Doreen grinned but did not motive her eyes from the tureen. She set it down in the middle of the table, where it slopped a bit of soup onto the tablecloth.
“Towel, please, Doreen,” Aunt Augusta said evenly, and when the girl had left the room she added, “I’ll never get her properly trained to serve. But she’s helpful with the cleaning. And she’s very young still. Maybe, with time…”
“What’s she doing in that apron thing?” Peyton asked curiously.
“For heaven’s sake, Peyton, it’s what people’s maids wear,” her aunt said. “Just because Chole comes to work looking like a ragpicker does not mean it’s proper. I bought the uniform for Doreen because I want her to learn how to be a good maid. She didn’t go to school past the third grade because she had to look after Tyrone, and I can’t imagine she would have had much future otherwise. At least she can always find work if she’s trained. We need to help our people when we can.”
No one spoke. Doreen came back into the room with a towel, looking as though she would burst into tears. Nora leaned toward her and took the towel.
“Let me,” she said. “It’s easier to reach from here. No, wait a minute, Doreen, don’t go yet. I’m Nora Findlay, Peyton’s cousin.”
Doreen looked at her wildly. Nora smiled and said, “You’re a good maid, Doreen, but I wonder if you might not like to go back to school?”
“No’m,” the girl said, casting a look at Aunt Augusta. “I’ve missed too much now. This is fine.”
“Well, look. I’m starting a special English class at Carver, and…I’d think you might enjoy coming and sitting in sometime, when you’re done with your work, of course. And I do tutoring, too. I think we could catch you up pretty quickly.”
“That will do, Doreen,” Aunt Augusta said, and the girl fled. Augusta turned to Nora.
“It may not be the custom in some of the places you’ve lived,” she said tightly, and Peyton could see that she was furious. “But in Lytton people do not steal one another’s maids.”
“I wasn’t stealing her, I was emancipating her,” Nora said, and there were two round spots of color high on her cheekbones. “It was this notion Mr. Lincoln had, a long time ago. I thought perhaps you’d heard of it.”
“You may bring in the plates, Doreen,” Augusta called. The girl did, and handed them around. The table was silent.
The meal was heavy and not particularly good, and it seemed to go on for years. Aunt Augusta did not speak, and only Nora ate heartily.
“Good old-fashioned southern cooking,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve had it since the last time I was here.”
“What sort of meals are you used to, then?” Aunt Augusta said sweetly. “Tropical food, I suppose. African, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Much like this. Chicken. Yams. Corn. Tomatoes. Okra. Oh, of course there are a few foreign touches. Goat, for instance. And there’s a big lizard they serve in Cuba, tastes just like chicken….”
At last the meal was over, and they went back into the living room. Peyton knew that they would sit there for an hour or so before she could go home, chatting and catching up, as Aunt Augusta said. She wondered if she could say she was suddenly ill and leave. But she knew she could not.
There was another, longer silence in the living room, and then Charles McKenzie said, “Got a new shotgun the other day, Frazier. It’s out in the garage. Want to go have a look?”
“Charles, you let Frazier sit and digest his lunch,” Aunt Augusta snapped. “Good grief. Frazier, don’t you pay any attention to him. He’s got a bottle out there. He just can’t wait to get out there and start tippling.”
Charles McKenzie’s ears reddened. He studied his shoes intently.
Nora stood up.
“I would love to see it, Charles,” she said. “I learned skeet and trap shooting when I was in Cuba. I’m a pretty good shot, if I do say so. Will you show me?”
Uncle Charles had no choice. He mumbled something and got out of his chair and shambled out of the room. Nora followed him, smiling back at them. “You’ll forgive me for a while, won’t you?” she said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been around anybody who knew good guns.”
After they left, the silence seemed to swell and shimmer. Even Peyton knew that what Nora had done had crossed some sort of boundary, though she did not know what it was. Aunt Augusta’s eyes were almost popping out of her rosy face. Peyton knew, too, that whatever it was she was bursting to spill would not come forth while she was in the room.
“Aunt Augusta, may I go in the den and listen to the radio?” she said.
“Of course, Peyton. You might want to close the door so we don’t disturb each other.”
Peyton got up and wobbled on Nora’s heels into the den, where the big Capehart radio had been banished when the new Motorola TV was given pride of place in the living room. The den had started life as a small screened porch and was barely large enough to accommodate the radio and two battered Leatherette recliners. It smelled of Cigars and, faintly, of sweet bourbon whiskey. She knew that this must be her uncle’s refuge. Peyton liked the little room, too. It had a huge picture window overlooking a rock garden, dun and soggy now, with two narrow bookcases on either side. The bookcases held mainly bits of china and gewgaws—Aunt Augusta’s collection of Royal Doulton figurines and one or two cut-crystal candy dishes—but there was also a small collection of tattered Zane Grey paperbacks. She thought that this was the only room in this house where her Uncle Charles had left his spoor.
