“Yes. It’s all right with him.”
“Well, I know who ain’t gon’ feed it and clean up after it. And if it get under my feet one more time I’m gon’ stomp it.”
“He won’t,” Peyton said fervently. “I’ll keep him in my room. I’ll feed him and clean up after him. He won’t be a bit of trouble.”
Trailways stuck his sharp little head out of Peyton’s arm and looked up into Chloe’s face. He put out a tiny paw and patted her arm, seven or eight rapid, whisper-soft pats.
“Rowr?” he said.
Chloe’s face struggled with implacability but lost. An unwilling grin broke its surface. “Well, he’s a feisty little thing, ain’t he?”
“He’s a good boy. He’s going to go everywhere with me. You’re going to love him, Chloe.”
“I ain’t gon’ love no flea-bitten stray cat. But maybe I ain’t gon’ hate him, either,” Clothilde said.
When Nora finally straggled down to breakfast it was too late for Sunday school, and Peyton and her father were playing with the kitten, tossing a ball of kitchen twine for him. Trailways leapt high into the air, arching and twisting, batting the twine from one end of the breakfast room to the other. Peyton was laughing aloud, and her father was smiling.
“Isn’t he the cutest kitten you ever saw?” she demanded of her father.
“Not by a long shot,” Frazier said. “But he’s cute enough. He can’t be allowed to tear things up, claw the furniture, and things like that, though, Peyton. You’re going to have to watch him closely. I’m not going to have him be any more work for Chloe.”
“Oh, I will! He won’t!”
Peyton looked up as Nora came down the stairs and into the breakfast room. Instead of the dragon robe and the ubiquitous cigarette, Nora was wearing a short black sheath of some stretchy material, and a strand of pearls, and high-heeled black pumps. She had her hair pulled back into a sort of chignon and had tied a red and black paisley silk scarf around it. She looked exotic and absolutely wonderful. She even wore makeup and some sort of coppery lipstick.
Peyton could feel her mouth open and freeze there.
“I thought we’d be going to church,” Nora said. “Am I too late? Is this wrong for church?”
“You look just fine,” Frazier said. “You just took us by surprise. Here you’re all dressed and Peyton’s still in her pajamas. I wasn’t sure you’d want to go to church, but we’re glad to have you.”
“I’d really like to. So, I see you’ve met Trailways. He’s a cutie, isn’t he?” She picked up the squirming kitten and held him under her chin, crooning to him.
“He’s not so bad. Where on earth did you find him?”
“Behind a garbage can at the restaurant,” Nora said easily. She smiled at Peyton, a small smile. We will always have our secrets, you and I, the smile said. Peyton, who had been about to recount the story of the bus-station garbage can, did not, and smiled back at her cousin. Her father, she knew, would have hated the entire idea of the bus station. Yes, secrets of our own, which nobody else will ever know, her smile said back to Nora.
She went to dress, and Nora came into her room with her.
“I remember this room,” she said. “This is where I slept when I was a little girl, the time I was here. They offered me one of the big rooms, but this was the one I wanted. It wraps around you like a hug, doesn’t it? You’ve fixed it up very nicely. I’ll like thinking of you snuggled in here under the eaves. Now. What are you going to wear to church?”
Without stopping for Peyton’s answer, Nora went to her closet and opened the door and stood staring in. She shook her head a little and then reached in and pulled out the dress and jacket that Aunt Augusta had selected from the Tween Shop. They were just as bad as Peyton remembered, hanging shapeless and joyless from their padded hanger.
“This,” Nora said.
“I hate it. It looks like a maid’s dress. It looks like a missionary society dress.”
“Just you wait. Put it on and I’ll be right back.”
Peyton slipped on the dark, sleeveless dress. It gaped and billowed on her, and the skirt flapped like a wet conquered flag at her calves. She would not look into the mirror on her dressing table. There was no way anyone was going to get her into the Lytton First Methodist Church in this.
Nora came back with a shopping bag and began to spread things out on Peyton’s bed, where Trailways dove and scrabbled among them. First she brought out safety pins and pinned the waist and armholes of the dress snugly. Then she took a big roll of two-sided tape and doubled the hem up and secured it with the tape. Peyton felt it just skimming her knees. She looked down. Her legs were bare and scabby and covered with downy dark hair. This could not be happening.
