The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (24 page)

“What Neddy needs,” he told me gravely, “happens to be exactly what I can offer: order and discipline. I get him up every morning at eight and send him off with his sketchbook. In the afternoons he paints in here.” He pointed proudly to an easel in the corner of the living room on which stood an unfinished painting of a canal after the manner of Ziem, colorful and dull. “In the evenings we relax, but in a tempered way. We dine out in a restaurant and drink a bottle of wine. But that's all. Bed by eleven is the rule.”

“I see that it's wonderful for Neddy,” I said at last. “But what, Clarence, is there in it for you?”

He stared at me for a moment and then shook his head thoughtfully.

“Well, if you don't see that, Peter, what
do
you see? It's what I have always waited for.”

When I walked back to my hotel I reflected with some concern on these words of his. I couldn't help feeling a certain responsibility at having been the agent who had brought him and Neddy together. Yet who was I to say that it was a bad thing? I had seen Clarence before he had met Neddy and I had seen him after, and I wondered if I could honestly say that the irritation which I felt at his blind enthusiasm for so fallible a young man was anything more than the irritation that we are apt to feel when an outsider helps one of our family for whom we have given up hope. If such was the case my doubts were the doubts of a dog in the manger.

***

Having established myself on a friendly basis in Clarence's new ménage, I was asked there from time to time, but by no means constantly, during the rest of the summer. It was apparent that both Clarence and Neddy were slightly on the defensive with me. The mere fact that I had previously known both of them without losing my head over either may have seemed an implied reproach to the extravagance of their mutual admiration. When two weeks passed in August without my hearing from either of them, I assumed that Clarence had carried Neddy off to Rome to avoid the pollution of the city by the influx of guests for the Lorisan ball. It was with surprise, therefore, that I received a card one morning from Aunt Maud, Clarence's mother, telling me that she had arrived at the Grand Hotel and asking me to come in that afternoon for a drink with her and Clarence and “Clarence's friend.”

Aunt Maud Dash, as she now called herself, having resumed her maiden name after the last of her marriages, had done me the dubious honor of singling me out from the other members of her first husband's family on the theory that I was not “stuffy,” or at least, as she sometimes qualified it, not quite as stuffy as the rest. There was also, of course, the fact that I was comparatively young, male, unattached, and last but not least, a writer. When I came into her sitting room at the hotel I found her on a chaise longue, her large round figure loosely covered by a blue silk negligee, examining with a careful, almost professional interest a wide ruff collar that was obviously a part of her ball costume. Her hair was pink, a different shade than when I had last seen her, and her skin, dark and freckled, was heavily powdered. Propped up in her seat she looked as neat and brushed and clean as a big doll sitting in the window of an expensive toy store. There was nothing, however, in the least doll-like about her eyes. They were small and black and roving; they seemed to make fan, in an only half goodhearted fashion, of everything about her, even of her own weight and of the stiff little legs that stuck out before her on the chaise longue and the wheezing, asthmatic note of her breathing.

“Why, Peter,” she called to me, “you've got a corduroy coat! We'll make a bohemian out of you yet.”

“Maybe it's time I went home.”

She turned away now from the ruff collar and examined me more critically.

“Not yet, dear. Wait a bit. You're almost presentable now. I always said there was a chance for you.”

“It's what has given me hope.”

She snorted.

“Tell me about Clarence,” she said abruptly. “I know I can count on you. They say he has a boyfriend.”

“Neddy Bane is not exactly a boy,” I replied with dignity. “He's my age. As a matter of fact I introduced them. Neddy's wife used to be a friend of mine.” I hoped by this to change the direction of her thinking. It was a vain hope.

“Now look here, Peter Westcott, if you think you can put me off with some old wives' tale at my time of life and after all I've seen—” She stopped as we heard steps in the corridor and then a light, authoritative knock on the door.

“Mother?” I heard Clarence's voice.

“Come in, darling, come in,” she called, and the door opened to admit Clarence followed by a rather sheepish-looking Neddy. “How are you, my baby,” she continued in a husky voice that seemed to be making fun of him. “Give your old ma a kiss.”

