Death, My Darling Daughters

I

Kenmore Valley has never forgotten the fact that it produced a Vice-President of the United States. It is true that Benjamin Hilton’s mild career in the Washington of the nineties passed almost unnoticed by history. It is also true that only his summer months were spent at the Hilton house in our valley. But Kenmore has overlooked these two facts. To its inhabitants Benjamin Hilton, with his Bostonian sobriety and his genteel interest in the arts, remains the jewel of their crown. His imposing image in marble dominates the neat strip of grass before the Congregational church. And a complete set of his critical essays (privately printed) stands unread but revered in a prominent place on the library shelves.

When, after my wife’s death ten years ago, I moved with my young daughter to Kenmore, the first landmark I was shown was the old Hilton house, boarded and shuttered long ago since the Vice-President’s children had all migrated to the larger centers of culture—Boston, Bloomsbury, Rome. And to this day the folklore, such as it is, of the community clings around the now almost mythologized figure of Benjamin Hilton. A rock by the laurel-fringed Konapic Brook remains the rock where Benjamin Hilton used to trout-fish with a celebrated Secretary of State. An abandoned sawmill has an aura of sanctity because it was there that the Hilton family had picnicked with Oscar Wilde—or was it Rudyard Kipling? The great figures of literature and art whom the Hiltons had so sedulously cultivated had never been more than names to Kenmore. Consequently folklore is already a little uncertain on detail.

Kenmore, however, has continued stanchly certain of the special luster which its association with Benjamin Hilton has given it. Through the hectic twenties and the ominous thirties, it clung stubbornly to its old traditions. Even the second World War which kindled the rest of the planet into revolutionary flame merely helped to intensify the valley’s preoccupation with the past. Wartime transportation difficulties outlawed undesirable summer tourists, and wartime gasoline rationing restored to Kenmore a Hiltonian atmosphere of horse and buggy tranquillity.

The war rendered the valley an even greater service. It brought back real live Hiltons to take up residence once again in the long abandoned Vice-Presidential house and to inaugurate, Kenmore felt sure, a cultural renaissance.

Some weeks before Mrs. Lanchester (nee Hilton) and her two daughters were due to arrive in the valley, Kenmore was bristling with information about them. This widowed daughter of the late Benjamin Hilton had lived a life of severe intellectuality in a Roman palace for many years when in 1941 she and her family had been forced to flee from a suddenly Americophobe Mussolini. Since that time the Lanchesters had spent several years as refined refugees with Benjamin Hilton’s other daughter in London. But all this, fascinating as it was, had happened outside Massachusetts and therefore was relatively unimportant to Kenmore’s regional mind.

What mattered was that last fall the three Lanchester ladies—thanks to high connections—had been permitted to sail to America and, having spent the winter in Boston under the wing of Benjamin Hilton’s only son, the eminent Dr. George Hilton, of Boston’s Arkwright Memorial Laboratory, were planning to spend the summer in Kenmore.

Kenmore was preparing itself for them. More than one of the ladies of the valley were known to be brushing up on their Edith Wharton.

Since most of my daylight hours are spent either at my doctor’s office in Grovestown, some ten miles away, or at the County Hospital, Kenmore has always been to me more of a country retreat than the hub of the universe. My knowledge of its activities comes largely secondhand through that impeccable Kenmorite, my daughter. It was from Dawn that, one spring evening, I heard the breathless news that They had arrived from Boston.

I did not have to ask to know that. They could only be the Lanchesters. But for the next few weeks I made no contact with our distinguished revenants from the past except to catch intermittent glimpses of a stately lady driving through the local lanes in a governess cart exhumed from the Hilton stables. With her were her two subdued-looking daughters who, Dawn informed me, bore the romantic and unequivocally literary names of Perdita and Rosalind. Dawn, infected by the general hysteria of curiosity, also passed on to me the news that the Lanchester household included an ancient Scotch nanny who dated back to the Benjamin Hilton epoch. She had apparently concentrated her loyalty upon the family ever since the days when Mrs. Lanchester, a little girl in rompers, had spent exalted afternoons playing on the White House lawn with her brother, her sister, and an assortment of presidential grandchildren.

I saw Nanny one day in the general store. Her gimlet eyes and the formidable straightness of her stubby figure made me glad that I had never torn my pants or come dirty fingered to a nursery breakfast table of her supervision.

Inevitably it was Dawn who first broke through the social defenses of the Lanchesters. Ever since their arrival she, like everyone else in Kenmore, was determined to storm the citadel. And she finally succeeded. The offensive weapon she employed was a violin.

