Boston Adventure

Book 0: Library of America E-Book Classics

by Jean Stafford

Genres: Coming of Age; Literary Fiction; Satire

Synopsis

Twenty-nine-year-old Jean Stafford made a bold entrance onto the American literary scene in 1944 when her first novel Boston Adventure became a surprise best seller, its style inviting comparisons to James and Proust. Sonia Marburg, the protagonist of Boston Adventure, grows up in the North Shore village of Chichester, the daughter of an angry marriage between immigrant parents who remain outsiders in America. Seeking to escape the material and spiritual impoverishment of her childhood, Sonia looks across the bay at the State House dome in Boston for the promise of a richer life. Her dreams seem to find fulfillment when she finds a position assecretary-companion to Miss Lucy Pride, a summer guest at the hotel where Sonia cleans rooms, and moves into her Beacon Hill home. Boston Adventureis a perceptive satire of upper-class Boston society and a quicksilver portrait of a young woman trying to navigate a singular transit between very different worlds.

Release date: June 29, 2021

Publisher: NYRB Classics

Print pages: 512

Sample

ONE

1

BECAUSE we were very poor and could not buy another bed, I used to sleep on a pallet made of old coats and comforters in the same room with my mother and father. When I played wishing games or said “Star light, star bright,” my first wish always was that I might have a room of my own, and the one I imagined was Miss Pride’s at the Hotel Barstow which I sometimes had to clean when my mother, the chambermaid, was not feeling well. I knew its details so thoroughly that I had only to say to myself the words “Miss Pride’s room” and at once my feet stood on the tawny rug with its huge faded peonies, and before me was the window seat covered with flat, flowered cushions, at one end of which was a folded afghan, at the other, three big soft pillows on which cherubs floated amongst blue daisies, holding up in their dimpled hands a misty picture of a castle. And I could gaze through the windows which overlooked the bay. On a clear morning, looking across the green, excited water, littered with dories and lobster-pots and buoys, I could see Boston and its State House dome, gleaming like a golden blister.

Often at night, I pretended that I was sleeping in the big brass bed, under the fringed white counterpane, my head upon the inflexible bolster. Turning over, I imagined I could hear the rattling of the loose balls which decorated the foot-rail and which, when I tucked in the sheets, gave the Spartan bed, with its hard mattress and thin blankets, a kind of saucy vitality. Suddenly, as if it were borne on a wind, there came to me the fresh, acrid odor of Miss Pride’s costly soap which she kept in a large carton under the bed. She was part owner of a soap factory, I had heard, and so, of course, it cost her nothing.

Some nights, though, my vanities were driven off, and I could not hold in my mind a picture of the room nor could I summon up the rich old lady. For on those nights, I lay terrified at the sound of my parents’ quarreling voices. I mocked the deep breathing they expected of me, but the air would not go down into my lungs and was caught like a hiccough in my throat. There was a raw-edged blade of pain straight through my chest to my backbone as though fear had laid back the sheath of my nerves. Anxious for morning, I lay on my back staring at the invisible ceiling or cautiously I turned over on my side, making out the contours of the sagging bed where my mother and father were enormously sprawled out and humped up, hissing their fury at one another. Until I was about ten years old, though, my distress did not continue after their voices had ceased and, exhausted as much by being an audience as they were by being the actors, I would fall asleep at once. It was not until then, the summer of my tenth year, that I learned, in what terms of childhood I cannot remember, that peace was to be desired above all things. The upraised voices, the bitter blasphemies, the profound outcries of hatred carried through the day. If at the end of it there was a silent night, I lay awake for a long time waiting for the storm to break, and in the morning got up fretful for my vigil.

Our poverty was my mother’s excuse for perpetuating the old anger. Although she had never been anything but poor, for her life in Russia before she married had been a tale of privation and suffering, still she had dreams of what it was like to be rich and, as she accused him, my father had promised her the finest of goods when he asked her to marry him. And what had she instead, she demanded. A two-room house in a fishermen’s village where the sand seeped in the doorways and across the window sills, where the winter winds gained access through the cracks in the walls, and where in the summer time the heat descended from the low beaverboard ceilings in a steady, unmerciful blast. And had she to eat the fowl, the caviar, the strawberries and melons and pears he had promised? Our fare was no better than the poorest peasant’s: day-old bread, pokhlyobka, side meat, and on great occasions, eggs. And did Shura Korf have a servant girl to go to the wine-cellar and fetch up champagne, Malaga, Rhine wines and Scotch whiskey, vodka and kümmel? Perhaps four times a year my father bought a bottle of corn whiskey from a bootlegger, and in the sordid kitchen they drank it in hot toddies which neither pleased their palates nor elevated their spirits and made them waken the following day with headaches, biliousness, and intermittent vertigo. Where were the yellow dresses, the summerhouse and the island in the lake, the solid silver samovar and the little black dog and the chestnut mare? What a brazen liar he had been! He was not the clever, ambitious man he had said he was when on the boat, caressing her as they leaned against the rail of the third-class deck, he had told her how he would have a great shoe business in the United States, selling only shoes made by hand and of the best leather money could buy. Why, he had declared he would have ten workmen under him! He would have commissions from the millionaires of New York City and Washington and Boston!

