Collected Novels and Plays (28 page)

17.
Up North—“back home where things happened,” as Mrs. McBride, overlooking many a drama on the Island, would say in letters to her daughter—winter came early. The first snow fell in mid-November. By Christmas most people suffered an odd delusion of the holidays’ having already slipped by. An atmosphere prevailed of hasty,
shamefaced preparation. Wreaths are hung, which surely had
been taken down just a few weeks before; at the last minute you wrapped your own belongings as presents, for lack of others; invitations went out to a holiday eggnog that seemed already to have occurred.

Xenia, the morning before Christmas, was a complacent exception. Upon the big worktable under her skylight, half-empty cups, spilled sugar, ashes, all bespoke leisure. She sat licking her lip over the last of three dozen letters to friends, each to be accompanied by a single white rose and explaining that,
hélas!
she could afford to send only this, a rose, but that it carried thoughts and prayers more numerous than its petals. The violet ink streamed
from her pen like tears of happiness. When the last of three dozen envelopes had been addressed in her pointed heartfelt hand, she gathered them up, cried, “I’m going round the block! Do you want anything?”—waited a moment for an answer that didn’t come, then cautiously descended the steep stairs to the street.

In one direction Lexington Avenue still claimed a certain wan gentility; clients from Park and Fifth, she had reasoned, wouldn’t mind crossing it. In the other lay a Third Avenue frankly Bohemian. Here were shops crammed with blackamoors, Tiffany glass, papier-mâche chairs, wicker beds; here were disreputable bars into whose windows bewildered old Irishmen (their patrons for forty years) peered at youths in fishnet pullovers, velvet gondoliers’
slippers from Venice—supposed to have been given as gifts, slightly used, by their original wearers, rather than paid for in the shop behind the Danieli—summer suits of mattress-ticking, winter suits of homespun. In such a neighborhood Xenia had found a studio. It saved her life. She was no longer welcome at Adrienne’s.

On aching feet she rounded the block. The day was lifeless, damp, her beaver coat weighed on her shoulders, but she was so happy! She flirted with the young Greek who managed the corner flower shop until he had to be coaxed into accepting money for his thirty-six roses. Oh, Xenia had rapidly become, in her own words, the favorite of these good
simple people. From whom, by the way, to hide anything was impossible. Only yesterday the
patronne
of her little bakery had asked, “How goes the cold of Monsieur? Better?”

She bought cottage cheese from a Pole and small gummed stars, gold and silver, from a Virginian. Before long she was back upstairs, braids agleam, cheeks aglow, calling,
“C’est moi!
”

A narrow staircase led to sleeping quarters from which somebody could look down or not, depending on whether curtains or sailcloth, the length of the balcony, were parted or drawn. The big room had style, with its skylight and lanterns, its ferns, basil, avocado seeds splitting and sprouting; sculpture, too—some finished pieces (a watchful shape in gray marble, a spiraling shape like a root in brass); others in plaster, shrouded or uncomfortably prone on the tile
floor; also a shelf of tentative forms in clay, most of which she knew would never outgrow the meager, expressionless gestures of dolls. On a plaster-encrusted stand the head of Lily Buchanan gleamed dully in brown wax. The little girl was coming after lunch to have one last look taken at her, before Xenia sent her head to the foundry. Mr. Tanning’s head, already cast in bronze, lay on the sofa, gazing upward.

Two objects in particular drew smiles from her. The first was an old-fashioned dressmaker’s form, an undulating torso covered in black muslin. Xenia had lugged it up from the street, brushed it off and set it on a low pedestal in the center of the room, which it could now be said to dominate. In the tubular wire cage beneath the upholstered thighs she had hung Christmas ornaments. These revolved on threads of varying length, a gay cosmography, bringing to mind as
well those circles filled with text and connected by lines to points on an anatomical drawing of, say, the glandular system. (Xenia had had a lover from Danzig who thought of nothing but glands. “Marry a woman,” he would harangue, “who is not a virgin, preferably a woman who has had a child—so that her whole endocrine system you have seen in action once!”) The dressmaker’s form, with its imaginary glands, was Xenia’s Christmas tree.
She had to step over a number of packages, gifts to her, to get to it, chuckling
to herself as she pasted her little stars in extravagant clusters across the black breasts and belly. Already from the neck’s neatly sewn stump a jet of plumes and baubles rose, as if in memory of some guillotined courtesan. All this Xenia deftly associated—thanks to eight years in analysis—with what she’d begun to speak of as her
old
life.

