Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  It was Corinna, of course, who spied Mary Elizabeth first. “There she is,” she said in a perfectly flat voice, indicating where with a tilt of her head, being very careful not to point. “She’s not dancing with the Prophet anymore.”

  And then I saw her out there, not twenty feet from us, dancing with a dark-haired young man in white tie and tails. Just as I caught my first glimpse of her, another young man tapped this one on the shoulder, and she changed partners. She was, as Corinna might have phrased it, the cynosure of all eyes.

  Corinna was on her feet. She cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted, “Lilly Belle’s engaged!”

  Mary Elizabeth couldn’t hear her above the music. But she stopped dancing and started toward us, leading her partner by the hand. The other dancers respectfully made way for her. When she had come about half the distance, Corinna called out again, “Lilly Belle’s engaged!”

  “No!” Mary Elizabeth called back, and her voice and her radiant countenance expressed astonishment and delight. “Is it Mr. Barker?”

  “None other!” said Corinna in her most grown-up tone. Mary Elizabeth was hurrying toward us now, and I beheld the spectacle of Corinna and Mary Elizabeth Caswell throwing their arms about each other. In that moment all was forgiven—all those splendid accomplishments, and all those unfavorable comparisons: forgiven forever. That which had separated them for so long had now united them.

  “But Bessie didn’t tell me!” Mary Elizabeth was saying. “She was by, this very morning, to have a close-up look at my dress.”

  “It’s gorgeous,” said Corinna.

  “Isn’t it!” And now another embrace.

  “She told me just before I left the house,” said Corinna. (Told me, not us? Before I, not we, left the house? How selfish that sounded.) “The wedding’s Sunday week. And Lilly Belle’s going to marry in her mourning veil!”

  “Oh no! Stop it!” cried Mary Elizabeth, and she and Corinna shrieked with laughter.

  “Bessie’s taking the train to Alabama late tonight,” Corinna said when she had got her breath again.

  “Oh, that wonderful Bessie!” said Mary Elizabeth.

  “Isn’t she splendid!”

  “Have you seen her?”

  “Seen her?”

  “Up there,” said Mary Elizabeth, pointing to the balcony opposite us. “I spotted her a while ago and waved to her.”

  “Why, she didn’t tell me she was coming!” said Corinna. “Isn’t that typical?”

  The two girls tried to locate Bessie again but soon gave it up. Next, I heard Mary Elizabeth introducing us to her partner, referring to us as her two “little cousins,” and realized that Bessie must have talked to her about us. She went on to say how brilliant Corinna was in school and how well I could draw and what “perfect lambs” we both were.

  I didn’t stop searching for Bessie when they did, and I didn’t hear what they were saying any longer. My eyes traveled up one row of the balcony and down the next, searching for Bessie’s green silk dress. The crowd up there was thinning out; the poor relations and the children and the servants were going home. Bessie had likely hurried off to catch her train. Already I felt that I might never see Bessie Calhoun again.

  But I kept looking for her until I could bear my lonely thoughts no longer. I put my arms on the railing before me, hid my face in them, and commenced to sob.

  Instantly all attention was turned toward me, but I wouldn’t look up or answer questions. In a matter of seconds Daddy and Mrs. Richards arrived.

  “What is it, honey?” I heard Mrs. Richards say.

  “He’s just tired,” Daddy said. “He’s not used to being up so late. This is what it means, bringing children to something like this.”

  Then I was led to a seat at the rear of the box, where I wouldn’t be so conspicuous. The Caswells had returned, too, now. I heard Mrs. Caswell say, “Poor little fellow,” and this evoked fresh tears and deeper sobs.

  “What is it, Son?” Daddy said. “You must try to tell me.”

  Finally I knew I had to say something—something that would sound reasonable to him. I swallowed hard and lifted my face and found Daddy. I don’t know whether or not I knew what I was going to say before I said it. What I said was “Bessie’s mama is dead.”

  “How did you know that, Son?” Daddy asked.

  “She told me just before I was leaving the house tonight,” I said. Then I hid my face and tried to begin crying again, but I couldn’t.

  “How awful of her!” I heard Mrs. Richards say, threateningly. “How really unspeakably awful!”

