Collected Novels and Plays (19 page)

And so Lady Good was the next to weep.

She feared that everyone was making fun of her. “If, as he swears, he’s grown tired of Irene,” she was murmuring by the end of dinner, “why is he afraid to tell her so? It’s fair neither to her nor to me. How do I know that he
has
tired of her?” It truly hurt Francis to see her caring so deeply. Why, Irene wasn’t worth the smallest tear fallen into her ice cream. “If I were that silly doll-faced Mrs. Maxon
pirouetting in a frock of natural chamois—in this weather!—I should know the line to take. I’d wiggle my hips and paint my eyes. As it is—oh,
make
that man stop!”

“Thank you,” Francis said to the accordion player. “We’re trying to talk.”

“He’s getting to behave more and more like Benjamin as the years go by,” tittered Mrs. Sturdevant across the table.

“Do you mean me?” inquired Francis, startled.

“Oh dear me, no,” she put his mind at rest, “not you, no, no—the
accordionist!
The way he flirts with all the old women—tell me, Lady Good,” the blue-haired smiler pursued naively, but at the top of her lungs, “I’m crushed over Sir Edward’s having to leave, but
you
won’t rush back with him, will you?”

“I’ve not yet made up my mind,” said Lady Good, instantly regaining her poise in the face of an overt challenge. “It may be that I shall accompany Benjamin to Boston next week.”

Francis raised his eyebrows. He had been invited to Boston himself. And Mrs. McBride, of course. The Cottage would be abandoned, a sinking ship.

“You mean, to the hospital,” said Mrs. Sturdevant, looking wise.

And so it went.

Wally Link had seen a flying saucer. But he was such a prankster that nobody believed him. The more shrill and red-faced he grew, the more Mrs. Gresham and Natalie and Charlie Cheek pounded the table, howling with laughter. Only Miss Tagliaferro nodded, paled, lowered her eyes—there
was
a higher form of life; the earth
was
being watched by Venus. When the accordionist struck up a waltz, Francis asked her to dance.

“Careful now, Cutie-Pie!” Charlie Cheek called after them. “That boy Francis is up to no good!”

The poor man no longer even pretended to be on the wagon.

“Do you know the Cheeks well?” said Francis. Xenia had told him to be nice to Miss Tagliaferro.

But it emerged that she was only a freelance writer whose name somebody had given Irene. As if this weren’t interesting enough, she added, “I was fired a few hours ago.”

“Really?” Heads were falling right and left, thought Francis, remembering Natalie. “Fired, you mean,” he went on, “by Mrs. Cheek?”

“No.” Miss Tagliaferro shook her silken mane. “By Mr. Tanning. He didn’t think we were getting anywhere.”

“With the biography?”

He was just keeping the ball rolling, yet she gave him an odd arch look. “With the biography,” she smiled.

“Well, were you? Getting anywhere, I mean. With the biography.”

“Not really. There’s so much material, what with all the claims on his time …” She seemed to be taking it in her stride.

“Fancy, Enid,” said Francis, pausing on his jerky progress past her table, “Miss Tagliaferro’s lost her job.”

Enid was genuinely sympathetic. Nevertheless, brown and beautiful in a full Chinese robe, she exchanged a significant flicker with her brother. “Poor Cousin Irene must be very disappointed,” she said. “It’s a pity when little plans don’t materialize.”

“I’ve got a feeling Mr. Tanning hasn’t told her yet,” said Miss Tagliaferro.

Indeed? All three looked involuntarily towards the old man, who was in the act of kissing Mrs. Underwood’s wrinkled cheek, while her husband grinned. “But gee, don’t feel sorry for me,” continued Miss Tagliaferro with an angel’s smile. “Your father gave me a beautiful big check and a few inside tips on the market. I can’t help it, I love him, that’s all.”

“Ah, so do I!” said a familiar voice behind them, as Xenia swept by in the arms of Sir Edward Good.

At last, with a din of spoons striking crystal, the speeches began.

Dr. Samuels rose first. Mr. Tanning had asked him to explain briefly a treatment his patient was to undergo next week in Boston. It was one with which the doctor had been experimenting for a number of years. He wanted to say at once that it involved serious risks. But after much observation and many tests right here at the Cottage—he hadn’t been playing golf the
whole
three weeks—he felt reasonably sure that Mr. Tanning would respond to
it.

His listeners composed themselves into an earnestness. It was right that
they
had been chosen to hear the worst.

