Collected Novels and Plays (6 page)

Not that he had been touched, to speak of. He lingered still in the daze of having arrived, of taxis, telephones, the enchanting summer city, the sickening costly hotel. Houses were being demolished. Women on street-corners were describing to one another their first experiences in Italian restaurants. Beyond all this, his customary response to his mother—and Francis marveled only at how soon he had felt it operate, once settled in the little needlepoint chair
beside her chaise longue—was a silence no less marked than her own talkativeness. Both silence and talk, furthermore, hinted at states of mind not easily enlarged upon. Forbearance? Disillusion?—the words flickered and went out. And yet, on first sight of her, kissing her at the dim door, hadn’t he felt like talking? And hadn’t she listened? Her eyes followed him about the small room, her laugh met his own. Admiringly she caressed the scarves and gloves he
had brought her. Francis had a pleasant sense of being too
big
for her bedroom, of ornaments rattling as he tramped about; and not till now, strolling down Madison Avenue, was he able even to put the question of how thirty months of enviable experience could have, in as many minutes, evaporated. It wasn’t right. There all at once he sat, as countless times before, bored, smoking, defacing the motto in her French ashtray—
“Quise mari pour
l’amour A bonnes nuits et mauvais jours”
—while Mrs. Tanning talked.

Her soft Southern voice, even if she had been speaking gibberish, would have declared, “I am the voice of a companionable, sensible, well-bred
woman of fifty-one, without affectations or illusions. I have never been raised in anger or stilled by passion.” Despite traces of illness (she’d been “delicate” since Francis’s birth) her face confirmed these words, a face both sweet and ascetic, but wanting in
subtlety. In her circle of friends, which had contracted over the years, she passed for the most knowing, the most fastidious, as well as the one with a degree of moral fortitude that sustained her through readings of “strong” novels in the modern manner, military memoirs, terse transatlantic reviews of current affairs. This same fortitude had allowed her, at dinners during the last war, darkly to predict a struggle of fifteen or twenty years, while every other woman at
the table, to whom
The White Cliffs of Dover
stood for literature and Ernie Pyle for the unvarnished truth, could only murmur, saucer-eyed at Mrs. Tanning’s tough-mindedness, “Oh but surely, Vinnie, it
can’t
go on like this!” At which she would turn, faintly shrugging, to what might have been—and in those days of sacrifice frequently
was
—a smoking dish of entrails.

Upon Xenia’s remark that he never spoke of his parents Francis had first felt a guilty twinge, then obliged her with several thousand words concerning his father. Concerning Vinnie, however, what
was
there for him to say? It didn’t help to remember that she had once been a beautiful young woman, giving herself up, with something more humorous than her present resignation, to the wearing of Paris dresses and oblong jewels. The dresses had long
since been cut down for goddaughters; the jewels waited in a vault for Francis’s bride. This was but a bit of the baggage Mrs. Tanning had cast off, as on some lonely trek into high clear wastes. She hadn’t even wanted alimony. The major part of it accumulated unspent.

In the eyes of others her life had been sown with sand, and Benjamin Tanning would at once have agreed repentantly that he had done it single-handed. But such a view took no account of Vinnie’s own will, which, in this or any matter, rose cool and tall from the insufficient ground. It was thus she could touch Francis, even with envy. Squaring
her shoulders, opening her book, she had affected him as living on where life itself had
ceased—or been so lived, so used, that nothing was left but the past and the vantage from which she saw it, perfect, remote, hers. Would a time ever come when he could mount his own tall pillar, subsist on honey and locusts, with not a pang of regret? The sky burned above him, he moved under rustling trees set in the pavement. Oh, to have lived!

Such thoughts weren’t meant to be put into words. But what else to say about her? Well of course, she
did
leave him alone, and he
was
grateful. There was that much to say. Probably she loved him, too—would she otherwise show all that concern for his appearance, his untrimmed hair, the stain on his cuff, each little conscious irregularity? “You see!”—entering the barber-shop, he flung out his hand to an imaginary
Xenia—“I don’t speak of her because I can’t! I begin talking like a child, I stop making sense!”

4.
The train was a scandal, its cars sooty and comfortless, no water in the toilets. It stopped repeatedly in full country for minutes at a time. Nobody knew why. Francis pictured the engine’s aged metal face turned aside in order to be sick along the tracks.

