by Peter Taylor
After three or four years, John R. began to say that he thought Jess would be with them always and that they would see the day when the boys’ children would call her “Mammy.” Helen Ruth said that she would like to agree with him about that, but actually she worried, because Jess seemed to have no life of her own, which wasn’t at all natural. John R. agreed that they should make her take a holiday now and then. Every summer, they would pack Jess off to Brownsville for a week’s visit with her kinfolks, but she was always back in her room over the garage within two or three days; she said that her people fought and quarreled so much that she didn’t care for them. Outside her life with the Lovells, she had only one friend. Her interest was the movies, and her friend was “the Mary who works for Mrs. Dunbar.” Jess and Mary went to the movies together as often as three or four times a week, and on Sunday afternoons Mary came to see Jess or Jess went to see Mary, who lived over the Dunbars’ garage. Jess always took along her scrapbook and her most recent movie magazines. She and Mary swapped movie magazines, and it was apparent from Jess’s talk on Monday mornings that they also swapped eulogies of their white families.
Sometimes Helen Ruth would see Mrs. Dunbar downtown or at a P.T.A. meeting; they would discuss their cooks and smile over the reports that each had received of the other’s family. “I understand that your boys are all growing into very handsome men,” Mrs. Dunbar said once, and she told Helen Ruth that Jess was currently comparing one of the boys—Mrs. Dunbar didn’t know which one—to Neil Hamilton, and that she was comparing Helen Ruth to Irene Rich, and John R. to Edmund Lowe. As the boys got older, they began to resent the amount of authority over them—though it was small—that Jess had been allowed by their parents and were embarrassed if anyone said Jess had taught them to drive the car. When John R., Jr., began at the university, he made his mother promise not to let Jess know what grades he received, and none of the boys would let Jess take snapshots of them any more. Their mother tried to comfort Jess by saying that the boys were only going through a phase and that it would pass in time. One day, she even said this in the presence of Robbie, who promptly reported it to the older boys, and it ended with John R., Jr.’s, complaining to his father that their mother ought not to make fun of them to Jess. His father laughed at him but later told Helen Ruth that he thought she was making a mistake, that the boys were getting big enough to think about their manly dignity, and that she would have to take that into consideration.
She didn’t make the same mistake again, but although Jess never gave any real sign of her feelings being hurt, Helen Ruth was always conscious of how the boys were growing away from their good-natured servant. By the time Robbie was sixteen, they had long since ceased to have any personal conversation with Jess, and nothing would have induced Robbie to submit to taking drives with her but the knowledge that his father would not allow him to use the car on dates until he had had months of driving practice. Once, when Robbie and Jess returned from a drive, Jess reported, with a grin, that not a word had passed between them during the entire hour and a half. Helen Ruth only shook her head sadly. The next day she bought Jess a new bedside radio.
The radio was the subject of much banter among the boys and their father. John R. said Helen Ruth had chosen the period of hard times and the Depression to become more generous with her servant than she had ever been before in her life. They recalled other presents she had given Jess recently, and from that time on they teased her regularly about how she spoiled Jess. John R. said that if Jess had had his back trouble, Helen Ruth would have retired her at double pay and nursed her with twice the care that he received. The boys teased her by saying that at Christmas time she reversed the custom of shopping for the servant at the ten-cent stores and for the family at the department stores.
Yet as long as Jess was with them, they all agreed that she was the best help they had ever had. In fact, even afterward, during the war years, when John R.’s business prospered again and his back trouble left him entirely and the boys were lucky enough to be stationed near home and, later, continue their education at government expense, even then John R. and the boys would say that the years when Jess was with them were the happiest time of their life and that Jess was the best servant Helen Ruth had ever had. They said that, and then there would be a silence, during which they were probably thinking about the summer morning just before the war when Jess received a telephone call.
