Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  They talked about the party for five minutes or so. They commented on how unchanged certain of their old friends from Tennessee, who had been at the party, were, how young the two Tennessee women looked—like young girls still, compared to Chicago women of the same age. Nate leaned against the newel post and blew cigarette smoke upward in the direction of the chandelier. In the bare, dim light from above, his blond wiry hair looked lighter than it usually did during this time of his life. The fullness of his tuxedo jacket concealed the paunch which he had acquired during just the last year or two. He leaned against the post in a casual, loose-jointed way that denied any of the stiffness of forty. Sylvia watched him from the third step. Her own hair was much lighter than his, though when they had married it had been a shade darker. When she threw back her cape, it fell over a wide area of the steps; and its white silk lining all about her was like an extension of her white evening dress. Her figure was not so slight as it had once been but that was, at least in part, because fashions no longer favored slightness. Her shoulders and her prettily rounded arms were bare and their skin could not have appeared softer or clearer. She was sitting now with her arms about her knees, her cigarette between the fingers of her right hand.

  Presently she heard (and she saw in Nate’s face that he heard) their oldest son, Wallace, calling out something in his sleep from his room upstairs. The two of them listened attentively for a moment. Then when they heard nothing more, Nate suddenly straightened and moved away from the post he had been leaning against. He went to a table in the hall, picked up a small metal ashtray and brought it back with him to the stairs, where he sat down on the bottom step. When he spoke again his voice sounded hoarse the way it did in the morning or at any time when he had not spoken for a long while.

  “Wallace has always talked in his sleep,” he said.

  “Not always,” Sylvia said, smiling a little. “Not during the time he wasn’t sleeping in the sleigh bed. That sleigh bed is uncomfortable, but he likes it.”

  Nate was silent a moment. “Well, regardless of what he likes, if he doesn’t get his rest . . .” He broke off there and was silent another moment. Finally he said: “I suddenly have a mental picture of all the stacks of beds we have, Sylvia, and bedsprings—in the attic, in the basement, and God-knows-where.”

  “Well,” Sylvia said, “this is where we always end when we stop down here to talk.”

  “I think of it as the way we begin to talk,” Nate said. “When we get on the subject of your furniture I feel that I am mighty near to understanding the difference between the mind of man and woman. There’s hardly anything I like better than hearing you chatter about your ‘things.’ ”

  Sylvia smiled affably, as she shrugged her shoulders. “I have little or nothing to say on the subject,” she said softly. “Nothing you haven’t already heard me say.” She wanted to humor him in his mood, but the words would not come.

  But Nate pursued the subject energetically, repeating things that she had said to him at one time or another in her own defense. She liked being able to put her hands on her things. She liked having the children grow up with the things she had grown up with. It wasn’t important but she liked the idea of taking the furniture everywhere they went, since they could afford it, and of then some day taking it back to Tennessee with them. Why, he said to her, it would be as though she had never left Cedar Springs. Wasn’t it that? he said, laughing. Wasn’t it?

  Sylvia nodded her head solemnly.

  And now he began pointing out, with the same good nature, the tremendous expense which the moves had been to them. But he did this for the sole purpose of getting Sylvia to affirm that the moving, to her, had been worth every penny it had cost.

