Answered Prayers

  At that time, the five reigning queens of the Casbah were two Englishmen and three American women. Eugenia Bankhead was among the females—a woman as original as her sister Tallulah, someone who made a mad sunshine of her own in the twilights of the harbor. And Jane Bowles, that genius imp, that laughing, hilarious, tortured elf. Author of a sinisterly marvelous novel, Two Serious Ladies, and of a single play, In the Summer House, of which the same description could be given, the late Mrs. Bowles lived in an infinitesimal Casbah house, a dwelling so small-scaled and low-ceilinged that one had almost to crawl from room to room; she lived there with her Moorish lover, the famous Cherifa, a rough old peasant woman who was the empress of herbs and rare spices at the largest of Tangier’s open-air bazaars—an abrasive personality only a genius as witty and dedicated to extreme oddity as Mrs. Bowles could have abided. (“But,” said Jane with a cherubic laugh, “I do love Cherifa. Cherifa doesn’t love me. How could she? A writer? A crippled Jewish girl from Ohio? All she thinks about is money. My money. What little there is. And the house. And how to get the house. She tries very seriously to poison me at least every six months. And don’t imagine I’m being paranoid. It’s quite true.”)

  Mrs. Bowles’ dollhouse was the reverse of the walled palace that belonged to the neighborhood’s third genetically authentic queen, dime-store maharani Barbara Hutton—the Ma Barker of Bab’s bunch, to quote Jay Hazlewood. Miss Hutton, with an entourage of temporary husbands, momentary lovers and others of unspecified (if any) occupation, usually reigned in her Moroccan mansion a month or so each year. Fragile, terrified, she rarely voyaged beyond its walls; exceedingly few locals were invited inside them. A wandering waif—Madrid today, Mexico tomorrow—Miss Hutton never traveled; she merely crossed frontiers, carting forty trunks and her insular ambiente with her.

  “HEY THERE! HOW’D YOU LIKE to go to a party?” Aces Nelson; he was calling to me from a café terrace in the Petit Socco, a Casbah piazza and great hubble-bubbling alfresco salon from noon to noon; it was past midnight now.

  “Look,” said Aces, who wasn’t high on anything but his own high spirits; in fact, he was drinking the Arabé. “I have a present for you.” And he juggled in his hands a wiggling plump-stomached bitch puppy, an Afro-haired pickaninny with white rings circling both her big scared eyes—like a panda, some sort of ghetto panda. Aces said: “I bought her five minutes ago from a Spanish sailor. He was just walking past with this funny thing stuffed in the pocket of his pea jacket. Head flopping out. And I saw these lovely eyes. And these lovely ears—see, one drooping, the other perked up. I inquired, and he said his sister had sent him to sell it to Mr. Wu, the Chinaman who eats roasted dogs. So I offered a hundred pesetas; and here we are.” Aces thrust the little dog at me, like a Calcutta beggar woman proffering an afflicted infant. “I didn’t realize why I bought her until I saw you. Sauntering into the Socco. Mr.… Jones? Have I got that right? Here, Mr. Jones, take her. You need each other.”

  Dogs, cats, kids, I had never had anything dependent upon me; it was too time-consuming a chore just changing my own diapers. So I said: “Forget it. Give her to the Chinaman.”

  Aces leveled at me a gambler’s gaze. He set the puppy on the center of the café table, where she stood a moment, trembling traumatically, then squatted to pee. Aces! You son of a bitch. The nuns. The bluffs above St. Louis. I picked her up and wrapped her in a Lanvin scarf Denny Fouts had given me long ago and held her close. She stopped trembling. She sniffed, sighed, slumbered.

  Aces said: “And what are you going to name her?”

  “Mutt.”

  “Oh? Since I brought you together, the least you might do is call her Aces.”

  “Mutt. Like her. Like you. Like me. Mutt.”

  He laughed. “Alors. But I promised you a party, Jones. Mrs. Cary Grant is minding the store tonight. It’ll be a bore. But still.”

  Aces, at least behind her back, always referred to the Huttontot (a Winchell coinage) as Mrs. Cary Grant: “Out of respect, really. He was the only one of her husbands worthy of the name. He adored her; but she had to leave him: she can’t trust or understand any geezer if he isn’t after le loot.”

