The Group (22 page)

Hatton was not only the “man” but also the “man of the house” and a very responsible character. He had been with the family for years, ever since the girls were small, and though he had once had a secret plan of retiring to England on his savings and marrying a young woman, he had done the distinguished thing of losing all he had in the stock-market crash, four and a half years before. They had sold Hatton out, on the Street, and here too he had outshone Mr. Prothero, who, after a short setback in ’29, had gone through the depression getting steadily richer without any effort on his part but because of a patent he had bought from a man someone had introduced to him at the Piping Rock Club after a polo game. This fellow, who had looked like a swindler, had killed himself shortly afterward by diving into an empty swimming pool. But the patent, which controlled one of the processes in making the new synthetics, turned out to be worth a mint. Making money, Mr. Prothero confessed, must be in the blood. He went downtown, now, to an office most weekdays, to provide what he called the window dressing for the firm that administered the patent; they made him a director, though he did not, as he said, understand what the hell they were manufacturing or leasing for manufacture, whichever it was. But he supposed it was his duty, in these times, to put his shoulder to the wheel.

The Prothero family, on both sides (Mrs. Prothero was Schuyler), was dim-witted and vain of it, as a sign of good breeding; none of them, as far back as they could trace their genealogy, had received a higher education, until Pokey, or Mary, as she was called at home, came along; her younger sister, Phyllis, had been dropped from Chapin, to Mrs. Prothero’s relief, in the sophomore year, and after a few months in Miss Hewitt’s Classes, had been able to leave school, according to state law, as soon as she turned sixteen. By now, she had had her coming-out party and was ready for marriage at nineteen—just the right age, Mrs. Prothero thought, although she would be sorry to lose her, for she was a lonely woman and enjoyed having Phyllis’ companionship on her trips to the hairdresser and the Colony Club, where she could sit in the lounge while Phyllis and her friends swam in the pool. Mrs. Prothero, poor soul, her staff agreed, was a woman of few resources: unlike most ladies, she did not care for shopping; fittings fatigued her, for she did not believe she could stand long, having suffered from milk leg after the births of the girls; matinees made her cry (there were so many sad plays nowadays), and she had never been able to learn the bidding for contract bridge. She took no interest in interior decoration, the way so many ladies were doing; the furniture, carpets, and pictures in the main rooms of the house had scarcely changed since Hatton had been there. The servants, except for the younger footman and Annette, the girls’ maid, had not changed either. Mrs. Prothero had a pale, dusty tannish skin—the color of the upholstery and stair carpets; the paintings in the drawing room were of white and brown ruminants, cows and sheep, sitting in dark-brown fields. Hatton approved of the paintings, which he understood to be Dutch and valuable, and of the subdued brownish tone of the furnishings, but the women servants said that the place needed livening up. The trouble was that you could not get either Mrs. Prothero or the girls to take any notice. Recently, Forbes, the girls’ nursery governess, who now looked after the linen and the heavy mending, had taught Mrs. Prothero to do petit point, which, as Forbes said, was like having a bit of company in the house, what with Miss Mary away at Cornell, studying to be a vet and never bringing her friends to stay any more, weekends, the way she had at Vassar, and Mr. Prothero at the office, and Miss Phyllis, who had been such a mainstay, off with girls of her own set to lunches and teas and fashion shows.

The Protheros entertained, but only at dinner; Mrs. Prothero was not equal to leading the talk at luncheon. Mr. Prothero always took his lunch at the Brook or the Racquet or the Knickerbocker, and the girls were told to have their friends to lunch at the Club, to save making extra work for Hatton. That was the Madam’s way of putting it, but Hatton had never shirked work, as she ought to know. It was Hatton who planned Mrs. Prothero’s dinners, bringing her the menus and a diagram of the seating arrangements, before writing out the place cards; the conundrum of seating eight or sixteen had never been unriddled by Mrs. Prothero, who always looked up at Hatton with faint surprised alarm when she found another lady opposite her, where she was used to seeing Mr. Prothero, at the other end of the long table. Mrs. Prothero’s life was too inactive to warrant her having a social secretary, except during the two seasons when the girls were coming out. Hatton managed her invitations and her acceptances, told her who was coming to dinner and whom she was going to. He directed her contributions to charity and sometimes, on a night when they were entertaining, was able to suggest a topic for conversation.

