Collected Novels and Plays (10 page)

“Oh, Lily would like that,” said Enid at one point. “She’s been badgering me for a turtle.”

The others said nothing at all. Mr. Tanning’s eyes never left the speaker’s face until, with a slight drop of his head, he fell asleep.

They smiled at one another and at him. “Poor little fellow,” said Natalie. “All tuckered out.”

“Has it stopped raining?” Enid wondered. Nobody could be sure.

“How one hears the sound of the sea,” Lady Good breathed.

In silence they let it speak to them, not knowing what else to do. Natalie drew her finger along the leg of the coffee-table, and held it up pensively; they saw it was black with dust.

Francis got to his feet and stole out. He paused by the hall mirror, whispering, “I’m tired, too.” When he returned with Mrs. McBride the women looked up gratefully.

“Gracious!” said the nurse. “Do you know what time it is? I’ve let him stay up a whole half-hour later than usual, because tonight was an
occasion.” Mr. Tanning stirred and woke. “I want you to be good now and come along with me. We know what happened last night. That’s why you’ve been so tired today.”

“Yes, my love,” he groaned. Did he always say that, on waking? It was amusing enough, but soon the old man, worn out, rose to do as he’d been told. He kissed each of them goodnight, solemnly. “I leave,” he told Francis, “the seraglio in your hands.”

“What’s the keeper of a seraglio called?” mused Natalie aloud.

“A unique,” said Francis. This met with laughter.

“Benjamin,” said Lady Good, “you don’t mean
me
to go to Irene’s tomorrow?”

“Why not come to us?”

“That’s very dear of you, Enid. I’d infinitely rather.”

“I like the way you call her Irene,” said Francis, “after taking such pains
not
to, this afternoon.”

“Ah well,” Lady Good said, memorably, “I daresay she’d love being called Irene to her face and Mrs. Cheek behind her back. But there are those with whom one tends to reverse normal procedure.”

“Miaow!” put in Mr. Tanning from the door.

“I’m sorry, Benjamin, but I’m used to speaking out.”

“Prudence, you can do as you like about tomorrow,” he said. “I’d be happier if you were along, but I’m just selfish.”

Lady Good pursed her lips. “Very well, I shall go to Ire—pardon me, to Mrs.
Cheek’s
, But only because you wish it.”

“We all wish it,” said Francis.

“Oh dear,” Mr. Tanning mumbled, taking his nurse’s arm. “Off to the Casbah.” Francis had to smile to think that, after so much innuendo, it was with plain old Mrs. McBride that Casanova retired. But he found it funnier yet, the way she, before leading him off, cast a backward glance, all starch and common sense, to reassure them of her own propriety. He might
talk
of casbahs, she conveyed, but they needn’t worry, that
was as far as it would go.

The evening had ended. Before dispersing, Enid to her car, Lady Good and Natalie to their rooms, each in turn told Francis how glad she was that he’d come home. “Everything’s all right
now
,” Lady Good even said, quite as if still talking of a sheepdog.

He followed Enid out into the drive, asking, “Do you think
now
that Irene means anything to him?”

“I don’t know what I think,” she said cheerfully, no longer visible in the gusty dark.

“But you
had
been alarmed. Your last letter said that Irene—or hadn’t you known then about Lady Good?”

“I’d never heard her name until last week. Things are too mysterious for words.”

“You understand of course that it’s she who will save him from Irene.” Enid was silent. “And don’t start wondering who’s going to save him from Lady Good. I can tell that’s in your mind.”

She gave her little gasp of a laugh. “You’ll do that? Oh my goodness!”

Francis had meant simply that Lady Good was someone from whom nobody needed to be saved. Enid drove off, nevertheless, leaving him to reflect upon the increasingly lucid part he had been given to play at the Cottage.

6.
In the community, that is among the people you knew, there were various assumptions about places. The most widespread was that whoever summered here kept a second, in some cases a third, residence elsewhere. It went without saying that one of these would be very large and handsome; a place in town sugared the pill of a too modest place in
the country, and so forth. Some few conformed excessively. The Buchanans, for
instance, moved between
two
large handsome places. They kept a house here and a triplex in New York, both of which—unlike the structurally so blatant Cottage—were perfection. This got said by somebody once a week at least: “Enid’s place is perfection.” But you had to be the right sort to get away with it—just as in another set of assumptions, those by which husbands and wives took mistresses and lovers as naturally as they moved from
one house to the next, there would always be a few couples (again, like the Buchanans) whose faithfulness to one another either refreshed or exasperated. The Buchanans’ refreshed, for they were not only rich but
attractive.
This was the key word. It allowed them, by and large, to do as they pleased.