But see how it was instead: after ten years he was a nothing, a nobody. He repaired boots for the poor fishermen; he did not make them for the millionaires. He had not made a single pair for anyone but her, himself, and me.

My father, his pride lacerated, his shame festering would, at this point, retaliate. He would call on God as witness to his wife’s failure to observe the laws of marriage: she did not honor him nor love him nor obey, but had made for herself a stifling little box of a life where she did nothing but slothfully brood and cry because she had no yellow dress. What man on earth would want to work for a creature like that?

I remember one of these quarrels especially well, not because it was different from any of the others, but because of what followed it on the next day. It was in September, the week before the Hotel Barstow was to close for the season, and I was awake, sorrowing that Miss Pride would soon go back to Boston and that all winter long I would have nothing to do but go to school. My father had gone off to the Coast Guard house where he often spent the summer evenings, playing checkers and drinking home-brew with the men off duty. I was always glad when he went, for usually it meant that my mother would be asleep by the time he came in. But tonight she was restless and several times she spoke to me, “I can’t sleep. Sonia, are you awake, darling?” I did not answer and I heard her turn over, sigh, and murmur to herself, “Too hot.” It was always either too hot or too cold for her, and not even in the spring or the autumn would she admit that the temperature was pleasant. She would present her perspiring face to my father, or, in December, would hold out her blue hands and say, “You want to kill me!”

For some time I had been living with Miss Pride, first in her room at the Hotel and then in her unknown Boston house and I was either half-asleep or else so preoccupied with my thoughts that I did not hear my father come in and it was only when I heard my mother whisper, “I hate you! Christ God, I hate you!” that I realized he had got into bed and that the close room was full of his breath.

“Let me alone,” said my father. “I’m drunk.”

But my mother repeated her malediction over and over as if neither he nor she would ever realize its full meaning. After a while, my father howled wearily, “Then go away, for the love of God!” He turned over and the bed springs gave a prolonged creak. My mother, though, knew that he was not asleep, and she began to talk in a monotone, marshaling the injustices she had suffered her whole life long until their perpetrators thronged the room. She began, as was her custom, with the beastliness at hand: “He tells his wife to go away. First he promises her he will be rich and give her a fur cape and French perfume and a hothouse with a gardener to grow white grapes. And then, in a little bit, he tells her to go away out by herself in America where she don’t know how to talk to beg. He wants this wife of his to be a beggar! You wish it was winter, don’t you, mein Herr? So you could send me to the snow without shoes, me and my little girl. Well, sir, wait till the first cold weather and drive us out then. It won’t be the first time for me. The child, she knows the words to beg with.”

“You speak English,” said my father.

She paid no attention. The past was advancing slowly upon her. I knew, because in the quiet I heard her sighing and I heard her rubbing her hands together as she always did when she was thinking of Russia. “It will not be the first time a man drove me into the snow.”

“Shura!” implored my father. “Don’t tell me again! I will go tomorrow to Boston for work if only you’ll go to sleep now.”

Heedless of him, she began. Under the night’s still heat, her voice flowed like a deep, unbending river as for the millionth time, using the familiar words and images, she recounted the disasters of her childhood. It was a tale so fantastic that not even I, a little girl, could believe it. Yet it was one so horrible that to scoff at it would have been inhuman. In the pauses I listened but could not hear my father’s breathing and I knew that he was wide awake, counting off each episode as it fell from her lips and calculating how many more were still to come before the end. As she mourned on, the heat was dispelled and the cold of Moscow’s winter streets invaded the bedroom. As clearly as a few minutes before I had seen Miss Pride’s afghan and pillows, now I could see nothing but crusted snow, a little cold, yellow sun, and the blue faces of poor people freezing in the gateways and the alleys.

When she was nine or ten years old, her mother died. Her father, who was a tailor and a libertine and a brute, commenced to drink heavily at the funeral dinner and continued to stay drunk for a week. It was in January and it was bitterly cold. The seven children, whom their father and his rioting friends drove away from the stove, kept warm only by hugging one another while the revelers, warm as toast with vodka and the stove heat, poked fun at the shivering little bodies and the chattering teeth and the bright red noses. One day, Constantin Ivanovitch Korf began to malign his dead wife, calling her in one breath a whore and a pious old crone, though she was neither but only a good hard-working creature who had come to the city from the farm and perhaps had died of years of homesickness.

