Around the World With Auntie Mame (31 page)

I looked and gasped. Auntie Mame had taken a long yellow muffler of mine and divided it, like Gaul, in three parts. One was wrapped about her loins—just; the second served as the most inadequate of brassières; the third—and by far the largest—section served as a turban, even more towering than Mrs. Mont d'Or's. In addition she was hung with gold, with amber, with topazes and canary diamonds. Mrs. Mont d'Or, in violet and aquamarines, looked conservative beside Auntie Mame. Conservative, but eager.

“Do go on, Mame
chérie
,” Mrs. Mont d'Or said. “One feels so, um, passé, so
fin de siècle
way out here and not
au courant
with . . .”

“Yoo hoo, Patrick,
mon petit trésor, j'attend
,” Auntie Mame screamed.

“Well, you can damned well
attend
until
enfer
freezes over if you think I'm going to be seen with you in that indecent . . .”

She drowned me out. “
Zut!
Regardez
, Sari,
le pauvre petit
in that union suit he's wearing.
Droll, hein
? How I wish I could get him into something
chic et moderne
—a kind of, uh, how-you-say
cache de sexe
.”

Enraged, I stretched my bathing trunks to cover as much of me as possible. “I have a message for you, Auntie Mame,” I called sweetly.

“From whom,
mon petit trésor
?”

“It's very urgent
and
confidential,” I said. That brought her on the run, although I feared for her hastily improvised bathing suit.

“How do I look?” she asked.

“Like midnight at Minsky's. What the hell do you think you're got up as, anyhow? If Mrs. Cantwell ever saw you in that rig she'd have you run in, and I wouldn't blame her. It's the most disgusting . . .”

“Oh, don't worry about that old spoilsport. I've sent her to Beirut in the Rolls to buy binoculars and our bird logs. And since you weren't here to fetch and carry for me, I
had
to send Sammy Mont d'Or on the most important errand. That errand is Lucia and they should be in each other's arms at this very moment. Meanwhile, I'm having a perfectly marvelous time wowing Maman Mont d'Or with all the latest fashion tidbits. Of course I just make them up, but she believes every word. Do you think I might go in for designing beach wear?” she asked as she posed elegantly at the rim of the pool.

“Not if you want to keep on this side of the law,” I said.

“Well, you're holding up my entire campaign. What's this important message?”

“It's this,” I said, noticing that Mrs. Mont d'Or was engrossed with her lipstick, trying to duplicate the Ubangi mouth Auntie Mame had effected. “Go soak your head!” I gave Auntie Mame a slight shove and was rewarded by a resounding splash. Then I stomped off toward the dressing room.

“Patrick!” Auntie Mame cried. “Patrick! For God's sake throw me a towel!” I turned around to look and found the three parts of Auntie Mame's bathing costume floating, independent of Auntie Mame and one another, toward the shallow end of the pool.

THE NEXT MORNING AUNTIE MAME WAS UP WITH the birds—literally. I heard a lot of yoo-hooing and hallooing about sunrise and saw Auntie Mame loping toward Mrs. Cantwell in an outfit that only I could describe—because every stitch of it belonged to me—burdened with binoculars, sandwiches, and a guide to our feathered friends. The mainstay of her costume was an old turtle-neck sweater of mine, which reached almost mid-thigh. Beneath it was a dowdy pleated skirt made of the dust ruffle from my bed. She was wearing my best English knee-length hose, my brogues—with tongues—and my pork-pie hat, pulled down to the level of my sunglasses.

“How radiant yew look, dear Mrs. Burnside—
may
I call you Mame?” Mrs. Cantwell bawled. “Now, off to gaze at our birdies.”

“What fun, Lucy!” Auntie Mame called.

As they stalked up the hillside, I saw Lucia dash out of her house and Sammy dash out of his to embrace in Auntie Mame's garden.

“Oh, my poor feet,” Auntie Mame groaned at high noon when she had bade a ladylike farewell to Mrs. Cantwell. She sagged up to her room and kicked my brogues and quite a lot of sand across the carpet. “I'm simply sweltering under this sweater of yours. I . . .”

Just then Mrs. Mont d'Or's cockatoo voice cried up from the lawn. “Mame! Mame,
chérie
!
Bon jour!
I've come to kidnap you. We're driving to Aley for
petit dejeuner
! I want you to meet my friends.”