Irene and Charlie Cheek, however, were not the right sort.
He
had been known to drink both too much and, of late, too little to be attractive. Still, you had known his family (if indeed you weren’t part of it), and he did love to sail. Irene’s position was graver. Before and after her marriage she had been on the jolliest terms with a number of rich older men (whom you knew and liked)—friendships that, like others of their kind, would have
been shrugged off, but for one damning circumstance. The Cheeks themselves weren’t rich. They had, to be sure, their two places, one here, one in Jamaica. But Irene made the mistake of pretending, in whichever of the two she found herself, that
this
was their simple summer (or winter) lodging, while the other house was, oh, quite a different matter, grand, serious, well staffed. It cut ice for a time. Then certain friends with whom she no longer put on certain airs,
like Mr. Tanning or the Governor-General of the Island, having visited the other house, praised in all innocence, but to her enemies, its unpretentiousness. Overnight her stock went down. She was seen wearing the same dress too often. When she appeared in a new one you wanted to know who had given it to her, and why. You took for granted that her interest in Mr. Tanning was of the most mercenary order. It had even been whispered that her husband was party to the plot, that if Irene
succeeded in marrying
Mr. Tanning, Cousin Charlie would have only to wait till the old man died, then take her back and live at the Cottage happily every after. “Poor Ben,” people said, “when will he see that it’s not
him
she cares for?”—which was the purest slander. Irene didn’t much care for
anybody
, rich or poor. Either security or imagination was needed in order to care for others; Irene lacked
both.

This didn’t keep you from going to her parties.

“Stay with me, Francis,” Lady Good begged, taking his arm to walk the weedy path. Already some fifteen cars were parked on what passed for a lawn, and the small house, buzzing with talk, had swallowed up Mr. Tanning and Natalie under their very eyes.

Francis, as it happened, had stayed with her the better part of the day, since her coming upon him early in a fine sunny haze beside the sea. All but ignoring his greeting, Lady Good had embarked on what he later saw to be a single inexhaustible conversation. Little had he reckoned, with his graceful naming of Mr. Tanning as their likeliest topic, the reaches of
her
interest.

She had wanted first to make her position clear. Francis was not to infer, from her presence at the Cottage, any resemblance between herself and the other women there. Her marriage to Sir Edward had been, still was, full of comfort and mutual esteem. If Benjamin had brought—she threw up her hands at the word—
“romance
into my drab life, who am I not to enjoy it like a schoolgirl? I’m very sentimental, Francis. Ned isn’t, not
one bit. He’s far too busy for that, although I’ve sometimes asked myself what he’d do, the poor man, were I not there.” Had she really? Wondered Francis to himself. It put her friendship with his father on a more complicated footing. Oh, Mr. Tanning loved her—Mr. Tanning loved everybody; but here was an inkling of the possible depth of Lady Good’s own feeling.

Throughout their talk she remained highly dignified. No one could have doubted that the affair was platonic.

Leading Francis back down the beach, she had gone on to describe
her first meeting with Mr. Tanning, through mutual friends in Jamaica. It took place after he had moved away from the Cheeks’ and into the beautiful old plantation house, Weathersome, which he had bought a few months later—such a truly beautiful house, she sighed, high on a hill, surrounded by trees, eucalyptus, palm, manchineel, and such flowers! Inside, wonderful gleaming
floors, chandeliers, decorations in plaster that were the work of
genius!
She hadn’t wanted to go, that first time. Mr. Tanning was American and well-to-do; it followed that he would be insufferable. Lady Good hadn’t, moreover, been invited, and it simply didn’t amuse her to barge in on strangers. How little a stranger she found him, after a brief hour in his company, was still a source of amazement. “Not that it should be,” she told
Francis, “for of all the charming men in the world Benjamin’s surely the most charming, and the sweetest, and the saddest. Why, he needs affection the way a child does!”

