“Not one bit,” he replied sternly, tightening his hold on her. “Why, Harriet’s here, off and on, all summer.”
The worst was Natalie. As they strolled through the churchyard Francis caught sight of her standing nearby, alone. She was looking about, a dazzling smile on her face, but seeing little more than blurred forms, colors, light and shade. He remembered an afternoon in her bed-sitting-room in town, its blind drawn upon a sooty court. “What would I do with a view, my pet?” she had laughed. Having missed her yesterday, he impulsively detached himself from Vinnie, went over to kiss her, tell her he was back and, without thinking, escort her across the short stretch of grass that separated them from his mother. “Look who’s here!” he gaily announced.
Vinnie checked a backward movement. “Well, Natalie,” she managed to say in a gentle voice.
“Is that Vinnie?” the other asked, squinting in vain. “Oh good heavens,” she added under her breath.
Both turned on Francis in exasperation. Only then he recalled that, for his mother, Natalie was the Other Woman, the first of several, equaled in malignity only by Fern. He grinned idiotically, imagining all the things Vinnie would say, once alone with him. That moment was postponed by Benjamin’s coming up to them, leading Mr. and Mrs. Durdee, whom he presented ceremoniously. Francis gave no sign of recognition. Even after Mr. Durdee’s “Well, how are you?” with its note of hearty reproach, he replied merely that he was very well, thank you, and risked a bewildered shrug not lost on his father; the old man seemed already at a loss to know why in God’s name he had invited Warren Durdee in the first place. They had gone thirty years without meeting, a fact that ought to have warned Benjamin. Responding to his silent appeal, Vinnie set about being nice. She’d heard Ben speak of Warren Durdee for years, she felt she’d known him all her life. Father and son watched her tenderly. Natalie meanwhile had drawn out Mrs. Durdee on the subject of names. “I hate mine,” she was saying, “always have. Bertha—Birdie Durdee. Could you invent a duller name?” “I think it’s a perfectly lovely name,” said Benjamin, and leaned over to plant a kiss on her veiled cheek. “I wouldn’t put it past Warren,” he added, “to have spent the last thirty years keeping us apart.” “Listen to him!” cried Bertha and Natalie together. “Hey now,” Mr. Durdee said feebly, no-doubt reliving the months he had shared his quarters with Benjamin and Howie Burr.
At a light kick from his mother, Francis took her arm. “Oh, should we be going?” she asked. “I’ll see you all at lunch, then.”
As the car started so did she. How could Francis have exposed her, deliberately, to that hideous meeting? What had he thought he was doing? What did he think she was made of. Francis shot quick looks at her face, stricken, white, from which the mild voice proceeded, that even now could not sound other than controlled and reasonable. “Why, that woman lived in my house, ate at my table! I know what I’m talking about, Son. I found letters from Natalie in your father’s handkerchief drawer!” Francis sighed, hating to acknowledge the reality of her suffering.
“Well, you handled it beautifully,” he risked.
“What else could I do?” Vinnie lapsed into a dry silence. Presently she had him stop the car while she powdered her nose and arranged her hair, which was decidedly gray now. He felt a vast relief. The camel’s back hadn’t been broken. In time even the obstacle of Natalie might be surmounted. For that matter, Francis had already witnessed an instant he was long to treasure. It had come when the two women, recovering from their initial stupefaction, turned towards one another and partook of a certain wry amusement that could only have been at his expense. They checked it promptly. But he had had time to read, in both Natalie’s face and his mother’s, how young you had to be, how hopelessly inexperienced, to have contrived a situation in such wild bad taste. Francis’s eyes shone. He guessed that he had hit upon a most valuable tactic. Not until seeing Benjamin draw near with the Durdees did he relax the stupid grin that had provoked that spark of sisterhood.
The main stumbling block, of course, was Benjamin; he saw this now. To the degree that Vinnie had loved him and been hurt by him, she would continue to resist any prolonged immersion in his element. Well, Benjamin wouldn’t last forever. Francis had his first glimmering of a scene: the Cottage with himself as master; the summers to be spent there with Vinnie, with a whole little crowd—Prudence, Natalie, Jane, Xenia, Adrienne. For it would all be his one day.
