his hand fall into his lap. “There’s nobody there.”

  Jane massaged her shoulder. She felt a kind of choking sadness, as though her whole neighborhood had migrated to Mars, leaving her behind to prowl the empty streets and abandoned rooms. Love, faith, truth—the words hung in curling tatters like so much wallpaper, wherever life had been lived. She looked wistfully at Francis, his face flushed but remote, a planet swimming through veils of haze; she was hard put to imagine the life that would go on there.

  “Let’s try one last time,” he said calmly enough, “and then we’ll dress. If Meno cannot reach us, another spirit possibly can, who would convey my message to him.” Each placed a hand on the cup. “Is anybody there?” asked Francis. “We want so much to make contact with anybody …. Please!… Is anybody there?”

  Presently, to Jane’s amazement, the cup began a tentative circling of the board. Could Francis be moving it? For a split second she let her fingers slip off the cool china; it stopped dead. He looked up, startled. Then, her touch restored, the cup started to move as before. “Who is there?” whispered Francis. His pencil hovered above a blank sheet of paper.

  The cup wavered towards the letter A.

  “A,” he nodded encouragingly, jotting it down. “Go on, A, what else? Tell us your name ….”

  An abrupt swerve left the cup-handle pointing to M.

  “A, M, very good … That spells am… Who am you?” he joked gaily with an upward roll of his eyes. “Amos? Amazon? American?” He had come alive, like a coal breathed upon. How easily the spirits might have taken pity on him!

  Instead, the cup returned to A, then to M, initiating a languorous motion back and forth between the two letters. Amamamamamama, the unknown visitor mused, leaving some doubt, in Jane’s mind at least, as to whether it was asserting its identity or crying for its mother. Francis stood up in disgust.

  “This happens now and then,” he said. “You get a meaningless syllable repeated over and over, you can only suppose by an infant or an idiot. There’s no point in going on. We seem unable to set the right waves in motion.” As he blew out the candles gouts of wax spattered onto the board, the papers, the lacquer table; Jane thought of scalding tears. In the gloom he asked if it was after six. It was? “Come then, I’ll lead you downstairs. Do you feel like another drink to help you change?”

  “No, I don’t, somehow, thank you.”

  “Nor do I, if one’s to hear the music. Wait!” Francis switched on a light, smiled guiltily and darted into the hall. She heard him dial a number. When after a minute’s silence he returned, his face was without expression. Jane couldn’t look at it. He was carrying her suitcase. She followed him down the winding iron stair.

  20. They dined within walking distance of the opera, in a miserable Italian restaurant, all sawdust and photographs. With the result that, having eaten little and talked less, they were among the first arrivals to pause, shivering, under the brilliant marquee. Première, the signs announced in red letters, and: ORPHEUS, a new opera by Thomas Utter. “Do you know him?” asked Jane when her teeth stopped chattering. Francis sniffed by way of reply, his glance moving about the lobby. They mounted the red stair in silence, to where a gray-haired maid unlocked the door of their box. Francis bowed for Jane to go in first. She thought she had never felt such cold, such desolation. The door behind them swung gently shut.

  Taking a front chair, she pretended that he hadn’t entered with her, that she had been left alone while Francis hurried off into the recesses of his life. Would it now begin, as in the past, the spell of strangeness initiated by his vanishings?—while she just sat and watched, from a café in the Piazza del Popólo, from a sheeted window in Cambridge, at noon or at midnight; the place and time never mattered. His footsteps would ring loud on stone. She would be shivering, she would want to cry. As for the shock with which the strangeness came to an end, if indeed it ever did, it wouldn’t be for Jane to question it: the shock not so much of Roger at the pier as of her own tear-filled eyes, her willingness to marry him then and there, the shock of a positive indifference to Francis; the shock, as well, of the doctor’s voice, that later day, over the office phone, “Mrs. Massey … a very tragic thing … if you could shed light …” until of course, under her questioning, out came the whole story of what Francis had done. She had kept cool. Walking home beneath the fiery green leaves of Cambridge, she had held her head high, meeting the eye of bird and squirrel and passer-by with gentle wonder. “Something had died inside of me,” she kept saying to soothe herself. In an hour beyond her control she even said it to Roger. He had taken her in his arms then, murmuring, “Are you sure? Mightn’t something have come to life, instead?” She remembered the smile on his face—that of his own relaxed possessiveness, a reflex of ease now that he had no rival. How primitive he was! she had thought with an interest that shocked and angered her. She had known Roger so many years, she hated to admit his power to mystify her.

  Slowly the house filled with people. Back from Mars. It warmed Jane, the sight and sound of them. She undid her black coat, let it slip from her shoulders, forgetting how sallow she’d grown during a sunless winter, forgetting also the wrinkles in the dress she had stupidly not hung up at Francis’s. It was a strange yellow dress from a thrift shop, made over, with shoes covered in what had been its train. To get away with it called for more animation than Jane had felt up to now. But the dry stale air was working on her like smelling-salts. From the pit a clarinet let out a wonderful high laugh. Soon the orchestra rocke
d with scales and trumpet-calls. She let her hand rest on the worn plush, her eyes glazing over. In her imagination she turned gradually beautiful. She looked around to see what Francis would say.

  He was not in the box.

  Well then, she was thinking, let it begin, the strangeness—when the door opened. He was back, his coat over one arm. “I’m going downstairs to wait. I must speak to Marcello as soon as he arrives.” He looked away. “Jane, I—” She instantly put out a hand. “Lest you suppose me utterly out of my mind,” continued Francis, grasping it, “I must tell you that I am the father of Xenia’s child. Does that explain a few of my concerns? She’ll join you here—Xenia—after the curtain goes up. Tell her you know. It’s been kept secret, by and large, for reasons she’ll make clear enough. Bear with me, my dear, and forgive me.” He left the box, not before placing in Jane’s hair a kiss, upon which lights throughout the theater dwindled to amber simmerings. The gold curtain swelled, the conductor acknowledged some sparse applause.

  The opera began.

  From the first, suffering was taken for granted. A suave overture brought to mind less the enormity of Orpheus’s loss than the miracle of his charm by which all things—even, it would shortly appear, the impassive dead—were drawn to him. Whatever his mourning for Eurydice, by the time the curtain swung apart, it had given way to the lively prospect of his search for her. The tenor sat at his desk in dungarees and shirtsleeves, first alone for a brief aria, then with the angel, a buxom aviatrix, peering over her shoulder. She (Mme Stempel-Ross) unrolled maps, consulted weather bulletins, and made of her findings a florid, Handelian report. From this she went on, above the burden of his gratitude, to equip him for his travels. She summoned dancing sprites out of the wings; they bore snowshoes, a pith helmet, a life preserver, a coil of rope. Finally, offering him a small package, she explained that here were extra strings for his instrument: