The Reservoir

  He immediately tore the letter into small pieces and threw them in the wastebasket. His final draft was short and neutral. “Thank you for your thoughtful letter … I’ve been busy with Latin and natural philosophy, which I enjoy … Your fond cousin, Tommie.”

  Over the Christmas holiday, he avoided Lillian and sought out the company of Nola. He and his brother and cousin were invited to the Brays’ house for a dancing party, but Willie found some excuse to stay behind. Lillian said that she was not good at dancing, and even though Aunt Jane encouraged her she refused to go. As Tommie was leaving she lifted her chin and said, “You look like you’re going to Sunday school.”

  “You could go too, you know.”

  She looked a little unsure, and he wondered if he should have asked her to go before now. “I know my place,” she said. “Anyway I wouldn’t want her to think I was stealing her time.”

  “What, with me? Nola and I are just friends.”

  “Uh huh.” She gave him a coy, lowered-eyelid look.

  Tommie rode off by himself, thinking about his little cousin. He had never danced either, but he was willing to learn. He had been to the Brays’ a few times, and Nola was always friendly, if a little too up-nosed. There were always other young people there, talking about cotillions and horse races and other things he had no familiarity with. Tommie had done his best to fit in. The Brays’ house was bigger, their garden more elaborate than Aunt Jane’s, and he wondered what it would be like to own such a grand place.

  This time even though there were more people, Nola seemed especially attentive toward him, her eyes sparkling as he told her about Aberdeen. Many of the young men wore white vests with crop-tailed coats and tight pants; their hair was oiled and split in back, their breath perfumed with spearmint. Yet the fact that he wore a simple pinstripe suit and red necktie seemed unimportant to Nola; she took him by the hand and guided him over to a refreshment table laden with hot cider, lemonade, trifle, cakes, and raspberry sherbet in a big silver bowl. “I’m sorry you couldn’t get your brother and cousin to come to my little german,” she told him. “But you’ll just have to make up for them with your own dancing.”

  “I’m not much of a dancer,” he told her.

  “It’s easy,” she said. She was wearing a dark red dress with a tight basque and a loose black bow on the back of her hair. They were in the dining room, with the connecting doors opened onto the sitting room and the furniture cleared away. A few well-turned-out grown-ups—wistful, gossipy, proud, or indifferent—stood along the edges of the merriment like stately pillars from another time. The musicians were stationed in a corner of the sitting room, and when they took up a waltz, Nola showed Tommie the steps. He found that he was not as bad as he thought. Then came a polka, and again he picked up the steps so quickly he thought he must have some special talent, and he was delighted with himself.

  “I don’t want to monopolize your time,” he told Nola.

  She pulled back and regarded him with spirited eyes. “Aren’t you having a gay enough time with me?”

  “Yes,” he said, embarrassed but quietly thrilled. He pressed his hand more firmly against her crepe de chine back.

  She asked politely about his aunt, then said, “And I hear Lillie is making herself popular at Bruington.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “She told me so herself,” Nola said. “She and I have become great friends. We trade letters almost every week.”

  And yet Lillie had told him that Nola was spreading rumors about her. He didn’t understand girls at all—could he possibly be an object of both their affections? It was vain to think so, yet he was not a bad-looking young man, he thought. His aunt told him he had nice symmetrical features and that both he and his brother were as handsome as young men could be. He had sandy brown hair, widespread eyes, and full lips that had, at nearly seventeen, never kissed a girl. “Want to take a walk in the garden?” he whispered.

  She smiled and shook her head, then after the dance excused herself to go speak with a group of boys milling around the refreshments. He felt ashamed. Of course she couldn’t leave her own party and go out in the cold with him; he had sounded too eager, too unrefined. But she hadn’t been completely dismissive. She hadn’t slapped him or said he was rude. She seemed to understand boys and how to carry herself among people of all ages and stations. Lillie was friendly with Lewis and Maria back home, bringing them leftovers and vases of meadow flowers, but she could never order them around with the simple ease that Nola could. Nola was more sophisticated and grown up than Lillie would likely ever be. She could even play the piano and speak fluent French.