As simply as possible: one fine morning Mr. Tanning would swallow perhaps a shot glass full of some colorless liquid, faintly flavored with iodine. This treat was to be served in a leaden casket, sipped through a leaden straw, in a room equipped with a special toilet that didn’t empty into the city sewer. For two days no visitor could be admitted. Benjamin, in a word, was going to be radioactive.

“What? No mushroom cloud?” laughed Charlie Cheek tactlessly. The others sat sobered.

Only a fraction of the atomic cocktail, Dr. Samuels went on, is
retained by the system, and of this all but an infinitesimal amount is absorbed by the thyroid gland. The gland, alas, is destroyed. The patient’s throat swells up and he can go through some painful hours. But within six or eight weeks the miracle happens: he no longer suffers any heart pain whatsoever.

That was all. A few guests looked troubled, as though it meant Benjamin was going to live forever. Then Wally Link had them sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” in honor of Dr. Samuels.

“I know,” said Larry Buchanan, rising, “that the prayers and good wishes of all of us here will follow the grandest guy I ever hope—” and so forth, fluently, for five minutes at the end of which Harold Feuerman rephrased it, adding a sentiment or two of his own, these last deftly echoed, when her turn came, by Mimsey Maxon. “I cannot understand,” whispered Lady Good through clenched teeth, “how Benjamin endures
such fatuity.”

For he was listening soberly, hanging on their words, and when at length, with a creak and a groan and a tardy flourish from the accordion, he stood up to thank them, a telltale brilliance trembled in his old blue eyes. Number five, said Francis to himself. But Mr. Tanning was always crying. Xenia had said it proved he was still potent, emotionally.

“An old man is always saddened,” he began, “when those dear to him take their leave. No matter how long they stay away he wants them to feel present and cherished in his heart. We see too little of our loved ones, unless we make an effort. I’d never have known my own father if I hadn’t made an effort. He was a country doctor. Some mornings he’d hitch his buggy and not come home till midnight. The days I went along, it meant
giving up a swim or a baseball game. But I never regretted making the sacrifice.”

Here the speaker choked on a swallow of champagne. He took his time coughing. The floor was his, nobody would interrupt.

“I only hope,” he said, then spat very noisily into an immaculate handkerchief, “that
my
children never regret not taking the many opportunities I’ve given them to know
me
.”

A queer silence ensued. Mrs. Cheek looked enigmatic. Francis had his hands squeezed by Lady Good. “Remember that he’s sick, my dear,” she breathed. Enid, across the terrace, bowed her head and was the sixth to weep. But Mr. Tanning simply refused to be at fault in front of so large a crowd. Peering about innocently, he went on with his speech.

“The first departing friend I should like to pay my compliments to is that gentleman planter, manufacturer of molasses, Minister and Right Hand to his Excellency the Governor-General of Jamaica, and
the
luckiest man in the whole world”—this with a comic leer in Prudence’s direction, while adopting the tone of a barker introducing a freak. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Sir Edward Good!”

Applause. Lady Good caught her breath, “Honestly, the
impudence
of Benjamin!” but laughed a bit in spite of herself. He hadn’t, at least, brought up
her
departure.

“Ned is what I call a truly good sport,” continued Mr. Tanning, a fresh frog in his throat. “Let’s drink to him.”

He spoke as if he had just won Lady Good from her husband in some friendly tournament. Glances were exchanged over the champagne. But she seemed not to mind. That she didn’t was further proof, to Francis, of her moral decline. Ten days earlier she would have left her place and swept proudly to her room.

“And now,” Benjamin was saying, “my most affectionate blessings on a fair and charming friend whose stay is over. I’ve enjoyed every minute spent in her company, and trust she will forgive and forget all but the sunlit hours at the Cottage.”

“Is he referring to poor Natalie?” gasped Lady Good. “I do feel that’s rather rubbing it in!”

“Wait and see,” Francis told her, amused. He noticed, however, that Natalie herself wore a look of grim attention. Had no one else heard about Miss Tagliaferro?

“But the old poop’s not what he used to be.” Mr. Tanning shook his head. “Paresis is slowly settling in.”

“You’ll have to prove it to us!” Mrs. Gresham heckled.

“My one regret,” he said, ignoring her, “is that this departing guest and I have been unable to complete the ambitious project outlined before either of us had had the chance—in my case I should say the privilege—of knowing the other.”