When the telephone rang that morning, Helen Ruth and John R. and the boys had just sat down to breakfast. As was usual in the summertime, they were eating at the big drop-leaf table in the sun parlor. Jess had set the coffee urn by Helen Ruth’s place and was starting from the room when the telephone rang. Helen Ruth, supposing the call was for a member of the family, and seeing that Jess lingered in the doorway, said for her to answer it there in the sun parlor instead of running to the telephone in the back hall.
Jess answered it, announcing whose residence it was in a voice so like Helen Ruth’s that it made the boys grin. For a moment, everyone at the table kept silent. They waited for Jess’s eyes to single out one of them. John R., Jr., and Kenneth even put down their grapefruit spoons. But the moment Jess picked up the instrument, she fixed her eyes on the potted fern on the window seat across the room. At once her nostrils began to twitch, her lower lip fell down, and it seemed only an act of will that she was twice able to say, “Yes, ma’am,” in answer to the small, unreal, metallic voice.
When she had replaced the telephone on its cradle, she turned quickly away and started into the dining room. But Helen Ruth stopped her. “Jess,” she asked, her voice full of courtesy, “was the call for you?”
Jess stopped, and they all watched her hands go up to her face. Without turning around, she leaned against the door jamb and began sobbing aloud. Helen Ruth sprang up from the table, saying, “Jess, honey, what is the matter?” John R. and the boys stood up, too.
“It was a telegram for me—from Brownsville.”
Helen Ruth took her in her arms. “Is someone dead?”
Between sobs, Jess answered, “My little brother—our baby brother—the only one of ’em I cared for.” Then her sobs became more violent.
Helen Ruth motioned for John R. to move the morning paper from the big wicker chair, and she led Jess in that direction. But Jess would not sit down, and she could not be pulled away from Helen Ruth. She held fast to her, and Helen Ruth continued to pat her gently on the back and to try to console her with gentle words. Finally, she said, “Jess, you must go to Brownsville. Maybe there’s been some mistake. Maybe he’s not dead. But you must go, anyway.”
Presently, Jess did sit in the chair, and dried her eyes on Helen Ruth’s napkin. The boys shook their heads sympathetically and John R. said she certainly must go to Brownsville. She agreed, and said she believed there was a bus at ten that she would try to catch. Helen Ruth patted her hand, telling her to go along to her room when she felt like it, and said that she would finish getting breakfast.
“I want to go by to see Mary first,” Jess said, “so I better make haste.” She stood up, forcing a grateful smile. Then she burst into tears again and threw her arms about Helen Ruth, mumbling, “Oh, God! Oh, God!” The three boys and their father saw tears come into Helen Ruth’s eyes, and through her tears Helen Ruth saw a change come over their faces. It was not exactly a change of expression. It couldn’t be that, she felt, because it was exactly the same on each of the four faces. It hardly seemed possible that so similar a change could reflect four men’s individual feelings. She concluded that her own emotion, and probably the actual tears in her eyes, had made her imagine the change, and when Jess now pulled away and hurried off to her room, Helen Ruth’s tears had dried and she could see no evidence of the change she had imagined in her husband’s and her sons’ faces.
While Jess was in her room preparing to leave, they finished breakfast. Then Helen Ruth began clearing the table, putting the dishes on the teacart. She had said little while they were eating, but in her
mind she was all the while going over something that she knew she must tell her family. As she absent-mindedly stacked the dishes, her lips moved silently over the simple words she would use in telling them. She knew that they were watching her, and when Robbie offered to take Jess to the bus station, she knew that the change she had seen in all their faces had been an expression of sympathy for her as well as of an eagerness to put this whole episode behind them. “I’ll take Jess to her bus,” he said.
But Helen Ruth answered, in the casual tone she had been preparing to use, that she thought it probably wouldn’t be the thing to do.
“Why, what do you mean, Helen Ruth?” John R. asked her.
“It was very touching, Mother,” Kenneth said in his new, manly voice, “the way she clung to you.” He, too, wanted to express sympathy, but he also seemed to want to distract his mother from answering his father’s question.
