At recess one of the senior boys, a rural Adonis so exalted by age and position on the football team as to be near sacred, said, “Hey, Peyton, I hear your cousin came to see you and that she’s a good-looking broad. You tell her that any time she wants a real man’s company she can call me. I bet we’d get along real good.”
Peyton, who would have passed by this gap-toothed behemoth a day earlier with her eyes averted, looked him full in the face.
“Don’t hold your breath,” she said. “She’s got about a million boyfriends.”
Whether or not this was true did not matter: the icon had no way of knowing one way or another, and somehow Peyton thought that there must have been if not a million men in Nora Findlay’s life, then at least a spectacular number of them.
“She really got a pink T-bird?” said one of the Adonis’s appendages.
“Yeah, she does,” Peyton said grandly. “We’re taking it into Atlanta tonight to a movie. She’s going to teach me to drive it.”
There was no reply, and she walked away, floating on power. It may be true, she thought, remembering something she had heard in history class: “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” To Peyton, the prospect of that corruption seemed to shine like diamonds, like stars.
When she got to the Losers Club that afternoon, Ernie and Boot were both waiting for her. Ernie had put out Coca-Colas and a little bowl of the cherished peanuts, and there was a crazed, blackened pan of his mother’s gingerbread sitting on the little stove. Peyton knew the feast was a votive offering spread for her, to supplicate the blessing of information about Nora. She smiled and sank down on the ottoman and nibbled peanuts and sipped Coca-Cola. She said nothing. Her corruption was near complete.
“OK,” Boot said. “Awright. Tell about Nora. I hear she smokes cigarettes and rolls up her shorts and she told Miss Augusta that she was the best fuck in the country, and Miss Augusta went steaming out of there like the dogs was after her. Did you see that?”
“I did,” Peyton said offhandedly. “She said ‘shit,’ too.”
“Whoooeee!” Boot breathed. “What you daddy say?”
“He wasn’t there. I don’t think he knows about it yet.”
“Don’t bet on it,” Ernie drawled. “Everybody else in town does. I heard it before nine o’clock this morning: Mother heard it from the drugstore lady. By this time everybody from Newnan to College Park will know about it.”
“Well, so what?” Peyton said crossly. All of a sudden she was weary of Nora’s celebrity. She realized that her own was only a reflection, like the moon’s light from the sun.
“So she gon’ stay?” Boot said.
“She might. If she does she’s going to teach me to drive the Thunderbird, and we’re going to take it into Atlanta for movies and things. But I don’t know. In a way she’s pretty boring. I really don’t think I like her very much.”
“Look to me like you don’t know whether to shit or go blind,” Boot said affably. This time it was Peyton, rather than her aunt, who sailed out in indignation. They were behaving like infants. Who needed it?
Nora did not eat dinner with them, but she sat at the table smoking and chatting pleasantly. She wore an astonishing outfit of tight black ankle-length pants and a loose, heavily embroidered blouse of some rough, gauzy material, and her hair was down again, obviously freshly washed and burnished. It shone like molten copper in the light from the brass overhead lamp. Her face was innocent of makeup.
“I’ll get something after the movie,” she said when Frazier McKenzie raised an eyebrow at her empty plate. “I ate lunch real late, and I hear there’s a nice little Italian restaurant next door to the movie theater. I haven’t had clam linguine for a long time.”
Peyton, who had tasted neither fresh clams nor linguine, shot a look at her father to see what he thought of this affectation, but he merely smiled.
“Neither have I,” he said. “There used to be a little place down by the courthouse in Atlanta that had it, but it closed during the Korean War. Maybe we’ll all go to your place sometime. I don’t think Peyton has ever tasted clam linguine.”
“I’ve had clams,” Peyton said. “I’ve had them at Howard Johnson’s. I personally think they’re overrated. I find that most seafood is.”
Even she could hardly believe the affected sentences coming out of her mouth. She looked up at Nora, expecting laughter.
