by Vin Packer
“I’m sick of you!” he had said last night.
Cass ran her hand along her pajama bottoms, from the waist to the stomach, down to where her legs began, to the part of her Chad called Mrs. Mine.”
“He’s fed up, Mrs. M.,” she said to herself. “He’s had us.”
And it depressed her all the more to know that in three days she would be thirty.
5.
Deel married me because she liked herself when she was with me, and because she really hated herself.
— Maurice Granger
OUT where U.S. 11 crossed State 1, a quarter of a mile from Bastrop, there was a drop in the land, where for a few acres a miniature valley ran, which was embraced by Judas trees and cedars, black gums and maples, and which was hard to see from the road. It was called the Dip, and that morning some minutes after seven, it was the only place where Delia Benjamin was sure she could be alone. One of the things she missed about New York was the fact that you could take a solitary walk there without being considered lonely, troubled, or eccentric, even if you were all three; and that it wouldn’t matter the time of day or night.
That and the myriad other facets of big-city life that created the blessed state of anonymity, Dee missed even more than she had imagined she would, but the one thing she missed most, which she had been too perceptive to underestimate, was Maury’s presence.
In the pocket of her silk dress was the letter she had written him last night, the kind of letter she would ordinarily have ripped to shreds immediately after writing — long pages of sordid and depressing confessions and recantations — a pitiful attempt to reconstruct something that had been dilapidated to begin with — their “relationship,” as Dr. Mannerheim would put it, but to Dee, simply, the awful mess of their marriage, and its nerve-naked aftermath.
There was a smell of burning brush in the air, goldenrod lit the wiregrass, and there was little sound except for the crunch of acorns underfoot, or the distant rumble of tobacco loads up on the road, bound for market under faded quilts. Dee fingered the corners of the thick envelope and thought that she was a far cry from analysts’ couches, Miltown and what Maury called get-it-out-of-our-system-nightcaps, but here, she thought, was where the roots wept; here, was the beginning of it all.
And she had not wanted to come back. That afternoon a week ago, when she had sat at the tiny square table in the rear of the cocktail lounge at the Gotham, sickened already by the fact that he was late, when he was always on time, she had still clung to the hope he would not say something like: “Dee, I think it’ll do you good,” when she had said, after he apologized (offering no excuse — God, Maury!), seated himself and ordered the familiar J. & B. — neat, “I’ve been thinking, Maury — ” she had watched his eyes closely — ”that I’ll leave town — ” no flicker of emotion — “that I’ll go back to Bastrop — ” still none — ”for good!” A frown had creased his forehead — for only a second. And then, the sentencing. For she had thought of his reaction to the news as a sentence: “you, Deel, my darling, beautiful, neurotic, ex, are condemned to life in Bastrop.” Then, the conditioned reflex of the psychiatrist’s failure, made her think: A sentence, Delia? Like Judge Benjamin sentenced people? Is Maury, the father, punishing you again for being naughty?
“What are you smiling at?” Maury had asked, watching her.
“I’m thinking of Pavlov’s dog.”
“Oh, conditioned reflexes and all, ah?”
“No,” she had said, “I’m thinking of the poor goddam dog. I bet there’s not a soul around who even remembers his name.”
“Identifying again, ah darling?” Maury licked a pretzel. “The search for immortality,” he sighed, “the fear of death. Deel, Deel, it’ll be lonesome without you.”
It was that easy for him. Or was it?
Last night as Dee had set at the desk in the living room, ancestral portraits staring at her from every angle in the room, the antique highboy stopping in the corner near where the grandfather clock chimed the quarter-hour — past midnight — she had thought she must have misinterpreted that meeting. She had tried to relive it through Maury’s eyes; to imagine how he had felt, he who had begged her once never to leave him. “Never, no matter what I say or how I act, Deel, never even if I tell you to go. Promise to stay. Say it!”
And while she had shouted back at her mother, “No, Mama, I’m not coming to bed for a while. Now hush, and don’t worry,” she had remembered that side to Maury — that everything had to be said. He always called it his compulsion.
