Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  “We have a real companionship, don’t we?” Larry cracked his knuckles. “We can talk things over with you—”

  “—in a friendly, natural way—”

  “Not like most parents. Love’s an investment, Lily, which your mother and I feel has been repaid, in your case, a thousand percent.”

  Lily’s head was reeling. The Virgin gazed sweetly from the table, forgiving them all. But Lily found that she cared not very much for Jesus’ mother, and immeasurably for her own. Nothing made of plaster was adequate to patch up a real difference between people. The Virgin’s blue robe, aglitter with the hilts of no knives, didn’t keep Lily from hearing the rip of canvas, her own breathing, her mother’s hurt voice afterwards.

  She had no choice. It was dreadful, only the exact truth would help.

  “Mummy,” she said hours later into Enid’s ear, when she came to tuck her in, “I was the one who did that to your portrait.” There! Lily fell back on her pillow, weak with the effort it had cost her.

  She’d had two glasses of white wine at Ranieri’s, a place full of atmosphere. She’d kissed her father goodnight, screaming as he pinched a fold of innocent fat through her seersucker pajamas—“Goodnight, my little oyster!”—and giggling at his admonition not to dream of the Pope. Then to bed, waiting, listening, their talk muffled by the thin wall. “Alice … church … fuss …” her mother murmured. “Rot … God’s name … money …” he replied. Lily tried to hear more, but the room had begun to hum, to quiver like a compartment in a train hurrying you towards a place you’d never seen. A light widened on the wall, then narrowed and went out with a click. Her mother had entered, closed the door behind her, maybe knowing all along what had to happen.

  The words uttered, Lily’s responsibility came to an end. She fell back on the pillow. Whatever followed wouldn’t be her doing. In a dull curiosity she watched Enid sink to her knees beside the bed. “Oh sweetie!” she cried, and made a soft crooning noise, while over the child’s skin sleepiness crept, strange, slow, a tide of honey. It turned out that her mother did know, had known from the very day.

  “I know, I’ve known from the day it happened,” she breathed, stroking Lily’s forehead and cheek. “I found out, I couldn’t help it—Michèle had seen you leaving the Cottage ….”

  “Then you lied,” murmured Lily wearily, unable to cope with the tenderness in her mother’s voice, speaking her words of a few hours before. She felt part of herself tremble, break into tears, but the rest of her, from some vast distance, watched, caught in that paralyzing sweetness.

  “Yes, I lied. Baby, don’t cry! Nobody else knows! Michèle didn’t suspect—don’t! I’m crying too!” she laughed, her voice high and squeaky with love. “Think of your old lady’s predicament! She didn’t want to say anything about it until you did!”

  Lily’s eyes closed. She needed to be told whether it was bliss or pain she felt. What did her mother feel, laughing and crying both at once? Whatever its name, the feeling was strong enough to put you to sleep.

  An hour seemed to pass. The high soothing whisper continued:

  “You see, my pearl, your Mummy really loves you. She hasn’t felt close to you this last year. It’s no fun when two little friends can’t tell each other their little problems, is it?”

  Lily had stopped crying. Her mother’s dress, where she had hid her face a while before, was still damp with tears.

  “And nobody your Mummy knows is as sweet and attractive as her oldest daughter!”

  “Not even Daddy?” asked Lily, opening her eyes.

  Enid put a finger to her lips. “I thought this was our secret,” she said, misunderstanding the question. Later, when Lily lifted a hand out of her trance to smooth back a wisp from her brow, her mother winced.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. Well, nothing really …” She touched the top of her head experimentally.

  Lily yawned in spite of herself. She knew the signs, but she was so tired. “It’s the first since the baby came? Will they start again now?”

  Enid looked at her fingers, as if expecting to find them smeared with blood. “Yes,” she said, her voice gay and young, a giggle almost. “I guess I’ll have to have another, won’t I? Our little friends seem to be the only cure for the old headaches!”

