ARIETTA MINOT FAY, at thirty-seven, still lived in the house in which she, her father and all their known male forebears but the first had been born, a white, Hudson River-bracketed house, much winged and gabled but with a Revolutionary cottage at its core, set in a tiny village, once only a road, on the west shore of the Hudson River, about twenty-five miles from New York. Arietta’s first forebear, Yves Minot, had come to the States in the entourage of Lafayette (some said as a body-servant, although this had never been proved) and had managed to stay near the general’s person throughout all the general’s campaigns except Valley Forge. In 1779, when the general had gone back briefly to France, Yves had stayed behind, first to marry one of the local Dutch girls (receiving the cottage and a large parcel of land as her dowry) and later to leave her at home while he ventured into battle or other forays, whenever he was so minded. In 1824, when Lafayette returned to America for a final visit, Yves was still there, flourishing in all but sons (because of land inheritance, the Minot line usually ran carefully to one) and had accompanied the general on his famous triumphal tour, again in some capacity typical of the Minots, something unidentifiable, profitable and without a doubt enjoyable.
Arietta, if asked to hazard a guess as to what this might have been, usually replied, with the family talent for presenting itself accurately, that Yves’s function probably had something to do with a cap and bells. For, all the Minots took for granted what they had been, were, and hoped to go on being. They were jesters, fonctionnaires attending the private person only, quartermasters supplying the ego, minor affections and spirits of those who were rich enough to keep living standards equal to their own bon viveur tastes, had the intelligence to relish the thrusts of which they were wisely capable, and above all were important enough to enable the Minots to admire them. This was the Minot vanity and their backbone through the years: that managing always to attach themselves to the most honorable patrons, they had meanwhile restricted their own knavish tricks to the surface diablerie required of their profession—that is, to entertainment only. Beneath the skin they were not knaves, beyond a certain French clarity as to the main chance, which in turn had instructed them that a supernormal honesty, shrewdly displayed, was invaluable to him who lived on perquisites.
For no Minot had ever had a salary, or had gone, as the phrase is, “to work.” Every male Minot had attended a university as a matter of course, to be refined for his trade, and occasionally to pick up there some symbiotic relationship that had lasted him for life. Arietta’s father, of the first generation to have no sons, had done his best by sending her to Vassar, where three members of the Rensselaer (an old dining-club of which he was secretary) had sent their girls that same year—the three men representing respectively money with family, money with politics, and—since the Minots had had to lower their standards along with the rest of the world, though belatedly—money with money. For until her father’s time—and he, poor man, was in no way responsible for the monstrous change in the world—all had gone marvelously well with the Minots in both comfort and reputation. And deservedly, for all had worked hard. Although their perquisites had often been extraordinarily vague, ranging from small properties given them to manage and subsequently inherited either in part or in toto, from careers as retainers (they retained so gracefully) or as incumbents of benefices that never had to be explained to them or by them, all the way down to the latter-day vulgarities of stockmarket tips—no Minot had ever boondoggled at the earning of what he received. Until well past the First World War, one could imagine two important men murmuring of a third, as in another context they might mention that his chef was the great-nephew of Brillat-Savarin—“Lucky man, he has a Minot.”
Even in the non-Venetian world of post-’29, the world that had begun to be so hard on those useful types for which there never seemed to be any but foreign names: the cavalière servante, the fidus Achates, the condottiere, the…Minot—the family had still managed, amiably using its talents where there was still scope for them, but for the first time dangerously using its resources when there was not. Over a hundred years in this country had weakened their French pith, making them less antipathetic than they should have been to eating their capital and selling their land. Marrying by inclination had been an even earlier symptom to appear, but here perhaps they had been lucky, for like so many reared nobly, their inclinations had always been a little bit coarse—and this had kept the line remarkably healthy. This meant that Arietta, when she came on the market, did so from a long line of non-idiots, non-hemophiliacs with a minimum life-expectancy of eighty. It also meant that, with one thing and another, she hadn’t much expectancy of anything else except the uses to which she might put her share of Minot temperament—that merriment spiked with truth-telling, suppleness just short of servility, and love of ease combined with a wonderfully circuitous energy for pursuing it. Like so many of her ancestors, Arietta was willing to burn any number of ergs in the process, as long as neither dishonor nor the usual channels of attainment were involved.
