Auntie Mame Page 25

  “But who’d be fool enough to take them?” Auntie Mame asked. “They’re notorious already.”

  “Even so, they’ve got to go,” Doc said firmly.

  “Maybe we could lie about Edmund’s age and get him into the Army,” Auntie Mame suggested.

  “And Gladys as a camp follower,” Doc said.

  “Look, Auntie Mame,” I said, “we can get rid of them. I’ll go into town to see the people at the agency tomorrow. But we don’t have to offer all six kids as a package deal. The team ought to be broken up. Edmund could go to some farm and work off his cussedness in the fields …”

  “Just be sure there aren’t any sheep around,” Doc said.

  “… and Gladys could be sent to some sort of convent …”

  “Preferably cloistered,” Doc said.

  “As for Albert and Margaret Rose,” I went on, “they’d have to go together, being brother and sister. But then, they’re the best-behaved.”

  “Albert’s a whining, cowardly little toad,” Auntie Mame said.

  “But still, he and Margaret Rose act better than the rest.”

  “And I’d be happy to throw in a rubber sheet for the little princess,” Doc said.

  “As for Enid and Ginger, we can find two suckers for them.”

  “Yes,” Auntie Mame said dubiously, “I suppose we could do it.”

  “Could do it? You’ve got to,” Doc said. “Now, get some rest. Pat and I will take care of the kids.”

  Downstairs quite a little crowd had gathered on the lawn, and stood there gaping at the yawning hole in Miss Peabody’s Tavern. “Don’t get upset, folks,” Doc shouted through one of the shattered windows. “You know how tricky these newfangled pressure cookers are.” Then he pulled down the shade and we were alone.

  That night the kids got a glass of milk and a graham cracker and a good bawling out. They didn’t seem much affected by what they’d done. Doc had to drag Margaret Rose back to bed three times. “And you stay there,” he growled. “We don’t want a sick girl on our hands. Not right now we don’t.”

  “Oi told her, sah,” Albert minced. “Oi sez to her, ‘Mogrut Raose, Doctah Pottah will be eva sew angry wiv you if …’ ”

  “Shut up, Nancy,” Doc snapped. He went out to his car and drove home.

  The next morning I got up bright and early and put on my British battle dress and the trench coat and ribbons so that I could be properly pukka with the English child-placement people. Auntie Mame had recovered considerably and was cursing at the vituperative old stove in the kitchen when I went downstairs.

  “Good morning, my little love,” she sang. “Is this Der Tag?”

  “This is the day,” I said. “Independence Day, Bastille Day, Guy Fawkes Day, May Day!”

  “Darling,” she sighed, “I can hardly wait.”

  Gladys sauntered into the dining room, her cardigan and plaid skirt in hideous contrast against the panchromatic make-up, the beaded lashes, the streaky dyed yellow hair (this was her blond, or Lana Turner phase; she had just finished the brunette, or Hedy Lamarr one). “Coo!” she said, eyeing me. “Full field regylia. Nevah seen you in yunyfawm before. Don’t you look the image of Dyvid Niven!”

  We ignored her rather elaborately. “Can I fix you a couple of eggs, darling?” Auntie Mame said to me.

  “No thanks, just toast and coffee. I’ll be tramping around from one agency to the other and I want to get there early.”

  “Ai-jency?” Gladys asked, raising her hairline eyebrows. “Oi do ’ope yaw not tryin’ ta ’ire maw sah-vints. Yew orta knaow they’ll nevah last. Not ’ere they won’t.”

  “Eat your breakfast, Gladys,” Auntie Mame said haughtily. “Patrick and I don’t feel much like talking to any of you children this morning. I think you know why.”

  Gladys shrugged impudently and swished out. I gulped down the last of my coffee, put on my peaked cap, and made for the door. “I’ll be home with your emancipation papers by five. Cross my heart I will.”

  “Darling!” Auntie Mame said happily. Then she began fixing a tray for Margaret Rose.

