Around the World With Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis Page B

smiled broadly, and I was stunned by the saffron splendor of her teeth. There must have been sixty of them. Very long, very false, they were the color of old ivory set into gleaming titian gums, and for some time I could think only of the double keyboard of an antique harpsichord. “And since we’re going to be such grand chums, my dear, you must call me Hermione—or even Hermie.”
    â€œWhy, certainly, Hermione,” Auntie Mame said, “and
you
must call
me
Mame.”
    â€œOf cawss, Mame,” Hermione said with another ocher smile. “But have you a tiara?”
    â€œTwo,” Auntie Mame said.
    â€œA pity,” Hermione said with a wistful little smile. “I have such a lovely one. Heirloom, of cawss, but I’d have let
you
have it for a song. Howsomever,” she continued, touching her brassy gold-dyed long bob, “we must do something about your living quarters. I mean, as your social sponsor, I really couldn’t permit you to live in an hotel.” She gazed around Auntie Mame’s suite at Claridge’s as though it were the county workhouse. “Luckly, I
do
know a little jewel of a house right here in Mayfair which we can lease for the season and . . .”
    â€œWe?”
Auntie Mame asked.
    â€œYais,” Hermione said with a lackluster flash of dentures. “You, Miss Charles, your neview and
I
—all of us. Now, Lady Styllbourne is a chum of mine and so I
think
I could coax her to let you have it for a thousand guineas the mouth. Plus, of
cawss
, the servants’ wages.”
    I tiptoed quietly off to my room as I heard Lady Gravell-Pitt saying, “Now if you will simply give me your check”—or cheque.
    GRAND, I BELIEVE, IS THE TERM FOR THE LITTLE jewel of a house Auntie Mame had rented through Lady Gravell-Pitt. It was a vast marble mansion in Grosvenor Square, close enough to the American Embassy so that Auntie Mame could annoy her countrymen whenever she felt it necessary, yet far enough across the square so that they couldn’t keep too careful an eye on her. Auntie Mame pronounced the house “divine” and the location “ideal.”
    Lady Gravell-Pitt, very much the chatelaine, met us at the door surrounded by a platoon of footmen. “Welcome, welcome, dear Mame! Patrick, dear!
Miss
Charles.” Lady Gravell-Pitt did not care for Vera. “Now let me show you through our lovely, lovely new home. Your, um,
setting
as it were.” She smiled her horrible crockery smile and said, “The perfect setting for a lovely Ameddican jewel.”
    Vera gagged.
    Hermione led us between the ranks of flunkies and then guided us through a series of marble halls hung with Water-ford chandeliers and dusty French tapestries and portraits of dead people. It was quite a place. Adam rooms opened into Chippendale rooms and Chippendale rooms opened into Heppelwhite rooms and Grinling Gibbons rooms and Regency rooms and Louis Quinze rooms and so on.
    It wasn’t very cozy, or even very clean, but Auntie Mame loved it. Eventually Hermione wound up her conducted tour in what she called “the sheerest Directoire conceit of a garden room” for tea. It was the cheeriest room in the house, which doesn’t say much for it, and it did look out over a sooty little patch of greenery, in the center of which a marble Apollo displayed with undue pride a pitiful array of amputated parts.
    â€œNow, Mame dear,” Lady Gravell-Pitt said finally, with a vivacious clatter of dentures, “about your presentation of cawss, anyone with
my
connections could have you presented immeejitly. . . .”
    â€œThen why don’t you?” Vera said.
    â€œBut”
—Lady Gravell-Pitt held up an imperious hand—“the best way is the gradual approach. First a little series of cocktail parties, luncheons, dinners. That way you can become intimate with the cream of Court circles. Then I shall arrange to have you invited