The second object she smiled at was an upright piano.

Her affair with Tommy Utter had started hard upon her exile from the Cottage.
“Figures-toi
,” Xenia told anyone who would listen at that time, “I thought I was in their house as a guest, as an internationally known artist, and here I am kicked out, sent from the door like
a fournisseur de tapis!
I have no studio, no place to go, no money and no prospect of getting it because
le fils
Tanning, who commissioned the head of his
father, is in the hospital at death’s door. I am ruined!” She had to humiliate herself by a trip—a subway trip, she was so poor—down to the offices of Tanning, Burr and Buchanan. “I was received,” she said afterwards, “like dirt, like shit, by
le gendre
Buchanan. I put the whole case before him, that Francis (whose affairs he handles) owed me this money. He said, ‘Has the head been delivered?’ ‘How can the
head be delivered,’ I said very politely, ‘when I have no studio in which to put on the finishing touches, thanks to having been invited to leave the Cottage?’ ‘Well, if the head hasn’t been delivered—’ he kept repeating, exactly like Salome—
der Kopf, der Kopf, der Kopf, des Jochanaans!
” Here Xenia, transported, would mimic the snarl and hiss of Strauss’s heroine, eyes ablaze with indignation over the snub
from Larry.

Adrienne and Tommy, and of course Max, had taken her in. They were friends whose like you didn’t often see. Tommy had just received a thousand dollars from the foundation that commissioned his opera, the
première
of which was scheduled now for late March. Half of this money he put at Xenia’s disposal on her return in a taxi, speechless with fury, from Larry Buchanan’s office. She burst into tears and fell in love with Tommy. From
then on, as her astrologist had predicted, good fortune came her way.

Once her conscience had been relieved by a few terrible scenes with
Adrienne, Xenia realized that she was wildly happy. Forgotten were the Tannings, the Buchanans. A check came from Francis. Within the same week she found her studio and discovered that she was pregnant.

By her
new
life she meant this. She never dreamed of keeping it secret. When she had told everyone else she telephoned Adrienne—who was reaching for the receiver in order to call
her
, having had the news that moment from a mutual friend. In twenty minutes they were in each other’s arms, laughing like schoolgirls. Xenia’s friend hadn’t found a new lover. “But, my God!” she cried, “how agreeable it is to
live alone! Now, when Max is away, I read, I get asked to dinners, I’ve even gone dancing! I’m having the time of my life, and it’s all your doing! And Max—he’ll be so amused, so pleased!” He was. One of Xenia’s first presents was a case of champagne from Max with a note accepting her invitation to a party on Christmas Eve, wishing her and Utter a happy holiday, and thanking her (if he hadn’t already) for having arranged that,
at his age, he should once again have a mistress whose favors he wasn’t asked to share with a younger man. Exquisite Max! His thumb and forefinger were orange with nicotine. One day at lunch a lower tooth, small and brown as a grain of rice, slid out of his mouth onto the plate. “Regard,” he sighed, holding it up; “is it not sinister to outlive one’s body?” It was decided he and Adrienne would be the child’s godparents.

The only people Xenia hadn’t told were the Tannings and the Buchanans. They had mysteriously dropped her, vanished from her life. Why, it hadn’t been a week ago that she received a card from Francis, a bare greeting but with a city address to which she promptly sent off an invitation to her party, and
would
send a rose. The same day came a call from Enid. “I’d been wondering,” she said in her tiniest, gayest voice, “if
we were going to have Lily’s head for Christmas. That was Daddy’s idea. I think he’ll be disappointed if his present’s not under our tree.” Xenia was stunned. “Enid, I’ve called you time and time again,” she began passionately, truthfully also, “left message after message to say I needed another sitting with Lily, and that
you
should come and see the head before it was cast—” “Oh well,
I’ve had my hands full,” said Enid,
“with our new little friend born December first.” “Ah! what joy for you!” Xenia cried, relaxing all her defenses at the thought of motherhood. “Tell me, is it a boy or a girl?” It was a boy at last, named Tanning Burr after the firm. “So I guess,” Enid went on in the silence that greeted the latter detail, “it’s nobody’s fault about the
sittings.” Xenia let it pass. An hour was found that conflicted with neither Lily’s piano lesson, nor her dancing-school, nor her ice-skating. “Actually,” Enid admitted, “I don’t see how she could have fitted it in before the holidays. She had her part to learn for her school’s Christmas play. They did
Macbeth
this year, it was really quite convincing.” An eerie giggle escaped her. Enid promised to call for Lily after
the sitting, so that she could write to Jamaica about the finished head.
“A rivederci!”
she signed off in the sweet singsong she used for no matter what language.

