THE DRESSMAKER who had been imported from New York to make Hopestill’s trousseau was known by her trade name, Mamselle Thérèse, which she herself always substituted for the nominative case of the first person singular pronoun, as though she were her own interpreter. “Mamselle Thérèse does not touch the potatoes,” she said on her first evening to Ethel who frankly tittered. She said to me, “Mamselle Thérèse goes to a night-club twice a week in New York,” by which I understood she wanted me to supply her with the Boston equivalent of this diversion, but I did not respond as she had hoped and thereafter she made no more such overtures but amused herself (and presumably me) in designing costumes which she said would “bring out” my personality. She spoke of Chanel, Lilly Daché, Mainbocher as if they were Brahms, Bach, Mozart, or Plato, Descartes, and Hegel. “Daché composed a superb number for an archduchess last month, a really revolutionary turban. People were simply swept off their feet.” Like the bald barber recommending a hair restorer, like the dentist whose teeth are false, Mamselle Thérèse dressed most frumpishly. She wore a strange assemblage of seedy garments, too large for her spare, nimble frame, out-of-date, soiled, frayed, reminding me of the hand-me-downs that two or three times a year the Brunsons’ Boston relatives sent them to be given to me. And it was not only that the little modiste had clothed herself out of a rag bag, but that she had very bad taste, burdening herself like a fancy-woman with gimcracks from the five and ten cent stores: wooden brooches in the unreasonable shape of a Scotty dog or of an ice-skate or of a Dutch shoe or of a football; enameled beetles or dragonflies or cobras made of tin, with blinding rhinestone eyes; earrings in the shape of oak-leaves or candlesticks; and with any costume, upon her right arm, she wore nine thin silver bracelets which she clanked interminably. Her shabbiness could not be explained by poverty, for she had a flourishing business, and the expensive dresses of her two assistants who had been lodged in a house on Joy Street, suggested that she could afford to be generous in their salaries. She was charging Miss Pride a shocking price for this assignment, as I knew from the estimate she had handed in on the day she arrived. She spoke quite openly of this as “a good thing.”
“Now for you, angel,” she said, “Mamselle Thérèse would sew for next to nothing, but for them, the price is in the hundreds, sometimes in the thousands. It is an art, ne c’est pas? Wouldn’t they pay ten thousand for a picture by Rousseau? Then why shouldn’t they pay ten thousand for a dress by Chanel? Mainbocher? Mamselle Thérèse don’t kid herself. She knows she isn’t in that class yet, but she works slow and sure like a mole. Five years from now Mamselle Thérèse will be in the movies like Adrian.”
Her ruling passion was business, and she could see nothing except in terms of its commercial value. Thus, when she learned that I had gone to a secretarial school, she said, “You must keep your eyes open and when the time comes, rush in and nab yourself a plum. Mamselle Thérèse’s advice to a young girl like you that has a good head on her shoulders is: be a secretary to a big-time lawyer. There’s the money! There’s the prestige! I’m telling you. What good are you doing yourself fooling around up here with that vieille furie when you could be on Fifth Avenue, New York? Mamselle Thérèse has a girl-friend working at Number One, Wall Street, on the thirty-fourth floor and she makes fifty dollars a week. I’m telling you.”
She talked ceaselessly in a hoarse whisper as if we were two business men making a slightly shady deal. Often she worked arithmetic problems with the tip of her finger on the polished table, so obsessed with the imposing figures of her last year’s state and federal income taxes that she did not leave off even when I warned her that her nails would scratch the finish. It was of no matter to her that I contributed nothing to the conversation but answered only with a monosyllable or a forced smile when she put such a rhetorical question to me as “Does Mamselle Thérèse know all the answers in the business world?” Her chief ambition was to receive a commission from visiting royalty; it deeply thrilled her to imagine some queen or princess finding, after she disembarked, that she had not brought enough evening gowns: “ ‘I must run right to Mamselle Thérèse. She will make me a chose merveilleuse for the White House ball.’ Wouldn’t Mamselle Thérèse be knocked off the Christmas tree?” Sometimes, impassioned by the memory of a gown that Mainbocher had executed for some foreign personage or by the contemplation of vast sums of money owed her by her “élite clientele” she would pursue me to my room, having given a peremptory order to Ethel as we left the dining-room, to bring our coffee to the third floor.
Occasionally, out of self-defense, I would deliver her a little lecture, on how much I liked the town of Concord and its environs or on the splendor of the Countess’ Saturdays, but Mamselle could attend nothing of what I said and the moment I paused, she burst in with a raging river of facts and figures to obliterate completely my little trickle of talk.
But she was not, as she seemed, out of touch with human affairs. She was not especially interested in them, but nothing escaped her shrewd French eye. Believing me to be Miss Pride’s secretary and nothing more, she spoke unguardedly of the household. “Mon dieu, that bridegroom! Angel, he is a fool, I’m telling you. Mamselle Thérèse don’t need to make his acquaintance to know that like she knows the palm of her own hand. She only has to contact the fiancée, ne c’est pas? That rich renarde.”
“Why do you say she is a renarde?” I asked.
“You can tell by the eyes. They are sub-zero. You know? It is on her part a mariage de convenance.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Because they haven’t slept together. And how does Mamselle Thérèse know that?” She tapped her forehead. “Par intuition.”
“But perhaps it is a mariage de convenance on his part too?” I suggested.
“Maybe. Yes, maybe. It is a cold place, this Boston. He marries her because she is rich, beautiful, what-not. Because a doctor should have a wife. She marries him because she is enceinte, ne c’est pas.”
I should have laughed and denied the charge, but I was so astounded at the woman’s wizardry that I could not gather my wits together for a moment and when I did, knowing that her conviction was not only right but that I could in no way shake her from it, I said, “You may be right, but I beg you to say nothing to anyone. It would kill Miss Pride.”
Mamselle Thérèse was offended. “Why should Mamselle Thérèse gossip? She is here for the money. She don’t care a damn about the mariage. Angel, it is a dirty business and not for me. This little up-and-coming couturière stays single, I’m telling you. Plenty of boyfriends and not a husband. Don’t mix business with pleasure, angel. So why should she interfere with someone else’s mariage? Mamselle Thérèse won’t talk to the interested parties. She is interested only in the money from the interested parties.”
We were sitting in my room at the time of this conversation and it was rather late, perhaps eleven o’clock. Both Miss Pride and Hopestill had gone out for the evening. Presently we heard light footsteps coming up the last flight of stairs and Hopestill’s door was opened. Evidently she had come back to get something for in ten minutes, she went out again and back down the stairs. Mamselle Thérèse, not so much through the fear of being overheard as through boredom with the subject, dropped it instantly on hearing the footsteps and began telling me about a new costume she had designed for nuns which would be at once more sanitary and more beautiful than their present ones. She had interviewed innumerable Mother Superiors and had written to various bishops and to the secretary of the Archbishop of New York. As she had what is aptly known as “total recall,” she repeated verbatim each conversation, each letter, and each reply, all of which seemed, on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities, to be stubbornly hostile to her proposition.
But the soliloquy, which lasted for half an hour after Hope left the house, did not prevent me from hearing through the wall which separated our rooms, the soft collapse of the girl’s body on the chaise longue and a sob, stifled at once as though she had pressed her face into a pillow. The sound would probably have escaped me if I had not heard it before and had not come to expect it as the expression, in a sense, of the reason for her visit to her room during the evening. Almost every night when there were dinner guests, she came up two or three times, and usually I heard that secret, frustrated outburst like a checked curse. On such evenings, she might stay as long as a quarter of an hour and hearing her footsteps back and forth across the carpet, muted so that I could not be sure if I really heard them or only felt the vibrations of the floor, I sat at my typewriter unable to strike a key, embarrassed because she must have heard the clatter of the machine which stopped as her door-knob turned.
I could not immunize myself to her misery and pitied her for whatever punishment her conscience was meting out to her. I was impelled to go in to her in the way one may start, hearing a human cry in the night and think it is someone lost or hurt and in need of help. Beside a warm fire in a light room, an impression of the night’s cold and darkness superimposes itself upon the altruistic impulse, and one rationalizes, says the cry comes from the throat of a drunk or of a cat that can sound like a woman or even that it is the lure of a thief. I would wait until I heard her going down the stairs again and then I would shrug my shoulders with a resolute indifference and say aloud, “It’s her affair, not mine.”