The relationship between Dawn and her violin was at that time still a source of astonishment to me. In her hoodlum career from the cradle my daughter had shown no symptoms of an artistic temperament. It was by chance one day that she picked up the violin of a school friend and discovered that she had a natural instinct for doing the right things with the right parts of the instrument. She basked in the prestige this unexpected accomplishment brought her and cajoled me into letting her take lessons in Grovestown. Presumably her technical proficiency made rapid strides, for soon she was the prize pupil of Mrs. Graebner, her pince-nezed instructress. Being unmusical myself, I could only conjecture as to the extent of her artistic talent.

The violin fired, as it were, the first shot of Dawn’s campaign one day in July. My daughter came rushing into the living room with the enthusiastic announcement:

Daddy, Mrs. Lanchester was in the post office and I sort of talked to her and she was awfully nice and I happened to mention the violin and they’re all terribly musical and she needs another violin for quartets and wants me to play with them. Isn’t that wonderful?

I expressed mild approval, and from that day on I received a barrage of Lanchesteriana from my daughter, who spent almost every afternoon scraping out Mozart and Haydn in the Lanchesters’ converted-barn music room.

I myself had no official trafficking with the valley’s restored Royal Family until one evening later in the week when a precise young female voice over the phone inquired if I was Dr. Westlake. The voice, presumably belonging either to Perdita or Rosalind, went on to inform me that Nanny was sick and supposed that I, as the local doctor, was the correct person to be called in such exigencies. It concluded:

It’s Nanny’s old trouble.

This, I was to learn, was typical of the Hilton clan. It would never occur to them that a complete stranger might not know what Nanny’s old trouble was.

The call came just after Dawn and I had finished supper. Since the Hilton house is only a quarter of a mile down the road, I started off on foot. It was one of those magical Kenmore evenings which must surely have inflamed the poetic imagination of Oscar Wilde (or Rudyard Kipling). The road hugged one side of the valley, stretching beneath a great upsweep of wooded hills, and to my left, beyond a frame of sugar maples, the little valley itself shimmered beneath a low trailing mist. The landscape wore a forlorn beauty hinting at lost glories. And when the Hilton house came into view behind its tousled hedge of lilac and syringas, the mists crept around it too.

Although old Benjamin Hilton had been immensely rich, he had belonged to an age and a class which eschewed vulgar display, and the clapboard house had never lost its original farm atmosphere. It was painted a tired white and rambled in a haphazard fashion that was neither beautiful nor quaint.

As I approached the rather skimpy porch I heard the sound of a stringed instrument being punished inside. I knocked and the music stopped. In a moment the door was opened.

One of the Lanchester girls stood on the threshold. I still did not know them apart. This one’s dark hair was cut in two large spaniel ears which flopped on either side of her face and half obliterated it. The Hilton tradition of plain living was very evident. She was wearing a shapeless cotton frock and old sneakers, and what little I could see of her face was aggressively free from make-up. Her eyes, however, were startlingly green and unusual. In spite of her dowdiness those eyes behind the square frame of hair indicated a camouflaged allure.

Oh, you’re Dr. Westlake, she said vaguely, as if her mind was on something else.

Yes, I said.

She pushed back one of the thick wedges of hair with a sensitive hand and half turned from me. Mother’s in the living room, I think. I’ll take you to her.

I said: It’s your Nanny who’s sick, isn’t it? Is there any need to bother your mother?

The green eyes stared with astonishment at so ill-informed a remark. But Mother always sees everyone first.

She drifted past the door of the dining room, where a cello was propped against a bare wooden chair. I followed her down a short passage to the living room.

Mrs. Lanchester was seated by the window. Her daughter led me forward.

Mother, this is Dr. Westlake.

Oh yes. Mrs. Lanchester gave me her hand without rising and turned to her daughter. Perdita, you still have half an hour more practice. And, my dear, do watch that legato passage in the Andante. Clear, singing, Perdita. Get that mud out of your cello.

Perdita Lanchester brushed back her hair again and murmured: Yes, Mother. She padded out on sneakered feet.

Dear Perdita, murmured Mrs. Lanchester. Such a good girl.

Left alone with her, I felt a slight sense of awe. Her personality alone was responsible, for her setting was far from awe-inspiring. The room was not only tasteless, it was positively dilapidated. One felt it had been furnished at random with pieces long discarded from the old Hilton town house on Commonwealth Avenue and that its ugliness was a deliberate tribute to plain living and high thinking. Even Mrs. Lanchester’s flowing purple dress, though more artful than her daughter’s, was as sternly elementary.

And yet, as she sat there smiling at me, her long throat curved slightly upward, one graceful arm thrown over the back of the couch, she looked as though she had just stepped majestically from a portrait by Sargent or from the very best, the most exclusive pages of Henry James.

Yes, Dr. Westlake, we were expecting you.