On this particular summer Saturday evening at about seven o’clock, Arietta, dressed to go out in her one still respectable cocktail dress, sat in the dimming upstairs parlor of the house that had been hers since the death a year ago, within a few months of each other, of her father and her husband, and gazed out on the river, musing, moodily for her, on the narrow area of play offered that temperament by the modern world. Saturday was shopping day for the week, and that morning, hold back as she might on things like paper napkins—they would use the linen ones—she had not been able to avoid spending eighteen dollars on food. Her nine-year-old son Roger, away for the night at a friend’s house, would consume that almost unaided during the school week. One of the sweet-voiced robot-ladies from the telephone company had phoned twice during the past few days, and even the Light & Power, usually so kindly, had begun to press her about last winter’s heating bill. This week, to the bewilderment of her friends, she had taken to answering the phone in French, ready to aver that “Madame” was away. There had been no cleaning-woman for a year. Behind her, the rooms, receding wing on wing into the hillside with the depressed elegance of a miniature château, showed, besides the distinguished stainings of a hundred and fifty years, the thin, gradual grime of amateur care. The house, free and clear for a century until the thirties, was hers thanks to her father’s single quirk of hereditary thrift, hidden from them until the otherwise worthless will was read—mortgage insurance. It was worth about twenty thousand dollars, possibly a little more to one of that new race of antiquarians who had debouched upon these hills aching to “restore” some old place electrically, and able to—viz. the Lampeys, where she was going that evening. But its sale, if she could bring herself to sell, would be slow. Here she sat in it then, in the richest country in the world. In addition to the house, she had a few marketable “old pieces,” small ones to be culled from among the massive bedsteads and armoires, but nothing on which to rear a nine-year-old boy. She was sitting at Great-grandmother Marie-Claire’s tambour desk; Roger could eat it in two months. She had the pawn tickets for Marie-Claire’s rose-diamonds, and for Marie-Claire’s daughter-in-law’s épergne. And she had $126.35 in the bank.
And in addition she had, of course, herself. It had been her only dowry, and until some six months ago she had never seriously attempted to draw upon it. “What a pity,” her golden-haired Uncle Victor—elder brother of her father and the last successful one of his generation—had remarked of her when she was eight, what a pity that Arietta wasn’t male, for she seemed to have all the Minot talents, including a marked facial resemblance to the founder of the line. Victor had died, from an overdose of his patron’s pheasant and Lafitte, at the minimal age of eighty, spared from knowing that it was even more of a pity that she wasn’t a nineteenth-century male. But here she was, and she was neither. The room where she sat now was the petit salon that held the conglomeration of family pictures, and without turning to look at that descending gallery of honorable rogues, she could trace in them not only the decline of the private patron—of which all the world was aware—but of his factotum—small, tragic, sub-dominant theme that the world had ignored.
Above the mantel was Yves, done on ivory, full-length too, which was unusual for the medium. Legend had it that he had insisted on this because, knee-breeched to the end of his life, he had declared a man to be incomplete without a show of calf; certainly their japing angle went with the face above. It was a triangular face in which all the lines went up, a minstrel face whose nose, long for its tilt, must have moved, as hers did, with speech. The enamelist had even managed to indicate in couleur-de-rose those same crab-apple bumps of cheek she had when she smiled. Next to him was the Dutch wife, shown in conventional oval to the waist, of which there was much, a great blonde, serene in all but her stays. Beneath the two, depending on lengths of velvet ribbon in the tree of life, were their heirs direct and collateral, daguerreotype to Brownie, spilling from the mantel to the side walls. As a curious phenomenon, one could see one or the other of the two progenitors always recurring, often with such fidelity that there had long been family slang for the two types—“the beefies” for the Dutch ones, and “les maigres” for those mince creatures who were true Minots. Although there had been no intermarrying, one type had usually managed to marry the other, and his children tended to be his opposites as well.
Yes, it is all very interesting, thought Arietta—we are a fascinating lot, rather like the green and yellow peas in Mendel—and her father had often dined out on that story. In time, if there was time, she might dine out on it too. Meanwhile, brooding on the three pictures between Yves and the wedding portrait of herself and Carolingus Fay, deceased, she traced a history much more in Gibbon’s line.
Beneath Yves came his son Claude, a “beefy,” of whom it might have been said (as Henry Adams had said of himself) that “as far as he had a function in life, it was as a stable-companion to statesmen, whether they liked it or not.” In Claude’s case they had. Next came Louis, her grandfather, who had switched to railroad barons—a light sprig of a man who had passed on, full in years and benefices, while accompanying home the equally aged body of his baron, on the Union Pacific somewhere between Ogden and Omaha, in a private car. Under him, in the sepia gloss of the eighties, were his sons, beefies again: her father in his teens, in the deerstalker’s cap so prophetic of his later years, and Victor, already a man with a beautiful Flemish jowl. Victor had already been with “munitions” at the time. At the minimal age of eighty he had died (her father used to joke) not of pheasant but of pique, because his patron’s son, seduced by the increasingly corporate air of Delaware, had entered Victor’s exquisitely intangible services on a tax sheet, had actually tried to incorporate him. If so, it had still been death in the high style, and of it. But with her father, the long descent, gradual as the grime on her bric-a-brac, was clear. He had still had the hereditary talent, but he had been fifteen years younger than Victor. Patrons herded in groups now instead of carrying on singly, and preferred the distressingly plebeian admiration of the many to the fine, patrician allegiance of the one. And gaiety, the mark of the personal, was suspect in a sociological world. Ergo her father. When a Minot was stripped of his devotion and of the truth-telling that was its honorable underside, when he was reduced to picking up crumbs of “contact” wherever he could, to making public show of his charms like anyone else, then he did so in the only way he knew. Her father had become a diner-out. It was some consolation that, under many lambent chandeliers and between many long-stemmed rows of pink and tawny glasses, he had dined so well.
