Auntie Mame Page 7

  “Miss Dennis, I been all over this town in a taxicab. But now that I found you, Miss Dennis, do you mind if I pay off the driver and let him go home to his family?”

  “Go ahead,” Auntie Mame said, like Jean Valjean trapped in the sewer, “it’s not as though you haven’t done enough to me already.” But I noticed that she hurriedly powdered her nose and ran a comb through her hair.

  Mr. Burnside came back and took off his coat. “Ma’am,” he said, kneeling by Auntie Mame, “I don’t want you to be mad with me because of that job. I was comin’ to offer you a position with the Dixie Belle Enterprises, on account of I felt so bad about your losing your place at Macy’s. But, Miss Dennis,” he said, looking appreciatively around the room, “I didn’t know you had money. A lady with a nice little place like this don’t have to work at Macy’s.”

  Then Auntie Mame threw back her head and started to laugh. She laughed and laughed and the tears rolled down her cheeks again. Mr. Burnside turned an angry dark red and his eyes blazed.

  “Miss Dennis, if you were just playin’ some kind of joke, I don’t think it’s very funny. I spent the whole, livelong aftahnoon huntin’ you up in alphabetical order, and I …”

  Auntie Mame was fumbling through her purse. “Yes, Mr. Burnside,” she laughed wildly, “I do have money. Here it is—all of it—every cent. One dollar and thirty-five, thirty-six … thirty-seven … thirty-eight cents.”

  I heard Norah hiss from the hallway. She crooked her finger at me and I tiptoed out. “You come on out here, darlin’,” she whispered, “Miss Mame’s entertaining a gentleman. A Southern gentleman!”

  I was upstairs reading Bring ’Em Back Alive when Auntie Mame came up, her eyes dancing. “Oh, darling, we’re saved,” she whispered. “He’s going to give me a job with the Dixie Belle Enterprises—that’s a big oil company. I’m to be a receptionist and it pays thirty dollars a week! He’s very polite. He asked me to go to Armando’s with him for dinner. I’m sure it’ll be all right. He is nice, and,” she shrugged, “it’s a free meal.”

  As she was putting on one of her unpaid-for Turner dresses, I slipped the rhinestone bracelet on her wrist. “Merry Christmas, Auntie Mame,” I said. Then I added, “it isn’t real.”

  “Darling, darling Patrick,” she cried, “it’s the most beautiful bracelet I’ve seen in my life.” With the real mink coat and the real smile of happiness, it looked like the realest diamond bracelet in the world.

  The next day was Christmas and Auntie Mame looked radiant—if a little hung over—as she gave me a big box from Brooks Brothers. It contained my first suit with long trousers. “Merry, merry Christmas, my little love,” she cried.

  “Gee, Auntie Mame, thanks!” I said. Later that day I noticed that a Tiepolo drawing of some naked religious people was missing from her bedroom. It was Auntie Mame’s favorite picture, but she seemed very happy.

  “Patrick, darling,” she said, “you haven’t asked me about my Southern gentleman.” Then she told all. “He’s a lovely man. We went to Armando’s and had steak and then we talked and we talked and we talked. His whole name is Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside and he’s descended—one way or another—from four Confederate generals! Oh, the gallant old Southland! He’s very nice and he owns this big oil company and he has lovely eyelashes. By the way, he’s coming here for Christmas dinner.”

  Mr. Burnside gave me twenty dollars as a Christmas present, tipped Norah and Ito lavishly after our last meal on credit, and took Auntie Mame to see Marilyn Miller.

  Auntie Mame was out most of the rest of that week. Mr. Burnside took her to lunch and tea and dinner and the theater every day. On New Year’s Eve he reserved a table at the Central Park Casino but they never got there. Instead they took a taxicab to Maryland, “Marry-land,” as she called it later.

  On New Year’s Day she telephoned me from the St. Regis. “Patrick, my little love,” she said, “this is Mrs. Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside. Come on over and have lunch with me and your Uncle Beau!”

  Chapter Four

  and the Southern Belle

  Rounding out its Unforgettable Character even more, this article goes on to say how the little spinster had a real athletic prowess. Or at least she developed one in a hurry.