  A SEVEN-FOOT SENEGALESE IN A crimson turban and a white jellaba opened iron gates; one entered a garden where Judas trees blossomed in lantern light and the mesmeric scent of tuberoses embroidered the air. We passed into a room palely alive with light filtered through ivory filigree screens. Brocaded banquettes, piled with brocaded pillows of a silken lemon and silver and scarlet luxury, lined the walls. And there were beautiful brass tables shiny with candles and sweating champagne buckets; the floors, thick with overlapping layers of rugs from the weavers of Fez and Marrakech, were like strange lakes of ancient, intricate color.

  The guests were few and all subdued, as though waiting for the hostess to retire before tossing themselves into an exuberant freedom—the repression attendant upon courtiers waiting for the royals to recede.

  The hostess, wearing a green sari and a chain of dark emeralds, reclined among the cushions. Her eyes had the vacancy often observed in persons long imprisoned and, like her emeralds, a mineralized remoteness. Her eyesight, what she chose to see, was eerily selective: she saw me, but she never noticed the dog I was carrying.

  “Oh, Aces dear,” she said in a wan small voice. “What have you found now?”

  “This is Mr. Jones. P. B. Jones, I believe.”

  “And you are a poet, Mr. Jones. Because I am a poet. And I can always tell.”

  And yet, in a touching, shrunken way, she was rather pretty—a prettiness marred by her seeming to be precariously balanced on the edge of pain. I remembered reading in some Sunday supplement that as a young woman she had been plump, a wallflower butterball, and that, at the suggestion of a diet faddist, she had swallowed a tapeworm or two; and now one wondered, because of the starved starkness, her feathery flimsiness, if those worms were not still gross tenants who accounted for half her present weight. Obviously she had somewhat read my mind: “Isn’t it silly. I’m so thin, I’m too weak to walk. I have to be carried everywhere. Truly, I’d like to read your poetry.”

  “I’m not a poet. I’m a masseur.”

  She winced. “Bruises. A leaf drops and I’m blue.”

  Aces said: “You told me you were a writer.”

  “Well, I am. Was. Sort of. But it seems I’m a better masseur than a writer.”

  Miss Hutton consulted Aces; it was as if they were whispering with their eyes.

  She said: “Perhaps he could help Kate.”

  He said, addressing me: “Are you free to travel?”

  “Possibly. I don’t seem to do much else.”

  “When could you meet me in Paris?” he asked, brisk now, a businessman.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “No. Next week. Thursday. Ritz bar. Rue Cambon side. One-fifteen.”

  The heiress sighed into the banquette’s goose-stuffed brocades. “Poor boy,” she said, and tapped curving, slavishly lacquered apricot nails against a champagne glass, a signal for the Senegalese servant to lift her, lift her away up blue-tiled stairs to firelit chambers where Morpheus, always a mischief-maker to the frantic, the insulted, but especially to the rich and powerful, joyfully awaited a game of hide-and-seek.

  I SOLD A SAPPHIRE RING, also a gift from Denny Fouts, who in turn had received it as a birthday present from his Grecian prince, to Dean, the mulatto proprietor of Dean’s Bar, the principal rival of Le Parade for the colony’s haute monde trade. It was a giveaway, but it flew me to Paris, and Mutt, too—Mutt stuffed into an Air France travel bag.

  On Thursday, at one-fifteen precisely, I walked into the Ritz bar still toting Mutt in her canvas satchel, for she had refused to remain behind in the cheap hotel room we had moved into on the rue du Bac. Aces Nelson, slick-haired and gleamingly good-humored, was waiting for us at a corner table.

  He patted the dog and said: “Well. I’m surprised. I didn’t really think you’d show up.”

  All I said
was: “This had better be good.”

  Georges, the head bartender at the Ritz, is a daiquiri specialist. I ordered a double daiquiri, so did Aces, and while they were being concocted, Aces asked: “What do you know about Kate McCloud?”

  I shrugged. “Just what I read in the junk papers. Very handy with a rifle. Isn’t she the one who shot a white leopard?”

  “No,” he said thoughtfully. “She was on safari in India, and she shot a man for killing a white leopard—not fatally, fortunately.”

  The drinks appeared, and we drank them without another word between us, except Mutt’s intermittent yaps. A good daiquiri is smoothly tart and slightly sweet; a bad one is a vial of acid. Georges knew the difference. So we ordered another, and Aces said: “Kate has an apartment here in the hotel, and after we’ve talked I want you to meet her. She’s expecting us. But first I want to tell you about her. Would you like a sandwich?”