She glanced at her wrist, remembered that she no longer had a watch, and looked at the river, estimating the seasonal angle of light on the opposite shore. Still too early to walk the short distance to the Lampeys, who, much as they adored her company, touted it, still preferred their guests to arrive, sharply gala, at eight. And these days Arietta aimed to please, had in fact aimed so steadily these past months and so far from her usual haunts, the shabby Saturday night parties of the real denizens of these hills, that it was no wonder if these were already remarking how unexpected it was of Arietta—slated one would have said for years yet to the memory of Carolingus—to be openly hunting a husband, and in such circles as the Lampeys, too. How surprised they would be if they knew that all she was hunting was a job. A job, to be sure, for a Minot—a sinecure not for sloth, but for the spirit. With, of course, perks enough to feed a healthy nine-year-old boy.
She rose and went to the mantel, staring up at Yves—one “maigre” looking at another. She was four velvet ribbons removed from him, and—except for Roger, who would be nothing for years yet—the last hope of his line. If from his vantage point he could have approved the resemblance, would he have expected her, a female, nevertheless to do something in his line? Being female, what she had done was, twelve years ago, to marry Carolingus Fay. After Vassar had come a year in Italy with one of the daughters of her father’s three friends; the girl had married there, and Arietta, after attending her in a horsehair hat, had returned home. Next, the second girl, married to an Englishman who farmed in Nigeria, had invited her there. Against her father’s wishes—it was not cautious for a woman to become too déracinée—she had gone, and in her lightsome way had enjoyed it, but marooned there, she had missed much of the war and most of the eligible men. In any case, esprit, or whatever it was she had, was difficult in a woman if it wasn’t so much accompanied by looks as contributed to by them. Returning home, with her laugh-lines baked deeper than they should have been for her age, and with some knowledge of cacao and palm oil added to the magpie lore of her clan, she had vegetated in the Hudson Valley for a few restless months—her father’s profession so seldom left him home to be cooked for—and then had gone to Baltimore to visit an old cousin.
And there she had met Carolingus. Eighteen years older than she, he had still seemed a man whom many might be glad to marry—a very fine “beefy” with proconsular manners and profile, and all his curls. Actually he had been a cliché, poor dear Carolingus—old Baltimore French, old poor, old hat—and he had been very glad to marry her. For, by heredity, and unfortunately nothing else, he was a patron—an even sadder case than hers. They had recognized each other, or loved—in time it seemed the same thing—at once. The only way he could afford to retain her was to come live in her house, which he did, to her father’s delight—their mutual recognition too was a touching affair. Carolingus had been too shy to dine out (he had only the dispensing talent), and in time, with her and her father’s full acquiescence, the house and what it held might have been taken by any casual guest to be his. At eighty her father retired, and the two men could not have been happier, jogging along in a life of aristocratic pattern gone native, shooting over their two acres for rabbit instead of grouse, and serving up the game with an excellent dandelion wine. And in their contentment Arietta had been happy too. It was so difficult for a Minot not to be happy, not to see, in whatever dried facts and kernels of incident the day provided, the possibility of a soufflé. Even when Carolingus had not long survived her father, she could not avoid thinking that he was better so, just as she could not help seeing, as the long, curlicued, taupe coffin went down the front steps, that it looked exactly like the éclairs of which he had always been so fond.
And then of course, it had become her turn—to dine out. She had let no one know her real situation; she would have been plied with all usually offered an untrained widow—“rent your lovely rooms to teachers; become a nursery school aide”—all the genteel solutions that would trap her forever. No, she was still child enough of her race to risk all on its chimera: that somewhere there was a post where one might exercise an airy, impalpable training which could never be put down on any resumé, somewhere even in this taxable world.
So far, her efforts to renew her father’s contacts in New York had shown her only how faded they were, and how even those old and well-bred enough to remember the breed she sprang from, its always delicate aims, tended to misinterpret when the diner-out was female, however plain. These last months she had been looking about her in the Valley, among people like the Lampeys, whose kindness had the practicality which went with money still fresh in the till. Tonight, for instance, they were having her in to meet a Miss Bissle from Delaware, who was devoting to a state-wide program of hedge roses and bird sanctuaries her one-twenty-fifth share in a great-grandfather’s fortune in explosives, and whose secretary-companion had just died. The Lampeys, drawing Arietta out for Miss Bissle’s benefit, would no doubt ask her to repeat the story they particularly loved—about the time a zebra, a real zebra, had appeared in her garden—although she had other anecdotes she herself preferred. A humanist, she liked stories about people, and the zebra one was bad art besides, having no ending really, and an explanation that was sadly mundane. She would much rather tell about Claude and Henry Clay, about one of the Great Compromiser’s compromises that had never reached the historians. Or about Louis’s patron, a philanthropist who gave in kind only, and who, on being approached at his door by a panhandler who wanted money for a glass eye, was able to invite him into a cabinet de travail where he had a box of them. But considering the roses and birds, possibly the zebra was more in line.
