by Peter Taylor
Flo Dear couldn’t find the words she wanted, but she continued to stare at Bert, and she knew that even with just a stare she was taking a hand in things. And now Bert, too, knew that she was taking a hand, and when he saw that, every last bit of foolishness seemed to go out of his face.
“I’m just going to tell you about it, Miss Flo,” he said. “Vance came down here in the kitchen and he was crying around and wanted to talk to me. He said he had hurt Miss Betty’s feelings and wouldn’t never git over it, and he was scared to talk to his daddy or Miss Amy about it. He wanted to go out yonder to my old rooms to talk with me, so I just taken him on out there, Miss Flo, and he and me had it all out. He’ll be along in the house directly.”
Flo Dear sat down on a chair beside the table. “Tell me how he hurt Miss Betty’s feelings, Bert.”
Bert, looking right into Miss Flo’s eyes, stood before her and told her how Vance had got Miss Betty to go in the cardroom and all they had said there and finally how Miss Betty wouldn’t really listen to Vennie and her company and wouldn’t “be conniving with any little old Vance.”
When he had finished, Flo Dear made no move to go. “You begin setting the table, Bert,” she said. “I want to just sit here awhile.”
Amy and James came downstairs in evening clothes. They were going first to a cocktail party and then to a large supper party honoring the debutante daughter of two of their friends. They knew that Miss Betty always liked to see them when they were “dressed,” particularly if they were going out among people whom she considered “prominent in an important way.”
Amy went to the dining-room door to see if the two ladies were in there. Bert was just beginning to set the table. “You’re late getting started with that, Bert,” she said.
“Yes’m, ain’t I, though? I got behind.” He was all big-eyed simpleness again.
“Well, have you gotten Mr. James’s car out?”
“Yes’m, it’s at the side.”
“Hasn’t Miss Betty or Miss Flo come down?”
“Miss Flo’s back here,” he said, and he dashed off toward the kitchen. Amy stood watching the swinging door until Flo Dear appeared.
“How lovely you look, Amy,” said Flo Dear, coming into the dining room. “Nothing so becomes you as green, Amy.” Compliments from her were rare but not unheard of. Such compliments on Amy’s appearance were Miss Betty’s prerogative, but now and then, when Miss Betty was not present, Flo Dear would say something like this.
“Why, I thank you, Flo Dear,” Amy said. “A compliment from you really sets me up. You’re not the wicked flatterer Aunt Betty is.”
“She’s just more articulate than I, Amy.”
“Pooh,” said Amy, turning back into the hall. “Where is she, anyway?”
“Here she comes from upstairs now,” James said. He was standing near the foot of the stairs, his derby on his head, his overcoat over one arm and Amy’s white lapin wrap over the other.
“Take off your hat in the house, James,” Amy said. “What will your aunts think of you?”
“It’s time we’re going,” James said, holding up Amy’s wrap for her.
“Do wait and let me see Amy’s dress,” called Miss Betty from the stairs, rather spiritlessly.
The others looked up at her. “Aunt Betty, you don’t sound like yourself,” Amy said.
“I’ve been taking a nap,” she said. “You look lovely, Amy. It’s a stunning dress.”
Amy’s dress was of a dark green silk, with a long waist, a very low back, and a hemline just at her knees. Her hair was not bobbed, but tonight she had it arranged in a way that made it at first glance look so.
“She looks sixteen, doesn’t she?” said Flo Dear.
Suddenly Amy called out, “Boys! Boys! We’re going!”
Landon and Jimmy came racing down from upstairs, and in a moment Vance appeared in the doorway from the dining room, looking solemn and dejected. Miss Betty went to him and put an arm about his shoulders.
“If you boys behave and mind your aunts,” James Tolliver said, getting into his coat, “I’ll take you to East St. Louis with me next Saturday. I’m going out to see old Mr. Hendricks at the stockyards.”
Jimmy was standing on the bottom step of the stairs. Partly, no doubt, because he didn’t like to go to East St. Louis but mostly because he wished to satisfy his thirst for scientific truth, he asked, “Why do you say ‘our aunts’ when Flo Dear is not our aunt or even related to us and Auntie Bet isn’t really our aunt, either?”