“Dark stockings,” Nora said, and brought them out. She turned her back while Peyton grumbled herself into the garter belt, and then Nora showed her how to roll the stockings down and fit them over her feet and pull them taut and fasten them. They felt somehow…depraved? No, but something….
Nora clasped a string of irregular freshwater pearls around Peyton’s neck. They bumped at her exposed collarbone. Then she produced black suede pumps with low, shaped heels.
“Cuban heels,” she said. “Do you think you can squinch your feet into them just for an hour?”
Peyton nodded, wondering how on earth she was going to walk.
“Now the jacket,” Nora said, and she slipped it over Peyton’s arms and buttoned it neatly at the throat, pulling out the pearls so that they lay just along the neckline. She puffed Peyton’s hair and whisked on a bit of the blush and eyeshadow and a slicking of the lip gloss and stepped back and looked.
“Wow,” she said. “This is even better than I thought.”
Peyton minced in the too-tight heels, her ankles wobbling a little, over to the mirror and looked.
Holly Golightly did indeed look back. At least she did if Peyton used her seeing-not-seeing trick. At the edge of her vision Holly stood poised and straight, her stalk of a neck rising from the collar of her dress, her long legs graceful and coltish. Even the cap of hair, even the dark slant of eyebrows….
Suddenly Peyton did not want to go out of her room.
“I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t wear this.”
“Oh, yes, you can, and you will,” Nora said, putting an arm around her shoulder. “You’re going to walk into that church with your father and me and you’re going to hold your back straight as a stick like Audrey does, and you’re going to smile, and I guarantee you’re going to hear a great big swoosh of breath from everybody there.”
“I’d hate that.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Once you’ve heard it, you’ve want to hear it everywhere you go. Now let’s get at it. Here, carry these white gloves. Oh, yes. Perfect.”
Tottering and terrified, Peyton followed Nora out into the breakfast room, where her father sat reading the Sunday Atlanta Journal Constitution. He looked up.
“Why, Peyton,” he said, and smiled. “Who is this? You look mighty pretty, baby. You really do. Nobody at church is going to know you. They’ll think we’ve got two cousins visiting us.”
“Daddy, I don’t think I…could I maybe just skip church this once? I need to look after Trailways.”
“And waste all this? Certainly not. Trailways can look after himself. I’m looking forward to showing off both of you. Get your coat; it’s turned cold.”
The bells of the Methodist church were ringing as they got out of the car and hurried through the cold rain. People stood in a knot on the porch and streamed into the sanctuary. Two appointed stewards stood at the door shaking hands and looking wet and resigned. Teetering drunkenly on Nora’s heels, Peyton navigated the steps behind her father and her cousin, her head down. There was a faint hum, as from a hive of bees, from the church. Nora turned around and grinned at her.
“The Methodists are swarming,” she said, and then she put her hand under Peyton’s chin. “Head up. Shoulders back. Let’s see that smile.�
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Blind, erect, and grinning, Peyton walked into the church she had attended all her life. It smelled of wet wool and dusty heat from the ancient furnace, and moldy hymnals. She knew none of it.
There was no whoosh of indrawn breath as Nora had predicted, but there was a small silence from each pew as Peyton passed, and then a little hum of conversation.
“Let me die,” Peyton whispered to the God who never seemed to hear her, and she slipped into the McKenzie pew. When she turned to seat herself, she looked back. Everywhere she looked, there were smiles. Her Uncle Charles, seated in the looming shadow of Aunt Augusta, held up his thumb and forefinger in an OK sign. Only Aunt Augusta was not smiling. She looked as if she had swallowed something rancid.
The sermon dealt vaguely with First Corinthians, thirteenth verse, and seemed interminable. When it ended, Peyton stifled an urge to dash out the back entrance and trotted dumbly up the aisle behind her father. Nora walked ahead of them, head high, a small smile on her mouth. Peyton thought that there had been nothing like her in this church in its living memory, though Nora wore plain black, like half the women there, and pearls, and just the silk scarf. Still, eyes tracked her, heads went together, a soft babble rose wherever she passed. When the eyes turned to Peyton the babble swelled, and there were more smiles. Finally, they gained the cold freedom of the porch, where Dr. Moss was greeting his congregation. He had baptized Peyton. He looked at her without recognition for a long moment, and then he hugged her and said, “Well, my dear, you all grow up, don’t you? Only you did it overnight. Next thing you know I’ll be marrying you and some lucky young fellow.”