  Lily gave in, let her eyes close again. She couldn’t help it, she was exhausted. Once, startled, she felt Enid’s kiss, then heard the quiet opening and shutting of the door. The little girl lay for hours, waking, sleeping, the receding din of Rome in her ears. Like the sun and the moon, feelings of love and fear rose shining above her, faded, set, returned. Nothing seemed right or even reasonable. All night Lily had vivid, bewildering dreams. They rose up like flowers out of her closed eyes. For days she hesitated to admit how happy she really was.

  22. And Francis was happy, too. Skidding sharply on a curve, he saw his mother bite her lip, and knew that he had frightened her. It made him want to laugh—he was never alarmed by other people’s driving, why should she be? As the road straightened, wind buffeted his head from all directions. Trees flew past, not yet burdened by the stifling green of midsummer. His lopsided smile of the past months had mended; even his teeth seemed straighter. He was taking Vinnie to the Cottage.

  Earlier that day, over lunch, he had been talking with Matilda Gresham about their revolts. It was a stimulating hour. The Stage Door Grill echoed with their mutual admiration. “You’ve carried it so much further than I,” he’d told her. “Why, you go months at a time without even seeing Boopsie.”

  “Yes,” said Matilda, “but that’s such a negative way out. I mean, I could never hug the bear the way you do.”

  Hugging the bear! He felt warmly towards the big clumsy girl in dungarees, who had seen him as a hero. He wanted to have given her more than beer and chow mein on Eighth Street. But she was caught up in a Clyde Fitch festival, her time wasn’t her own; things fell apart backstage without Matilda. She expected a week off in August. “I’ll go out there,” she said, crunching Francis’s hand. “It’ll help if you’re still around.”

  He had formally moved to the Cottage the previous week, for the summer. His old room was filled with roses. On the dresser he arranged photographs of Xenia, of Jane, of his mother. Natalie was already installed at the main house. But something was missing. No sooner was Francis settled than he returned inspired to town, where he kept after Vinnie until she agreed to drive out with him, in his new convertible, for the christening of—well, whatever Enid’s child was to her. An ex-step grandson? The relation, if any, didn’t call for Vinnie’s presence at the ceremony. She had made this objection, and many another, which Francis met with laughter. “Nonsense!” he urged. “Where’s the harm? Prudence loves you, Enid loves you! You needn’t meet Harriet and you won’t see Fern. You’ll stay at the Inn and I’ll drive you back Monday. So come along! Be a sport!” Prevailing at last, he had hugged her out of happiness.

  Francis had begun to feel a new tentativeness in his mother, a puzzled, passive air, an air, indeed, of asking to be taken advantage of. It only added to his high spirits. She had followed the doorman out to the curb, her face stark, unpainted. One look at the low open car and she covered her hair with a scarf of gray and brown chiffon, tightening it under her chin. Francis kissed her, and away they went. Grime from the river settled upon Vinnie’s white face; her hands, however, did not leave her lap. Once or twice, seeing that they were clenched, he smiled to calculate the satisfactions in store for her.

  One winter day she had said, “I wait for you to tell me things.” So, as they headed over the bridge, he mentioned having seen Matilda.

  “Is that Boopsie’s child? What’s she doing?”

  He told her; or rather, invented a Matilda twenty pounds lighter, wearing a fresh denim dress, with clean hair—like one of the daughters of Vinnie’s Savannah friends, up North for a “year” in a woman’s hotel, an interesting job, the shops and the shows. Francis talked fluently until his mother had
relaxed enough to risk a more personal question:

  “Will someone be in your apartment this summer?”

  “No.”

  “I just hope you take care of your lovely things.”

  He reassured her.

  “Who’s keeping your cat?”

  “It died.”

  She made no comment, having always loathed cats. But he felt her shift somewhat toward him in her seat. Everything would be all right. Even when the car skidded, and she bit her lip, Francis only smiled, hugely relishing his role.

  By then they were in full country, under an egg-white sky he remembered from every summer of his growing up. In another hour the first windmills would begin, and the potato fields stretching, so flat as to appear concave, towards the far-off sparkle of pond or ocean. There would be time for a swim that afternoon. Ah, the summer was really under way! People he knew were already in Europe, among them Jane and Roger, who, by a great stroke of luck, had been stationed in Germany; Marcello, also, bound for Greece—or so Francis gathered from certain friends, their own friendship having cooled. His blessing followed each traveler. For himself, he was content to stay behind, hugging the bear.