She watched me from keen blue eyes which, I felt, were gauging the exact degree of my acceptability into Hiltonism. Although past fifty, Mrs. Lanchester was an exceptionally beautiful woman. Her body had that hourglass slenderness so much admired in the Edwardian epoch; her features, beneath the silk-fine white hair, might have been modeled in porcelain. When she smiled she showed small level teeth, and if I had not known of her rigid asceticism I would have sworn that the delicate rose of her cheeks had been subtly enhanced with rouge.

At length, in a voice so melodious that it sounded almost foreign, she said: It is nice to meet you, Dr. Westlake. We have grown so fond of your little daughter. Such fluency in reading. She smiled again, enchantingly. Of course her interpretation is a trifle relentless. But then she is too young for the finer shadings. And she is such a help in keeping Perdita’s and Rosalind’s noses to the grindstone.

Mrs. Lanchester’s voice moved easily on, touching with butterfly lightness upon this musical subject and that. There were several charming anecdotes concerning individuals whom she affectionately referred to as Ignatz and Fritzl and who, I gathered, must be no less personalities than Paderewski and Kreisler. But I detected no trace of snobbery in her, and, although I did no more than listen, she somehow managed to make me feel that I was being charming and sympathetic.

She did not mention Nanny and her old trouble. It was as though I had been invited for a social visit, and, even as I succumbed to Mrs. Lanchester’s undoubted fascination, I had a strange sensation that she was making a conscious effort to fascinate me. I mean nothing so vulgar as to imply that she found me attractive as a male animal. It was merely the formula fascination of a perennially beautiful woman who had developed the habit of bringing all men automatically and, of course, respectably, to her feet

And continuously as she talked, the sound of a cello, neither particularly clear nor singing, in the next room gave evidence that Perdita’s nose at least was still at the grindstone.

It was not yet dark. Mrs. Lanchester rose and moved to the open window, looking out across the old orchard where the mist crept around the trunks of apple trees, grotesque from years without pruning.

Kenmore, she murmured. "Strange how this funny little place is in my blood. Sometimes in the old Roman palazzo or in my summer villa at Anacapri, the feel of Kenmore would suddenly sweep through me, bringing an almost unbearable nostalgia. Picnics up at Indian Rock; the piebald pony Father bought me to console me for a particularly hideous brace on my teeth; the duck pond and learning to swim, with dear kind Mr. Garfield blowing up my water wings. Dr. Westlake, looking out of this window I am six years old again."

From any other woman of my acquaintance this speech would have sounded affected. But I was under Mrs. Lanchester’s spell now. I think she realized it as she moved towards me.

Here I am chattering away, Dr. Westlake, when I really do have a favor to ask. I am expecting quite a plague of house guests tomorrow, and I shall give a picnic for them—the sort of picnic dear Father used to give. I want you to come.

Before I had time to refuse or accept, she laid a wooing hand on my sleeve. Don’t disappoint me. My brother George Hilton is coming from Boston with his young wife. And my sister and her husband, Richard Kenton-Oakes, have just flown over from London. George and Richard have both been doing research on some mysterious thing, and the British Government has sent Richard over for an important conference. So important in fact that it has to be held here, where the newspapers won’t ferret it out. Oh dear, I suppose that’s one of those things I should not be talking about. One has to be so careful these days.

She laughed with what I can only describe as a pretty foolishness.

You mustn’t think of me as a prattler. It’s just that I need you. You see, if there is only family here tomorrow, George and Richard will talk shop and quite ruin my picnic. I want someone to leaven the lump. She smiled again. And do bring your daughter. George is a great flute enthusiast. We will have music afterwards.

I had been able to take Ignatz and Fritzl more or less in my stride—even dear kind Mr. Garfield. But Mrs. Lanchester had intimidated me with her George and Richard. For I had forgotten that her brother George was the famous Dr. George Hilton of the Arkwright Memorial Laboratory, and I had never known that her brother-in-law was Dr. Richard Kenton-Oakes, Dr. Hilton’s equally famous English equivalent. The prospect of picnicking with these two men, both of whom had reached the highest pinnacles in my profession, was rather alarming, but since it was impossible to refuse Mrs. Lanchester anything I found myself promising to come.

Her objective obtained, Mrs. Lanchester switched at last to Nanny and her old trouble. This, I finally learned, was a heart condition of long standing. That evening she had had a bout of pain and had been forcibly put to bed by Mrs. Lanchester.

Nanny is a remarkable character, murmured Mrs. Lanchester as she led me out of the living room and up the shabby carpeting of the stairs. To her I am still a little girl with ink-stains on the ends of my pigtails. She is firmly convinced that the whole household will collapse if her iron hand is not at the helm. That is why we have such difficulty in keeping her in bed when she has one of her turns.

She paused on the stairs and faced me, her mouth moving humorously. I was wondering if perhaps you could—well, frighten her a little, Dr. Westlake.