Here came a hiatus in the narrative and I knew that my father, like myself, was mouthing the words that were to follow. She brought out: “The Russians are always homesick people.” It was a minute or two before she went on, and in the firm enclosure of the silence, I seemed myself to ail like a Russian and a hot cloud grazed my eyelids.

“There was a yellow-haired German milliner who sat on his lap and pulled at his beard. Fräulein Lili, she called herself. I suppose she had no real parents and that was why she had no family names. She would sit there plucking the old goat’s beard and call him, ‘Constantin, my little bear.’ Ah, it was sickening!”

His grief had flown away like a sparrow and he shouted for a song from Fräulein Lili. One of the children whimpered, whether from sorrow or shame or cold no one knew, but whatever its cause, the outburst was contagious and directly all the children were sobbing and wailing. You would have thought Constantin Ivanovitch would be too drunk to hear or care. But he flung the woman from his lap and stood up, his feet wide apart, shaking his fist at his sons and daughters. He shouted that he was through with his brats, they could freeze that night for all of him. Then he advanced and together they rose, holding up their little arms as if to thwart the blows from his hairy hands. They turned and made for the door as he followed, slapping their backsides until they were across the threshold. The door was shut. The bolt was drawn. Immediately the milliner began to sing:

Till with age my hair starts graying,

Till my locks have ceased to curl,

Let me live in joy and gladness,

Let me love a pretty girl!

Let me live my life in joy and gladness,

Let me love a pretty girl!

The children scattered, knowing that no one would take them all in together. Whether my mother wandered by herself for hours or for days, she was not sure, she said, for such cold as the cold of Moscow tyrannizes over the light and the dark; the sun is like one poor candle in a vast hall, or else, shining forth with a rowdy blaze, it burns and the kindled snow sears the eye. But at the end of whatever time it was, she was taken into the house of a witch, so-called because of her profession: for a price, she mutilated men who wished to escape military service. She cut off their fingers or their toes or broke the arches of their feet. This Luibka was a dried and wrinkled old prune of a woman with a cackling voice and a bright, shrewd eye and hands which, even in idleness, crooked as though they held a knife.

“You would have come to Luibka, Hermann Marburg,” she accused my father. “You would be too lazy and cowardly to be a soldier.”

“I served my time,” he replied dully.

“In Germany, yes, where everything is soft. But you would have come to Luibka in Russia where the food is scarce and the soldiers’ boots are no good.”

The witch was not a bad woman, my mother insisted, but was only the innocent slave of the wicked men who patronized her. The customers might cuff and kick the little girl who washed the knives and handed up the cloths, but the old woman never raised a finger against her and never spoke so much as a single word of reproof. And still, though she had enough to eat and a dry place to sleep, there came a time when the witch’s kindness was not enough to stop my mother’s ears to the screams nor to close her eyes to the bloody blades and the anxious hound who sprang from his corner whenever a gobbet of flesh fell to the sawdust-covered floor. She was already a tall girl, about fourteen years old, when she left Luibka; and she was so comely that once she set about it, she had no trouble in finding work. She became a waitress in an officers’ tavern. From two o’clock in the afternoon until two in the morning, she brought the gentlemen dinners and tea and suppers with champagne as well as the occasional glass of vodka and Löwenbräu beer, imported from Munich, the specialty of the house.

In many ways, my mother felt she had advanced considerably in the world for she was supplied with a pair of handsome uniforms and she was allowed to feed on delicacies, and her tips, because she was beautiful, were by no means trifling. And yet, with all her good fortune, there were times when she would sooner have been handmaiden to Luibka, for the officers made such impertinent overtures to her that she could scarcely sleep at night for shame. Once, in her second year, a cossack whose advances she had rebuffed slapped her face in a drunken fury and his companions jeered her and to him they cried, “Touché!” A few days later, she fell ill of a mysterious fever. She recalled that two old nuns, friends of the landlady of the tavern, came to see her sometimes in the afternoons and stroked her hot forehead with their cold white fingers. When she told them that her sickness had been brought on by a ruffian’s spitefulness, they exchanged a glance and, smiling benignly down on her, they said perhaps God would call her to a convent.

All the officers were angry with Shura when she was well and went back to work, and as she served their dinners, they twisted her arms or dug their nails into her hands or stepped on her feet, and she was afraid to cry out lest she be discharged if the master learned how much his clients hated her. Once, as she was going home to her room a few streets away, a soldier followed and pushed her under the wheels of a cab; she was not hurt badly, but her face was cut and her whole body was one great bruise.