Towards the end of lunch Mr. Tanning stood up, but not to make a speech. “Too much excitement for Grandpa,” he mumbled and, draining his glass of champagne, made his way into the house. A few guests looked up, half-rose, their faces puckering in inverse proportion to the concern they felt. Beyond, the blue sea sulked and smoked. The air had lost part of its early morning clarity. You were not invited to scan the distances. When the cakes were brought everybody agreed it was a crime to cut them. They had been decorated with beautiful white sugar roses, the name Tanning Burr Buchanan, and, best of all, a border of babies—oval candies not an inch long, to each of which had been applied, in sugar, a tiny pink face, three dots for buttons, the frill of a bonnet.
You would have thought they were real, to hear the women talk. “These are the cutest things I’ve ever seen!” declared Mrs. Gresham. “Whose idea! Enid, it was yours!”
From the neighboring table Enid shook her head, mouth full of cake.
“Then Francis! With his cute sense of humor!”
“Not I,” he assured her.
“I’ll bet it was Prudence,” said Mrs. Sturdevant. “Wasn’t it, pet?” She looked slyly round to her hostess’s chair, but found it empty.
Boopsie was vexed. “Louis Leroy,” she called, “where did these babies come from?”
“Somebody please tell Boopsie the facts of life!” a distant male voice put in.
“At least she asked the right man!” cried Natalie.
The accordionist struck up “Some Enchanted Evening.” Everyone was uncontrollably laughing.
“Shut up!” shouted Boopsie, laughing herself. “I want to know!”
Louis Leroy smiled and shifted. “Loretta, she brought them from the village, Miss Gresham.”
“Well, you tell her for me, Louis,” she said, speaking very distinctly lest he forget or garble her message, “that I think they’re perfectly adorable. Can you remember that?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, all agleam.
Mrs. Durdee turned back to Francis. “I don’t know when I’ve had so much fun,” she sighed. They had been talking about spiritualism. Francis, describing his own experiences, found that Meno served brilliantly as a conversation piece. His companion had laughed till she cried. She wondered if she mightn’t make a good medium. Once in Marseille she’d been another person for an entire evening—“Don’t ask me who. All I know is, I wasn’t myself.” Her slice of cake had two babies on it. “Here,” she said, scraping one onto his plate, “you don’t have any.”
She was psychic. “I hope you stay longer than the weekend,” said Francis.
“We’d love to, but Warren has to get back to his office.”
Better yet, he thought. “Then why don’t you stay?”
“For one thing, I haven’t been asked.”
“Don’t imagine you won’t be!” he chuckled, resolving to suggest it to Benjamin.
Mrs. Durdee smiled at him. “We’ve met before, Francis, only you’ve forgotten.”
“Have we really? Where?”
“Last year in Rome. Through that sculptress, Xenia Grosz.”
“Xenia? How funny! Yes, she’s a dear friend. She was out here last summer, did you know? But we were never in Rome at the same time. You have me confused with one of her other young men. I sometimes wonder how she keeps them all straight,” he finished with a malicious smile. What he meant to deny was not the fact of his earlier meeting with Mrs. Durdee, which Francis remembered vividly, so much as his impression of her, ill and querulous in that “authentic” restaurant. It embarrassed him to have taken the
easy view of her, the Italian view. Falling through vine leaves, the light of Rome had splotched her face with greens and yellows, like camouflage. He hadn’t once questioned the evidence of splashing water whose lovely voice made hers sound brittle and unmusical. He saw how the skins of eggplants, of apricots and cherries, to say nothing of the other diners’, brown, olive, red-mouthed, lustrous—he saw how he had let all that, itself illusory, make the American woman unreal. And here she was today, perfectly nice, delightful really. Seeing her where she belonged, against a whitening sky and flat sea, Francis found in her exactly the kind of cool artificial prettiness he most liked. She was rather in the style of Fern. He imagined her having a very tonic effect on Benjamin. For Prudence, wonderful as she was, could be the least bit tiresome and self-righteous. As now, for instance, leaving her guests to their own devices.
A cry of distaste rose from the ladies at the far end of their table. Mrs. Gresham had just decided to eat her candy baby.
“Don’t do it, Boopsie!” laughed Vinnie in spite of herself.