Across the river, the last evening light shone on the silver roof of a New York Central streamliner; she had a few minutes’ walk and it was time. Courage, she said to herself, thinking of Roger. You are learning your trade a little late, that is all. You still have $126.35 worth of time. And maybe Miss Bissle would be a jolly hedonist who wanted a “good companion,” although this was not often the conclusion one drew from watching people who watched birds. Remember, in any case, that when the artist is good, it is still the patron who is on trial. Reaching up toward Yves, she blew the dust from his frame. Why should our art, she thought, the art of happiness, be such a drug on the market these days? On that note, she tilted her head and went out, swinging the skirt of her dress, luckily so dateless, and tapping sharply, almost as if she scolded it, the tambour desk.
Meanwhile, a few minutes away, the Lampeys and their houseguests, Miss Bissle and her second cousin Robert, were speaking of Arietta. Parker and Helen Lampey, a white-haired couple in their sixties, had started life together at Christian College, Missouri, but long since, owing to Parker’s rise to the extreme altitudes of international law, had accustomed themselves to the ponderous social mixture to be found there—Swiss bankers, German industrialists, American judge advocates and solid rich like the Bissles. Thirty years of moving intercontinentally had not made them raffish—so far as was known they had never felt an expatriate tingle. What it had done was to give them the eternally pink-cheeked, good-tempered look of summer people; they had in fact been summer people all over the world. By native standards they should have been suffering from all the ills of cosmopolitan riches and ease; actually money, comfort and change had kept them amiable, enabling them to be as kindly as they looked, though considerably more worldly. Parker held several directorships adjacent to Robert, whose share in the family fortune was much larger than Miss Bissle’s, and it was through him they had heard of her needs. And had at once thought of Arietta.
“I made Robert come with me,” said Miss Bissle, “because Mary Thrace, the last one, you know—drank.” She was a large, gray pachyderm of a woman whose eyes blinked slowly. “And I don’t at all. You would think that would make it easier to notice in others, wouldn’t you? But it doesn’t. So I brought Robert.”
“Well, I do,” said her cousin, looking at his drink through the lower half of his bifocals. “Steadily. So you did just right.”
Parker smiled. He knew Robert, a quiet, abstemious sort, widowed early and childless, devoted to rather sec philanthropies since. One of those mild, almost expunged men for whom second or third generation fortune was a conscience, not a release.
“Why do men always make themselves out more colorful than they are?” said Miss Bissle, for whom Robert, past fifty, was still a younger cousin.
Helen Lampey glanced at Miss Bissle’s shoes, the flat, self-assured feet of a woman who would never know why. Her cousin looked the way most people who wore glasses like that did—round and tame.
“Is this Mrs. Fay outdoorsy?” said Miss Bissle. “Mary Thrace wasn’t.”
“I don’t know that one thinks of her as ‘out’ or ‘in,’” said Helen slowly. “What would you say, Parker?”
“Delightful either place. In Arietta’s company, where you are always seems just where you want to be. The father was just the same.”
Helen could see Miss Bissle thinking that this was not the way one got things done. “She had a year in Africa,” she said hastily. “I should think one would have to be…outdoorsy…there. And of course she grew up right here in the Hudson Valley—why, they caught a copperhead on their place only last year.”
“Still has the old place. Old family hereabouts, the Minots,” said Parker, rising to replenish the drinks.
“Minot!” Robert said softly. “Did you say—Minot?”
“Yes, ever know any of them? Understand they were quite a family at one time.” Busy with the drinks, he did not note Robert’s lack of response, covered in any case by Miss Bissle.
“Trigonocephalous contortrix,” she said. “They don’t eat birds.”
Robert sat back in his chair. Yes, I knew a Minot, he thought. I knew Victor. Probably isn’t the same family; chances are it couldn’t be. Still, what Lampey had just said about the woman they were expecting—that was just the way Victor had been, turning life rosy and immediate wherever he was, and for adults too, as could be seen in the aureole that went round a room with him—not merely for Robert, the small boy on whom he had occasionally shone his great face, fair, hot and flame-colored as Falstaff's sun. Looking back on Victor now from the modern distance, it seemed to Robert that he must have dreamed him—that day on the Brandywine for instance, 1912 it must have been, when Victor had taken him fishing, the same day he had insisted on letting Robert join the men lunching at Robert’s grandfather’s table before the stockholders’ meeting, and had fed the boy wine. Robert could see him now, jutting like a Rubens from even that portly group, the starched ears of the napkin he had tied around his cravat shining blue in the water-light reflected from walls that were white instead of walnut because of his choice, the napkin flecked, as lunch went on, with sauces Victor had conspired with the cook, the heavy company meanwhile tasting him with the same negligent appreciation they gave the food, as now and then he sent a sally rolling down the table like a prism, or bent over Robert, saying, “A little more claret with the water, Robert?…And now, if you please—a little more water with the claret.” After lunch, Robert had seen him give his grandfather a sheaf of papers, saying, “Here they are, Bi—Robert and I are going out after turtle.” As they left, one of the men said, “Bi—where do you get your cigars?”—it was Victor who had started people calling Robert’s grandfather Bi. “Victor gets them for me in Philadelphia.” At the man’s murmured envy, his grandfather had taken a careful puff, gently guarding the long, firm ash, and had smiled.
