Around the World With Auntie Mame (23 page)

“Patrick,” Basil said, ripping the adhesive tape off my mouth. “We've been so worried.”

“
You've
been worried? What about
me
?”

“Oh, no harm could have come to you,” he said cutting the ropes. “I've been following you as close as seemed provident. And of course I was armed.”

“Well, why didn't you shoot? I didn't feel so provident at the edge of that cliff.”

“Don't stop to ask a lot of questions now, old boy. We haven't a moment to spare.” He started at a dogtrot down the mountainside with me close behind—mystified, but happy to be still alive. Naturally we kept gathering momentum, so that scarcely ten minutes later we were down on the road leading out of Stinkenbach-im-Tirol. Auntie Mame's Rolls was pulled up at the side, waiting for us. Behind, I saw Basil's little sports car with Ito at the wheel. Beside him sat Friedl, huddled in Vera's lynx cape. She looked scared stiff, but at least she looked warm.

“Patrick, darling,” Auntie Mame cried, bursting out of her car. She gathered me in her arms and held me. She was trembling terribly and her cheeks were streaked with tears. Then Vera, not to be upstaged, threw herself from the car and into Basil's arms, smothering him in marten furs, anointing him with smudgy mascara tears. “Basil! Oh Basil! My hero! I'm so glad you're safe. I aged a hundred years while you were up that mountain. Tell me, my darling, what did they . . .”

“Not now,” Auntie Mame said, trying to light a cigarette. Her hands were trembling too violently. “Let's get out of this horrid place. We've no idea how many . . .”

“Right you are,” Basil said. He got in behind the wheel and I, knowing the highways and byways of Stinkenbach, got in beside him. He threw the car into gear and we were off, with Ito following.

Except for having two eyes and two arms, the Hon. Basil looked just like Lord Nelson at the helm of the Rolls as we sped toward Salzburg. Totally mystified by everything that had happened that day, I prodded him for an explanation. “Well, you see, Patrick, your dear Aunt Mame discovered yesterday that Baron Von Hodenlohern—Putzi, that is—was a Nazi when she and Vera were looking out at the valley throught the field glasses.”

“Well, I could have told her that, only she wouldn't listen.”

“It was perhaps better for her to discover it for herself. And discover it she did when quite by chance she happened to see Putzi and his young brother Johannes out on a field drilling all the men and boys of the village. It was quite a shocker, according to Vera. The goose step, the Nazi salute—all that sort of rot. Well, needless to say, that was more than enough for your aunt. And you can just imagine how frightened she was for you when you said all of those unfortunate—but perfectly true—things at dinner last night.”

“I guess I did shoot off my mouth a bit.”

“And Mame had every reason in the world to be concerned. I discovered that for myself when I happened to be passing the
Herrenzimmer
and overheard Putzi instructing his brothers to do away with you on the mountain. If it hadn't been for those tiresome German lessons from that beastly old
Fräulein
of mine, I shouldn't have had the faintest idea what they were talking about. In fact, I couldn't believe my ears at the time.”

“Well, you might have warned me.”

“Patrick, Mame did. But you wouldn't listen to her. Instead, you went right along with Hannes and Maxl. However, that's not all the story by half. It seems that Friedl told your Auntie Mame everything last night and even showed her some of the things that are in the locked rooms of Schloss Stinkenbach. Guns. Dynamite. Cases and cases of munitions. And, for a house that doesn't even have electricity, one of the most elaborate radio stations I've ever seen. Those Jerries are damned clever at that sort of thing. You've got to hand it to them. Well, as I say, Friedl made everything pretty clear to Mame. She even told her about the ammunition in all the outbuildings. Well, you can jolly well see that Mame was beside herself with worry by then. It was a sticky situation and one that called for decisive action.”

“Yes indeedy,” I said, shuddering at the thought of what had almost happened to me.

