Auntie Mame Page 9

  After an eternity of bouncing and lurching, we came to the worst road of all. It ran in deep clay ruts straight across a sloping meadow. Neither horse nor hound was in sight. Auntie Mame stopped the car and busied herself with her compact. “Mercy,” she said, “now we’ve lost them.”

  Then there was a thunder of hoofs and yelping of hounds. A small black fox dashed down the hill with the pack in hot pursuit. “Here they come, Auntie Mame,” I yelled. They were headed straight for us. Auntie Mame dropped her lipstick. Now the horses appeared over the rise. Frantically Auntie Mame tried to start the car; it spluttered and gagged, but nothing happened. She tried again. The pack was drawing nearer and nearer, the horses pummeling down the hill.

  “The key, Auntie Mame!” I shouted.

  “Oh, yes,” she said wildly. The fox was desperately close. Auntie Mame switched on the ignition and the car bounded forward just as a small cannon ball of black fur darted into the road. There was a terrible screech of brakes and I was thrown forward against the windshield. Then all hell broke loose. Hounds, horses, and riders descended on us like an avalanche. Nearly three dozen riders were thrown, and two big bay mares rammed into the Dusenberg so hard the front fender and hood had to be replaced. A third mount was half in and half out of the back seat, whinnying horribly. All in all, there were more horses shot that day than at the Battle of Gettysburg, and when the final casualty list was posted there were six broken ankles, four broken arms, a fractured leg—compound—three cases of concussion, a dislocated pelvis, and countless bruises and abrasions. The riders who were able to walk and speak raced down to the car in a fury and Auntie Mame fainted dead away. I was almost hysterical, but still able to hear Emory Oglethorpe McDougall growl, “What’d Ah tell yuh?”, and to note the bitter smile of triumph on Sally Cato’s face. Auntie Mame had been in for the kill, all right. The fox lay dead under the car.

  If Auntie Mame had been the subject of a good deal of county conversation before the fateful fox hunt, she was now the absolute mania of the riding set. Emory Oglethorpe made it perfectly clear to me that she was now referred to as “that crazy, damnyankee woman who killed all ouah hawses.” People for miles around talked of nothing else, and every day the telephone buzzed with hesitant voices saying how sorry they were that they’d be unable to come to Bride’s Cottage for lunch or that they had to postpone indefinitely the little dinner they’d planned in Auntie Mame’s honor. Auntie Mame, after two weeks of being the uncontested belle of the county, now seemed about as popular as General Sheridan.

  Mother Burnside seemed to feel a lot better after the news of her daughter-in-law’s downfall, and managed to come downstairs for dinner every night. Between soda mints and waves of wind, she favored us all with such reminiscences as, “When Ah was a young bride theah was nothin’ Ah loved and adohed moah than huntin’. Ah was a regulah Di-ana.” Beau sat tight-lipped and looked grim and embarrassed. And one evening when Mother Burnside’s memoirs of field and flatulence were particularly trying, Miss Fan lent Auntie Mame a handkerchief and whispered, “Don’t you pay any heed to her, Miz Beau, she hated hunting and she rode worse than I did!” But Miss Fan’s mousy solicitude did little to comfort Auntie Mame. She was persona non grata in the entire community, and she knew it. The only one who still offered her friendship was Sally Cato McDougall.

  “But, Mame, honey,” she’d say, “don’t cry like that. It wasn’t your fault—everybody knows that accidents will happen. If the others are too narrow-minded to forgive and forget, well, to hell with them. I’m still your friend. You know that.”

  Auntie Mame was intensely grateful to Sally Cato. They saw each other daily, and Sally Cato was the only person who was nice to her. Even Uncle Beau seemed stiff around Auntie Mame.

  I saw a lot of Emory Oglethorpe while Auntie Mame was in purdah. He taught me how to smoke and chew and drink a vile kind of dandelion wine he concocted. “Didn’ believe me, didja, when Ah tole yuh Sally Cato was out to have yoah Auntie’s hide. Lawd, man, she knew you-all’d be drivin’ acrosst that field jes when the pack was. She knows the huntin’ country like the back of huh ha-yand. You shoulda huhd huh laughin’ and screamin’ an’ ca’yin’ on aftah all them hawses spilled to hell an’ gone ovah yoah Auntie’s cah. Ah thought it was a pretty funny-lookin’ sight, mahself. Don’ worry, Sally Cato’s gonna get Beau back if she has to kill yoah Auntie doin’ it.” He chuckled maliciously. “Ole Sally Cato’s nevah lost a bet, o’ a race, o’ a man in huh life, and she sho don’t inten’ ta staht now. Heah, take the resta this packa Luckies.”