Before my brother was born, I could not bear to have my mother speak of miscarriages and of “the pains” because I was sure that pain must be much more terrible to other people than to myself. And when Miss Pride reproved the Gonzales boy for stealing her soap to carve his little Virgin, I would have been glad to exchange places with him in order not to see the shame in his downcast face and the limp arms hanging at his sides, the palms of his hands turned out in broken-hearted supplication. And now while I did not minimize the discomfiture of my own position and spent a good part of every day in sorrowing over my unjust luck and even thought that in the end, my lot was much the worse, I felt that I was somehow better equipped to endure than Hopestill. She, the frail sheep lost from the herd, could not find her way back nor could she make her way alone. She knew already, as these flights to the privacy of her room showed, that she could not carry it off, for even if the discovery of her deception were long postponed or never made at all or made only by a few people who would not blame her or, if they did, would keep silent, she had nevertheless ruined herself in the only milieu for which she was trained. She had ruined herself even though there might never be suspicions or rumors, for she would never be sure that she was not suspected: she would hear the most innocent remark as a double entendre, the most amiable question as put with an ulterior design. It was possible, too, I thought, that after the secret gratitude to Philip for unknowingly saving her from disgrace had expired, she would commence to hate him, as the impoverished libertine, her father, had hated his martyred wife whose rich dowry had provided him with the means for his philanderings.
Long before this, Hopestill had damaged herself, though not irremediably, by her connections with “the Bohemians.” She had occasionally brought young men, who let their beards grow and who dressed most unusually, to the houses of her friends and her aunt’s friends, exhibiting them like trained poodles. Unconventional and explosive, they alarmed the hostesses whose disapproval could not find its exact target and fired nervously upon all sides. The poverty of these barbarians was thought to be an intentional and Communistic affront; they were believed to be practitioners of free love, companionate marriage, and atheism; their painting or their writing was eyed with distrust as revolutionary or satirical. The Boston hostess, finding herself at the mercy of a novelist (she had not heard of him and therefore could not tell if he was a satirist or not) guarded her words against the escape of a stupid or a typical remark, yet most typically, most stupidly, said, “I hope you won’t put me in one of your novels.”
It would have been tolerable, everyone thought (according to the Countess, my faithful informant), if Hope had been content merely to bring her friends to parties for, despite their appearance, they behaved usually quite well. It was that Hope had given herself such insufferable airs, sprinkling her talk with the cryptograms of literary critics, explaining, unbidden, the meanings of abstruse poems. She had painstakingly studied out an erudite essay on “psychical distance” the year before and for several months judged thereby every book, painting, play, or movie that came up. But as someone remarked—someone who probably had never heard of the esthetic principle she used so boldly—she shot only at sitting birds, and she was openly laughed at when she was heard to say to Amy Brooks, “The trouble with your Oyster House pastel is the figure in the fore-ground, which is under-distanced. He is simply too much the pitiable bum. He actually brings tears to one’s eyes, and that won’t do.”
To be sure, she was over her “intellectual” phase and no longer carried marinated herring to the obscure studios. But she had not become any more manageable. Exactly what she was doing in New York no one knew. Indeed, no one knew her address beyond the vague fact that it was “in the fifties.” When someone said to her, “I wish you’d look up my friend so and so. She has a charming place on the Park and I know you’d find her amusing,” Hope replied with a warm smile, “It’s terribly sweet of you. Of course one never does anything one wants in New York, but do give me her address anyhow.” Only once had anyone seen her and that only by chance. A Miss Bradley, an elderly spinster, idling away an hour between appointments in Central Park, had come on Hopestill staring raptly at the sea lions who were being fed. “Oh, aren’t they beautiful?” the girl had cried. “Oh, aren’t they wondrous! Oh, if only I had seen them when I was a child. You know, Miss Bradley, that Aunt Lucy never let me go to the zoo.” Miss Bradley, reporting this uninhibited speech to Amy Brooks, said, “I expected her to give me a lecture on child psychology, but she spared me and we had a very pleasant little chat.”
Now that she had made the full circuit and had returned to the starting point, she was generally forgiven all her past peculiarities, and there was universal rejoicing in Miss Pride’s circle that the marriage, prophesied for so long, was at last to come off. In my exile, I was obliged to rely entirely on the Countess for my information, and she assured me that both Philip and Hopestill were ecstatic, that it made her quite giddy herself just to be in the same room with them. Hope, she said, had never looked so well or so handsome.
I would have been glad to believe the Countess, but I could not because of that testimony of Hopestill’s misery that I heard nearly every night. As soon as her footsteps had died away, I would give in to a vicarious fear that set me trembling and, suddenly cold, would go to the fire to warm myself. I would muse into the brilliant coals and shut my eyes. The inner wall of my lids retained the clarified red of the flames like the surface of one of those freakish hot pools in certain places where minerals behave in a fanciful way. Willfully I would force myself downward through a red wind until the door to my imagined room was opened and I stood upon its threshold. Recently I had identified the lobster-claw letter opener as belonging to a very aged woman who lived in Chichester and had rendered some service to my mother when I was about five years old, so that we went to call on her one afternoon at tea time. I had been given the letter opener to play with and I was horrified by it, but I was bashful and did not want to be rude to the kind old lady, and so I had twirled the agate sphere and stroked the reptilian claws until I was nearly sick and had to refuse the hot cocoa which had been made especially for me. Still, the aged woman’s room was not my room. I remembered distinctly that she received us in her bedroom because there were no fires in the rest of the house and that the spool bed had been covered with a blue and white quilt with a design of five-pointed stars and crescent moons, and that I had sat on an ottoman covered with scarlet oilcloth and that the tea things had been on an old-fashioned washstand through the half open door of which had been visible a chamber-pot with pale roses painted on the side.
My memories of rooms where I had been were delineated with the perfection of detail of truthful photographs. I saw Miss Pride’s room at the Hotel as it had been one day after a windy rainstorm. A cherub pillow had been by the open window and one of the castles was dark with dampness; an elm leaf was flattened against the screen, and a letter which had been on the sill had been blown to the floor. One day I recognized the unlabeled bottle of red wine. It had been in the Countess’ music room one afternoon, late, when I had gone there to listen to some records and had been alone. I had tasted the wine, but it had gone sour and I concluded that it had been removed from the cabinet to be taken downstairs but had been forgotten.
My visits to the red room were infrequent. Though I was convinced that there was no harm in it, that it was, if anything, an achievement of will that should be envied and applauded by other people who had not so sure a refuge, I was, at the same time, loath to make my seclusion there a habit. I entered it only (rather, I stood upon the threshold, for I was never actually in the room and could not visualize myself taking a book out of the shelves or sitting at the desk) when I felt that I could not withstand the onslaught of worry or of loneliness. Whenever I realized that Sunday was approaching and I must go again to see my mother and probably to have another conversation with the doctor, whenever Miss Pride reminded me that I was in disgrace, and whenever I came to think of Hopestill, then I would turn to my ghost of a sanctuary as I might turn to a drug.
When there were no guests but Hopestill and Miss Pride had gone out and Mamselle Thérèse was in her own room working at her sketches of a renovated nun, the stillness of the house unnerved me and if by chance there was a wind lamenting in the trees of Louisburg Square, my heart was plucked quickly like a taut gut. It was not that I feared sneak-thieves or murderers or Kakosan’s spirits, nor did I feel, at this particular time, the watchful eyes of people who thought I might repeat my mother’s pattern. It was a fear I could describe only approximately as a fear of myself. It was not a new experience. Sometimes in Chichester, I had taken care of children in the evenings at a lonely house almost at the Point. An old, one-eyed Airedale kept me company, snoozing on the sofa. Abruptly he would waken and lift his head, pointing his nose toward the door, and then, assured that there was nothing outside after all, he would look at me with his one intelligent eye. This look, so companionable and preternaturally wise, frightened me more than his attention to the door, beyond which he had sensed the lurking of some unknown thing: I was afraid the dog would speak. This droll idea, of brief duration, was but the envelope for another fear: the fear of my own mind which had conceived so awful a possibility. Like the motorist through dense fog at night who has proof of only himself, his automobile, and the road, and must accept a priori the fact that the rest of the world has not been dematerialized, I could not demonstrate the external authorship of myself and the dog nor our independence of one another. What proof had I that the dog was not the creation of my own mind and being such might, if I willed it, speak to me; conversely, what proof was there that I was not the dog’s idea, evolved in those mysterious, perhaps Olympian, brains behind the obtuse snout? What broke my ghastly reverie was the registration of sound on my mind, the footsteps of some later walker, or the rustle of a bed above me as one of the children turned in his sleep. I argued that since my mind had been altogether on the dog, it could not have produced a noise in the distance. My hearing re-established my spatial relation to the outer world’s complexities and immediately thereafter my judgments were restored.
