Three

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

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

“Come on in, baby,” she said.

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

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

He kissed her lightly and sat down beside her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I can’t. I give up.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Something about your glasses?”

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean, playing with her?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s right,” he said.

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

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, as a matter of fact I didn’t.”

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

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

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

“No, you haven’t, Sandy,” he said.

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

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

“Go down in a what?”

“A bathysphere, darling. I mean it. Explore the sea floor.”

“Yes, Sandy,” he said. “You really should go down in a bathysphere.”

“I’m serious. You know how marine life has always fascinated me. All those—eels and things. Do you know of any bathysphere trips leaving soon? I’m serious. Bill Beebe was a dear friend of mine, and I was just dying to go down in his. Oh, well,” she said, sighing, “I’ve got to do something. Perhaps I will just marry Titi.” She picked up her teacup again and held it to her lips. “Ah, cooling at last!” she said, and sipped it. Looking at him over the edge of the cup, she said, “There is just one thing, baby.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, don’t worry. I won’t run off or do anything rash while you’re here. This visit with you is too rare, too much fun. I can’t tell you how happy I am, and how grateful, that you were willing to come. You didn’t mind too much, did you, coming up to see poor little me?”

“Of course I didn’t mind,” he said.

“Oh, there’s so much we have to talk about still,” she said. “It will take us days. We haven’t even begun, have we? But there is one thing—if I may be a little bit personal just for one minute, now that I think of it—there is one thing.”

“I’m all braced for it,” he said, smiling. “Tell me what it is.” And he could tell from her voice and the way she looked at him that she was really going to be serious now, just for a minute.

“Your weight. You haven’t gained, have you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are you sure? Positive? Oh, Hugh, you know how important that is—how careful you’ve got to be about that. You know what Dr. Zimmerman said. How, if you gained weight, it could affect—the walking.”

“I know,” he said quickly. “I know that.”

“Good. Please be careful. Please hop on the scales every morning. And not some old bathroom scales, but that good Fairbanks scale I sent you. A Fairbanks scale can’t lie. And Hugh, your walking is—I noticed it yesterday—it’s so much better. Really. I think it’s—well, I think it’s barely noticeable any more, when you wear the shoes.”

“I’ll watch my weight, Mother,” he said. She was beginning to irritate him a little. He knew what she meant, of course. But still—still, sometimes …

Sometimes he wished nobody had to mention the walk at all. It was not that mention of the walk pained him. But it had become, through the years, such a boring subject, and it had taken on such a dreary pattern. The subject of his lameness came up again and again—with friends, with everyone he met, it seemed, sooner or later—and it was usually after a few drinks when the person, whoever it was, decided that mentioning it was somehow tactful, and was putting him at his ease. It was always the same. The person said, in a gentle and solicitous tone—patronisingly kind—“You know, Hugh, when I first met you, I noticed it—the limp. But honestly, Hugh, and no kidding, since I’ve got to know you—why, I hardly notice it at all.” And that remark, which was intended to be so polite, and which had been emptied upon his ears with the persistence of a steady rain throughout almost two decades of his life, meant only one thing to him: His lameness was barely noticeable; therefore it was noticeable. It meant that whoever said it was a liar trying to tell an affectionate lie.

His mother had sensed his mood—she was good at that—and had sensed that she had stirred up unpleasant thoughts for him, for she said now quickly in a bright voice, “Oh, I’ve got something to show you, baby. Quick. Hand me that. That hatbox there on the chair.”

He reached for the hatbox and handed it to her.

“You can’t guess what I’ve got here,” she said.

“A hat.”

“Yes, but not just any hat. Wait.” She began to untie the ribbons of the box with deft fingers. “I was in Saks the other day and Miss Lucy, my hat lady, was saying to me, ‘You know, Mrs. Carey, I have one hat here that I want you to try on. But I ought to tell you that Mrs. Ernest Bratton was in here the other day, and tried it on. And she said she just couldn’t wear it—it was too extreme.’ Well, baby, you know Polly Bratton—what a raving beauty she is! And so I said to Miss Lucy, ‘Miss Lucy, if a hat is too extreme for Polly Bratton it is not too extreme for me. Give me the hat.’ So I bought it practically sight unseen, without even asking the price. Look,” she said, and she lifted it from the box.

It looked Hugh thought, like a perfectly ordinary black hat, of felt, with a wide circular brim. His mother put it on her head and it looked like a small sombrero.