At last he descended, perspiring, stickers fluttering showily from his suitcases onto the humble platform. A high sweet voice called his name, and there was Enid. How lovely of her to come to the station, thought Francis and said so, kissing her. But he hadn’t foreseen the touch of gray in her hair—how old was she? thirty-four? thirty-six? Her face looked tired, too, for all its rose and tan against lavender linen. Well, she was pregnant; that explained a
lot.

“I couldn’t miss my baby brother’s homecoming!” she declared. “How well you look! Lily, would you have known your uncle?”

“This can’t be Lily!” he thought of saying, having heard it often enough himself.

The child gave him a stricken smile.

“How well
you
look, Enid!”

“Me? I’m an old bag!” Her laugh ran up and down a tiny scale. “Now, my pearl,” she continued, “that we’ve got the credit for meeting you, I must break the grim news.”

“There’s Daddy!” cried Lily, and ran towards him.

Had Larry been on the train? Was that Enid’s grim news? “I wish I’d known,” said Francis, genuinely dismayed. He had had something important to talk over with his brother-in-law. Still wondering, and with his mouth open to ask who, since Enid was meeting Larry, had come to meet
him
, Francis caught sight of his father’s colored valet, Louis Leroy. The latter, bald, beaming, cap in hand—Louis Quinze, Leroy Soleil, such
names did justice to his exquisite good humor—trotted up with words of welcome. Then Lily returned, followed by Larry laughing, “Well I’ll be damned! When you weren’t in the Pullman I assumed you’d missed the train!”

Had there been a Pullman? “You see,” Francis told them, bravely grinning, “I’ve got so used to traveling third class. It’s the one way to know a country.”

He waited for them to laugh, but Enid only reached for Lily’s hand—protectively? “What are we going to do about your uncle?” she marveled. “He’s just too Bohemian for words!”

“And you know
this
country,” Lily reminded him.

“That’s all right, Francis, you do what you want. I always say, though,” said Larry, not quite accurately—it was Mr. Tanning who often said it—“there’s no such thing as a bargain. Not when you’re traveling, or eating, or buying clothes.”

Louis Leroy said nothing. However, taking up Francis’s suitcases, he started a movement towards “his” pearl-gray limousine.

Francis’s remark had been so much his kind of joke that the Buchanans’ responses perplexed him. It occurred to him that, just as in Europe he had more and more taken for granted their kinship with him,
they
might have developed a real uncertainty as to his place in any world of theirs. Well, there was always the bond of blood. But as he squirmed a bit under their tactful scrutiny, he felt a hesitation about even the bond of
blood. He hoped he wouldn’t have to test it too soon; he didn’t want it snapping in his face like old string.

From the car window he asked when he would see them again.

“Whenever you like,” said Enid promptly.
“We
have no special plans. Tonight you’ll be having dinner with Daddy, won’t you? Tomorrow, let me see—you go to the Cheeks for cocktails ….”

“Perhaps I’ll see you there?”

“Don’t count on it,” said Larry.

“No,” Enid added, “the little Buchannibals have turned into homebodies. Give me a ring in the morning, sweetie, and let me know when
you’re
free.”

“All right …”

He must have looked mystified. “Oh, you have a lot of surprises in store for you, Francis my lad!” shouted Larry as the huge engine started. All three Buchanans were left behind, waving.

“What does he mean?” asked Francis. But Louis Leroy, though visibly tickled by any word addressed to him, didn’t lend himself to soundings of this sort. The effect was less of discretion than of simple deference; Louis had never learned, or had modestly forgotten, how to make his own view of things noteworthy. He shifted the talk to the weather, to Francis’s health. He sped past many a landmark, supposing rightly—if he supposed at
all—that his passenger’s curiosity would be caught up by them, old familiar sights, the Common, the cannon, the plaque commemorating three centuries of peaceful village life. Further on, the monstrous shingled houses began, and the glorious trees. The car slowed down, passed between two columns capped with beasts bearing shields, and at the end of a winding gravel drive stopped. Francis let himself be
helped out, the wiser for Louis’s
illustration of how things were done in his father’s house.

There it stood.

