Collected Novels and Plays (4 page)

As they downed their first liter of Frascati, a half-dozen people stopped at the table to kiss Xenia’s hand, slap her bare brown shoulder, exchange a joke in French or Italian. They were all artists, all more or less political: a communist sculptor and his wife, who wove; a film-director who could not return to France—the figures blurred after a bit. Francis knew that Xenia, because she liked him, took for granted that he, too, was
“creative.” He had soon given up trying to contradict her. “You Americans,” she would laugh, “with your modesty and your guilt!” So he ended by letting her see him as a liberal, a writer (though he scarcely now wrote letters) struggling, young, living the
vie de Bohéme
in a high bare frugal room. He
had
such a room, but not from necessity. He had wanted the cold tile floors and the smelly stove. The bareness appealed
to him, like that of the straight razor he affected; it made
him
seem more real. Accordingly he found Xenia’s view of him far more soothing than that held by Jane, to whom he had confided the worst.

Still, he couldn’t shake the sense of his own imposture. There had been evenings out under the stars with Xenia and her friends, drinking the cheap white wine for which each had so scrupulously put down his
pittance, when Francis could only sit—while they joked and waved their arms and criticized America—smiling but silent, lest a false move betray him. The truth, Francis had come to suspect, was that they didn’t care one
way or the other; he wouldn’t be sitting there if he hadn’t wanted to, and as long as he claimed no attention they would pay him none. All but Xenia. “You’re so mysterious,” she would chuckle, licking her lips, “I like that!”—never guessing his secret, although she kept a studio in New York and had dealt, by her own confession, with the rich.

Their food was slow in coming.
“Subito, signora,”
the waiter chanted, and brought more wine. Jane had promised to take some cousins of Roger’s, virtual strangers passing through for two nights and a day, on a quick tour of the splendors. It was now half past one, and she had begun to fidget. Francis watched her a full tolerant minute before she looked up, blushed, and blurted out, as if anything that came to mind would do, “Then you
aren’t
going back to America next month?”

He ran a hand through his cropped hair. “Why? Did I say so?”

“I thought you had, after reading your sister’s letter.”

“What!” cried Xenia. “Aren’t we all planning to go back together? I booked my passage last month. For two weeks from today, out of Naples.”

“So did I, but Francis didn’t.”

“I’m afraid to go back,” he laughed apologetically.

“Well, I wish you had told me,” said Xenia, glaring briefly at Jane. “Now it’s too late to make other plans. We’re in July already. It seemed like such a good idea, our cozy little group, absorbing the shock together.”

Francis winced. But he hated not to oblige. “I’ll see about it this afternoon. You’re both in,” he faltered,
“second
class?”

“Good heavens, no!” said Xenia, thinking to put his mind at rest. “Do you think we’re millionaires? Besides, on the Italian line, there’s no difference between second and third.”

He saw Jane smile. He had had to confess to her his taste for first-class carriages. Francis had few extravagances, had indeed picked, on their
trips, hotels not even amusingly squalid—but let them board a train!
“Do
you mind?” he would ask, sinking with an embarrassed grin into red plush, as he paid the difference on both tickets, “so as not to have to talk to people …!”

“Write it down, Francis,” she said firmly, offering him her pen. Jane repeated for him the name of the ship, the date of sailing, and when at length he looked up with the distant fixity of a child who has incriminated himself at a schoolroom blackboard, she was on her feet. He guessed that she dared not linger, after taking such conscious advantage of him.

Meanwhile, the waiter appeared with their food, a look of horror crossing his face. The Signorina leaving? Impossible! His dismay, Francis knew, was no more genuine than the long reprimand from Xenia that met it. Both were behaving as the Americans wanted them to. Only at the end of their duet did they risk beaming at one another, or rather at Jane, their victim, who had torn open a roll and was gingerly stuffing it with
saltimbocca.
Before she could finish,
the Durdees, he sallow and blue-eyed, she pink and white with blue-tinted glasses, had made their way over to the little group.

“I’m enchanted to see you,” said Xenia suavely, extending her hand at an angle prescribed by old books of etiquette, so as to give Mr. Durdee the choice of kissing or of shaking it. Without hesitation he shook it. “I told you to come here, remember? Did they give you something good? May I present my friends? Miss Westlake and Mr. Tanning—Mr. Durdee.”