In her seventeenth year, she had saved enough money out of her tips and wages to set forth into the world. It was on the boat which brought her to America that she met my father. A week after they disembarked they were married. How great had been her hopes the day she left Moscow! Her fellow waitresses, clinging to her, sobbing with envy, had sworn that she would be rich. Disentangling herself and mounting the steps to the train she laughed and called to them over her shoulder, “Your turn will come. Come to a picnic on my island, my dears!” And how close to fulfillment had seemed those hopes when the fair-haired German boy, tall, well-dressed, smelling of expensive cologne, had promised her that fine house, that immense wardrobe, those journeys to Paris and to Shanghai and to the Panama Canal. Each night, as the old boat rocked and groaned through stormy water, he shouted his promises over the racket of the wind and the protesting timbers.

“What do I have?” she groaned. “Nothing. No dresses, nothing but slops to eat. Ah, Hermann Marburg, I hate you from the bottom of my soul!”

My father, now that the long, sad tale was done, had had enough. He laughed at her, and that laugh, made up of all the scorn of devils and all the resentment of the damned, made me half sick to death with fright and I was glad for the darkness so that I could not see his genial face askew and scarlet, for the sound could not help corrupting what it issued from.

“Hush!” said my mother. “You’ll wake up Sonia.”

But he only laughed the harder, gasping and choking as though this glee were a convulsion beyond his control. Then, quieted, in a solemn, even voice, he said, “The child should never have been born.”

His words concluded the scene. Worn out, they went to sleep. Over and over, until my eyes closed, I imagined the day on which my parents would die and Miss Pride would come to take me to live at the Hotel, if they died in the summer, or in Boston, if in the winter. Or I watched the waves part and saw a dry path laid for me between the water’s furniture and then I stepped forward off the beach and walked across to the first wharf in Boston harbor. I could hear the calm waves washing the rocks and the shore and although my mind was far away, I could hear their undertone, gentle and melancholy, reiterating endlessly my father’s words: the child should never have been born.

2

On the following morning, both my parents slept late, and I was on edge, fearful that my mother would not be on time at the Hotel or that a customer would come to my father’s cobbling shop at the rear of the house and finding the place closed would leave and not return. My worry made my fingers all impatient thumbs and the fire would not start for me. Through a shimmering veil of tears, particulars of the room, aglow with morning sunshine, were distorted in a dream-like beauty: the stains of the dark blue sink under the window were invisible and it appeared, with the glittering water-drops that depended from its brassy taps, patinated with green, like some old and precious vessel. The crimson geraniums on the sill above were blurred in a tropical splendor. As the kindling caught, my eyes cleared, winking away the transformation of the sink and seeing once again its preposterously graceful legs and its drain-board bristling with sodden splinters. I counted slowly to sixty before I lifted the stove-lid again to see the progress of the fire, and as I counted, stared at the two pictures which hung one above the other over the table. The lower one was a barn-yard scene of russet hens and two majestic roosters avidly pecking at the foot of a pile of manure while beyond them there loomed a red barn from which stared out a thoughtful cow. The higher picture represented two little girls in white dresses and white satin slippers playing with five white puppies under the supervision of the snow-white mother dog.

When the kindling had caught, I dropped in a few lumps of coal, then waited until I had counted two hundred before I closed the damper. I gazed at one object until I had counted fifty and then shifted my eyes to another. We had three hard chairs with imitation leather seats adorned with lions’ heads in bas-relief; a bright red step-ladder; a footstool made of a cheese box; a pea-green washstand where stood a pitcher and bowl, discarded by the Hotel Barstow. Long ago, when he had bought the house, my father had put shelves up against one wall which were called “the book shelves” although they contained only a German translation of Riders of the Purple Sage, a Bible, my schoolbooks and a very old copy of Harper’s Magazine in which I had one time read a bewildering advertisement: “Everyone wants a gold tooth. Now you too can have one by sending only ten cents (10¢) for a complete Dento-Kit.” The shelves were crowded with pliers, hammers, Mason jars full of bacon grease as old as myself, an empty caviar can which my mother fondled now and again in memory of the day, ages ago, when she had eaten its contents; broken pipes, broken knives, shattered sea-shells, a landing net, a wooden snake, a gauze bag filled with venerable headache pills.

Just as I lifted the stove-lid for the third time, the door to the bedroom burst open and my parents tumbled out, shouting at me to put the kettle on for tea and to run unlock the shop and to run to the Hotel to say Mamma was not well today and I would do for her. These tousled, foolish creatures seemed not the same at all as those hobgoblins who had rollicked and bawled in their temper tantrum the night before. My father, while he rubbed his eyes with one hand, patted my cheek with the other and said, “Good morning, Fräulein. Look sharp, there. Today is the day we get rich all of a sudden, ni’t wahr?” My mother did not hear him, for she was running water at the tap for her perfunctory toilet.