Jimmy’s mother and father looked at him as though he had spoken an obscenity. “Jim, are you asking to be punished?” his father said. “Do you want me to take you upstairs in my dress clothes and punish you?”
Amy dropped her velvet evening bag on the console table and sat down in one of the high-backed hall chairs. This was her usual way of saying she wouldn’t go somewhere until the boys stopped misbehaving. It was also a way of emphasizing her speechlessness. After a moment, she said, “Just what do you mean by that, James? What earthly power made you ask that?”
Flo Dear glanced at Miss Betty and saw that she had managed to catch Vance’s eye and was shaking her head at him warningly. Jimmy was blushing and carefully avoiding the eyes of the aunts. He kept looking first at his mother and then at Landon. After a moment, Landon, who was always the one most moved by his mother’s threats, said to Jimmy, “Go ahead and tell, Jimmy. It’s just Vennie, and she always says she doesn’t care who you tell.” Then, turning to his mother, he said, “Vennie’s always saying we aren’t a bit of kin to Flo Dear, and not much to Auntie Bet. And she thinks they ought not to live with us unless they are close kin.”
But Jimmy still had not told when his father pulled the derby off his head and was saying, “You boys—all of you—get upstairs to your rooms and get up there quick.”
The three boys were upstairs and in their rooms almost before their father had taken off his overcoat. He removed the coat with great care and folded the sleeves and the collar as though he were about to pack it in a traveling bag. Then he handed it and his derby to Amy.
“Oh, James,” said Miss Betty in a hoarse whisper, “don’t punish the boys.”
“I’m not going to punish the boys,” he said. “I’m going downstairs before I leave this house and give Amy’s notice to Vennie.”
“No,” Miss Betty said, “don’t do that, James!”
But Amy said, “Tell her she needn’t ever come up in the house again.”
“I’ll meet you at the car, Amy,” he said to her, and as he went out through the dining room, he called back, “I’ll tell Bert to stay in the house all evening, till we come home.”
When he was gone, Amy tried to smile. “I don’t know why he couldn’t wear his overcoat to fire Vennie,” she said. “A sign of special respect, I suppose.”
Miss Betty, wearing a dazed expression, said, “This won’t do, Amy. It just won’t do.”
“Oh, it’ll do fine, Aunt Betty,” said Amy. “Don’t you think I know what’s been going on in my own house? It was James who had to be shown. He has been Vennie’s protector since long before this business. And Emmaline and Bert both gave me notice a week ago; I’ve been sick about it. Why, for a houseboy, you just can’t beat that simpleminded Bert. No, my dears, Vennie’s days of usefulness in this house are past. Her superannuation is long overdue.”
Supper for Miss Betty and Flo Dear and the boys was delayed for three quarters of an hour that Sunday night. Bert was an eternity getting the food on the table, but none of them was hungry, and so it did not matter. Not long after their parents were out of the house, Vance and his brothers came downstairs and into the living room, where the two aunts were sitting together. But before the boys came down, Flo Dear and Miss Betty had exchanged a few words, and each had had a great many thoughts that were not exchanged, at least not in words.
They were seated directly opposite each other on either side of the fireplace, in two little Windsor chairs that were the only unco
mfortable chairs in the room. Last embers of the usual Sunday fire were smoldering in the wood ashes between the andirons. When first they sat down, there was a long silence, with each of them staring into the embers, watching an occasional flame spring up and then die almost at once. Miss Betty’s small, pudgy nose seemed swollen and her eyes were two glazed buttons. She sat with her feet placed far apart, her ankles looking swollen like her nose, and on her knees her hands rested, the ten fingers spread out like so many wrinkled little sausages. Flo Dear sat crossing and uncrossing her narrow ankles, fingering the buttons that ran from the high neck to the waist of her dress, and blinking her eyes at the fire.
At last, without changing her expression or moving a muscle of her body, Miss Betty said, “We should go on back to Nashville, I think, Flo Dear, or maybe to Thornton.” She wanted to tell Flo Dear that she had had no hand in Jimmy’s outburst, but it would be useless and somehow not entirely truthful to say that. Yet at the very moment she was saying that they must leave and thinking that they must, she was also thinking that if they could stay, if they could only stay, she might, with her new insight, begin to be of some use to the Tolliver boys. After all, they were rich children, just as she had been a rich child, and the world was still changing, preparing people for one thing and giving them another. And poor little Vance—what problems would be his! Not excelling in his schoolwork, certainly not good-looking, with only that one terrible talent that she, too, had—the talent for observing what things the world valued and making the most of that.
