Auntie Mame Page 27

  I was so stunned that Margot had accepted my offer of marriage—just like that—that I could hardly walk straight. That a girl so beautiful, so intelligent, so sought after could have yearned from afar for me, just as I had yearned for her, seemed totally unbelievable. But then the whole holiday had been unbelievable.

  “Are you going to tell them now?” I asked as we strolled hand in hand across the lawn.

  Margot said in her beautiful voice, “I’m sure that Miranda and Melissa have guessed by now, but I’ll make the word official at dinner. They’ll both be so pleased, and I know your aunt will.” I didn’t like the sound of that.

  Well, they were pleased. Miranda kissed me, Melissa kissed me, Auntie Mame kissed me. Then everybody kissed everybody else. Auntie Mame made Ito open half a dozen bottles of champagne and we drank toasts to every conceivable person and cause.

  I was feeling no pain, and by the time I left, my heart ran over with family feeling. “Tomorrow night,” I said, “I’m going to give a party. It’ll be dinner. There’s a kind of terrace—or back porch—down at Mickey the Mick’s, and Pegeen’s a wonderful cook.”

  “How divine!” Auntie Mame said.

  The girls looked a little shocked.

  “Do you really want us to go down and mix with natives, darling?” Margot said.

  “Oh, it’ll be heaven!” Auntie Mame said.

  “And I’ll ask your men friends, too,” I said expansively. “You could bring the Sears boys or the Lodges or somebody like that and make a party of eight.”

  The sisters stared at me blankly.

  “Oh, I think it would be so much more fun,” Auntie Mame said quickly, “if it were just a family affair. Just the five of us.”

  Well, I wasn’t going to argue. “Like to see me to the gate?” I asked Margot, giving her hand a squeeze.

  “Of course, darling.”

  I put my arm around her as we walked along the pathway, but I saw that we were not alone. Miranda and Melissa and Auntie Mame were with us, too.

  * * *

  The next morning I could hardly wait to get up and dash down to the bar to order a sumptuous dinner from Pegeen. She was alone in the taproom, washing up glasses.

  “Congratulate me, Pegeen,” I said. “I’m about to be married.”

  “Do tell!” she said maddeningly. “Which one of the big-game hunters got you? Miranda?”

  “No,” I said, feeling miffed. “Margot.”

  “That’s odd. They usually save her for the older gentlemen.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Let’s see,” she said, ignoring my question. “You’ll be wanting to have a nice dinner here—out in back, of course—tonight. And you were thinking of having filet mignon and broccoli with hollandaise and …”

  My mouth fell open. “How did you know?”

  “That’s what the lucky man always ordered before—except when rationing was on and we had chicken. Now let’s see, there’ll be you and the Maddox girls and your aunt. Five in all. That’s a nice change. It was usually just the fiancé and the three sisters.”

  “I was thinking of having some other men, too—the Searses and the Cabots and …”

  “You’d have to get them disinterred pretty fast. Nobody like that has been on Maddox Island since I was a little girl. Now, it’s always been the custom to start out with cold vichyssoise, then the filet, then …”

  “Well, we’re not going to have anything like that tonight!” I raged. “We’ll have a plain Maine shore dinner—steamers and lobster and …”

  “Suit yourself,” Pegeen said. “Maybe it’ll change Margot’s luck.” With that, she disappeared into the kitchen.

  Saturday night was the big night at Mickey the Mick’s. My little function was making it even bigger. The bar was full of natives and summer people and some big bruisers off a Coast Guard cutter when the contingent from the Maddox place swept in. As usual, the sisters were in white evening dresses, and Auntie Mame appropriately wore black. There were lots of appreciative whistles as they passed through the taproom, but the four of them were queenly to the end—although I could have sworn that Auntie Mame cast a cordial eye toward a big blond Coast Guardsman.

  When the tide was low, the back porch of Mickey the Mick’s smelled of old crabs. The tide was low. The Maddox sisters sniffed the air a bit distastefully but said nothing. Auntie Mame, every inch the Beacon Hill matron, flapped a scented lace handkerchief ineffectually past her nose.

