Milking the Moon (28 page)

I liked her instantly. She was giddy, but she was also one of the 3 percent. She has one of those minds so quick, she finishes the sentence you’re saying for you, even before the object has been revealed. It’s that quick, quick mind. She was Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison’s daughter, and he had exiled her to Europe for two years. She had this stepmother she hated. It was a very distant cousin who was a singer and lived in Baltimore and swooned into Samuel Eliot Morison’s arms the minute he was widowed. Catherine called her the Baltimore Oriole. They married, of course, and Catherine hated that because she had been her father’s official hostess during the war years. She was only nineteen or something, but she sat at the other end of the table when Daddy was entertaining ministers of state from Washington. Admiral Morison and the Baltimore Oriole were off somewhere, honeymooning or something, when Catherine gave a party where all the Harvard boys dressed in her grandmother’s ball dresses. And they burned the first floor of the house out on Beacon Street. When the firemen came they found all these beautiful ladies shivering in the snow, and it was all these Harvard boys dressed in her granny’s dresses from the attic. So her daddy exiled her.

I guided her to the rue de Tournon, and she took a place about a block away, in a little hotel right where the rue de Tournon changed into the rue de Seine. The Boston crowd at the Café de Tournon grabbed her at once. She had known George Plimpton in Boston. She and Vilma Howard also fell into each other’s arms, because there’s a certain kind of Bostonian who is still doing antislavery. They have an attitude about making friends with intelligent blacks.

She was in Paris like a year and a half and then went to live in London. That’s where she married Julian Cooper, this roaring boy from a British family that had lived in Argentina for a hundred years and had vast estates. She said, “I don’t want the usual wedding. I don’t want the usual dress. I don’t want the usual wedding cake. What am I going to do?” I said, “Well, can I help you?” She wanted to be married in that Elizabethan mansion Crosby Hall, on the Thames. It had been bombed in the war, and she asked me to decorate the ruined chapel. So I decorated with garlands and cherubs and diamond flitters wherever I could toss them. She had musicians playing Elizabethan tunes. Then there was this great banquet hall Hadden Hall, in another building about a block away, where she had the wedding breakfast. So I hung garlands off the balcony and garlands off the chandeliers. Garlands, garlands, garlands. Flowers on the table. I went to Chelsea flower market at dawn and bought it out. She had said she wasn’t going to wear white because white was only for virgins and there were no virgins left in the world. She had gotten this beautiful blue-and-white dress made to be presented to the queen, and she used that for her wedding dress. I had designed a wedding cake that had Eros skipping rope with seven cupids applauding. It wasn’t your usual wedding.

But I told her, “Darling, you have gotten the wrong apartment, because there are no doors that slam. A newlywed couple has got to have a door that slams.” I was right: they were divorced within a year. I think she and Julian fought from early on. I don’t think he knew what he was getting into. He was getting a surprise package he didn’t know about. Catherine liked men, boys. She just liked them. All of them. She had once been kicked out of a prissy proper New England girls’ school because they found lipstick on a penis of a statue of Eros in the garden. Apparently Catherine would pass and just kiss it. They knew it was Catherine because nobody else in the school would have done it. She was a phallic worshiper. There are lots of ladies like that, and they call them all kinds of things—neurotic, abused, oversexed—but they are just phallic worshipers. It’s fertility and fun and games, and I’m glad I’m alive. She had thousands of little friends—some not from the same social classes as frequented our café. Sometimes she got into what I would call a working girl’s outfit—like a clerk in an office—a white blouse and a black skirt and a shoulder-strap battered bag—and head for truck drivers’ cafés. She just liked men.

I think her mother died when she was at the wrong age for her mother to
die. And her father must have been a severe gentleman—an admiral. Used to giving orders. Sweep the deck. And if she didn’t do right, he’d sweep it with her. And with her father, I think a brother, uncles, and all of these government types in and out of the house, you can just see all of them saying, “Ooh, look at the little Kitty, sweet little Kitty. Where’s your papa? We’ve got business.” Living in a world of men admiring her and petting her.