  As for Vinnie’s nervousness, he had to smile at it. She might have been a child headed for her first summer at camp, white-faced and tense. “I don’t want to go out there, Francis,” she had insisted. “I have nothing to say to those people. I have no part in that life.” Of course she didn’t! Why should she, after fourteen years? But let her wait a bit, give the place time to work on her. Meanwhile, Francis trusted his own happiness would put her at ease. Impulsively he squeezed her elbow, but Vinnie withdrew.

  “I’d keep both hands on the wheel,” she said in a dry whisper.

  He felt some fleeting impatience now—as if accidents happened in their world! Then he understood; she saw herself at his mercy. Vinnie would never have feared a stranger at the wheel. But to Francis her imagination had granted the power of destroying her. Slowing down indulgently—he had been going over seventy—he smiled at her with tenderness and love. “Has the cat got your tongue?” he said presently, as a joke. The Cottage drew nearer and nearer.

  Francis found it empty; at least there were no other cars out front. He had left his mother at the Inn to rest and change, had changed quickly himself, passing through the house on his way to the beach. The murmur of maids reached him from the basement. In the little pantry where Xenia had worked, stacks of china stood in readiness for tomorrow’s christening luncheon, which had been planned to precede Lily’s birthday party.

  “Hello?” he called once, softly. “I’m back!” He expected no answer, but took pleasure in announcing the fact.

  Again and again, since returning to the Cottage, Francis had been stirred by a sense of arrival, to which the place itself just wasn’t adequate. Even with the ocean room newly covered and curtained in Enid’s red damask from Rome (like Christmas at St. Peter’s) it couldn’t absorb all that he felt for it. This welled up, overflowed, till Francis came to wonder if he hadn’t arrived in quite a different place, one that the visible house, with its lacquers and lawns, gave no clue to. What is this place really? He wondered as he ambled, where am I? And he peeked through a door ajar as if to catch himself there beyond it, in his father’s study.

  To his surprise he saw Lily on the window-seat, gazing out to sea.

  Francis hesitated, nearly retreated, expecting to hear Benjamin’s voice take up some lecture or reminiscence, so vividly the child’s posture brought back the submissiveness with which he had listened, at ten. But no voice spoke. Little Lily, he thought with an uprush of tender affection, alone on the eve of her birthday, dreaming about the world and time. In a queer revulsion—for he had caught himself too often of late smiling over inanities, winking back tears like a grandmother—he crossed the threshold.

  “Hello, child. Is Grandpa here?”

  She started. “Oh! No, Grandpa’s over at Fern’s.”

  “Ah, to be sure.” Francis grinned. He had been working on Fern all spring, and finally she had asked the Monster over for a drink. He guessed now that she couldn’t have done this earlier, in the New York house which was part of her settlement. Another part, the place in Hobe Sound, Fern had decided to sell. It was so out of the way.

  “Why do you call Grandpa Grandpa?” asked Lily.

  “Because that’s what he is.” Francis perched on the edge of the desk, still grinning. He toyed with a silver paper-knife. His niece looked sad and he thought he knew why. “We grow up too quickly, Lily, don’t you agree?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, I did.” Francis laughed. “Are you so very happy?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She had to think. “I’m too little to have a permanent. Mummy says wait till I’m twelve.”

  “Then you’ll be happy?”

  “Then I’ll be very happy. I’m happy enough now.”

  “So am I,” he hastened to agree. “My point was simply that time goes so fast.” His eye had fallen upon a photograph of himself holding a blacksnake at a certain distance. Vinnie had snapped it, how many years ago? He retained an impression of the snake’s squirming body, its blind blue eyes. “A year ago today,” Francis went on, “I was in Rome, not even thinking of coming home.” Then, in order not to keep talking about himself: “What were you doing a year ago today?”

  “I don’t remember. Nothing special.”

  “Oh come!” he coaxed. “The day before your birthday? One always remembers that.”