And that afternoon on the dock, sitting over the lines that the caramel-colored Negroes in the shack behind them had lent them, had been a time he had remembered always, like a recurrent dream—a day on which absolutely nothing had happened except sun, water and the lax blush of the wine in his limbs. And Victor—doing nothing all afternoon except what he did everywhere, making one feel that whatever you and he were doing at the moment was “it,” that where you were was “here.” They had caught, Robert recalled, two turtles; he remembered being warned of their bite, and informed, lovingly, of their soup, “Victor,” he had asked suddenly, “what are you in?”—meaning chemicals, cotton, tin, this being the way men in those days, at that table, had spoken of what they did. “Oh I’m not ‘in’” had been the laughing answer. “You might say I’m—with.” Breathing hard, Victor had been peering in at the hamper that held the turtles. Robert had looked down at him. “So shall I be,” he had said. “Oh no you won’t. You’re already stuck with it, like these chaps. You’re already in.” Victor had risen, puffing. “Best you’ll be able to do is to have somebody around like me—way Bi does.” Robert had considered. “I’ll have you then if I may,” he had said.
Victor’s face had been in shadow, the sun behind him, but after more than forty years Robert could still sense in him the unnameable quality that had sent him fishing in his cravat. “Mmm. If your father doesn’t get to you first,” he said. And Robert’s father had got to him first, as, in Victor’s old age, he had got to Victor. Not a hard man, his father, but a dull one, of the powerful new breed that cherished its dullness for its safety, and meant to impose that, along with the rest of its worldly goods, on its sons. “Like that brew we had at lunch?” Victor had said, as they trotted the hamper along the shore. “And well you might,” he said, mentioning a name, a year. “Pity I’ve only daughters,” he sighed. “Women’ve no palate. Perfume kills it.” Above them, atop the green dunes of lawn that swept to the water’s edge, a small figure waved at them, his grandfather, guests sped, sauntering the veranda alone. “Will I have one, d’ya think?” asked Robert. “Mmm, can’t tell yet.” Robert considered. His grandfather, colorless and quiet, seemed to him much like his father, who drank only Saratoga water. “Does Bi?” he said with interest. Victor smiled, waving back. “He’s got me,” he said.
And Grandfather was like me really, not like Father, thought Robert, returning to the Lampeys’, where conversation, as so often happened elsewhere, had rippled on without him. He was a dull man too, as I am, but like me with the different and often painful dimension of not valuing it, of knowing that somewhere, sometimes in the same room, conversation twinkled past him like a prism, a rosier life went by. Grandfather was like me. But Grandfather had Victor.
And looking at the door through which Emily’s possibility was to come, telling himself that it was midsummer madness—of Victor’s daughters one was dead and the other last heard of years ago in a nursing order in Louisiana—he still told himself that he would not be surprised, not at all, if the woman who came through the door were to be huge and serenely fair, a great Flemish barmaid of a woman, with Victor’s florid curls.
When Arietta walked through the door, he was surprised, at the depth of his disappointment. For what he saw was a slight woman, almost tiny, whose hair, sugared now like preserved ginger, might once, at youth’s best, have been russet, a small creature whose oddly tweaked face—one of those pulled noses, cheeks that looked as if each held the secret cherry of some joke—was the farthest possible from the classic sun-face he remembered. Even if she were some relation, she was nothing like. There was no point in asking, in opening a private memory to future rakings over whenever he paid a duty call on Emily. For what he was looking at, he reminded himself, all he was looking at was Emily’s future companion.
As the evening progressed, he was not so sure. For the Lampeys’ protégé remained dumb. From their baffled glances he judged that this was not usual; he himself would have guessed that Mrs. Fay’s ordinary manner, if she had any, was more mobile. But for whatever reason, her eyes remained veiled, her hands folded in the lap of her pale, somewhat archaic skirt. A certain stubborn aura spread from her, but nothing else, certainly nothing of the subtle emanation they had been promised, and but rarely a word. Only Emily, impervious to this as she was to so much, noticed nothing, intent on numbering the occasional sips Mrs. Fay took of her wine.
Nor could Arietta have explained. She could have said only that almost at once she had felt Miss Bissle to be a person she could never admire. Or tell the truth to, the truth about Miss Bissle being what it was. Not because Miss Bissle was dull—the best patrons necessarily had almost as much dullness as money—but that she did not suffer from it, whereas the real patrons, all the great ones, had a sweetening tremor of self-doubt at the core. If dullness was what had made them keep Minots, then this human (and useful) sweetening was what had made Minots keep them. But I must, thought Arietta. Roger, she said to herself. $126.35. Nevertheless, when Parker deftly introduced Nigeria, on which he had often heard her entertain, she heard herself furnish him three sentences on the cultivation of the cocoa nib, then fall still. It must be stage fright, her first professional engagement. Her father should have told her that the artist’s very piety and scruples were a considerable hindrance when the artist came down to dining out. In desperation she gulped the rest of her wine. Opposite her Miss Bissle blinked slowly at Robert, as if to say “I count on you.”
“Arietta!” said Helen Lampey. It was half command, half plea. “Do tell us the story about your zebra.”
“Zebra?” said Robert. “Have you hunted them, Mrs. Fay?”
