Saratoga Trunk Page 17

  But he knew he would never go.

  X

  In the fortnight following Clio’s arrival old Madam Van Steed was made to realize that her male offspring in Saratoga was even more in need of her maternal protection than was her ailing daughter in Newport. News of Bartholomew’s preoccupation with a mysterious and dazzling widow traveled to her on the lightning wings of hotel gossip. Bag and baggage, the beldame arrived, took one look at what she termed the shenanigans of the dramatic Mrs. De Chanfret, and boomed in her deepest chest tones, “De Trenaunay de Chanfret de Fiddlesticks! The woman’s an adventuress! It’s written all over her!”

  But before her antagonist’s arrival Clio Dulaine had had a fortnight’s advantage. And in less than two days after Madam Van Steed’s announcement the Widow De Chanfret had managed to bring about a cleavage in the none too solid structure of that bizarre edifice called Saratoga society.

  On one side were ranged the embattled dowagers holding the piazza front lines, their substantial backs to the wall at the Friday night hops. Behind their General, Madam Van Steed, rallied the conservatives, the bootlickers, the socially insecure and ambitious, mothers with marriageable daughters, daughters for whom Bartholomew Van Steed was a target. Defying these pranced Clio Dulaine and her motley crew made up of such variegated members as Clint Maroon, a frightened but quaveringly defiant Bart Van Steed, Kakaracou and Cupidon, all the Negro waiters, bellboys and chambermaids, a number of piazza rockers who for years had been regularly snubbed by Madam Van Steed, and, astonishingly enough, that walking arsenal of insult, bonhomie, and social ammunition large and small, Mrs. Coventry Bellop of the Western Hemisphere.

  The batde had started with a bang the very morning on which Clio, refreshed to the point of feeling actually reborn, awoke from a thirty-six-hour sleep. The hotel management had been politely concerned, then mysdfied, then alarmed by the tomblike silence which pervaded 237 and 238. Messages went unanswered, chambermaids were shooed away, food was almost entirely ignored, a discreet knock at the door brought no response, a hammering, if persisted in, might cause the door to be opened a crack through which could be discerned the tousled head and goggle-eye of a haggard Cupidon or the heavy-lidded countenance of Kakaracou looking like nothing so much as a python aroused from a winter’s hibernation.

  “What you want? . . . Madame is resting. . . . We have all that is needed. Come back tomorrow. . . . Go away. Go away. Go away.”

  Once a tray was demanded. The Negro waiter saw that the bedroom door remained shut, and it was evident that it had been the Negress and the dwarf who had partaken of the food.

  Then, suddenly on the morning of the second day following the arrival of Mrs. De Chanfret and her attendants all was changed. The chambermaid slouching along the hall in her easy slippers at seven in the morning heard a gay snatch of song whose tune was familiar but whose words differed from those she knew. A fresh young voice, a white voice, for all its fidelity to the dialect:

  Buckwheat cakes and good strong butter

  Makes mah moufgo flit-ter flut-ter.

  Look a-way a-way a-way in Dix-ay.

  “Them funny folks ‘is up an’ stirrin’,” she confided to her colleague down the hall. “I thought they was sure ‘nuff daid.”

  Except for three brief intervals Clio Dulaine actually had slept through that first night, through the following day and the second night. Once Kaka had brought her a tisane of soothing herbs brewed over the spirit-lamp, once she had fed her half an orange, slipping the slim golden moonlets between the girl’s parted lips as you would feed a child. Clio’s eyes were half shut during those ministrations, she murmured drowsily, almost incoherendy, “. . . sleepy . . . what time . . . Mama ... no more . . . Cleent. . . chéri. . . Cleent...” And she had giggled at this last coquettishly and then had sighed and snuggled her face into the pillow and slept again. During the heat of the noon hour Cupide had stood in his shirt sleeves, a tireless little sentinel fanning her gently with a great palmleaf fan as she lay asleep. Time after time Clint Maroon had knocked at the inner door. Sometimes he was admitted, often not. He had tiptoed away mystified and resentful but satisfied that nothing was seriously wrong.

  “When she wake up,” Kaka droned each time, “zoomba! Look out!”

