by Peter Taylor
Miss Betty’s complaints were not all of indirect thrusts through the boys and the other servants, for after Bert and Emmaline had been neutralized, Vennie began, herself, a series of personal affronts. If Miss Betty crossed the threshold of the kitchen, she put down whatever she was doing and retired to the basement. If the two were about to meet in the narrow hall or on the stairs, Vennie would turn back and manage to get out of sight before Miss Betty could call her. Miss Betty did try to call to her sometimes, or at least to speak to her—there was a period when she imagined it was not too late to make friends and join forces with her adversary—but Vennie would have none of it. At last, Miss Betty trapped her one day in the pantry and said, “Why don’t you and I plan a surprise dessert for the family tonight? You make us a cake—one of your good devil’s food cakes—and I’ll set us up to a wonderful new sort of ice cream they’re making at a place I know out on De Baliviere.”
Vennie rared back and her voice became shrill: “I been making the ice cream since before you-all came here, and I’ll be making it when you and her’s both gone.”
When Flo Dear heard about this, her heart went out to Miss Betty in a way it seldom did. But she was also frightened by the look in Miss Betty’s eyes. Ruin seemed inevitable at that moment—spiritual ruin, or, more specifically, spiritual relapse. Flo Dear’s life in Nashville had been as quiet as Miss Betty’s had been active. She knew that some people in Nashville had called her “Miss Betty Pettigru’s silent partner.” She had overheard people speaking of her that way, but she had said to herself, “I live this way because I have chosen to live this way.” It was true that if she had wished, she could have shared all of Miss Betty’s activities, for that was what Miss Betty had once hoped she would do. But the choice had been made long before she came to live on West End Avenue. She didn’t herself pretend to know when she had made the choice, but it was made before she ever married Tolliver Blalock and became a part of his huge family connection. In the big country family that she was born into, they had always told her she was by nature a mouse, to which she had replied (silently), “If I am a mouse, at least I am a principled mouse.” But when she was twenty-two and already considered an old maid, she had been swept off her feet by Tolliver Blalock, the black sheep of his family and widely known as a rascal with women. He had left her after only two months, “disappeared off the face of the earth,” leaving his hat and coat on the bank of the Tennessee River, more as a sign that he would never return than as any real pretense that he had drowned. As his widow, Flo Dear was taken to the bosom of the Tolliver-Pettigru-Blalock connection as no other in-law ever was. For years, she lived with first one of her in-laws and then another. They quarreled over who was to have the privilege next. Apparently there had never been a mouse in any of those families, or at least not a silent mouse, and they delighted in how she would sit and listen to what any of them said. She listened, and listened especially to the old ones, and then, one day, thinking it would help her forget for a while the loneliness and humiliation she felt in the bosom of her husband’s fine family, she sat down and wrote out all she had heard about their splendid history. As much as anything, it was to clear her head of the stuff. The manuscript was discovered and she became known as the finest living authority on the history of the Tollivers, Blalocks, and Pettigrus. After ten years of this life in the vicinity of Thornton, there came a letter to her from Miss Betty Pettigru, whose wealthy old father had taken her up to Nashville in the vain hope of finding her a suitable husband. Miss Betty was then seeking membership in the Colonial Dames of America and she wanted Flo Dear’s help in that cause. It ended, of course, by Flo Dear’s moving up to Nashville.
Searching through Nashville libraries for proof of Miss Betty’s eligibility, Flo Dear found her true vocation, discovered the one passion of her life. It happened in a single moment. She was standing—tiny, plain, dish-faced creature that she was—in the dark and towering library stacks of what is surely the mustiest, smelliest, dirtiest, ugliest of state capitol buildings in the Union. In her pawlike little hands she held a book whose faded title she was trying to read on the mildewed binding. Presently, she opened the book with an impatient jerk. It came open not at the title page but at the plates of two brightly emblazoned fifteenth-century escutcheons. They were the first coats of arms Flo Dear had ever seen, and the beauty of their joyful colors seemed suddenly to illuminate her soul and give her a first taste of the pure joy of being alive. Needless to say, the joy and inspiration she received from her discovery made the matter of talent an unimportant one. In practically no time at all, she became a modern master in the art of blazonry, and by the time she left Nashville, thirty years later, there was hardly a nice house in town on whose walls a piece of her work was not hung.
