Collected Novels and Plays (20 page)

Whereupon Francis woke fully.

He understood that he was in Xenia’s room and in Xenia’s bed and that he had drunkenly made love to her during the night. Horrified, he recalled her mouth against his neck and chest, her fingernails along his thighs, things she had uttered in a number of languages. What he couldn’t bear was the suspicion that it had been, for both of them, an hour more gratifying than not. This suspicion, easily enough quelled, nevertheless lent violence to his
ensuing thoughts.

He suffered then two rapid hallucinations. Frozen outside the shut pantry door, he heard Xenia’s laughter, followed by his father’s mocking chuckle: “Well, I’ll be damned!” Next it seemed to Francis that he was gazing into his mother’s eyes as into a couple of spun-sugar Easter eggs. Deep within the pupils a flowery scene of forgiveness was acted out. Growing tinier and tinier, “What did I do?” he piped, and let go
of the
needle. “Whatever you do, I shall love you,” she replied, blood welling from her forefinger and staining her embroidery.

Worst of all, that sense of commitment! Francis pictured the years ahead as a succession of intimate French meals ordered by Xenia and served beneath pink lanterns. While he listened in silence, she would make one interesting energetic remark after another. He felt drained by a fierce languor. Only then did he count the dangers—blood, pleasure, peril in the dark, an endless falling. His lips formed words: the vampire, the
vampire.

Opening his eyes he met her own, the somewhat blurred eyes of middle age, whites tinged with ivory, a milky blue fleck upon one iris. A golden braid lay uncoiled; but its roots were somber. The more I see, he told himself, the less I shall have to feel. However his glance wavered perilously. Nothing had foretold that she would still be naked.

“Eh bien
, darling,” said Xenia on a friendly note, “do you hate me now?”

“What do you mean?” he mumbled, wishing to be polite, but slipping nervously out of bed before he had time to wonder whether or not he was supposed to kiss her. “Excuse me, I must go to the …”

“Turn around,” she said.

Again not thinking, he obeyed.

“Tu es très beau
” whispered Xenia after a pause. “Come back when you’re through.”

In the bathroom he stared despairingly at his reflection, looking for
clues.
Why couldn’t he hide in the little damp room forever? He had not the least desire to make water but, feeling that this was expected of him, wasted over a minute in a vain attempt. Finally, on a table littered with tubes, jellies, implements Francis had never dreamed existed—certain of which, however, showed signs of all too recent use—he noticed a plain rubber
syringe. This he filled from the faucet, then squirted the contents gingerly into the toilet bowl. He gave a sigh of relief; it was an adequate
trompe l’oreille.
When he had replaced the syringe and washed his hands
he looked about for something to wear. “Just so she won’t get ideas,” he said softly. But every last towel lay wet and trampled underfoot, thus limiting his choice to a frilled white nylon negligee. It was on the
tight side, surprisingly—how monumental Xenia seemed without it!—but he kept it on. Anything was preferable to nakedness.

His own clothes lay here and there on the floor. Before long he would be free to change into them. But the negligee gave him, during the interview that followed, a comforting sense of not being quite real.

“So,” said Xenia roguishly, pulling the sheet up over her breasts, “it’s going to be
that
kind of affair!”

Not to appear a prude, Francis sat on the edge of the bed. “What kind?”

“The
Rosenkavalier
kind, of dressing up in your mistress’s boudoir. Once in a while it can be very amusing.”

Francis turned pale. Was she his mistress? Was it going to be an affair? She sounded so authoritative, he dared not doubt her. “Do I look funny?” he managed to croak.

Now Xenia had begun to understand, but only barely. A silence grew and grew. “My dear,” she said at the end of it, “I’ve spent far too many years in analysis to think that you look funny.”

“You think then that I’m sick,” he concluded, trying to sound indifferent, but his heart pounding.

“You sound,” she laughed, “like a guilty child with his mother”—in a tone that indeed was very
like
his mother’s. “Please realize I’m your friend, Francis. If last night was a mistake, or if this morning you think it was, then no harm’s done, is there?” She kept up her sickroom gaiety to the end. “We can still have a normal friendly relationship, can’t we?”

The phrase was not fortunate. He had to strain to speak. “Can we?” he said, adding an apologetic grin that showed, for all his power to withstand her, he was only a little boy.