  When at last they went upstairs Nate was still talking to her about her “things.” At the top of the steps he put his arm about her waist, and suddenly, as though at the sensation of having his arm about her, Sylvia remembered something he had said to her long ago when they were first engaged. They had been sitting out in the yard at her father’s house after supper at night and Nate had been talking about the various avenues that might be open to him in business. As he talked there, hidden in the dense shadows of a huge willow-oak tree, she had been thinking how very boyish his voice sounded and once when he had leaned forward for a moment she saw the faint light from the porch outline his handsomely shaped head and for one instant catch in its faintly glimmering rays the cowlick on the back of his head. “What one has to remember,” she recalled his saying finally, “is that everything changes so fast in our country that a smart person can’t hold on to the past—not to any part of it if he wants to be a success. It’s as though we lived in a country where the currency changed every week, and you had to go every Monday morning and convert your old money into new.” When he said that in the dark that night it had given Sylvia a scare, had made her feel afraid of him. Recalling it now it only impressed upon her the gentle indulgence he had shown her during the years of their marriage, but that night it had meant to her, somehow, that she would never be able to think of Nate as a mere boy again, and never of herself as a girl. Presently her sense of fright and dismay had left her. But after Nate had taken the 10:30 train back to Cedar Springs and she had returned from the depot and gone upstairs to her room, she imagined that she could now see all her childhood and young ladyhood in a new perspective. She imagined that she was seeing it as she would see it when she was a woman of forty. How fine it would seem then to have grown up the way she had, in such pleasant, prosperous, pastoral surroundings, at just the time she had, and with just the friends she had had. How she would then cherish the bittersweet tone of things as they were in Middle Tennessee in 1915. For everyone said it would all be different in twenty years. There would be no Confederate veterans left then, no old ladies who had once danced with Jeff Davis, and none of the old-time Negroes. The white people and the colored people would be more alike and yet farther apart in their independence of each other. There would be none of the bitter memories of the Civil War to make anything that bespoke the past sound sweet to the ear. Life in a Tennessee country town then would be indistinguishable from that in any other place in the land. But in her time and in her town she had seen everything that was good in the noble past of her country meeting head on with everything that was exciting and marvelous about the twentieth century. Her generation, she was sure, had found growing up more exciting than any generation had in a thousand years. It seemed to her that the boys of her time were as different from their fathers as motorcars from oxcarts. And the girls . . . they were not so different from their mothers, not yet; but there was a feeling of exhilaration and anticipation in the air that made the joy of being young seem almost unendurable to them and made it imperative, if they were to endure, that they bind themselves together in close friendships. Being young could not always have been like that, Sylvia told herself. Oh, surely not! And that night in her father’s house, after she had put out the light in her room, she lay awake thinking of her friends and thinking of what it was like to have been young with them in that place and that time. She saw them in their summer dresses walking through the cemetery on their way to a picnic at the sand banks, saw them in the old clapboard grade school at Thornton writing Latin sentences on the huge blackboards, all of them wearing middy blouses and pleated skirts, and later a few of them at Ward-Belmont, in Nashville, swinging Indian clubs in Miss Katty Moore’s gym class. She saw them dancing at the Christmas cotillion in Germania Hall, and dancing again at the old Thornton Wells Hotel on the Fourth of July, and saw them finally not as a group but each with the man she would marry walking down beside the river, under the shade of the giant trees there, following the half overgrown path known among them as the Dark Walk.

  When this series of pictures had passed before her mind and she was about to drift off to sleep she found the same series beginning all over again. But this time the pictures were more in detail and in each there was a definite incident or character that revealed to her
why her mind had photographed that scene. When they were picnicking at the sand banks that hot summer day they had climbed one high embankment and peered down into the next ravine to see a Negro couple there, copulating in the sand. The man was shirtless and his trousers had fallen down about his ankles. The sweat on the black skin on his buttocks and his back glistened in the blazing sunshine. The woman still wore most of her clothes. Her brown head lay back on the sand and her eyes were closed. The girls watched in silence for a few seconds, and then they hurried back to their picnic to talk, not of how the sweat had glistened on the man’s skin, but of the rapturous expression they had all observed on the face of the woman. . . . Once as they sat at dusk on the porch at Thornton Wells an old woman from back in the hills had told fortunes with tea leaves all round. When the girls wearied of the fortunetelling, she proceeded to entertain them with more practical talk. She said that if they would notice how their true-loves held them when they danced that night they could judge what manner of men they were, what sort of husbands they’d make. “A man who don’t hold you firm when he waltzes you,” she warned them, “it’s a poor bed partner he’ll make.” In the rooms which the girls shared in the hotel that night only Mildred Pettigru would not report what promise her true-love had shown. . . . Sylvia and Nate, strolling in the verdurous Dark Walk on a Sunday afternoon in May, had stopped near the ruins of an old lattice summerhouse, and there Nate had asked her to marry him. His face bending over her and his voice, suddenly gone a little hoarse, had seemed to fill the whole world.