My father gave me then a purposeless wink and nodded toward the box of corn flakes on the table. “Esel von Hexensee hasn’t eaten his hay yet.” This was my favorite joke. Out in the shop, in the dark little room that smelled of pipe smoke and leather, he made up stories, pretending that I was a boy named Fritz or a donkey named Esel von Hexensee, and if I were the latter, he would fit a saddle to my back and two Concord grape baskets for panniers and drive me up the Zugspitz for some droll, pious purpose such as taking hot soup to Fritz who had fainted from the altitude. The games delighted me and when he was tired of playing, I would beg him to go on. “Na,” he would say, suddenly sober. “I am stiff from beating that dummkopf Esel,” and picking me up like a cat, he would put me out of the shop and bolt the door behind me.

I drank a cup of tea that had not brewed long enough, swallowed a few spoonfuls of corn flakes and ran out of the house towards the road leading to the Hotel. The fishermen were untying their boats and calling greetings to one another. Their wives stood on the doorsteps complaining to their neighbors that it looked like “another scorcher.” Mrs. Henderson, who lived next door to us, cried something to me but I did not hear what she said and I ran on, flinging back, with no thought of its meaning, “I know it!”

We did not live far from the Hotel, perhaps no more than a quarter of a mile, but because after the cluster of fishermen’s cottages there were no houses at all on either side of the curving white road, it seemed a long and tedious distance. Here there were no shade trees to interrupt the glare of the sand and the dry flowers that straggled half-heartedly along the road were too dwarfed even to cast a shadow. It was a relief to take a turning and then, from a slight rise, to see the big white frame Hotel with its bright flower beds and its verandas where hung baskets of fern and ivy.

The Hotel Barstow was the sort of place which never changes and then, with very age, it falls and the site is used for a new structure. Such a day was impossible to imagine. Anyone who had lived there assumed that the stuffed hoot-owls and the Wilson snipes and the herons would go on forever patiently standing on one leg in hoary moss or placidly sitting on unseen eggs behind their glass cases in the dining-room, that until the end of time the same old ladies, musty-smelling and enfeebled, would be offered cream-of-wheat as the first entrée on the evening menu. Forever, too, the same sort of pert, plump man would stand behind the curved desk in the lobby, fetching down keys and mail and inquiring after his guests’ health.

Miss Pride, an early riser, was drilling on the beach, unwithered in spite of the sun which was already very warm. The clerk, Mr. Hagethorn, called from the veranda, “Well, Miss Pride, is it hot enough for you today?”

Unsmilingly she replied, “I observe no change from yesterday. Has the mercury risen?” Even in midsummer, she always wore black broadcloth suits and an olive beaver hat. She apparently suffered neither from the heat nor from the cold, for she did not shiver or perspire, and she was never heard to discuss the temperature.

I slackened my pace in order to hold her in my vision: straight as a gun-barrel, she carried her lengthy shadow up and down the golden sand; or she rested it, squarely facing Boston, looking with her formidable eyes into the very conscience of her care-taker who was probably loafing on the job. I had heard someone say of my mother, “She is beautiful except in one thing, her eyes are too large.” I believed, therefore, that Miss Pride was beautiful for hers were very small. They were eyes more like a bird’s than any other creature’s: that is, such was their intensity and their sharp change of direction (they never wandered, but rather, disconnected their focus from one point of concentration and abruptly fixed it upon the next) that they gave the impression of being flat to the skull or slightly convex, that they had a container more like a plate than a socket. They were “on” her head rather than “in” it. I suppose in her passport they were called “gray” or “hazel,” but to me they were “cold gold” and were like the yellow haze that followed sundown when the shine of the sand was gone.

I hesitated a moment in the hope that she might turn and greet me. A sigh, involuntary and profound, ruffled up through my lips and when it had passed, I ran to the back of the Hotel. Without explaining to the head chambermaid that my mother was ill, I snatched a mop and a broom and a dust-cloth from the closet off the kitchen and ran up the backstairs two at a time. For I wanted to repeat the strange experience I had once had of regarding Miss Pride through the windows of her very own bedroom. She was still on the beach when I stole to the central window. Now a few bathers had come for an early dip and Miss Pride was plowing up and down through the sand, fixing them with her clear, indifferent eyes as though, without loss of dignity to herself, her gaze could penetrate them to their very giblets. As I watched her, taking in with admiration each detail of her immaculate attire and her proud carriage, I heard, from the adjoining room, embedded in a yawn, the waking squeal of Mrs. McKenzie, a garrulous and motherly old woman whom I had always disliked. Her room was no pleasure to clean: her bed was strewn with corsets and short-sleeved nightdresses, and on her bedside table, I often found drying apple cores which I removed gingerly, having in my mind an image of her with her sparse hair unpinned sitting up in bed cropping with her large false teeth. Upon the bureau, amongst sticky bottles of vile black syrups and tonics and jars of fetid salve, there lay her bunion plasters and her ropes of brown hair which she sometimes arranged in a lofty cone on top of her head. Usually she was in the room when I entered and she saluted me with disgusting moonshine as “mother’s little helper” or asked me if my “beauteous mamma” was sick.