The first look of real distress crossed Xenia’s face. “How old are you, Francis?” She raised herself and lit a cigarette. “Twenty-five?”

“Not yet,” he protested, “not till October.”

“But why be so helpless?” she broke out. “Do you imagine you’re not a good lover?
Voyons!
It
worked
between us, you know!”

He knew. “If only you wouldn’t talk about it,” he said slowly through his teeth.

By now the room was brimming with sunlight. Xenia held out her hand, which he took, ever wishing to oblige, and drew Francis into a kiss—dry, reassuring, maternal. He endured it awkwardly. “Do you want to go to your room?” she sighed at length, releasing him. “Is that it?”

He began to tremble then like a child being sent from the dinner-table, as much afraid to leave as to stay.

“Tell me!” She grasped his wrist. “Can you give no thought to anyone but yourself? Was it such a terrible experience, Francis?”

The justice of the reproach together with its overtone of weary irony—which, had he been less frightened, might have persuaded Francis that he was but one in a series of disappointments—stung him into sobs.

His fear was of what she might do to him, now that he’d shown himself unable to give what she asked. “You have no right, no right at all!” he kept saying as he shuddered on the edge of the bed, in his white gown, like a bride.

In time the
degree
of his emotion became his principal source of fear. Why didn’t it end? Although the drop was slight, and he could glimpse calm waters beyond, still he clung and clung to the brink, letting the unguessed power break over him.

He heard Xenia say, “Get dressed now, why don’t you?” and felt the mattress shift as she got out of bed. It annoyed him to picture her washing her face, smoothing away with lotions the wrinkles
he
had caused, finally bestowing upon the mirror a long wry shrug, a roll of the eyes to heaven while painting her lips. What did Xenia, what did any foreigner care for innocence or its corruption?

The slow minutes passed. Much as Francis hated to admit it, the worst
was over. He sat, however, eyes shut, perplexed as to how one decently retreats from shows of intense feeling. Sunlight fell hot upon his bare feet, the robe hung sweet and cool against his ribs. Mortified, he knew himself utterly without thought, and on the verge of sleep.

At the sound of a brisk cough his eyes opened. There was Xenia seated across from him, fully dressed, a little black book in her lap. Ignoring his weak smile, she began at top speed:

“This has been a profound shock to
me
, Francis, I hope you realize. I doubt that another woman could
ever
compose herself sufficiently to say what I am about to say now. I blame myself for the entire situation. I ought to have understood, from observing your father’s
milieu
and your own mixed responses to it, what your sexual problem would consist of. I didn’t mean to say sexual, for it seems to me that you have no
sexual
problem to speak of; rather the barriers, the emotional walls that have grown up within you. No wonder, with all the open talk about sex in this house, and all the nonsense that surrounds any attempt to live it out, no wonder—”

Francis had raised his hand helplessly, unable to take in more than the fact of Xenia’s agitation—for which, in the bargain, he saw no reason.

At once she was on her knees beside him. “Listen!” she cried, fixing him with wet and anguished eyes. “I know you’ll never hear it from me! You’re set against whatever I say now. But let me help you, I beg you! You’ve saved my life, Francis! You helped me to work, you brought me these commissions when I had nobody to turn to! Relieve my conscience—read this little book! You’re intelligent, you’ll understand
that it has nothing to do with religion.” She pressed it into his hand,
Modern Man’s Quest for a Mother
by Mother Ann Veronica of the Buffalo Ursulines. “And one thing more—
go
to an analyst! Talk it over, find out what he thinks!”

She had made up her mind that Francis was feeling certain things. He studied her with pity, spitefully pleased to prove her wrong. For just then he felt nothing—nothing, that is, but that he was stronger than Xenia. He would never again learn about life from
her
.

Off and on during the whole long day he attained these reaches of mindless calm, only to discover that a hairsbreadth divided his emptiest smiles from a need to weep uncontrollably. Now, stumbling late along the beach towards the Cottage, Francis was truly tired. The spray and wind had sent people into the ocean room. By her dress he recognized Xenia and somebody else pausing at one window with a man who might or might not have been Benjamin. It
didn’t matter. Francis had resolved well in advance not to join them. He felt like a ghost, haunting his father’s house. But it was
all
unreal. The whole crowd wavered like ghosts through the beautiful trusting room.