  I spent a terrible day in New York going from agency to agency, bureau to bureau, department to department. Everyone in town seemed to know—at least by reputation—about Auntie Mame’s brood. “Bad actors,” one woman said darkly. “Filthy brats,” a spinster on Fifty-seventh Street said. “Beastly little bounders,” a man told me—quite unnecessarily. It was about four o’clock before I finally got the right person, a hard-bitten old girl with a crew cut and a regimental necktie.

  “Oh, them,” she said out of the corner of her mouth. “Yeah, we all had bets on how long your aunt would last. I had a little inside information about her from a gal I know and cleaned up. So now she’s beginning to crack, eh? Small wonder.”

  “My aunt has great stick-to-itiveness,” I said loyally.

  “She sure has, brother, she sure has. Well, cheer up. I got a brand new sucker list here—people who’ve never been tapped before. An’ all of ’em aching to have the patter of little feet in their houses. Can you imagine? Here, sit tight while I make a couple of calls. I’ve made so much dough at five-to-one on your aunt I almost feel I owe you a commission.”

  I sat tensely while she made a series of telephone calls. In half an hour the last of the six children was placed. “Well,” she said, “that’s that. When can you have ’em packed up and ready to go?”

  “If you’ll let me use that telephone,” I said, “I can have them waiting in the driveway within an hour.”

  “Oh, don’t bother about that. Plenty of time.”

  “No there isn’t,” I said.

  “Well, suppose I send a couple of those motor corps babes out there tomorrow?”

  “That’ll be wonderful!” I said. There were tears in my eyes.

  * * *

  I exceeded the speed limit every inch of the way out to Long Island. Free! Free forever from Edmund and Gladys and Enid and Albert and Ginger and Margaret Rose. No more household duties, no more screaming and fighting and breakage and mayhem.

  The car careened into the driveway at the Tavern in a fine spray of gravel. I jumped out as though my leg had never been touched by so much as a spitball and ran toward the door. There was a sound of hammering. “Ah,” I said to myself, “workmen already repairing the damage.”

  A local rustic, still swinging a hammer, strolled down the driveway.

  “Good evening!” I called cordially.

  “Evenin’ sojer,” he said.

  “Getting everything fixed up?” I asked in my best conversational tone.

  “Sealed in tight as a drum,” he said.

  “Already? That’s just great.”

  “Well, buddy, it may be great for you, but it ain’t so hot for that poor little lady locked inta the house with them devils for the next six weeks.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Aintcha seen the sign I jist nailed on the front door?”

  “Sign? Front door?”

  “Better take a look, sojer, an’ I wouldn’t go in there unless yer fixin’ to stay a long, long time.”

  I raced to the front door. Tacked to it was a red and white sign:

  QUARANTINED

  KEEP OUT

  SCARLET FEVER

  All persons entering these premises …

  That was all I read. I collapsed into the iris bed on the lawn.

  Chapter Ten

  Golden Summer

  The Unforgettable Character’s last days are just as beautiful as any of her other days. There she is in her prim little house surrounded by adoring friends and still spreading sweetness, light, and salty New England wisdom to anyone willing to listen. The author calls it the Golden Summer of her life, a fitting term. It brings to mind Auntie Mame’s golden summer because that’s exactly the way she described. it. And two weeks of a gold
en summer with Auntie Mame in her house and surrounded by her friends were such a rich experience that the course of my whole life was changed.

  Right after V-J Day, Auntie Mame went to Elizabeth Arden’s and got the works. She came back looking about ten years younger, except for a genuine white streak among her curls. Well, the white was genuine, but I couldn’t swear as to the dark hair surrounding it. She described herself as Frankly Forty, although she was factually fifty, and said a good deal about the fruitful harvest season of womanhood.

  “I’m a mature woman, my little love,” she said, admiring the white streak for the thousandth time. “These are my richest years and I’m going to revel in them. I plan to live more sedately, more compactly—live on a higher spiritual and intellectual plane—so that I can be a fit grandmother to the sweet little curly-headed babies you and your wife are going to bring to me.”

  I dropped my beer. “The sweet little what that I and my what are going to bring you?”