  Nate Harrison died of a heart attack soon after his forty-eighth birthday, in January of 1939. By the standards of Chicago bankers and board chairmen he had still been a young man. At the time of his death he was president of the American Wire and Steel Mesh Corporation, a concern which he had been brought to Chicago to reorganize in the darkest days of the Depression. His death came entirely without warning. He had played handball at the Athletic Club in the early afternoon and returned to his office at three o’clock. He was found less than twenty minutes later lying on the floor beside his desk. Sylvia had to be summoned from an afternoon party at Indian Hills, up in Winnetka. She did not see him alive again.

  Two months later she made her final decision about leaving Chicago. She decided that in June she would give up the big house they had been renting on Ritchie Court and move all her possessions, including her four near-grown children, back to Tennessee. Everyone told her that the move would be too great an ordeal for her just yet and that she ought to put it off another six months, but Sylvia wouldn’t listen. “Moving has practically been my life’s work,” she said to them. “It doesn’t upset me the way it does other women.”

  II

  There was an interval of nearly three months between the time that Sylvia announced her decision to leave Chicago and the day of the actual move from Ritchie Court. Sometime during the first weeks of this interval she began speaking of herself, to her children and to all her acquaintances, as “one of the newly poor.” No one—probably not even she—could remember when she first used the phrase, but everyone was soon aware of how much she seemed to enjoy thinking of herself as a widow in straitened circumstances. Her friends in Chicago accused her of taking pleasure in the role, and so did her children. Sometimes she would admit that there was some truth in their charge and would even laughingly suggest that it was a play for sympathy on her part. But she always returned to the position that Nate’s death had left the family in “straitened circumstances” which necessitated the move back to Tennessee.

  From time to time she practiced little household economies, like shutting off the heat in rooms that were seldom used. She bought an electric sewing machine and attended the free classes in tailoring to which the purchase entitled her. The economy of which she tried to make the most was the dismissal of her part-time chauffeur and yard man. But even this did not represent any appreciable saving or the loss of great services. The Negro man who had done that work was the same Leander who had set out from Cedar Springs with the Harrisons seventeen years before. For several years now he had been employed by them only on a part-time basis, and had found other employment with another family in the neighborhood. Sylvia’s economy in that quarter was as negligible as in any other.

  Everybody recognized her pretensions to poverty as mere pretensions. Her daughter Margaret, who had had a course in psychology at her finishing school in New York that very year, suggested that she was “suffering from certain deep psychic disturbances.” Fortunately, however, neither Margaret nor anyone else made the mistake of thinking Sylvia was subject to any real delusions. After Nate’s death in January, Margaret had remained at home with her mother, instead of returning to school. Wallace, who was a student at the University of Virginia, had, of course, returned to Charlottesville after the funeral. By the time he came home for a few days at Easter, Sylvia had made her plans to move the family back to Cedar Springs and had invented the fiction of their financial reverses.

  Wallace lost no time in expounding his theory about this fiction of his mother’s. She had made it up, he said (at the dinner table on Easter day), to prevent the usual brand of sympathy she received whenever she moved. Whether or not he really believed this to be Sylvia’s motive he insisted upon it in a teasing, good-humored way throughout his Easter visit and even afterward in letters he wrote home. The other children followed his lead, and as far as they were concerned there was never any further effort to interpret Sylvia’s talk of financial reverses. No doubt they all knew that their father’s life insurance did not entirely countervail the income from his business activities and knew that the family’s income from investments and from the Tennessee property had diminished during the Depression; but they knew also that their losses were not commensurate with Sylvia’s representations of them. They humored their mother in her economizing, teased her about it sometimes, and on the whole gave about as much thought to it as they might have to any other irksome little habit she might have had. Certainly it never occurred to them once that their mother was concerned, consciously or unconsciously, with justifying in their eyes her plans to return to Tennessee.