“So when you set out innocently with those bounders this morning, I followed. Luckily, I know a bit about mountaineering—the World War, you know.”

“But all those explosions?”

“Ah yes, jolly good show, what? Mame and Vera saw to that. They simply went round to the various arsenals with a tin of lighter fluid and started fires. It
is
Mame's property, after all.”

“Gee, Basil, you must have been some army man to have thought of all that.”

“Good God no, dear boy. It was Mame's idea. It seems that her husband's great-grandfather, General Lafayette Pulaski Pickett, created the same diversionary action at Second Manassas by blowing up an arsenal there. At least that's what Mame said. No indeed, she conceived the entire plan. Greatest military strategist since Joan of Arc.”

“But did Putzi just stand by and . . .”

“Good God! Putzi! I'd forgotten all about him.”

“Where is he?”

“In the boot.”

“In the what?”

“The luggage compartment—whatever you Americans call it.” He stopped the car and we all got out.

“Oh, Patrick, my little love,” Auntie Mame said, wrapping her arms around me. “If anything had happened to you I'd have killed myself. You were so right about Stinkenbach— tatty, sinister little jerkwater town—and I was such a fool; it was almost too late.”

“Mame,” Basil said, “we've got to get rid of your Austrian baron.”

“Oh, heavens, yes!”

“What's Putzi doing back there, Auntie Mame?” I asked.

“Well, Patrick, I hated to do it, but he simply would not leave Vera and me alone long enough to get our work done this morning. So I knocked him out.”

“Knocked him out?”

“Yes, darling, with that ugly cloisonné vase in the
salon
. He was on his knees proposing to me and the opportunity seemed just too good to pass by. Then Vera and Friedl helped me carry him down and lock him up. I couldn't think of any place else to put him.”

Basil opened the luggage compartment, and Putzi, incoherent with rage, unfolded himself and scrambled out. “Mame! If you think this is some sort of amusing joke . . .”

“Joke, Baron von Hodenlohern? I was never more serious in my life, you despicable little traitor!”

Putzi looked up toward Schloss Stinkenbach, his face contorted in horror. Great black clouds of smoke drifted up from the hardly visible roofs of the outbuildings. Then there was a horrible thundering roar and we saw the roof fly off the castle itself. Putzi sprang toward Auntie Mame with the speed of a panther. But I was even faster. I put out my foot and he fell with a splat into the road. “I'll have you in jail,” he shrieked at Auntie Mame. “You've set fire to our house.”

“Your house?” Auntie Mame said. “I have the bill of sale right here. And by the way, my answer to your proposal of this morning is no.”

“But our munitions, our guns, our . . .”

“You sold it to me lock, stock, and barrel, Baron von Hodenlohern. I assume that the arsenal and the short-wave radio were included. Anyhow, I should think that your government might take a rather dim view of you and your subversive activities. Now get out of my sight!”

“Just wait,” Putzi snarled. “You're the rich American who thinks she can buy a castle and burn it down. Money to burn, eh? But when we take over . . .”

“It isn't costing me a penny, Putzi. This fire's on the Allegemeine Bodenkredit Versicherungs and Handelsgeselschaft.”

“What in the name of God is that, Mame?” Vera said.

“The Allegemeine Bodenkredit Versicherungs und Handelsgeselschaft? Why as any child could tell you, it's the biggest Nazi insurance company in Germany. I wanted to insure the place with Lloyds, but Putzi insisted on this firm. I mailed the premium yesterday. Now, Putzi, there's no need for you to tarry here any longer. Have a nice walk back to Stinkenbach.”

“Oh, and would you mind taking a message to your brother Maxl?” Vera said. “Just tell him that he'll no longer be bothered with having a wife. I'm taking Friedl to England with us. And tell him that I won't be able to become his mistress. My grandfather, who is a rabbi in Schenectady, wouldn't like it a bit.”

