House Party (7 page)

"Elly, couldn't we just slip away for . . .
"

"Dinnah is served, Miz Ames."

"Thank you, Jonas," Mrs. Ames said, rising grandly. "Come, everyone."

The weekend had begun.

"Of course we didn't have none of these new-fangled ways when, I was bringing up the Ames children, Frawleen," Nanny said. "I simply reared them as is fitting to the sons and daughters of a lady and gentleman of means. Another cup of coffee, Frawleen?" Nanny tapped the bell on the servants' dining table with limp-wristed languor. She feared and hated Fraulein. To Nanny all Germans wore Huns who wore spiked helmets, who said "Heil Hitler" to the Kaiser and cut off babies’ hands. She feared and hated Fraulein just as she had feared and hated the series of mademoiselles—loose-moraled fly-up-the-creeks—who had raised Miss Felicia. But here at the old Pruitt Place, where Nanny had been uncontested empress since Bryan Ames's birth, she felt that she could expand a bit and play the gracious hostess to the barbarian horde.

"Thank you, no,” Fraulein said glumly. She hated Nanny, she hated this house and she hated the country. How she wished she
were back in town, just a step from the
Hofbrau,
the
Sänger-bund
and the Gloria Palast dance hall on East Eighty-sixth Street

“I, for one, shouldn't mind a second cup, Miss Magruder," Stur
gis said. He had been pretending to read a fly-blown copy of Mr. Pruitt's
Tatter,
just biding his time until he could get a word in
edgewise and show these two harridans a thing or two about life
as it was really lived among the upper crust. "Say, now, what do you know! Here's a picture of Castle Upshot where me and Mr.
Pruitt has been entertained many's the time. Just look, would you,
Miss Magruder, Fraulein Schimmelpfennig." The
Tatler
was
passed reverently around the table. Nanny and Fraulein cautiously reserved comment. "A smashin' house they've got there—not that
I haven't been in
bigger
ones—rooms to sleep a hundred and
more'n fifty in help. And a proper servants’ hall they have. Two of 'em, in fact: one for people of
our
station and then another for the
maids and the men and such. I recall . . ."

"Ach," Fraulein sneered. "That's nothing. You should have seen
Schloss Tilleulenspiegel at Einheldenleben back in the old coun
try!"

Nanny clutched nervously at her hair brooch. These two always
managed to outclass her. Already she had exaggerated the glories of Bleecke House, Little Caring, Herts., where she had begun her career of child care some fifty years ago, but Sturgis and Fraulein
made light of it, just as they made light of the old Pruitt Place. Now
she tapped the bell again. Until just recently Nanny had never
been subjected to the indignities of eating in the servants' hall. Her
meals had always been served in her room adjoining the old nurs
ery. But Lutie and Jonas had made it clear that she could starve before they carried so much as a soda cracker up the back stairs to her.

After the second ring Lutie poked her head around the kitchen door and fixed Nanny with a burning stare. "Listen, Magruder,”
she said, "if you want anything else you can just come out here and
get
it. I'm making an aspic for lunch and I can't be bothered with waiting on
you.
So just stop ringing that bell and leave me be."

This was the last straw, the final indignity. Nanny had had no
traffic with the Negro race except for seeing them in films on her Wednesdays off. Before the advent of Lutie and Jonas, Nanny had always imagined Negroes as happy children—little more than sav
ages—singing, dancing and grinning widely over slabs of water
melon.

Lutie and Jonas had come as a horrid shock. Servile to a fault in
the front of the house, they behaved scandalously in the kitchen. The soft, slurring drawl was dropped for the clipped English of a
Princeton professor. They referred outrageously to Mrs. Ames as
The Madam, to Mrs. Clendenning as Birdbrain and to Felicia as
Miss Bitch. They read what Nanny felt was subversive literature,
bounded on the left by
The Nation
and on the right by Thorstein
Veblen's
Theory of the Leisure Classes.
They spoke of Nanny as
woefully ignorant and hopelessly reactionary and looked forward to the day when their considerable savings would allow them to
retire from service and open an existentialist bar in Mexico
City.

"And another thing," Lutie continued, "if Jones and I had known
that there d ever be as many as twelve people to feed without any outside help except useless you, we'd never have come out to this
waxworks. The sooner domestic help unionizes, the sooner . . ."