“Oh God!” Auntie Mame groaned. Then she threw off my hat, fluffed her hair, and leaned out of the window. “
Mag
nifique
, Sari,
chérie
! I'll be right down.”

“What are you going to wear this time, adhesive tape?”

“I'll think of something. Even if it's terrible, I can always tell her it's next year's.”

It was terrible all right. She took off all of my clothes except the turtle-neck sweater. She pushed the sleeves up above her elbows, put on all her bracelets and all her pearls, painted on her Ubangi mouth, and stepped into a pair of high-heeled sandals. “How do I look?”

“What pretty kneecaps,” I said. “Hey, don't stretch that sweater down any farther, it's all out of shape as it . . .” She was gone before I could say more. Below I could hear Mrs. Mont d'Or and her two overdressed friends groaning in ecstasy. “How
chic
! How divine.
Très jolie!
Where did you get it, Chanel?
Combien?
”

THAT NIGHT AUNTIE MAME, MORE DEAD THAN alive, entertained the Cantwells and Lucia at a New England boiled dinner. She looked a bit like Marie Dressler in a smart shroud made from my best blue dressing gown adorned with a strand of coral beads. She wore no make-up. The turtle-neck sweater was again called into play, this time ripped to shreds and stabbed through with two meat skewers. From time to time Auntie Mame pretended to be knitting.

Grape juice was served, and Auntie Mame's conversation was just about as intoxicating. “Ah, when I was a girl at the convent, the dear sisters—Episcopalian, of course, Lucy, dear,” she added hastily, allaying Mrs. Cantwell's dark suspicions of popery—“were ever so particular about our work with the needle. Ouch!” Her lips formed a short and most unholy word. “In my debutante year I wore the loveliest lace bertha. Daddy would have died if my, um, bosom—excuse me, Mr. Cantwell—had been uncovered.” Over the tapioca she went into a long discourse about the old families being the best families. Ours, it appeared, was the
very
oldest. Sanka was served.

Mrs. Cantwell was purring with contentment when Auntie Mame said, “And now, Patrick, you and Lucia may be excused to go to the movies. It's
Little Women
, Lucy—so sweet,
if
a trifle dikey. And we old people will just sit here and reminisce about the good old days—the cotillions, the horse-cars, the hobble skirts.”

“Such a pity your nice nephew is a few months younger than Lucia,” Mrs. Cantwell was saying as we left.

“Nonsense, dear Lucy,” Auntie Mame said, “age means nothing in marriage. Why Mrs. Mont d'Or tells me that you're
years
older than Humphrey. Don't be too late, children. No need to worry, Lucy; the Roxy's just a short way from here.”

As soon as we got outside, Sammy materialized. Mrs. Mont d'Or had been told that he, too, was going to the Roxy with me—a stag evening.

“Gee, thanks, pal,” he said. “Pick us up after the movies.” They went off to the garden.

I
went to
Little Women
—with Arabic subtitles.

When I got home to tell the lovers that
Little Women
had
finally
ended, Auntie Mame's house and the Cantwell house were dark, while the Mont d'Or house was ablaze with lights. There was no sign of Auntie Mame, but as I was getting into bed she appeared, looking like Sadie Thompson in a naked, scarlet satin rag that was slit to the thigh. It was pretty outlandish, but at least it had never been mine.

“My God, what have you done,” I said, “decided to take the Cantwells on a tour of the brothels?”

“Oh, no, darling. They've been gone for ages. I had Ito put sleeping pills in their Sanka and they were nodding by nine. So I just slipped into something cool—
and
the ice—and trotted over to Sari's for some late revels with the local Fast Set.”

“How were they?”

“Deadly. Lots of minor French Colonials, some Belgians, some Greeks, a ve-ry few wealthy Lebanese, some of those Silly Ass professional English, and some shrill international pansies. All rich, naturally, and
most
of them with eligible daughters!”

“Was it frightfully gay?”

“Both. Gay
and
frightful. I mean they all try so hard. They're stuck out here a million miles from nowhere with nobody to impress but one another and so that's what they do all day every day. It's almost incestuous. And the
pretense
! Some of them haven't been back home for ten years, but they'd die before they'd admit it. All they talk about are European resorts and restaurants and night clubs and dressmakers and playwrights that have been forgotten ages ago. They all scream with laughter at the dreariest old saws. They're not very hard to fool. And their gaiety is so
desperate
! Actually, they're just as dreary as Lucy Cantwell's crowd, but noisier and showier about it.”

