by Peter Taylor
But the cap and the dull-colored coat have lost that quality which meant the probability of my departure. They mean no more than that I am actually here. Yet I realize that it is because I have entertained no thought of leaving just now that I dared turn my eyes to them, and I only wanted to see if there would be any temptation, or rather to see if I had lost all will to go. And so I am conscious again of betrayal and still do not know whether it is a possibility or a fact. My betrayal is like some boundless fear that has really had no beginning in me and can have no end. This room and this old woman and this woman’s voice constitute the only certainty. I feel strangely that I must remain until I can identify my guilt or possible guilt with some moment of the visit if not with some object in the room or some trick of her behavior. And so now I say to myself that she has been right, that all experience can be translated into the terms of any one moment of life if one believes sufficiently in the reality of that moment. “Young man, would you be good enough to admire my figurines.” Her smile is full of irony. “They are said to be world famous and of inestimable value.”
I have hurried to join her before the mantel. I allow her to see that she has remembered correctly my having flashes of garrulousness like her own. I chatter about John Brown and remark endlessly upon the cunningness of the little nigger who stands at his side with John Brown’s pink china hand on his coal black head. I reveal my pedantry asking if it was not for Nell Gwynn that all flowers were pulled from some London park. I laugh at the face of Louis Napoleon.
I find suddenly that we are laughing together at the ridiculous sort of dignity which the artist has faithfully, if unknowingly, represented in the delicate figurine of the bourgeois emperor. Our eyes meet in the glass for an instant. Presently I see the whole room reflected there. I see the two of us looking over the heads of the world-famous figurines. I catch the sound of our commingled laughter.
Then we are facing each other again and she is saying, “What if I should ask you to leave now, should ask you to go now and come again to finish our visit some other afternoon, would you think me too insufferably odd and rude? Would you?”
And before I have thought or considered what I am saying, “But I cannot come here again.”
At first her countenance seems frozen in an austerity that is totally disarming to me after so much geniality. Her glance is set for a moment on some object in a far corner of the room. It might almost be my own cap and coat, yet I know it is not with an object that she is concerned. Rather, it is the thing I have just said. She is giving its meaning her most serious consideration.
While she does so, I realize the peculiar turn our intercourse has taken. In my voice there has been almost a plea to allow me to remain since I could not come here again. But it was to say: I have come here and glimpsed the unique sort of power and truth you have discovered or created, but now I wish to remain to disprove its worth. Perhaps that is how she is interpreting it. Or perhaps she thinks I have been unaffected by the interview and want only to cause her all possible discomfort before I leave.
Yet of course she at last sees the thing as it is. She sees that I spoke before I thought, and laughing she shrouds herself again in her grand ignorance. “Of course you can come back, dear child, if you will. Let’s say good-bye and plan on another afternoon.”
Having once spoken plainly it is easy to speak plainly again. “Then I must ask you a question. I want to know why you suddenly desire me to go.”
As each moment passes my departure seems to become more difficult for me. I turn with the same abruptness with which I have spoken and go to one of the long windows that overlook the quiet street and park.
There is no sound in the room, and I know that she is still standing there before the mantel. Finally her voice comes groping, yet with confidence in its effect, “Then you do think me rude.”
“I don’t understand, of course.” But I imply that I should listen to explanation. I turn and face her. Our smiles are like smiles in photographs. “You asked your nephew to tea, my dear aunt. I suppose I am only surprised at what a very short teatime you have. I thought you English lingered over tea things.”
“See here,” she says coming toward me, “there is no great mystery. To be very frank, I have an engagement I had forgotten. I mixed my days. But it is one I intend keeping.”
“Certainly it must be important.”
“Yes, it’s important as an old lady’s social engagements go. But if I should describe it you would laugh.”
“I should laugh. Yet it is important?”
She drops her eyes. And with her eyelids still closed—broad wrinkled, powdered lids—she says, “I promised someone I’d keep it, you see.”
“Oh, it’s your word and not the engagement that matters.”