Nora only smiled. “That’s because you’ve never had it fresh, right out of a tropical sea, and cooked over an outside grill, or made into a soup with things you wouldn’t believe if I told you about them. I agree with you, frozen fried seafood is ghastly. I’ll make you my special sopa caliente one day. That ought to change your mind about seafood.”
“What’s in it?”
“Oh, rice. Sweet potatoes. Fresh coconut milk. Crab and langouste—little warm-water lobsters. Chunks of fish. Broth. Spices that I can’t even pronounce. I brought some with me when I left Miami. I learned to make it when I lived in Cuba.”
“It sounds hideous,” Peyton said.
Her father gave her a look.
“It sounds good to me,” he said. “Might make a nice change from plain southern cooking, not that Chloe doesn’t do that better than anybody. Sometimes I think we just don’t get out into the world enough down here in Lytton.”
Nora stubbed out her Salem in the ashtray Chloe had silently put at her place—two days and already it was her place, Peyton thought resentfully, as if Buddy had never been—and lit another. Then she put that out, too.
“This can be pretty offensive if nobody else in the house smokes,” she said. “I’ve been around smokers so long that I just forget not everybody does it. Hispanics smoke like chimneys. I’ll confine it to my room, or go out on the porch, if you’d rather.”
“No, don’t bother,” Frazier said, and Peyton frankly goggled. Her father could scarcely tolerate the smells of cooking cabbage, or spare ribs boiling, or even chicken parts simmering on the stove for soup.
“I used to smoke,” he said. “I still keep a pipe out in my office. I think smoke after a meal smells good. Maybe I’ll bring in my pipe and we can smoke Peyton out of here.”
Peyton stared. Her head spun. Her father, smoking? Cigarettes, a pipe? This cool, abstemious man? She felt the world teeter and shift on its axis before it flowed on. In this, her own house, at her own table, she knew no one anymore.
“So, did you have a tour of Lytton like you planned?” her father asked. “It must have taken you all of twenty minutes. What did you do with the rest of your day?”
Nora stretched luxuriously, and the soft breasts surged under the cotton gauze.
Slut, thought Peyton.
“I spent the whole day around town,” she said. “It’s a charming little town, Frazier. Almost a Disney town. I looked into both churches and parked on the square and walked all over, into all the neighborhoods I could find…. The houses aren’t grand, but they’re so neat, so right somehow. Actually roses on trellises, and vegetable gardens. I even think I saw a cow down behind the Methodist church. It feels like Oz. it feels like nothing bad could ever happen here.”
You ought to try Lytton Grammar School, Peyton thought grimly.
“It’s a pretty little town, and most of us like it,” her father said mildly. “But it’s not Oz, not by a long shot. We have our share of bad business, bad doings. There are a lot of things that need changing in Lytton, but somehow nobody seems to have a go at them.”
“You mean like the separate-but-equal drinking fountains by the monument? Or the ‘Colored’ and ‘White’ entrances to the movie theater? Maybe you could start with those.”
“It’ll come,” Frazier McKenzie said. “But it’s going to have to come in its own time. If you tried to force that kind of change on Lytton all at once you’d hit a brick wall. Nothing would ever change then.”
“But Frazier, it’s the law of the land….”
Her father put down his coffee cup.
“Yes. It i
s,” he said. “And we’re lucky to have those laws in place at last. There’s great change going on in the cities; you know that. But out here, in the little backwaters, we’re a hundred years behind the cities. It’s going to be a matter of years. It’s going to happen one mind at a time, one heart at a time. Meanwhile, we try, and we measure our victories in inches.”
Nora regarded him thoughtfully. “Like what?”
“Well, like something I want to talk to you about. We talked about it at the school-board meeting this morning. The country education folks are about to get all over us for making no move toward compliance, and if they do that they’ll never get any. So I thought—we thought—that a compromise might work for a while. Lytton isn’t going to integrate its schools by itself; the blacks don’t want that, either. They know they’d get the short end of the stick. But maybe one shared class, maybe an honors class so that everyone could see the idea working. You could hold it one week at Lytton High and the next at Carver High, and so on. I think maybe, once it got going, everybody might be able to live with that.”