Similarly at Miss Pride’s on silent nights, what unbalanced the poise of quintessential self (a play on words would come to me: the eye was the proof of I, not only of my own eye or my mind’s eye, bur the Cyclopean eye of the Airedale) was the protesting, bewildered cry of Miss Pride’s cat shut up in her bedroom. It would come toward the middle of the evening and was no more than one prolonged off-key yet musical howl which petered out on a descending scale.
I had seen Mercy only once or twice in all the time I had lived with Miss Pride. When I first came, I had been told that she was jumpy and unfriendly because her kittens, begot by an unauthorized tomcat during the summer when she had been entrusted to the care of the Hornblowers in Concord, had been chloroformed as soon as they were born, and the mother, her instincts baffled, hunted them with piteous persistence, crying and snooping through the closets, the bedroom, the bath, and her own apartment, a storeroom no longer in use. Until her mesalliance and its results, she had been allowed to roam at will throughout the house, but Miss Pride, attributing a high degree of intelligence to her, thought that by way of revenge, she might now defile upholstery and rugs, in her search might overturn vases and clocks, might in her despair and anger scratch visitors and claw their stockings. By this time, she had surely forgotten her kittens, but Miss Pride had decided to make this limited arena permanent, for what reason I do not know. Each morning, I saw Ethel putting Mercy’s sand-box (called by Miss Pride “the kitty-cat’s water-closet” but by the embarrassed servants “the cat’s carton”) shrouded with last night’s Transcript on the dumb-waiter to be emptied and filled with fresh sand. This and the lonely cry at night were the only evidence I had that there was an animal in the house.
One night I thought that it would do no harm if I let the prisoner out for an hour or so, bringing her up to my room which was not a spacious place to romp in but would at least be a change of scene. I went down. Miss Pride’s room was dark except for the fire that had burned down to a rich glow and at first I could not see the cat. When I was accustomed to the shadows, I perceived a pair of sulphurous eyes which, seeming to be suspended in the air four feet from the floor, regarded me with the unflinching stare of the hypnotist. I switched on the night-lamp beside the bed and in its weak light saw the animal perched on a chest of drawers beside the fire-place. For a moment she did not move but only looked at me. She had a short, square face and silver whiskers that curved downward from her tawny cheeks, marked on each side with two black stripes. She sat with her front legs straight and her luxurious tail curled about her feet. I moved toward her and she started, thrusting her head suddenly forward so that I could see the pure white fur under her chin. “Kitty, kitty,” I said. She leapt from the chest with a chirrup of fear and ran to her room, a streak of fur that blended shades of red and yellow and blue, all overlaid and softened with a cloudy silver and striped with black. As she ran, her tail dragged on the floor like a train. I did not pursue her, for there had been in her face as she saw me coming toward her a look of primitive terror that could, I thought, easily become the rage of a wild beast. I ran back up the stairs two at a time to my cheerful room where all the lights were burning. Three or four nights later, again hearing the cry and again wishing to bring her upstairs, I went down to try a second time. I found the door to Miss Pride’s bedroom locked.
It was easy enough to explain the locked door. I remembered that in my haste the first time to get away from the cat and to end our mutual fear, I had neglected to turn out the night-lamp, and Miss Pride, finding it and realizing that someone—probably a servant, she would think—had been in her room, henceforth took precautions against Mercy’s escape. She preferred to do that, I reasoned, rather than to shut the door to the storeroom. But ever after that, when I passed through the hall on the second floor, the fact struck me as potentially sinister that I had never heard Mercy’s call until these last weeks when I, too, was virtually a prisoner, heard it only at night when I was alone except for Mamselle Thérèse and the servants who were all on the floor above me. As I went on and ascended the flight of stairs to the third story, my common sense returned and told me that heretofore I had been reading aloud to Miss Pride at this hour, and that on the nights when she was at home, I used my typewriter, the racket of which shut out all but loud noises or very near ones. But there is a side in us that courts and would like to believe in the fanciful. “Of course it was no more than coincidence,” we say, but we would like our audience to share our wonder and reply, “Coincidence, certainly, and yet . . .”
2
By day our house was the scene of what Miss Pride crossly called “a needless hullabaloo” for which, as a matter of fact, she was largely responsible, for while Hopestill and Philip had wanted a small wedding, she had insisted that a step of this kind be taken with public pomp. It was typical of her to speak of it as “a step of this kind,” as if it were some sort of sensible negotiation which had been undertaken after several other “kinds” had been discarded. It was she who had wired Mamselle Thérèse (recommended by the Countess and deplored by Hopestill who had her own modiste) and she who had sent out invitations to three hundred guests for the wedding breakfast, and she who had persuaded a notable clergyman who had left Boston several years before to perform the ceremony. There had been some argument about this last detail. Both Miss Pride and Dr. McAllister’s father were Unitarians and did their best to dissuade Hopestill from being married in the Episcopal church in which, adopting her father’s rather than her mother’s sect, she had been confirmed. She was adamant and requested, moreover, that the minister from whom she had received the Eucharist at her first communion be brought back for the occasion. In only one other particular had she insisted on having her own way. She refused to be given away by her uncle Arthur Hornblower or any other relative and before even consulting her aunt, conferred the honor upon Admiral Nephews.
I thought that she wanted to be married in the Episcopal church out of a nostalgic attachment to her childhood, as it had been a better and happier time. I could find no other reason, for she was altogether without religious conviction and never went to any services. I divined, too, that in denying any member of her family the right to participate actively in the ritual, she was relieving them, symbolically, of any accessory responsibility.
In the week before the wedding, my duties were many and complex. I acted as the intermediary between Miss Pride and the representatives of florists, liquor dealers, caterers, and took great pleasure in ordering such things as twelve cases of champagne and thirty pounds of filet of sole. Miss Pride would have preferred to attend to these matters herself because all tradespeople were scoundrels and I was both gullible and extravagant, but she was occupied with other things, among them with ridding the house of kinsfolk who came in droves beginning at nine o’clock in the morning, expecting to be asked to luncheon and then tea and even dinner. They infuriated her by telling her that she looked “worn-out” and that they were going to make her go to bed while they themselves took over, lock, stock, and barrel. To such a suggestion, Miss Pride would say, turning her eyes like pistols on the offender, “If I want crutches, I’ll buy them, Sally Hornblower.” They were full of plans for what she would wear to the wedding (I knew what she would wear: a new black broadcloth suit and a green beaver hat) and for the most decorative way of arranging the display of gifts. She would nod her head and say, “I dare say that would be nice. But I shall just muddle on in my old way. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Once, after this cliché, she gave a mirthless “ha! ha!” and sounded, indeed, like the dog that could not be taught but had learned in his youth the trick of biting trespassers.
The continual stir of the house was intoxicating. On my way out of the house to run some important errand, I would glance into the upstairs sitting-room where the presents gradually were accumulating. Hopestill might, as I passed, be unwrapping something that had just come. She would hold up for me to see a blue plum-blossom jar or a silver pitcher. We could hear the bee-like flurry of the sewing machine and the animated conversation of Mamselle Thérèse and her two assistants. The door-bell and the telephone reiterated their clamorous demands until the servants were beside themselves. Leaving Hopestill surrounded by her treasure, I would go downstairs to receive a final instruction from Miss Pride. Nearly always, on one of the tables in the hall, there was a silver bowl half filled with water on whose surface floated the disintegrating but still fragrant flowers that Hopestill had worn the night before. I was curiously moved at the sight of them, and imagined her coming in late, the dangers of another day behind her, Philip’s car already pulling away from the curb. I wondered if she would not ponder her face in the mirror above the table as she unpinned the orchid or the gardenias just as I pondered mine a moment before I left the house. Which face would she see? The one with which everyone was familiar or the one I had seen on the day she had come home when in her distress she had seemed old and plain?