  “Really!” Melissa said. “All those natives whistling at us!”

  “Noblesse oblige, darling,” Miranda said.

  There was a faint snicker and Pegeen stood in the doorway, ready to take orders for drinks.

  “Good evening, Pegeen,” Margot said charmingly.

  “Good evening, Miss Maddox,” Pegeen said, bobbing slightly. There was an unpleasant pause.

  “What’ll it be to drink, everyone?” I said jovially.

  Well, there was a lot of fussing over the order. Miranda was particularly indecisive and finally gave her order in French. Pegeen answered in French, too.

  “Is she a French-Canadian?” I asked after Pegeen had left.

  “Oh, dear no,” Margot said. “Just a native.”

  “And just like all the rest of them,” Melissa said.

  “Yet there’s a certain haunting pre-Raphaelite beauty to her …” Miranda said.

  “If you like anything that obvious,” Melissa interjected.

  “I’ve been begging her to pose for me for ages but …”

  “Well, naturally she won’t,” Margot said. “The natives are all so class conscious and …”

  “And of course our being Maddoxes,” Melissa continued, “makes Pegeen feel so …”

  “Hush, please,” Auntie Mame said. “She’ll hear you.”

  Pegeen was back with the drinks, and I saw to it that everyone had two rounds before we commenced dinner.

  I’d never seen the three Maddox beauties off their home field before, and somehow they gave me the impression—but ever so subtly—that I’d chosen the wrong night, the wrong place, the wrong food, the wrong drink. I hoped the evening would brighten with the wine, but it didn’t. During Pegeen’s delicious cold crab soup, Melissa held her lovely head between her lovely hands and said: “Oh, oh, oh! That vulgar what-kind-of-box do you call it?”

  “Juke,” Pegeen said, as she brought out her piping-hot rolls.

  “Yes, that’s it, jute. All day long I’ve been trying to think of just the right moody atonal music to go with a ballet written around Kafka’s Trial, but with that wretched caterwauling—who is that singing, Pegeen?”

  “Jo Stafford.”

  “He has a very high voice,” Melissa complained.

  “Hormones,” Pegeen said. Auntie Mame giggled and then returned to her Back Bay role.

  “Couldn’t you ask them to stop playing it, Pegeen? It’s ruining my whole sense of composition and …”

  “I’m afraid there isn’t a selection labeled ‘Silence,’ Miss Maddox,” Pegeen said and bustled away.

  “Now, darling …” Margot began.

  “More wine, anyone?” I said.

  “Well, it’s such beastly wine,” Miranda said, holding out her glass. “Now last year when we were visiting the Chalfontes at Chantilly …”

  “Nonsense, girl,” Auntie Mame said, tapping her with her fan, “it’s a very nice, presumptuous little wine.”

  “Please, Miranda,” Margot said nervously.

  “Oh, I loathe it here, with everything cold and chaste and poor,” Miranda said, emptying her glass. For one who detested the wine, she was certainly able to put it away. “Give me mon belle France.”

  “Ma belle,” an almost inaudible voice said. It was Pegeen, entering with a huge tray of lobsters and drawn butter.

  “Ma belle—yes,” Miranda said, not knowing whence the co
rrection had come. “France, France, France, where I can paint, paint, paint!” She threw her arms out in a gesture that was meant to embrace all of France. Instead, it caught Pegeen right under the elbow. There was a deafening crash and I sat spellbound as Miranda and Melissa were inundated with lobsters, steamers, fried potatoes, green salad, and gallons of drawn butter. The sight was so breath-taking that I could only stare.

  Not so Melissa and Miranda.

  Miranda jumped to her feet and faced Pegeen with blazing eyes. “You doltish, clumsy, shanty-Irish clod. Look what you’ve done to me!”

  “Look what she’s done to you!” Melissa screamed. “Look what she’s done to me. And she did it on purpose. These natives are …”

  “Hey, wait,” I said. “It was only an accident. You knocked …”

  “Miranda,” Margot snapped. “Remember who we are!”

