Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  But Son and Ann were insisting as well. She looked at Son and he said, “Please do sing.” So if her singing was what they all wanted, how could she refuse? Perhaps it would make them forget whatever was the trouble. Besides, Harriet loved so to be at the piano singing the old songs that were fixed so well in her ear and in her heart.

  As she sat down before the piano Helena ran to get Sweetheart, for he would never forgive them if Mother sang without his hearing it. She would also get Mattie who loved hearing her mistress sing above all else. Then Helena returned with her father, saying that Mattie would listen from the pantry.

  So as Sweetheart took his stand by the upright piano and watched her with that rare expression of alertness in his eyes and as the young people grouped themselves behind her Harriet began to play and sing. Her soprano voice came as clear and fresh as when she was nineteen. When she had finished “Barbara Allen” she followed with other ballads almost without being asked. Anyone listening could tell how well she enjoyed singing the old songs that her grandpa had taught her long ago and how well she remembered the lyrics and the melody, never faltering in the words or hesitating on the keyboard. But her lovely, natural talent was not merely of the music. She seemed actually to experience the mood of each song. And her memory and ear for the soft vowels and sharp consonants of the mountain dialect were such that what was really a precise rendition seemed effortless. All her family and their guest stood round remarking on the sweet, true quality of her voice.

  At the dinner table the girls began to talk again of who was kin to whom in Nashville. “Mama,” Kate said, “I didn’t know till the other day that Miss Liza Parks is Mrs. Frazier Dalton’s aunt. She’s one of that Parks family who used to live at Cedar Hill.”

  Harriet could hardly resist saying that Miss Liza was also second cousin to Mr. Bob Ragsdale. But without even looking at Kate she said, “Now, what interest could that be to Ann? Tell us, Ann, how you liked Sweetheart’s little farm.”

  “Oh, it’s a beauty,” Ann said. “And his methods are quite modern. He even rotates his crops and paints his barn. Dr. Wilson is certainly no backward Southern farmer. B.T. showed us the garden, and I think B.T. is a wonder.”

  “He’s grand on outside work,” Harriet said.

  The two girls began to laugh, and Harriet frowned at them.

  “Son has told me,” Ann whispered to Harriet, for Mattie was passing in and out of the room, “about the poor fellow’s peculiarity. He’s going away for the Duration, I understand, but when he comes back, why doesn’t he try to get a farm of his own and make a real business of it. You can tell he has a genuine love of farming, and he’s quite intelligent, isn’t he? He ought to—”

  “Now, Ann,” Son interrupted, “how on earth is a poor Negro just going to reach out and get himself a farm? How can you ask such a question with all your knowledge of conditions?”

  “I was thinking that Dr. Wilson would help him. Wouldn’t you, Doctor?”

  “Yes, of course, if he wanted—”

  The girls were laughing together again. “That’s just it,” Helena said, “if B.T. wanted to. But he’s a gentleman’s nigger, Ann. He worships Daddy, and Daddy couldn’t live without him. It’s a very old-fashioned relationship, you know what I mean? It’s the same with Mother and Mattie.” At this point Mattie came in. She was serving the last of the four vegetable dishes. Nobody spoke while she was in the room. The picture of Mattie and B.T. in the kitchen this morning returned to Harriet, and she found herself thinking again of what she had said to Mattie yesterday in the yard. The brooding expression in Mattie’s eyes and her repeated glances at Son as she passed round the table suggested anew the hateful comparison she had drawn. But Harriet could not feel such strong resentment now. She told herself that it was because she saw now how great was the real difference between her son and Mattie’s little nephew. It was too absurd even to consider. She must have been out of her head yesterday! Her nerves had been on edge. That was the answer. And Mattie had spoken to her about that foul-scented B.T. just when she was grieving most about Son’s going into the Army. Today the real pain of that grief had left her. It would doubtless return. But why, she considered, had it left her now? It seemed that his putting on a uniform was as unreal and indifferent a matter to her as the mysterious life he led in New York and his intellectual friendship with Ann Prewitt and this conversation they were having at her table. Last night she had overheard Son and Ann discussing herself as objectively as they were now discussing B.T. and Negro “conditions.” Then she rebuked herself and allowed that Son simply lived on a higher plane. She felt that she should be ashamed to understand so little about her son and about her daughters and the antagonism there was between the young people.