Frighten her? I repeated in surprise.

Mrs. Lanchester laughed. Oh, I know that sounds rather wicked. But— She paused as if weighing the advisability of further confidence. To tell you the truth, I am particularly anxious to keep her in bed for these next few days. She’s old and jealous and thinks we all belong to her. Particularly George. She kept house for him and his daughter Helena for years after his first wife died. And then this year, when he married again—well, she just didn’t get on with his second wife. She was quite impossible. That is why I brought her here with me—to get her away. So, you see, George and Richard have such important things to discuss. I do not want them aggravated by Nanny making scenes. That’s why I would be grateful if you could make her believe she’s a little more sick than possibly she is.

She was watching me with an earnestness which seemed in excess of her request. It struck me as curious that a forceful character like Mrs. Lanchester should feel incapable of preventing friction between her sister-in-law and a paid employee.

I’ll see what I can do, I said evasively.

She smiled a cozening smile. I am sure we are going to be friends, Dr. Westlake. You must come to see us often this summer. As an afterthought she added: It is so good for the dear girls to have a nice young man around.

Although I suspected deliberate flattery, I warmed to that young. When one is fortyish the word has a reassuring sound.

Mrs. Lanchester sighed. I’m afraid both Perdita and Rosalind are rather difficult and shy. I’ve tried to interest them in so many nice young men, but always before the evening is over I seem to become stranded with the men myself. Her smile was studiedly guileless. I can’t understand why.

I could understand why. And as she started up the stairs again, carrying her charm like a lighted candle, I found myself feeling a little sorry for the invisible Rosalind and Perdita of the muddy cello.

Mrs. Lanchester conducted me to the third floor, tapped on a door, and led me into a small room where Nanny lay in bed, propped stiffly against the pillows. Her round little body had been tucked into a starched white nightgown, and an antique frilly bedcap perched incongruously on her straight gray hair. The aggressive dynamo of a woman I had seen in the general store had definitely run down. The black eyes which had been so needle sharp were lackluster, and a bluish pallor had taken the place of the Scotch ruddiness in her cheeks.

On a bedside table stood a tray with a teapot of chased silver, a silver tea kettle on an old-fashioned spirit lamp, and a cup containing dregs of tea which looked strong enough to take the hair off a Highland bull.

Mrs. Lanchester began: Nanny, dearest, this is Dr. Westlake. He’s come to have a look at you.

Nanny eyed me suspiciously, drawing the bedclothes up to her throat with a gesture which was at once prim and defensive.

You’re a wayward, headstrong lass, Emily, she snapped. I told you I was having no flibberty-gibbety young doctor prodding and prigging me around with my ain Georgie comin’ tomorrow.

Now, Nanny, don’t be silly. Mrs. Lanchester spoke firmly, as if anxious to prove that she was anything but a wayward, headstrong lass. You know George never doctors the family. Besides, Dr. Westlake isn’t flibberty-gibbety.

Nanny’s sloe eyes surveyed me dubiously. You’ll not be one of those dreary lads tha’ put a body in mind of her coffin with their glooms and dooms?

I assured her that I always looked on the more cheerful side of things. She brooded for a moment, apparently contemplating some glooms and dooms of her own. Then, with a wistful sidewise glance at me, she said:

It’s a flutter here and a flitter there, Doctor, and a bump and a boom that fair doubles me up. Ca’ you pu’ me on me two feet again?

I’ll do my best.

Nanny sniffed. After a pause she announced: All right. Mebbe I’ll let you moither me. But just this once.

That’s a dear, sensible Nanny, put in Mrs. Lanchester.

The old nurse swung round on her with a sudden return of energy. Be off wi’ ye, Emily. You’re always the same giddy lass, dangling and angling around whenever there’s a bonny man in the house. Off wi’ ye and your smiles and smirks, or I’ll be minded to ta’ me hairbrush to your backside.

The porcelain roses deepened in Mrs. Lanchester’s cheeks as she retreated before this formidable threat. Giving me a rather flustered smile which I interpreted as a reminder to keep Nanny in bed, she withdrew from the room.

Once she was alone with me, Nanny became surprisingly tractable. It was clear that she had a peasant terror of any physical malfunctioning, and she was still sufficiently weak after her spell of pain to be dourly and Scottishly in mind of her coffin without any outside assistance. She gave me a long history of her trouble in her own individual and cryptic jargon. From it and a superficial examination I was able to diagnose a mild anginal condition, with bouts of pain and precordial distress following any undue exertion or emotional stress.

This latest attack had obviously been precipitated by excitement at the prospect of a reunion with the two other Hilton children, coupled with an excess of scrubbing, polishing, and strong tea. In spite of her almost eighty years her condition was not alarming, but since rest was obviously the best therapy, I was able to