Now in Miss Pride’s room, there was never anything amiss. Perhaps once or twice a summer, I found a bottle of imported wine or whiskey on her writing desk; this was the only medicine she took and she took it regularly in small quantities. On the bureau, the china hair receiver did not receive a wisp of hair, and there were neither spots nor foreign objects upon the white linen runner. A hatpin holder, sprouting long, knobbed needles, two cut-glass cologne bottles, and a black glove-box, shaped like a small casket, were reflected in the clear swinging mirror. Though I should have loved to dearly, I had not the courage to investigate the drawers which were always neatly shut, but I was sure that they were in scrupulous order. The other old ladies, almost without exception, allowed the feet of stockings and the straps of camisoles to stream from each gaping tier like so many dispirited banners.

As I watched, Miss Pride ascended the steps that led from the Hotel beach, and I knew that now she would enter the dining-room and, after she had eaten one boiled egg and one slice of toast, she would examine the newspaper over her coffee while all about her, her coevals would be prattling of their sound sleep or their insomnia, depending on how the dinner of the night before had affected them. It seemed to me that Miss Pride looked up and saw me even though my face was hidden by the marquisette curtains and my body was behind the heavy drapery. I backed away from the window and began to run the oiled mop over the edges of the floor which the rug did not cover. While I worked, I heard Mrs. McKenzie thrashing about in the bed and rise finally, stumbling over her shoes, bumping against the furniture and repeating her vociferous yawn. The sound of the bed rolling across the floor, as I pulled it out to make it, roused her to rap on the wall and cry, “Good morning, Mrs. Marburg! I’ve been a lazybones again today!”

I did not answer. There was something in the tone of her voice, a quality of dampness—as though the words themselves were kisses from unminded lips—which embarrassed me. She called again, “Yoo, hoo, Mrs. Marburg!”

“It’s Sonie,” I grudgingly gave out.

“Oh. Well, Sonie, I’ll be out of my room in three shakes of a lamb’s tail and then you can come get me straight.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Get yourself a lemon drop, dear!”

Presently I heard her door open and close and heard her toil down the stairs, one dropsical foot at a time. I now worked rapidly, brushing my cloth over the bedside table, the writing desk, and the bureau, plumping up the cherub pillows and setting the bolster precisely at the head of the bed. When I had finished, I stood for a few minutes before the mirror and, as I had done many times before, pulled out the stoppers of the bottles and inhaled their clean, alcoholic fragrance. I opened the black box and gazed upon the white silk button gloves, the yellowing white kid and black chamois ones, amongst which were scattered single cuff-links, broken bone buttons, a mysterious, star-shaped brooch and three edible beads. My brief survey finished, I sat down before the desk and though I touched nothing, I took in everything: the brass letter opener with its carved wood scabbard, the matching ink-pot and pen and the dark green blotter in a brown leather holder, the calendar which gave the date, September 7, 1925. A week from today she would leave. All winter she would live in a house I had not seen and could not imagine, a house of which I knew nothing except that it was on the celebrated Beacon Hill, perhaps close by the luminous dome of the State House. My sorrow was reinforced when I saw a stamped letter, addressed in her careful hand to her niece, Miss Hopestill Mather, Camp Pocahontas, Southport, Maine. For, if I could not envisage the house which stole her away from me each autumn, I knew exactly what the little girl looked like who lived with her. Once, the summer before, when she was ten years old and I was nine, she had been brought by a small nervous woman, Mrs. Brooks, her second cousin, to have luncheon at the Hotel. She had been so self-assured, carried her head with such a grown-up dignity that she seemed advanced in her teens. I, who that day had been charged with filling the water glasses, stared from the sideboard at her bright red hair, caught at the left temple by a green ribbon and falling down her back, long and straight, over a white batiste dress, printed with tiny yellow flowers. As I passed by Miss Pride’s table on my way to Mrs. Prather, I heard her say, “How absurd, Auntie! You ought to know the counselors are all stupid.” And later, when I had returned to my post where, sick with envy of her voice and her cultured language I felt my face color and the pulse in my forehead leap, she signaled me with her white hand, calling, “Waitress! Water, please.”