The churchly odor of old wood and stone was sweetened with the perfume and boutonnières of the wedding guests assembled twenty minutes early. A beam of sunshine came through the open door and extended the length of the central aisle until, at the sanctuary, it joined in a pool of opaline light with another laden shaft sifted through the stained glass windows, of which the three segments were so detailed that I could read in them no narrative but saw only brilliant colors throwing off the glitter of jewels. Then, through the gilded haze the altar was visible, furnished with a massive cross, two golden urns of white azaleas, and pale candles still unlit. The sun and the flowers and the open door made me think of spring, though I had only to look at the fur coats to remember that it was not yet midwinter and that the cool of the church was withal warmer than the outside temperature. The freshness of the bath I had just taken and the clean, acrid odor of my new clothes combined with this pleasure to give me a general sense of well-being and excellent health, as if I had shaken off the aches and miseries of one season and had entered upon the next under favorable omens, like the day on which we realize that our blood has expunged the last particle of disease. Two incidents the day before, which was Sunday, had lightened my heart. When I went to the library in the morning, I found Miss Pride more cordial than she had been since the night of my defection (“The night,” she called it, “when you came home in such an informal state of mind.”), and by way of showing that I was being recalled from exile, she gave me a glass of her fine personal sherry and told me that I must not fail to be at the wedding and the wedding breakfast the following day. Then, at the asylum, I was told that I could see my mother for only a few minutes as she was very ill and was confined to her bed in the infirmary. The doctor, the same one I had talked with before, admitted that he was not so confident of her cure as he had been. He was positive, he told me, of her ultimate recovery but thought she could not be moved for at least six months instead of three as he had told me before. The extension of time seemed like an act of benevolence performed by the doctor himself out of the goodness of his heart and I so ill concealed my gratitude that I drew from him a smile and a companionable pat on the shoulder as he wished me a Merry Christmas. I was, moreover, in good spirits today because the end of my suspense was at last in sight and henceforth I would not hear Hopestill weeping into her pillow nor catch in her face an occasional look of alarm.
From where I sat at the back of the chapel, I could see Miss Pride in the front pew sitting between the Reverend McAllister and his wife. She was wearing a new suit, but as it was made in the same pattern as all her others and cut from the same wool, perhaps I alone knew that it was new, for I had seen the tailor’s bill. She had made one concession to her relatives, and in place of her green beaver wore a small hat planted with red posies which caused her so much consternation, because she thought it would fall off, that during the ceremony, as she told everyone later, she could think of nothing but the moment when she might take it off.
She and the clergyman, in their sober black, whose forebears had not taken passage on the same boat with the Tory Almighty who had lodged in this chapel since pre-Revolutionary times, sat rigidly, staring straight ahead with disapproval at the Popish paraphernalia of the altar which, as Miss Pride said, was “tantamount to a repudiation of the Declaration of Independence.” Distrust of the high-church folderol as well as of her headgear gave her face the dour immobility of a Protestant martyr and she did not smile once or look either to the right or to the left from the moment Frank Whitney ushered her to her seat of honor until she left it. The Reverend McAllister, on the contrary, sent his eyes meddling into the nooks and crannies of the “temple,” as he spoke of it, and glowered upon the kneeling attitudes of some of these first cousins to the Roman Catholics, into whose ranks he was heartily disinclined to release his son. The Reverend was a man of extraordinary obtuseness and had he ever taken the trouble—as his wife and mother did—to observe his future daughter-in-law even to form an impression of her external appearance, he would have been freed at once of his suspicions that she was leading Philip to the Pope, would have been far more worried that she would lead him to atheism. I had heard that at the time Al Smith was running for president, Reverend McAllister had been the victim of a recurrent nightmare in which a company of dwarfs (presumably Catholic dwarfs) attempted to stuff him into a confessional box, and he remarked to several people that if Smith were elected, he would die. Very likely he would have. He had presented himself at the house this morning to pay his respects to Miss Pride and as she was then engaged, I went down to entertain him until she would be free. He was a teetotaler and refused the port I had been commissioned to offer him. For five minutes he listed some facts to me which he had gleaned from his reading the night before, among which was the sagacious custom of polar bears who, when stalking seals, covered their black noses with their paws so that there was nothing about them to show that they were anything but mounds of snow.
Philip’s mother who, although she would have preferred to wear black as a sign of mourning for her son, had finally decided that it would be too much of a good thing if all four of the chief relatives were attired as for a funeral, and was dressed in pale blue, becoming to her rosy checks and her white hair and her blue eyes, which had not been reddened but made only prettily clouded by the incessant stream of tears they had released ever since the engagement was announced. She had lost her appetite, had been unable to sleep a night through, and had not appeared at any of the pre-nuptial parties. It was said by her husband that her heart was temporarily “out of kilter.” She had several times written Hopestill begging her to come to Concord: “We have so much to talk about,” she wrote. “I feel there are many things you must know about Philip which only I can tell you. The hastiness of your wedding has prevented us from getting really well acquainted, but perhaps we can make up for lost time if only you will agree to spend two or three days with me.” Hopestill, either because she was harassed by the business which the wedding involved or because she could think of no way to refuse the invitation graciously, did not answer, a breach of manners that had already had serious consequences. The elder Mrs. McAllister had told the story everywhere and, making use of her daughter’s unwittingly accurate phrase, repeated often, “The wedding is too hasty for me. Marian and I both wish they’d wait until June. It is breaking Philip’s mother’s heart that she can’t have a garden party for them. And since the poor thing’s ill now, she can’t even have an indoor party for them. I do think it’s inconsiderate.” The heart-sufferer, through a supreme sacrifice of her health, had managed to come to the wedding, though she would not be able to come to the breakfast. Her excuses, “doctor’s orders,” had been made through her husband this morning, as if she could not bear even to speak to Miss Pride.
The Countess, resplendent in a gray suit and a fox scarf, was sitting with Amy Brooks some pews ahead of me but she had spied me and was mouthing something which I could not catch and so mouthed back, “I can’t understand what you’re saying.” It came out later that she had been telling me to be sure to look at Mrs. Hornblower, who had oddly enough come in evening clothes. I had, as a matter of fact, been on the lookout for Mrs. Hornblower who had heretofore seemed mythical, for I had learned on asking someone why it was that the tea-party to which I had been invited was such a remarkable event because the host’s wife was to be there, that while she was on the friendliest terms with her husband, she did not share his house or his servants but lived in her own establishment fifty yards from his, a path leading from one door to the other. I asked my interlocutor—it was, as I remember, one of the girls at the Countess’ Friday—to explain this. “They’re just cranks,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “Mrs. Hornblower used to come to tea with my grandmother now and again when she was in town and she was at that time wrapped up in spiritism. It made poor Grandma have bad dreams about Mrs. Hornblower’s astral body, and once when she said, ‘Mary, I can simply walk through that wall if you only have faith in me,’ Grandma shrieked, ‘Nellie!’ at the top of her lungs and it made Mrs. Hornblower furious although Grandma passed it off very nicely by saying that she just wanted Nellie to bring some more muffins. After that she took up the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti, but she didn’t come to call any more for, as she told someone who of course repeated it to us, she didn’t think my grandmother was interested in ideas.” She had given up the occult for more pressing matters, but every now and again she would put in an appearance at a séance for old-time’s sake, and at one of them, Kakosan had met her. Mrs. Hornblower had been a tremendous success and Kakosan, who assumed that because I lived opposite Louisburg Square I was intimately acquainted with everyone of consequence, had begged me to arrange an introduction. Mrs. Hornblower was a person of fine bearing, a large woman of whose face one immediately said, “She must have been lovely when she was young,” and now, pitifully palsied, her white hair stained with yellow, she was still handsome. Much larger than her chubby husband who, although he was her senior, was better preserved and still wore black hair in which there was not a trace of gray, she bent toward him the loving and respectful looks of the obedient young wife.