The Cottage, so-called because of its mere dozen rooms, its shaggy swollen look, as of thatch copied in teak and slate, formed the fourth side of a vast unshadowed lawn. This had, to be sure, a rose-arbor in the center of it, and shrubbery—boxwood, hydrangea, laurel—that in time would mask the brick walls that enclosed it; even so, it couldn’t be thought of as a garden. Nobody used it. Nothing about it invited people in the house to stroll out
beyond an elevated terrace that extended from the north porch. Indeed, no steps led down from this terrace to the lawn. The two levels were connected by a ha-ha—you had either to jump or, re-entering the house, come out another door. The lawn seemed therefore so much sheer space, watered clipped magnificent space, against which any person approaching the Cottage on foot would give the illusion of tarrying, of fumbling, pitched forward as if walking into a fierce wind. But once
indoors he would understand, puzzled by an air of intimacy out of all proportion to the giant scale of the rooms, that the lawn
had
been used, that if the fruit were sour it could no longer be tasted as such after biting through the bitter green husk.

The sea glittered on the far side of the house. Also out of sight, down a narrow drive, four smaller buildings faced one another like card-players, over a square of gravel—a garage, a greenhouse, a cottage for servants, and one for the overflow of guests. Here Francis was to stay. He had just been staring up dazedly at the big house when a voice from inside called, “Mr. Francis goes to the guest-house, Louis, not here!”

A little apartment had been contrived. Louis Leroy ushered him proudly in, opening doors: bedroom and bathroom, a kitchen with beer on ice and the makings of snacks. For the present, Francis was to be the one occupant of the house.

The rooms smelled of fresh paint, the bed felt very soft, there were flowers everywhere. None of it was to Francis’s taste, really, but all that
thought and effort absurdly touched him. He couldn’t help it. As a child he had wept to read a recipe for apple pie, a dish he hated. “What is it? What is it?” his nurse had cried when he came to her sobbing with the cookbook. And he couldn’t explain, nor could he now. It
had something to do with the very idea of patiently choosing “small tart apples,” dotting them with butter, baking “till tender”—how could they resist such loving care? How could he, each time they were set, small, tender, full of love, before him, continue to gag at the first mouthful? Surely the rejection of love was wicked, even if it turned your stomach.

Still, wondered Francis looking straight into the eyes of a Royal Doulton fruit vendor, to what purpose had he developed a taste of his own, if not to tell that bit of rosy-cheeked porcelain how much he didn’t like her? But he couldn’t do it, he turned away. Something in him had grown mild and melting. The unpalatable means vanished into his sense of the motive behind them. He was wanted here.

He washed quickly, left Louis to unpack, and walked over to the Cottage. Up from the basement came the voices of maids. Entering, Francis caught what could have been the scent, lingering, transmuted, of all his younger entrances there.

Although the ocean room had been done over by Fern, and altered, he noticed, in the general reaction against her, what hadn’t altered were the clues to Mr. Tanning’s presence. They were three: illness, wealth, women. It had always been so.

A piece of knitting ornate but dreary, the work surely of a trained nurse, lay on the coffee-table next to a hypodermic, gauze-tipped, ready for use. This brought back from long ago the nights Mr. Tanning, then perfectly healthy, would elect to spend in the hospital, a patient subject to all regulations, for the luxury of an alcohol rub, a tranquil sleep, the cool voice of a nurse waking him early. He had mastered the mannerism of illness, like a prodigy too young to
learn the brilliant lesson of the sonata he performs, though it will be at his fingertips when the time is ripe. We play with fire, his son thought.

For evidence of wealth he had just to look about, and for evidence of women as well, the two being here curiously intermingled. Not the small careful pile of bills and change, prominent against the pale leather of the desk—this stood for wealth on the same low rung as the nurse’s knitting, the raw symbol, the mere gender—but the room itself told, and in a high hushed voice, how it had been furnished by women, for women, would be
in a little while (if Francis cared to sit and wait) positively furnished
with
women. What it had been furnished without, it all but blushed to confess, was any visible regard for expense. Bland satins, fruitwood and lacquer, massive peonies, English paintings of Childhood in its most handsome and least credible aspect, these things at once murmured their testimony, then, as it were, half-closed their lovely eyes and drummed their dainty fingers.