  I was beginning to be half convinced that Emory Oglethorpe was right, although it didn’t seem possible that Sally Cato would stoop to anything so low.

  But that evening I began to appreciate Emory Oglethorpe’s appraisal of his sister. Sally Cato, who was the great favorite of Mrs. Burnside’s, dined with us at Peckerwood. She looked very Southern, very romantic, very beautiful in white lace, and she was charm itself. Auntie Mame, who had been openly snubbed in the millinery department of J. B. White’s that afternoon, looked tired, and what’s more, she looked old.

  Mother Burnside was unusually talkative that night, and in her oblique fashion she let poor Auntie Mame have it right between the eyes. She spoke of nothing but Sally Cato. Sally Cato’s beauty, her youth, her wealth, her ancient lineage, her seat on a horse, how lovely she’d looked at the last Hunt Ball, how vital and healthy she always seemed, how typically, charmingly, radiantly Southern she was. “A real, genu-wine daughtah of ouah own fay-ah county. A blue-blooded young flowah of the Old South and of ouah glorious community wheah every family has a rich background of great traditions and wheah no strangeh has trespassed since the Wah of the See-cession.”

  Auntie Mame claimed a sick headache and left right after dinner. She’d been having a lot of sick headaches lately, and Beau said, “What, again?”

  I went up to my room early. It was hot and humid and I couldn’t sleep, so I stuck one of Emory Oglethorpe’s cigarettes in my mouth and went out onto the upstairs piazza. But the cigarette hung dead on my lips, for below me I could see the red ends of two other cigarettes and I heard Sally Cato’s voice, low and urgent. “Oh, Beau,” she said, “I know Mame’s nice. Believe me, I love her just as much as you do, but is she right for you? Beau, honestly, all I want is your happiness. I took it pretty hard when I heard you’d married her instead of me, but truly, that’s all water over the dam. Mame’s a grand woman, but Beau, does she belong down here?”

  “Mame’s a Yankee,” Beau said stiffly, “and they have different ways from ours.”

  “Oh, Beau, I realize all that. After all, I’m her only friend. But Beau, I keep asking myself, can she give you the family, the home, the children that are a part of our Southern heritage? Can she, Beau?”

  “I don’t know why not,” Beau said with a note of doubt.

  “Well, Beau, just remember, your happiness is all I want. I’ve got to get up early tomorrow for the hunter trials, so I’ll run along now. Want to give me a little kiss for old times’ sake?” The cigarettes dropped to the grass and there was no more talking. They just stood there in the shadows, kind of wrapped around each other, and didn’t move for a long, long time.

  Wretchedly I turned away, and as I did, something woolly brushed across my face. I was too frightened to utter a sound. Then a bony hand clutched my arm and a voice whispered, “Come in here, child.” It was Miss Fan.

  She led me into her hot little room. “Give me a cigarette,” she breathed. “I know you have some, I saw them in your wardrobe.”

  We smoked in silence. She was a lot better at it than I.

  “I suppose you heard—Beau and that, that dreadful Sally Cato?”

  I nodded.

  “Now do you understand? Now do you see why you’ve got to get your aunt out of here—and Beau, too?”

  I bobbed my head dumbly.

  “Lord knows I’m only a poor old spinster—
no better than a servant in this house and at the beck and call of that terrible old shrew twenty-four hours a day. I have no business saying all this, but Miz Beau is the only person in this whole godforsaken county who’s ever treated me like a human being. Beau’s a nice boy, too. That’s why you’ve got to get them out of here, before it’s too late. Before that dirty old woman and that slut of a girl wreck the whole thing. Every day I hear the two of them up in her bedroom, plotting, plotting, plotting. Do you understand, child? Do you see? Get your aunt out of here. Quick, before those two ruin her. Now go to bed, child. Oh, yes, and leave those cigarettes here.”

  The next day I tried in a bumbling, callow way to warn Auntie Mame about Sally Cato, but I did it so badly that she flew at me in a rage. “What!” she cried, sitting bolt upright.