At that moment, Jess passed under the sun-parlor windows, walking down the driveway, carrying two large suitcases. Helen Ruth watched her until she reached the sidewalk. Then, very quietly, she told her family that Jess McGehee had no baby brother and had never had one. “Jess and Mary are leaving for California. They think they’re going to find themselves jobs out there.”
“You knew that right along?” John R. asked.
“I knew it right along.”
“Did she know you did, Helen Ruth?” he asked. His voice had in it the sternness he used when questioning the boys about something. “No, John R., she did not. I didn’t learn it from her.”
“Well, I don’t believe it’s so,” he said. “Why, I don’t believe that for a minute. Her carrying on was too real.”
“They’re going to California. They’ve already got their two tickets. Mrs. Dunbar got wind of it somehow, by accident, from Mrs. Lon Thompson’s cook, and she called me on Monday. They’ve saved their money and they’re going.”
“And you let Jess get away with all that crying stuff just now?” John R. said.
Helen Ruth put her hands on the handlebar of the teacart. She pushed the cart a little way over the tile floor but stopped when he repeated his question. It wasn’t to answer his question that she stopped, however. “Oh, my dears!” she said, addressing her whole family. Then it was a long time before she said anything more. John R. and the three boys remained seated at the table, and while Helen Ruth gazed past them and toward the front window of the sun parlor, they sat silent and still, as though they were in a picture. What could she say to them, she kept asking herself. And each time she asked the question, she received for answer some different memory of seemingly unrelated things out of the past twenty years of her life. These things presented themselves as answers to her question, and each of them seemed satisfactory to her. But how little sense it would make to her husband and her grown sons, she reflected, if she should suddenly begin telling them about the long hours she had spent waiting in that apartment at the Vaux Hall while John R. was on the road for the Standard Candy Company, and in the same breath should tell them about how plainly she used to talk to Jane Blakemore and how Jane pretended that the baby made her nervous and went back to Thornton. Or suppose she should abruptly remind John R. of how ill at ease the wives of his hunting friends used to make her feel and how she had later driven Sarah’s worthless husband out of the yard, threatening to call a bluecoat. What if she should suddenly say that because a woman’s husband hunts, there is no reason for her to hunt, any more than because a man’s wife sews, there is reason for him to sew. She felt that she would be willing to say anything at all, no matter how cruel or absurd it was, if it would make them understand that everything that happened in life only demonstrated in some way the lonesomeness that people felt. She was ready to tell them about sitting in the old nursery at Thornton and waiting for Carrie and Jane Blakemore to come out of the cabin in the yard. If it would make them see what she had been so long in learning to see, she would even talk at last about the “so much else” that had been missing from her life and that she had not been able to name, and about the foolish mysteries she had so nobly accepted upon her reconciliation with John R. To her, these things were all one now; they were her loneliness, the loneliness from which everybody, knowingly or unknowingly, suffered. But she knew that her husband and her sons did not recognize her loneliness or Jess McGehee’s or their own. She turned her eyes from the window to look at their faces around the table, and it was strange to see that they were still thinking in the most personal and particular terms of how they had been deceived by a servant, the ignorant granddaughter of an ignorant slave, a Negro woman from Brownsville who was crazy about the movies and who would soon be riding a bus, mile after mile, on her way to Hollywood, where she might find the friendly faces of the real Neil Hamilton and the real Irene Rich. It was with effort that Helen Ruth thought again of Jess McGehee’s departure and the problem of offering an explanation to her family. At last, she said patiently, “My dears, don’t you see how it was for Jess? How else can they tell us anything when there is such a gulf?” After a moment she said, “How can I make you understand this?”
Her husband and her three sons sat staring at her, their big hands, all so alike, resting on the breakfast table, their faces stamped with identical expressions, not of wonder but of incredulity. Helen Ruth was still holding firmly to the handle of the teacart. She pushed it slowly and carefully over the doorsill and into the dining room, dark and cool as an underground cavern, and spotlessly clean, the way Jess McGehee had left it.