  There were two people in Sylvia’s acquaintance, however, to whom this possibility may have occurred. One was a man who, by Sylvia’s standards, had had no vital connection with the Harrison family. His name was Mr. Peter Paul Canada and he was the owner of the house on Ritchie Court. He was a very kind and very rich old widower, and he had held on to this house, instead of selling it, because it was here that his wife had spent her happiest years. . . . The other person was Sylvia’s former chauffeur, Leander Thompson.

  Soon after Easter, Sylvia had gone by appointment to Mr. Canada’s office in the Loop district. To him she had described herself as a widow in straitened circumstances and had made known her intention of giving up the house. Mr. Canada at once said that he would not hear of such a thing. He insisted that she and the children must continue to occupy the house without paying rent. There would be the greatest difficulty, he insisted, in finding a renter for a big house like that in these times, and it would be enormously to his advantage to have it occupied. Sylvia, as though she had not heard him, then repeated that she and the children were returning to Tennessee because there would be no problem of a place to live there. Presently, however, she seemed to realize what he and what she had said, and she smiled self-consciously. “It isn’t really just a matter of rent or a place to live,” she said with a worried expression about her eyes which indicated that for the moment she could not remember what it was a matter of. “It is a matter also,” she said uncertainly and after a pause, “of other property we have in Tennessee. There is a good deal of farm land and some downtown real estate in Nashville to be looked after. And then, too, I still have my own family place at Thornton, which is a little town not too far from Cedar Springs.”

  Now she smiled self-consciously again and blushed a deep red. She had not only divulged the considerable extent of her property but had possi
bly made it, by her rambling speech, seem larger than it was. She did not try to correct this impression; the person to whom she was speaking was, after all, only her landlord. She sat blinking her eyes while Mr. Canada said: “What about your children, Mrs. Harrison? They have so many educational and social advantages in a place the size of Chicago, I should think.”

  “Oh, it’s just the children I am thinking of,” Sylvia said with enthusiasm, reminded at last of what the matter was. “It is very much to the interest of the children to go back to Tennessee where their property is and where . . . where their name will mean something to them.”

  “I see,” said Mr. Canada, putting a freckled, wrinkled old hand up to his forehead and rubbing his brow. On one freckled finger was a wide, gold band and on his starched white cuff shone a monogrammed gold cuff link. “I had thought probably,” he said sweetly, “that your children, having—to some extent—grown up here in Chicago considered themselves real Chicagoans.”

  Lowering his hand from his forehead Mr. Canada now turned his face away from Sylvia and toward a window that opened above the tops of other office buildings. Under different circumstances Sylvia might have attached significance to what Mr. Canada said and to his glance out his office window. But as things were—that is, he being only her landlord, she accepted the old gentleman’s words that day as mere gestures, as marks of half-absentminded civility, and she replied by drawing from her purse a list of articles of furniture that had been in the house when she moved there. It was really to present this list and to have it verified that she had called in person instead of giving notice to Mr. Canada by telephone or mail. Mr. Canada looked over the list hastily and said that so far as he could recall the list seemed complete.

  Only a few days after this interview with Mr. Canada, Sylvia’s former chauffeur came to her house. He arrived shortly before dinnertime, and when he and Sylvia had dealt with the matter that had brought him there, Leander asked to be allowed to stay and serve the evening meal. But Sylvia very politely refused his request. Having always preferred women servants in the house, she had never let Leander serve meals unless they had just moved and hadn’t yet found a downstairs maid. As chauffeur and sometimes as gardener he had served the family long and well and had been a willing worker when called upon to lend a hand in spring cleaning or at moving time. Nate had been genuinely attached to Leander, and so indeed had Sylvia. But for several years now—since the children had begun to drive—the family had required little chauffeuring. Leander had, with the consent of all, taken another job in the neighborhood but had continued, in his spare time, to care for the minuscule bit of lawn between the house and the sidewalk and to come once or twice a week to wash the cars or perhaps to drive Sylvia or one of the girls to a party. The little work he had done for them before Sylvia dismissed him altogether could hardly have been worth his while, and no doubt he had continued to do it only out of old-fashioned attachment for the family.