As it sank in, “Oh, so
Zinnia’s
leaving!” marveled Lady Good.

“Why no, of course not,” Francis laughed, forgetting that he would have welcomed this piece of news. But gazes had begun to converge upon Xenia from the many who shared Lady Good’s misapprehension. Xenia herself, during a vivid instant, half rose from her chair, one hand at her throat, pale with the imagined humiliation she had received.

Once again, the little drama his words caused played itself out unnoticed by Mr. Tanning. And of course, after all the fuss, it was only a question of poor Miss Tagliaferro. She stood up now, tried to convey that the privilege had been hers. By then who cared? The speeches were over in a sudden flurry of drinking, though Mr. Tanning had the puzzled air of one with much left to say. “I could have gone on talking all night,” he told Francis later, in Boston.
“There I was headed for the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and not a damn soul wanted to hear about it. Oh dear,” he sighed comically, “I hope you’ll always be able to laugh at yourself, Sonny.”

The dinner was a great success. Even Irene withheld her venom. Miss Tagliaferro’s dismissal seemed a trivial matter next to the retreat of the Goods.
That
was the victory over which, all evening, Irene glittered and gloated, not having heard yet what in her narrow-mindedness she wouldn’t have believed—that Prudence expected to stay on. Not return to Jamaica when your husband had been summoned by the Governor-General? Fat chance! Why, the
Governor-General was a far bigger catch than Benji Tanning!

Xenia, when Francis looked again, was ruddy and laughing, her glass raised. But he was longest to see her in her hunted aspect of a moment before. Granted she did nothing that wasn’t theater, her fear, though another might have shown it less fluently and more convincingly, had
been real. In a flash she had known herself shamed, her career threatened, her status as an alien—who knew?—remarked upon to some personage both able and
eager to order her out of the country. As a citizen Francis couldn’t imagine how
careful
foreigners had to be. “Our phones are tapped,” she would nod over his protests, “our letters read. In any crisis we call each other up and say, ‘Isn’t it a lovely day? Let’s take a walk in the Park!’”

This was ridiculous.
“Become
a citizen, if you feel that way,” he had said. Really, Kafka had done untold harm.

“No thank you!” Xenia replied, sunny and prompt as when speaking of marrying Mr. Tanning. “I value my freedom!”

The deeper assumption behind her panic, Francis saw with a movement of impatience that sent him up from his chair, away from the popping corks and down to the loud dark beach, the deeper assumption was that he and Benjamin were capable of dismissing her from the Cottage, coldly, without warning. “How can she be so stupid?” he said aloud to the powerful wind that nearly always rose at night, down by the shore. “She knows us, knows that we’re
not monsters. Why must she act as if we were? It’s ridiculous—we’re so gentle, really, so full of trust and readiness to love ….”

At which point he remembered Natalie, and how
she
had been dismissed from the Cottage—coldly, yes, and without warning—that very day. He gave a little helpless laugh. Could he turn nowhere without stumbling upon the power to harm? And was it Benjamin’s power or his own? Just then Francis couldn’t see that it made much difference.

He faced full into the wind that came now mixed with light rain or spray, as if power were learning how to weep over itself. The sand was damp and firm; wherever he stepped a meager zodiac of phosphorescence glimmered about his shoe. The harder he trod, the brighter it spread, greenish, before fading. Tiny creatures, Francis thought, waiting for the blow to fall, in order to shine.

The terrace, distant under festive awnings, might have been a stage
viewed from the last row of a huge dark theater. Could it be raining back there, also?

Calmer than he had felt all day, Francis tried to look back on his awakening with Xenia.

He could not have said, at first, that he
was
awake. A brilliance lay upon his closed eyes like a mask, as if it was very early in the day, or as if, already, fall had come. More clearly than he had ever seen them he imagined leaves scarlet and gold whirling across lawns, across beaches into the pearly churning of an autumn surf.

The noise of the sea had first suggested that he wasn’t in his own room. Which room faced the sea? Benjamin’s room? Well and good, he all but murmured, then he would play at being Benjamin, and rolled over. At once against his shoulder was a softness, something that, if touched at all, would scarcely have been felt, so far did the concept of Shape lie beneath vaguer notions, warmth, fragrance, tint, thrown like veils over the sleeping figure. Against his
shoulder and now against his cheek. He would not open his eyes. I’m
not
Benjamin, he tried to think; but the body remained beside him, veiled in its warmth.