Lily arrived on time, left at the door by her nursemaid.

“Come in, both of you!” cried Xenia.

“Thank you, Miss,” said the apple-cheeked Alice, “but there’s a special service at St. Patrick’s I’m hoping not to be late for.”

“Ah, then say a prayer for me,” Xenia smiled, waved her down the stairs. “Come in, Lily.”

The child put out a hand. “It’s nice to see you, Xenia.” Graciously she let herself be helped off with her “things,” a pale gray coat, fur-trimmed, with matching gloves and earmuffs of fur. She wore gray wool stockings with little red and white pom-poms at the top. “Lily, how you’ve grown!” Xenia couldn’t help exclaiming, finding her on the threshold less of puberty than of a precocious womanhood.
“Would I have known you? You’re a big girl!”

“Isn’t it ridiculous?” replied Lily, pleased. “Actually, I won’t be eleven till next summer.” This came out with a deprecating wrinkle of her nose, borrowed from Enid. It showed that, while discussion of your age wasn’t especially well bred, she didn’t mind confiding in Xenia. The dressmaker’s form caught her eye; she had a good laugh over it. “I think your studio’s very attractive,” she
declared. “May I look upstairs?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Xenia kept firm and cheerful. “Because I keep my secrets there,” she said. “I like this studio, too. It’s a kind of room one often finds in Europe.”

“I know. We’re going to Europe this Easter. To Rome.”

“Rome!” sighed Xenia, slipping into her old blue smock. She added absently, “Why? You’re not Catholics, are you?”

“Catholics!” her visitor gasped. “I should say not!”

“All right, sit here.” She patted the high-chair beneath the skylight. “We have an hour of good light, so you keep still as a mouse.” Cautiously she wheeled the stand into position. Lily’s waxen head teetered.

The real Lily made a face. “That isn’t
me?
”

So she was turning into that sort of little girl. Xenia shrugged, feeling no less good-humored because of it. “You haven’t changed so much, really,” she laughed, knowing presently as she began to squint at the two heads, the one alive, the other triumphantly
not
, that Lily had been right; she wasn’t the same person. A look was missing—the Tanning look. Enid had it, so did Francis, Benjamin too, at times: a look of being roused
against one’s will. Xenia had seen it on her lover’s face also, a slackening of the lips, not a smile, as he nuzzled closer to her fragrant pillow. Lily, however, was wide awake.

“What did you mean,” she wanted to know, “about being a Catholic?”

Xenia explained that Rome held a unique interest for Catholics. Lily would surely see the crowds in front of St. Peter’s, the saint’s toes worn away, the Pope on his balcony.

The child looked skeptical. “Alice never told me that.”

“Didn’t your mother?”

“Mummy? What would she know about it?”

“She used to be a Catholic when she was your age.”

“That’s not true!” cried Lily, on guard against novelty. “How do you know?”

“Your grandfather told me,” Xenia said pleasantly.

For the next several minutes Lily sat as still as could be wished. “Daddy says,” she finally brought out, “that Rome’s the best place to have clothes made.”

Putting down her little curved stick with which she had been halfheartedly skimming the waxen mouth, Xenia said to herself, “No.” She saw no point in going on. Lily had turned into her mother’s image. The child’s head was finished.

They sat over tea—Xenia putting rum in hers—while Lily told about her baby brother. She made him sound like a yardstick to measure how far she herself had come. “He has eyelashes and teensy little fingernails—his whole hand isn’t as big as my thumb! Of course he can’t smile yet, he’s too little, but he knows me. Mummy says he’s going to look like me. Yesterday I held him while he had his bottle!”

Xenia’s eyebrows went up. “But a little baby should be fed by its mother,” she said in real concern, “not out of a bottle.”

“Oh no,” Lily corrected her. “Mother’s milk doesn’t supply
half
the nourishment a formula does.”