The Towers of Love (5 page)

As she had shown him about the new room yesterday, his mother had kept saying that she was waiting for him to notice Titi's most exquisite touch. It was out in the hall, she said. And he had wandered about the hall trying to spot it, with her just behind him saying, “Now you're getting warmer—warmer—warmer.” And, “No, now you're getting colder—colder—you're practically freezing, darling.”

Then at last he had noticed it.

High on the first landing of the staircase had stood, since his grandfather's day, a huge bronze statue of Venus de Milo, perhaps seven feet tall. She had been built permanently into the house and, beneath the landing where she stood, a thick column of reinforced concrete extended into the bedrock below the house to support her weight. Her bowed head, above the armless torso, addressed the hall below. And Titi, for his ultimate touch, had strung a long, triple strand of dime-store pearls around her neck.

“My God!” was all he had said.

“Amusing, don't you think?”

He turned and went out of the living-room now and into the hall, and started up the stairs, past Venus in her pearls that glowed against her dark and naked breast. And he remembered that, after some long-ago party in the house, Venus had been found with somewhat more explicit features drawn upon her body in scarlet lipstick. He looked, and sure enough, the bronze nipples still bore traces of pink that soap and water and scrubbing had never been able to wash off.

He continued up the stairs to see his mother. She would, he knew, be resting in her room. She always rested from five o'clock till dinner-time.

Three

“Is that you, hugh?” she called as he came down the hall towards her room.

“Are you decent? Can I come in?” he asked her.

“Come on in, baby,” she said.

He opened the door and stepped inside. She was sitting up in bed with a tea-tray across her knees, flanked by two pink-shaded lamps. All around her, on the satin bedspread, were scattered pieces of her afternoon—scraps of mail, newspapers; a book spread open, face down, bottles of nail lacquer and remover, Kleenex, and various other tubes and jars of cosmetics, an ashtray crowded with cigarette butts, a couple of partly emptied packs of cigarettes, matches, a box of cotton balls, cuticle scissors, an ivory-backed hand mirror and, it seemed to him, a good deal else. On her tray a china pot held tea, and her full teacup was steaming. She was wearing a marabou-trimmed bed-jacket and, as she lifted her arm, smoking her cigarette, wispy bits of feathers seemed to float from her sleeve. Her yellow hair hung loose over her shoulders, and she had rested a pair of green-tinted reading glasses on her nose.

“Come, baby,” she said. “Come sit by me,” and she began clearing a little space for him to sit among the débris beside her on the bedspread. “Here,” she said, handing him a pack of letters, “put these over there, will you? And take this, and this.” She handed him the nail polish and the Kleenex box. “Now sit down. Give me a kiss.” She turned her cheek and offered it to him.

He kissed her lightly and sat down beside her.

“Darling,” she murmured. “Now rub my back, will you? I've got the damnedest crick in it. Right over there,” she said, as he massaged her shoulders with his fingers. “No, over there more. A little bit higher up. No, lower. To the right. To the
right
, darling. No, not that far—
there
! Ah, there. That's it. Just rub there. Ah! Ah, that feels good. Rub hard, hard. Ah, that feels wonderful. Fine.”

He stopped the rubbing and sat up straight. She stubbed out her cigarette in the ash-tray, reached for another from the pack beside her, and carefully screwed it into her silver cigarette-holder. Through all this, bits of fluff scattered from her bed-jacket. He reached across the bed for matches and lighted her cigarette for her. “Ah, thanks,” she said, inhaling deeply and blowing out a thin stream of blue smoke. Waving her hand, she cut the smoke away from her face.

“I should think that thing would make you sneeze, Sandy,” he said.

“What thing? Oh, this? Oh, marabou always behaves like this. That's its nature. Isn't it the stupidest thing? I wouldn't wear it, but your father gave it to me. He thinks it's—cute. Yes, ‘cute' I'm sure is the word he used to describe it. Get rid of that, too, will you?” She pointed to the white telephone, which also lay beside her on the bed. “Put it on the floor. Put it anywhere.”