  And yet he found himself thinking of Lillie’s tiny waist and the way she ducked her head when she was talking about something she was unsure of. She wasn’t elegant like Nola, but she was adorable, even if she did sometimes stretch the truth. The contrast between the two girls seemed to give him a window into the nature of his soul; he thought he must be in love with Lillie, but it disturbed him that the way he felt about her was passionate and physical, almost violent in its ability to take over his entire body and mind. It would be so much more pleasant if he were in love with Nola.

  He danced again with Nola, inhaling the strange warm smell of her body. She was very lovely and refined, and though he didn’t want to crush her against himself it was still a joy to hold her. “You dance like an angel,” he said.

  Nola gave him a mock smile, flaring her thin, aristocratic nose. “And you learn very quickly.”

  He rode home in the late afternoon, a waltz still playing in his head. A light snow was falling and he pushed his horse, trying to fit its rhythm with the one in his mind—it would not work, there were too many beats. He slowed down, catching his breath, enjoying the cold stinging his cheeks. When he got home he called out for his brother. Lewis told him that Willie was out cutting wood.

  He had not really wanted to see Willie, only to know where he was. Lillie was in the parlor, a piece of needlework in her lap; Aunt Jane was lying down in her bedroom. He stood for a moment staring at the fold in Lillie’s bodice as she bent over her work, his throat a dry husk. “You should have been there,” he said, his voice almost choked out.

  She glanced up. “You have snow on your shoulders.”

  He just lingered there in the doorway while she laughed at him; she got up and came over. “Lost in thought, Professor?” A curl draped across her forehead as she went up on tiptoe and brushed the snow from his coat, her hand-stitched bodice stretching across her sides and chest as she reached for him.

  She laughed gaily while he told her about the party. He hummed some of the music, then put his arm around her and began waltzing her around the room and out into the back entry-way and into the summer kitchen. “See?” he said, “You do know how to dance. You should’ve come.”

  And then Willie entered. He stood there a moment, a bemused smile frozen on his face, his eyes uncertain.

  “She’s my cousin too,” Tommie said.

  Lillie stopped. “That’s enough dancing for me,” she said, and she took herself back to the parlor.

  Willie bent to unlace his mud-caked boots. “That should be enough wood for the week.”

  “Been out chopping?” Tommie asked. Willie grunted, and Tommie stood there watching his bare head. “Go on and hit me if you want to.”

  “Why would I want to do that?” Willie said, standing, chest out. In his stockings he was taller than Tommie. He forced a good-natured laugh, then rapped Tommie on the chest with a fist. “I’d sooner hit myself.”

  The next fall he was off to the College of Richmond, having kissed Nola twice—once on the cheek and once lingeringly on the lips behind an Oriental screen. She seemed to favor him over all other boys. She admitted that she had kissed boys at camp meetings, but “just for practice” and only “because they were sweet,” not boys she would take seriously as suitors, such as himself. He sensed that her logic was somehow flawed, but she sounded so convincing that h
e never tried to do anything except hold her hand unless she suggested he might do more.

  As for Lillian, she and Willie had become such close friends that Jane had quit worrying about them. “I don’t know exactly what they’re doing when they’re gone together all afternoon,” she told Tommie, “but I think Willie is very mature and he’ll do the right thing by her. He’s not too young to marry at eighteen, nor she at fifteen.”

  A few days before he left for Richmond, Tommie asked his brother what it was like to lie with a girl.

  “Why do you ask me?” Willie said. They were standing out under a tremendous multitrunked pine in the front yard, a pre-storm wind shivering the needles. Willie’s shirt was soaked with sweat from lifting hay bales; Tommie had just bathed, though he had worked as hard as Willie earlier in the day, then gone in and studied for two hours—a habit he had kept up all summer.

  “I’m going off to college and I wanted some pointers,” he said.