  I sat with my face in my hands. After a moment I felt someone’s arm go around my shoulder. I didn’t know or care whose it was. Probably it was my father’s though it may have been Mrs. Richards’s, or even Corinna’s. Whosever it was, it didn’t have the feel I wanted, and I purposely kept my face hidden until it had been removed.

  Heads of Houses

  I. THE FOREIGN PARTS AND THE FORGET-ME-NOTS

  KITTY’S OLD bachelor brother gave Dwight a hand with the baggage as far as the car, but Dwight would accept no more help than that. He had his own method of fitting everything into the trunk. His Olivetti and his portable record player went on the inside, where they would be most protected. The overnight bag and the children’s box of playthings went on the outside, where they would be handy in case of an overnight stop. It was very neat the way he did it. And he had long since learned how to hoist the two heaviest pieces into the rack on top of the car with almost no effort, and knew how to wedge them in up there so that they hardly needed the elastic straps he had bought in Italy last summer. He was a big, lanky man, with a lean jaw that listed to one side, and normally his movements were so deliberate, and yet so faltering, that anyone who did not mistake him for a sleepwalker recognized him at once for a college professor. But he never appeared less professorial, and never felt less so, than when he was loading the baggage on top of his little car. As he worked at it now, he was proud of his speed and efficiency, and was not at all unhappy to have his father-in-law watching from the porch of the big summer cottage.

  From the porch, Kitty’s father watched Dwight’s packing activities with a cold and critical eye. Only gypsies, Judge Parker felt, rode about the country with their possessions tied all over the outside of their cars. Such baggage this was, too! His son-in-law seemed purposely to have chosen the two most disreputable-looking pieces to exhibit to the public eye. Perhaps he had selected these two because they had more of the European stickers on them than any of the other bags—not to mention the number of steamship stickers proclaiming that the Dwight Clarks always traveled tourist class!

  Yet the exposed baggage was not half so irritating to Judge Parker as the little foreign car itself. The car would have been bad enough if it had been one of the showy, sporty models, but Dwight’s car had a practical-foreign look to it that told the mountain people, over in the village, as well as the summer people from Nashville and Memphis, over in the resort grounds and at the hotel, how committed Dwight was to whatever it was he thought he was committed to. The trouble was, it was a big little car. At first glance, you couldn’t quite tell what was wrong with it. Yet it was little enough to have to have a baggage rack on top; and inside it there was too little room for Dwight and Kitty to take along even the one basket of fruit that Kitty’s mother had bought for them yesterday. Judge Parker pushed himself as far back in his rocker as he safely could. For a moment he managed to put the banister railing between his eyes and the car. He meant not to be irritated. He had been warned by his wife to be careful about what he said to his son-in-law this morning. After all, the long summer visit from the children was nearly over now.

  Busy at work, Dwight was conscious of having more audience than just Dad Parker—an unseen, and unseeing, audience inside the cottage. Certain noises he made, he knew, telegraphed his progress to Kitty. She was upstairs—in the half story, that is, where everybody but Dad and Mother Parker slept—making sure both children
used the bathroom before breakfast. (She knew he would not allow them time for the bathroom after breakfast.) And the same noises—the slamming down of the trunk lid, for instance, and even the scraping of the heavy bags over the little railing to the rack (the galerie, Dwight called it fondly)—would reach the ears of brother Henry, now stationed inside the screen door, considerately keeping hands off another man’s work. The ears of Mother Parker would be reached, too, all the way back in the kitchen. Or, since breakfast must be about ready now, Mother Parker might be on the back porch, where the table was laid, waiting ever so patiently. Perhaps she was rearranging the fruit in the handmade basket, which she had bought at the arts-crafts shop, and which she was sure she could find space for in the car after everything else was in . . . Everybody, in short, was keeping out of the way and being very patient and considerate. It really seemed to Dwight Clark that he and his little family might make their getaway, on this September morning, without harsh words from any quarter. He counted it almost a miracle that such a summer could be concluded without an open quarrel of any kind. Along toward the end of July, midway in the visit, he had thought it certain Kitty would not last. But now it was nearly over.