  “I said, Auntie Mame, did you ever stop and think that maybe Sally Cato isn’t your friend? After all, she used to be engaged to Uncle Beau, and she was the one who drew that map and made you kill all those horses, and Emory Oglethorpe says …”

  “Emory Oglethorpe says,” she mimicked shrilly, “Emory Oglethorpe says … Who cares what that little goat-eyed hellion says! As for you, I’m ashamed—yes, good and ashamed—that any nephew of mine could be so small-minded, so petty and rotten as to entertain for one moment such a filthy, vile notion. The idea!” At that moment Sally Cato’s big Packard roadster was gliding up the drive. “Here comes Sally Cato now. I will spare you the embarrassment of seeing her. Get out of here and don’t come back until you can think and speak like a gentleman. Sally Cato’s the only real friend I’ve got down here, and I won’t hear another word about her. Now scat!”

  Crestfallen, I loped away. I hadn’t mentioned what had happened the night before, because I didn’t want to hurt Auntie Mame’s feelings. She loved Uncle Beau an awful lot—she must have, or she wouldn’t have put up with life at Peckerwood.

  But when Sally Cato drove away, Auntie Mame seemed terribly nervous and upset and called me into the Bride’s Cottage. “Oh, Patrick, Patrick,” she moaned, “whatever am I to do now?”

  “Do about what?”

  “Sally Cato was just here and she’s planning another of those ghastly rodeo things. She says the only way I can redeem myself with the people in the county is to show them what a wonderful horsewoman I am. Now I have to ride and, oh, Patrick, it wasn’t true, all that business about my loving horses. I loathe them.”

  “Why don’t you just admit that you were only kidding, Auntie Mame?” I said with certain childlike innocence. “Then they won’t expect you to ride.”

  “What! Be made even a worse laughing stock than I am now? I’d rather die!”

  “But that’s exactly what may happen to you if you go out on this hunt.”

  “Better to die in the saddle,” she said nobly, and shuddered.

  “Well, cheer up, Auntie Mame, you can always come down with a cold or sprain your ankle again before the hunt.”

  “But it’s tomorrow, at six o’clock in the morning!”

  Uncle Beau was out at a landowners’ meeting that night, and Auntie Mame and I dined silently in the Bride’s Cottage. Auntie Mame was trying to read Fleurs de Mal when the station wagon from Foxglove drove up to the door. Emory Oglethorpe hopped out carrying a big box, a pair of boots, a silk hat, and a leather sidesaddle. “Evenin’,” he grunted in his nutmeg-grater voice, “ole Sally Cato tol’ me to hustle these hawse duds ovah to yoah Auntie Mame. Man o’ man, you oughta see Sally Cato, she’s whoopin’ an’ hollerin’ all ovah the stables. Sez she vows yoah Auntie Mame ain’t nevah been on so much as a merry-go-round. She’s takin’ all kinds o’ bets on the hunt an’ givin’ odds of a hundred to one. The hawse she’s picked fo’ yoah Auntie Mame’ll be ovah in the van tomorrah mawnin’. You betta tell yoah Auntie ta break huh laig o’ somethin’ befo’ she breaks huh neck. Well, so long, Ah gotta fine piece o’ high yallah waitin’ fo me back to the shack.”

  I felt as though the black broadcloth riding habit I carried in to Auntie Mame were a shroud. She looked aghast and began to tremble. “Oh, God, Sally Cato’s sent over the whole outfit.” Then she eyed the sidesaddle. “Am I supposed to sit on that jock strap?” She began to cry, and she was still weeping softly on her pillow when I went back to the big house.

  By the time I was dressed next morning I heard hoofs clomping up the drive. The whole county—all except those who were still convalescing from Auntie Mame’s last performance on the hunt field—was congregated in front of Peckerwood. There were even a few people from across the Carolina border. They seemed less hearty than they had the last time, and there was a malicious, conspiratorial feeling in the air.

  Somehow Auntie Mame and I didn’t give the impression of haute couture. I was wearing a castoff outfit of Emory Oglethorpe McDougall’s and he was nearly a head shorter than I was. From certain angles Auntie Mame looked very dashing in Sally Cato’s broadcloth riding costume and her brow was misleadingly serene under the tall silk hat. But the jacket was a trifle tight here, a trifle loose there, and the skirt dragged a little. Then, too, the size five boots must have been misery. Auntie Mame chain-smoked a lot and took several nips from a silver flask. She tried to seem lighthearted and cheery, but she looked ill at ease, and all the riders eyed her suspiciously.

  Sally Cato cantered up on a fine big mare, followed by Emory Oglethorpe and a van from Foxglove. There was a terrible amount of stomping and kicking coming from inside the van, and with a good deal of trouble two grooms finally led the biggest, meanest-looking horse I’ve ever seen down the runway.