“And this is Mrs. Durdee. Bertha, Miss Grosz is the sculptress.”

“I’ve been hoping to meet you in my studio, Mrs. Durdee. Won’t you sit down with us?”

“I really must go,” Jane put in, following the newcomer’s eye to her sandwich. She picked it up, smiled bravely, and was gone.

“They do seem to cook everything in oil,” said Mrs. Durdee, gazing vaguely after her.

Her husband turned to Francis. “You’re Benjamin Tanning’s son, I suppose. I’ve done business with your Dad. Known him forty years.”

Francis colored. “No,” he brought out in his most strangled voice, “as a matter of fact, there’s no relation.” If his father’s business associate had read Proust, Francis tried to reason, he would conceivably interpret this show of embarrassment as that of a young man who would suffer his life long from
not
being Benjamin Tanning’s son. But as it was, Mr. Durdee had glimpsed the truth.

“Excuse me,” he said coldly. “I’d heard somewhere that the Tanning boy was in Italy.”

Francis felt his hand trembling. He steadied it on the table. “Isn’t it curious?” he stammered. “I met him, last week, actually. He was on his way, I believe, to Munich. We met him together, Xenia,” he appealed, feeling her gaze upon him, “or was it with Jane?”

“Oh, the fat young man with ulcers!” cried Xenia, referring to one indeed bound for Munich, but whose name she had forgotten. And, lulled by the authority in her tone, Mr. Durdee let the subject drop.

Francis shut his eyes.

Any given Italian, however unreal, took on a comforting plausibility next to the Durdees. They came by the thousand in search of their kind. With camera and medicines they overran a continent so barbarous that the fellow-countryman rumored to live there was tracked down, taken to dinner, spared no detail of hardship or humiliation. For discomfort itself was what they traveled towards, their goal, their vice. Mrs. Durdee’s voice assumed a lyric warmth as she spoke
of thieving porters, lost luggage, food poisoning, vermin on buses. “They made us swallow our lunch whole, in order to be ready by one. At
two-thirty
the tour began. Well, after ten minutes in those gardens my feet were soaking wet. I said to Warren, ‘You do what you like, I’m going back to the bus.’ By evening there were little red marks all over—well, just look!”

In Francis’s mind, wealth accounted for the phoniness of Mrs. Durdee. He could see her months hence, telling the same story to friends,
their mouths voluptuously ajar, who wouldn’t laugh it off as Xenia did, as he himself did to show there was no sympathy from
his
quarter. He had his own catalogue of European discomforts, which straightway, by including Bertha Durdee, rendered hers comical, colorless. Here his incognito really
worked. It allowed Francis to make light of those whom, judging by his recent confusion, he took with full seriousness.

Among friends, however, a time came to play the card of truth. Alone, facing Xenia, he drew a deep breath and confessed. Benjamin Tanning
was
his father. He hoped she would forgive the lie her innocence had confirmed; then wondered, with a toss of his head, if she could honestly blame him for it, considering the Durdees.

His manner gave her pause. “But why,” she finally asked, “does it upset you so? Why all this bravado?”

“It doesn’t upset me. It bores me.”

Xenia treated him to a lofty gleam. “Ah, but everyone knows that boredom is guilt. Now I,” she went on sententiously, “am never bored.”

He was openmouthed. “What do you mean, boredom is guilt? My whole family bores me!”

“Voilà!”
cried Xenia. Then she took pains to shrug: it was all a matter of degree. “I’ve done the same thing myself a hundred times. People like the Durdees ask nothing better than to wear you out, especially if you have work to do. With me, it’s different. They’re customers. If he’d been a publisher,” she made her meaning clear, “then
you’d
have had to be nice to
them.”

Francis grew more agitated. She hadn’t understood. “You see, it’s not so much that—” But he broke off and poured a glass of wine.

“You don’t like your father, perhaps?” suggested Xenia with an experienced laugh. “Dear Francis, I begin to understand you!”

“Do you know my father?”

“Not at all. You never speak of your parents. I assumed they were dead. What I meant, though, was that it’s what the whole world goes through. Some day I will tell you the anguish my mother and father
caused me as a child. Enough to keep me in analysis for eight years!” A forkful of spaghetti hovered before her mouth. “Such traumas!”

“The point is that my father,” Francis murmured, “is very rich.”