  When the last strap over the bags was in place, Dwight stepped away from the car and admired his work. He even paused long enough to give a loving glance to the little black car itself, his English Ford, bought in France two summers ago. Such a sensible car it was, for a man who wanted other things out of life than just a car. No fins, no chromium, no high-test gasoline for him! And soon now he and Kitty would be settled inside it, and they would be on their way again, with just their own children, and headed back toward their own life: to the life at the university, to life in their sensible little prefab, with their own pictures and their own makeshift furniture (he could hardly wait for the sight of his books on the brick-and-board shelves!), to their plans for scrimping through another winter in order to go abroad again next summer—their life. Suddenly, he had a vision of them in Spain next summer, speeding along through Castile in the little black automobile, with the baggage piled high and casting its shadow on the hot roadside. He stepped toward the car again, with one long arm extended as if he were going to caress it. Instead, he gave the elastic straps—his Italian straps, he liked to call them—their final testing, snapping them against the bags with satisfaction, knowing that Kitty would hear, knowing that, for once, she would welcome this signal that he was all set.

  He turned away from the car, half expecting to see Kitty and the children already on the porch. But they were still upstairs, of course; and breakfast had to be eaten yet. Even Dad Parker seemed to have disappeared from the porch. But, no, there he was, hiding behind the banisters. What was he up to? Usually the old gentleman kept his dignity, no matter what. It didn’t matter, though. Dwight would pretend not to notice. He dropped his eyes to the ground . . . As he advanced toward the house, he resolved that this one time he was not going to be impatient with Kitty about setting out. He would keep quiet at the breakfast table. One impatient word from anybody, at this point, might set off fireworks between Kitty and her mother, between Kitty and her father. (He glanced up, and, lo, Dad Parker had popped up in a normal position again.) Between Kitty and her ineffectual old bachelor brother, even. (He wished Henry would either get away from that door or come on outside where he could be seen.) And if she got into it with them, Dwight knew he could not resist joining her. It would be too bad, here at last, but their impositions upon Kitty this summer had been quite beyond the pale—not to mention their general lack of appreciation of all she and he had undertaken to do for them, which, of course, he didn’t mind for himself, and not to mention their show of resentment against him, toward the last, merely because he was taking Kitty away from them ten days earlier than the plans had originally called for. The truth was that they had no respect for his profession; they resented the fact that his department chairman could summon him back two weeks before classes would begin . . . For a moment, he forgot that, in fact, the chairman had not summoned him back.

  As Dwight approached the porch, in his slow, lumbering gait, Judge Parker suddenly rocked forward in his chair. Stretching his long torso still farther forward, he rested the elbows of his white shirtsleeves on the banister railing. Dwight, out there in the morning sun, seemed actually to be walking with his eyes closed. Perhaps he was only looking down but, anyway, he came shambling across the lawn as though he didn’t know where he was going. Judge Parker had noticed, before this, that when his son-in-law was let loose in a big open space, or even in a big room, he seemed to wander without any direction. The fellow was incapable of moving in a straight line from one point to another. He was the same way in an argument. Right now, no doubt, he had a theory about where the porch steps were, and he would blunder along till he arrived at the foot of them. But what a way of doing things, especially for a man who was always talking about the scientific approach. It had been, this summer, like having a great clumsy farm animal as a house guest. It had been hardest, the judge reflected, on his wife, Jane. Poor old girl. Why, between the fellow’s typewriter and record player, she had hardly had one good afternoon nap out. And, oh, the ashtrays and the glasses that had been broken, and even furniture. For a son-in-law they had the kind of man who couldn’t sit in a straight chair without trying to balance himself on its back legs. . . . Out-of-doors he was worse, if anything. He had rented a power mower and cut the grass himself, instead of letting them hire some mountain white to do it, as they had in recent years. He had insisted, too, on helping the judge weed and work his flower beds. As a result, Judge Parker’s flowers had been trampled until he could hardly bear to look at some of the beds. A stray horse or cow couldn’t have done more damage. All at once, he realized that there was an immediate danger of Dwight’s stumbling into his rock garden, beside the porch steps, and crushing one of his ferns—his Dryopteris spinulosa. Somehow, he must wake the boy up. He must say something to him. He cleared his throat and began to speak. As he spoke, he allowed his big, well-manicured hands to drape themselves elegantly over the porch banisters.