  “Babies, darling. You’ve reached the age when you should be thinking of marriage. You don’t like the boys, do you?”

  “Only to shoot craps with,” I said. “But I don’t like the girls either—at least no particular one. Not enough to marry.”

  “Don’t worry, darling, I’ll take care of all that.”

  “That’s damned decent of you.”

  “I have only to get my new way of life organized and then I’ll start on you.”

  Auntie Mame got organized very quickly. She bought a lot of New Look clothes—“so much more grace and dignity than those skimpy little apache skirts we had during the war”—and signed up for an overwhelming series of courses at the New School for Social Research—“so that I can be of some intellectual stimulation to your little ones.” I winced.

  That fall I got a job in a small advertising agency writing copy for the Itsa-Daisy Electric Stove at eighty bucks a week. Auntie Mame felt that it was inadequate to support a wife and children, but at least a start. I also moved into an apartment of my own—one room and sink on University Place—and Auntie Mame felt that it was woefully inadequate for a wife and children, but also a start. Yet even though I was no longer under her roof, I couldn’t have seen more of her if we were sharing the same bed. I was invited to dine with her on the average of five nights a week, and each time the meal featured a lot of faintly aphrodisiac dishes, with “Amour” written on them with a pastry tube, and a beautiful single girl of Auntie Mame’s choosing. Auntie Mame would invariably talk of marriage and babies, fill me full of champagne and brandy, and then sidle out to a mysterious engagement, leaving me on the sofa with her latest candidate for the bridal couch. She was as blatant as a call-house madam, but somehow none of the girls was quite right.

  That fall there was a dazzling succession of lovely houris. There was Vivian who, according to Auntie Mame, was a “perfect peach of a girl and born for motherhood—look at that pelvis!” But all Vivian ever talked about was tennis and riding and spear-fishing, and on our last date she got so enthused over jujitsu that she threw my back out and I spent the next two weeks in a corset, hobbling off to the osteopath.

  Elaine came next. She was a dark, Middle Eastern sort who could think of nothing but politics, and the evening I pressed her hand and asked if she wouldn’t like to spend the night, she looked soulfully into my eyes and said, “Why don’t you run for the legislature on the Liberal ticket as a token protest against Tammany Hall?” That ended that.

  Then there was Carolyn who didn’t smoke or drink and tried to convert me to Christian Science. Helena was attractive and intelligent, but so crisp and efficient that it was like necking with a machine. Mary and I got kind of moony over the Double Crostics in the Saturday Review, but our affair ended when I kissed her in a taxicab and she said, “Who’s a Hindu philosopher, circa 800, in eight letters?” Dotty was much too energetic. Fran too Southern. Isabelle too mystical. In other words, nothing came of anything.

  Auntie Mame was outraged. “Really, you ought to get hormone shots or analyzed or something. What’s the matter with you? Here I dig up all these lovely girls and what happens—you sniff around them like an altered tomcat and stalk away. It’s disgusting!”

  “For God’s sake, why don’t you leave me alone? I’ll get married in my own good time.”

  Around New Year Auntie Mame got bored with the role of procuress and took off for the sunshine of Mexico, where she stayed and stayed and stayed. And where she also put to practice some of the psychology she’d learned at the New School. She wrote regularly and in each letter she’d enclose a snapshot or two of herself and three of the most exquisite girls I’d ever seen. The girls were ravishing brunettes and of a beauty and elegance that was downright illegal. I got interested at once and kept writing to Auntie Mame to ask who her friends were. But she always neglected to answer the question and just kept sending vague, gossipy letters and more photographs of herself and the three beauties. I was itching with curiosity, but it did me no good. She ignored my questions and went right on writing about herself.

  In April, when I was almost frothing with curiosity, she began casually mentioning names other than her own—“Margot said …”; “Melissa told me …”; “Miranda and I …”—but there was still no clue as to who these beauties were, and she continued to ignore my direct and underscored questions. By then she was sending snapshots of just the three beauties (and her own shadow) labeled “My friends.”