On this their eyes met. Now she will scorn me, he thought, almost relieved. But Xenia munched placidly, quite as though waiting for him to continue. When he did not, she moistened her napkin, wiped her lips, and looked at him with a new intensity. “I see. And he gives you nothing.”

“On the contrary,” groaned the young man, “he gives me everything! I don’t even ask for it! It’s been mine since childhood, set up in a trust fund—in twenty trust funds, for all I know! I try to live it down, but I can’t! The Durdees show up and give it all away!”

Xenia put down her fork and shouted with laughter. Francis gaped and blinked. In a moment they were both laughing, uncontrollably, tears in their eyes.

“But tell me then—”

And so he did. He told her about the divorces, about the Cheeks, about his own picture in the paper at the age of twelve—pawn in parents’ fight. He told her at length about the Buchanans, whom he confessed he didn’t envy. Oh, Larry couldn’t complain. He was very high up in the firm. But since Mr. Tanning’s retirement, after his second heart attack seven years ago, his son-in-law
had
rather been taken advantage of.

It startled Francis, who was touching on most of these topics for the first time in months, to hear how easily he adopted Larry’s view of the old man. Had he himself no view? With alarm he felt the perfect blankness of his mind, like a limb gone numb. Not wanting this to show in front of Xenia, he improvised amusingly and at length on songs the Buchanans had sung to him.

At home, at Larry’s office, every other day brought cables or telephone calls from Mr. Tanning’s latest retreat; this year, Jamaica—in darkest Irene.
Why
(these communiqués said) had the monthly report not reached him?
Why
hadn’t he been informed of a partner’s wife’s mother’s illness?
Where
were the figures he had requested on Bishop
Petroleum? Along with these came
letters to Enid, once even a
copy
of a letter written to Francis, full of bewilderment and self-pity. Files would be ransacked, subordinates humiliated; Enid would lie flattened by a headache, she took it so to heart—while nine times out of ten the figures, the monthly report, the memo about Mrs. X, would be lying unopened on Mr. Tanning’s desk, under a great stack of correspondence. It was now two years since he had fired his traveling secretary in a fit of
economy! Economy! Poor Mrs. McBride, the nurse who had stuck it out, was forever on the verge of doing so no longer, because of the demands he made upon her.

So that Larry, as the only member of the family who was also a partner in the firm, bore the brunt of it. He worked like a horse. On the side he handled the affairs of both Enid and Francis, administered their trust funds, invested their profits. What thanks he had from their father seemed at times so tinged with mockery—with the implication that, if Larry was treated as a clod and a convenience, he had only to look at himself to see the reason why: hard-working,
humorless, happy with wife and children, all that the imaginative, polygamous Mr. Tanning had never been—“that at odd times,” Francis wound up, “I can feel Larry wishing he were in my shoes. For him, you know, I’m the classic image—the young man sowing his wild oats on the continent.”

“Your father sounds very disagreeable,” observed Xenia.

“But he’s not!” cried Francis in surprise. Had he given her that impression? He cast about for images to dispel it.

Money and business, he pursued, these weren’t the main issues. No, what upset the Buchanans was rather Mr. Tanning’s love life. He gave out an air of sexual wakefulness almost indecent, considering his age and general state of health. Fern at least had discouraged
that
side of it—perhaps too emphatically, for her coldness had made headlines in Hearst papers—but now, in Mr. Tanning’s fourth and, God willing, final bachelorhood,
what mightn’t go on at the Cottage! A nice example for Lily and the twins! There would be women all summer, dropping in, running out,
women in towels, women in tears. Fern had kept them at a distance—all, apparently, but Cousin Irene. Francis silently reviewed three or four, each well preserved if not downright pretty, who would be sure to figure.

Then without warning his mind cleared. “What I’ve forgotten to stress,” he laughed, speaking now for himself, “what makes Larry and Enid’s point of view so unnecessary,” and he took a long swallow of wine to celebrate the fact—“is how
sick
the old man has been!” For Xenia’s benefit he sketched in his father’s illness, how Mr. Tanning had lain with his limping heart, unable to read or
see people, turning his eyes slowly, timorously upon his own life. “Instead of dying,” said Francis, “he was given time. He made wonderful use of it. He would lie awake nights remembering all the hurts, real or imaginary, he had inflicted on people, on his mother, on
my
mother. He would find out the whereabouts of women he’d loved as a young man, and send them gifts, or money, something to show how much he remembered and cared.”