“No.” Mrs. Fay addressed her small, clenched hands. “That’s equatorial Africa.” She heard Helen sigh. “Have you?”
Now, what none of them, what no one knew about Robert Bissle was that once in a while, under certain conditions, he lied. Not on the Exchange of course, or in any real situation. It was his only valve, his sole vice, and it escaped him, with the wistful sound of steam from an air-locked radiator, only when, as tonight, he deemed himself in the safe company of those even duller than he. He leaned back—on these occasions he always did. “Zebras are very beautiful creatures. I never molested them save to procure specimens for the museums, or food for the porters, who liked their rather rank flesh.”
Mrs. Fay, for almost the first time, raised her eyes and looked closely at him. “Yes?” she said. Her nose, he observed, moved with speech. “Do go on.”
“The hartebeest,” he said slowly. “Coke’s hartebeest, known locally by the Swahili name of kongoni—were at least as plentiful and almost as tame.”
“Why Robert!” said Miss Bissle. “I never knew you were in Africa.”
“Oh yes,” he said, still looking at his neighbor, in whose odd face—he had not noticed until now—all the lines went up. “One year when your back was turned.” He plunged on. “A few months before my arrival, a mixed herd of zebra and hartebeest rushed through the streets of Nairobi, several being killed by the inhabitants, and one of the victims falling just outside the Episcopal church.”
“Handy,” said Helen Lampey, in spite of having been informed that the Episcopal was Miss Bissle’s own. She was watching Arietta and Robert—Arietta with Robert, smiling her pawkiest smile at him, and saying, “Yes, yes, do go on.”
Robert took off his glasses. No, there was no resemblance, not even if he imagined a napkin tied round her neck, although for a moment there he had almost fancied an echo saying, “and now, a little more claret.” He shook his head. The company, whatever it was, was not as safe as he had thought. “Your turn,” he said. “Your zebra.”
Arietta unfolded her hands. They trembled slightly. Miss Bissle’s cousin, and even richer one had heard—and even more. One of the old breed, she was sure of it—and she had almost missed him. “My zebra?” she said. “Mine was—” She had been about to say real. But one let people see one knew the truth about them only after one had won them, sometimes long after. And particularly these people. “Mine was—here,” she said. “Right here in the Hudson Valley. In our garden.”
“So help me it was,” said Parker. “I saw it. Go on, Arietta.”
So she did. It had been a Saturday morning, she said, and she had been sitting in her bath, when Roger, seven then, had knocked at her door and said there were policemen in the garden and she had called back, “Tell Daddy.” Minutes later, Roger had knocked again and said, “Mum, there’s a zebra in the garden,” and she had replied—“Tell Daddy.” “Now,” said Arietta, “Roger is not a fey child. I should have known.” She knew every periphrasis of this story, every calculated inflection and aside; this was the point where everyone always began to smile expectantly, and pausing, she saw that they had. “I’ve never been able to afford to disbelieve him since.” For then Carolingus had come up the stairs. “He looked,” said Mrs. Fay, delaying softly, expertly, “well—like a man who has just seen a zebra in his garden.” As, according to him, he had. She went downstairs—and so had he. She made them see the scene just as she had, the two policemen, Mack Sennett characters both of them, yelling “Stand back there!” from a point well behind Carolingus, and there, cornered in a cul-de-sac near the carriage house, flashing and snorting, the zebra, ribanded in the rhododendrons like a beast out of the douanier Rousseau.
“The policemen,” she said, “had had no breakfast, so there I found myself, carrying a tray with sugar and cream and my best coffee cake—luckily I had baked on Friday—to two policemen and a zebra, in a back yard twenty-five miles from New York.” She rose, circled the room, holding the scene with her hands pressed lightly together, and as if absent-mindedly, poured Parker some coffee out of the Lampeys’ silver pot. Outside, in the Lampeys’ garden, a barn owl hooted—it was the atmosphere, conspiring gently with her as usual. She waited. At this point someone always asked, “But how?”
“But how?” said Miss Bissle.
“Ah, now,” said Mrs. Fay, “I have to double back. I have to tell you that across from us, in one of those very modern houses with the kitchen set just under the crown of the road, the family gets up very early. They garden, and the mother-in-law is a past president of the Audubon Society of Atlanta, Georgia.” Still circling the room, a diseuse gently fabricating her own spotlight, Mrs. Fay rested one hand, a brief wand, on Miss Bissle’s shoulder as she passed her. Robert watched, enthralled. There was nothing to it, yet she held them all. They sat like marionettes whom she was awakening slowly to a mild, quizzical sensation like the pleasure-pain in a sleeping foot. “And at about six o’clock that morning, the head of the County Police picked up the phone and heard a cultivated Southern voice say, ‘Ah should like to repo’t that jus’ now, as we wuh setten at breakfas’, we saw a zebra payss bah on the Rivuh Road.’” Parker laughed, and Mrs. Fay picked it up, wove him in quickly. “Ah yes,” she said, “can’t you hear her? And the chief thought to himself that the River Road is rather the bohemian part of his parish, and that Saturday morning comes, well—after Friday night. So he calls our policeman and says, ‘George, people down your neck of the woods seeing zebras.’ George decides to wait until, well, two or more people see it. Then Joe Zucca, the old caretaker at Fagan’s, telephones, babbling that a striped horse is crashing around his conservatory. And the chase is on. And they bring it to bay in our garden.”