Their Losses
AT GRAND JUNCTION, the train slowed down for its last stop before getting into the outskirts of Memphis. Just when it had jerked to a standstill, Miss Patty Bean came out of the drawing room. She had not slept there but had hurried into the drawing room the minute she’d waked up to see how her aunt, who was gravely ill and who occupied the room with a trained nurse, had borne the last hours of the trip. Miss Patty had been in there with her aunt for nearly an hour. As she came out the nurse was whispering to her, but Miss Patty pulled the door closed with apparent indifference to what the nurse might be saying. The train had jerked to a standstill. For a moment Miss Patty, clad in a dark dressing gown and with her graying auburn hair contained in a sort of mesh cap, faced the other passengers in the Pullman car with an expression of alarm.
The other passengers, several of whom, already dressed, were standing in the aisle while the porter made up their berths, glanced at Miss Patty, then returned their attention immediately to their luggage or to their morning papers, which had been brought aboard at Corinth. They were mostly businessmen, and the scattering of women appeared to be businesswomen. In the silence and stillness of the train stop, not even those who were traveling together spoke to each other. At least half the berths had already been converted into seats, but the passengers did not look out the windows. They were fifty miles from Memphis, and they knew that nothing outside the windows would interest them until the train slowed down again, for the suburban stop of Buntyn.
After a moment Miss Patty’s expression faded from one of absolute alarm to one of suspicion. Then, as though finally gathering her wits, she leaned over abruptly and peered out a window of the first section on her left. What she saw was only a deserted-looking cotton shed and, far beyond it, past winter fields of cotton stalks and dead grass, a two-story clapboard house with a sagging double gallery. The depot and the town were on the other side of the train, but Miss Patty knew this scene and she gave a sigh of relief. “Oh, uh-huh,” she muttered to herself. “Grand Junction.”
“Yes, sweet old Grand Junction,” came a soft whisper.
For an instant Miss Patty could not locate the speaker. Then she became aware of a very tiny lady, dressed in black, seated right beside where she stood; indeed, she was leaning almost directly across the lady’s lap. Miss Patty brought herself up straight, throwing her shoulders back and her heavy, square chin into the air, and said, “I was not aware that this section was occupied.”
“Why, now
, of course you weren’t—of course you weren’t, my dear,” said the tiny lady. She was such an inconspicuous little soul that her presence could not alter the impression that there were only Memphis business people in the car.
“I didn’t know you were there,” Miss Patty explained again.
“Why, of course you didn’t.”
“It was very rude of me,” Miss Patty said solemnly, blinking her eyes.
“Oh, no,” the tiny lady protested gently.
“Oh, but indeed it was,” Miss Patty assured her.
“Why, it was all right.”
“I didn’t see you there. I beg your pardon.”
The tiny lady was smiling up at Miss Patty with eyes that seemed as green as the Pullman upholstery. “I came aboard at Sweetwater during the night,” she said. She nodded toward the curtains of Miss Patty’s berth, across the aisle. “I guess you were as snug as a bug in a rug when I got on.”
Miss Patty lowered her chin and scowled.
“You’re traveling with your sick aunt, aren’t you?” the lady went on. “I saw you go in there awhile ago, and I inquired of the porter.” The smile faded from her eyes but remained on her lips. “You see, I haven’t been to bed. I’m bringing my mother to Brownsville for burial.” She nodded in the direction of the baggage car ahead.
“I see,” Miss Patty replied. She had now fixed this diminutive person with a stare of appraisal. She was someone from her own world. If she heard the name, she would undoubtedly know the family. Without the name, she already knew the life history of the lady, and she could almost have guessed the name, or made up one that would have done as well. Her impulse was to turn away, but the green eyes of Miss Ellen Watkins prevented her. They were too full of unmistakable sweetness and charity. Miss Patty remained a moment, observing the telltale paraphernalia: the black gloves and purse on the seat beside Miss Ellen; the unobtrusive hat, with its wisp of a veil turned back; the fresh powder on the wrinkled neck.