Sitting at the aisle in the middle of the church, casually dressed in tweeds, Mr. Morgan slouched against the side of the pew, his chin in his hand, his eyes closed. He had not been invited, as I well enough knew because I had checked over the list of guests. But I was not in the least surprised to see him although I could not be certain of his motive, whether he had come to tease Hopestill or if he was in love with her and wished to torment himself, or if it was that desiring to escape suspicion he had thought it the better policy not to hide himself away. He had, if this last was his intention, made a serious mistake in his costume and continued, throughout the ceremony, to make an even graver error in his indolent attitude and his drowsy grin, for he was most conspicuous in that church full of people whose dress (with the exception of Mrs. Hornblower) was all so similar it was virtually a uniform, and thus he was set down by everyone who saw him—and he escaped the notice of very few—as vain and impudent for in gainsaying the decrees of custom, he was usurping custom’s power. His presence relieved me on one point and troubled me on another. Evidently Hopestill had not been seeing him, as I had suspected from time to time, for if she had she would have told him not to come. I had suspected meetings between them because I had learned from Nathan that Morgan was in town all the the time now and there was no falling off of his visits and telephone calls from young women. What disturbed me—vaguely because this morning I felt detached from the whole business—was that since he apparently thought there was nothing odd in his coming this morning and coming with so blatant an air of indifference, there was no reason to suppose that Hopestill and Philip and their friends would be deprived of his company in the future.
Nathan, after two years of anatomizing his pupil, had come to the conclusion that he was not really selfish nor cold-blooded but that he was one of those unfortunate people in whom is missing the talent for falling in love. Such people do not give up but suppose that love will come at last in the person of some now unknown woman, just as other people do not relinquish their hope that belief in God will at last batter down the impregnable battlements of the soul. He carried on two or three affairs concurrently and was equally tenacious of each of his women because it was possible that she was the one who would, under an abrupt and accidental change of circumstances, become his solitary objective. This being the case and if Morgan’s need for the centralization of his life about one woman was as urgent as Nathan would have me believe, would not Hopestill’s marriage be an obstacle of slight consequence to him? I could only conjecture what had taken place in New York, but I was sure that if Morgan offered to marry her (and I imagined that he did, for he was the kind of person who could, with the left hand, dispense a sort of sentimental honorableness at the same time that the right hand was composing a love-letter to another woman) Hopestill had refused, not because she did not love him, not even because she was unwilling to support his infidelities, but because her pride had been mortally wounded and its resuscitation could be effected only if the accessory to the crime were out of sight and, eventually, out of mind. The refusal (I continued my hypothesis) impressed her lover who had not reckoned on so easy an acquittal and after his first sweet sensation of relief, he became tantalized with the possibility that he might have fallen in love with her on the revelation of her stern character which, in spite of her yearning, had firmly dismissed him. Perhaps he had come today, then, for the simple reason that he wanted to see her, to refresh his memory of her beauty and to determine, from the expression on her face and the way she walked, whether his siege of her would be rewarding.
In the hush that forewarned the wedding march, a hush that fell upon the flesh as well as on the ears so that the guests froze briefly in their postures of kneeling or leaning towards their neighbors, a faintness passed over me, obliterating the vigor of a few minutes before. And as from its rich reservoir, the organ’s voice ascended, translating the march from Lohengrin into its ecclesiastical language, I was apprised of the crisis of my complex feeling about this wedding, so similar to the sickness of the flesh that it was as if the very guardians of my body’s fluids had told me of my disequilibrium. My dizziness had no cause more serious than excitement, was but another and more acute version of that agitation which caused the women in the church to apply handkerchiefs to their eyes. And yet, the anguish, that one moment inched like a cold worm through the tunnels of my flesh and the next kindled a fire that spread from branch to branch until I was all aflame, was so much fiercer than any emotional distress I had had before that for a time I believed I was really “coming down” with some disease. Tears boiled over my eyelids and half screened the four bridesmaids in their green tulle dresses, preceding the maid of honor whose medieval velvet gown, a deeper shade than theirs, was like the outer leaf and theirs the paler inside ones. As I was on the verge, I thought, of toppling forward over the back of the pew ahead of me, my mind, like a rapid finger flicking through a book to find a special passage, went over possible diseases and diagnosed my weakness by presenting to me Hopestill’s face, shrouded in shadows, as I imagined it might look in the mirror above the table in the vestibule. Certain then that my symptoms were not physical, I sought to efface them by an effort of will. My eyesight, still somewhat deformed by the tears, cleared enough so that the maid of honor was less nebulous than her vanguard. With a smile directed towards nothing but an abstract point of the compass, she addressed to her gait as much science and regard for the rhythms of the music as if she were executing a step in a difficult dance. But although I saw her thus and followed her slender body and the head whose black hair was caught in a cap of gold and perceived that in her hands she carried a bouquet of yellow roses, I saw her also through the hot vapor of my tears as a mobile stain upon the undulating curtain that obscured the church and the wedding-guests. Similarly, while the music advanced from chord to chord, it clung, at the same time, in my ears, to one deep, roaring note everlastingly renewed by its infinite vibrations. Closing my eyes, I saw repeated on the black waves of my blindness, the same green smear which my sightless pupils pursued until it swam out of their ken, yet entered again at once when the ball rolled back to its central position.
With the passing of the maid of honor, I felt a temporary return of strength. The vertigo ceased and my mind cleared. Across the heads of the audience, who were turning to behold the bride, I saw Philip entering from the chancel, and through some unstudied sophistication, I saw him separate from the person I had known but instead, as a total stranger who, in a few minutes, could no longer lend himself in my imagination to romantic equations of which I was the other magnitude. He underwent a second metamorphosis and became “the physician.” It was under the auspices and according to the rules of this genus that I should henceforth govern my relationship with him. In the service of my own interests, I was then able to transmute the smile of a young man about to be married, who at this moment had caught sight of his bride as she entered the chapel, into the smile of the understanding healer who by his attentiveness seemed to exist for me alone. And taking this clean-boned Yankee together with his opulent and august setting, I was, despite my frustration, glad that our flirting had come to nothing, that he would be unchanged when throughout the years I sought his advice.
The dazzled guests watched the proud flower for whose protection and enhancement the leaves had been created: a chaste and perfect column draped in satin as pure as the wax of the tapers on the altar and outdoing their flame with the hair that blazed through a calotte of pearls. Her face, white as her finery and her lilies, wore an expression of solemnity befitting the occasion, although, as I heard someone whisper, there should have been something of a smile in her countenance, if not upon her lips, then at least within her eyes, for joy should be in proportion equal to the other feelings of the partaker of this particular sacrament. Her look, to me, was one instinct with death, yet death less chill than that which now like a layer beneath her skin gave off a waxen luminosity and imparted to her movement a brittleness as if the soft integuments of skin and cloth concealed a metal mechanism. Her thin fingers were tightly curled on the Admiral’s arm. Harry Morgan had turned, with all the others, and while I could not see her face, I knew by his, when she had passed by, that a sign had passed between them, for his mouth curved into a serene smile as if he had half won his battle.
It seemed to me, as they joined before the minister, that Hopestill shuddered as she had done when she took the camellias from my hand. If this was seen by anyone else—indeed, if it occurred at all—it was attributed to her nervousness, the understandable and appropriate reluctance of a girl about to relinquish her virginity by so public a ritual. With a tidal rustling, the audience sat down, arranged their hands in their laps and adjusted their spectacles like people anticipating a well-known and beloved piece of music. It was, to be sure, an artistic performance, for the minister, wreathed in benign smiles, posed his literary questions and offered up his prayers with the intonations of a Shakespearean actor, which grace of pitch and diction was afterwards to evoke from Reverend McAllister the remark that the service had been “nothing but rhetoric.” I was astonished at the brevity of the cross-examination, and before I had accustomed myself to the idea that something of great importance was going on, the whole thing was over and the man and wife were coming back down the aisle, arm in arm, smiling to their well-wishers, their faces illuminated by the sunlight into which they were walking. Hopestill did not fail to include her husband in her dispensation of impartial smiles, but her hand that clutched the bouquet of flowers was clenched like stone.