I could linger no more in Miss Pride’s room, but cleverly I omitted to put clean towels on the rack beside the wash-stand in order that I might return after my other work was done, this afternoon when she had gone for a drive.

It was nearly luncheon time when I came into the lobby to dust the albums on the brocade covers of the round tables, and all the old ladies were sprily exercising the rocking chairs on the veranda, having a chat about relatives with diabetes and friends with Bright’s Disease, and talking of their own improper pains, their bizarre sensations in the region of the gall-bladder, and their physicians who were either “very understanding” or obscurely “unsatisfactory.”

“I love cucumbers,” Mrs. Prather was saying, “but they don’t love me.”

Mrs. McKenzie replied, “I’m the same way with seedy things. They give me heart-burn and of course they clog the colon.”

I drew back my hand with horror from the golden callosities of the “worked” covers on the albums for, smooth and round, they resembled human organs as I recalled them from the colored diagrams in my hygiene book.

A voice I did not know well inquired, “Has the Hotel Barstow always had a restricted clientele?”

“No, indeed!” cried Mrs. McKenzie. “About three years ago, a new manager came, a really vulgar person whom I’m perfectly certain was a Jew although his name was Mr. Watkins. And by the time I arrived —I came a little late that year—the Hotel was swarming with uninvestigated guests. I dare say we won’t forget Mr. Johnson in a hurry, will we?”

The story of Mr. Johnson, one of the veranda favorites, was retold for the newcomer. From what walk of life he had come was impossible for anyone to tell. But he was no gentleman as a child could see in the first glance at his reversible silk shirts, his diamond tie-pin, his bright orange oxfords and his loud, checked jacket. He teased the old ladies by putting a bottle of bootleg whiskey on his table in the dining-room in imitation of their phials of medicine. “Oh, my hair hurts so,” he would say and take a drink. He carried a walking stick, although he was neither a cripple nor a great walker, and the other guests thought it was probably hollow and contained a rapier.

“I’ve heard of such a thing, you know,” said Mrs. McKenzie. “When my poor sister was in Wiesbaden taking the baths for her arthritis which nothing on earth would cure—how much money she spent I couldn’t tell you and she must have suffered twenty years—there was a man living in a pension a block away who was proved beyond a shadow of a doubt to have a rapier in his stick.”

“But now,” pursued the unfamiliar voice, “now your manager is discreet?”

“Oh, Mr. Hagethorn is the soul of caution. He caters solely to those of us who have been coming here for at least twenty years. We call ourselves the Barstow family.”

Mr. Hagethorn, pleased with the compliment that had come to his attentive pink ears, bawled in authority, “Sonie, clean up around the ferns there. Don’t dawdle.” The ferns and several potted palms made a little triangular garden in the far corner of the lobby, and as I made my way towards them, I perceived Miss Pride, sitting erect on a straight chair, half hidden by the foliage. This was her reading hour. Today she held The Atlantic Monthly directly in front of her. Her thin lips were set in concentration beneath her short, sharp nose with its contracted nares. She did not look up when I knelt down, three feet away from her and began to brush the fallen fronds into a dust-pan. I kept my eye on her and presently I saw a frown invade her high forehead. I did not know if she had come to a word she did not understand or if she were annoyed with the chatter that came through the screen door. Evidently the old ladies were now scrutinizing the fashionable young people on the beach who had drifted down from the smarter hotels and who were clad in bathing costumes that exposed long, sun-browned legs. “I just don’t know,” said someone, “I just don’t know. Are we advancing? Or are we going back to paganism? I don’t say it’s immoral to expose the legs to the public eye: I say it’s not fastidious. Why, our chambermaid, Mrs. Marburg, has more modesty than those young ladies out there who, you can rest assured, either have come out or will come out at the Chilton Club.”

Even at this mention of my mother and although she must have known that I was beside her, Miss Pride did not look at me. Her frown deepened; reluctantly she closed her magazine just as the only male guest of the Hotel, Mr. Brock, slipped quietly through two pots of fern, carrying with him a folding chair which he set down beside hers. What impressed me in that moment was that the frown, which had lasted two or three minutes, showed that she had known of his approach long before I either heard or saw him.

“Good morning! I hope I am not disturbing you at your devotions?” The chuckle following his remark was not returned and Miss Pride only said, “Good morning.”