  It seems that she got kind of worried with her foundling being bright in school and a comfort to her and her cat but still having no father to instruct him in the manly arts. She thought he might end up as a bookish weakling if she didn’t take action. So she sent off to Spalding’s for a whole lot of sporting equipment and set out to teach him all he’d ever need to know. It worked fine and in the process of coaching the kid, the old girl became quite the athlete herself—so good, in fact, that she copped half the prizes at the Danbury Fair and broke the ladies’ shot-put record for all time.

  Well, I won’t come right out and say that Auntie Mame ever did anything like that, but she did establish a certain reputation for herself in the field. In fact, she is still spoken of with awed reverence in certain parts of the country for her feats as a sportswoman after she married Mr. Burnside.

  A few uncharitable people have said that Auntie Mame married Mr. Burnside for his money. I will concede that Mr. Burnside’s being the richest man under forty south of Washington, D.C., may have influenced her. But she really loved him. He was father, brother, son, Santa Claus, and lover.

  Her new husband, Beau, was one of those big, genial, easygoing, lovable Southerners. He sprang from a fine, impoverished old Georgia family, but he was unique among generals’ descendants in that he didn’t mope around Dixie talking about the carefree days before those damnyankees ravished its land and its women. Instead, Beau had gone out and raised soybeans and peanuts while the neighboring gentry were still bemoaning the paucity of their cotton crops. By the time he was nineteen, the Burnside land was free from debt and erosion and was showing a profit. During his last year at Georgia Tech he went off to Texas to settle an estate of barren wasteland left by some migratory cousin, discovered oil on the property, and was a millionaire before he was twenty-one. Everything Uncle Beau touched seemed to turn to gold, and he was constantly amazed and delighted by his good fortune. “Just luck, sugar,” he’d say to Auntie Mame. Money meant very little to him except for the pleasure it could give to others. He was high on the list of every charity in the country, he was the sole support of an ancient mother and a pack of indolent kinfolk, and he was an easy touch for anybody with a fairly plausible hard-luck story.

  Uncle Beau paid up all of Auntie Mame’s debts, sold her carriage house—he said that nice women didn’t live on Murray Hill—returned Norah’s life savings, and sent her back to County Meath with a handsome pension. He moved Auntie Mame into about ten rooms in the St. Regis Hotel and encouraged her to go right back to her old scale of spending. She was happy to oblige.

  Although she was pretty much her old self, I noticed certain subtle changes. It was fashionable to be romantic in 1932, but Auntie Mame went a step farther. Her hair was fluffier, softer; there were always a lot of camellias around the rooms; her dresses seemed to run to organdy and ruffles, and there was almost a roar of crinoline beneath her skirts. When Uncle Beau insisted that she have her portrait painted, Auntie Mame commissioned a society portraitist rather than one of the stark moderns who frequented her drawing room. The finished picture gave the impression of having been executed not with a brush, but with a pastry tube, and Auntie Mame kept saying it was a pity that Winterhalter wasn’t still alive.

  Her speech grew slightly blurred, softer and less staccato. She called me Honey a great deal and used You-all both in singular and plural.

  For my thirteenth birthday she sent a whole bale of gifts, but prominent among them were a beautiful and intricate set of antique Confederate soldiers, which I still have, a three-volume set of books on General Lee, and, of all things, a yellowed first edition of The Little Colonel. I knew what was coming.

  That June I
graduated from the Lower School to the Upper School. I could have managed to do it myself, but Auntie Mame wrote an exuberant letter to announce that she and Uncle Beau were motoring up to St. Boniface to take part in the great celebration. “Then, honey,” she wrote, “I’ve got a big surprise. You and your Uncle Beauregard and I are all going to drive down to Georgia to spend the summer on our big old plantation and see my sweet little old mother-in-law. Excuse the haste of this letter, but the Daughters of the Confederacy are meeting here today. Can’t wait to see you-all!”

  She was a triumph of Southern Womanhood at the commencement exercises. She wore a fluttering white garden party dress—it looked as though it were made of spun sugar—lace gloves, lace hat, lace parasol which she twirled coquettishly, and a lace fichu which she kept dropping to be retrieved by the pimpled gallants of St. Boniface. I won the composition prize for the Lower School and she said to the English master, “Ah vow, Ah’m so proud of that child Ah could jes bust! But then, his daddeh was one of the most literareh boys down home.”