  The child gave a little stage yawn. “Well, I don’t,” she said, casting in spite of herself a rapid glance elsewhere, as if for reassurance. So that Francis, instead of shrugging and letting the matter drop, looked up with her to see the portrait of Enid above the mantel. Restored, refinished, beautiful, it showed no trace of the damage done to it. That lay in Enid’s mind, and in the mind of whoever had struck the blow. His own mind, then, sustained an idea that astonished him. The paper-knife fell from his hands. Words uttered long ago sounded in his ear: “The next day was Lily’s birthday ….” Also: ’Tis the eye of childhood That fears a painted devil…

  Her face gave it all away.

  “No, wait, Lily,” began Francis, rising to block her way out. He felt unbearable concern for the little girl caught in the toils of her guilt, to what degree he could well imagine! He saw her paralyzed by her deed, as by a constrictor. Lily, Lily! She was staring at the carpet, a panicked smile on her face as she waited, he knew, for nothing less than the blacking out of consciousness.

  What he had to do was somehow to set her free—but lightly, deftly, harming not a hair of her head. Francis saw himself uniquely fitted to accomplish this, a Perseus hovering before the maiden.

  “Oh Lily, how well I know what’s in your heart,” he began, “but I also know how much more terrible it seems to you than it actually is. People are constantly making that mistake. The truth is, nobody’s hurt but oneself. Look! you can see no harm’s been done! The picture’s back in its place, lovelier than ever. That’s one reason we keep pictures, isn’t it?”—Francis was quoting his erstwhile analyst—“in order to use up feelings of love or of anger that we’d never dare show to the person’s face. Look! see how easy it is!” Inspired, Francis took up the photograph of himself grappling with the snake and, removing it from its frame, tore it lovingly into little pieces. The child’s lips parted. “You see?” he finished. “The picture’s gone, but I’m still here, I haven’t been hurt by what I did, and,” his mouth had grown very dry, “you mustn’t be either, dear Lily. It doesn’t matter. Please believe me!”

  Lily was speechless, but no longer tense. It had worked.

  “Now,” he assured her, “I’ll never speak of this again. To anyone. There’s no reason for anyone to know, is there?”

  Her eyes met his in innocent perplexity, as if it were now his turn to be left off gently. “That’s what Mummy said,” she ventured at last.

  F
rancis stared. “What do you mean, Mummy said? To whom? When?”

  “To me, when I told her.”

  “You told her?” he echoed. “But everyone thinks—”

  “—that Cousin Irene did it?” offered Lily. “I know, but Mummy said, just like you, that it was all over, it didn’t matter. She’d known all the time.” The child hesitated. “I don’t think she wanted Daddy or Grandpa to find out.”

  Francis sat down. “Or for that matter me, I daresay.”

  “I thought you knew,” said Lily sympathetically. “You kept making remarks.” She gave a smile that might have been seen, in the movies, to accompany her next words. “You were smart to guess it, Uncle Francis.”

  The lesson was plain. “And stupid to speak of it, no?”

  Lily balanced herself on one leg. She could afford to.

  “Are we still friends?”

  “Oh my goodness, yes!” she exclaimed.

  Seeing in whose world she belonged, he rose and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

  She had her own questions, however. “Won’t Grandpa be upset when he finds out what you did? Are you going to tell him?”

  “Grandpa knows what I did, Lily.”

  “I mean, about the photograph.”

  “Oh.” Francis turned red. Her tone took for granted innumerable shocking things in his past. “Yes, one of these days.”

  Lily snickered. “I didn’t have the nerve to tell Mummy. I waited almost a year.”

  “A year is a long time.”

  “Yes, but it goes faster as you grow older.”

  They exchanged a loaded look, partners no longer in crime but in expiation. “In that case,” said Francis, opening the door, “I shall wait for the year 2000 before telling Grandpa about the photograph. Bye now.”

  But she followed him onto the beach, the smallest in a family of babbling golden-haired Eumenides, eager now to cement their new complicity. “What’s the worst thing you ever did? I had to finish supper in my room last night because I wouldn’t eat my string-beans—so guess what! I flushed them down the toilet! Did you ever do that, Uncle Francis? Did you ever kill a kitten? Did you ever eat a doll?”—lapsing, while he absently replied, back into childhood with a virtuosity that bordered on reproach. He had to throw himself into the icy surf before she let him be.