  When Mattie had left the room Kate said, “Yes, it’s quite the same with Mattie and Mama. Yesterday Mattie was upset by some bad news and she came and threw herself into Mama’s arms and wept like a child. It seems to me that’s what they really are: a race of children, a medieval peasantry. They’re completely irresponsible and totally dependent upon us. I really feel that Southern white people have a great responsibility—”

  “We are responsible,” Ann Prewitt said, “for their being irresponsible and dependent, if that’s what you mean, Kate.”

  “Oh, that’s not what she means,” said Helena. “Their whole race is in its childhood, Ann, with all the wonders and charm of childhood. And it needs the protection, supervision, discipline, and affection that can be given only by Southern white people who have a vital relationship and traditional ties with them. The poor nigs who I feel for are those in Chicago and New York who have no white families to turn to.”

  Ann was looking to Son to see if he were going to make an argument of this. But Son said only, “What do you think of that, Ann?”

  With an aggrieved, shy glance at Son she said, “I think it’s a lot of nonsense. But that’s only my opinion.”

  “Well, it’s my opinion too,” said Son. “The people in the South cannot expect to progress with the rest of the nation until they’ve forgotten their color line. The whole system has got to be changed. In some strange way it hinders the whites more than the blacks. When B.T. was in the garden with us this morning I felt that this was his home more than mine and that it was because of him that I feel no real tie to this place. Even when we were children it was so. . . . The whole system has got to be changed . . . somehow . . . someway.”

  “Somehow!” Ann exclaimed. Then she lowered her eyes and seemed to regret having spoken.

  “You have a definite idea of how, then?” Helena asked.

  “Equality: economic and social.”

  “You can’t be serious,” the girls said in one voice.

  “Of course, she’s serious,” Son rejoined. Ann was silent. She appeared to have resolved not to speak again.

  “You two are speaking as New Yorkers now,” Helena began, “not as Southerners. Didn’t it ever occur to you that the South has its own destiny? It has an entirely different tradition from the rest of the country. It has its own social institutions and must be allowed to work out its own salvation without interference.”

  “Sister,” Son laughed, “you’re beginning to sound not merely old-fashioned but unreconstructed.”

  “Then unreconstructed it is,” defied Kate with a gallant smile. “Who can say that the Southern states were wrong to fight for their way of life?”

  “For slavery, Kate?”

  “The Southern master was morally responsible, which is more than can be said for the industrial sweatshopper.”

  Now Son slapped his hand over his mouth and presently his vehement laughter burst forth. He pushed his chair a little way from the table and said, “Now the cat’s out of the bag! I know what you girls have been reading and who you’ve probably been seeing—those fellows at the University in Nashville. You know what I mean, Ann! Why, Ann, I’ve brought you into a hotbed of Southern reactionaries. How rich! How really rich this is! Now I know what you gir
ls have been trying to put across. You and all Southern gentlemen and gentlewomen are the heirs and protectors of the great European traditions—and agrarian tradition, I should say. That’s what all of this family pride and noblesse oblige mean. And Ann here, my comrade, believes that come the Revolution it will all be changed overnight. How rich!”

  His laughter was curiously contagious and there did seem to be a general relief among all. “And now, my wise brother,” asked Kate, “what do you believe?”

  Ann and the two sisters were managing to smile at one another, for Son’s derision had united them temporarily. While Son was trying to get his breath Ann leaned across the table and said, “He believes nothing that’s any credit to him. He’s been reading The Decline of the West! A man his age!”

  Harriet was utterly dismayed, though she did sense that the incomprehensible antagonism had reached its crisis and that the worst was over. At least the young people understood each other now. But as they were leaving the table she wished, for the first time in many years, that she could be alone for a while this afternoon. She wanted to remember how Son and Helena and Kate had been when they were children—the girls quarreling over scraps from her sewing or playing dolls on the porch and Son begging to go off swimming with B.T. when the creek was still cold in May.