“Has Dad come home yet?” he asked her.

“No. He telephoned. He's tied up for another night with that damned client in Hartford. He'll be home to-morrow. He very much wants to see you. He wants to have a talk with you. He says he'll be home by ten o'clock to-morrow morning, and he said, ‘Tell Hugh I want to have an appointment with him at ten o'clock.' You know how your father always is about making appointments with people.” She lifted her teacup to her lips. “Damn!” she said. “This tea simply
will not
cool! I know Pappy boils it. He says he doesn't, but he does. He boils it.”

“I'll try to be punctual,” he said. “Ten o'clock.”

“Darling,” she said, “do you really think he'd notice if you were punctual or not? You know how he is about appointments. He loves to make them, but he's always late for them himself. And darling, guess who else called.”

“I can't. I give up.”

“Titi. And you can't guess, darling, what
to-day's
idea of Titi's is for me. Guess. Try to guess.”

“Jets of perfume under Venus's armpits?” he asked her.

“Darling, you're being mean, you're being horrid. No. It is not jets of perfume under Venus's armpits. Titi would never dream of such a thing. No. It's something for me—a perfectly dazzling new idea for me. Guess.”

He had, for as long as he could remember, always been playing guessing games with his mother. “I give up again,” he said.

She removed her glasses from her nose and held them dangling by one stem. “It has to do with something I'm holding in my hand,” she said.

“Something about your glasses?”

“Yes! Do you know what Titi says? Titi says my glasses are so much a part of my
personality
that he wants me to have a special pair designed for each room! He wants me to have dozens of pairs and keep one in each room. Then, as I go from room to room, I'm to put on the pair of glasses that Titi's designed for that particular room. Don't you think that's an adorable idea, the most adorable idea you've ever heard? What do you think? Tell me.”

“Well,” he said, “I don't know, Sandy. I just don't know. What do
you
think? Are you going to do it?”

“Do you know something, darling?” she asked him, gripping the silver holder between her teeth and looking at him, arching her fine eyebrows. “Do you know something? Do you know I just
might
?”

It was easy, he thought, to dismiss his mother as a caricature, and a rather foolish one at that. It was even easier when you realised that she herself tried to create the impression that she was a caricature, a grotesque figure from some other time and place. She wanted, in many ways, to be a joke, and to be thought of as a joke. You had to know her better to realise that the character she offered to everyone was not her own character at all, but an elaborate invention, and that her true character lay buried somewhere deep within the other person that she tried to be. Her real self was a person that almost never showed, and that only a few people knew existed. Her manner was applied over the surface of this true person as carefully as her nail polish was enamelled over her long, curved fingernails, as cautiously controlled as her deep, cigarette-weary voice. To know all this, you had to know Alexandra Pryor Carey a long time and, through all the long time, you had to accept the rules of manner which she had established for herself, and not question the artifact, and call her Sandy.

“Were you out playing with Edrita?” she asked him.

“What do you mean,
playing
with her?”

“Oh,” she said. “Forgive me, baby. Sometimes I seem to be utterly oblivious to the passage of time! I find myself still thinking of you as a little boy! No, of course I don't mean playing with her, do I? I mean, were you out
walking
with her or something?”

“You must know I was, or you wouldn't ask,” he said.

“Well, as a matter of fact, I saw you both coming out of the woods together, from my window.”

“Yes, I went for a little walk with her.”

“It's what's known as taking a little tramp in the woods, isn't it?” she said, and laughed loudly.

“That's a very old gag, Sandy,” he said. “And not a very good one.”

“You're right. I'm sorry,” she said. “And I don't mean it, either. I'm very fond of Edrita, actually. I think she's very sweet.”

“It's fun to see her again,” he said. “She's an old friend.”

“Of
course
. You and she were always very close as children. And so it's only natural that you should want to—what is the phrase?—revisit the scenes so dear to your childhood?”

“That's right,” he said.

“Of course. I was interested and—in a grim way—amused, to hear that she was home.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, she's such a clever little thing, you know. And it occurred to me—well, I just wondered: Could she have heard about your coming and just hopped in her little car and driven east from Chicago to be here at the same time?”