“Too late!” she said, and bit it in two. A ruddy syrup ran down her chin. The others screamed. “Ummm!” She smacked her lips. “They’re full of liquor!”
“What are you doing over there?” Enid called.
“Mummy, Mrs. Gresham ate her baby!” squealed Lily, jumping up and down in ecstasy.
“Oh my goodness!”
“I’m going to get mine,” Francis told Bertha Durdee. “Are you going to eat yours?”
“Absolutely!” She popped it into her mouth.
The idea was catching on. “I like sweets,” he heard his mother say, “but they don’t like me.”
“Play something!” Mrs. Gresham commanded the accordionist.
“Play ‘Baby, It’s Warm Inside!’” said Wally Link.
“I don’t mind sucking mine,” Mrs. Sturdevant was explaining to Vinnie, pointing to the bulge in her cheek, “but I could never have bit into it like Boopsie.”
The music began and didn’t stop, though all but drowned out by shrieks and laughter, until every baby in sight had been consumed. Those too squeamish to eat their own saw them gobbled up by their neighbors. The first arrivals at Lily’s birthday party, two neat little boys accompanied by a nanny, looked at one another with misgivings.
Lunch was over. Rising from his seat, Francis entered the ocean room, where card tables had already been set up. On the north terrace, which faced the sunken lawn, children were gathering. Shyly they offered Lily their gifts. Francis sighed to think he had nothing for her. Outside his father’s door he met Mrs. McBride, her hands full of knitting. A startling green-eyed young girl stood next to her; Francis waited to be introduced. “Go on in,” the nurse said, “You’ll find a nice quiet family party.” He watched them move away, neither looking back, then put his head into the dim room.
Benjamin lay flat on the bed with a thin white blanket over his legs. On one side, holding his hand, sat Prudence. They seemed in a trance of contentment, beyond speech. “Is everything all right?” asked Francis.
His father’s eyes opened. “Everything’s under control,” he said.
“Everything’s just wonderful, Francis,” came from the gloom behind the door, where he had failed to notice Larry Buchanan sitting peacefully. Francis tiptoed across the room and took a chair. Ornate curls of smoke rose from his brother-in-law’s cigar, like the clouds surrounding a representation of some powerful spirit, in Chinese painting. His face was purplish red in the suppressed light, his tie cobalt and cream. The stump of his little finger pointed up. Dreamily he repeated for Francis the good news he had been telling the elder Tannings. Benjamin’s pet project, Bishop Petroleum, had closed at 18½ Friday afternoon. That meant a 500-percent profit since a year ago—a profit in which both Enid and Francis shared, and for which they could thank their father.
The latter cleared his throat. “Don’t be modest, Larry.”
“Me modest?” He grinned. “I’m a private in your ranks, Ben. You give the orders, I try to carry them out. How about it, Francis? Want another ten thousand shares in your account?”
“Go right ahead,” said Francis pleasantly but flippantly. “I love money.”
“Don’t let your father fool you,” Larry went on. “Look how he handled the mess last winter, when the President of the company resigned. We all stood to lose plenty that day.”
Benjamin remarked, “Orson Bishop’s a fine man,” and yawned.
“A high-minded man, a man with ideals. We know now,” Larry addressed Francis, “why that crisis occurred. Irene Cheek had been poisoning his mind against your father, writing him a lot of nonsense about your father’s immorality.”
The old man leered. “Every word of it true, what’s more.”
“But why?”
“Because she was jealous of me, Francis,” said Prudence. She touched her hair, causing a star sapphire he hadn’t seen before to twinkle victoriously.
“Anyhow,” Larry said, “that’s all settled now.”
“Grandpa’s decently married,” groaned Benjamin. “Lily Buchannibal can come to the Cottage without being corrupted by the old poop. He’s harmless as a baby and hairless as a French whore.”
“Benjamin, I’ve begged you…”
“Was that Mrs. McBride’s daughter just now?” asked Francis.
“Yes, Mary Ann. She’s sweet, isn’t she?”
“She has phenomenal eyes,” was the best he could do.
“My goodness!” exclaimed Enid from the doorway. “Aren’t we the shining examples of hospitality!” She perched, nevertheless, on the edge of the bed and took Benjamin’s other hand.
