A Southern Exposure
Page 25
And then there’s the me-and-Russ story, thinks Jimmy. I have to admit it: I had this real old schoolboy crush on Russ, who for years would not give me the time of day. And then he did; he got interested in my book (that was just after the trauma of Norris Drake) and turned it into a goddam best-seller. And then turned back into not giving me the time of day again.
Who or what could be next in line for Russ? he wonders. And then, glancing over at Esther, who has never looked better than she does today (Jimmy first met Esther at a swimming party, come to think of it—back in Tulsa, almost twenty years ago), he thinks, If Russ should take a shine to Esther, I’d kill him dead. But of course that isn’t Russ’s way, not at all. It’s other people who take a big shine to him. They come after him. And he just lets them. Sometimes.
• • •
Dolly Bigelow is sitting there in the lovely sunshine, among all the wonderful flowers and all her dearest friends, looking just as cute as pie in her red polka-dotted suit (trust Cynthia to wear a red suit too, and such a tight, show-off one), and she thinks: It does not matter one damn without Clifton. She misses Clifton Lee in just the worst way; sometimes she thinks she can’t stand her life without him. She needs him for flirting at all the parties, and then, just sometimes, not often—the kissing, off in cars. It was wonderful, that kissing, and wonderful Clifton never, never tried to push it any further. To do anything that would cause her to have to stop him. And oh! that terrible night when he died, just up and died, right there in the car, in her arms!—made this funny noise in his throat, and then a sort of shudder, and then he was gone. She knew right away he was dead. No person in that body anymore. She had watched her daddy die—same thing. All heavy and limp. In her arms.
But Cynthia looks so tacky in that little old red bathing suit of hers, like some teenager, just the tackiest thing. Trust a Yankee! (Clifton never took to Cynthia at all. “That bottle-blonde can’t hold a candle to you, honey-babe,” he used to say.) And Esther Hightower, just busting out of her suit all over the place. Hasn’t anyone told her she’s too big now for that suit? And Russ, you can see his—well, some of him is hanging out just a little below his suit.
Oh, Clifton, why did you have to die?
After the war things will be a great deal worse, is what Russ thinks, sitting there dejectedly in the sun. Thinking: I do not want to get into that goddam lukewarm copper-sulfated water. And also thinking: What an inferior, lowly bunch of so-called humanity gathered here, in this stinking garden. Not a first-rate mind in a carload of these folk. Or a beautiful woman either. Deirdre’s so pregnant, and besides he is married to her. There’s Cynthia—well, there is Cynthia. He does not want to think about Cynthia today. Looking up, he sees not Cynthia but Esther Hightower. A brand-new person. A goddess, the most beautiful woman he ever saw. A Jewish queen. Biblical, splendid. How come he never saw her before? Oh, how come!
That goddam Jimmy, Russ thinks; now he has everything. Success and fame and the most gorgeous living woman, who is probably intelligent too. Intending nothing, Russ smiles in Esther’s direction, but his gaze is somehow intercepted by that of Jimmy himself, who is scowling directly at him. And for what? Now what has got into that silly Oklahoma oil-king bugger?
Is it possible that the sun is getting even hotter, this late in the day? Russ feels that it is, or maybe it’s all the booze he has drunk. Too much gin, he knows it, and he’s got no head for liquor at all. But today it’s not making him drunk, just hot. Looking out at the pool, at all that cool blue lapping water into which no one, so far, has ventured—just Abigail Baird, sitting there on the side with her feet in, kicking up little waves—Russ thinks he really should go in swimming, he really should. And, thinking that, he begins to laugh, just quietly, to himself. The joke being that he does not know how to swim. As a kid, afraid of water, he never learned, and now, still afraid, he is much too old to learn.
Dangling her feet in the water, which is really not so cool, Abby thinks of Benny. “Sweltering,” he says, in a shipyard job his Uncle Max got for him. Tough work, but he’s making good money, and it may keep him out of the draft. He and a friend plan a little vacation trip before fall and back-to-school.
How great if they came down here! thinks Abby, at first, and then she thinks, Would it really be so great? What about—what about his being “colored,” as they say down here? Abby can just hear that silly Dolly Bigelow, her mother’s friend: “Well, I just never thought I’d live to see the day, that snippy little old Abby Baird has got this colored friend, and he’s come to stay with them in their house, and he’s even going into their swimming pool.” She is not even sure that her own friend Betsy Lee would be so swell about it. Melanctha—well, you can never tell how Melanctha will be about anything. The boys would all be just awful, she knows that. She hates all the boys around here.
Abby recently read an article, though, about Negroes in the armed services. According to this writer, it’s been a big success. And so maybe after the war things will be a lot better. Abby is almost sure that they will. This Southern stuff about “colored” is just too dumb, it can’t go on forever. So maybe, if not this fall, some other fall soon Benny will come down to visit. When he’s at Harvard, maybe. A football star. She smiles with secret delight at this thought, and she kicks her feet harder, sending blue ripples all across the pool.
Watching her feet, and the water, she is not quite aware at first that Deirdre Yates (Byrd) has got up from where she was sitting and is making her way toward Abby, coming to the edge of the pool where Abby sits.
“Come on, take your shoes off. It’ll cool you,” Abby tells her friend; she feels full of affection for poor heavily pregnant Deirdre, whom she has not seen or talked to for a while.
Awkwardly, slowly, Deirdre lowers herself to the edge of the pool, her body so cumbersome now. Everything she does is slow and awkward. “Lord, that feels good!” she says at last, her shoes slipped off, feet cooling in the water. “I’m hot enough for two people.” She laughs. “I guess I am two people.”