The drawing-room, the library, the dining-room overflowed with cawing guests and the stairs were packed with two lanes, one ascending to view the wedding presents, the other coming down. As soon as I had offered my congratulations (the bride and groom were stationed before the bay-window. Both of them had protested against this lavishness and were so harried that they seemed not to recognize me at all), I pushed my way through the throngs who, because they blocked the way between myself and my room for which I longed, offended me as if they were being intentionally hard-hearted. Outside the drawing-room door, I met Miss Pride who had got rid of her hat and looked refreshed. I told her that I thought I was ill and wanted to go to my room.
“Nonsense,” she said. “I’ve never seen you look better. There are two or three things I want you to attend to in the pantry. Come along with me and I’ll show you.”
I said, “I thought that if I went to bed now the cold wouldn’t have a chance to develop.”
“Oh, I know your kind of cold, you vixen. I’m not as easily taken in as Berthe, though, and won’t let you off. What I think is that you’re just concerned too much with yourself. After this is over, we must have a long talk and straighten things out.”
I followed her docilely down the hall to the door of the pantry where she instructed me to post myself in order to see that the dirty dishes were immediately sent down on the dumb-waiter to be washed and sent up again so that everyone might be served. The waiters, who were perfectly capable of managing by themselves, regarded me with such wounded displeasure that for the half hour I stood on guard I did not utter a word, but leaned against the window where the sunlight was warm, drinking the remains of the champagne in the glasses that came out from the other rooms. Once I closed my eyes to feel the sun on my lids and when I opened them again saw Harry Morgan lounging up against the door giving me what I could only call “a once-over.” Fearing that if Miss Pride chanced to come into the pantry and saw us there together she might surmise that I was responsible for this intrusion, and being, moreover, greatly perturbed by his prowling eyes, I exclaimed, “My God!” and he, straightening up, extended his hand as he said, “May I share your quiet inglenook, dear, just we two?” One of the accommodators, a portly middle-aged man with a bald head and a frowning face, turned on him a look of avuncular disapproval as he pushed past with a tray of glasses and I said, “It’s very crowded in here.”
“Well, then, let’s find a place that isn’t crowded. I can’t go back into that crush.”
“Nobody asked you to,” I said, so nervous that I was obliged to put down the glass I was holding for fear of dropping it. “Nobody asked you to come in the first place.”
“What kind of talk is that? I am guest Number One. I came at the urgent invitation of the doctor himself. No one asked me, indeed!” He laughed openly at my perplexity. “Well, in that case,” I said, “you ought to join the party.”
I myself, feeling that my services in the pantry were dispensable, went out, taking up a place between the long buffet table and the doors to the drawing-room which had been slid back all the way there to examine the implications of the conversation I had just had. I was prevented from a long study by the Admiral who, with old Mrs. McAllister, appeared slowly making his way toward the refreshment table. “Ah,” he cried, spotting me, “here we have an ally. Sonie, what could you do in the way of a hot bird and a cold bottle for two old fellows? I’m hungry as a bear. I tell you, giving away a young lady is hard work. It’s a strain on the heart! Particularly if you wanted her for your granddaughter-in-law.” He winked at his companion. “Well, all’s well that ends well, as they say. And while I’m about consoling myself, ma’am, let me congratulate you on getting a pippin for the boy.”
“Much obliged,” said Mrs. McAllister coldly. “I think Hope looks ill.”
“Ill? Why, ma’am, though you’re a woman, you don’t know women. What female creature ever looked well on her wedding day? I always say the expression shouldn’t be ‘white as a ghost’ but ‘white as a bride.’ And the whiter they are, the prettier, what?”
Mrs. McAllister received a plate of sole and salad and a glass of champagne from me. Refusing from that moment forward to discuss the wedding, the wedding breakfast, or the bride and groom, she commenced on an analysis of Amy Brooks’ water colors in which she displayed more affection than intelligence. “The sweet thing, knowing that I don’t get about, brought a whole portfolio full of them to me yesterday and I was perfectly charmed. She has real talent.” She went on to describe in particular a little scene Amy had done of the hemlocks in the Arboretum. While I nodded with interest and even volunteered a few comments (“How much I should like to see the picture. No, I have never been to the Arboretum, but I hope to go on Lilac Sunday,” etc.), I was actually engrossed in staring at Harry Morgan who had belatedly followed me out of the pantry and was in conversation with the Countess who, from her smiles and laughter, appeared to find him delightful. A surge of people presently obliterated them and I turned my mind again to what Mrs. McAllister and the Admiral were saying. The Arboretum had led her to her own garden in Concord, and Concord had led her to the bitter announcement, corroborated by her son, Reverend McAllister, who edged his way up to us, that “I suppose you’ve heard Philip Senior has given the young couple a handsome wedding present? That house on the Bedford Road left to him by my husband.”
“I declare!” cried the Admiral. “That is handsome of you, Phil. Why, that’s a humdinger of a house. Up on a hill, ain’t it?”
Mrs. McAllister sighed deeply. “The loveliest house in Middlesex County, Lincoln. One of the loveliest in New England. I have always said we ought to turn it over to a historical society.”
“No, Mother, not in my lifetime. I hope the children will get some pleasure out of it. I’ve never cared much for the house myself. Would have sold it long ago, Lincoln, but Mother here didn’t like its being in the hands of a stranger.”
The old lady pursed her lips, said nothing, but obviously was thinking that the house was in the hands of a stranger.
Her son asked me then, “How much champagne would you say Lucy Pride ordered for this collation?” I told him exactly: twelve cases. He raised his eyebrows, appalled. “If all the money spent on drink were handed over to the missionaries, we would have a Christian world.”
Mrs. McAllister, who had wanted her son to go into the navy, had often been heard to speak like a pagan. She snapped at him, “I hope that time never comes, son, for I feel that there are times when one needs alcohol. Now, for example. At weddings and at funerals.” Her voice had risen to an impassioned shriek and her son put his finger to his solemn lips. “Hush, Mother, they say it takes very little to go to one’s head when one is advanced in years.”
The Admiral snorted, “Your mother can take care of herself, old man. She hasn’t had enough to drink, that’s her trouble. Hand me your glass, ma’am, and let me refill it.”
“Good afternoon,” said Miss Pride crisply from behind us. “Ah, Sonie, I see you’re taking over out here. I don’t know what I would do without you. Well, and have you seen our poor lambs, Sarah? They’re complaining that their arms ache from shaking hands and their faces hurt from smiling. They groaned when I told them they must stay another hour at least.”
“At least,” rejoined the old lady, staring hard at Miss Pride. “Why, I dare say that less than half of Boston has had a chance to congratulate them. My dear Lucy, you have outdone yourself!”
Miss Pride smiled pleasantly and turned to the Admiral. “I haven’t even thanked you, Lincoln, for contributing to the occasion, but I’m angry with you for not wearing your decorations.”
“Not with mufti, ma’am. Not me, thank you!” returned her friend, beaming all over his pink face in gratitude for her mention of his medals.
Old Mrs. McAllister, determined to find one barb at least to pierce Miss Pride’s composure, at this said, “How did Arthur Hornblower feel about it?”
But she did not fell Miss Pride who retorted, “I expect he breathed a sigh of relief when he knew he wouldn’t have to perform in that church. You know his objection is not to the Romish atmosphere but to the English. He’s a great Anglophobe.”
“Oh, I’m quite aware of that,” said Mrs. McAllister with considerable asperity. “We’ve had several disputes. I tell him he’s provincial, he tells me I’m a snob and we get nowhere.”