  “Professor Clark,” he began, not knowing what he was going to say, but using his most affectionate form of address for Dwight. “Is it,” he said, casting about for something amiable, “is it thirty-eight miles to the gallon you get?”

  Dwight stopped, and looked up with a startled expression. He might really have been a man waked from sleepwalking. But gradually a suspicious, crooked smile appeared, twisting his chin still farther out of any normal alignment. “Twenty-eight to the gallon, Dad Parker,” he said.

  “Oh, yes, that’s what I meant to say!”

  What could have made him say thirty, he wondered. Not that he knew or cared anything about car mileage. It always annoyed him that people found it such an absorbing topic. Even Jane knew more about his Buick than he did, and whenever anyone asked him, he had to ask her what mileage they got.

  But he couldn’t let the exchange stop there. Dwight would think his slip was intentional. Worse still, his son Henry, behind the screen door, would be making his mental notes on how ill the summer had gone. The judge had to make his interest seem genuine. “That does make it cheap to operate,” he ventured. “And it has a four-cylinder motor. Think of that!”

  “Six cylinders,” said Dwight, no longer smiling.

  The judge made one more try. “Of course, of course. Yours is an Ambassador. It’s the Consul that has four.”

  “Mine is called a Zephyr,” Dwight said.

  There was nothing left for Judge Parker to do but throw back his head and try to laugh it off. At any rate, he had saved his fern.

  At the steps to the porch, a porch that encompassed the cottage on three sides and that was set very high, with dark green latticework underneath, and with the one steep flight of steps under the cupola, at the southwest corner—at the foot of the steps Dwight stopped and turned to look along the west side of the house. Dad Parker’s lilac bushes grew there. Wood ashes
were heaped about their roots. Beyond the lilacs was the rock pump house, and just beyond that Dwight had a view of Dad Parker’s bed of forget-me-nots mixed with delphiniums. Or was it bachelor’s-buttons mixed with ageratum? He was trying to get hold of himself after the judge’s sarcasm about the car. In effect, he was counting to a hundred, as Kitty had told him he must do this morning.

  For the peace must be kept this morning, at any price—for Kitty’s sake. For her and the children’s sake he had to control himself through one more meal. And the only way he could was to convince himself that Dad Parker’s mistakes about the car were real ones. With anybody but Judge Nathan Parker it would have been impossible. But in the case of the judge it was possible. The man knew less than any Zulu about the workings of cars, to say nothing of models of foreign makes. This father-in-law of his most assuredly had some deep neurosis about anything vaguely mechanical. Even the innocent little Italian typewriter had offended him. And instead of coming right out and saying that Dwight’s typing got on his nerves, he had had to ask his rhetorical questions, before the whole family, about whether Dwight thought good prose could be composed on “a machine.” “I always found it necessary to write my briefs and decisions in longhand,” he said, “if they were to sound like much.” And the record player, too. The judge despised canned music; he preferred the music he made himself, on his violoncello, which instrument he frequently brought out of the closet after dinner at night, strumming it along with whatever popular stuff came over the radio . . . There was not even a telephone in the cottage. That seemed to Dwight the purest affectation. Dad and Mother Parker were forever penning little notes to people over in the resort grounds, or at the hotel. They carried on a voluminous correspondence with their friends back in Nashville. During the week, they wrote notes to brother Henry, who had to keep at his job at the courthouse in Nashville all summer long, and only came up to the mountain for weekends. In fact, three weeks ago, when the generator on Dwight’s car went dead, Dad Parker had insisted upon writing brother Henry about it. The garage in the mountain village could not furnish brushes and armatures for an English Ford, of course, but from the telephone office Dwight might have called some garage in Nashville, or even in Chattanooga, which was nearer. Instead, he had had to tell Dad Parker what was needed and let Henry attend to it. Henry did attend to it, and very promptly. The parts arrived in the mail just two days later. When the judge returned from the village post office that morning, he handed Dwight the two little packages, saying, “Well, Herr Professor, here are your ‘foreign parts.’ ” Everybody had laughed—even Kitty, for a moment. But Dwight hadn’t laughed. He had only stood examining the two little brown packages, which were neatly and securely wrapped, as only an old bachelor could have wrapped them, and addressed to him in Henry’s old-fashioned, clerkish-looking longhand.