Flo Dear’s work became the absorbing interest of her life. Yet it wasn’t entirely her fault or her work’s fault that she and Miss Betty could not become “as close as sisters.” At first, Flo Dear was guilty of suspecting Miss Betty of disingenuousness. She could not see why Miss Betty made over her so and she felt that she was being “cousined” to death. Outside her profession, Flo Dear soon got so she could not abide the word “cousin.” She felt that if she allowed it, Miss Betty would smother her with confidences. More than her time, somehow her small supply of energy seemed to disappear when she listened to her cousin. She simply could not afford the intimacy and dependency that was being asked of her.
There was more explanation than this: When old Major Pettigru was on his deathbed, he had said to Miss Betty, who was his only child, “It’s a shame and a scandal, Bet. Since I brought you to Nashville, you’ve expended your time making a place for yourself among strongheaded women while you ought to have been making your place in the heart of some gentle, honest man.” He had said that to her in the presence of two doctors and a nurse, and so almost immediately it had become known all over town. To most people it was an amusing story, but not to Flo Dear. She felt, exactly as Major Pettigru had, that Miss Betty had expended foolishly not merely her time but her invaluable, marvelous energy as well. Perhaps, with her unprepossessing appearance and her lack of small talk, finding a husband was not feasible for Miss Betty, but something—surely something—better than a life of social climbing could be found. It was worse than a shame and a scandal in Flo Dear’s eyes; it was a sin. She had never told Miss Betty in so many words, but she knew that Miss Betty acknowledged in her heart that she was right. Else why had Miss Betty always made a point of matching every social victory with some act of charity? When she succeeded in having Mrs. John O’Neil Smith impeached as madam president of the Corrine Society (for having sat down to dinner with the president of a Negro college), she immediately gave a formal luncheon for the homeliest, least eligible debutante of the season. After she had blackballed every candidate for membership in the West End Book Club until the other members accepted an ambitious but illiterate satellite of her own, she paid a formal call on a notorious lady in town and went about saying that she, for one, thought that that lady’s “adopted” child looked nothing in the world like its foster mother. Surely, in Nashville, Miss Betty’s life had been all sin and expiation, but with never a resolution to sin no more.
“They have big get-togethers down there,” Vance said.
“Big get-togethers?” said Miss Betty.
“Yes, ma’am. Sometimes there’s a whole crowd and sometimes not so many. We used to always listen to them through the radiator in here, till we got tired of it. Listen! That’s Vennie’s cousin who works out at the Florisant Valley Club. He’s from Thornton, too, and used to work for us. Listen to them! They think they’re whispering now. But you can hear them just as plain.”
“Yes, you can almost hear them breathing,” said Auntie Bet.
“And they can’t hear you at all unless you really holler.”
Vance and his Auntie Bet were in the cardroom, behind the drawing room. It was a room that Amy kept shut off, because she and James were not cardplayers and it wa
s only another room for Bert to keep clean. It was a tiny room, and the furniture had been left there by the former occupants. There was a built-in game cabinet with a dozen different size pigeonholes and compartments, and a “stationary card table,” and some chairs. It all went with the house, the former occupants had said.
It was a Sunday afternoon and Vance and Auntie Bet were playing checkers. He had come back from a long walk in the park and had found her arranging some flowers in a vase on the hall table. When he invited her to go with him to the cardroom and have a game of checkers, she looked at him wonderingly, because she could tell that he had something on his mind. When they began to play, it occurred to her that perhaps the boys weren’t supposed to play games like checkers on Sunday. And in the cardroom, too. Then she began to notice the Negro voices coming through the hot-air register in the corner of the room. She was so distracted by her thoughts and by those voices that almost before she knew it, the game was over and she was badly beaten.