  We ordered plain chicken sandwiches, the only variety available in the Ritz bar, Cambon side. Aces said: “I had a roommate at Choate—Harry McCloud. His mother was an Otis from Baltimore, and his father owned a lot of Virginia—specifically, he owned a big spread in Middleburg, where he bred hunting horses. Harry was very intense, a very competitive and jealous guy. But anybody as rich as he was, and as good-looking, athletic—you don’t hear many complaints. Everybody took him for a regular guy, except for this one strange thing—whenever the guys started bullshitting about sex, girls they’d laid, wanted to lay, all that stuff, well, Harry kept his mouth shut. The whole two years we roomed together he never had a date, never mentioned a girl. Some of the guys said maybe Harry’s queer. But I just knew that wasn’t the case. It was a real mystery. Finally, the week before graduation, we got loaded on a bunch of beer—ah, sweet seventeen—and I asked if all his family were coming for the graduation, and he said: ‘My brother is. And Mom and Dad.’ Then I said: ‘What about your girl friend? But I forgot. You don’t have a girl friend.’ He looked at me for the longest while, as if he were trying to decide whether to hit me or ignore me. At last he smiled; it was the fiercest smile I ever saw on a human face. I can’t explain, but it stunned me; it made me want to cry. ‘Yes. I have a girl friend. Nobody knows it. Not her folks, not mine. But we’ve been engaged for three years. The day I’m twenty-one I’m going to marry her. I’ll be eighteen in July, and I’d marry her then. But I can’t. She’s only twelve years old.’

  “Most secrets should never be told, but especially those that are more menacing to the listener than to the teller; I felt Harry would turn against me for having coaxed, or shall I say permitted, his confession. But once started, there was no surcease. He was incoherent, the incoherency of the obsessed: the girl’s father, a Mr. Mooney, was an Irish immigrant, a real bog rat from County Kildare, the hand groom at the McClouds’ Middleburg farm. The girl, that’s Kate, was one of five children, all girls, and all eyesores. Except for the youngest, Kate. ‘The first time I saw her—well, noticed her—she was six, seven. All the Mooney kids had red hair. But her hair. Even all scissored up. Like a tomboy. She was a great rider. She could urge a horse into jumps that made your heart thump. And she had green eyes. Not just green. I can’t explain it.’

  “The senior McClouds had two sons, Harry and a younger boy, Wynn. But they had always wanted a daughter, and gradually, without any resistance from the girl’s family, they had absorbed Kate into the main household. Mrs. McCloud was an educated woman, a linguist, musician, a collector. She tutored Kate in French and German and taught her piano. More importantly, she took all the ain’ts and Irish out of Kate’s vocabulary. Mrs. McCloud dressed her, and on European holidays Kate traveled with the family. ‘I’ve never loved anyone else.’ That’s what Harry said. ‘Three years ago I asked her to marry me, and she promised she would never marry anyone else. I gave her a diamond ring. I stole it from my grandmother’s jewel case. My grandmother decided she had lost it. She even claimed the insurance. Kate keeps the ring hidden in a trunk.’ ”

  When the sandwiches arrived, Aces pushed his aside in favor of a cigarette. I ate half of mine and fed the rest to Mutt.

  “And sure enough, four years later, Harry McCloud married this extraordinary girl, scarcely sixteen. I went to the wedding—it was at the Episcopal church in Middleburg—and the first time I saw the bride was when she came down the aisle on the arm of her little bog-rat dad. The truth is she was some kind of freak. The grace, the bearing, the authority: whatever her age, she was simply a superb actress. Are you a Raymond Chandler fan, Jones? Oh, good. Good. I think he’s a great artist. The point is, Kate Mooney reminded me of one of those mysterious enigmatic rich-girl Raymond Chandler heroines. Oh, but with a lot more class. Anyway, Chandler wrote about one of his heroines: ‘There are blondes, and then there are blondes.’ So true; but it’s even truer about redheads. There is always something wrong with redheads. The hair is kinky, or it’s the wrong color, too dark and tough, or too pale and sickly. And the skin—it rejects the elements: wind, sun, everything discolors it. A really beautiful redhead is rarer than a flawless forty-carat pigeon-blood ruby—or a flawed one, for that matter. But none of this was true of Kate. Her hair was like a winter sunset, lighted with the last of the pale afterglow. And the only redhead I’ve ever seen with a complexion to compare with hers was Pamela Churchill’s. But then, Pam is English, she grew up saturated with dewy English mists, something every dermatologist ought to bottle. And Harry McCloud was quite right about her eyes. Mostly it’s a myth. Usually they are grey, grey-blue with green inner flickerings. Once, in Brazil, I met on the beach a light-skinned colored boy with eyes as slightly slanted and green as Kate’s. Like Mrs. Grant’s emeralds.