Parker guffawed. “There are zebras at the bottom of my garden.”
Arietta, reaching her own chair, sat down in it. Someone always said that too. She looked round at their faces. Yes, she had them, particularly one. Quickly, quickly now, wind it up. And in a long, virtuoso breath, she wound it all up—how the village had filled the yard, a gold mine if she’d just had the lollipop concession, how her smart-aleck neighbor had stopped by the front gate, offering a drive to town, and when she’d said, “Wait a bit, Tom, we’ve got a zebra in the back yard,” had smirked and said “Yeah, I heard that one at Armando’s—and the horse said, ‘I've been trying to get it to take its pajamas off all night.’” And how it had been one of the great satisfactions in life to be able to lead him round to the carriage house. And how the cops had finally got hold of the Hudson River Cowboys Association—yes there was one, those kids in white satin chaps and ten-gallon hats who always rode palominos in the Independence Day Parade—and how they’d come, out of costume alas, but with their horse trailer, and how Carolingus and the cops had finally jockeyed the beast in, using a three-man lasso. And how, at the height of it—children screaming, yokels gaping, three heated men hanging on ropes, the whole garden spiraling like a circus suddenly descended from the sky, and in the center of it all, the louche and striped, the incredible—how Arietta’s eighty-five-year-old Cousin Beck from Port Washington, a once-a-year and always unheralded visitor, had steamed up the driveway in her ancient Lincoln, into the center of it all. “Oh, Cousine Beck,” she’d stammered—in French, she never knew why—“you find us a little en deshabille, we have us un zèbre.” And how Beck, taking one look, had eased her old limbs out of the car and grunted, “Arietta, you are dependable. Just bring me a chair.”
Mrs. Fay folded her hands. Now someone would ask the other question. She gave a sigh. Next to her, her neighbor marveled. No, she was nothing like—no aureole. This one whisked herself in and out, like a conjuror’s pocket handkerchief. But the effect was the same. Small sensations, usually ignored, made themselves known, piped like a brigade of mice from their holes. There was a confused keenness in the ear…nose…air? One saw the draperies, peach-fleshed velour, and waited for their smell. The chandelier tinkled, an owl hooted, and a man could hear his own breath. The present, drawn from all its crevices, was here.
“But where did the beast come from?” said Miss Bissle.
Yes, it would be she, thought Arietta. The cousin, his glasses still off, was staring at her with eyes that were bright and vague. “A runaway,” she said in a cross voice. It always made her sulky to have to end the fun this way, with no punch line but fact. “There’s an animal importer up the mountain; we found out later. He buys them for zoos.” She turned pertly to the cousin. “Perhaps it was one of yours.”
“I can’t think when, Robert,” said Miss Bissle. “I’ve always known exactly where you were.”
Robert, before he replaced his glasses, had a vague impression that Mrs. Fay looked guilty, but she spoke so quickly that he must have been wrong.
“Parker,” she said, “did you and Helen ever hear about Greatgrandfather Claude, and Mr. Henry Clay?”
They hadn’t. Nor had they heard about Louis’s patron’s glass eye. Robert, saved, sank deeper in his chair. He was his father’s son after all, trained to fear the sycophant, and he brooded now on whether Mrs. Fay wanted something of him. Look how she had got round the Lampeys. Was she honest? Victor’s tonic honesty, he remembered, had spared no one; he never flattered individually but merely opened to dullards the gross, fine flattery of life alone. And what did he, Robert, want of her? If he closed his eyes, prisms of laughter floated past him, flick-flack, down the long cloth of another table; he could feel, there and here, the lax blush of the present in his limbs. He slouched in it, while Arietta told how, when Carolingus spoke for her, her father had said, “You know she has no dot.” And how Carolingus, who was slightly deaf, had replied, “I’ve no dough either.” And how in after years, both always amiably purported to be unsure of who had said which.
And then Robert sat up in his chair. For Arietta was telling the story of the “beefies” and “les maigres.”
So that’s it, he thought. I knew it, I knew it all the time. And in the recesses of his mind he felt that same rare satisfaction which came to him whenever he was able to add to a small fund he had kept in a downtown savings bank almost since boyhood, money separate from inheritance, made by his own acumen, on his own. I recognized her, he thought, and the feeling grew on him, as it had been growing all evening, that in the right company he was not such a dullard after all. He leaned back now and watched her—quiet now after her sally, unobtrusive whenever she chose. It was not wit she pretended to; her materials were as simple as a child’s. What was the quality she shared with Victor, born to it as the Bissles were born to money, that the others here felt too, for there was Lampey, murmuring ingenuously into his brandy-cup “Wonderful stuff, this, isn’t it?”—quite oblivious of the fact that it was his own—and there even was Emily, her broad feet lifted from the floor? Whatever Mrs. Fay did, its effect was as Victor’s had been, to peel some secondary skin from the ordinary, making wherever one was—if one was with her—loom like an object under a magnifying glass—large, majestic and there. She made one live in the now, as, time out of mind it seemed, he had once done for himself. But he did not know how she did it. Or whether she did. Watching her rise from her chair, begin to make her adieu, the thought came to him that he would not mind spending a lifetime finding out.
