Evening Performance

by George Garrett

  “When Henry was a boy he made a lot of fun at those picnics.”

  “He’s changed now.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “We’ll see.”

  So the women called on Ilse Monk while Henry was at work, talked to her through the screen door at least, and painted such a picture of the pleasures of that day that she couldn’t imagine refusing to come.

  The procession of cars, wagons, trucks, bikes, even the school bus, went off the highway and through the woods to the place where pine trees, sweet gum, and scrub oaks had been cleared away down to the riverbank. The clearing was hedged with the bright green of the woods, and all around wild dogwood burst like puff-ball smoke explosions. The men set up trestles for the long tables and built cooking fires. Then through the afternoon the women worked while the men were fishing, playing softball, pitching horseshoes, and firing their rifles and pistols at floating things in the river. Ilse was left alone to wander like an ineffectual ghost among the busy women. Dressed in the white she had worn when they had first seen her, she walked about smiling, watching what they were doing without understanding any of it.

  Late in the afternoon, with the meal prepared, the women went off by themselves to bathe in the river. They went in single file along a snaky path that struggled through the deep woods for maybe a quarter of a mile before it climbed a steep rise. At the top of this, overlooking the river, there were the ruins of what had been a church once. From that spot the path ran down swiftly and steeply through an old, forgotten nigger graveyard, the forlorn tombstones leaning and tilting at wry angles. There was a narrow sandy beach at the edge of the river, a kind of cover, a fine hidden and sheltered place, and there the women, young girls, wives, old women stripped off their clothes and waded out into the slow river, still thrilling with some of winter. Soon they were splashing and shouting in shrill voices, drunk with the pleasure of it, almost dancing. The men did not trouble their privacy, and only some of the young boys, peering from the trees and shrubs with amazed eyes, saw all of what happened.

  Ilse had not seen them go. Not needed, she had wandered off in the woods, and she came on that path by accident. She followed it, unknowing, to the place, and she stood at the top of the little hill seeing them, all shapes and all sizes, shed of their clothing like winter skin, in the clay-colored water. When she came suddenly upon this scene, she laughed.

  Perhaps it was the sound of her laughter, perhaps only the sight of her, elaborately dressed, tall on the hilltop, perhaps, at just that moment, only a desire to transform her from the stranger and spectator (like some visiting goddess) into a sharer, but whatever the first cause, they soon let their long-stored feelings possess them. Her laughter became to them a kind of profanation. Some of them stumbled dripping all the way to the top of the hill and, taking hold of her, urged her toward the bank. At first she laughed more loudly and resisted. Then more of them came running. They swarmed over her, ripped her clothes until she was as bare as they. For a moment, panting, aware of what they had done, they drew back in a circle and looked at her. She stood still as if carved there in stone on that spot, but then she threw back her head with a flash of gold hair and shrieked like a wild animal. All at once they were bearing her overhead, high in their hands, into the water. They baptized her amid a tangle of swarming bodies, of squirming legs like a nest of snakes, a thrashing fury.

  As soon as the men heard that terrible shriek, they came running through the woods. Henry ran with them on his frail legs. Coming to the place, he tripped over a grassy tombstone, fell and rolled end over end down the hill, rose and fought through the storm of bodies and lifted her up in his arms. Nearly drowned, she huddled against him like a child.

  Just then it went silent. The men fell back along the path to make a way for him, the women crouched down in the water or covered themselves with hands and arms, touched with shame. But, following the powerful torso, Henry’s dwarfed, absurd legs emerged from the water, bowed and shaking with the strain of the burden, and then someone began to laugh. Then another. Then everyone was laughing at once, men and women, shameless, delirious, wildly relieved. They were rolling with it, falling on their knees and backs with it, dancing with it, some nearly drowning with laughter.

  Henry ran up the steep path and turned away, blundering among the trees, pursued by the sound of laughter like hounds, unaware, unable to grasp the simple truth that now he had paid them a debt, that now, purged, they could freely offer him, if not love, then at least his rightful place again in the only world they knew about or cared to believe in.

  BREAD FROM STONES

  I DO NOT KNOW much about rich people. I have been among them sometimes and was always more or less accepted because I am Southern and it is all right to be Southern and poor if your ancestors were Southern and rich. Still, I find them very strange.

  I can give examples. Once I was invited to luncheon at the country house of some rich New York people, and it happened that I sat between a successful Dutch businessman and his wife. The only memory I keep of him is of a round bright blond head bent busily close to a plate of food. I remember his wife more clearly. She was an astonishingly beautiful woman, delicate, fragile, and pale-faced with wide amazed eyes like an expensive china doll. She told me that she was deeply involved with Eastern philosophies, that she had been for years, and that she was continuing her studies at an American university while her husband was here. I was really interested in what she had to say because I don’t know anything about Eastern philosophies. She talked to me in a kind of whispered breathless urgency like a child sharing a very solemn secret. I tried vainly to follow the words and all of the veiled nuances her voice implied. But I couldn’t. Chiefly because the whole time she was talking to me her little sharp-nailed hand was as busy as a spider, exploring my thigh and groin under the table. Of course, after we rose from the table and went our separate ways I never saw or heard of her again.