I really don’t know all the details, because I wasn’t in the bedroom or the backseat or the barn or the beach or the thicket. And I always prefer not to know too many details. I don’t mind prying into people’s minds, but I’m very old-fashioned about some things, because as a poet and humorist, I can imagine better things than they really do. I mean, my idea of the very best sex is to be in a phone booth, naked, with a lot of butterflies.

*

I met Sally Higginson through Catherine Morison. They were not gossipy friends. They were sort of formal tea party friends, both being of old, high Boston. But once in Paris they gave parties on the same night and never spoke again. They were cool to each other at café. They may still not be speaking. On that night they both gave parties, that’s when I left town. Because the world had to decide. I didn’t go to either party. I left town. I don’t know what George and the others did. I left town. I never wanted to talk about it with either of them. I left town.

Sally had come to Paris because all those Boston people go to Europe every year or so: the Boston trek to Europe every two or three years. And if you are going to go to London, you may as well go to Paris. Because they all had money. They weren’t ruined in the Civil War. They made money in the Civil War. Sally is one of those who came for a few weeks and stayed on. She knew George Plimpton—both Sally and Catherine had known George Plimpton vaguely. Knew who he was and met him at Harvard and blah, blah, blah. All that, over the years. But I don’t think they had really known him intimately or closely until Paris. They looked up one another and said, “Well, did you know So-and-so was here?” It was one of those things.

Sally’s great-uncle or something was the Reverend Higginson—Emily Dickinson had the big literary crush on him. And Sally’s mama was of the J&P Coats Thread. Southern cotton went up north and was spun into J&P Coats cotton thread that went around the world. Sally was a millionairess. And never made a show of it. I was very impressed when she tried out the little Hôtel Helvétia, just because all of us were there. She was not slumming. She was coming with great interest to be across the street from the Tournon. At one moment, everybody in the hotel was a friend of mine. That’s when M. Jordan broke down and gave us all keys. When I first went there, you had to ring the doorbell to get one of them to come and let you in when you got back to the hotel at night after ten. That must have been all right when the hotel was kind of, you know, sort of quiet. But when all my friends were there, they got pretty tired of getting up every ten minutes at one in the morning and opening the front door to the street. We all came in around one, because we stayed at the Tournon until it closed. It was all buzzer system. Buzz, buzz. Buzz, buzz. They got sick of it and finally gave us all keys. But Sally couldn’t really take the john in the hall shared by four rooms. Even I found that rather…and I’d been in the army with a latrine shared by twenty-five soldiers. After trying it for a few weeks, she went back to live in her fancy hotel at the place Vendôme.

She and I became great friends. Out of the 3 percent, she was of the 2 percent of the 3. The Boston sense of humor finally is as provincial and as international as the Southern. Boston and certain New England have the grandly provincial outlook that the Deep South has. Finally it ain’t provincial. Like Princess Caetani, like Catherine, Sally had been raised in a world where ideas are coinage. So many people, from New England, especially from Boston, that I have met—we have become instantly
au rapport.
Whereas there are people from Chicago or Milwaukee who are as exotic to me as Tibetans. Anyway, I saw Sally off and on for a lot.

After her mother died of cancer, I went with her to Switzerland to get her mother’s last bits and pieces that she’d left in this villa of a friend of hers. Sally really was pretty downcast and hated the idea of going through her mother’s stuff in this room where she had stayed before she went into hospital. Which is why I went as her comic relief. We left early so we could go and spend a few days at George’s place on Lake Como. This is the villa that George Plimpton’s family owned on Lake Como. Some grand cousin left it to all the family—by the time George came along, there were so many that they had to reserve it a year ahead. George only had it for two weeks every third year. So he had a
Paris Review
gathering there.

Then Sally and I drove right out through the mountains and got as close to Voltaire’s birthplace as we could. We were afraid the emanations there might scorch us. And then we went to this place way over in the east on Lake Geneva, I think, where a friend of Sally’s mother had this villa on the lake. With this delightful orchard and this wonderful garden and oh—the furniture and objets d’art in this house. It made you remember that the Swiss haven’t had a war for several hundred years. Undisturbed was this eighteenth-century garden. Polished was this eighteenth-century furniture. Polished was this eighteenth-century floor. Little sterling-silver trinkets. Little bits of blown glass. Little bits of brocade. I mean: European civilization. It’s like Cocteau said: “The Americans say, We can show you wealth. But the Europeans say, We can show you luxury.” Anyway, it was a wonderful experience, that particular villa and that particular Swiss gentleman.