  Clio had opened her eyes at six in the morning. It was fresh and cool this early. Wide awake at once, alert, renewed, she stood in the middle of the room in her bare feet and nightgown and surveyed the world about her. Kaka, fully dressed, lay on the sofa, her tignon askew so that you saw her grizzled skull, so rarely visible that now it gave the effect of nakedness. She, too, was at once awake at this first sign of fresh life in her mistress. She got to her feet, her tignon still tipped rakishly.

  “My gabrielleClio commanded, crisply. “Go down to your own quarters. Make yourself fresh from head to foot, everything. Roll up those shades. Where is Cupide? In there?” She passed into the sitting room where Cupide lay curled like a little dog in one of the upholstered armchairs. Awake, he was either merry or pugnacious. Now, asleep, he looked defenseless and submissive as a child. “Poor little man,” murmured Clio, looking down at him. She picked up a shawl from a near-by chair and placed it gendy over him. But at that he, too, awoke, he cocked one ribald eye up at her, then he leaped to the floor in his tiny stockinged feet, shook himself like a puppy, and, running to a corner, slipped into his boots, shrugged himself into his coat.

  “Why didn’t you sleep downstairs in the room provided for you?” demanded Clio, not unkindly.

  “I wanted to be near you and Kaka,” he answered, simply.

  “Get down there now, both of you. I want you to wash and make yourselves neat and smart. You, Cupide, look to your shoes and your buttons. Be quiet. And above all, polite to the hotel servants.” She eyed Cupide severely. “No tricks. And you, Kaka. No voodoo, no witchwork. Your best black silk. I am going to bathe in that funny box. Like a coffin, isn’t it! But to have one’s own bath in a hotel—how wonderful! America is really marvelous. When you are fresh and clean come back. Then you will make me a cup of your coffee, Kaka, hot and strong. How good that will be! Then I’ll dress and we’ll go to the Congress Spring, early. It will be the fashion to walk to the Congress Spring, early. I’ll make it so. You’ll see. Get along now! Quick. Vite!”

  When the door had closed behind them she stood at the window a moment looking down at Broadway, watching the little green-shaded town come to life.

  The long trancelike sleep had left her mind clear and sharp as mountain air. She felt detached from her surroundings, as though she were seeing them from some godlike height. Curious and haphazard as her life was, there always had been about it some slight sense of security at least. In her babyhood there had been her mother, the luxurious litde house in Rampart Street; later there had been the orderly routine of school in France and the rather frowsy comfort of the Paris flat with Rita Dulaine and Belle Piquery and Kakaracou and Cupidon to give it substance. Even on her return to New Orleans, brief as the interlude had been, the Rampart Street house had again given her the illusion of security that accompanies the accustomed, the familiar or the remembered. Now, she thought, as she stared down at the main street of the little spa, what have I? In the whole world. Well, an old woman and a dwarf. In the next room a man I have known a few weeks. A blagueur, for all I know. Trunks full of clothes. Some good jewelry. Money enough to last me a year if I am careful. No home, no name, no background, nothing. I want comfort, security, money, respectability. Love? Mama had that and it ruined her life.

  “Food. That is what I need,” she said, aloud. She looked around the disheveled room. Hot, hot coffee, very strong. It was then that she began to sing as she turned on the water for her bath. By the time Kaka and Cupide returned and she had her second cup of Kaka’s coffee she was buoyant, decisive, gay.

  “Cupide, go downstairs, tell the man in the office that I have decided to move into the cottages. Kaka, you yourself look at the rooms. Make a great bruit, but everything dignif
ied and proper. Tell them I will not pay more than I pay here in this location. Here it is noisy and hot, and anyway, for my plan it is better to seem to be alone. This is not discreet, here. The rooms must be ready when I return from the Spring.”

  Kaka, rustling importantly in her best silk and her embroidered petticoats, stood sociably drinking her own cup of coffee.

  “How you going drink spring water after all that coffee?”

  “I’m not going to drink the water, silly. Vile stuff!”

  “Faire parade, h’m?” She rather liked this faring forth to stare and be stared at. “It’s time. Two days lost.”

  “Not lost at all, idiot! I could go for days now without rest or sleep. I’ve stored up sleep as a camel stores water. . . . Let me see. I think I shall wear the mauve flowered cretonne and the shoes with the little red heels.”

  “Red heels are not for widows,” grumbled Kaka. She began deftly to dress Clio’s hair in a Marquise Cadogan coiffure, bangs on the forehead, very smooth at the back and tied in a club with a black ribbon à la George Washington. It was a youthful, a girlish arrangement.