“Of course not,” he said. “It was just a coincidence.”

“Oh, I'm sure it was,” she said. “But still I couldn't help wondering. I telephoned her this morning, actually, and asked her to dinner to-night. I knew you'd want to see her. She said she couldn't come.”

“Yes, I know. She told me. She said she had to wash her hair to-night.”

“H'm! Can't she afford a hairdresser? Well, it doesn't matter.”

“She said she was very sorry. She wants to see you while she's here.”

“Well, she'd better be a little more receptive to invitations if she wants to see me,” his mother said. “Oh, it's so hard to believe that you children have all grown up. But you have, haven't you? Of course, I only saw Edrita from a distance, from the window, but it looked to me as though she'd aged a great deal. Did you notice that?”

“No, as a matter of fact I didn't.”

“Well, I thought her face looked thinner—harder. She used to be such a pretty little thing.”

“To see all that, you must have been watching her with binoculars, Sandy,” he said.

“Ha!” she laughed again, her loud, throaty laugh. “Well, I have an excellent pair, you know. Pre-war Bausch and Lomb—I bought them in Munich in 1933, in a little shop in the Maximilianstrasse. Our hotel was opposite the Brown House, you see, and I wanted terribly to see a
Putsch
, but all I could ever see was a couple of German soldiers sitting at a table and playing something that looked like Scrabble, but it couldn't have been Scrabble. But seriously, darling, I do think she's changed. And it's too bad. After all, you haven't changed that way. I haven't changed.”

“No, you haven't, Sandy,” he said.

It was true. She hadn't. She had been, of course, a child bride, as she told everyone. And she was still under fifty, though not by much. But of course, in her manner, she referred to herself as “barely forty,” and she often said, “Here I am, barely forty, and I have a son over thirty! I can't understand it. How could that be? Do you think I should leave my uterus to Harvard, darling?” It was easy, too, to be annoyed with her; it was easy to dislike her, easy to find her vapid and vain. But here again it was easy because she really seemed to want people to think her vapid and vain. She wanted you to know, though her skin was still smooth, that she dyed her hair. After all, the hair of a woman of forty-eight or forty-nine (she was one of those ages now) couldn't possibly be as vibrantly yellow as her hair managed to be, as yellow as a teenager's. As long as Hugh could remember, his mother's hair had been the most frankly and explicitly dyed hair anybody had ever seen. Was that, then, really vanity? She had never been a beauty, and she was not beautiful now. She was striking, yes. She was very tall and very thin, and she had a wide forehead and large, handsome blue eyes. But she also had what was known in the family as the Pryor chin, and the Pryor chin was almost no chin at all. And this gave her, when she stood looking down at something, the look of a curious hawk. (On the telephone once, to someone whom she was meeting for the first time, Hugh had heard her describe herself: “You can't miss me, darling,” she had said. “I look exactly like Eleanor Roosevelt, if Eleanor Roosevelt were a honey-blonde, were two inches taller, and weighed forty pounds less.”) To compensate, perhaps, for her not at all pretty but singular face, she had developed, once upon a time, a sizeable amount of that commodity called charm. Conversation was one of her specialities. Her wit, in the old days, had taken her to places where she could never have gone by looks alone. In their débutante days, she and her sister Reba—who was also tall, also thin, and who looked a great deal like her—had been known as the Chinless Charmers, and the Pryor sisters, close of an age, had been much sought after at parties in Boston and New York and Philadelphia and Baltimore and—on their trips to Europe—in Europe.

“Yes,” she was saying now, “I really have no comprehension of the passage of time at all. I simply can't believe that the clock ticks. But it does, doesn't it? I abhor it, but it does. Still, you and I don't seem to change, do we? Oh, I sometimes think the trouble with me is—the
whole
trouble with me is—that I've been hanging around this house too long. I sometimes think that what I really need is a change of air, as the English say. I sometimes think I really must get away somewhere. Go some place and do something—something exciting. Go down in a bathysphere, for instance.”