Just then there was the sharp jangle of a bell and a piercing shriek from the lawn.

"Oh Gawd," Sturgis moaned, looking up at the bell panel, "it's Mr. Pruitt awake already and wantin' his tea and his bath and his
shave and his rub."

"Ach, those children," Fraulein cried, heading for the back door.

"Robin! Emily! Stop!"

The pantry door swung open and Mrs. Ames entered, dressed
for the day. "Good morning, Lutie, Jonas. Hello, Nanny."

Her face wreathed in smiles, Lutie chuckled shrilly. "Lan sakes,
Miz Ames. If you ain't the beatin'est lady. Up awready when you
shoulda called me or Jonas to ca'y yo’ breakfus up to yo’ baid!”

"Mawnin, ma'am," Jonas crooned, "lovely day. Ah 'spect you'd
lak me to fix yo' breakfus out on the py-azza."

"Thank you, Jonas," Mrs. Ames said. "That would be lovely . . .
just
want to make one telephone call first. By the way, Nanny, oughtn't you to be dusting upstairs?"

With a sigh of martyrdom, Nanny rose from the table, a word of despair forming on her thin lips.

"Good morning, Miss Vandel," Mrs. Ames said into the telephone, "could I have General Cannon's house, please? I forget the number . . . Hello, Betty? This is Lily Ames. I hope you haven’t forgotten that you're to join us at the club dance tonight?"

"But of course I haven't forgotten, Mrs. Ames," Betty Cannon said into the telephone. "I've been looking forward to the dance ever since you asked me, and so has Daddy, I can't wait to see Paul and Bryan and Kathy and the whole family. And of course you're coming to us this afternoon—all of you. . . . Yes it
is
a lovely day. I was so afraid it would rain or something and the house is really too crowded for . . . Oh,
of course
bring your guests. The more the merrier. Daddy loves a big crowd on his birthday. And please come early . . . Good-bye, Mrs. Ames."

Pretty Betty Cannon hung up the receiver and looked distractedly around the cluttered hall of her father's house. She would have liked an extra hour's sleep. It was hard enough operating a book shop and running a house without having to leap out of bed at reveille every morning. She rarely questioned the cast-iron whims of her father, but a bugle blast at six in the morning did seem a
little
too much. Betty yawned and stretched and felt her eyes closing, then the thunder of hoofbeats on the driveway out in front made her snap to attention. Casting a frantic look at the open front door, she scurried out to the kitchen to prepare the traditional steak and creamed potatoes which constituted her father's daily Second Breakfast.

Brigadier-General Walter Duvernoy (Hell-for-Leather) Cannon, USA (retired) dismounted from his bay gelding with remarkable agility for so heavy a man. He gave the horse a resounding whack on the rump. "Off to the barn with you, Truman!" General Cannon had owned, since 1932, a string of old cavalry horses christened Franklin, Eleanor, Elliott, Tugwell, Hopkins, Baruch, and finally his present mount. It was one of his lighter jokes. "See that Truman gets a good rub-down, Timberline," he shouted jovially to his orderly, a cretinous soldier from the Tennessee fountains who had gone into retirement with the general.

Stomping into the house, spurs a-jingle, the general called out heartily to his daughter. "Snap to it, Little Soldier, time for mess!" He laughed immoderately. It was a witticism which he repeated every morning of his life. Betty smiled nervously and placed the well-done steak, the potatoes, the rye bread and the decanter of bourbon on the dining table.

It was nine o'clock, time for Betty to put on her hat and catch lite bus for the bookshop which she ran in the village, but today, being the occasion of her father's lawn party, she had arranged to pay a substitute so that she could stay at home to make sandwiches, answer the telephone and oversee the cateresses.

"Delicious steak, Mess Sergeant Cannon," her father roared gustily. This was also a daily witticism. "Anything in the mail?"

"Only some bills and your manuscript back from Random House, Daddy."

"Oh, so
they've
sent it back, have they? Lousy Commies! Clean the Reds out of the book business and we'd be able to get some good old American ideas into print instead of all that Bolshie propaganda."

"Yes, Daddy," Betty sighed.