Peyton smiled sickly and fled.
Her father and Nora were waiting in the car, the heater blasting out warm air and fogging up the windows.
“You ladies surely kicked up a fuss,” her father said. “I never saw so much whispering and eye-rolling and what-all. I thought for a minute they were going to clap.”
“Well, maybe they just don’t have enough to do,” Nora said lazily. “Surely girls grow up in Lytton. Surely people come to visit.”
“It’s a small town, Nora,” Frazier McKenzie said. “Not much changes.”
Suddenly Peyton was wild to be home, to skin out of the pinned-up clothes and stockings and toss the gloves on her bed and kick the pumps across the room, to curl up with Trailways under her afghan and read away the long afternoon.
“Augusta has asked us to lunch,” her father said. “I thought we’d go and get it over with. If we don’t, she’s going to be at the house every morning at dawn until she finds out all she wants to know about Nora.”
“I think she already has,” Nora said.
“Daddy,” Peyton wailed.
“It’s not for long, Peyton. I know she’d like to see you in your new clothes. You need to thank her. And it’s been a while since you’ve seen your Uncle Charlie. I want Nora to meet him.”
“I look forward to it,” Nora murmured. Peyton glanced at her.
The faint smile was still in place.
Augusta McKenzie met them at the doorway of her home two streets from the church, on the “new” side of town. It was a rambling brick structure with black shutters and a walkway bordered with barren azalea bushes. They were pretty in the spring, Peyton knew, but now they looked like tatty sheep huddled in the rain. The house was fairly new, and looked it. Aunt Augusta had bullied Charles McKenzie out of the big, ramshackle, once-beautiful house at the edge of the downtown area four years earlier, when the town offered them a sizable lump sum to buy it and tear it down and put up a small shopping center. The money had been used to build this house in a “far better part of town.” It was the ranch style that was popular in that part of the South, but it was longer and lower and had more lawn and a pocket-sized swimming pool behind it. Peyton had never understood why. Uncle Charles did not spend enough time at home to swim, and Aunt Augusta in a swimming pool was simply unimaginable. She had been invited to swim there whenever she wanted, and her father had brought her over once or twice to do so, but everything was so rectangular and pristine and chlorinated and blue and white that she barely got her feet wet before she was out and wrapped in a towel, shivering. Her father did not make her go back. Peyton did not really know how to swim. He thought she was afraid of the water, but it was the pool. She did not know how to tell him that.
Augusta kissed Frazier lightly on the cheek and nodded to Nora and simply looked at Peyton.
“Your new clothes suit you very well, Peyton,” she said. “I’m sorry you didn’t think so much of your pretty permanent. Did your Cousin Nora cut it for you?”
The smile she bent on Nora was sharklike and brief. Peyton knew that her father had not seen the teeth in it. She knew that Nora had.
“Yes, I did,” Nora said sweetly. “We thought something a little simpler, maybe. Let her pretty natural color and wave show through. I don’t think Peyton quite knew how to take care of the permanent. I know she appreciated it, though.”
“I’m sure,” Augusta McKenzie said. Her eyes took in Nora’s trim dress, the pearls, and the scarf. “Quite a change from your last costume,” she said.
“I have one for every occasion,” Nora said. Augusta led them into her living room, done in turquoise and rose and beetling with bulbous brocade pieces that she had once told Peyton were Duncan Phyfe. Charles McKenzie was perched uncomfortably on a wing chair, stiff in a blue suit and a red and blue tie. He clashed with the room. Peyton imagined that her aunt would have had him change his clothes if there had been time.