But she knew that she could not spend the last years of her life with Flo Dear sitting there so straight in the Windsor chair, accusing her with every crossing of her slim ankles and every blinking of her narrow eyes.
All that Flo Dear said before the boys came down was “We must do whatever seems the right thing to you and the best thing for the boys.” From this, Miss Betty took hope. She detected a new softness in Flo Dear’s voice. It was a softness that must have come from Flo Dear’s own reassessment of things. Whether it was the thought of Thornton or her thoughts in the dark kitchen or the knowledge that Miss Betty had been truly hurt by Vance’s proposal, something was making her question her old judgments of Miss Betty Pettigru. It seemed to her that perhaps to do anything at all in the world was to do wrong to someone. She thought of Vennie and of what would become of her now. Perhaps it was fair and just that Miss Betty should have the affection the boys gave to Vennie. Perhaps Vennie had nieces and nephews of her own. She could go and live with them or with some of her many friends. There must be many of her relatives who loved and needed old Vennie. And yet perhaps she didn’t really have a family of her own. Or perhaps none of them would find her so lovable and attractive when she no longer had this good job and could make them presents and cook them meals on her little coal range. But already Flo Dear could hear Vance and Jimmy and Landon coming down the stairs into the hall.
When the boys came into the living room, with their hair combed and wearing fresh shirts, Miss Betty and Flo Dear stood up and greeted their nephews as though it were after long months of separation. And the boys seemed equally glad to see their aunts. There was even kissing and hugging, and there were some tears shed. Supper was still not on the table, and though Miss Betty complained about Bert’s being “so mortally slow,” Flo Dear did not say again that he wasn’t worth his salt. Instead, she gathered the three boys about her chair and commenced explaining to them, as no one else in the world was so well qualified to do, just exactly what her family connection was to them, and in even greater detail she described the blood ties that existed between them and their Auntie Bet. There was a certain hollowness in her voice, and as she spoke she stared somewhat vacantly into the dying embers of the Sunday fire. The boys, however, did not notice any of this. They listened attentively to the facts she was presenting, as though they were learning life’s most important lessons.
For a while, Miss Betty watched this scene with tears in her eyes. But then she went and lay down on the sofa. It would be no more protracted visit to St. Louis; she was here for life. And when, finally, Bert announced supper, Vance had to go and touch Auntie Bet’s hand to wake her from a deep, dreamless slumber.
What You Hear from ’Em?
SOMETIMES PEOPLE misunderstood Aunt Munsie’s question, but she wouldn’t bother to clarify it. She might repeat it two or three times, in order to drown out some fool answer she was getting from some fool white woman, or man, either. “What you hear from ’em?” she would ask. And, then, louder and louder: “What you hear from ’em? What you hear from ’em?” She was so deaf that anyone whom she thoroughly drowned out only laughed and said Aunt Munsie had got so deaf she couldn’t hear it thunder.
It was, of course, only the most utterly fool answers that ever received Aunt Munsie’s drowning-out treatment. She was, for a number of years at least, willing to listen to those who mistook her “ ’em” to mean any and all of the Dr. Tolliver children. And for more years than that she was willing to listen to those who thought she wanted just any news of her two favorites among the Tolliver children—Thad and Will. But later on she stopped putting the question to all insensitive and frivolous souls who didn’t understand that what she was interested in hearing—and all she was interested in hearing—was when Mr. Thad Tolliver and Mr. Will Tolliver were going to pack up their families and come back to Thornton for good.