“That’s very disappointing,” he said.

“It isn’t finished yet,” she said. “Now watch.” And she seized the front of the brim and gave it a sharp tug downwards. The brim, he saw now, was somehow artfully not connected to the crown of the hat in the front, and his mother pulled this ingenious brim down, across her face, and tucked it under her small chin. Now she looked as though her face were encircled with a wide, black beard, and the effect was so droll that he couldn’t help but laugh.

“My God,” he said. “It’s fantastic, Sandy.”

“Like it?” she asked him. “It’ll do, don’t you think, for tea with the neighbours?” Leaving it on, she lifted her teacup, extending her little finger, and sipped her tea.

He was still laughing.

“What’s so damned funny?” she asked, but her eyes were merry and now she began to laugh, too, and had to set down her teacup shaking in its saucer. She reached out quickly and covered his hand with hers. “Oh, Hugh!” she said. “It’s so good to have you home. We do like each other, don’t we? We do have fun. Oh, and I’m so proud of you. So damned proud! You’ve been so successful: My successful son! You’ve made all this money! Do you mind if I tell you that I’m proud of you? Because I am, my lamb, I am. You went off to New York and—well, you did it! The—the conquering hero has returned.”

He smiled at her. “Well, I’m glad you’re proud,” he said.

“We’ve—we’ve always reached upwards, you and I, haven’t we? We’ve always reached up for the god-damned moon and stars!” And she lifted her hand in the air, as if clutching for a star, to show him what she meant, and a little noisy rivulet of bracelets came tumbling down her arm.

Then, very quickly, she came back to her other self again. “Of course,” she said with a long sigh, “I don’t really know why you felt you had to be so successful. You would always have been comfortably off.”

“I know,” he said, falling in with her game. “It’s embarrassing, really. To be born rich, and then make money.”

“Terribly embarrassing,” she said. “But I’ve always said that I find rich people more amusing than poor people, and so I suppose successful people. Anyway, to-morrow night’s the party.”

“What party?”

“The party to welcome you home, for God’s sake! Didn’t I promise you on the phone that if you’d come I’d do something lavish and gay? Didn’t I promise you I’d hire naked houris to entertain you? Well, I haven’t got any houris, but you certainly didn’t think you were going to come home rich and famous and successful and not at least have a party given for you. I was going to have sort of a party to-night, with Edrita, but when she couldn’t come I got busy for to-morrow night. I’ve got all sorts of more interesting people.”

“Who, for instance?”

“Well, let’s see,” she said, spreading her long fingers and beginning to count them off. “Your father will be here, for one. I thought it might be nice to include him. And your Aunt Reba will be here, of course, and she’s bringing some terribly interesting new playwright or something. And then—oh, yes—I asked Titi to come.”

“I can hardly wait to meet Titi,” he said.

“Yes. But, oh dear, I’m afraid I was rather dreadful to Titi on the phone when I asked him. I did a really awful thing. I said to Titi, ‘Titi, darling, would you mind terribly not bringing Waldo?’ Was that too awful a thing to say, do you think? It’s not that I don’t love Waldo, of course, but—but well, don’t you think that one fairy is enough at a party?”

“I agree,” he said, “that one fairy is enough at a party.”

“Yes, I think so. Of course, I didn’t put it quite that way to Titi. But really, when they’re together they’re so thick—it’s boring, actually. Of course, I’d hope Titi would have enough sense not to make a pass at you, but you can’t tell. You never can tell about Titi.”

“Just don’t seat us side by side,” he said.

“And would you like me to ask Edrita again—for to-morrow night?”

“I think that would be very nice,” he said.

“All right, I’ll do it if you’d like. I’ll do it first thing in the morning. And let’s see—who else? Oh, yes. There’s a surprise guest coming.”

“Who’s the surprise?”

“Never mind. Don’t ask questions.”

“Give me a hint.”

“It has something to do with your sister.”

“What’s Pansy been up to?”

“I’ll tell you about it at dinner to-night. There’s news-news-news about Pansy.”

“Good or bad news?”

“Mixed. Mixed news. I’ll tell you at dinner to-night. Dinner to-night will be à deux. I hope you don’t mind. Do you mind having dinner alone to-night with your poor old frail grey-haired mother?”

“No,” he said, smiling at her. “I don’t mind having dinner alone with my poor old frail grey-haired mother.”