Needless to say, he was also in the habit of giving the girls a hand. “Hatton, you’re a genius!” Miss Mary and Miss Phyllis were always shrieking when they did a list or seated a table in consultation with him. “Infallible social sense,” Mr. Prothero often muttered, of the butler, with a wink and a peculiar movement of the cheek muscle that gave him a paralyzed appearance. The girls had more confidence too in Hatton’s judgment in matters of dress than they had in Annette’s or Forbes’s; they would come up to his room in their ball gowns, twirl around before him, and ask him whether they should wear the pearls or the Madam’s diamonds or carry a scarf or a fan. It had been Hatton, in alliance with Forbes, who had seen to it that Miss Phyllis was made to wear a patch over one eye, as well as keep the braces on her teeth; if Hatton had not backed up Forbes, poor Miss Phyllis would be, as Forbes said, a regular Ben Turpin today.

The whole family adored Hatton. “We all adore Hatton,” Miss Mary would announce in a vigorous whisper, shielding her pursed mouth with one hand, to a young man who was seeing her home, for the first time, from a tea dance or a young lady who was coming, for the first time, to stay; the butler’s trained features would remain impassive as he led the way up the stairs, though the pretense of not hearing would have tried an inferior servant, since both the young ladies were not only blind as moles but had loud, flat, unaware voices like the voices of deaf people, so that even when they whispered everyone turned around to look at them and listen to what they were saying. They had inherited this trait, another sign of blue blood, from their grandmother on their father’s side.

Hatton, though he took no notice, partly from habit, was not displeased that the young ladies made it a point that nobody who stayed in the house or came to dinner should fail to appreciate him. The slow ceremoniousness of his manners, his strict austere bearing ought to have spoken for themselves, but it was a convention, he understood, among the better class of Americans, to pretend that the service was invisible, which was
their
little way of showing that they were used to being waited on. This offended Hatton’s professional pride and had caused him to leave his last place. With the Prothero family, being more of the old school, his exceptional endowment and qualifications were brought into the limelight, and the more unobtrusive he made himself, the more all heads turned surreptitiously to watch his deportment as he entered or left a room. He had only to close a door, noiselessly, or retire into the pantry to know that the family and its guests were discussing him. To be aware of Hatton was a proof of intimacy with the family—a boast, you might say, particularly among the young people. “Hatton’s a wonder,” the tall young gentlemen who were going on to a dance in white ties and tails would confide to each other, profoundly, over the coffee and the brandy when the young ladies had left the dining room. “Hatton’s a wonder, sir,” they would say to Mr. Prothero, at the head of the table. Hatton did not have to be psychic (which Miss Mary liked to let on he was) to surmise, from a glance through the pantry door, the trend of the conversation. The Vassar young ladies upstairs not all being used to society, the footman who served the Benedictine and the crème de menthe sometimes came down with a tale to tell, but with the young gentlemen over the brandy it was always the same.