All right, Maur, she thought, all right, there’s more, buckets more, darling. Is that it? You want to hear everything? Will that do it? Because something is going to have to!
As quietly as she could, she had gone upstairs to her room, lifted the pigskin suitcase onto the folding luggage rack, at the foot of the canopied bed, and from under the slips and bras and panties, taken out the fifth of J. & B. she had packed. A nightcap with Maur, she had thought, like old times; prepare the patient for surgery; it is the hour of the guts, and I’m going to spill mine.
She was carrying the bottle by the neck when she collided with Flo Benjamin in the hallway. Her mother was wrapped in a faded pink robe over the gray nightie — hair in a net, lips pursed, her bridgework back in her room in a tumbler of water.
“Liquor, Delia?” she said.
“Mama, I’m going to have one nightcap. Puts me to sleep, Mama.”
“I’m sick about it, Delia. A daughter of mine drinking alone at midnight. Gaw, Delia, I’m just sick in bed about it!”
“Mama, don’t be silly,” Dee passed by her, starting down the spiral staircase with its Chinese Chippendale woodwork. “Don’t worry so. It’s not necessary.”
Mrs. Benjamin had whined: “It was meetin’ Chad like that, so sudden ‘n all. Now it’s driving you to sit up till morning, drinking. Gaw, Delia, don’t let him do that to you hear?”
As Delia rounded the corner on the way to the kitchen she heard her mother call: “He’s not half so well thought of as you may think, Delia. More than one say he’s a Nigraw-lover. He’s not worth sittin’ up past dawn swillin’ whiskey over. You listen to your mother.”
In the kitchen, as Dee broke ice from the rubber tray, she remembered that evening in Paris, the day of her twenty-fifth birthday. Maur had wanted everything to be perfect; he had made arrangements way in advance. She had read in a travel guide of Laperouse, a restaurant on the Quai Voltaire, and Maur had made reservations there — but they had driven up and down every crazy, twisting street on the Left Bank, because Maur had wanted to surprise her, and he had given only the address to the taxi driver, and the old man could not understand his French. So hours from the time they left the hotel — Dee, dressed in net and satin, frshly made up and beautiful — the cab had reached the restaurant, and, perspiring from the heat, dust-blown and exhausted, they had made their entrance. The second surprise Maur had planned was a room all to themselves — instead of eating in the elegance and excitement of the main dining room, they were to be cooped up in a tiny cubicle alone and suffocating. And on the winding staircase that led to it, Dee broke a heel and turned an ankle. When they were finally back to the hotel — Dee forcing rage back — Maury made the nightcaps in the room — made them the way he always did — one small, melting cube, to one tall glass of whiskey and soda. And Dee had sat across from him on the big iron bed and thought: Your drinks are the same way you are, limp and feckless; thought it so indignantly and vindictively that when she got to her feet and snapped: “I need more ice!” Maur had looked up at her and answered quietly, “I know what you mean, Deel, I know what you’re telling me.”
Even as he was saying it, the boy appeared at the door with the cable. The judge was dead. He had been buried that same day.
• • •
Carrying her drink from the kitchen back to the living room, Dee made a mental note: Juan les Pins, summer ‘52, the English squash player. And another: Florence, same summer, the man — Emil
e? Emilio? — from the Pitti Palace. All right, Maur — everything will be spelled out in capital letters for you. Will that help? As she sat down at the rosewood desk with the Scotch in one hand and a ball point pen in the other, she believed it would help, the way the heart-lonely and, tired-past-midnight, is slow to perceive what next morning it knows is ridiculous.
Still, Dee had reread the letter an hour ago, sealed it, and carried it with her on the walk; perhaps merely to make certain that Flo Benjamin would not have access to it, before it was burned or torn up and destroyed; and perhaps because for some little hour Dee wanted to believe she carried in the pocket of her dress an answer to Maury and to her, that would make it all right again in some swift and sudden metamorphosis — the way it used to happen when, injured at play, she ran to the judge for the magic promise: “We’ll make it all better, Dee-Dee, we’ll make it all right again.”
