Near Canaan

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  As I was saying. Gaston is not of the servant class. And my family never owned his, or anything like that. The Taylors were free even before the War. I suppose they really were tailors at one point in their history, but in Naples they run a sort of general store, down near the railroad. Gaston still works there sometimes; he took it over from his father, and his son has it now; Donny’s expanded it and put in a lunch counter. They’ve done well, the Taylors; some of them have risen far from the humbler trades, and travelled far from Naples. Gaston’s nephew is an attorney in Maryland. The family had to struggle some, certainly, but that wasn’t unusual; the whole town fell on hard times in the teens and twenties. The Taylors weren’t as poor as some, but even if they’d been starving, none of them would have gone into service. Gaston’s father wouldn’t have stood for it. Not even for the girls; they became typists and clerks and later housewives. Somehow, they all got by without ever cleaning a white person’s home, not even so much as polishing a doorknob. The Taylors were not of the servant class; it was a point of pride with old Joseph, and it passed on into his children.

  Gaston and I were playmates when we were little. My grandfather did something nice for his grandfather once upon a time, and the habit of friendship persisted between our two families through the generations. He was slightly younger than I, and I bossed him dreadfully. I didn’t go too far; he had a special look he’d wear when I’d hurt his feelings; and that look would be followed by silence. He’d ignore me, never flickering an eyelid, even when I shouted. I’d been brought up with all the fuss and flurry that surrounds an only girl; I’d been teased and petted and punished and spoiled, but I’d never been ignored; and I couldn’t stand it. And no one could ignore a person so thoroughly as Gaston could when he wanted to make a point. It kept me walking a line.

  Looking back on it, I guess Gaston and I suited a well-worn stereotype, Missy and her black playmate. So typical of pre-War times. But I didn’t see it that way. Does any child ever see any of its life as typical of anything else? Its life is its life, and that’s all. To a child, everything is exactly as it should be, as it must be, in fact.

  School separated us, of course, but outside school hours we were always together, always up to some mischief or other. We spread newspapers over Minnie Tolliver’s back doorstep once, just before a big rain; she was furious. Of course, the wet paper stuck to the stone like it had been glued there, and it dried like that. It was the devil’s own work to get it off. A whole afternoon of scraping, and still you could make out the backward letters of the headline, ever so faint, for months afterward.

  Now, my father was a mild man, and my high jinks made him laugh; but my mother scolded. She was worried about me, loping around the countryside like a boy in the company of Gaston and my older brother Harrison. How I adored Harry! I would have done anything he told me to do; once, I jumped into the river with all of my clothes on because he dared me I wouldn’t do it. “You’re as good as a boy, Tessie,” he said, after that. His praise rang in my head and made the subsequent scolding easier to bear. I often took all the blame for our escapades, and all the punishments, too; I didn’t mind. It was pure common sense: my father had a soft place for what he called “spirit” in a girl; in Harry, it would have been called irresponsibility, and he would have gotten a whipping for it. So I confessed alone, and scraped off the Tolliver doorstep alone, and went by myself to apologize to Russ Winter for stealing peaches from his orchard. If Mother was really displeased, I went to bed straight from the supper table without having my dessert. Sometimes, she’d forget, but still I missed a regular three or four desserts a week; it seems to me I’m still owing a few. All this, while the boys went scot-free.

  The arrangement had been Harry’s idea in the first place, but after a while it started to bothering him. He was getting older, you see, and was beginning to develop what he called “a sense of honor.”

  “Would you rather get a whipping?” I asked him, reasonably.

  “Maybe,” said Harry. “I should take my punishment like a man.”

  “She takes it like a man,” said Gaston, and I smiled at him.

  “She’s a girl,” said Harry. “I’m supposed to protect her. It’s not right, that’s all.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said. “And Gaston doesn’t mind. Do you?” I asked him.

  “Well, he wouldn’t, would he,” said Harry, keeping his eyes on me. “I don’t expect him to understand. It’s not the same.”

  Gaston went quiet when Harry said this, and I looked from one to the other.

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said, finally, and the matter was dropped there, although I could see it lingering in their faces the rest of that afternoon: the half mentioned, the evil, imprinted on their features like bedsheet wrinkles on skin after a long, hot sleep.

  There was that little unpleasantness, and a few other episodes like it, but for the most part, those were unsullied years, comradely and smooth. I withstood the seminary in the morning, with its idiotic backboards and foolish young ladies, my fellow pupils. In the mid-afternoon I was rewarded with release. Release, to the freedom of the countryside and the company of the boys. It was a perpetual childhood, such as children don’t have now. Children today are expected to be responsible, but are given no responsibility. Harry and I would not have dreamed of shirking the light duties our parents demanded of us, and I don’t like to think about what might have been the consequences of such carelessness. But at the same time, most of our pranks were indulged as entirely natural, as examples of youthful exuberance, and we were not seriously upbraided for them. Even at fifteen and sixteen, we were considered to have only just left the throes of infancy behind us; we were free.