12.
The next several days Francis spent in bed with what Mrs. McBride called a bug. Only when he saw that she and Benjamin and Lady Good would be off to Boston without him did he pull himself together in time to take his place, though still not well, in the car. Louis Leroy circled the gravel drive, waving regally to Loretta and the maids—a wave his master copied for the bleak remainder of
his
seraglio, Enid, Lily,
Xenia, where they stood in the doorway. Mrs. Cheek had made a point of telephoning to say she wouldn’t be on hand. “That’s your tough luck, baby!” the old man told her jovially.

What joy to be away! At last they could be
natural
with one another. To prove as much, they ate hard-boiled eggs and cookies on the ferry across the Sound. Prudence had brought a scarf for her hair, Benjamin wore dark glasses, Francis unbuttoned his cuffs. They were clearly taking their cue from any of a dozen little family groups—father, mother, child—sitting or romping about the deck, younger in years but not in spirit. And they tossed their
crumpled wax paper overboard with the best.

With their arrival in Boston, the vacation seemed really to have begun. They gawked at a gilded dome. Nobody spoke in sentences. “Those
trees
” wondered Mrs. McBride as though she had spent her life in a slum, “so green!” “Benjamin! Swans!” cried Lady Good, clapping her hands. He nodded happily. At the hotel a pink-and-gold suite awaited them. They ordered highballs. The young waiter switched on the
television set without even being asked. For a blissful spell they stared at the screen, lively but dimmed by daylight. Every so often they turned for sustenance to the great green Common that all but sang up to them, “Come on down! You’re nice simple folks like the rest of us! Everybody’s welcome here!”

Gone were the responsibilities, the rivalries, the riddles of life at the Cottage. They tottered down to dinner in a daze of freedom. With no pressure upon them to talk, how beautifully they did without it! Once Mr. Tanning said, “Please explain to me how a freshly grilled lamb chop can be served stone cold.” But he was addressing the headwaiter, it couldn’t fairly be called conversation. The rest of the time they conveyed their extreme
self-satisfaction in dumb show, sighing and smiling and smacking their lips. The warmth that made Francis’s skin tingle, was it fever or family feeling?

After dinner he and Lady Good escorted the old man to the hospital. He would sleep there, take more tests on the morrow, and join them for, as he put it, a last supper. Francis bit his lip; he had already arranged to dine with Jane Westlake. “Bring her along, Sonny,” his father smiled ever so sweetly, “I’d love to meet her.” “Francis and I have a date to look at pictures tomorrow,” Lady Good murmured. Once again all three
exchanged adoring glances.

She added mildly, as Louis headed back to the hotel, “This is my last week in America, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know,” said Francis.

“Well, it is. So hush, there’s nothing more to say.”

Her mildness was that of some remembered childhood,
Paul et Virginie
or a Song of Innocence. It brimmed with a romance that excited no scruple. Lady Good might have been painted by Burne-Jones in color-of-thought robes, holding out to her lover a grail of forbearance and otherworldly comfort. Straightway Francis perceived that she had stayed on for the sole purpose of this gentler renunciation, before following her husband. It wasn’t she who had been corrupted by the Cottage, so much as Francis himself by Xenia’s
Mediterranean view of things. In his heart he confessed to Prudence that he had doubted her, and begged her pardon. If only all women loved as wisely as she!

They drank Mrs. McBride’s hot milk, then parted for the night. “I’ll be right in this middle bedroom,” said the nurse, “so just call if you need me. I wonder if you still haven’t a touch of fever,” she added, feeling Francis’s cheek.

“I think it’s just that I’m already asleep,” he smiled.

Morning found him hot and exhausted by dreams. But he had swallowed aspirin and guided Lady Good dutifully among the old masters. Planning to see the remaining galleries after lunch, they groped their way now out of the blinding noon into some dim ice-cold restaurant, Italian as it soon appeared, sank into a booth and ordered tall glasses of ale. “Would ravioli be light?” she wondered, resolving in the same breath to try eggplant. Then, with foam on her
lip and elbows on the table, she started in. Last night there may have been nothing more to say. Today there was plenty.