“What kind of class?” Nora said, studying her perfect nails.
“What do you think of English? An honors English class that maybe addressed the literature of blacks and whites alike. A small class, so there could be a lot of discussion….”
Nora raised her head. The bell of coppery hair swung forward over part of her face.
“I want that class, Frazier,” she said.
“I thought you might,” he said. “I sold you and the class as a package. It would be only an hour a day every day, but I said you might be willing to do some intensive tutoring, too. The black children are going to need it.”
“I would love it,” Nora breathed. “It’s just what I’ve hoped I’d find, but I never dreamed it could be here. When will you know? When will I?”
“The chairman’s going to take it to the country meeting this next week, but I don’t anticipate any problems. The country is going to be so relieved to see that we’re making some sort of effort, and your credentials really are unique.”
“I even have a certificate somewhere,” Nora said excitedly. “And of course I’d get my own place.”
“No, we’d want you here if you’ll stay,” her father said. “You remember, we talked about it. That is, if you’re still willing to spend some time with Peyton.”
“I can’t think of anything I’d like more,” Nora said. “We will teach each other wondrous things. As long as we all understand that I’m not trying to be a mother or a disciplinarian. Just a friend who’ll be underfoot a lot.”
“It’s all we ask, isn’t it, Peyton?” her father said. He was smiling.
Peyton thought about boarding school with halls the color of liver and girls with their perfect Sandra Dee noses in the air, and about an endless replay of the horrific shopping trip with Aunt Augusta.
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“So I’ll let you know as soon as I do,” her father said. “But I should think you might plan on starting in a couple of weeks. You’ll want to do some lesson plans or whatever it is teachers do, won’t you?”
“I’ve never used lesson plans, exactly,” Nora said. “I like to sort of let things go where they want to. But I do want to look through some books, mine and the library’s. Maybe I’ll go into Atlanta and look through the Carnegie up there, too.”
“Whatever you want to do. You mustn’t feel that we have full claim on your time. You’re a young woman in a new town. You’ll make friends. We want you to do that.”
Who on earth in this town would be Nora’s friend? Peyton thought in honest wonder. But maybe someone would. Good, it would get her out of Peyton’s hair once in a while….
“Right now you all are enough for me,” Nora said, smiling. “I’m really not used to having family. I just want to luxuriate in that awhile.”
They sat in silence for a small space of time, and then Nora said, “I met your grandmother today, Peyton. Your mother,” and she nodded at Frazier, who grimaced.
“I can’t wait to hear about that,” he said.
“Well,” Nora said, “I was sitting on a bench in the square reading a book and eating a sandwich from the drugstore and this old lady sat down beside me. She had a sack of groceries, and I asked if I could put them down against the bench for her, and she turned and looked at me and said, ‘I know you. I saw you coming in a bowl of tomato soup.’”
“Oh, Lord,” Frazier said, closing his eyes. “I’m really going to have to do something about her. I hope she didn’t bother you.”
“God, no.” Nora giggled. Unlike the rich laugh, it was silvery, burbling, flutelike. Peyton felt the corners of her own mouth tug upward.
“I thought she was fabulous. How many of us have been foreseen in a bowl of tomato soup? We talked for as long as she’d let me. We talked about some truly amazing things. Then she raised her fist at a limb full of crows over by the railroad tracks and yelled, ‘Go tell the Devil!’ and they flew off and so did she. I like her better than anybody else I’ve met except you all.”
“That’s a folktale. She’s Scottish,” Peyton said.
“I know the tale. I loved hearing somebody actually say it. I’ll bet the Devil is getting an earful right now.”
Peyton looked at her keenly to see if she was making fun of her grandmother, but there was no indication of that. Nora’s face was soft with enjoyment.