  “I know who we are and so does she. That’s why she did it, because we’re Maddoxes and she’s nothing but a …”

  “Miss Miranda,” Pegeen said, coloring furiously, “I’m sorry, but you hit my arm just as I …”

  “You common little island slut!” Melissa shouted with a toss of her curls. What was most fascinating was that a lobster was attached to either side of her head, swinging like some of Auntie Mame’s more outlandish earrings. “You …”

  “Melissa!” Margot said. “Stop it this minute. There’s no reason for you to lower yourself to her …”

  “Girls!” Auntie Mame cried, getting up. “Please. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was just …”

  “You keep out of this!” Miranda yelled. “You don’t know anything about the natives here and their tricks. She did it on purpose just to humiliate us and she’ll pay for …”

  “Just let me wipe that bit of hashed-brown potato off your shoulder, Miss Miranda,” Pegeen said from between clenched teeth. She reached out with a napkin.

  “Take your filthy hands off me!” Miranda bellowed. Then she slapped Pegeen right across the face.

  “I wouldn’t do that again, Miss Miranda,” Pegeen said steadily. Then she hauled off and fetched Miranda a slap that sent her staggering.

  Well, that was enough. Melissa leaped into the fray, and all I could see for a second were flying red lobsters and Pegeen’s red hair.

  “Oh, stop it, stop it please!” Margot cried. “Can’t you see, you’re ruining everything. I …”

  “Girls!” Auntie Mame called, scared and upset, but still the chaperone, “if you don’t stop this at once I shall have to …”

  She was spared from doing whatever she had to do by the arrival of Mickey the Mick. He came bellowing out to the porch and, without laying a hand on any of them, managed to herd Auntie Mame and Margot and Miranda and Melissa right out through the taproom and into the street. Then he came back and conducted me, a lot less gently, by the same route past all the natives and summer people and Coast Guards, out to the street.

  In dead silence I walked them back to the old Maddox place. I might as well have been silent, because through the squabbling of the Maddox sisters and the weeping of Auntie Mame I couldn’t have got a word in edgewise. Not even if there had been anything I wanted to say. I left them at the gate. When I got back to Mickey the Mick’s, the place was closed and dark. My bags, neatly packed, were standing at the front door with a note reading: “Consider yourself checked out.”

  I spent the night under a wharf, shivering in my summer dinner coat.

  The next morning I woke up stiff and miserable. What had happened the evening before seemed like a nightmare, but seeing the wharf and my suitcases and the barnacles that had grown on me, I knew it was all too true. Stiff and shivering, I changed into some more respectable clothes and made my painful way back to Mickey the Mick’s. It was closed officially, but the door was open. It was dim and cool and deserted except for Pegeen, who was behind the bar washing glasses.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “We’re closed on Sundays,” Peegen said. “Besides, Pop’ll be back any minute and I’d hate to face a lawsuit for what he’ll do to you.”

  “I came down to pay the check for last night.”

  “Oh, don’t dream of it. Pop’s very generous with bums.”

  “And also to apologize for the way …”

  “A Maddox apologize to a Ryan? Unheard of!”

  “I’m not a Maddox,” I said a little too forcefully.

  “You might as well be.”

  “Oh, hang it up and let me have a beer, will you?”

  “Yes, Mr. Maddox! With pleasure, Mr. Maddox! Always happy to serve you, Mr. Maddox. Just charge it, Mr. Maddox! We’re only natives. And we don’t serve on Sundays.”

  “Pegeen, will you please lay off? I told you I wanted to apologize. I’m not responsible for Miranda and Melissa.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Do forgive me,” she said. “It’s so hard to tell which gentlemen belongs to which Maddox.”

  “That was a kind of unnecessary crack. What have you got against Margot? Hasn’t she always been decent to you?”

  “Oh, she’s a doll! There’s nothing that makes me love anyone quite as much as being patronized every summer of my life. Yes, Miss Maddox. No, Miss Maddox. Nice to have you back on the island, Miss Maddox. About as nice as having cholera on the island, Miss Maddox.”

  “Why all this Miss Maddox stuff? Don’t you call her Margot?”