“We’ve been talking about Irene,” said Larry.
“Irene mutilated your portrait, Enid,” her father said. “It wasn’t Fern. I’m sure of that now.”
“Enid and I have always been sure of it.”
Francis watched his sister smooth out the folds of her dress, pale blue with little yellow suns, and say nothing. They all fell silent for a bit, following her example, as if that world in which violent deeds were done revolved far beneath their own concerns.
“Why don’t you tell us how pleased you are with your grandson?” asked Prudence.
Benjamin gave her an enigmatic look and said, “Which one?”
She snorted. “Are we to suppose that you have grandchildren in all corners of the earth?”
Each one smiled wisely out of an imperfect knowledge of the others that amounted to a real community of feeling. How much they had kept and would keep secret all their lives! Indeed, thought Francis, their equilibrium as a family seemed to depend upon separate orbits, a law preserving them from collision or eclipse. He took pleasure in reflecting that he knew more than the rest, that in a sense, if they smiled, it was largely because he hadn’t yet told Larry about Lily, Prudence about Fern, Benjamin about the true fatherhood of Xenia’s child. He held in his hands their peace of mind. As for secrets they might be keeping from him—for not doubt it worked both ways—he felt at once incurious and complacent. Of course he was being spared something, some joke had to be on him—well and good. Like a tired child on the eve of his birthday, glimpsing gifts but too drowsy to speculate upon them, Francis chose to leave it at that.
He couldn’t leave them, however, without a trifling test of his power. As he got to his feet he produced Bertha Durdee’s name. She was an attractive woman, wasn’t she?
“Oh, very!” said Enid.
“Terribly,” said Prudence.
“Who is Bertha Durdee?” Larry asked.
“Warren Durdee’s wife.”
Benjamin spoke. “Warren Durdee hasn’t changed. He’s still the biggest stuffed shirt on Wall Street.”
“Two incarnations ago,” said Francis, “he was a white dog.”
“He’s not the most alert little soul,” Enid admitted.
Francis came to the point. “I wondered, Daddy, if you mightn’t like Bertha to stay on for a few days, after he leaves. I have a feel
ing she’d enjoy a holiday from her husband.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Yes, I do,” said Francis; a note of interest in his father’s voice had made him smile.
The old man studied him quizzically. “Very well, my loving son, bring her on! If you prefer we can move her into your little house.”
“You’d have to move Natalie back first,” said Francis, before understanding that he was being made fun of. He added without inflection, “In any case, it’s for you to decide.”
Benjamin thanked him. “Have you issued the invitation?”
“Of course not.”
“Then may I suggest you let me be the judge—” But in mid-sentence his tone changed. “Don’t mind me, Francis. I’d be glad to have Mrs. Durdee stay on if you think she’d like to.”
“Really,” said Francis, “it was only an idea.”
“It’s just that new people tax Benjamin so,” Prudence explained. “I’d selfishly been hoping for a quiet week, after today’s celebrations.”
“Come to town with me tomorrow,” said Larry. “It’ll be quiet enough there, I promise you.” He grinned and cracked his knuckles. Enid let out her lilting laugh, as if Larry’s solitary week was a joke they shared.
“It’s for Benjamin that I want quiet,” insisted Prudence, “not for myself.”
Francis sighed, reading into her concern the anxiety of any reigning favorite, caught in a web of watchers and whisperers. More telling yet was to find her eyes on him. “It appears that nothing,” she all but said aloud, “helps the poor woman who marries Benjamin. She must pass her test alone. Even you are no longer my ally.” Granting the justice of her reproach, Francis still couldn’t expect Prudence to understand how much his position demanded a firm line taken towards favorites. They, by definition, had passed their test, stopped needing help, unlike others he knew of. The recent talk, for instance, had started him brooding over Irene. He didn’t like her, but she had been falsely accused in the matter of Enid’s portrait—perhaps in the Bishop affair as well—and the injustice of it caused Francis a real pang. He thought of her in that cheerless house, alone with Charlie Cheek. Would she receive him if he drove out there one day next week? Why, she’d have to—they were relatives! And it might do something to help ease the tension.
Collected Novels and Plays Page 32