The Withdrawing Room (2 page)

“Then why didn’t you say so in the first place?” Dolph snarled. “Emma’s got a head on her shoulders, at least.” That from him was highest praise. “Mabel will raise hell on general principles, I daresay, but who gives a damn for what Mabel says?”

“And I’ve also mentioned it to Anora Protheroe,” Sarah went on, referring to an old and respected friend in Chestnut Hill, “and she’s terribly relieved that I shan’t be trying to stay on here alone. She’s going to see if she can’t get me a boarder for the drawing room. You know him, that Mr. Quiffen who’s her husband’s old fraternity brother or whatever.”

“Quiffen? Must have met him sometime or other, I suppose, though I can’t recall him offhand. At any rate, if he’s a pal of George’s he probably has sleeping sickness so he oughtn’t to cause you any trouble,” chirped Uncle Jem. “You see, Sarah, that’s how you work it. Drop a word here and there to the right people and you’ll find takers fast enough. I’ll start alerting the tribe myself. How are you fixed for beds and stuff, by the way? Shall I do a little panhandling on the side?”

“No, thank you. I’m reasonably sure I can bring what I need in from the place at Ireson’s. Mr. Lomax, our caretaker out there, has a friend who will lend him a truck.”

“Uses it to lug fishheads to the glue factory, no doubt, and your mattresses will stink to high heaven by the time they get here,” said Dolph with his customary optimism. “Well, then, Sarah, since you’ve made up your mind to cut your own throat, I’ll see what I can do about getting you a permit.”

A
FTER THIS FAMILY DISCUSSION,
if such it could be called, Sarah went into high gear. She got Mariposa to round up a few more brothers-in-law and sold the McIntire escritoire. She knew she was getting skinned on the price, but there was no help for that. Bills for labor and materials were piling up and she needed cash in a hurry.

Perhaps she could have kept herself going by selling off the family treasures one by one, but she saw no point in just surviving. Having people around her and work to do at least kept her from thinking too much.

Sarah was still handicapped by an arm injury that hadn’t fully healed. She couldn’t paint or wallpaper, but she could do small jobs and drive the 1950 Studebaker Starlite Coupe that had been bought new for Aunt Caroline and kept running like a charm by Alexander. That would have to be sold, too, if anybody was buying Studebakers these days. She had nobody now to do the repairs. Garaging and insurance at Boston rates would be far beyond her straitened means. She’d already made the grim decision to take the old car off the road at New Year’s, but right now she must have transportation.

When she wasn’t urging her work crew to yet more frantic efforts, she was dashing from the tiny, twisting streets of Beacon Hill—lined with unbroken rows of elegant and once-elegant townhouses in brick and brown-stone, with their Bulfinch fronts and wrought-iron grilles, their window boxes so carefully tended in summer, so festive now with evergreen boughs and dried scarlet salvia—out to the deserted Victorian clapboard ark at Ireson’s Landing on the North Shore. There, with the wind howling around her ears and the ocean pounding on the rocks in the distance, she roamed her vast, overgrown estate with Mr. Lomax, the caretaker, marking trees for him to cut and sell. With firewood at something like a hundred and fifty dollars a cord, the proceeds ought to pay his wages and, God willing, leave something over toward the back taxes. Sarah and Alexander had talked of selling off some of the land but she couldn’t do that now on account of the pending litigation. She could and did pillage the house to furnish her empty bedrooms. If she managed to rent the estate next summer, Mr. Lomax would have to borrow the truck again and bring back all the beds and dressers, no doubt, but by then she’d either have money enough for replacements or else have made such a fiasco of her boardinghouse idea that she’d have to pitch a tent out here among the chipmunks and live on roots and berries.

Going to bed totally exhausted every night had its advantages. Sarah had no time to brood over Alexander, though she missed him fifty times a day. She couldn’t keep calling the workmen from their more vital tasks to help her spruce up battered chairs and chests, hang curtains, do all the puttering odd jobs he’d performed so expertly and enjoyed so much. Charles and Mariposa did their best, and it would have to be good enough.

After dinner when Sarah was too worn out to work any longer, she would put on high heels to raise her five feet three inches to a more imposing stature, don a black crepe dress of her mother’s that was old enough to be back in style had any true Boston lady ever given more than a passing hoot for the vagaries of fashion, sweep her light brown hair into a twist that lent a few years and an air of dignity to her small, pale, squarish face, and grant interviews to prospective tenants.