Mr. Brock was a soft-spoken and scholarly old man who, although he had come from New York, called himself “a professional Bostonian.” He was the victim of a delusion which he propounded, whenever he had the opportunity, to myself, my mother, the Mexican gardener, Gonzales, to Mr. Hagethorn, to the waitresses. He believed that of all languages, only the English was capable of vulgarity, and he claimed that bad American books were transformed by translation into promising, if not brilliant, prose. He had made a collection of such translations, having E. P. Roe, for example, rendered into French and the Elsie Dinsmore books into Spanish. He had given my father his copy of Riders of the Purple Sage and my father, although he was totally indifferent to Mr. Brock’s thesis, so thoroughly enjoyed the book for its adventure that the old man danced for joy, sure that this was the proof of the pudding.

Now he produced a leather-bound book from his brief-case and handing it to Miss Pride, said, “I sought you out to show you my latest find. This is Bob, Son of Battle in German or Old Bob, der graue hund von Kenmuir and it is enchanting. Would you care to read it?”

“No, Mr. Brock, I would not,” said Miss Pride sternly. “I do not share your enthusiasm for foreign languages. And as for dog-books I had no use for them in my girlhood and feel quite sure I would find them even less to my taste now that I have passed beyond the age for juvenile literature.”

He was not rebuffed. “I admire your linguistic singleness, Miss Pride, since in you I am sure it is the result of strong nationalistic convictions. Alas, we are not all by opinion or antecedents eligible for membership in the English Speaking Union.”

“I am not a member of the English Speaking Union,” she returned. “But in any case your remark is, to use a foreign phrase, a non sequitur.”

Mr. Brock, receiving the book which she extended, allowed his disappointment to show briefly in his foolish old face and then, catching sight of me, he cried, “Now here is someone whose father will appreciate the book.” In a voice a little lower but not intended to be inaudible to me, he added, “Did you realize that this child’s father is an educated man?”

“I believe I haven’t had the pleasure of knowing him.” Miss Pride took me in, perhaps for the first time since I had been coming to the Hotel, and I felt that in her rapid but comprehensive examination of my face and person she had discerned everything about me, that she knew I had once broken my collarbone, that I did poorly in arithmetic and singing and well in reading, and that brushing my teeth had not yet become habitual with me.

“Yes,” Mr. Brock went on, “Hermann Marburg, the Chichester cobbler, is an educated man. A graduate of the gymnasium of Würzburg, Germany, and, except for an ineffacable accent which I myself find appealing, has been completely bilingual since the age of eleven, and partially trilingual—his third language, of course, being French—since the age of fifteen.”

Miss Pride did not seem impressed but rather than humiliate me, as I assumed, said nothing. “I have had several illuminating conversations with Mr. Marburg, sometimes in German, sometimes in English. I neglected to mention, by the way, that through his wife he has also picked up quite a considerable Russian vocabulary. Now a graduate of a gymnasium, Miss Pride, as you are perhaps not aware, is, if anything better educated than a candidate for an American baccalaureate degree. Yet the gymnasium is the counterpart of our preparatory school!”

“What do they learn?” inquired Miss Pride, frankly dubious.

“Having been something of a Latinist myself at Mr. Greenough’s, naturally I admire Mr. Marburg’s firm classical foundation. I must admit his Latin is less literary than ecclesiastical, for he was trained by the Franciscans, but it is, nevertheless, good, sound Latin. In addition he knows history. Oh, he knows his history well, Miss Pride! Roman and the French Revolution are his specialties. And then, although he’s a modest man, I have no doubt in the world he could put many of our Harvard men to shame in the field of philosophy. Literature he is not so keen on although he did drop the remark that he had at one time been a great admirer of Goethe. Now there is a man who has the perspicacity to see what I mean when I say that in his language Riders of the Purple Sage is a superb piece of craftsmanship.”

Miss Pride had had enough. She rose and her face, shaded by the wide brim of her hat, represented the pure substance of scorn. “You will forgive me, Mr. Brock, for finding your crotchet fantastic. It is my cantankerous opinion, sir, that you do not believe this nonsense yourself, but that you wish to disguise your appetite for rubbish. Not to put too fine a point on it, how could you, without the aid of some such camouflage, indulge yourself in Elsie Dinsmore at the age of seventy-two?”

Mortally wounded, he gave her a wan smile, “Your wit is all that it is said to be, ma’am.”

Less coldly but with the same firmness she went on, “What interests me about this Mr. Marburg is, does he make his shoes well? Does he know that craft, Mr. Brock, as well as his Latin?”

“Oh, I have no idea. I never discuss business with him.”

Miss Pride was looking at my feet, shod in a pair of white moccasins which my father had made. I was ashamed that they were so dirty and that my socks were ragged. She turned at the announcement of luncheon, but I did not fail to hear her say to Mr. Brock as they crossed the lobby, “I gather that he knows his business and has little of it.”

•

After Audrey, the headwaitress, and I had set the tables for dinner, I went upstairs with Miss Pride’s fresh towels. ...