Clarence bent down gingerly and touched his cheek to hers, emerging from her embrace with a white powder spot on his face that he immediately, without the slightest effort at concealment, proceeded to rub off with a handkerchief.

“And is this your Mr. Bane?” Aunt Maud continued in the same voice. “What sort of man are you, Mr. Bane? Are you as severe and sober as my Clarry?”

“No, but I try,” Neddy answered shyly. “Clarence is my guide and mentor.”

Aunt Maud looked shrewdly from one to the other and grunted.

“Are you going to the ball, Mother,” Clarence put in quickly, with a bleak glance at the ruff collar, “as the Virgin Queen?”

“Clarry, dear, your
tone,”
she reproached him. “But since you ask, child, I am. I've always liked the old girl.” She turned suddenly back to Neddy. “Do you believe in the theory that she was really a man, Mr. Bane? Nobody ever saw her, you know, with her clothes off.”

Neddy was fingering the red velvet hoop skirts of the costume spread out on the chair beside him.

“Oh, never!” he protested with unexpected animation. “You don't think so, do you?” Then he appealed to her suddenly, with a rather sly little smile that I had not seen before. “You mean she was really a queen?”

Aunt Maud put her head back and roared with laughter.

“But I
like
your friend, Clarry!” she exclaimed. “Can I call him Neddy? I shall anyway,” she continued, turning glowingly from Clarence to his friend. “And you, Neddy, must call me Maud.” She nodded in satisfaction. “Perhaps you will be my Essex? I have a man's costume, too. It's over there in that box on the chest.”

Neddy glanced questioningly at Clarence and then hurried over to the box and took out the red pants and doublet. He stood before the long mirror and held them up in front of him.

“But they fit perfectly!” he exclaimed, and went back again to the box. “Oh, and just look at that sword! Gosh, Mrs. Dash, I mean Maud! Don't you love it, Clarry? Do you think we could go?” He looked anxiously at Clarence.

I didn't have to look at Clarence to know that he would resent Neddy's calling him “Clarry,” aping his mother so immediately. He stood there primly, his lips twitching, like a governess who has been overruled by an indulgent parent. Then he turned on Aunt Maud.

“Why must you have an Essex?” he asked sharply. “Would you not do better to search among your own contemporaries for a Leicester? Or even a Burleigh?”

But she simply laughed, this time a high, rather fluty laugh that was just redeemed from silliness by its mockery.

“Because I
want
an Essex!” she said defiantly. “A young attractive Essex.” She winked at me. “Clarence is so absurdly conventional,” she continued, more maliciously. “He thinks one should only see people one's own age. As if life were a perennial boarding school. But Neddy doesn't have to be Essex, does he, Peter? He could be one of those pretty pages whom the old queen used to favor, tweaking their ears and pinching their thighs.” She threw back her head and gave herself up once more to that laugh. “Or even,” she added, gasping, “stifling them half to death in her musky old bosom!”

I could see that Clarence was beside himself. I could only hope that he would not interpret her laugh as I did, as a challenge to compare the relative improprieties of Neddy as an escort for her or Neddy as a companion for him. She picked up the ruff collar now and put it almost coyly around her neck.

“Don't you think it's a good idea, Clarence?” Neddy asked hopefully. “You don't really mind, do you?”

“Mind?” Clarence snapped at him. “Why on earth should I mind? You don't expect me to decide every time you go to a party, do you?”

He got up and walked across the room to the little balcony and, going out, stood by the railing and stared down into the canal. Neddy was at first abashed by his sudden exit, but after I, at Aunt Maud's bidding, had mixed a shaker of martinis from the ample ingredients with which she always traveled, he cheered up again. In a very short time he and Aunt Maud had discovered a series of mutual acquaintances and become positively noisy. I had to leave early and went out on the balcony to say goodbye to Clarence. He was still standing there, gloomily watching the line of gondolas arriving at the hotel bringing more and more guests to the hated ball. He hardly turned when I spoke to him, but simply pointed to the scene below.

“I warned Neddy about this, but he wouldn't believe me,” he said. “All hell is breaking loose here.”