“Oh, you weren’t even trying, Auntie Bet,” said Vance.
She smiled—or, rather turned up the corners of her mouth self-consciously. “I tried, but I got to listening to the Negroes’ voices in the radiator,” she said. “We must be right above Vennie’s living room.” And then Vance told her about the get-togethers down there.
“It’s rather eerie, isn’t it?” she said. “I mean how we can hear their voices and they can’t hear ours.”
Vance began arranging the checkers for a new game. “Sometime,” he said, not looking at her, “you might just come in here—you and Flo Dear, that is—when Jimmy and Landon and I are down in Vennie’s rooms.” He raised his eyes and said in a grave, reflective tone of voice, “Auntie Bet, that Vennie says the darnedest things to us children. You should just hear her.”
“Why what, Vance?” But before he could answer, Miss Betty had suddenly understood what sort of plot he was suggesting, and she abruptly got up from the table.
Vance instantly grew pale. “What’s the matter, Auntie Bet?”
“Nothing’s the matter, my darling,” she said. “But I—I left half my flowers out of water.” She was opening the door into the drawing room, but she glanced back at Vance and saw him still sitting with the checkerboard before him and with the bare light of the overhead lamp shining on his black hair, which looked rather too soft and too thick for a boy, and on the mottled complexion of his forehead, on the widespread nares of his nose. And silently Miss Betty Pettigru was saying to the oldest of her three Tolliver nephews, “Poor wounded, frightened child! What thoughts have you had of me? What thoughts?”
As she passed through the hall, she was surprised to see that she had indeed left some of her flowers lying on the big console table. She had bought them at a florist’s on the way home from church that morning but had waited till Vennie left the kitchen to select her vase and arrange them. She snatched the flowers from the table and went upstairs.
In her room, she dropped the flowers in her wastebasket and, without taking off her daintily pleated dress, she lay down across the bed. This time, she was not pacing the floor after fifteen or twenty minutes. She was still lying there when Flo Dear called her to go down to supper.
As she lay on her bed this Sunday afternoon, she thought of the life she had left in Nashville. Her life there had never in her eyes been one of sin and expiation. It had just been life, plain and simple, where you did what good things you could and what bad things you must. As she looked back, it seemed that it had been hard for her to decide to leave Nashville only because it had meant facing the fact of the worthlessness of the goal she had set herself many years before—the goal set for her, really, by circumstances and by her personal limitations. What else could she have done with her life? She had not asked to be born in the days when Victoria was queen of England, when Southern womanhood was waited upon not by personal maids but by personal slaves. She had not asked to be born the unbeautiful, untalented heiress of a country family’s fortune, or to grow up to find that the country town that gave that fortune its only meaning was decaying and disappearing, even in a physical sense. The men of her generation, and of later generations, had gone to Nashville, Memphis, Louisville, and even St. Louis, and had used their heads, their connections, and their genteel manners to make their way to the top in the new order of things. And wasn’t that all she had done, and in the only way permissible for a Miss Pettigru from Thornton? Once the goal was defined, was it necessary that she should be any less ruthless than her male counterparts? In her generation, the ends justified the means. For men, at least, they did. Now, at last, Miss Betty saw how much like a man’s life her own had been. She saw it in the eyes of the wounded, frightened child. She saw how it was that every day of her adult life had made her less a woman instead of more a woman. Or less somebody’s old granny instead of more somebody’s old granny. Wrong though it seemed, the things a man did to win happiness in the world—or in the only world Miss Betty knew—were of no consequence to the children he came home to at night, but every act, word, and thought of a woman was judged by and reflected in the children, in the husband, in all who loved her. “If only Flo Dear had not been so embittered before she even came to my house,” Miss Betty thought miserably, “maybe my instincts would not have died so dead.”