  By June I was so consumed with curiosity that I put through a long, expensive, and almost inaudible long-distance call to Cuernavaca to find out just who Auntie Mame’s constant companions were. It didn’t do much good. The static was fierce and operators kept breaking in in Brooklynese, Southern, and Spanish. I gathered that the three beautiful girls were sisters and their name was Murdock or Medoc and that Auntie Mame had no plans to return to New York. We were finally cut off. Then there was a long, long period of silence in which my letters were returned with the equivalent of “Removed—No forwarding address” scrawled on them in Spanish.

  During a New York heat wave I got a letter from Auntie Mame filled with clichés such as “Sleeping under blankets every night.” It was postmarked Maddox Island, Maine, and there was a snapshot of the three beauties in bathing suits. Auntie Mame also added, in a vague postscript, that she’d leased the old Maddox house on Maddox Island from the three lovely Maddox sisters—“some friends I met casually in Mexico last winter and may have mentioned to you”—and that they were all staying there “for the whole golden summer.” There was also a kind of offhand invitation for me to spend my vacation there.

  Well, I was hooked. Psychology, indeed.

  Getting to Maddox Island was no cinch. You took a plane to Bangor; a bus to Eastport; a ferry to a much bigger island; a jitney to the end of that island; and then a launch to Maddox Island. I was dead tired when Maddox Island finally came into view, but seeing Auntie Mame waiting on the pier revived me.

  She gave me a brisk, businesslike kiss, tossed my bags into a coaster wagon—there were no cars on the island—and led me along the dusty road toward the village. She talked a blue streak, but she was maddeningly evasive about the three Maddox sisters.

  Luckily, I’d been able to do a little research—they were so beautiful that every glossy magazine in America had run full-page pictures of them. They came from one of those old New England families where the blood runs thin and blue. They were not only socially impeccable but intellectual, artistic, creative, and, as I said, gorgeous. But do you think Auntie Mame would say one word about them? No. She simply dismissed every question with “Mmm-hmm” or “Oh, yes” or no answer at all.

  The village of Maddox looked kind of like a setting for a Western film. There were a general store, a pharmacy, a church, a town hall that showed movies on week ends, and Mickey the Mick’s Saloon and Hotel. That was where Auntie Mame stopped.

  “Well, here we are!” she said.

  “
Did these babes sell you a gin mill?” I asked blankly.

  “Oh, no, my little love. We’re all staying at the old Maddox house. You’re staying here.”

  “I’m staying here? Isn’t there room for me where you are?”

  “My dear, the Maddox house has more than two dozen bedrooms, but you certainly didn’t think I’d have you staying there. Not with three unmarried girls. After all, they’re my guests—so to speak—for the summer and it’s up to me to chaperone them,” she said prissily.

  “Who the hell do you think you are,” I asked angrily, “Mrs. Grundy?”

  “Oh, Patrick, my little love,” she said, casting her eyes to the Maine heavens, “how life in that hard, commercial advertising agency has toughened you! What has happened to your sensibilities? Here I’ve tried to raise you with some gentility, some feeling for the things important to ladies and gentlemen of breeding and family background, and …”

  “Now come off that crap right now,” I growled. “You raised me with all the rag, tag, and bobtail you …”

  “Oh, darling,” she said with an airy look at her wrist watch, “I must fly! We’re dining with the Saltonstalls tonight. I’m so sorry I couldn’t wangle an invitation for you, but do come around for lunch tomorrow. You can’t miss the old Maddox place. Just turn left when you leave Mickey the Mick’s and walk to the very end of the island. That’s where we are. Say around one-ish?” Before I could vilify her properly, she was gone.

  Mickey the Mick’s was just like a million other saloons, bleak and barren in its cold fluorescent lighting, and decorated with a ghastly jukebox, pictures of the Miss Rheingold of 1947 candidates, and ads from liquor dynasties—signs made of neon that hissed or glass tubes that bubbled. The only thing there that was in the least noteworthy was Mickey’s daughter, Pegeen. Pegeen was a statuesque redhead with a figure that made your temperature rise and a manner that made it fall. Talk about a cool article, that girl was a glacier.