“Is it the Golden Ghetto sort of thing?”

“No, Patrick, not at all. And that's what I think is so very sad about Sari Mont d'Or. If she'd simply admit that she's just a Bronx housewife whose husband struck it rich and forget all this
haut monde
crap, she wouldn't be half bad. But no. She's going to be the Madame Pompadour of this silly little place. Swanking about, tucking in her bits and pieces of fashion magazine French, changing her nice old husband's name—it's actually Hyman Julius Goldberg and he asked me to call him Julius—and driving poor Sammy into what
she
considers a desirable life. There's nothing of the warm Jewish mother about her at all. She's as hard as her diamonds and every bit as cold.”

“But maybe her objections to Lucia as a daughter-in-law are based on some sort of religious feeling that . . .”

“Not a bit of it, darling. It's money and chichi. If Sari were one of those Jewish mothers who didn't want her children to marry out of the faith that would be perfectly understandable. But she isn't. She'd died if Sammy
did
marry a Jewess. Actually, she's more anti-Semitic than Mrs. Cantwell, but in a different way. Probably because she's trying so hard to run away from it. I don't know exactly what it is, but I do know one thing. . . .”

“What's that?”

“She adores
me
. She thinks that I'm high life on the hoof, just as Lucy Cantwell thinks I'm the head of the ladies' aid society. They both trust me.”

“
I
wouldn't trust you around a glass corner, you big ham.”

“Who cares about
you
? They're the ones who matter and I've almost got them eating out of the palm of my hand.”

“Just be careful they don't bite,” I said.

FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, REVOLTED BUT FASCInated, I watched Auntie Mame seducing the two rival leaders of Shufti, keeping one occupied and the other out of sight while their children courted. Done up like something from a Mack Sennett comedy, she splashed in the club pool with Mrs. Cantwell while Mrs. Mont d'Or was safely off in Beirut being fitted into a turtle-neck tube. Dressed in my track pants, pleated evening shirt, tie, and her emeralds, she impressed Mrs. Mont d'Or and her fast friends at a picnic of absinthe and raw hamburger in the hills. In a grim middy blouse made of my pajama tops, she turned over her drawing room to a commotion which I discovered was a hymn sing for the Cantwell contingent. She was able to convince the Sari Mont d'Or set that jockey shorts and a T shirt, smartly wound with velvet and studded with star sapphires, were
de rigueur
for luncheon. Even though my wardrobe was going fast, Auntie Mame was making a terrific hit in both of Shufti's warring circles. Whenever I ran into either Mrs. Cantwell or Mrs. Mont d'Or, they were loud in their praises.

“Sew nice to have a real
lady
in our community,” Mrs. Cantwell bellowed. “I had no idea that dear Mrs. Burnside was a direct descendant of George
and
Martha Washington.”

Sammy's mother was even more effusive and just as hard to take in a burlap shift and a glittering tiara as she squealed, “
Oo-la-la!
Quel chic! La divine tante!
A true Continental!”

Auntie Mame was feeling pretty tuckered out from all the quick changes and the constant social whirl, which kept her hopping twenty hours a day, but she was the toast of Shufti and no doubt about it. After a week of the steady society of Mrs. Cantwell and Mrs. Mont d'Or, she came to my room one morning dressed just about like anyone else. “Good morning, my little love. Do you happen to know what day this is?”

“Certainly. It's Friday. Good morning.”

“Of course it's Friday, but it's more than that. It's also Sammy Mont d'Or's twenty-first birthday.”

“Isn't that nice. What are you giving him, some more of your brilliant advice?”

“No, darling. I'm giving him three things: a party, the car, and Ito.”

“The car?
Ito?
Why would a boy of twenty-one want a big Rolls-Royce and what do you think Ito is, a slave?”

“Those are just temporary gifts, Patrick. A loan, so to speak. And as for the party, it's going to be so big that I'm having it at the club and . . .”

“Exactly who's coming to this brawl?”

“Oh, everybody—the Mont d'Ors and their friends, the Cantwells and
their
friends . . .”