Agnes talked of Gene a lot that summer.
She told us how miserable he’d been when they’d spent the winter at Old House a couple of years earlier, when he was working on The Moon of the Caribbees. The play was scheduled to open at the Provincetown Theatre in New York at the end of December, but they couldn’t afford to live in the city in the months before the production, and going to Agnes’s family home on the coast of New Jersey had seemed a good solution. Gene could take the train in to New York for rehearsals, and Agnes promised him that he would have his solitude for writing. Absolutely no visitors, he’d warned.
Gene had sworn off liquor, that was one good thing. He was determined to work. But that didn’t make everything rosy for Agnes. Far from it. He was irritable, and she was nervous and angry. She’d done everything she could think of to make the house pleasing to Gene, to make it a quiet haven so that he could write in peace. She’d cleared the dining room when he decided that was where he wanted to work; she’d even had a carpenter build a special long table with two drawers so that he could more easily correct his manuscripts. She kept the coal stoves burning. She was a vigilant watchdog, turning away all visitors.
Still, Gene was impossibly churlish. Agnes said he found fault with everything.
“He complained about everything. . . . He’d say things like, Who can concentrate with that god-damned windmill creaking all the time? Why do I have to wake up in the morning and find a cat on my bed? That is not a draft, Agnes, that is a fucking hurricane blowing through this house! I tried to ignore him but then one day he found two bills from the hardware store in the mail and accused me of overspending. I told him I wasn’t buying anything we didn’t need and I’d had to get the windmill fixed.
“He said, ‘Well, I can’t for Christ’s sake be worrying about the money on top of everything else. When are you going to start working?’
“Well, that did it . . . by then I was just red-hot mad and I went to my typewriter, jammed in some paper, and shoved back the carriage return over and over so that the bell kept ringing. Naturally, Gene wasn’t going to hang around for my childish behavior, so off he went, just walked out the front door. When he came back, though, he was all sad-eyed, and he grabbed me and said Promise me we’ll never fight like that again. Promise me! So of course I said Never, darling! Never again! But…”
Agnes laughed and threw up her hands. “Never say ‘never’— right?” She was quiet for a while, staring out at the gray expanse of water.
“He even found fault with the ocean, for God’s sake! He thought it was boring . . . everything was boring, boring, boring. He was like a caged lion, always running out to throw a tennis ball against the old barn over and over . . . didn’t do any good, he’d be just as angry when he got back in the house. We just avoided each other. Then maybe he’d have a good day of work on his play, and he’d be jolly for a bit.”
Pamela listened to it all, wide-eyed, and when we were alone she said to me, “I don’t think I like that Gene very much.”
We spent quite a lot of time with the O’Neills after that summer. Bermuda. Cape Cod. At some point I noticed that Pamela avoided Gene as much as possible. Francesco and I were ambivalent about him. We saw his moody side, saw he would be impossible to live with. Still, we didn’t have to live with him. But Pamela would shut down whenever she was near him. It began, as I recall, after one of our holidays in Truro. She knew—or saw—or felt—something that we didn’t. I asked her about it, but she just shrugged. Well, I never did like him very much, she said.
pamela
For years, Agnes O’Neill had hovered about in my consciousness like one of the colorful hot air balloons that dotted the skies of Paris in the spring. And now the beautiful balloon had landed, gracefully, in the kitchen at Old House.
Agnes. Exotic, unknowable, Agnes. The cousin who’d married a difficult playwright, who’d got Mam’s Murano vase. I had only vague memories of her from that time long ago when Cecco and I’d spent a year with her family, when Daddy was sick. I mostly remembered that she always seemed to be leaving the house to go off with friends. After that, I’d seen her only in the few photographs that Cecil had sent to Mam. We always commented on how much she resembled my mother. Though they were aunt and niece, there were only twelve years between them, and they seemed more like sisters.
Now that I could see them together, I knew the photographs hadn’t lied—they looked remarkably alike: shining, cropped dark hair; a fine, long nose; and large eyes—though Agnes’s were glittering, dark topazes, while Mam’s were deep blue pools, infinite and warm. They had similar proportions, and they moved with the same elegance. Yet there was great difference. Agnes emanated a kind of tension—a greyhound straining at the leash. Mam radiated gentleness—a doe munching on a shrub.
Agnes sat with Mam and me at the kitchen table, talking of Gene, her husband. It had started off such a romantic story. When she told how she’d first met him, how he never said a word all night until they’d walked back to her hotel and he told her he wanted to spend every night of his life with her—it seemed to me the most wonderful story I had ever heard. But then her tale took a sharp turn.
She looked off into a corner of the room, took a deep breath, then confessed that she worried about Gene’s drinking.
Just after they were engaged, she said, they’d stayed at the Garden Hotel, across from Madison Square Garden—a small, dingy place with a bar in the lobby.
“We were planning to leave in the morning for Provincetown, but when we woke Gene lay in bed grousing about the trip and the long wait we were sure to have at the station in Boston. Finally he got up and went into the bathroom. . . . He tried to shave, but his hand shook too badly to hold a razor, so he asked me go down to the bar and get him a milk shake with a shot of brandy. It was awfully creepy and dark. There were already a few men hunched over at the bar, and I felt sick when the bartender winked at me and said, ‘Having a rough one, is he?’ when he handed over the drink. It was horrible.
“I did think Gene seemed a little better after his milk shake. He shaved, then sat looking over some papers he’d spread over the coffee table. But I guess he couldn’t concentrate, so he just sank back on the sofa. Then he told me to bring him an eggnog—a couple of eggs in a double shot of brandy! He said that’d be breakfast, and he promised we’d get going after that. But we never did. Later he went out and got some Old Taylor and by afternoon . . . well,” Agnes shrugged, “at least he made it to the bed before he passed out.”
I didn’t know what to think, really. Milk shakes. Eggnogs. Dark hotel bars. Gene’s hand shaking so much he can’t hold a razor.