  Clio grinned. “But my dear husband, the Count de Trenaunay de Chanfret died—oh—at least two years ago. So I’m out of mourning. Even second mourning. I only keep on wearing it because my heart is broken. . . . The large leghorn hat, Kaka, with the black velvet facing.”

  It was scarcely half-past eight when they appeared in the hotel lobby. Clio, followed by Kaka and Cupide, looked spaciously about her, seeing everything, enjoying everything—the vast brass spittoons, the ponderous brass gas-chandeliers, the glimpse of garden at the back, the dapper and alert Northern black boys in uniform, so different from the slow-moving, soft-spoken Southern Negro.

  As she approached the great open doorway Roscoe Bean, looking more than ever like Uriah Heep, slithered out of his cubbyhole under the stairs. “Why Your Ladyship—why Mrs. De Chanfret! You are an early riser indeed! Is your carriage at the door? May I assist you?”

  “I am walking to Congress Spring.”

  “Walking!” His surprise and horror could not have been greater if she had said crawling.

  “Certainly. I am in Saratoga for my health. I shall do here as I and everyone else did in Aix-le-Bains, in Vichy, in Evian, in Wiesbaden. No one in Europe would dream of driving to the springs. It is part of the régime to walk.”

  Bean, murmuring at her side, was all deference. “Of course. Naturally. So sensible.”

  She stood a moment in the doorway, surveying the vast spaces of the piazza. A scattering of portly and rather pufiy-eyed men smoking large cigars. A few very settled matrons in the iron embrace of practical morning costumes—sturdy sateens, bison serge, relentless brown canvas, snuffy cashmere, high-necked, long-sleeved. Clio thought, I’d as soon wear a hair shirt for my sins, and done with it.

  Well back near the wall in a rocking chair that almost engulfed him sat a little man, thin-chested, meager, with brilliant feverish eyes. With sudden conviction, “That is Mr. Gould, isn’t it?” Clio demanded.

  “Yes.” Bean managed magically to inject awe, admiration and wonder into the monosyllable.

  Audaciously she moved toward him, Kaka and Cupide in her wake, a reluctant Bean deferentially at her side. “I must speak to him. Though perhaps he may not remember me. Perhaps you’d better introduce us.”

  “Oh, Mrs. De Chanfret! I really—”

  But it was too late. Deftly she covered his remonstrance by taking the office from him. “Oh, Mr. Gould, I was just saying to him— uh—to this—I used to hear my dear husband speak of you. I am Mrs. De Chanfret.”

  He rose, his eyes hostile, his face impassive. “I do not know the name.”

  Nasty litde man, thought Clio. She smiled sweetly. “You will recall him as the Count de Trenaunay de Chanfret, no doubt. Please don’t stand. After all, we’re all here for our health, aren’t we? So charming. So American!” Rather abruptly she moved away toward the street steps. No knowing what a man like that might do, she thought. But I’ve been seen in conversation with Mr. Jay Gould. All these frumps on the piazza saw it. That should soon be spread about. She dismissed Bean with a soulful smile and a honeyed good day and moved down the street, her attendants in her wake. She looked about her with the liveliest interest. A neat New England town with a veneer of temporary sophistication, like a spinster schoolteacher gone gay. Wall Street tickers in the brokerage branch occupying a little street-floor shop in the United States Hotel; millinery and fancy goods, stationery and groceries in the windows of the two-story brick buildings to catch the fancy of the summer visitor. A spruced-up little town with an air of striving to put its best foot forward, innocendy ignorant of the fact that its white-painted houses, its scroll-work Victorian porches, the greenery of lawn and shrub and ancient trees furnished its real charm. Past the Club House, Morrissey’s realized dream of splendor, its substantial red-brick front so demure amidst the greenery of Congress Spring Park.

  Clio Dulaine was ecstatically aware of a lightness and gayety of spirit and body and mind such as she had never before experienced. She had eaten almost nothing in the past three days. The hot, strong coffee had been a powerful stimulant. Every nerve, artery, muscle and vein had been refreshed by her trancelike sleep. After the clammy and stifling heat of New Orleans the pine-pricked air of Saratoga seemed clear, dry and exhilarating as a bottle of Grand Montrachet. Added to these were youth, ambition and a deadly seriousness of purpose.