“You could understand that?” she asks with her eyes still closed, and I can imagine an echo to her last word “that.”
I make my answer with a nod, as though not knowing that her closed eyes mean she cannot see me. But actually I do know that she has not yet my answer; and simultaneously I am filled with disgust for her and with a desire to tiptoe from her presence before she looks up again, for surely this is it. Once again I think I am free of the spell of this room. I can almost visualize a pure and self-righteous darkness in which I suspect she is holding herself behind those wrinkled lids. I feel that she has created a terrible war and brought me halfway round the world to prove that she, an old lady in a London apartment, can keep her word in some matter of etiquette. But the harm is not in its being only a small matter of decorum. The harm suddenly appears to be strangely in the altruism, the mere keeping of her word. It is as if her life which she has twisted and formed so willfully has been but a vast circle by which route she has returned to the simple sort of truths that my mother possessed in the beginning. I shall leave now believing what I wished to believe and what this room and this woman have for a time caused me to doubt: that my mother was good because she was simple and unworldly, that my aunt is evil because she is complicated and worldly.
Then in an instant all of my victory is swept from me by the mere opening of her large, handsome, articulate blue eyes. Her last question is now translated and spoken by her eyes. But there is also the further question, “Could you understand more?” And whatever my dull eyes may reply, her lips part and she speaks with new indirectness.
“No. It is not my word. It is something much smaller.” A new earnestness has come over her countenance. It is she that has withdrawn from me now. The final accident did not occur. She is no longer hoping that I may see. I know that by “smaller” she means “larger,” but beyond that I cannot conceive of what is in her mind. She gives me her hand. As we say good-bye I hear the jingling of her bracelets and observe the barely perceptible twitch at the corner of her mouth.
Now I am outside her door and on the stairs with my military coat over my arm. I wonder, with an insipid smile on my lips, at my own brutality. Have I been a soldier frightening an old lady at teatime? But as I descend the stairs, her face is before me as it was by the window when she raised the wide, wrinkled lids and exposed the brilliant blue of her eyes. I hear again the jingling of her bracelets. And it is then, suddenly recalling now the hard circles of gold rested on the ancient skin drawn over the ungainly wristbone, that I am filled with awe and with a sort of fear as of some fate I might have met at her hands. I feel that I have been in the presence of a withered savage tribeswoman, at the mercy of her absolute authority. But when finally I have passed through the vestibule and out onto the sidewalk and have inhaled gratefully the free air of the cleanswept city street there is no sense of freedom. As I wander in the half-light of evening through the wide thoroughfares and the broad squares of this foreign place, it all seems suddenly as familiar as my mother’s parlor; and though my mind is troubled by a doubt of the reality of all things and I am haunted for a while by an unthinkable distrust for the logic and the rarefied judgments of my dead mother, I feel myself still a prisoner in her par
lor at Nashville with the great sliding doors closed and the jagged little flames darting from the grate.
A Long Fourth
FOR OVER five years Harriet Wilson had been saying, “I’d be happier, Sweetheart, if B.T. were not even on the place.” Harriet was a pretty woman just past fifty, and Sweetheart felt that she grew prettier as the years went by. He told her so, too, whenever she mentioned the business about B.T. or any other business. “I declare you get prettier by the year,” he was accustomed to say. That was how the B.T. business had been allowed to run on so. Once she had pointed out to Sweetheart that he never said she grew wiser by the year, and he had replied, laughing, that it certainly did seem she would never be a judge of niggers. It was while they were dressing for breakfast one morning that he told her that, and she had quickly turned her back to him (which was the severest rebuke she was ever known to give her husband) and began to powder her neck and shoulders before the mirror. Then he had come over and put his hands on her pretty, plump shoulders and kissed her on the cheek saying, “But you’re nobody’s fool, darling.”