  Willie made a puffing noise. “I don’t know anything about girls, especially Richmond girls. Though I expect they’re about the same as girls around here.” He grabbed a branch and leaned his waist into the trunk in a casual way that Tommie admired. His brother had always been a better athlete, a more outgoing and uncomplicated person than himself. But though they were best friends and he knew Willie better than anyone in the world, there were things Willie kept to himself. Tommie suspected that Lillian had become his new best friend and confidante. His brother had all but quit asking him to go out on fishing and hunting jaunts, not that he missed them so much, though he did miss being with Willie and having him desire his company.

  “But you’ve been with a lot of girls,” Tommie said.

  “Not so many. And only ones that I care about.”

  “You used to ask me what I thought about her.”

  Willie nodded. “So you want to know if I’ve lain with her?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Then I won’t tell you.”

  “Well, have you?”

  Willie looked out across the oatfield. “Maybe. What about you and Nola?”

  Tommie puffed and shook his head. “Nola’s not that kind of girl.”

  “And you think Lillie is?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I know some terrible things nobody else does,” Willie said. “About her father. Her father’s an evil man.”

  “I know he beat her.”

  “Worse than that,” Willie said. He flexed the muscles in his jaws. With Tommie waiting for him to go on, he opened his mouth, closed it, then said, “He made her feel dirty … he came into her room when she was getting dressed.”

  “You know she tells lies.”

  “So she fibs sometimes about where she’s been, or what she’s been doing. That’s the kind of fib you’d learn to tell if you didn’t want your father to hit you for living.”

  And that was all that Tommie was able to get out of his brother. He knew that going away to college in Richmond would be different from going off to boarding school. He was fairly certain that both Nola and Lillie would miss him—what he did not know was whom he would miss more. Three days before he was to leave, Lillian had departed for her second term at Bruington. She’d stood on tiptoe and laid her head briefly against his chest. He’d started to pat her head, then stopped himself, his hand suspended awkwardly in the air.

  On his own departure day, Aunt Jane kissed him on the cheek. “You’re such a man now,” she said, beaming proudly at him, her eyes crinkling into crescents; then she turned away a moment so she wouldn’t cry. She adjusted his bowler and necktie. “Don’t neglect your health in the city,” she said, gripping his shoulders.

  He shook his brother’s hand, endured another squeeze from his aunt, and got into the cart. His father came just in time to see him off and give him a pocket edition of Shakespeare quotes, which he already owned, telling him it was from his mother who was not feeling well. Inside was a folded ten-dollar bill that Tommie knew better than to try to refuse.

  He had not been to Richmond since the trip with his father, and the city had been growing ever since. It was after New Orleans the largest city in the South, and it was on the verge of change. The reluctant Confederate capital was still in some ways a war-scarred city, holding on for dear life to its past, with memorials popping up in cemeteries and public squares, and one-legged veterans swinging down the streets on crutches. The trauma of the war years was not easily shaken off. But the bitterness and despair the city had endured under the watchful eye of the conquerors was gone, and the city Tommie was entering was a changed place. Its ironworks were again preeminent in the South, its marketplaces hummed with life, and in nearly every way it was on the verge of industrial modernity.

  He caught a horse-drawn omnibus heading west on Broad. At seventeen years old and on his own, he felt constrained in a new way, having to act the part of a man, like the dignified gentleman on the seat beside him. The man had nodded to Tommie when he boarded near the capitol, as though he knew Tommie were green, as fresh from the country as first-cut alfalfa. At the same time, Tommie was so caught up in his excitement at being in the city he could lose himself for blocks at a time in the passing show out the window: all the fine houses, the carriages clipping smartly along.

  He took the bus to the end of the line, two miles from the station. The driver helped him with his trunk, and then he was alone, standing there not quite knowing what to do with himself. He began to drag his trunk toward the largest building he saw. A young black porter with a hand cart came running to help him. “Richmond College?” the boy asked him. Tommie said yes, trying to act as though he knew his way around. The boy nodded and said, “Ryland Hall, straight ahead.”