WE STOOD THERE IN THE ROADFORJUST A SECOND, Auntie Mame's arm around my shoulders, watching Schloss Stinkenbach go up in smoke.

Auntie Mame and Mother Russia

“SO AFTER THE TWO OF YOU YODELLED AROUND THE Tyrol, where did she take you?” Pegeen asked.

“To Russia.”

“To
Russia?
How could you?”

“Very simply in those days. Before the war, tourists were more than welcome.”

“I'll bet she wasn't.”

“On the contrary, my aunt caused a minor sensation in the Soviet.”

“I can believe that, but why would she want to go to a place like Russia anyhow?”

“Auntie Mame was a keen student of political science, always interested in learning more. Her Russian, um sojourn was, by and large, an experiment.”

“What sort of an experiment?”

“An experiment in living.”

ARE YOU COMFORTABLE, dushka?” Auntie Mame asked gaily. “That's Russian for darling, darling."

“As comfortable as can be expected,” I said balefully surveying the plush and mahogany interior of our compartment aboard the
Krasnaye Strela
, or the Red Arrow Express, as it made its lumbering, jerking, halting, screeching way across the dismal Russian countryside.

“Ah, my little love, let those scoffers on Wall Street say what they will about the Socialist Republic, but we have nothing like the October Line in America.”

“Nothing except, maybe, the Long Island Railroad,” I said. The October Line was really the old Nicholas Line that ran, or limped, from Leningrad to Moscow on the most casual of schedules. The cars were European Wagons-Lits, antedating 1917. The trip took several days. The toilet didn't work and there was no dining car, although the train stopped every fifteen minutes or so for people to bring on tea and black bread. However, Auntie Mame was In a New Phase and would hear nothing against Russia.

“Are you comfortable, comrade?” Auntie Mame asked Ito.

“No, madam,” Ito said and giggled.

“Ito! How many times have I told you to
stop
calling me
madam!
I have given you your freedom. I have released you from your bondage and set you free to find yourself in a world of men, after years of selfishly forcing you to the yoke of domestic servitude. I hope, Comrade Ito,” she said more kindly, “that some day you will forgive me.”

“You don't worry, Madam Comrade,” Ito said, going off into peals of laughter.

“Besides,” Auntie Mame said, “we should all feel very lucky to be riding in a first class compartment.”

“First class?” I said, wondering what the masses were going through in the other cars. “But I thought that Russia had a classless society. How come, Auntie Mame?”

“Why,
dushka
, it's because, uh, it's because . . . Well, I mean to say that . . . Why don't
you
explain to Patrick, Dr. Whipple?”

“Why, um, certainly, um,” Dr. Whipple began, stroking his straggly little gray goatee. “It's, ah, simply that, uh, ah, International, ah, guests and, ah, certain, um, Soviet intellectuals, um, are, ah, treated as guests of the, ah, government. Um. Yes, ah, that's it exactly. Just, ah, so.”

I was accustomed by now to Dr. Whipple's making absolutely no sense and taking forever to do it. He was an old poop of about sixty. Just what he was a doctor
of
I never knew. Several things, probably, from the scrambled alphabet that appeared behind his name. Dr. Whipple was one of those people who are always going to other places to do whatever it is they can't do wherever they happen to be at the moment. He had spent most of his life taking courses in abstruse subjects in far-away universities and accumulating initials to put after the Euclid (that was his first name, no kidding) Alonzo Whipple, Junior. They looked very impressive on his grubby little visiting cards. Auntie Mame picked him up in Budapest after her flight from Austria. Dr. Whipple was studying
something
or other at good old Budapest U. and had come to her rescue with a neat Hungarian translation when Auntie Mame was having a little difficulty ordering a Sidecar in the Abazzia-Kaveha. The rest was history.