  When I was seventeen, everything changed. Harry went to war, and Gaston went to work for his father. The house seemed very empty without my brother’s clattering footsteps. At school, all the talk was of cotillions and betrothals. I felt abandoned. Gaston and I did manage to meet some afternoons down by the river, but we had little time for mischief anymore. We mostly giggled and talked, and parted before supper. Without Harry, the friendship began to change. The three of us had had a reckless camaraderie, a Musketeerlike partnership, and Harry had been the dominating figure. With all of the privilege of seniority, he had suffered our presence, and we had followed his lead gratefully. Gaston’s and mine was a gentler alliance. In Harry’s absence, the two of us moved a little closer to one another, and told each other everything, things we might not have revealed if Harry had been there to scoff at us.

  But now my mother, who had always permitted my father the upper hand in these matters, began to remonstrate against my wild ways. She wanted me to devote more of my energies to the arts of womanhood and to stop getting the edges of my skirts muddy. I resisted her, and I had a will of iron, forged by years of getting my own way. Mother was easy to get around, too, distracted as she was by worry about Harry, who was fighting in France. When he was killed, Mother went sort of limp; and she sagged a little forever after.

  There’s a portrait of me in the hall, done when I was eighteen. You can see how I was, how spirited I was. Remarkable, isn’t it? how that painted arm, ivory and firm, was once this arm, which is now lax and freckled. I had no lack of suitors, but the local swains who were considered suitable seemed soggy to me, brainless, with no ambition. They had too much money; it made them soft. The ones who weren’t soldiers were defectives or cowards; the soldiers weren’t much to speak of, either, but they were better. Still, I wouldn’t look at them. I knew that being a soldier’s wife was just courting sorrow.

  Down by the river, Gaston and I made fun of the hopeful young men; I ridiculed every detail of their various characters, and he endowed them with witty nicknames. Together we thought up ways in which I could discourage them. When a young man showed too much interest, I’d be cool to him; and when he asked me for another date, I’d tell him that “I didn’t know, I’d have to check my appointment schedule.” Gaston invented that baffling phrase; we f
ound it hilarious; and I used it again and again.

  At the same time, I was conscious of my mother’s feelings; she was grieving deeply for Harry, and she poured all of her hopes into a good match for me. I too was grieving, and would have liked to mourn with her, but she kept me at a distance, shutting herself into her bedroom every afternoon and evening, taking her meals in private. If I mentioned Harry to her, it was as though she had not heard me; she spoke only of my “prospects,” or to reprimand me upon my behavior with one suitor or other. “You’ll end up alone,” she warned me. “Un-marriageable, thirty.” She meant well, but to me then thirty was a world away, impossible that I should ever reach it. I knew that my obstinacy vexed her, and sometimes, seeing the new weakness to her chin, hearing the new tremor in her voice, I softened toward her. But when I considered a lifetime with any of the men who courted me, I made my heart cold again.

  Franklin DeWitt was an older man, nearly forty. He owned a lot of property in West Virginia. I found him attractive, and his quiet manner intrigued me, but by that time I was in the habit of nastiness, and I behaved as callously to him as to any of the others. But unlike the others, Franklin’s interests were not spurred on by coldness; once, when I had been terribly, deliberately rude to him at a dance, he carried me across the floor and deposited me summarily with my parents, bowing to my mother, and leaving without a word. It was a public disgrace, and I deserved it, but I was angry. I reported the matter to Gaston.

  “Looks like you found a live one,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Nothing of the sort!” I told him. “He was badly brought up, is all. Carrying me across the floor in the middle of a waltz. I never heard of anything like it.”

  “What’d you say, made him so angry?” inquired Gaston.

  “Oh my,” I said, and, giggling, began to tell him. But then I caught sight of his expression, innocent and mocking, and I shut right up. “Just never mind what I said,” I told him. “It’s what I’ll say when I see him next that matters.”

  I waited for him to call again, all the time preparing the words I should use to spurn him. I went to dances on the arms of other men, and moved slowly around the floor with them, all the time craning my neck for the sight of those ridiculous side-whiskers he affected. I even scraped a conversation with Sylvia Tolliver, thinking she would have news of him, if anyone did. But although I listened through a tide of gossip, I never heard any mention of his name. He seemed to have vanished. Weeks went by, and winter began to turn, and still he had not reappeared. I grew more and more anxious: surely he was not to have the last word, so to speak. Was I never to be given a chance to use the reproof I had rehearsed so exhaustively, even watching myself in the mirror, so as to achieve the perfect disdainful lift to my lip? I was irritable with Gaston, and snapped at him.

  “Why you waiting on him so, you hate him so much?” he enquired.

  “I don’t hate him,” I retorted. “I feel nothing for him at all. Well, no. I feel contempt, is what I feel.”

  “Contempt,” repeated Gaston.

  “Yes,” I said. “And pity. It must be awful to be so ill-bred. Imagine, humiliating a lady that way, and then just skulking away, never giving her a chance to say a word.”

  “Seems that’s what started it,” said Gaston. “You saying a word.”

  “Oh, be quiet,” I said. “You don’t understand.”

  “Oh, I understand,” said Gaston.

  “I said be quiet,” I said. “And I never want to hear—that man’s—name again. Never.”