  Here, in July, were gathered the worst and the best of America. Even if Maroon had not told her she would have sensed this. Here, for three months in the year, was a raffish, provincial and swaggering society; a snobbish, conservative, Victorian society; religious sects meeting in tents; gamblers and race-track habitués swarming in hotels and paddocks and game rooms. Millionaires glutted with grabbing, still reaching out for more; black-satin madams, peroxided and portiy, driving the length of Broadway at four in the afternoon, their girls, befeathered and bedizened, clustered about them like overblown flowers. Invalids in search of health; girls in search of husbands. Politicians, speculators, jockeys; dowagers, sporting men, sporting women; middle-class merchants with their plump wives and hopeful daughters; trollops, railroad tycoons, croupiers, thugs: judges, actresses, Western ranchers and cattle men. Prim, bawdy, vulgar, sedate, flashy, substantial. Saratoga.

  I knew America would be like this, Clio Dulaine thought, exultantly. Everything into the kettie, like a French pot-au-feu. Everything simmering together in a beautiful rich stew. I’m going to have a glorious time. How Aunt Belle Piquery would have loved it, poor darling. She’d have had one of these dried-up millionaires in no time. Well, so shall I, but not in her way. Though I’m more like Aunt Belle, I do believe, than like Mama.

  She turned her head to catch Kaka’s jaundiced eye and the strutting Cupide’s merry look. “It is well,” she said, speaking to them in French. “This is going to be very good. I can feel it.”

  Kaka shrugged, skeptically. “Peut-être que oui. Not so fast, my pigeon.” But the volatile Cupide whistied between his teeth, slyly, and the tune was Kaka’s old Gombo song of “Compair Bouki Et Macaques”; Compair Bouki who thought to cook the monkeys in the boiling pot and was himself cooked instead.

  Sam-bombel! Sam-bombel taml

  Sam-bombel! Sam-bombel dam!

  Now there was the sound of music. The band was playing in Congress Spring Park. They turned up the neat walk with its bordering flower-beds of geraniums and petunias and sweet alyssum. There at the spring were the dipper boys, ragamuffins who poked into the spring with their tin cups at the end of a long stick and brought up a dripping dipperful. Kaka had brought her mistress’s own fine silver monogrammed cup, holding it primly in front of her as she walked. The little crowd of early-morning walkers and drinkers gaped, nudged, tittered, depending on their station in life. Saratoga’s residents, both permanent and transient, were all accustomed to all that was dramatic and bizarre in humanity. But this beautiful and extravagan
tly dressed young woman with her two fantastic attendants were more than even the sophisticated eye could assimilate. One tended to reject the whole pattern as an optical illusion.

  Dipper boys stared, promenaders stared, the band trombone struck a sour note. Clio, enjoying herself, walked serenely on toward the little ornate pavilion with its scrolled woodwork and colored glass windows and its tables and chairs invitingly set forth. Kaka, very stiff and haughty, held out her cup to be filled. Then she turned and marched off to tender the brimming potion, while Cupide, in turn, flipped a penny at the spring boy and strutted on. Strolling thus while Clio seemed to sip and contemplate the scene about her, they circled the little green square three times, and three times the cup was filled. If Clio poured its contents deftly into the shrubbery, no one saw. And now fashion began to arrive. They came in carriages, in dogcarts, on horseback; a few nobodies came afoot, the women’s flounced skirts flirting the dusty street.

  The crowds began to arrive in swarms. Clio had been waiting for this. She would leave as they came, moving against the incoming tide of morning visitors to the Congress Spring. She did not know these people but she marked them with a shrewd eye. Later she was to learn that it had been the Jefferson Deckers who had dashed up in the magnificent Brewster coach, black, with the yellow running gear, drawn by four handsome bays. The black-haired, black-eyed beauty, partridge-plump, guiding two snow-white horses tandem with white reins, for all the world, Clio thought, like a rider in a circus, could be only Guilia Forosini. The handsome old fellow beside her, with a mane of white hair and the neat white goatee was her father, of course, Forosini, the California banker-millionaire. There came Van Steed. Now he had seen her. The doll-like blonde stopping him now must be the Mrs. Porcelain that Clint wrote about. Where is he? Where is he? Some left their carriages and walked into the park to the spring; others were served at the carriage steps, the grooms or spring boys scampering back and forth with brimming cups.