Thinking of that had oftentimes been consolation to her when Sweetheart had prettied her out of some notion she had. But really she had always considered that she was nobody’s fool and that she certainly was not merely a vain little woman ruled by a husband’s flattery, the type her mother had so despised in her lifetime. She even found herself sometimes addressing her dead mother when she was alone. “It’s not that I’ve become one of that sort of women in middle age, Mama. It’s that when he is so sweet to me I realize what a blessing that is and how unimportant other things are.” For Harriet was yet guided in some matters by well-remembered words of her mother who had been dead for thirty years. In other matters she was guided by the words of Sweetheart. In still others she was guided by what Son said. Her two daughters guided her in nothing. Rather, she was ever inclined to instruct them by quoting Mama, Sweetheart, or Son.
Their house was eight miles from downtown Nashville on the Franklin Pike, and for many years Sweetheart, who was a doctor, had had his own automobile for work and Harriet had kept a little coupe. But after the war began the doctor accepted gas rationing rather conscientiously and went to and from his office on the interurban bus. “We eye-ear-nose-and-throat men don’t have to make so many professional calls,” he said. Harriet usually walked down to the pike to meet him on the five-thirty bus in the evening.
It was a quarter of a mile from the pike to the house, and they would walk up the driveway hand in hand. Harriet, who said she lived in perpetual fear of turning her ankle on a piece of gravel, kept her eyes on the ground when they walked, and Sweetheart would usually be gazing upward into the foliage of the poplar trees and maples that crowded the lawn and overhung the drive or he would be peering straight ahead at the house, which was an old-fashioned, single-story clapboard building with a narrow porch across the front where wisteria bloomed in June and July. Though they rarely had their eyes on each other during this walk, they were always hand in hand and there was always talk. It was on one of these strolls, not a week before B.T. gave notice, that Harriet last uttered her old complaint, “I’ve always told you that I’d be happier, Sweetheart, if B.T. were not even on this place now that he’s grown up.”
“I know.” He squeezed her hand and turned a smiling countenance to her.
“I don’t think you do know,” she said keeping her eyes on the white gravel. “He’s grand on the outside, but all of them are grand on the outside. As long as we keep him I’m completely deprived of the services of a houseboy when I need one. When Son and his young lady come I don’t know what I’ll do. The girls are angels about things, but next week they should be entertaining Son and her, and not just picking up after her. It seems unreasonable, Sweetheart, to keep B.T. when we could have a nice, normal darkie that could do inside when I need him.”
Sweetheart began swinging their joined hands merrily. “Ah, oh, now, B.T.’s a pretty darned good darkie, just clumsy and runs around a bit.”
Harriet looked up at her husband and stopped still as though she were afraid to walk with her eyes off her feet. “Sweetheart, you know very well it’s not that.” And making a face she held her nose so acutely that he could feel it in the fingers of the hand he was holding.
“Well, there’s nothing wrong that a little washing won’t cure.” He was facing her and trying now to take hold of her other hand.
“No, no, no, Sweetheart. It’s constitutional with him. Last Monday I had him bathe before he came in to help old Mattie move the sideboard. Yet that room was unbearable for twenty minutes after he left. I had to get out, and I heard his Auntie Mattie say, ‘Whew!’ Mattie knows it as well as I do and is just too contrary to admit it. I’m sure that’s why she moved into the attic and left him the whole shack, but she’s too contrary to admit it.”
The doctor threw back his head and laughed aloud. Then for a time he seemed to be studying the foliage absently and he said that he reckoned poor old Mattie loved her little nephew a good deal. “I think it’s touching,” he said, “and I believe Mattie would leave us in a minute if we let B.T. go.”
“Not a bit of it!” said Harriet.
“Nevertheless, he’s a good nigger,” her husband said, “and we can’t judge Negroes the way we do white people, Harriet.”
“Well, I should say not!” Harriet exclaimed.