Now we stayed at the hotel where Hermann Hesse lived and wrote
Siddhartha.
I went to him and asked for an interview for the writers series in the
Paris Review.
And he agreed to do it. This Jewish lady from New York with the biggest ears I ever saw, and tiny little diamonds in them, was my interpreter. She was a wonderful woman, all in black, in old European Jewish style. Very intelligent, very well read, speaking seventeen languages. So I would go early in the evening when the bar first opened in the hotel. This three-piece Italian jazz band would tune up and play 1920s American music. But on the second day as we sat there, there came a bulletin on the radio that Thomas Mann had died in Holland. And Hermann Hesse got very flustered and ran from the room. I’m not sure he didn’t say something like “Now there’s only me!” as he rushed out of the room. He never finished the interview.

I thought he was an old pest. I didn’t like him. He didn’t like the Jewish lady, and I hated that in him. Because she was very amusing. She was obviously a grand lady, obviously a money background, but she made herself as invisible as possible as an interpreter. She made herself part of the furniture in the brief moments that we had, the three of us.

My only other encounter with Hermann Hesse was when I was sitting in some pine woods near the hotel. I was learning to play the alto recorder, and I would go every morning and every evening to practice. There’s this Couperin piece I’m queer for called “The Nightingale in Love.” It has this heavenly up-and-down thing, and then it goes into twittering. And quick fingering. I was trying desperately to learn it. And I was sitting under these pine trees. Down the forest path came Hermann Hesse. I think he said, “What kind of bird is that?” Then when he saw me, I think he said, “Oh, it’s you.”

*

We did have some lovely times, all of us, in that period of time. Paris was good for everybody who had come from a somewhat closed world. My world was closed because I had never known the advantages of money. In fact, nobody told me about money. Money had never entered my world. I was twenty-something years old before I really and truly understood that if you left money in the bank, it drew interest. And then finally there was interest on the interest on the money you left in the bank. I’ve never gotten enough money to put in the bank and leave it there. I’ve never had more than ten dollars at once, ever. The idea of having an estate lawyer whose office you go to four times a year to look at the audit was completely exotic to me. Sally and Catherine and George and all those people had that closed world. I had the other closed world. That’s why we were refreshing for each other and why it was good for all of us to go to Paris. It was children from closed worlds meeting not on a battleground, but a ruined garden. New York is a battleground. Paris is a ruined garden.

*

Tom Keogh had designed one of the productions of the Roland Petit ballets which I had liked so much when I saw it in New York before I went to Europe. It was not serious ballet; this was ballet bouffe. When I was in Paris, I made a point of finding someone who knew him so I could meet him. He wasn’t well-known then; he was just beginning. So I did meet him, and we became friends. We were sitting at a café one day, and I said, “There she is again. Who is that fascinating girl?” She had a slightly nervous thing about her—not jerky—a little nervous. Very bony. Very elegant. Had this face that came to a little point like certain Victorian ladies. She had this auburn hair and these hazel eyes. There was something charming about her. I said, “Who is that girl? I’ve seen her at several of the cafés.” He said, “That’s my wife, Theodora. We often go our separate ways. We’re very much a married couple, but we don’t always like the same cafés. I like certain cafés; she likes certain cafés. Do you want to meet her?”

I just liked her right away; she was a very funny lady. Then I saw in a bookshop a novel by her about a man who leads a completely double life, and I saw she’d written three or four novels, so I got them all and read them, and I liked them. But nobody took her seriously, and her reviews were never very good, although she had the storyteller’s art and a good sense of character. She had observed. But for some reason, she wasn’t taken seriously, and at a given moment she stopped writing. Then after I’d known her quite a while, she said, “I live in two Parises because of my two names.” I said, “I thought you were Theodora Keogh. Do you have a pen name?” She said, “No, I’m Theodora Roosevelt. I’m Teddy Roosevelt’s granddaughter.” And I said, “Well, Lord love a duck.” Then I understood why New York critics wouldn’t take her seriously. This was Teddy Roosevelt’s granddaughter pretending to be a novelist. But I took her seriously and still do.