  “Never. We natives don’t mix with the summer people—especially the Maddoxes who own the island—or used to, before they went broke. After all, my grandfather was her grandfather’s gardener. She must have told you that.”

  “She’s never mentioned it,” I said angrily. “Anyhow, that was three generations ago. Times have changed.”

  “The Maddoxes haven’t. They’ve just got poorer while the Ryans have got richer. But they’re still the aristocrats and we’re still the natives. My mother used to make me curtsy every time I saw the Maddox girls. That’s why natives were born.”

  “You sound like a Communist!” I said. “Why all this nonsense about natives? Why do you have to be a native?”

  “You’re a native of wherever you happen to be born,” she said. “I was born here. Ergo, I’m a native.”

  “Ergo, schmergo. You talk pretty fancy for coming from simple fisherfolk.”

  “Oh, we get the breezes from the mainland. I have been to college—scholarship, made-over clothes, and all that. But at least I graduated.”

  “You’re supposed to graduate,” I said primly.

  “Margot didn’t. She flunked out of Bennington in her second year. But of course Bennington’s a much nicer school than the one I went to, and Margot was so cultivated and aristocratic to begin with that there wasn’t much those common little professors could teach her.”

  “I guess you just don’t like Margot,” I said.

  “Doesn’t take you long to grasp an idea, does it?” she said. “Now, I’m not kidding. You’d better make yourself scarce. Pop’s going to be pretty sore when he finds you here. There’s a very strict code about native girls and summer gentlemen.”

  “But I don’t get it …” I began.

  “There’s a lot you don’t get, apparently.”

  “I mean, if you bothered to get all this education, why are you …”

  “A barmaid, sir?”

  “Stop putting words in my mouth! I mean, do you just hang around the island all year and work for your father?”

  “No, I’m away all winter. I teach French in a school in New York. And if you don’t mind my saying so, Miranda could do with a bit of tutoring. But I come back here in the summers. I’m all Pop’s got, and besides, it helps me to remember my place.”

  “I thought I told you and that la-de-da pack of friends of yers to get outta my place and …” It was Mickey the Mick, bellowing in the doorway.

  “Lay off, Pop,” Pegeen said. “He’s just leaving.�
��

  “Here,” I said, embarrassed. “How much do I …”

  “On the house,” Pegeen said.

  I skulked out into the hot little street. I didn’t much feel like going back to the Maddox place, so I poked around in front of the drugstore gazing at a dusty display of hot-water bottles and feeling miserable. I don’t know how long I stood staring into the window, but I was interrupted by Pegeen Ryan. She had on a hat and gloves and was walking briskly along the street. “Not like the windows at Bonwit’s, is it, city slicker?” she said. She kept right on going.

  “Hey, where are you off to?”

  “Movies.”

  “Alone?”

  “Alone. It’s The Best Years of Our Lives.”

  “Can I come too?”

  “It’s a public building. I can’t stop you.”

  “Would you mind if I sat next to you?”

  “No reserved seats—not even for the Maddoxes and their friends. Just don’t talk during the feature. And don’t come in with me. I don’t want the rest of the natives to think I’ve lost my virtue to a summer gentleman.”

  “Can’t I pay for your ticket?”

  “You certainly cannot. And don’t get the idea this is a date. It isn’t. I wouldn’t dream of poaching on Maddox territory.” She slapped down her money and went in. I followed at a respectful distance.

  At the end of the film we left. “Well, so long,” she said.

  “Hey, couldn’t I buy you a drink or something?”

  “No. The only place you can get a drink on the island is Pop’s and not on Sundays. Run on back to the Maddoxes.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’ll be seeing you.”

  “You’ll have to look pretty fast. I go back on the launch tonight—Petit Larousse, Candide, Le Malade Imaginaire, Heath’s Visible Vocabulary, and all. School starts.”

  “Well, gee,” I said, “maybe we can all see each other in New York?”

  “You mean maybe a date—you and Margot and Miranda and Melissa and me, with your aunt as chaperone? I think not. Thanks anyway—and good luck.” With that she was gone.