  Or take the time I took a girl to call on her uncle who was a rich Texan. He lived on a yacht, an enormous one as white and pretty as a birthday cake. He was anchored not far from New York and we drove up the Hudson to call on him. As soon as we came on board he invited us to join him in a drink.

  “This is a nice yacht you have,” I said.

  “You think so, huh?”

  “Yes, sir, that’s what I think.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  “Well,” he said, “the yacht’s all right. If you’ve got to live somewhere a yacht is as good a place as any I guess. Personally I can’t stand living in a house.”

  “Did you ever try a trailer?”

  “Boy,” he said gruffly, “you don’t understand much. Don’t ever trust your snap judgments about people and things. You probably are under the impression that I am a happy man. Look at me.”

  He was a big, handsome, red-faced man lolling comfortably in a deck chair. The first thing he reminded me of was a great big teddy bear. Which, offhand, is about the happiest thing I can think of.

  “You look happy to me.”

  “Well, you’re wrong.”

  “Okay.”

  “Dead wrong!” he went on. “My personal tragedy is as follows. All my life all that I have wanted to be is a cattle rancher. To make a long story short, every time I would buy a cattle ranch, the damn fools came along and drilled and struck oil. Whamo! There went the cattle ranch.”

  “Are you still trying?”

  “Hell, no,” he said. “I quit trying years ago. What’s the use?”

  I have no idea where this general discussion would have led and maybe ended, because just then the girl interrupted us.

  “Uncle Ed,” she said, “do you remember when I was a little girl and I used to come and visit you and one time you said you would give me a quarter if I learned ‘Break, Break, Break’?”

  “Sure do,” he said. “She did it too. She memorized that poem and earned the quarter.”

  “I’ve never forgotten it.”

  “Think you can still say
it?”

  “Oh yes.”

  And without hesitation she began to recite. I was watching her, a picture of intense concentration as she summoned up the melanchcly of the poem. Then I heard him gasp for breath. He sat there for a minute or so quietly after she had finished, and then, apparently the victim of a sudden impulse, he jumped to his feet, trotted down the deck, and disappeared into a stateroom. He came back after a while, all smiles, waving a check so the ink would dry.

  “Here,” he said to her. “Take this. It’s the least I can do.”

  It was a check for more money than I can make in a month or two.

  Afterwards, when we were driving back to the city, she seemed pensive and a little sad.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I said.

  “It’s all so pathetic,” she said, “so tragic.”

  “What is?”

  “Being rich,” she said. “It must be tragic to be very rich.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I reckon it must be.”

  I couldn’t see any point in arguing with her. That wasn’t what I had in mind at all. She got most of her ideas on the subject from a passing familiarity with the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Anyway, I couldn’t care less about it one way or the other. I have never had to be around rich people that much.

  My cousin Raymond was always trying to be around rich people. He had even been slightly rich once or twice himself. Raymond was one of the black sheep of our family. Almost any old Southern family has its quota of black sheep, and I could tell you something about that general subject too. But it is beside the point. Take my word for it. Raymond ran away on his way to Yale and spent the money for his tuition in New York. Then he became a professional ballroom dancer. Raymond was a wonderful dancer, I’ll say that for him. He was tall and broad-shouldered and slender and darkly handsome. And he looked just fine in a white tie and tails. The family didn’t object to his dancing even though they wished he had gone to Yale. Or at least managed to get as far north as New Haven. They did object, however, to the fact that he changed his last name to a Spanish one. He maintained that his new name was much more exotic than Raymond Singletree, and nobody could disagree with him on that. The crux of the matter was: did Raymond need an exotic name to be a dancer? He seemed to think so. The other members of the family did not. The other thing they disapproved of was his dancing partner, Vivian. She was a glazed, beautiful blonde, absolutely perfectly equipped for a nightclub dance team, but all the hierarchy of aunts insisted that she was fundamentally “common.” Raymond said they were married, but nobody took that assertion at face value. Oh, he had a grand old time before the War, dancing in nightclubs all over the world, his pockets jingling and bulging with easy money. Then the War came and when he returned home from three years in the infantry, ETO, he was ravaged, his face gray and deeply lined and most of his hair gone from wearing a steel pot on his head so much of the time. Meanwhile Vivian had left him for a 4-F saxophone player. And the last of the money was gone.

  One week with Christmas coming soon, I ran into him on the street. He was skulking along the sidewalk. He had on an ill-fitting, cheap trench coat with the collar turned up and he wore a snap-brim hat pulled down over his eyes. He looked for all the world like a gangster in an old-fashioned grade-B movie.

  “Raymond!” I said. “Where are you going—to a masquerade party?”

  “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I’m afraid I don’t know you from Adam’s house cat.”

  “Don’t kid me,” I said. “You’re Raymond Singletree and you know it.”

  He stood there glaring at me fiercely under the brim of his hat while the quick crowds flowed all around us.

  “All right,” he said at last. “So what if I am?”

  “I’m glad to see you, that’s all. Where have you been and what are you up to?”

  “I’ve been down and out,” he said. “Down and out. At the moment I’m on my way over to stick up Macy’s.”