They had always promised her to come back—to come back sure enough, once and for all. On separate occasions, both Thad and Will had actually given her their word. She had not seen them together for ten years, but each of them had made visits to Thornton now and then with his own family. She would see a big car stopping in front of her house on a Sunday afternoon and see either Will or Thad with his wife and children piling out into the dusty street—it was nearly always summer when they came—and then see them filing across the street, jumping the ditch, and unlatching the gate to her yard. She always met them in that pen of a yard, but long before they had jumped the ditch she was clapping her hands and calling out, “Hai-ee! Hai-ee, now! Look-a-here! Whee! Whee! Look-a-here!” She had got so blind that she was never sure whether it was Mr. Thad or Mr. Will until she had her arms around his waist. They had always looked a good deal alike, and their city clothes made them look even more alike nowadays. Aunt Munsie’s eyes were so bad, besides being so full of moisture on those occasions, that she really recognized them by their girth. Will had grown a regular wash pot of a stomach and Thad was still thin as a rail. They would sit on her porch for twenty or thirty minutes—whichever one it was and his family—and then they would be gone again.
Aunt Munsie would never try to detain them—not seriously. Those short little old visits didn’t mean a thing to her. He—Thad or Will—would lean against the banister rail and tell her how well his children were doing in school or college, and she would make each child in turn come and sit beside her on the swing for a minute and receive a hug around the waist or shoulders. They were timid with her, not seeing her any more than they did, but she could tell from their big Tolliver smiles that they liked her to hug them and make over them. Usually, she would lead them all out to her back yard and show them her pigs and dogs and chickens. (She always had at least one frizzly chicken to show the children.) They would traipse through her house to the back yard and then traipse through again to the front porch. It would be time for them to go when they came back, and Aunt Munsie would look up at him—Mr. Thad or Mr. Will (she had begun calling them “Mr.” the day they married)—and say, “Now, look-a-here. When you comin’ back?”
Both Thad and Will knew what she meant, of course, and whichever it was would tell her he was making definite plans to wind up his business and that he was going to buy a certain piece of property, “a mile north of town” or “on the old River Road,” and build a jim-dandy house there. He would say, too, how good Aunt Munsie’s own house was looking, and his wife would say how grand the zinnias and cannas looked in the yard. (The yard was al
l flowers—not a blade of grass, and the ground packed hard in little paths between the flower beds.) The visit was almost over then. There remained only the exchange of presents. One of the children would hand Aunt Munsie a paper bag containing a pint of whiskey or a carton of cigarettes. Aunt Munsie would go to her back porch or to the pit in the yard and get a fern or a wandering Jew, potted in a rusty lard bucket, and make Mrs. Thad or Mrs. Will take it along. Then the visit was over, and they would leave. From the porch Aunt Munsie would wave goodbye with one hand and lay the other hand, trembling slightly, on the banister rail. And sometimes her departing guests, looking back from the yard, would observe that the banisters themselves were trembling under her hand—so insecurely were those knobby banisters attached to the knobby porch pillars. Often as not Thad or Will, observing this, would remind his wife that Aunt Munsie’s porch banisters and pillars had come off a porch of the house where he had grown up. (Their father, Dr. Tolliver, had been one of the first to widen his porches and remove the gingerbread from his house.) The children and their mother would wave to Aunt Munsie from the street. Their father would close the gate, resting his hand a moment on its familiar wrought-iron frame, and wave to her before he jumped the ditch. If the children had not gone too far ahead, he might even draw their attention to the iron fence which, with its iron gate, had been around the yard at the Tolliver place till Dr. Tolliver took it down and set out a hedge, just a few weeks before he died.
But such paltry little visits meant nothing to Aunt Munsie. No more did the letters that came with “her things” at Christmas. She was supposed to get her daughter, Lucrecie, who lived next door, to read the letters, but in late years she had taken to putting them away unopened, and some of the presents, too. All she wanted to hear from them was when they were coming back for good, and she had learned that the Christmas letters never told her that. On her daily route with her slop wagon through the square, up Jackson Street, and down Jefferson, there were only four or five houses left where she asked her question. These were houses where the amount of pig slop was not worth stopping for, houses where one old maid, or maybe two, lived, or a widow with one old bachelor son who had never amounted to anything and ate no more than a woman. And so—in the summertime, anyway—she took to calling out at the top of her lungs, when she approached the house of one of the elect, “What you hear from ’em?” Sometimes a Miss Patty or a Miss Lucille or a Mr. Ralph would get up out of a porch chair and come down the brick walk to converse with Aunt Munsie. Or sometimes one of them would just lean out over the shrubbery planted around the porch and call, “Not a thing, Munsie. Not a thing lately.”