Jeremy Kelling had been right about applicants. Once the news got around that the same Sarah Kelling who’d made headlines a month ago was now opening her home to paying guests, she had them camping three deep on her doorstep. Her chief problem was to weed out the insolvent, the impossible, and the sensation seekers who didn’t really want to move in but couldn’t resist a chance to gawk. For this she relied heavily on the superior worldly wisdom of her household staff. About 80 percent of the hopefuls never got past the vestibule. Those who did got a shrewd going-over from the apparently impassive maid and butler. A muttered, “Honey, this baby’s for the birds,” from Mariposa wiped out a beautifully dressed lady who was an ardent volunteer for one of Dolph’s inherited charities. The merest flicker of Charles’s eyelids turned away several others whose references and manners appeared impeccable.

Her assistants themselves were impeccable and then some. The pair had insisted on providing themselves out of Charles’ paycheck from the plastics factory with uniforms suited to their positions as they conceived them. Mariposa had elected to set off her trim figure and vivid coloring in bright orange topped by a frilly white cap with long orange velvet streamers. Charles was the epitome of what the well-dressed Eaton Place butler should wear, up to and including the white cotton gloves, though his were in fact drip-dry nylon which he felt Mr. Hudson would have pardoned since Mariposa made him wash them himself. His dress suit had come from the costumer’s with certain embellishments, but Sarah had persuaded him to save the red ribbon and the row of medals until he was either made ambassador to somewhere or offered a bit part in
The Merry Widow.

Indisputably the uniforms lent cachet to the establishment. The mere sight of Charles in full panoply was enough to discourage most of the inéligibles. Those who did manage to run the barricade, having been formally announced by Charles and then served a minuscule glass of sherry on a silver tray proffered by Mariposa in her beribboned cap, were far less apt to quail at the rates Sarah quoted.

The three had decided together that it would be easier and what Charles referred to as better theater to assemble the cast of boarders all on the same day rather than have them trickle along one by one. Since it was fiscally vital to set the day as soon as possible, the Tulip Street house began to look like the setting for a Keystone Cops movie with people flying in all directions at impossible speeds.

Sarah developed quite a talent as a nagger. When she flagged, Jeremy Kelling was ready to take over. Either because of his expert chivvying or because they couldn’t endure to stay and hear any more of his reminiscences, the plumbers, carpenters, electricians, and decorators made well-nigh superhuman efforts to meet their deadlines.

Cousin Dolph was as expeditious and no doubt a good deal more obnoxious in getting the required license. Thanks to the plethora of applicants, Sarah had her boarders all chosen well before the last nail was driven and the last curtain hung.

Mrs. Theonia Sorpende was to have Sarah’s old room. Mrs. Sorpende was a stately, handsome, middle-aged lady of brunette complexion, almost overpowering refinement, ineffably gracious manner, and a surprising streak of dry humor. She said she wouldn’t mind the two flights of stairs a bit, and added with a ruefully amused glance down over her Junoesque contours that she could use the exercise. She was a widow and dressed the part in a simple black dress and coat, though she had relieved the somber costume with a wine-colored velvet turban and matching handbag and gloves. She had few acquaintances in Boston and would be living very quietly. The name she gave as a reference was Mrs. G. Thackford Bodkin, a friend of Aunt Marguerite’s in Newport. With Mariposa making thumbs-up signs behind the lady’s back and Charles so far forgetting himself as to mouth a fervent, “Hubba, hubba!” Sarah dispensed with Mrs. Bodkin and accepted Mrs. Sorpende on the spot.

Alexander’s room would be occupied by a Miss Jennifer LaValliere, who probably would not be living very quietly. She was another who needed no investigating since her grandmother lived just around the corner and had served on committees with Aunt Caroline. She was perhaps attractive, if one could have seen beyond the frizzy hair and the assortment of garments awful enough to be no doubt the ultra chic of the moment. Sarah hoped the moment would soon pass.