“Good. I’m glad. Besides, you and I have so much to talk about. We haven’t even begun to talk about all the things I want to talk with you about. We’ve been having so much fun that we keep getting side-tracked from the business at hand—which of course is to talk about you.”

“I’ll give you a full report about me,” he said.

“Good. That’s just what I want,” she said. He stood up.

“Here,” she said, “hand me that—and that—and that—” and she began pointing to things: her hairbrush on the dresser, her hand mirror at the foot of the bed, her satin slippers and the dressing robe that lay across the chair. He collected them for her and brought them to her.

“Now hurry and change,” she said. “I’ll see you downstairs.”

On his way out of her room he stopped for a moment in front of her dresser and looked, as he often had before, at the photographs that marched, in their monogrammed silver frames, down the wide length of her dresser top: at his mother, in her riding habit, her crop resting against one polished boot, standing imperiously before the living-room fireplace; at his mother again, in a dinner gown, in the library; at his father, in his World War I cavalry uniform and puttees; at his father in golfing knickers; at himself, in cap and gown, just graduated from Yale; at himself and Anne, in their wedding clothes on their wedding day; at his sister Pansy (so nicknamed because, as a baby, she was considered to have a perfect pansy face), sitting on the stairs in the white ball gown and long sleeves she had worn for her début; at his younger brother Billy, who had died, in his first long pants; at My Fancy, who had been one of his mother’s favourite horses; at stiff portraits of his Grandfather and Grandmother Pryor; at his Aunt Reba, looking silly in the tights she had worn for a Junior League Follies once long ago.

“Stop looking at the pictures,” his mother said. “Hurry and change.” He went out of her room and down the hall to his own.

His room was the same as it had always been. Neither Titi, thank God, nor anyone else had done anything to it. It was still large and dark and cool, filled with the same old furniture—the desk with his initials carved in the top, the big mahogany chiffoniers, the wardrobe with the broken lock—that he had grown up with. All his old clothes still hung in the closet. He closed the door of the room and his image was trapped, as it always was, in the huge, heavy mirror that hung against one wall. No matter where you moved in that room, you could not completely escape that mirror’s gaze. It had been put there, after the polio, because he was supposed to exercise in front of it. He had exercised in front of it. He had worked out there day after day—with bar bells, lifting weights, with hand grips and chest pulls and foot stirrups and skip-ropes—chinning himself with the chin bar that had been set into the frame of the closet door, doing push-ups on a mat on the floor. In the mirror now he could almost see the boy who, sweating, in his undershorts, had exercised there through those long afternoons, month after month. He had been driven to do it, of course—driven by the fear of being crippled. And it had been his mother who had instilled the drive in him, she who had supplied him with the mirror, the mat, and the exercise equipment. “If it hadn’t been for your mother,” he had often heard it said, “there was a good chance that you’d never have walked again.” It had been in those days that she had shown some of the grit—not that she was made of, perhaps, but that her anatomy certainly contained. He stripped off his shirt now and tossed it over a chair.

In the mirror’s reflection—he couldn’t help it, it was omnipresent—he saw himself, bare-chested, and he thought again of how everybody kept saying that he hadn’t changed. Perhaps they were right; perhaps he hadn’t. He walked closer to the mirror now and looked at himself—not admiringly, but dispassionately. His belly was still flat and hard. His shoulders were well muscled. His forearms looked strong, and there was hardly any sign visible to show that one arm, like one leg, had been affected. In the years of exercise he had come to know every muscle of his body by name and function, and he let his fingers run along some of these familiar muscles now—not narcissistically, but with a physician’s scrutiny—testing for flab, for weakness.

He turned away from the mirror. Well, perhaps he had not changed. And he wondered suddenly why the fact that he had not changed saddened him somehow. Perhaps, he thought, I should have. His mother had not changed; the house had not changed. Oh, of course the rooms changed year by year, from Empire to Directoire to Chinese to French Provincial to Victorian—but the house itself didn’t really change. The way the rooms always changed was only a part of the house’s changelessness. Nothing had changed at all since he had been away, except possibly Edrita. Was Edrita Everett the only thing that had the luck to be impermanent? And he began to wonder if home had somehow been the wrong place to come back to. But still, as his mother had said, what other place was there to come to besides home when you had to go somewhere?

He walked over to his bed. Pappy had laid out his dinner clothes. Dinner in the house was always black tie. After all, if you lived in a castle, didn’t it follow that dinner should always be black tie? It was more amusing that way.