“Let me go with you,” he said, standing up. “Let me drive you home.”
But Emily had arisen too. “Mrs. Fay,” she said, her blinking fluttered, “have you had any experience with birds?”
Arietta smiled between them. How lucky she had recognized him, the real thing, poor dear, even if his sad little blague—out of African Game Trails of course, old Teddy Roosevelt, on half the bookshelves in Nigeria—was not.
“Do,” she said to him, “but let’s walk.” She turned to Miss Bissle. and let the truth escape from her with gusto. After all it was her own. “No, not really. Of course—I’ve shot them.” On the short way home, the river, lapping blandly, made conversation. Robert spoke once. “I don’t really think Emily would have suited you,” he said, and Mrs. Fay replied that it was nice of him to put it that way round.
At Arietta’s doorway, they paused. But it was imperative that she find out what was on his mind. Or put something there.
“I’d ask you in,” she said, “but I’ve nothing but dandelion wine.”
“I’ve never had any,” said Robert. “I’d like to try it.”
She led him through the hall, past the rack where Carolingus’s leather jacket hung, and her father’s, and the squirrel-skin weskit they had cured for Roger, then through the softly ruined downstairs rooms, up the stairs and into the little salon. It was an educative tour; it told him a great deal. And this was the family room; he sensed the intimate patchouli that always clung to the center of a house, even before he looked up and saw them all above the mantel, hanging on their velvet tree. While Arietta went for the wine, he moved forward to examine them. What a higgler’s collection they were, in their grim descent from ivory to pasteboard to Kodak, yet a firm insouciance went from face to face, as if each knew that its small idiom was an indispensable footnote to history, to the Sargents, Laverys, de Lászlós that people like him had at home. And there, in that small brown-tone. Yes, there.
“Take me round the portraits,” he said when she returned, and here too, since she also was on the wall, he learned. He saw that Carolingus must have been of an age near his own. “And who are they?” he said. “You missed that one.” They were sitting at a small escritoire on which she had placed the wine, and if he stretched a hand he could touch the faded brown-tone. “That’s my father as a boy, and his older brother, Victor.” What an absurd feeling happiness was. That must be its name. To feel as if such a sum, such a round sum had been deposited in that bank that he need never go there again. Not if he stayed here. As, in time, he thought, he could arrange.
Opposite him, Arietta fingered a drawer inside which the name of the desk’s first owner was inscribed—Marie-Claire, who had married for inclination but had got the rose-diamonds too. She stole a glance at her vis-a-vis. After all, she had recognized him, and in time, as she did remember, this and inclination could come to be almost the same. It was strange that he was no “beefy,” but she had already had one—and no doubt her tribe, along with the rest of the world, must move on. And he was very responsive. In time, she thought, the house would come to seem to him like his own.
“Wonderful stuff,” he was saying, holding up to the light one of the old green bottles into which Carolingus and her father had put the wine.
“Is it really?” said Arietta. “I was never any help to them on it.”
“What it wants,” he said, “is to be decanted, for the sediment. One does it against a candle flame. I was thinking—I might come by tomorrow. And show you.”
“Do—for company,” said Mrs. Fay. “Actually, one wine seems to me much like any other. I’ve got no palate for it. Women don’t, my father always used to say.”
“No, they don’t.” He was looking at her so deeply that she was startled. “Perfume kills it,” he said, and so intensely that, odd averral as it was, it hung over them both like an avowal of love.
Downstairs, she let him out the front door, and watched him to the end of the lane. Roger’s spaniel yipped, and over the hill another dog set up an answering cry. In the darkness, as she closed the door, she smiled, one of old Teddy’s sentences lumbering through her mind. “The hunter who wanders these lands sees the monstrous river-horse snorting, the snarling leopard and the coiled python, the zebras barking in the moonlight.” As she went back up the stairs, she wondered whether she would ever tell him. Some truths, as an honest companion, one spoke in jest; others, as a woman, one kept to oneself. At the moment it didn’t matter. Standing in the doorway of the little salon, she stretched her arms. “I’ve dined out!” she said to the pictures, to herself. “I’ve dined on zebra, and on hartebeest, and yes, I think, on…husband. I’ve dined well.”
Outside the hedge at the end of the lane, Robert watched the door close. He knew just how it would begin tomorrow; he would begin by asking her, as he had never asked anyone, to call him “Bi.” There would always be a temptation to say more—who, for instance, would understand about that day on the Brandywine better than she? But he must remember; with all she was—she was also a woman. They liked to be chosen for themselves. He must always be as mindful of that as of his incredible luck. And what utter luck it was! He swelled with the urge to tell someone about it. But there were not many in the world today who could appreciate precisely its nature. It was even possible that he himself was the last one extant of all those who once had. Standing in the shadow of the hedge, he whispered it to himself, as once a man had whispered it to his grandfather, over the cigar. “Lucky man,” he said to himself, “you have a Minot!”