Auntie Mame had been living like an Eszterhazy at the Dunapalota for about ten cents a day when Dr. Whipple, having befriended her, and cadged a free meal in that pretty Danube cafe, took it upon himself to revamp her social conscience. Every day they drove out in the Rolls to the Angels' Field to see how the downtrodden Magyars lived under the Horthy regime, with Dr. Whipple as our guide. He was a great friend of the masses, although it occurred to me that the masses didn't think much of Dr. Whipple. And I also noticed that he came back in time to take his meals at the Dunapalota, apparently preferring the Ritz cuisine to the noodle-and-potato dishes of the Hungarian poor.

It wasn't romance with Auntie Mame, of that I'm certain, because only Dr. Whipple's mother could have loved him. But it was reaction, and Auntie Mame's reactions were just fine, thanks. Having run, sick with revulsion, from a Nazi culture in Austria, Auntie Mame ran just a little too far and ended up with Dr. Whipple. The next thing I knew, we were on a plane heading for Leningrad.

Russia was very interesting for a visit, don't think I'm trying to be blasé about it, but Auntie Mame was able to see it only through the eyes of Dr. Whipple.

Leningrad, which used to be Petrograd or St. Petersburg, was just about as baroque as Peter the Great could make it. We stayed at the Astoria Hotel which, in its threadbare way, reminded me a little of the Plaza, inexplicably taken over by the management of a Bowery flophouse. We went to performances at the Mariinsky Theatre, which used to be the old Imperial Opera House, and made reverent tours of the Winter Palace, out of Peterhof and the palace of Peter the Great, to Eyetskoye-Selo for Catherine the Great's place and quite a lot of other elaborate establishments that had once belonged to the rich and now were the property of just everybody.

Auntie Mame had been thrilled by the happy lot of the Common People, not that she ever met any. “But simply
everyone
in Russia has a fur coat, my little love!” she cried. Since Auntie Mame was both nearsighted and In a New Phase, I hadn't bothered to point out to her that all the fur coats looked like ruptured tom cat. Besides, it would have spoiled her pleasure in buying all those beautiful sable skins at the Leningrad fur trading market. In addition, she found some down and out old White Russians who sold her a rather decorative, though splintered, antique triptych and some very elegant Fabergé Easter eggs. Thus fulfilled in Leningrad, we were on our way to G.H.Q., Moscow.

In 1937 Russia not only welcomed visitors from the West, the latch-string was a lassoo. I can see why. We put up at the Metropole Hotel, a hostelry that made the Astoria of Leningrad seem like Xanadu. There were no Louis-the-Whatever suites, just square, bleak rooms furnished in hard blue plush, a period I still think of as Stalin Standardized. Sagging balconies gave onto a bleak courtyard. There were private bathrooms, but in my own, I had to sit on the bathtub drain to keep the water from running out. There was no plug. But I knew it was pointless to mention this to Auntie Mame. She was In a New Phase, thanks to Dr. Whipple, and the Soviet could do no wrong, although, if any hotel in America had been just half as bad, she would have checked out before the bellboy had switched on the lights and opened the windows. I shared a room with Ito, her houseboy, who was terribly embarrassed and just couldn't get used to calling me Comrade.

But Auntie Mame loved it or said she did. With Dr. Whipple in command, she took Ito and me on endless tours of Moscow. Dr. Whipple had gotten out his soiled old Order of the Red Banner of Labor and, so honored, got us easily in to see such recherché sights as the new subway system; the taxidermy that was Lenin; a tractor factory; the Tretyakov Art Gallery; the Museum of the Revolution on Upper Gorky Street and the Sokolniki Park. It was all very interesting, but after a few views of public monuments, Ito and I were just as happy to go to the movies, where they showed double features, one film invariably a thrilling Soviet epic in which young Dmitri, head of the Konsomol, and his sweetheart, Sonia, go off happily into a red sunset on a new tractor; the other, and far more popular movie, was always something involving Shirley Temple.

Ito and I had had our fill of Moscow when Auntie Mame came bounding into our room. “We've done it, we've done it, we've done it!” she cried.