Harriet was not a light sleeper but she complained that she often awoke in the night when there was something on her mind. On the last night of June that summer she awoke with a start and saw by the illuminated dial of her watch that it was 3 A.M. She rolled over on her stomach with great care not to disturb Sweetheart who was snoring gently beside her. This waking, she supposed, was a result of her worries about Son’s coming visit and the guest he was bringing with him. And then Son was going to the Army on the day after the Fourth. She had been worrying for weeks about Son’s going into the Army and how he would fit in there. He was not like other men, more sensitive and had advanced ideas and was so intolerant of inefficiency and old-fashioned things. This was what had broken her sleep, she thought; and then there was repeated the unheard-of racket that had really awakened her.
Harriet grunted in her pillow, for she knew that it was her daughters quarreling again. A door slammed and she heard Kate’s voice through the wall. “Oh, Goddy! Godamighty! Helena, won’t you please shut up!” She knew at once the cause of the quarrel: Kate had been out this evening and had turned on the light when she came to undress. Poor thing certainly could not pin up her hair and hang up her dress in the dark. Yet it was an unreasonable hour. She wondered where the girls ever stayed till such a late hour. They were too old now to be quizzed about those things. But they were also too old to be quarreling so childishly. Why, when Harriet and her sister were their age they were married and had the responsibilities of their own families. What a shame it is, she thought, that my girls are not married, and it’s all because of their height. Then Harriet rebuked herself for begrudging them one minute of their time with what few beaux they had.
For there really were so few tall men nowadays. In her own day there had been more tall men, and tall women were then considered graceful. Short dresses do make such a difference, she reflected, and my girls’ legs are not pretty. Harriet was not tall herself, but Mama had been tall and Mama was known as one of the handsomest women that ever graced the drawing rooms of Nashville. But the girls were a little taller than even Mama had been. And they were smart like Mama. They read all the same books and magazines that Son did. Son said they were quite conversant. Nevertheless they must behave themselves while Son’s friend was here. No such hours and no such quarrels! She did wish that Son had not planned to bring this girl down from New York, for he had said frankly that they were not in love, they were only friends and had the same interests. Harriet felt certain that Son would bring no one who was not a lady, but what real lady, she asked herself, would edit a birth-control magazine? Just then Sweetheart rolled ov
er and in his sleep put his arm about her shoulders. Something reminded her that she had not said her prayers before going to bed, and so with his arm about her she said the Lord’s Prayer and went off to sleep.
She forgot to speak to the girls the next day about their quarreling, but on the following day she was determined to mention it. Sweetheart had left for town in his car since he was to meet Son and Miss Prewitt’s train that afternoon. Harriet was in the front part of the house wearing a long gingham wrapper and her horn-rimmed spectacles. In one hand she clasped the morning paper and a few of the June bills which had come in that morning’s mail. The house was in good order and in perfect cleanliness, for she and the girls and Mattie had spent the past three days putting it so.
These days had been unusually cool with a little rain in the morning and again in the afternoon. Otherwise Harriet didn’t know how they could have managed a general housecleaning in June. The girls had really worked like Trojans, making no complaint but indirectly. Once when it began to rain after a sultry noon hour Helena had said, “Well, thank God for small favors.” Kate, when she broke her longest fingernail on the curtain rod, screamed a word that Harriet would not even repeat in her mind. But they had been perfect angels about helping. Their being so willing, so tall, and so strong is really compensation, Harriet kept telling herself, for not having the services of a houseboy. They had tied their heads up in scarfs, pulled on their garden slacks, and done all a man’s work of reaching the highest ledges and light fixtures and even lifting the piano and the dining room table.
They had spent last evening on the big screened porch in the back, had eaten supper and breakfast there too, so there was not a thing to be done to the front part of the house this morning. In the living room she looked about with a pleasant, company smile for the polished floor and gave an affected little nod to the clean curtains. All she did was to disarrange some of the big chairs which Mattie had fixed in too perfect a circle. Mama used to warn Harriet against being rigid in her housekeeping. “The main thing is comfort, dearest,” and Harriet knew that she had a tendency to care more for the cleanliness and order. So she even put the hearthrug at a slight angle. Then she went to the window and observed that a real July sun was rising today; so she pulled-to the draperies and went from window to window shutting out the light till the whole front part of the house was dark.