  Everybody slept late on the morning of the Fourth of July. Sweetheart was still snoring gently at nine-thirty. He awoke when Harriet started the electric fan. “I’m so sorry, Sweetheart,” she said, “but you looked so hot there I thought the fan might help.” She was already half dressed, but before she had snapped the last snap in the placket of her dress Sweetheart had put on his clothes and shaved and gone out onto the porch. She smiled as she thought of it; and then she began to hurry, for Son’s voice could now be heard on the porch. Besides, there was a lot to be done in preparation for the supper party tonight. Probably the girls were already helping in the kitchen. They were being such angels this weekend!

  She was smoothing the last corner of the counterpane when Kate came in.

  “I feel like the devil,” Kate said. She was wearing her silk negligee and her hair was uncombed and even matted in places. She was barefooted; and the girls always looked taller to Harriet in their bare feet.

  “And you look like the very devil,” Harriet said.

  “Thanks, dear.” She sat down on the bed which Harriet had just now made. She struck a match on the bottom of the bedside table and lit the cigarette which she had brought with her. She patted the bed beside her indicating that Harriet should sit down. Harriet could always tell when the girls had been drinking a good deal the night before by the sour expression which the heavy sleep left on their features. She was long since accustomed to their drinking “socially,” and to their smoking but she still did not like the smell of whiskey on them next morning. She pulled up her rocking chair and sat down.

  “Mother, I do wish that Helena wouldn’t drink so much. She just doesn’t know how.”

  Harriet only shook her head, saying nothing, for Helena would have a similar report about Kate later in the morning. The truce between them was evidently over. “How was the Buchanans’ party?” she asked.

  “It was pretty nice.” Then she shrugged her shoulders. “I want to tell you about Ann.”

  “What is there to tell?”

  “I thought you wanted to hear about the party!” Kate said sharply.

  “I do.”

  “Well listen, that’s what I mean—how Ann behaved last night.”

  “She didn’t misbehave?”

  “I should say not. She’s a perfect little lady, you know. A perfect parlor pink, as we suspected—Helena and I.”

  Parlor pink meant nothing to Harriet. She turned her face away toward the window to indicate that if Kate persisted in talking the kind of nonsense they talked at the table yesterday she didn’t care to listen.

  “She holds her liquor well, all right,” Kate continued, “but after a few drinks she’s not the quiet little mouse she is around here. She talks incessantly and rather brilliantly, I admit. And what I’m getting at is that when she talks Son seems to hang on her every word. He plainly thinks she’s the cleverest woman alive.”

  “What does she talk about?”

  “For one thing, she talked about birth control and its implications to Lucy Price who is a Catholic. She was really very funny about the Pope as the great papa who doesn’t pay.” Harriet had no full understanding of birth control itself, much less of its implications. And she knew that she was unreasonably prejudiced against Catholics. Why couldn’t Kate talk about Ann without dragging in those things?

  “She quotes Marx and Huxley and lots of young British poets. And all the while Son sits beaming with admiration as though she were Sappho or Margaret Sanger, herself.”

  “Is he in love with her then, Kate, if he does all that?”

  “Not at all.”

  “And Ann herself?”

  “Hardly! She’s not the type. She never looks at him.”

  Harriet sighed.

  “But there’s something between them,” Kate said speculatively.

  “I suppose intellectual friendships can have very deep feelings.”

  “Pooh,” said Kate.

  “Then the girl is in love with him, and he—”

  “No, Mother. I don’t believe it.” But Harriet looked at her daughter with the matted hair and the sleep-creased face and the cigarette with its smoke drifting straight upward into the breathless air. Her girls had never been in love. And it isn’t their height, she thought, and it isn’t their legs. They’re like Son, she thought, and it isn’t them. She got up from her chair and as she left Kate behind she met Helena at the door. Helena’s face and hair and general attire were about the same as Kate’s. “Kate’s in there,” Harriet said and brushed past the daughter who towered above her in the doorway. She went into the parlor to draw the draperies before the sun got too warm.