“Done what?” I asked, “got train tickets out of this place?”

“No,
dushka
, no. We're all going to Georgia!”

“But Auntie Mame,” I said, “we've all
been
to Georgia and you hated it. Remember old Mrs. Burnside?”

“Not
that
Georgia,
dushka! The
Georgia!
Iberia!
You know, darling where the Mdivani boys come from . . .”

“Where I wish they'd go back to,” I said.

“And that's just where
we're
going, my little love! Just outside Tiflis.”

“Well, a few days of Tiflis, even syph'lis would look pretty good after . . .”

“A few
days?
Ah
dushka
, how light you can be, carefree youth, when the whole course of your life is being re-routed.”

“What in the name of God are you talking about?”

“Hush,
dushka
, there isn't any God.”

“Be that as it may, what
are
you talking about?”

“I'm talking about the most wonderful experiment ever conceived by mankind, the Mother Bloor Communal Farm (English speaking).”

“The
what?
” I cried.

“Oh, Patrick, my little love. This is it. This is the goal, the target, the bull's eye of my whole empty life. All this wealth, this chi-chi, this dawdling about with wastrels who suck the blood of the workers in order to . . .”

“Who do
what
? What have you been drinking?”

“Only vodka with a beer chaser, like
any
good proletarian. Yes, my little love, Euclid, that's Dr. Whipple,
dushka
, has shown me the
way
and that is the Mother Bloor Communal Farm (English speaking).”

“Are you insane?” I asked.

“No,
dushka
, but I have been. All of my life. Yet now when we jolly comrades, English speaking, thank God, all get together down in Georgia; do everything together; live in complete independence of the Capitalistic world . . . Oh, my little love, I can't even
try
to describe what it's going to be . . .”

“I'll bet you can't,” I said.

“Exactly, Patrick love! Oh, the hand at the plow; the community loom; the people of all cultures, colors, classes learning, living, loving together . . .”

“Hey!” I said.

“Oh
dushka
, if only you could have a good, long talk with Euclid, Dr. Whipple.”

“I have had,” I said. “But what about getting back to America and college?”

“College! Faugh! Why, Patrick, you'll learn more on the Mother Bloor Communal Farm (English speaking) in four
days
than you could in four
years
of some tatty shut-away ivory tower. Oh, my little love, this is
it
. I've been such a fool for these forty . . . for
ever
so long. But this is so right for me, right, right,
right!
Euclid says . . .”

“Did Dr. Whipple put you up to this?”

“Euclid is a great leader and it is he, he and I, with the help of this wonderful, wonderful government, who will prove to the Doubting Thomases of the Capitalistic world that Anglo-Saxons can live richly and productively in peace and harmony in a culture of
culture
and pacifism that . . .”

“Okay,” I said, knowing that this was just another storm to be weathered. “Just tell me what to do next.”

“Oh, Patrick,
dushka
, I
knew
you'd be enthusiastic!” Auntie Mame hugged me and she smelled deliciously of
Nuit de Noel
. “Now you and Ito are simply to rush down to the Mother Bloor Communal Farm . . .”

“English speaking,” I added patiently.

“Exactly, my little love! And of course I know you won't mind taking a few of my things with you. Well, you're to get my rooms ready on this divine old Georgian farm and just give a hand to those who are already there. Dr. Whipple and I are to meet Stalin and Max . . .”

“Who's Max?” I asked.

“Maxim Litvinov, naturally,
dushka
, and Micky Borodin, and I
may
just snoop around to see if Anna Louise Strong is in town . . .”

“Do we drive there in the Rolls?” I asked.

“Oh how
like
you! That school! That trust fund! That Mr. Babcock! Trying to mould your life to the Scarsdale pattern! Whatever decadence have they all taught you? That you and poor Comrade Ito should be riding in a Rolls-Royce, manufactured from the very
blood
of the British workers, while millions are hungry . . .”