The sun was rising higher in the sky over Bastrop now, and off in the distance a red fox struck out for the brown hills. Dee found a log near a black gum, sat and fished in her bucket bag for a cigarette. She tapped it on her long red nail, and thought of the way Maur would have had a match lit by now, would have reached his long arm across to give her the flame. Then suddenly from behind her she felt an arm extended, saw a silver identification bracelet on a thin white wrist, and a flame flickering from a bullet-shaped lighter.
“It’s nice to see you again,” a voice said.
PART FOUR
It was nearly seven in the morning and the Chevy was going too fast for one that didn’t know the country. Like its driver, it was from the North. A city car used to straight paved controlled-speed highways, and the twists and snags of State 1 sent it dizzily through the Red Hills, like some crazy moonshiner from over in the mountains, too jug-bitten to find the worn and familiar patch back to the holler.
Since dawn the stranger had been driving through the thin pines and past the vine-hung woods of Tate County, by the festering swamps and restless yellow rivers, hardly looking at what there was to see around him, not even disgusted, as some strangers get, at the dust the car kicked up, not even aware of the noise that stack of pamphlets made in the back seat as they slapped the leather on the turns.
The radio in the ’45 Chevy was tuned into WJLD over in Birmingham, to Gospel Jubilee Records, but Richard Buddy wasn’t aware of that either. He just sat driving, his face stone set with the frown on his forehead below the carefully combed straight black hair, his brown eyes intent on his thoughts, mouth full and firm, lips tightened a little the way a man’s will when he’s concentrating on something, and small square hands gripping the steering wheel tightly.
All night down at the Wheel he had tossed and turned on his makeshift bed in the rear of the car, alternately plagued and teased by mocking and provocative dreams, which danced across his mind’s screen in one dizzy reel after the other. In one his hand had suddenly started turning black as a nigger’s while he was making a speech against desegregation, and when he had tried to hide it in his pants pocket, it wouldn’t fit. He had awakened pounding his side with his fist. In another a beautiful woman — who was she? where had he seen her before? he searched his waking mind in vain — had opened the car door, touched his shoulder gently and announced, “You have won a prize. Mr. Buddy, you have won a prize for — ” and then wild cheering and applauding crowds drowned out her words, and she was kissing him while he wondered why he had won the prize — and he had awakened suddenly with a keen sense of frustration, still trying vainly to hear the words after “prize for — ”….
His night was a patchwork of quick, queer, unconsummated dramas, which left him with an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach, and made him wish morning would come soon. And even before morning did come he had sat up, rubbed his eyes, worried and thought and planned over the problem he faced, climbed out of the car and urinated against the fender countless times — his bladder always belied his ostensible calm — and cleaned under his fingernails, where there was no dirt, where there never was, with his silver penknife. Until finally he had decided to drive anywhere, fast until morning came.
Even now his whole attention was on the problem; it seemed that no time of day, no road, no slapping of pamphlets in the back seat, no Jubilee singing — nothing — could take his mind from it. But then something did.
It was standing right smack in his path, in the spot of the newly risen sun, on the road’s center line, and Richard Buddy came close to mowing it down. He punched his brake pedal with his well-polished loafer and the Chevy whined to an abrupt stop. Winding down the window, Buddy looked out at a man, a big fellow, even taller than himself, but not much older. Buddy placed him in the middle thirties. For some reason he always thought of how old a person was. At twenty-nine it seemed important to him, because he was all too aware of the fact that in a few years he would not be Richard Buddy, a young man of promue. In his own mind he framed it that he would be, in a few years, somebody or nobody. So in the beginning when he met people, he tried to size them up in his mind, as to their potential, their failure, or success. Those — like Duboe Chandler, the man he had met back in the drugstore last night — who seemed never to have had any potential, therefore had neither chance of success of any real sort, or of failure, were specks to Buddy. He was incapable of taking them seriously, or caring about them at all, except during the little hour of their importance to him. In his book they were merely punctuation marks.