“Like one of the family,” Mr. Prothero would reply. “Kind of an institution, Hatton is. Famous.” Hatton was not sure that he cared to be described as “like one of the family”; he had always maintained his distance, even when the young ladies were toddlers. But he did feel himself to be an institution in the household and was used to being looked up to, like a portrait statue raised on a tall shaft in a London square. With this end in mind, he had perfected an absolute immobility of expression, which was one of his chief points, he knew, as a monument and invariably drawn to the attention of visitors. The signals directing attention to his frozen, sculptured face on the part of the young ladies and their friends Hatton was perfectly familiar with and accepted as a form of compliment while not, even inwardly, moving a muscle. When asked about the family he had served so long and with such apparent suppression of self (“Hatton is
devoted
to us,” Mrs. Prothero declared, in one of her rare positive assertions of any kind), he would answer, with reserve, that it was “a good place.” Miss Phyllis, when she was younger, used to pester him to say he liked her, being the ugly duckling, not that the rest were swans, but all Hatton would answer was simply, “It’s a good place, miss.” The same with the master when he was half-seas over and Hatton was guiding him to bed: “You like us, eh, eh, Hatton? After all these years, eh?” Forbes, a stout party from Glasgow who had been with the family ever since Miss Mary was born, sometimes reminded Hatton that there were better places: a first-class butler, she said, was not supposed to act as a social secretary and valet, besides being a Holmes Protective man and a human fire-alarm system (this was Forbes’s joke). “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Hatton, who was fond of a proverb, coldly retorted, but he really meant the opposite: a butler of his capacities could choose to take on extra duties without prejudicing his legend. He was the bigger man for it. Hatton, through doing crossword puzzles, was familiar with the principal myths, and his mind sometimes vaguely dwelt on the story of Apollo serving King Admetus, not that he would place Mr. Prothero so high. Yet the comparison occasionally flashed through his head when he was waiting on table, throwing a spacious aureole or nimbus around him as he moved from one chair to the next, murmuring “Sherry, madam?” or “Champagne, miss?” Miss Mary, he felt, was aware of the nimbus, for he would find her nearsighted eyes frowningly focused on him, as if observing something unusual, and her nostrils sniffing, a sign of aroused attention she had probably-picked up from the Madam; the poor young lady herself had no sense of smell. Miss Mary swore by telepathy; she had a sixth sense, she insisted, to make up for the missing one. She had decided that Hatton had too. “Are your ears burning, Hatton?” she often asked him when he came to answer the bell in a room where she and her friends were playing one of those mind-reading games, with cards, she had learned at Vassar. He explained to her that it was the job of a good servant to read his master’s mind and anticipate his wishes; for him, he added reprovingly, it was all in the day’s work, no fun and games about it. “How did you become a butler, Hatton?” she sometimes asked, seating herself on his bed. “Yes, how did you, Hatton?” said Miss Phyllis, occupying his footstool. But Hatton declined to answer. “That is my private affair, miss.” “
I
think,” said Miss Mary, “you decided to become a butler because you were psychic. Natural selection.” This was over Hatton’s head, but he did not allow the fact to be seen. Miss Mary turned to Miss Phyllis. “It proves my point, Phyl. Don’t you get it? Darwin. The survival of the fittest.” Her loud peremptory voice resounded through the servants’ quarters. “If Hatton wasn’t psychic he’d be a flop as a butler.
Ergo
, he is psychic. Q.E.D.” She scratched her head and beamed victoriously at Hatton. “Pretty smart, eh wot?” “Very smart, miss,” Hatton agreed, wondering if this was the Darwin who had discovered the missing link. “Girrls!” came Forbes’s voice from below. “Come down and get into your baths.”

The fact was, Hatton had become a butler because his father had been in service. But he too had come to feel that there was something more to it than this; like Miss Mary said, he had had a vocation or a higher call that had bade him assume the office. This conviction had slowly overtaken him in America, where genuine English butlers did not grow on trees. “You’re the real article, Hatton!” a gentleman who had come to stay in the Long Island house had said to him one morning with an air of surprise. He was like a stage butler or a butler you saw on the films, the gentleman doubtless meant to imply. Hatton had been pleased to hear it; being somewhat younger then and on his own, so to speak, in a foreign country, he had tried to conform to an ideal of the English butler as he found it in films and in crime stories and in the funny papers that Cook read, for the wise man knew how to turn the smallest occasion to profit. Yet he now felt that study alone could not have done it. When the young ladies told him he was a genius, he believed they had hit on the truth: “out of the mouths of babes.” He had long accepted the fact that he was the brains of the family and the heavy obligation that went with it. The eternal model of the English butler, which he kept before his eyes, even in his moments of relaxation and on his day off, required that he have the attributes of omniscience and ubiquity, like they taught you in the catechism: “Where is God?” “God is everywhere.” Hatton was Church of England, and did not mean to blaspheme, but he could not help noticing those little correspondences, as when he had observed, in his earlier situation, that he was expected to be invisible too.

Folding the newspaper, Hatton sighed. One of the duties or accomplishments of the classic English butler, of which he personally was the avatar, was to be well informed on matters that would not at first glance seem to be relevant to the job in hand and also to be a past master of proper names. That was why, at present, he was reading the
Herald Tribune
, on behalf of the family, having already had a hasty look at Cook’s tabloid for the murders, and why he had started with the society columns and the sporting pages, to have a go at them while his mind was fresh. Hatton was not a sporting man, except for the races and, back home, the cricket, but duty obliged him to take cognizance of the proper names and lineage of dogs, cats, boats, horses, polo players, golfers, as they appeared in the news, together with all sorts of figures and ratings, since it was these names and figures that were most commonly wanted in the Prothero household. Then there were the society columns, for the Madam and the girls. When a young gentleman got married, it was Hatton who struck his name off Miss Mary’s list, and when a young lady announced her engagement, it was Hatton who reminded Miss Mary or Miss Phyllis to buy a wedding present—a thing Miss Mary often neglected or sent Annette to do.