  We drove down to Georgia in Uncle Beau’s big Dusenberg phaeton, stopping here to see this grand ole monument or that noble ole battlefield where our Southun boys fought and died valiantly defendin’ theah beliefs. Most of the countryside looked pretty bleak to me, but Auntie Mame, who’d been through it before on the Palm Beach sleeper, spoke at some length of its gracious ole heritage and its rich memories.

  When the car swept up to the pillared portico of Peckerwood, the Burnside plantation, a genial old major-domo capered out to take the bags and a mountainous colored woman who looked like the ads for pancake flour heaved and shook and said Lan’sakes about thirty times. Auntie Mame was in her element.

  Beau’s Texas oil money, his Cuban sugar money, his New York stock market money, his Canadian mining money had all helped to restore the gracious rooms of Peckerwood to their ante-bellum magnificence. There were damask draperies, rosewood chairs, Sheraton tables, and crystal chandeliers with hurricane chimneys. Auntie Mame said it was just dawlin’. I was shown to my room, a big chamber with a canopied bed, a Chippendale chest-on-chest, and French windows giving on the second floor piazza. There was a Yankee bathroom next to it with real post-bellum Crane plumbing.

  Auntie Mame seemed a little miffed that she wasn’t going to be quartered in the main house, too, but tradition had it that the son and his wife always lived in the Bride’s Cottage beyond the boxwood maze in the garden. Later I think she was thankful.

  “But, Beau, honeh,” she kept saying as she unpacked her dimities, “when am Ah gonna meet yo sweet little ole mothah?”

  Mrs. Burnside could by no stretch of the imagination be called either sweet or little. But she was old, and I suppose that God in His infinite wisdom had seen fit to make her mother, although I’ve often risked blasphemy to wonder why. She was built along the lines of a General Electric refrigerator and looked like a cross between Caligula and a cockatoo. Mother Burnside had beady little eyes, an imperious beak of a nose, sallow skin, and bad breath. She wore a stiff black wig and a stiff black dress and she sat all day long in a darkened drawing room, her pudgy hands—encrusted with dirty diamond rings—folded over her pudgy belly. She was a grim, taciturn woman, but when she put her mind to it, she could converse on several subjects: a) her exalted ancestors, b) how uppity the nigrahs were gettin’, c) the Yankees, d) how unworthy everyone but Mrs. Burnside was, and e) the lamentable condition of her bowels. But usually she just sat in thin-lipped disapproval, her evil black eyes darting like a malign old parrot’s.

  There was one other occupant in the manor house at Peckerwood. That was Cousin Fan, the poorest relation. She was a faded, vague, timid spinster, whose penance for her poverty was to be at the constant beck and call of Mother Burnside. Miss Fan was rather sweet and pathetic in a masochistic fashion. She had an I.Q. of about thirty-five and all of her time that wasn’t passed catering to the stolid whims of Mrs. Burnside was spent in doing Good Works for the Negroes and praying to a genteel and stone-deaf Episcopal God.

  Miss Fan scratched at the door of my bedroom after I’d gone to the bathroom and unpacked my clothes. “Hello,” she whispered, “I’m Miss Fanny Burnside, Beau’s cousin. I’m sorry I wasn’t at the door to greet you-all when you drove in, but I was upstairs giving Cousin Euphemia—Miz Burnside, I mean—her purge. You’re Miz Beau’s nephew, aren’t you?”

  I said I was and how did she do.

  “Maybe you’d care to come down to the verandah and sit a spell. Miz Burnside don’t finish her nap ’til four.”

  Miss Fan and I sat and rocked and eventually Auntie Mame and Uncle Beau strolled over from the Bride’s Cottage. Auntie Mame was fearfully animated, kissed Miss Fan several times, and called her Cousin Fanny. The old colored man brought out a big decanter of bourbon and some Coca-Cola and Auntie Mame grew awfully cozy and familiar there on the verandah. “Ah sweah, Cousin Fanny,” she shrilled, “yoah jes about as cute as a bug!”