The very next morning he came alone to see me at my hotel. He looked tired and worn.

“I want to ask a favor of you, Peter,” he said gravely.

“A favor, Clarence? How unlike you. But go ahead, I'm delighted.”

“It is unlike me,” he agreed, frowning. “I am not in the habit of asking favors. I am sure you will be sympathetic when I tell you that I do not find it an easy experience.”

I hastened to cut short his embarrassment.

“What can I do for you, Clarence?”

“You know my mother,” he began rapidly. “You understand her. She'll listen to you. You can tell her that she mustn't take Neddy to this ball.”

“But why mustn't she?”

“Why?” he exclaimed in a suddenly shrill tone. “Good heavens, man, you can't have known Neddy all your life and not see what this will do to him! Just now, of all times, when he's really painting, when for once he's got parties and girls and drinking out of his mind—”

“But one ball, Clarence,” I protested.

“One ball!” he almost shouted. “One marihuana! One pipe of opium!”

“But what am I going to tell your mother?”

“Tell her—” He paused and then appeared to give it up. A bitter look came over his face. “Oh, tell her,” he went on harshly, “that as long as she's taken everything she could from me all my life, she may as well take Neddy too. But why she has to have her gin-soaked body hurtled in a plane three thousand miles through the ether just to interfere with the only friendship I've ever had—”

“Clarence!”

But he was completely out of control now.

“Why do I ask you, anyway?” he cried. “You like people like her, you even write about them! You think she's admirable, the old tart!”

“All right, Clarence, all right,” I said firmly, putting my hands up to stop him. “I'll speak to her, I promise. But calm down, will you?”

He seized my hand in sudden embarrassed gratitude and hurried away without trusting himself to say another word. I shook my head sadly, amazed to have discovered such depths of feeling in him. I had always known that he had disliked his mother; I had not realized that he hated her. She must have seemed, in the isolation that even as a child he had preferred, the very essence of the vulgarity of living and loving as the world lived and loved, the symbol of the Indian giver, because for all her vitality he may have instinctively suspected that she wanted back the one pale spark she had emitted in bearing him. And even now, when she came to his beloved Italy, wasn't it the same thing all over again, didn't she participate more in the carnival life of the country by attending one crazy ball than he with all his monographs? That, she must have known, was his vulnerable point; that was why she struck at it year after year. It was as if she resented the very existence of what he called the gemlike flame within him and had determined to blow it out.

I telephoned Aunt Maud and invited her to have cocktails with me at Harry's Bar that afternoon. She arrived in high spirits, in a red dress and an enormous red hat, and, as I had known she would, flatly refused my request about Neddy.

“What's wrong, infant?” she asked suggestively. “Do you want to take him to the ball yourself?”

“I'm only thinking of Clarence,” I retorted. “This whole thing is bothering him terribly.”

“And why should it bother Clarence?”

I noted the glitter in her eyes. It was as if she had been playing bridge with children and had suddenly picked up a slam hand, a waste, to be sure, but a hand that she could still enjoy bidding.

“You know perfectly well why, Aunt Maud,” I said wearily.

“My dear Peter,” she said firmly. “I know a great many things, including what stones do not bear turning over. I have no idea of asking Clarence to explain to me, his mother, what his involvement with this young man is. But I cannot see that borrowing his precious Neddy for a single evening is interfering very much. Must he have Neddy with him every second? Why doesn't he keep him in a harem?”

“You don't understand, Aunt Maud,” I tried to explain. “Clarence thinks that Neddy has finally settled down to be a painter and—”

“Nonsense,” she interrupted firmly. “It's selfishness, pure and simple, and you know it, Peter. Clarence is simply scared to death that Neddy will find the big world more fun than his cell. Which I should hope he would!”

“Aunt Maud,” I said desperately. “
I'll
take you to the ball.”

“Thank you very much, Peter, but I haven't asked you. It's all very well for Clarence to go on about my interrupting Neddy's work, but I'll bet he doesn't begrudge him the hours they waste sipping chocolate on the Piazza San Marco while he rants about his poor old mother's wicked life. Oh, I know Clarence, Peter!”