“You would have quarreled with Papa, Sarah. I have always been glad that he died before war was declared because, since he liked neither France nor England, I have no doubt he would have made himself talked about in Boston. Oh, I don’t mean to imply that he would not have supported the Allies whole-heartedly as far as the United States was concerned, but he would have turned a cold shoulder on England, I’m sure. His sister, my aunt Josephine, had what Papa called ‘the hebetude’ to marry a baronet and to be called henceforth ‘Lady Fulke.’ It was the name, even more than her large and totally inconvenient country establishment, that struck Papa so ridiculous. And I recollect that at the time I was presented at court and we were perforce staying with my aunt and my uncle Geoffrey, Papa consistently introduced her as ‘Mrs. Faneuil’ or ‘Mrs. Fuller,’ being unable to bring himself to say ‘Lady’ or to utter a name so peculiar as ‘Fulke.’ But I remember, also, that my sainted father was worsted on one such occasion by Mr. Henry James who turned to an English woman and said, ‘One may forget other names, but Faneuil Hall is always on the tip of the tongue.’ Papa was no backwoodsman: he blushed to the roots of his hair and never returned to England again or permitted the names of Mr. James and Sir and Lady Fulke to be spoken in his presence.”
“Ha! Ha!” laughed the Admiral who was well-known himself as an Anglophile. “Lucy, you’re a real raconteur!” But old Mrs. McAllister, pretending that she had not heard the story, groped for my hand which she pressed as she said, “My dear, do find Amy Brooks for me!”
As I went in search of Hope’s cousin, the Countess, fragrant as a whole garden, came towards me with outspread arms, bumping everyone who stood in her way, among them the easily terrified Mr. Otis Whitney who immediately fled through the drawing-room in the direction of the door and was not seen again. She had nothing to tell me of any more consequence than that she loved me and that I was not to wear anything ever again but the same shade of green that I had on today and that if I did not come to hear the “Scarlatti I’ve dismembered, dismembered, my angel,” at her next Friday, her heart would be broken into a thousand pieces. As she embraced me at our leavetaking—she had of course given me a welcoming hug and had let me go for only about a minute—she dropped her effusive tone and spoke as if we were contemporaries: “I’m not pleased, Sonie! I’m much distraught. I’ve been talking with a young man who has given me a real fright. You . . .”
But she could not finish for, to my great vexation, we were interrupted by one of the girls who came to the Fridays. Martha Dole was a large, plain bluestocking whose embonpoint was apportioned helter-skelter so that the thin, rectilinear legs did not harmonize with the bossy torso and likewise the long, willowy neck was inadequate support for the full-blown Norman face. She, like the other young ladies, had always shown me great cordiality in the Countess’ presence, and had two or three times sent me tickets to the theater or to concerts with which, to be sure, she had parted because she could not use them herself but which were accompanied by a flattering note which told me I was more deserving than she to hear the music or to see the play. Only three nights before, I had gone, thanks to her generosity, to see Hamlet, but this had not prevented her, on the following day, from becoming suddenly so engrossed in her companions that she did not see me, even though I passed directly in front of her, when I entered the cocktail lounge of the Parker House to keep an appointment with Nathan and Kakosan. Yet, her first remark to me this afternoon was, “Who was that lovely girl, Japanese, Chinese, whatever she was, that I saw you with the other day?”
“At the Parker House, do you mean?” I asked experimentally, watching her face to see what degree of confusion would be recorded there. If there was any, it was too infinitesimal to be measured, and she said, “Was it at the Parker House? Yes, of course, that’s right. She was exquisite! We were all quite enchanted and I was greatly set up to be able to say that even though I didn’t know her, I did at least know her companion. She looked as though she had stepped out of a fairy tale. You would have fallen in love with her, Berthe!”
The Countess gave me an indulgent spanking. “What do you mean, you wicked creature, keeping all of this from me? No, no evasions! I want to know all about her. Oh, such a betrayal!”
I explained that Kakosan was a stenographer in some firm, the exact nature of which I had never determined, for she always referred mysteriously to “the commodity” which might have been anything from ink to corsets. I told them also that she was the daughter of a nobleman in exile, a cultivated patriarchal gentleman who preserved all the customs of his country and his class, writing hokku, painting water-colors of the Yanagawa from his faithful memory of it, sitting beside his pool in the American duplicate of his garden in Kyushu, in contemplation of the Zen-Buddha to whom, each day, he paid his ceremonial respects in the tea-house. As I observed the mounting interest in the Countess’ face, I regretted I had made Nathan’s mistress sound so interesting for I had no wish to bring her to the salon. My reason was that I could not trust her to exercise any restraint in her conversation. The several times that I had seen her (in my exile, I had welcomed her invitations to the movies), she had been naïve enough to tell me, when we had stopped at Schrafft’s for raspberry frappés, about her lovers previous to Nathan whose attentions she described with a thoroughness that made me blush. I had no reason to suppose that she would be less candid with the Countess and the Boston girls.
“But she sounds charming!” cried the Countess. “Just imagine a real Samurai daughter simply at large in Boston! I’ve never heard anything so exotic! I command you to bring her to hear the Scarlatti on Friday, and if you do not, Euphrysone, I’ll think up some really humiliating punishment for you. I’ll make you spend a whole evening with Kalenkoff playing omber!”
I agreed, with misgivings, to bring Kakosan, and started to take leave of the Countess to go in search of Amy when Mrs. Hornblower approached us and halted me with an upraised and trembling hand. Gently with a dreamy, timid smile on her face—entirely out of keeping with her reputation of being a firebrand in political discussions, of being a sly one, and possibly engaged in subversive activities on the behalf of the Third Reich and Mussolini, having long since lost her interest in Sacco and Vanzetti—she said, “Lucy Pride told me where I’d find you. Someone told me you were acquainted with a young lady whose address I’m very anxious to get hold of. I mean the little Japanese girl, Miss Yoshida, or, rather, I should say, Yoshidasan without the ‘Miss,’ shouldn’t I?”
“Ah, it’s an epidemic!” cried Miss Martha Dole. “Imagine Sonie being in the key position!”
I told Mrs. Hornblower that I did not know Kakosan’s address but that I should be glad to give her a message as I often saw her in Cambridge. “I’m getting up a benefit party for the Rebels in Spain, and I want her to come, partly for decoration, partly because I suspect that she’s a sympathizer. Wouldn’t you like to come too? Or don’t you believe in Franco?” I had no strong feelings for either party in the Spanish Revolution and agreed with Miss Pride who said, “When the pot calls the kettle black, I shan’t back either one.”
“No, I can’t say that I do think Franco’s right,” I said, and the Countess, a rabid Loyalist supporter, squeezed my arm and said to Miss Pride’s cousin, “Sonie and I would be driving ambulances if we could, wouldn’t we, darling?” This was not in the least true. The Countess supported “causes” solely in her drawing-room and the drawing-rooms of her friends, and I, for my part, was too ignorant of world affairs to be anything but apathetic towards them.
“What a pity,” said Mrs. Hornblower. “I have not found many recruits here. Countess, have you stolen everyone for yourself?” And turning to me, she said, “I had thought that you . . . your name, you know, such echt deutsch . . . might be of our persuasion. De gustibus non est disputandum.” She moved off murmuring half to herself, “So few people are willing to take the long view, the Weltanschauung. But the time will come.” These words, proceeding from a face so venerable and harmless, gave me such an unaccountable fright that for a moment I stood looking after her, and what occurred to me as she was swallowed up by a crowd of people in the doorway was that perhaps my father, if he had gone back to Würzburg, had become a Nazi.
Martha Dole, espying an old friend, left us and the moment she was gone, I said to the Countess, “You were telling me about Harry Morgan.”
“But he told me something extraordinary! Something too really strange! Don’t misunderstand: I like him although he’s rather racy in his language. I’m only wondering how everyone will take it.”
“Take what, my dear Countess?” I cried with impatience.
“Oh, it’s probably nothing at all. It’s only that he told me that Philip has asked him to take charge of doing over the Concord house, and it only struck me odd because of the way Mrs. McAllister feels about the place. And of course, no one knows him. D’you understand me, Sonie?”
“Yes, yes,” I said. “But what I don’t understand is why Philip asked him. He hasn’t known him for longer than a month.”
“Precisely!” said the Countess with a wink and then, perceiving that her stepdaughter was at her side, added, “It is precisely as you say: a ‘four-square’ sonata, as tedious as a wooden block.”