“She sees things, too. She sees them in fire and water,” Peyton said.
“And tomato soup. That’s the best of all.”
“How did you know she was my grandmother?”
“Oh, she introduced herself,” Nora said. “But I’d have known anyway. You look just like her, Frazier, and you’re probably going to, Peyton. I thought she was beautiful.”
“I’m glad you got along,” Frazier said almost primly. “But if she starts to get intrusive, just let me know.”
“Not at all. She never could. I’m going down to see her sometime over the weekend. She wants to ride in my car. Peyton, you come, too, if you want to.”
“I have a lot of homework,” Peyton said. Was this amoebalike cousin going to absorb her grandmother, too?
Presently Nora got up and gathered up a huge straw purse and went out into the twilight, jingling her car keys. Peyton and her father sat in silence while the engine growled into life and then faded away down the street.
“Do you think she ought to do that by herself?” Peyton said finally.
“Why not? She’s a grown woman. She’s accustomed to taking care of herself. It’s not our place to tell her what and what not to do.”
“She just wasn’t very dressed up. You could see right through that blouse.”
“No, you couldn’t. Don’t be unpleasant. She has a very individual sense of style.”
There was no responding to this. The idea of her father’s having any opinion at all about style was totally alien to Peyton.
“Are you glad she’s going to stay awhile?” her father asked her after a time.
“I don’t know. I know Mama didn’t like her,” Peyton mumbled, feeling her heart pound with her own daring. But this was no ordinary night.
“It was her mother whom your mother didn’t get on with. And it was a very long time ago. How did you know about that?”
“Ernie told me. He used to play with her that time she was here. He said she was a sneak.”
“Ernie doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Her father pushed away his dessert plate and looked at her thoughtfully. In the spill of light from the brass lamp, he looked strange: planes and angles of his face that she did not often notice leapt out at her. She could not see his eyes for the lamp-shadow.
“So you still go to those club meetings of your,” he said. “I’d forgotten about them. Maybe your aunt is right. Maybe you’re spending too much time with Ernie and Boot in that shed.”
Peyton took her plate into the kitchen and scraped it neatly. She did not
look back at her father. Her heart was leaping and battering in the cage of her ribs.
If you make me stop I will run away, she said to him clearly, but she said it far back in her head.
7
In the night the teasing sultriness broke and winter came back. Peyton heard the crash of thunder that broke the spine of the false spring and before she fell asleep rain was coming down in pelting sheets. She wriggled her face deep into her pillow and drew up into a ball. She was not cold, but winter brushed and fingered at her nevertheless. Before she fell back asleep she heard the slam of a car door and the pounding of footsteps on the front porch, then the softer opening and closing of the front door. Nora, coming back from Atlanta. It was, Peyton knew, very late, or maybe even early in the morning. She uncurled a little and relaxed into warmth. Her father wasn’t going to like this one bit.
Peyton, lulled by rain and the absence of sunlight filtering through her venetian blinds, slept very late and woke up cross and disoriented. She wrapped herself in her grandmother’s afghan and stumbled into the breakfast room, trailing the afghan, blinking into the overhead lamplight.
“Tell Mr. De Mille I’m ready for my close-up now,” Nora said from her seat at the table. She was smoking and smiling at Peyton. Her face, too, was crumpled with sleep, and her hair poured into her eyes like a sheepdog’s. She wore a black silk kimono, belted tight and crawling with scarlet and gold dragons and tigers. Her clown’s smile flashed.
“Who’s Mr. De Mille?” Peyton said thickly, slumping down into her seat and looking up at the phony cuckoo clock on the wall. It was hideously ugly and kept abominable time, and its cuckoo had long since flown the coop, but her father kept it in place. Buddy had bought it as a Christmas gift for his parents with the money from his first paper route. Peyton loathed it. The clock said ten-fifteen. Outside, the aqueous light looked like dawn.
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