This fellow was one of them, Buddy decided, before he had even spoken to him. A big hunk in a thread-bare lightweight sweater, with an olive-green fatigue hat pulled over his no-color hair, smoking a stubby black pipe. A speck — out stopping cars on a bad state road, probably not a quarter in his pants. At that thought, Buddy remembered with considerable depression that he himself had slightly under eight dollars with him in Alabama — $50 back in the Manhattan Savings — and then, uneasily, Buddy thought of the fact that he was out in the middle of nowhere, in strange country, and some bums rolled a man for even less than eight dollars. He touched the button lock on his door and thought of rolling the window back up, but the big fellow was leaning his arm on top the glass now, grinning at Buddy.
“You were coming at me like you were set on killing me,” he said.
“I didn’t even see you.”
“I started out for a ‘little hike this morning and hiked myself about four miles farther than I’d counted on. Not too proud to beg a ride.”
“I’m going to Bastrop,” Buddy answered, trying to measure in his mind the gain in picking up this fellow. He seemed to be fairly well spoken, for a Southerner, but half the time Richard Buddy never could decide, when he was South, whether he was talking to a literate or an illiterate; sometimes they all sounded like niggers.
But before Buddy decided for or against the hitchhiker, the fellow had taken his words as an invitation; smiled, “Fine, I’m going there myself,” and passed by the front of the Chevy, and opened the door on Buddy’s other side.
“So you’re going to Bastrop?” he said, getting in, “What brings you our way?”
Buddy’d been wrong about the no-color hair. The man took off his cap and passed his hand over his head as he settled, and Buddy saw the great shock of yellow hair, gold even in the faint light, and neatly parted. He had an impressive look from his heavy high-top boots to his rugged, strong-jawed countenance. Seeing him fumble for a light for his pipe, Buddy gave him one from his lighter, and looked him over. Thirty-four or thirty-five, a morning’s stubble on his chin, big shoulders and huge white hands; bright, alert eyes — green, or blue? — and a wide mouth with good white teeth. Seemed all right, Buddy guessed; some hick from back country.
“Thanks.” The man grinned again. Then repeated his question. “What brings you to Bastrop?”
“You live there, or near there?” Buddy asked. If he didn’t Buddy didn’t want to go into it. Not in detail. It took too much out of him, and he’d have enough to do in a few hours.
“I
live in Bastrop,” the man said.
“Oh? Well — good!”
“Are you on business of some sort, or visiting?”
“I’m doing a little of both,” Buddy said, pleased that he’d picked the fellow up now; looked like the kind he wanted. “I’m visiting you people because of something that’s my business and your business — everybody’s business, really.” He looked at the fellow and the man nodded encouragement.
“I’m interested in the segregation issue, or as some people put it, the desegregation issue.”
Glancing at his rider, Buddy saw the expressionless face, the lips clamped over the stem of the black pipe, smoke spiraling up to the roof of the car, making it stuffy. Buddy didn’t smoke and didn’t approve of people who had that habit, considering it a weakness; but he carried the lighter to give lights. Good gimmick.
“How does Bastrop figure?” the man said finally, feeling Buddy’s surveillance.
“You know what’s happening Monday, don’t you? The niggers are going to school in Bastrop. They’re not going over to their own school in Morrow any more! They’re going to school in Bastrop,” Buddy said, and added emphatically, “with whites.”
“Ummm-hmmm.” The big fellow sucked his pipe. “We all know that.”
Buddy was frustrated at this reaction, but he knew how to get these crackers’ shackles up. Said, “Of course, that means mixing the races, inter-racial marriages and all. Niggers think they’re privileged to marry white girls.”
“Even so,” the big fellow said, “even if that were true, how many white girls you think would consent?”
“Let me tell you something,” Buddy said. “I come from up North and I’ve seen how this thing works. You’d be surprised what happens when you give the nigger that inch. He puts on a necktie and takes a bath just like you and me, and before you know it some little white girl who’s been reading too much Freud just simply doesn’t see color any more. Ever think of that?”