Abby is unable to imagine being pregnant. Carrying a baby in your stomach. She supposes that someday she will, but for the moment she would rather not even think about it. Instead she says, “Deirdre, I’ve been reading all this stuff lately, and do you think it’s true that things will be a lot better for Negro people after the war?”
Deirdre stares at Abby for a moment, then seems to adjust to this shift in tone. “I reckon they will,” she says. “Stands to reason, with all the colored in the service.” She adds, “I surely hope so. The way things are now is just so wrong. Unfair. Not Christian.”
This opinion comes as a surprise to Abby. They have never before touched on “race” as a topic, and Deirdre after all is as Southern as anyone around. Pleased, Abby tells her, “Deirdre, I’m so glad you feel like that. Me too. And you see, I have this friend—”
No one, still, has really gone in swimming. Everyone seems content simply to contemplate the cooling water.
Hearing what she believes is the ringing of their phone, and momentarily forgetting that Odessa is there at the house and presumably in the kitchen where the phone is, Cynthia gets to her feet. But as she approaches the back door she hears not rings but Odessa’s voice, speaking rather loudly.
She seems to be finishing a conversation, which must have been brief. “… that’s all right, then,” she hears Odessa say, in a warmly welcoming voice. “I see you later. Soon, now. This here is long distance!”
She has not heard this friendly tone from Odessa before (why would she?), nor seen the happy face that she finds, walking in.
“Oh, Odessa, I thought I heard the phone. But it was for you? Well, that’s good.” She smiles vaguely, noting that Odessa’s expression is already fading back to its customary blankness.
But Odessa says (as though she owed an explanation), “That Horace. He back.”
“Oh good, that’s nice.” And then, from some sheer if diffuse goodwill, Cynthia adds, “You know, Odessa, if you
and Horace both decide to come and live here, I’d be—well, that would be wonderful.”
“That so?” That is all Odessa says, for the moment, but Cynthia is amazed to hear the quick notes of pleasure and surprise in Odessa’s voice. And Cynthia thinks, My God, how terrible, Odessa is surprised and even grateful, just because I said her husband could live here too. Her husband, for God’s sake. How terrible!
“Well, you think about it,” she says to Odessa.
“Yes’m, we think.”
When I’m a lawyer, thinks Cynthia a little vaguely, a little ginnily, I will really try to change everything. I’ll come down here and take cases for Negro people, for free. She sees herself in front of a courtroom, passionately declaiming. Dressed in something incredibly simple and smart—a little black Balenciaga, perhaps. And then she chides herself severely: I’m going to be a lawyer, not a movie star. However, nevertheless, it wouldn’t hurt her cause for her to be well dressed—would it, really?
It is interesting, she also thinks, as she crosses the lawn, that almost no one at the party has mentioned her going to law school.
Several thoughts arrive at Russ Byrd’s mind simultaneously. He thinks, I’ll never be able to write a play again, or even the smallest poem. He thinks, I am terribly drunk. He thinks, I must go in swimming.
He slips down to the pool, strangely unobserved. Everyone else is too occupied with drinks and with talk; they are mostly stupefied, and paralyzed by the heat, and the gin.
But Russ feels an instant cool relief as he wades very slowly out into the pool. The water reaches his cock—ah, delicious!
He walks a foot or so more, and then, quite suddenly, as he might have known it would, the floor falls out of the world, and he has slid underwater, to where he cannot see or breathe. Where his mind will explode into a poem.
It is Abby who first sees that Russ is in trouble. That he is in fact about to drown. She jumps in, followed by Deirdre in all her clothes. Then Cynthia, just arrived at the edge of the pool. And the three women, somehow, pulling together, haul Russ out of the pool.
In some later versions it is Deirdre alone—“big as she was, she jumped right in with her dress on”—who saved Russ’s life. Other people say it was Cynthia, who, according to legend, “took a shine to Russ the first time she ever laid eyes on him, maybe even before.” Others said Abby, “that brave little Yankee girl, and not so little anymore.”
It is Harry, though, who gets Russ from the pool’s edge to the grassy space at one end, to a spread-out towel. Harry who sits astride Russ’s back, rhythmically pushing down on his ribs, then letting go. Repeating as he does so, “Out goes the bad air, in comes the good.” An old Navy incantation.
As Russ comes back to life, he sees not a poem or a play but a movie in Technicolor. It seems to be about Heaven, with bursting clouds and the most beautiful angels, also golden and very sexy. He believes that he saved his own life, by agreeing to breathe again.
Cynthia thinks that Harry saved Russ, with his artificial respiration. Harry thinks Cynthia saved him, jumping in like that. There is never any general agreement about who or what saved Russ’s life, but it is a topic discussed locally for many months.
In the middle of the following November, a brilliant month of blue skies and scarlet and yellow leaves, and blue-gray wood smoke, Deirdre gives birth to a round, very amiable little baby girl. A golden girl, whom she and Russ name, without much further argument, SallyJane.
A Note About the Author
Alice Adams was born in Virginia and graduated from Radcliffe College. She was the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lived in San Francisco until her death in 1999.
Books by Alice Adams
Careless Love
Families and Survivors
Listening to Billie
Beautiful Girl (stories)
Rich Rewards
To See You Again (stories)
Superior Women
Return Trips (stories)
After You’ve Gone (stories)
Caroline’s Daughters
Mexico: Some Travels and Travelers There
Almost Perfect
A Southern Exposure
Medicine Men
The Last Lovely City (stories)
After the War
The Stories of Alice Adams