Having delivered to Amy the message from Mrs. McAllister, I made my way into the drawing-room where the crowd was beginning to thin. Hopestill beckoned to me. “Go up with me, will you, Sonie?” she whispered. I glanced towards her maid-of-honor and she said impatiently, “I’ve arranged that, don’t worry.” Philip’s face was fixed in a smile that revealed his teeth which were so regular and white they looked almost false. The adjective “sanitary” flashed across my mind as I took in his clear, intellectual eyes, his fair hair, his meticulously cared-for person, and in that moment, I preferred his bride upon whose cheek there was a light streak of dirt and who was frankly exhausted and was making no attempts to conceal the fact. I told her that I would meet her in her room and she left when she had said something to Philip who, looking at me as if he had never seen me before, formally shook my hand, not altering his grin in the least. I laughed uneasily and said, “I’ve already congratulated you once, don’t you remember?” and he replied, “How stingy you are! Can’t you congratulate a man twice on the happiest day of his life?” But there was in his voice a note of such staggering unhappiness, so taut an irony that I could make only a feeble rejoinder, told him I must hurry up to Hopestill, that I wished him all the happiness, that I . . .
Hopestill had flung her bouquet down the stairwell, but one flower, limp and ragged at the edges, was caught in the pointed cuff of her wedding dress. She was waiting in her sitting-room for me and she could have been waiting ten years, she had changed so much. The structure of her face was loose, as if the sagging muscles had weakened the mortised bones. There was a starched pallor on her thin lips, a narrow canniness in her eyes, and the skin, in the brief time since I had seen her in the church, had lost that shimmer which had seemed to be touched by the moon rather than the sun, to have been inoculated by the spring rather than the summer, was ashen now, darkening to a bruised blue beneath her eyes. She had had a drink and when I came in, put down her glass. There was a newly opened bottle of whiskey on the table near where she stood.
“By God, he can wait for me!” she cried. “I’ll go down when I’m God damned good and ready.” And she sank into one of the wing-chairs and poured herself another drink.
“It was a very nice wedding,” I said.
“Lock the door, Sonie. I won’t have any of them coming in here! I won’t! I wish I were dead!”
I locked the door as she ordered me and reluctantly returned. She directed me to sit down opposite her and she said, “I really mean it: I wish I were dead. Now if I were you, I wouldn’t wish that, but strictly sotto voce, strictly entre nous I wouldn’t predict what you’ll be feeling if you go on living with Aunt Lucy for another two years.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s not quite the same thing. It’s not the same at all, Hope.”
“Listen to me, you child, you baby, you innocent little girl: the time will come when you see through that woman and know her for the bitch she is. It’s that she’s got to have power. All of us do here: we are obsessed by it. Philip is. I am. As soon as Aunt Lucy saw she couldn’t control me—up to a point she could because she was my guardian and doled out my money nickel by nickel—she got a cat! That’s the vile perverted thing she did! And kept the cat locked up in a storeroom deodorized by pine-scent! Oh, she fed Mercy well: the best tinned salmon, the finest kidneys, the richest milk, and every now and again the ‘Persian fat lady,’ as she was revoltingly referred to, was allowed to come down and purr for Aunt Sarah and Uncle Arthur and Admiral Nephews. Until, mind you, she had a chance to perpetuate her species and have four hybrid kittens and then she was permanently incarcerated.”
“Oh, that’s not the reason,” I said, determined to defend Miss Pride.
“Hush! Let me finish. But a pussy-cat wasn’t enough, and now she’s got you, and she intends to have the time of her life with you because you’re helpless. You’re dependent on her. No matter what gaffe you make, if you get drunk and use obscene words in front of Mrs. Frothingham, Aunt Lucy will find some way to keep you.”
“I am not property!” I cried, angry with Hopestill and at the same time perturbed.
“Well, dear, that’s beside the point. All of this is beside the point. I’ll have a drink if you’ll pour it for me, please, and tell you what isn’t beside the point.” I filled our two glasses. I was muzzy and out-of-sorts with this oblique diatribe. “What isn’t beside the point,” she continued, “is that all I’ve accomplished today, all I’ve accomplished in my whole life, is that I’ve transferred myself from one martinet to another.”
“You didn’t have to marry him.”
She got to her feet and glared at me. “I’m sure I don’t know why I’ve taken you into my confidence, and you can jolly well forget this. Now I’m going to dress.”
The crowd had thinned considerably when I went down. In the vestibule, I heard a woman remark, “I wouldn’t mind if my income were cut to fifteen thousand. I’d just go out to my farm for the whole year.” And another voice replied, “Of course it wouldn’t go hard with you, Augusta. Why, you have a fortune in your roses if you’d only do something about it.” Augusta, whom I immediately knew to be the aunt Philip had visited when he drove me to Wolfburg from Chichester, laughed heartily. “That’s what my nephew tells me, but he’s a pipe-dreamer. I’m so glad that at least one of his pipe-dreams has come true. Hope is the sweetest girl in Boston, I’ve always felt.”
“Wasn’t it strange,” said the Countess to Miss Pride, “that Mrs. Hornblower brought her present with her?”
“I didn’t know she did,” said Miss Pride. “It was peculiar enough of her to come in an evening dress.”
“That’s not all. She unwrapped it herself as well, and what do you suppose it was? A dozen perfectly horrid souvenir coffee spoons.”
“My dear!”
Hopestill was coming down the stairs and in her carefully composed face there was no sign of the fright and anger that had made her burst out to me in her room. She joined Philip at the door and they went out, sped on by the uproar of the guests who had lingered.
“At any rate,” Miss Pride was saying at my elbow, “I haven’t lost this one,” and she slipped her arm through mine. Through the sleeve of her black suit, I felt her bone on my flesh like a steel wand or, as she bent it into a hook, like a thin, inflexible staple. “And now,” she went on to the Admiral, “now I’m going back to my memoirs.”
The Admiral smiled radiantly. “When is this celebrated volume to be finished?”
Miss Pride returned his smile. “I dare say it will be years. At least that’s what I intend, for I want something to occupy me so that I won’t get foolish, and to occupy Sonie so she won’t forsake me. Am I selfish?”
“No, ma’am. You’re the most generous woman in Boston.” He bowed deeply and then said to me, “And you, Mademoiselle, are the luckiest.”
It was with a sort of sudden desperation that I saw that the drawing-room was empty and that the accommodators were taking down the extra tables in the dining-room and that through the open door to the library only Reverend McAllister was visible, holding open in his hands a large dark green book which I knew was a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.Voices still came from the upstairs sitting-room, but presently a little group of people appeared at the head of the stairs and as they came down in a gust of talk, I could tell that even that room was empty now for Ethel, who had evidently been waiting for her chance, crossed the hall and went in with a tray to pick up the glasses that had been carelessly left there by the sight-seers. I wished to detain these last few guests but they were saying good-by. Gratuitously they told their hostess where they were going: to the matinee of Richard II, to the Country Club for ice-skating, to Brookline to shop at Best’s. Amy Brooks and Mr. Pingrey, shy with one another because Amy had caught Hopestill’s bouquet which she clutched tightly against her quivering breast, shaken with silent giggles, passed by me without a word because they could not see me or hear me though I called out to them, “Oh, don’t go yet!” Their only thought was to get through the door and away, by themselves. They hastily told Miss Pride good-by and Amy screamed, “It was lovely! I caught the bouquet, Cousin Lucy! Edward and I are going to Agassiz! I am going to do the glass flowers in pastels for Mrs. McAllister!”
They were gone then, the last. Miss Pride, still holding my arm, linked her other in the Admiral’s, and three abreast we went down the hall towards the library. “We’ll quickly get rid of Ichabod,” whispered Miss Pride, nodding in the direction of Reverend McAllister who was still absorbed in his book, “and then we three can have a nice talk.”
“Right-o,” said the Admiral. “Ain’t it a pity my wife had to miss this! Why, Lucy, I haven’t had such a good time since I went dancing at the Country Club, unless it was a month ago when Rose Park gave the cocktail party for her Community Chest people. I’m gay as a lark. Aren’t you, Sonie?”
“Oh, yes, sir!” I cried. Miss Pride released us both and after she had gently closed the door behind us, switched off the ceiling light. The sun had gone behind a cloud and the library was shadowy and cold. “There now,” she said. “It’s cozy. It’s just right to have this sort of dämmerung follow a wedding. It is the anti-climax to these affairs that I like most.”