  “I won’t say it again,” agreed Gaston.

  “Well, all right,” I said.

  “Not even if I hear that somebody is coming back to Naples,” he said.

  “Somebody?” I said.

  “Not even if I know from somebody’s housekeeper that she’s opening his house somebody just bought, sweeping out all the cobwebs cause he’s coming here to live,” said Gaston, ignoring me. “No sir, not even then.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, pulling at his arm.

  “Somebody’s coming to live in Naples,” said Gaston. “And no doubt looking for a bride to put in that big old house just the other side of Doc Williams’s place.” He swung his head from side to side. “And even was a person to shake me like you’re doing, they couldn’t get me to tell that somebody’s name. No sir.” He cut his eyes at me.

  “Gaston, tell me,” I said. “Is it true?”

  He wouldn’t tell that day, but it was certainly true that Franklin DeWitt had bought old Kerry McGee’s place, the one his widow’d been trying to sell for years. I heard he was having it painted; I heard what color he had chosen for the trim; but I saw nothing of the man himself until one evening in early spring, at Missy Booth’s birthday dance. I spotted him across the room, and when at long last he did come up to me, I felt literally dizzy, watching him approach. While he bowed to my mother, I scratched another fellow’s name off my dance card. Dancing, I tried to recall the words I had prepared, words intended to shrivel him, finally and absolutely, but they didn’t come.

  “How’s somebody?” asked Gaston, when we were by the river a few days later.

  “How would I know,” I snapped.

  “No reason,” said Gaston. “But your mama’s looking mighty pleased. Been a long time since she looked so happy.”

  After we parted, I cried, knowing it was the end of something.

  And it was. As a married woman, I had to take my place in society; I had duties to my husband and to my family name. It’s something young women now don’t understand about the way things used to be. If I’d wanted something else, I’d have gone after it. But I loved Franklin, and I wanted to keep his home and bear his children. These days, that kind of feeling is scoffed at, and only the woman who goes out working is treated with respect. The way I see it, both desires have been there all along, portioned out, so that every person gets some of both. I hear it all the time, about the freedom of the modern woman, but she’s not free if she can’t choose. Well, it took long enough for word to get out that women might be interested in the workings of the world; it’ll take some time for people to understand that it’s not what she wants, but that she wants it that matters. And I don’t agree with the fools who say that fulfillment has to come from anywhere in particular, whether inside or outside the home. The Working Woman. Work! I had more work than I could do. It’s fine that some need other things, and put them before home and family, but I was content, keeping house.

  And so I was a wife, and shortly after, a mother, and Gaston worked in town for his father; we saw one another very little during the next twenty years.

  I was married during wartime, and widowed toward the end of another war, and my husband never once a soldier. I had given my son, Harry, to the effort; he fell in a foreign land, like his namesake, and was buried there. Two weeks after we’d gotten the news, Franklin, coming home from the mill, died in a railway crash.

  It was tragic, in keeping with those tragic times, but I didn’t manage the double mourning gracefully. I fled to my mother’s house, which had been standing locked and empty since my parents had moved to the Cummins house in Tennessee, years before. I stayed there with only two servants and saw no one. I wanted nothing more than to be left alone; but of course I had gone about it absolutely the wrong way; a hermit is always a curiosity; and so the bell was going all day long, with one lady or another calling to pay her respects. I didn’t feel like making conversation or being stared at; I had the girl send everyone away, and got so that I hardly got out of bed.

  Gaston rescued me then, you might say. He came knocking at the door one afternoon with a basket of vegetables, which he gave to the cook. I refused to see him that time, but the next day he was back, and the day after. By the end of that first week, I was at the window watching for him, and by the end of the next, I had let myself be washed and dressed, and told the downstairs girl that I would be receiving in the parlor that afternoon, and to lay out tea.

&n
bsp; We talked of nothing in particular, at first.

  “Real meat,” said Gaston, pulling the sandwich flaps apart, and bringing his face close to inspect the contents. “I can’t say when it was last I saw any.”

  “Wartime,” I said, and stopped, the words cut off.

  “Hard times,” said Gaston, putting the sandwich down and looking at me. I nodded, with my head bowed; I couldn’t speak. He must have gotten up, for a minute later I felt his hand on my shoulder, a light pressure, there and gone. I began then, slowly at first, and then faster, my words borne on a great tide of misery. I told him of my son and husband, idiotic things, things I had never told anyone, things Gaston already knew, every thought unconnected to the one before it, every sentence forgotten as soon as it was spoken. It was not the sense of it, but the telling, that mattered; I was the only one left of a family; I had to tell someone. I laughed, talking; and I cried, something I hadn’t done yet, and when I was done, I was hoarse and darkness was at the windows. Gaston, who had been silent and gently attentive whilst I talked, stood up to light the lamp.

  “Leave it,” I said.

  “There’s enough darkness,” he said, and when he brought up the flame I could see how dark it had been before. “What you want to stay in here all the time for?” asked Gaston, bluntly.

  “It’s safe in here,” I said.

  “Jes as safe on the porch,” said Gaston. “And there’s a breeze.”

  I shook my head.