  The day grew warm. You could almost hear the temperature rising if you stood still a minute. Harriet was so busy about the house that she thought it her activity that made her perspire. But now and then she would step out to the porch and slip on her spectacles to look at the thermometer. “What an awful day,” she would say to Sweetheart who was sleeping in his chair.

  The girls remained in their room until afternoon. Once or twice Harriet heard them speaking irritably to one another. When they finally appeared Helena turned on the radio in the parlor and Kate sat on the porch. They would show no interest in the coming party. They sulked about as though they had been disappointed or defeated in something.

  “Quit buzzing around, Mother,” Kate said. “There are only a dozen or so people coming and it’s supposed to be informal.”

  “Oh, Goddy, I never saw so much commotion over a cold supper,” Helena said.

  Ann tried to help, but Harriet said, “There’s nothing left to do. I just have to cut the melon balls and everything will be ready.”

  Later Sweetheart and Son went off to Nashville to pick up the whiskey at the hotel. Ann went along to make her Pullman reservations, for she was taking a train at one A.M. She said she had to be in Little Rock the next day.

  Most of the guests parked their cars in the backyard alongside B.T.’s shack or in front of the garage. As they arrived Son went out into the yard to greet them or welcomed them on the screened porch. Supper was served buffet style, and Sweetheart brought everybody two or three drinks before they began to eat. “We want you to have an appetite,” he would say.

  The guests were, for the most part, Son’s old school friends and their wives. There were two young men of sufficient height to escort the girls from room to room. And there was a young professor from the University and his wife who had taught at Miss Hood’s School with Helena. Son was most cordial to this couple, introducing himself to them in the yard since Helena was not present when they arrived. The young professor (he explained that he was really only a teaching fellow) wore a small mustache and a da
rk bow tie with his linen suit. He was very timid and spoke only a few words in the course of the whole evening.

  While dressing for the party Harriet observed in the mirror that her face showed the strain she had been under. She spread extra powder under her eyes and applied more rouge than was usual for her. When she had finished her toilet she removed all her personal things from the dressing table, opened a new box of powder, and brought from the closet shelf an ivory hand mirror and comb and brush. The ladies were going to use this as a powder room. From the closet shelf she also brought four small pillows with lacy slipcovers which she arranged on the bed.

  She was arranging the pillows when Son knocked at her door. He entered with his own large glass in one hand and a small tumbler for her in the other. “It’s mostly ginger ale,” he said, “and I thought it would cool you off. It’s right hot tonight.”

  It is this moment, she thought, that I’ve been waiting for through the whole weekend. And in this moment she banished all the despair that had been growing in her feelings toward Son and the girls. The insufferable insolence with which Mattie had treated her today also seemed as nothing. He has come to tell me what is in his heart. Or at least he has come so that we may have a few minutes alone before he leaves for the Army tomorrow. She glanced up at the childhood pictures of him which with pictures of the girls and a few of Mama and Papa and of Sweetheart covered one wall of her room. She pointed to a picture taken when he was thirteen wearing a skullcap on the back of his head and a sleeveless sweater. “That’s my favorite,” she said. “I began to notice a new look in your eyes when you were that age.”

  Son looked at the picture. Then his eyes roved indifferently over the other pictures there. “Well,” he said, “I’d better go out and see that the girls are not sticking hat pins in Ann just to see how she reacts. Or at least not miss seeing it, myself, if they do.” The guests were beginning to leave by eleven-thirty. Harriet was sitting in a straight chair on the front porch. She had been sitting there in the dark for an hour with her hands folded in her lap. Sweetheart was slumped down among the pillows on the swing nearby, asleep. The party had all been vague to Harriet, like a dream of some event she dreaded. After Son left her standing alone before the gallery of pictures in her room she was hardly able to go into the house and meet the guests. There were no tears and no signs of nervous agitation. Rather, she felt herself completely without human emotion of any sort as she lingered there in her room for a long while. When finally she did go forward and take her place by the buffet in the dining room, she pretended to be preoccupied with the food so that the guests would not notice how little concern she had for them. There were things she had planned to watch for this evening; but those things had become trivial and remote.