  It was a massive new building, Second Empire-style, mansard roofs crowning ornate towers. It was what college should look like, and Tommie liked that it had the same name as his minister back home. The boy stayed with him until he found his room, then Tommie gave him a nickel and thanked him. Tommie’s roommate was already there. He introduced himself as Tyler Bagby from Essex. He had unkempt dark wavy hair, an open collar, and a droll smile about him, as if he found the entire world an amusing curiosity. He also had a sharp angular face, shadowed with evening stubble that made him look older than he was. After a few minutes of light conversation, Tyler put his hands behind his head and leaned back. “I think we’ll get along just fine, Tommie,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind if I call you that.” Tommie shook his head. “And you should call me Tyler. Bagby sounds too boarding school, and Mr. Bagby too formal. Help yourself.”

  He tossed Tommie a package of what were labeled Richmond Gems. He watched with amusement as Tommie opened the thick paper pouch and slowly pulled out one of the pencil-thin cylinders. “What’s the matter with you?” he said. “Never heard of tobacco?” Tommie nodded and smelled the cylinder. He and his brother had tried cigars, but his aunt disapproved and he himself didn’t care for the taste. Moreover, Reverend Ryland had said in one of his sermons that tobacco was an addiction and therefore a vice and had only hurt the farmers who depended on it.

  “It’s a cigarette,” Tyler explained. “Greatest thing this city’s ever produced. And when I get myself an education, I’m going to join my brother over in Manchester. He’s a floor manager at Allen & Ginter. I worked under him this summer, as assistant floor manager. They have twenty-two women rolling these beauties, which by itself is a good reason to get into the business. We’re going to make a fortune, and if you want in on it I could say a good word for you.”

  He showed Tommie how to smoke it, but since smoking was a vice Tommie had a hard time taking pleasure in it. Still, he enjoyed watching Tyler hold the cigarette between two fingers as he slowly exhaled a cloud of smoke in apparent utter satisfaction.

  They started going to church together at Grace Street Baptist, where the college chaplain, Reverend Hatcher, preached on Sundays. One Sunday they met the widow Carlotta Henry, who invited them to a Saturda
y tea dance. On the appointed day they strolled down Broad to her brick-and-stone mansion, its turreted bay and columned portico making it, in Tommie’s mind, a castle. A short lively bird of a woman, Mrs. Henry was a society matron who thrived on the company of young gentlemen; the locket she wore around her neck was said to contain a shard of her husband’s shattered thigh bone. She grasped Tommie warmly by the hand and introduced him and Tyler to a group of older students. The women were mostly from the Richmond Female Institute. He danced with a pretty, blond-haired girl, and since he was homesick he asked if he could visit her sometime. She told him matter-of-factly that she was not allowed to go carriage riding with a young man unchaperoned and that anyway she expected to be engaged shortly after her coming-out party in the spring.

  Thus schooled and chastened, Tommie rejoined Tyler and a group of upperclassmen who had decided, as soon as the dance was over, to go to a place called Garolami’s on Mayo Street. One of the young men, a medical student named Randall Croxton, had a cousin who worked there. And so Tommie found himself swept along in the camaraderie of a boisterous group heading to the east side of town. There was Bobby Valentine, of the Valentine meat juice family, a law student named James Courtney, and Sid and Harry Aylett from King William.

  The farther east they proceeded, the rougher-looking the people they passed—painted women on corners openly leering, scruffy men carrying illegal sidearms. It was a cool evening, with moisture beaded along the bases of gaslight globes; Tommie felt the growing warmth of his herd. By the time they got to Garolami’s it was as if they were well into their third round already. Bobby’s arms were draped around Tommie and Tyler and they were singing “O dem golden slippers.” At the saloon, Randall’s cousin seated them near the back. He wiped his hands on a dirty apron and told them in a friendly way he hoped they were all eighteen years old, which Tommie was not, nor was Tyler, though Tyler, in an offhand way, claimed he was. They ordered drafts of lager, except for Sid, who asked for porter. Then after his first sip, he told the group about a cadaver raid on Oakwood Cemetery with Randall when he was a freshman. “They never found out who it was, but it was thanks to us that the legislature finally decided to donate corpses to the medical school. That’s progress, gentlemen!” He raised his glass and everybody cheered.