She had done nothing to bring on Vennie’s dismissal, and yet Vance had seen that she was capable of doing that something and had thought she might enter into a conspiracy with little children in the house of her kinspeople. If he condemned old Vennie for saying things to “us children” that she ought not to say, what thoughts must he have of her? All was lost, and in the morning she would go—not back to Nashville but perhaps to Thornton itself.
Flo Dear knocked on Miss Betty’s door from the hall. “It’s almost supper time,” she said.
“Well, I’ll be along soon,” Miss Betty answered, not suggesting that Flo Dear open the door and come in.
“It’s Bert’s Sunday on,” Flo Dear reminded her, “and Amy and James are going out to dinner.”
Its being Bert’s Sunday on meant that Bert would prepare and serve the cold supper and that someone must check closely to see that he washed the lettuce for the salad and that the table was set properly. Amy and James’s going out to dinner meant that the check on Bert would be Miss Betty and Flo Dear’s responsibility.
Flo Dear inferred from Miss Betty’s being alone for so long in her room that there had been another incident. She had heard Miss Betty come upstairs an hour earlier, and although she had put down her book, her mind had wandered more than once from the subject of heraldic symbolism to all the incidents of recent weeks. Miss Betty had managed to make it plain enough to her, in the way she reported the incidents, that Vennie’s antagonism was directed equally at both of them. It was really Flo Dear, wasn’t it, Miss Betty had asked her one day, that Vennie had made fun of to the boys and their Wednesday guests? During all their thirty years together, Flo Dear felt, this was the first deliberate unkindness Miss Betty had shown her. Yet she interpreted it as a “sign of nerves.” It was so unreasonable that she could not really resent it. It was as though Miss Betty expected her to do something about Vennie. Even in Nashville, Miss Betty had never tried to involve her in her petty wars with womankind. She stood outside Miss Betty’s door now, shaking her head and saying to herself, “Well, it can’t go on. It can’t go on. We must leave. We must leave Amy and James and their children to their peace. If we can’t go back to Nashville, we—or I—can go back to Thornton.” But the very thought of that prospect made Flo Blalock clasp her hands and shudder inwardly. Spending her last days among the remnants of the Tolliver-Blalock-Pettigru clan! Moving from garrulous house to garrulous house! She, the pitiable woman whom one of them had wronged. She hurried along the hall, past the room where Amy and James were dressing, down the stairs, and into the dining room to see how things were going with Bert. The light was on, but there were not even place mats on the table yet. “I declare,” she whispered, “tha
t Negro Bert is not worth his salt.” She went into the pantry and into the kitchen, but one of the gas jets of the stove was burning, though no pot or pan was on the stove, or even a coffeepot.
And then, through the backdoor and vestibule, she heard Bert’s footsteps on the cement driveway. She stepped to the backdoor and saw him, in his white coat, coming through the twilight from the garage—the old carriage house, where he had his room, in the coachman’s loft. She could see that he saw her, and that he hesitated. “What’s the matter, Bert?” she asked.
He came on up the steps. He was a tall, brown-skinned Negro and walked with a peculiar gait. Amy said he picked his feet up slewfoot and put them down pigeon-toed. As he came inside the door, he pretended to laugh. “You know what I done, Miss Flo? When I left out of here, I aimed to turn off the stove, but I turned off the light instead.” He switched on the light and went to the table where the coffeepot and the open coffee can were sitting.
“And now you’ve left the light on in your room.” She was still looking out toward the garage.
“Is I now?” He was filling the coffeepot.
Flo Dear was trembling. When she spoke, she hoped her voice would sound like Miss Betty’s or Amy’s or James’s, or Vennie’s, or anybody’s but her own. “Somebody’s out there, Bert, who hasn’t any business out there. Is that so, Bert?”
Bert put the coffeepot on the stove and then looked at Miss Flo, but not in his usual simple big-eyed way. “Yes, ma’am, they is. It’s Vance.”