  “She was perfect. Harry worshiped her; so did his parents. But they had overlooked one small factor—she was shrewd, she could outthink any of them, and she was planning far beyond the McClouds. I recognized that at once. I belong to the same breed, though I can’t pretend to have one-tenth Kate’s intelligence.”

  Aces fished in his jacket pocket for a kitchen match; snapping it against his thumbnail, he ignited another cigarette.

  “No,” Aces said, responding to an unasked question. “They never had any children. Years passed, and I had cards from them every Christmas, usually a picture of Kate smartly saddled for some hunt—Harry holding the reins, bugle in hand. Bubber Hayden, a guy we’d known at Choate, turned up at one of those chatty little Joe Alsop Georgetown dinners; I knew he lived in Middleburg, so I asked him about the McClouds. Bubber said: ‘She divorced him—she’s gone abroad to live, I believe some three months ago. It’s a terrible story, and I don’t know a quarter of it. I do know the McClouds have Harry tucked away in one of those comfy little Connecticut retreats with guarded gates and strong bars at the windows.’

  “I must have had that conversation in early August. I called Harry’s mother—she was at the yearling sales in Saratoga—and I asked about Harry; I said I wanted to visit him, and she said no, that wasn’t possible, and she began to cry and said she was sorry and hung up.

  “Now, it happens that I was going to St. Moritz for Christmas; on the way I stopped off in Paris and called up Tutti Rouxjean, who had worked for years as vendeuse for Balenciaga. I invited her to lunch, and she said yes, but we would have to go to Maxim’s. I said couldn’t we meet at some quiet bistro, and she said no, we had to go to Maxim’s. ‘It’s important. You’ll see why.’

  “Tutti had reserved a table in the front room, and after we’d had a glass of white wine she indicated a nearby unoccupied table rather ostentatiously set for one. ‘Wait,’ said Tutti. ‘In a moment the most beautiful young woman will be sitting at that table, quite alone. Cristobal has been dressing her for the last six months. He thinks there has never been anything like her since Gloria Rubio.’ (Note: Mme. Rubio, a supremely elegant Mexican who has been known in various stages of her marital assignments as the wife of the German Count von Fürstenberg, the Egyptian Prince Fakri, and the English millionaire Loel Guinness.) ‘L
e tout Paris talks about her and yet no one knows much about her. Except that she’s American. And that she lunches here every day. Always alone. She seems to have no friends. Ah, see. There she is.’

  “Unlike any other woman in the room, she wore a hat. It was a glamorous soft-brimmed black hat, large, shaped like a man’s Borsalino. A grey chiffon scarf was loosely knotted at her throat. The hat, the scarf, that was the drama; the rest was the plainest, but best-fitted, of Balenciaga’s box-jacketed black bombazine suits.

  “Tutti said: ‘She’s from the South somewhere. Her name is Mrs. McCloud.’

  “ ‘Mrs. Harry Clinton McCloud?’

  “Tutti said: ‘You know her?’

  “And I said: ‘I ought to. I was an usher at her wedding. Fantastic. Why, my God, she can’t be more than twenty-two.’

  “I asked a waiter for paper and wrote her a note: ‘Dear Kate, I don’t know if you remember me, but I was a roommate of Harry’s at school and an usher at your wedding. I am in Paris for a few days and would like so much to see you, if you care to. I am at the Hotel Lotti. Aces Nelson.’

  “I watched her read the note, glance at me, smile, then write a reply: ‘I do remember. If, on your way out, we might talk a minute alone, please have a Cognac with me. Most sincerely, Kate McCloud.’

  “Tutti was too fascinated to be offended by her exclusion from the invitation: ‘I won’t press you now, but promise me, Aces, you’ll tell me about her. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I thought she was at least thirty. Because of her “eye”—the real knowledge, taste. She’s just one of those ageless creatures, I suppose.’