Miss LaValliere had caught the career bug and was doing a business course at Katy Gibbs, which had also given her a plausible excuse to get away from her vigilant parents in Lincoln. What she’d wanted, of course, was an apartment of her own in town. Mrs. Kelling’s boarding-house was a family-approved compromise that couldn’t have been wholly acceptable to a nineteen-year-old with advanced ideas, but the girl was taking it well enough. She seemed to be an agreeable little thing on the whole. Sarah couldn’t recall that she herself had ever alternated with such blinding rapidity between ultramundane sophistication and fits of the giggles, but at Jennifer’s age she’d already become a married woman with two big places to keep and a blind, deaf tyrant of a mother-in-law to cope with.

On the top floor she was putting Mr. Eugene Porter-Smith, an elderly gentleman of about twenty-seven. He put Sarah in mind of W. S. Gilbert’s ballad of the precocious baby although he was by no means a fast little cad like that disreputable infant and certainly not about to die an enfeebled old dotard at an impossibly early age. He worked for Sarah’s third cousin Percival as an accountant. Percival vouched for him as a model of rectitude and what Percy didn’t know about rectitude wasn’t worth knowing. Moreover, Mr. Porter-Smith was into, as he said, mountain climbing and proved it by taking the three flights in high gear without a single puff.

Mr. Porter-Smith looked decorous enough, at any rate, with his neat three-piece suit and his sand-colored hair slicked back from a thinnish face that was neither attractive nor ugly but merely present in the usual place. His frame was spare and wiry, his height perhaps five feet nine or ten, his pale blue eyes sharp and inquiring. Mr. Porter-Smith was obviously a man who liked to know things; in fact he spouted information on any given subject at such a rate that Sarah suspected him of reading the encyclopedia in his spare time, which was surely a habit no landlady could disapprove.

Her other attic room was assigned to Professor Oscar Ormsby, a burly, hirsute man of fifty or so who wore hairy tweed suits and brown turtleneck jerseys and taught aerodynamics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just across the river. When Sarah apologized for the room’s being so high up, he grunted, “Hadn’t noticed.”

That was about all Professor Ormsby did say except to grunt again as he wrote the check for the first month’s rent in advance, which Charles and Mariposa had drilled Sarah always to insist on, and ask what happened if he didn’t show up for meals.

Sarah and Mariposa had that one all worked out. “If you call the house sometime during the day and let us know you’re going to be late, we’ll keep something hot for you. If you don’t call, you’ll be free to go to the kitchen when you come in and help yourself to a snack from the refrigerator. If you choose to eat out, we can’t give you a refund but we do allow you to bring a guest free of charge any time within the month. With proper notice, of course. If you haven’t missed a meal but still want to bring a guest, there is a ten-dollar charge. In advance,” she added, responding to the frenzied pantomime Charles was going through behind the professor’s back.

Uncle Jem had set the fees, and while they were indeed far from cheap they were still lower than the cost of maintaining an apartment and much less than living at a hotel and eating in restaurants. Costs of food, salaries, utilities, and maintenance would have to be deducted from the gross, but Sarah figured that with careful management and her monthly allowance from the trust, she’d clear enough to stay afloat until she knew where she stood with the bank.

Her basement room was the only one not yet ready to let. Sarah was still in a quandry about whom to put there. She’d abandoned the idea of students. They might not mind sharing a meager bath with the maid and butler or object to their occasionally somewhat rowdy behavior offstage since Charles could hardly be Mr. Hudson all the time. However, they might intensify the rowdyism and that would never do. Her upstairs tenants were paying for class, and class they were going to get. She’d just have to wait for the right sort of applicant, whoever that might be. If she didn’t, Mr. Quiffen would be sure to raise a stink.

Barnwell Augustus Quiffen, George’s old fraternity brother, had indeed taken the drawing room. Anora and George had brought him to look at it themselves. It was the first time they’d been in the house for ages, and Sarah couldn’t help thinking that away from their own ever-blazing fireside they looked like a couple of pigmy elephants gone astray. With both of them clad in baggy gray tweeds, with George’s soft rolls of flab and Anora’s short gray hair and white bristles about her mouth and chin, it would have been hard for a stranger to say which was the man and which the woman.

Barnwell Quiffen was a perfect Tweedledee, ovoid in shape and about to have a battle. He glared around the beautifully proportioned, spacious room, sniffed at Anora’s exclamations over Sarah’s excellent redecorating job, and snapped, “Where’s the desk? I told you this would be a waste of time. Of course it won’t do! I can’t live here without a desk.”