Affection, the capacity for feeling and showing it, led her finally to speak of Irene. In fact she was still speaking of Irene now, as they entered her house. Lady Good felt very sorry for Irene. “One has to face it, Francis, she simply isn’t your father’s intellectual equal.”

By then Francis had begun to feel very sorry for Lady Good. Though equipped with a few intellectual advantages of his own, he’d never found them useful in his father’s circle. And though Vinnie Tanning was still proud of her last withering retort—“Kindly tell me what you and Fern are going to
talk
about!”—the
mot
hadn’t kept Benjamin from marrying dear mindless Fern. Nor would Lady Good’s
intellect
save him from Irene.

Oddly enough they collided with Irene in the hall. “A drink just spilled on Natalie,” she said, extending a dripping hand to each. “Go on in. I’m scurrying for a towel.”

They obeyed. Mr. Tanning was already seated across the room, talking to a florid man with wavy white hair—Mr. Bishop, evidently. In a corner, unnoticed by them, Natalie, vigorously shaking her head, rejected napkins and handkerchiefs. Small aimless groups stood by. From
under a table two beagles peered expectantly. Francis could see Irene having spoiled Natalie’s dress on purpose, hoping to draw everyone together by means of some lively
incident.

Cut-glass bowls had been piled with potato chips or nuts enough for a hundred people. It promised to be just the kind of formless party Mr. Tanning hated.

A dapper, fattish little man, black-browed, gray-templed—the face of one who has never worked in his life—hurried up to Lady Good and seized her hand. Francis recognized him a moment later: Charlie Cheek. He had aged ten years during the past three. He asked what they wanted to drink.

“What are you drinking?” asked Francis thoughtlessly.

“Oh I’m on the wagon,” his host replied. “Haven’t touched a drop for six whole years. This is ginger-ale.” He hadn’t, at least, said wormwood; in fact Mr. Cheek appeared to enjoy the role of an alleged cuckold. While pouring her sherry he kept beaming at Lady Good with clear brown doglike eyes. How nice to see her, how was Sir Edward? Yes, yes. In Washington? Well, well. Probably Charlie knew better than anyone how his
wife could behave, and was trying to make up for it.

Irene, reappearing, fussed over Natalie with a towel.

“Don’t bother about me, pet,” Natalie said. “Introduce Francis to some of those pretty gals.”

So he gulped half his cocktail and let himself be led away, under the reproachful eye of Lady Good—though, as he told her later, he would have preferred to stay at her side.

Francis had known most of the pretty gals before. They had been his playmates at the Beach Club, at afternoon birthday parties, at dancing school. They had thrown sand into his eyes and he had put gum in their hair. One of them (now “little” Mrs. Drinkwater, twice divorced) had followed him behind a hedge, to watch him urinate. He had thought it funny to wet the front of her dress, but she ran screaming to her nurse and Francis was taken home and spanked.
Ginny Neale, yes, that had
been her name. She seemed, today, to have forgotten the episode. She had very sleek red hair and wore gold bracelets on her lightly freckled arms. “I’m dead to go back to France,” she said through her nose, “but I’m stuck with my heaven child.” Another girl, “big” Matilda Gresham, had given away all
her
dolls on her tenth birthday. She drank beer and gruffly told Francis
about working last winter for a theater group in the Village. “Tilda’s always been a daredevil,” her mother joined them long enough to explain. “She can’t abide League work. I beg her just to try Palm Beach
one
more season, but do you think she listens to me? People wonder what she does—I tell them I don’t know.” Mrs. Gresham (Boopsie) gave a bright drunken smile. Years back, during a great luncheon at the Cottage, she
had grasped Francis’s wrist and asked a passionate question: “Do you now, looking straight into my eyes,
dare
to deny the ethos of the Anglo-Saxon race?”

She lingered to speak of his mother. This showed that Mrs. Gresham, like Matilda, was no slave to fashion. She had her loyalties, however rarely she exercised them—“I haven’t laid eyes on Vinnie for years but I’ve always loved her. I don’t care who hears me say it.”

“She’s very fond of
you
, Boopsie,” Francis improvised.

“Really, Boopsie,” said her daughter crossly, “is your mind utterly gone? We had a long talk with Mrs. Tanning two days ago, in front of the five-and-ten. She told us Francis was back.”