  I started to laugh.

  “Don’t laugh,” he said. “It isn’t a laughing matter. I’ve got it all figured out and I think I can get away with it.”

  “All right,” I said. “But before you go and rob Macy’s how about having a drink with me, just for old time’s sake?”

  He glanced furtively at his wristwatch.

  “Why not?”

  Once I got him into a booth in a bar and he had a drink in his hands, it was clear that he was dead serious about trying to stick up Macy’s single-handed. He explained that he was flat broke and that it was especially awkward for him to be so broke at this time because he had a marvelous opportunity to get his hands on a couple of million dollars. All he needed was to get his good clothes out of hock and a little extra pocket money.

  “This couple of million,” I said, “is it a sure thing?”

  “It’s a woman,” he announced simply.

  Raymond had always been a lover and I had to admire his beautiful, resigned honesty about it. He went on to tell me that this particular woman was the daughter of a famous financier. She was divorced and she loved to go out drinking and dancing with him. He added sententiously that it was a crime for a man in his position to let such an opportunity go begging.

  “You were really serious about robbing Macy’s, then?”

  “Sure,” he said. “It’s the only way.”

  And with that grim remark he fished out a huge Army .45 pistol and plunked it down in the middle of the table.

  “Get it out of sight,” I said. “Don’t you know it’s against the law to carry around a gun like that?”

  “Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

  And he put the pistol back in his trench-coat pocket.

  “Are you crazy, Raymond? Don’t you have any idea what you’re doing?”

  “Sure I know what I’m doing,” he said. “I’m taking a chance to get some money. I’m sick of being poor.”

  “You make me tired,” I said. “You don’t have to be poor. You could make a living doing a lot of different things. You could always teach dancing. Arthur Murray’s would probably be glad to hire you.”

  “Arthur Murray’s!” he said. “Oh my God!”

  “All right, forget about Murray. You could do any number of things.”

  “I don’t want to make a living. I want to be rich.”

  “Listen,” I said, “nobody in our family, nobody, has been rich since the War Between the States.”

  “That’s it!” he said. “That’s it exactly. All my life I’ve had to hear all about the wonderful old times they had down on the old plantation. Etc., etc! Well, I had to grow up in a crummy furnished apartment eating off of fine leftover old china with fine leftover old silver. My old man divided his time between dodging bill collectors and telling me what a privilege it was to be a Singletree. The chosen people. The hell with it!”

  “That’s the spirit,” I said. “The hell with it.”

  “No,” he said. “Not right. Not correct. On the contrary, I am going to show them.”

  Here it was with Christmas coming on, and I hadn’t even seen Raymond for years. It should have been a wonderful reunion. It should have been like the old times when both of us were new in New York and we would meet once in a while in some bar. And over a drink or two we’d hatch fantastic conspiracies, the conspiracies of two lonely Southern boys a long way from home. I had always admired Raymond. I admired him for his looks, his attitude, his talent. And when I went to work for the bank, how I used to envy him his nimble feet and the bright, bitter world of the nightclubs I couldn’t afford to go to, and the shining, kiln-baked finish of his dancing partner. Once in a while in those days I would get a postcard from some far-off place—from Paris, Mexico City, Montevideo. I still keep one he sent me from Rio. It is an aerial view of the harbor in brilliant color. I remember sitting in my room and just staring at it for a long time while the rain fell heavy on the gray city outside. All that it said was “This is the life. You ought to try it sometime. As ever, Raymond.”


  “Raymond,” I said. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll buy that pistol from you.”

  “Why?”

  “I want it.”

  “It’s worth a lot of money,” he said.

  “How much?”

  “I could make do with a couple hundred dollars.”

  “I guess it’s worth that much to me,” I said.

  I gave him all the cash I had with me and wrote out a check for the balance. He seemed to be very grateful and promised he would get in touch with me soon. After he left I went into the men’s room and put the pistol in the wastebasket, hidden underneath a pile of used paper towels. I often wonder what the janitor, or whoever it was, thought when he found it there. The damn thing was loaded and everything.

  A few months later I heard from Raymond again. It was in early April, I think, because I remember walking from the bus stop and noticing how beautiful the first frail green leaves were in the park. Raymond was waiting for me in front of the apartment building. He was parked right in front in a sleek, shining, low-slung sports car. He looked quite different now. He was wearing an expensive sports jacket and an ascot. He had some kind of a wig on that looked perfectly natural. He appeared to be about ten years younger, and he was all smiles.

  “Hey you!” he said. “You’re coming with me.”

  “Okay.”

  I didn’t have anything else to do with myself, so I just got in the car. We eased out into the traffic and tore away with a spectacular growl of pure horsepower.

  “Like it?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Whose is it?”

  “Mine,” he said cheerfully. “It’s all mine.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To meet Sonya.”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t you even remember?” he said. “She’s the one I was telling you about at Christmastime.”

  “You’re not married, are you?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “Not just yet.”

  We drove on downtown and left the car in a parking lot.

  “Listen,” he told me as we walked along, “there’s one little thing I ought to tell you. She’s Jewish.”