  Sally Cato kissed Auntie Mame warmly. “How unusual you look this morning, Mame honey,” she said. “Excuse me just a moment, dear, I want to run in and say a word to Mrs. Burnside.”

  In a minute she was back. I looked up to the second-story piazza and saw old Mother Burnside standing there with a funny, unpleasant expression on her face. Sally Cato skipped over to Auntie Mame. “This is the horse I picked especially for you, Mame dear,” she said with a sly smile. “His name is Lightning Rod, and he’s as gentle as a lamb.”

  Lightning Rod was an Irish hunter, seventeen and a half hands high; a gelding who’d never quite reconciled himself to a life of celibacy. He looked at Auntie Mame with blood in his eye and pawed the ground savagely. Sally Cato stroked his muzzle. “He’s a booful ole darlin’, dat’s wot he is.”

  Emory Oglethorpe slithered up to me. “He’s the goddamndest, most vicious piece o’ hawse flesh in Richmond County, that’s what he is. O’nery son-of-a-bitch shoulda been shot two yeahs ago when he trompled Uncle Grady half to death. Least, that’s what the vet said. That cussed ole plug’s been cockeyed crazy an’ runnin’ roun’ the pastcha evah since. Took six niggahs all yestiddy aftahnoon to ketch him.”

  Sally Cato clapped her elegantly gloved hands and said, “Your attention, everyone, we are now going to have the unique privilege of hunting with one of New York City’s most famous equestriennes, Mrs. Beau Burnside.” She winked maliciously, but not quickly enough for Auntie Mame to miss. Auntie Mame’s eyes opened wide. There was a ripple of repressed mirth among the riders. Only Beau had an air of innocence.

  I was already astride a spastic old nag when three grooms led Lightning Rod to the mounting block and Auntie Mame climbed gingerly aboard. I breathed a silent prayer and I noticed that Auntie Mame’s lips were moving, too.

  All the way out to the field I tried to keep as close as possible to Auntie Mame, but Lightning Rod had a pernicious habit of kicking out behind so that she had the road pretty much to herself. I hoped she wouldn’t be hurt too much when she fell. We ambled along placidly enough, even though I received the distinct impression that all dogs, most people, and some horses made Lightning Rod nervous and irritable. Finally we got to the starting place. Lightning Rod whinnied eerily and reared. But surprisingly enough, Auntie Mame stayed on. A couple of the people seemed impressed. Sally Cato just sneered.

  As we were
about to start, the Peckerwood station wagon raced up to the field with a scared-looking Negro at the wheel. Miss Fan jumped out and screamed, “Stop! That horse is mad!” But she was too late. The fox had been released and was dashing wildly across the meadow, the hounds hot on his trail; simultaneously, Cousin Van Buren Clay-Pickett and Auntie Mame led off and the hunt was under way. There was no stopping her now.

  I’d thought surely that Auntie Mame would have the good sense to select a nice soft-looking hummock and throw herself off, but she didn’t. Instead, she and Lightning Rod galloped hell-for-leather after Cousin Van Buren. “Gawdlmighty, what a seat Miz Beau has!” someone shouted. I turned around to see who could be so deranged and my eye caught an expression on Sally Cato’s face that was awful to behold.

  We raced off, leaving poor old Miss Fan screaming incomprehensible things. The old nag I was riding wasn’t good for much more than glue, but at least it kept up with the pack long enough for me to see Auntie Mame and Lightning Rod sail over a jagged stone wall that threw two others. Auntie Mame lost her silk hat and her hair floated out wildly, but still she kept on going.

  “Ja see huh cleah that woll?” someone called. “That damnyankee gal’s got style. Soopub hawsewoman. Pufeckly soopub!”

  We rode for better than an hour, thundering over the springy turf, scraping beneath low-hanging branches, and splashing through muddy creeks. Auntie Mame was out of sight most of the time, and even Uncle Beau and Sally Cato found it impossible to keep up with her. At one point she and Lightning Rod took a sort of detour through a whole field of feeding corn, but still they had no trouble in catching up with the Master of the Hounds. Another time the horse charged into an old lean-to and right out the other side with Auntie Mame still aboard. There was a lot of clucking and squawking and chickens flew out from every direction. In a flash I saw that one old hen, gamer than most, was even perched on Auntie Mame’s shoulder, but the sheer velocity of the wind soon sent it flapping helplessly into the air.