  Miss Fan tittered nervously.

  It was easy to see that Uncle Beau was terribly proud of Auntie Mame. She called him her big, ole lamb-cat and kept twining his reddish-gold hair into little ringlets. Miss Fan giggled uneasily and said she was so glad that dear Cousin Beau had found such a nice little wife.

  About that time there was fearful thumping from somewhere inside the house and Miss Fan’s plain face went gray. “Mercy,” she said, “I hope all our talking hasn’t disturbed Cousin Euphemia. She almost never wakes up so early.” Again the thumping, and Miss Fan flew into the house.

  Auntie Mame’s meeting with her mother-in-law was epic. Miss Fan came scuttling out to the verandah as Uncle Beau was pouring another round of bourbon. “She’s ready to see you-all.”

  “Oh, isn’t that dandeh, Beau, honey!” Auntie Mame gushed. “Ah jes cain’t wait!” I could have waited an eternity.

  Miss Fan timorously led the way into the back drawing room, and there sat Mother Burnside.

  “Mothah, honeh’ ” Auntie Mame squealed, and rushed up to kiss her. If Mother Burnside’s pungent breath wasn’t enough to stop further intimacies, her opening remark was.

  “You look oldah than Ah expectid,” she said.

  Auntie Mame reeled. She never revealed her exact age and on a legal document she’d say “Over twenty-one,” which no one ever seemed inclined to question. I suspected she was between thirty-five and forty, and she seemed a lot younger.

  Mrs. Burnside favored Uncle Beau with her baleful black stare. “Yes, Beauregahd, you gave me to unduhstand that yoah wife was much youngah. You look tired son; mighty tired.” Beau kissed her forehead reverently and then introduced me. I took her puffed old hand and bowed in my best dancing school manner.

  “You seem nice enough,” she said, “for a Yankee boy.”

  Auntie Mame had by now recovered from the initial barrage and gamely tried once more. “What a lovely, lovely old Greek Revival house this is, Mother—uh, Mrs. Burnside.” I noticed that all trace of her Southern accent had disappeared.

  “We like it,” Mrs. Burnside said tersely, and then turned to Beau and launched on a long anecdote about her bowels.

  Dinner that night was a funereal affair. There was a thick soup, a great roast of pork, roasted potatoes, candied yams, hominy grits, corn bread, and a pineapple upside-down cake. I had terrible nightmares, and even Auntie Mame admitted to a slight twinge of acid indigestion. The conversation was spotty. Auntie Mame held forth valiantly on the charm of Greek Revival houses and the influence of Virtruvius brought down through Palladio, Castle, Jones, Adam, and finally Thomas Jefferson. Beau said about six times how good it was to be home, but without much conviction. Miss Fan twittered a great deal until Mrs. Burnside jabbed her viciously with a fork and said to be still. That, plus a few portentous belches, was her only contribution to the merrymaking. Directly after dinner she went to bed and Miss Fan scurried along to help her undress and to read a chapter of the Bible aloud to her. Aunt
ie Mame’s visit hadn’t started out well.

  It was Beau, finally, who planned the big family reunion. Left to her own devices, Mrs. Burnside wouldn’t have given so much as a wake for her new daughter-in-law, but since it was owing only to Beau that she and the rest of her patrician relations weren’t residing at the County Home, she gave in reluctantly when he wanted to spend some of his own money in his own home for his own wife, and the gathering of the clan was scheduled.

  The bride was presented officially to her new relatives when they appeared en masse at a giant barbecue the following Sunday. At noon we were all on the verandah. Auntie Mame was looking lovely and fragile in yellow dotted swiss with a big leghorn hat, and Uncle Beau stood next to her in his ice cream suit, proud as a peacock. Mrs. Burnside was dressed for the next ice age. She sat in a rocker wearing a voluminous black silk dress, black boots, a black shawl, black glasses, a black sunshade, black gloves, and a black hat. She greeted me with a mournful belch and sent Miss Fan in for her potion.

  Then the relatives started coming. Car after car streaked into the drive and parked on the spacious lawn. “Ruin the grass,” Mrs. Burnside growled, and her stomach rumbled alarmingly.