For some time now, General Cannon's diaries—three thousand typewritten pages covering every moment from his admission to West Point until his forced retirement—had been circulating America's larger publishers in alphabetical order: Appleton-Century; Bobbs-Merrill, Crowell, Doubleday, and so on. The consensus of editorial opinion was that no career so long could possibly be so uneventful.

Since the Boxer Rebellion, General Cannon had never heard a gun fired in earnest. He had passed World War I in Manila and World War II in Texas, except for a brief tour of the sewers of Paris in a glass-bottomed boat well after the allied victory—a project described in such vivid detail as to make Betty quite ill while typing the manuscript. But if the General's career had been
dull, his statements concerning people, policy and politics were extraordinarily colorful, although they showed a sorry disregard for accuracy, objectivity and the laws of libel.

"Shall I send it on to Scribner's, Daddy?" Betty asked, consulting the list of publishers her father had drawn up.

"No, child. That Ames girl—that Eleanor—is comin' here today. She works for a publisher, don't she? I'll give it to her. Always better to know somebody on the inside. Then the Commies can't sabotage you so easy. Now, who all's comin' to my party?"

Like everything of General Cannon's, his birthday was very special, superseding both Christmas and Easter. July was, indeed, a highly favored month, having two holidays in a row: General Cannon Day and Independence Day. It was the occasion each year for General Cannon to throw open his home to all the people whom he owed hospitality and to all whom he would
like
to owe hospitality. It made for quite a turnout. Looking out onto the sunny lawn, the general said for the fourth time this morning: "A beautiful day, Regular Hell-for-Leather Cannon weather. Isn't that so, Little Soldier?"

"Yes, Daddy."

Betty wandered idly out of the dining room trying not to see the other rooms on the first floor. This house had been her mother's. It was once a fine Georgian building, perfect in every detail. Through the dreary years of living at far-flung army posts, summer camps and boarding schools, Betty had cherished a handful of faded photographs of her mother's house. All of her life she had dreamed of living here, of rearranging the delicate old furniture, of tending the garden, of filling the gracious rooms with flowers. But she had not reckoned with her father.

The fine Georgian proportions, the graceful furniture, were still there, but so were the impedimenta, the mementoes, the souvenirs and the junk accumulated during the general's fifty years in khaki and shipped at government expense to Pruitt's Landing. The house was glutted with teak, bamboo and rattan from a long stay in the Philippines; with silks and dragons and screens looted during the Boxer Rebellion; with polished brass and dull bronze from the Middle East; balsam cushions and birchbark teepees from the middle west.

Walls were adorned with daggers and sabers and rifles and spears. Portraits of forebears on the distaff side were flanked with the moth-eaten heads of wild game which the general had slaughtered. One could hardly cross the hall without tripping over a bull whip, a collection of canes, an incense burner or an elephant's hoof umbrella stand treasured by the general. He said that this house bore the stamp of his personality and he was perfectly correct.

There had once been a Mrs. Cannon—a pale, fragile spinster endowed with a large intellect, a medium-sized family tree, a small inheritance, a tiny resolve and an infinitesimal number of red corpuscles. The general, at that time a middle-aged major with a promising future on the Fort Leavenworth polo team, saw in his bride a woman of some means and great breeding—the ideal hostess and housekeeper for a rising officer. So after a respectable passage of time, Mrs. Cannon found herself large with what the general ordered to be a fine son. She died giving birth to Betty, preferring death in childbed to the general's official reprimand. Since then, Betty had taken her mother's place as hostess and housekeeper, living by a set of army rules and regulations laid down by her father.

The general's retirement had appeared to be Betty's just reward for twenty-two years of playing the double role of hostess and housekeeper. She had looked forward to Daddy's retirement as the time when she could choose her own friends, live in her own house, do as she wished with her life, go to art school, relax, let someone else run the house. It was all going to be wonderful.

But none of this had quite come off. A succession of cooks and household drudges, hired by Betty, had been found guilty of insubordination or goldbricking by the general. Unable to subject them to court martial, he had done the next best thing by presenting them with dishonorable discharges. Not a few had gone A.W.O.L. to the nearest employment agency or simply deserted. Eventually the general issued an order that there would be no more civilian employees until a good depression came around to show them their place and make human beings out of them. So Betty ended up not only as hostess and housekeeper, but cook, serving maid, charwoman and laundress. She never relaxed. She didn't go to art school. The house was hers in name only and she had no time for friends.