Charles McKenzie was a squashed and spread version of his older brother. You could see the resemblance in the gray eyes and the dark hair and the ruins of cheekbones, but the rest seemed blurred and sagging, like a melting snowman. His nose was traced with red veins and he had two shiny-shaved chins poised over his starched collar. His stomach pushed unhappily over his belt and the soles of his black shoes were still unscratched. Peyton could not remember ever seeing him in anything but hunting boots or desiccated old moccasins, except on Sundays, when he seemed to her like a captive gorilla, miserably dressed up in human clothes and brought to church. She loved him. When she was very small, he used to toss her in the air over his head and catch her, and she remembered her own shrieks of joy.
He got up and hugged her briefly and hard. He smelled as he always did, of whiskey and cigar smoke and his aftershave and, somehow, of the hunting dogs he kept over at Chief Fletcher’s house. It was one of the smells of Peyton’s childhood, and she breathed it in like oxygen.
“You look might pretty, honey,” he said. “All grown up. You’re not going to be our little girl much longer.”
“This is Peyton’s cousin, Nora Findlay,” her father said, and Nora put out her hand, smiling. Uncle Charlie took it, reddening. In this wax-works room Nora seemed pulsing, overflowing with life and energy.
“I’m glad to meet you finally,” Nora said. “I’ve met Cousin Augusta, but I was wondering when they were going to let me meet you.”
“Pleasedtomeecha,” Charles McKenzie mumbled, looking at the rug with interest.
“Please sit down,” Aunt Augusta said. “Lunch will be only a minute. I’d offer you a touch of sherry, but it being Sunday I thought we’d do it another time. Now, Nora, tell us all about yourself. I knew your Lytton cousin, Lilla Lee, forever, of course, but I don’t believe I ever met her Cousin Carolyn. Your mother. She’s passed away, I understand?”
“Yes, she has,” Nora said. Peyton knew that Aunt Augusta Knew that. She knew also that Nora knew she knew. Her stomach knotted, but Nora only said, “As you know, she was sick for a long time before she died. I don’t remember much about my father. So the only family I can come close to claiming is here in Lytton. It’s nice to check in with them.”
“And you’ll be moving on to a job in Atlanta, you said?”
“Well, actually…”
“I hope Nora will be staying awhile with us, Augusta,” Frazier McKenzie said. “There are
plans for a new joint English class with Lytton and Carver Highs, and I’ve suggested Nora for it. She says she’d like it and I can’t imagine the board will be anything but delighted. We’ll know this week, but I’d say it was a done deal.”
“Staying with you, of course,” Aunt Augusta said.
“Well, of course,” Peyton’s father said. “Look what her influence has done for Peyton already. And yours, of course.”
“Of course. Well, Nora, you’ve landed well, haven’t you?”
“Better than I could have dreamed,” Nora said, wrinkling her freckled nose at Aunt Augusta.
“Oh, I’ll bet not,” Augusta said. Frazier and Charles McKenzie turned to look at her, and she said hastily, “I think I heard Doreen say lunch was ready. Let’s go on in.”
Aunt Augusta’s table was spread with linen and china and crystal and silver, most of it in turquoise and rose. A prim tower of artificial fruit rose from a silver epergne in the middle of the table. Rose candles burned on either side of it.
“My goodness, it looks like a wedding with the candles and all,” Nora said. “Beautiful, Aunt Augusta. Or should I say ‘Cousin’?”
“‘Augusta’ will do,” Peyton’s aunt said.
“You’re a bit too old to be my niece, and we’re really not cousins. Thank you. I thought the candles because it’s so dreary outside. I know it’s not strictly proper before dark, but we can surely bend the rules a little with family.”
“Certainly,” Nora said.
A young black girl came into the dining room carrying a tureen of something smoking hot. She walked as carefully as Peyton had that morning, balancing the heavy dish, and her pink tongue protruded a bit from her lips. She wore a black dress and a starched white apron. Peyton stared. She had never seen such a costume on anyone but the angry woman in Rich’s restroom. Then she looked harder.
“Doreen!” she said. “What are you doing in that thing?”
Doreen was the grandniece of Clothilde, and lived in a small house on the other side of hers. She was a quiet girl only a few years older than Peyton. Her mother had died when she was very small, and she did not know who her father was. Chloe looked after her and her younger brother, Tyrone. Peyton had played in the woods with both of them all through her childhood.
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