She turned on the radio and closed the glass French doors that separated the den from the living room. She could not hear so well with them closed, but she still hear, and she could see. The volume had scarcely swelled before she saw Aunt Augusta’s mouth open and begin to work as if she were chewing gum, though Peyton had never known that to happen. She had not really meant to listen, but there was something so disturbing about the sight of her aunt’s mouth working furiously and silently that she found herself straining to hear.
“…see what I mean now, Frazier? How can you possibly think she can stay in your house…want Peyton to learn that kind of thing? You’re a kind man, I’ve always said so, but this is simply not…out there alone with a man she doesn’t even know, when she knows he’s got a bottle…”
Peyton looked at her father through the glass. He said nothing. She got up and kicked off the pumps and curled up on the floor next to the big radio and laid her cheek against its fretwork as she had when she was a child, feeling the warmth and the living vibration from the station in Atlanta seep into her like sun. She did not think that she slept, but she must have. The next thing she knew someone had opened the glass doors and she could hear her father saying, “Well, it’s been a treat as usual, Augusta, but we’ve got to be on our way. I don’t think Peyton has done her homework yet.”
“Yes, I have,” Peyton protested. Her father gave her a look.
Nora and Uncle Charles stood at the door, laughing. Nora’s hair was beaded with rain and Uncle Charles’s coat was damp, so she knew they had just dashed in through the rain from the garage.
“Thank you, Charles,” Nora said, her rich voice lilting with pleasure. “What a lovely way to spend a rainy afternoon. Maybe you’ll let me shoot it one day. I don’t hunt, but I’m a terrific shot.”
Uncle Charles said heartily, “It would be my pleasure,” and then looked at Aunt Augusta’s face and dropped his eyes to study his shoes once more.
“Thank you, Augusta,” Nora said, leaning over to give Aunt Augusta a kiss on the cheek; Aunt Augusta flinched as if she had been bitten by a blue-tail fly.
“It was a wonderful lunch, and your house is just extraordinary.”
Peyton ran with Nora through the diminishing rain to the car. Behind them, they heard Augusta McKenzie saying to Frazier, in a whisper that was more squall than voice, “I smelled whiskey on her breath, Frazier. Surely that should be enough for you.”
Nora laughed and shook out her wet copper hair. “a littl
e shot of Uncle Charles’s stash wouldn’t hurt her any,” she said.
Peyton was silent. In her world, no living white woman had ever been known to drink anything but eggnog at Christmas and a glass of champagne at weddings.
Her father was quiet on the drive home, and as they were putting away their wet things, he said, “I’ve got a good bit of work to do. I’ve be out in my office for a while.”
Peyton looked after him as he left the kitchen. Sunday afternoon was always their time to drive up to the Howard Johnson’s on the interstate and have ice cream, and afterward to watch television until it was time to eat the cold supper Chloe had left them. Peyton had never known her father to work on Sunday afternoons.
Nora looked after him thoughtfully and then said, “Put on something comfortable and get Trailways and I’ll show you some of the things I brought with me from Cuba.”
“I think I’ll read,” Peyton said. Tears were smarting in her eyes.
“This is better than any book, even Salinger,” Nora said, ruffling her hair. “I’ll even show you my voodoo charms. Nobody has ever seen them before.”
Peyton brought the angry kitten, struggling wildly in her arms, to Nora’s room and settled down in the middle of her unmade bed. The room was a mess of strewn papers and books and clothes. Clothilde would, Peyton knew, have a fit.
“I’ll clean it up before Chloe comes in the morning,” Nora said, as if catching her thoughts. “I’m not going to leave it for her. I’m a slob and a packrat, I admit it. Neatness definitely does not count with me.”
Trailways ran about the room sniffing, lapped some water from a little Haviland dish that had stood on the dressing table since time out of Peyton’s mind, and dove into the soft, tangled mass of covers. He burrowed under the bedclothes and down to the bottom of the bed, scrabbling furiously, and then curled into a ball. Soon he was a still, small lump there, his buzzing purr loud over Nora’s little radio.
“Now, there’s a guy who knows how to make himself at home,” Nora said, smiling. “He can curl up in my bed anytime.”
She opened a big box that had been tied with twine and pulled out her treasures for Peyton’s delectation. There were bolts of vivid printed cloth, as strange and beautiful as a cheetah’s hide, that looked unlike anything Peyton had ever seen—batik, Nora said. “The natives in Haiti make it, and sometimes the Cubans, too. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Wild as the jungle. I’ve got a skirt and a sundress made out of it. Maybe we can have something made for you.”
Books came out of the trunk, shabby hard-covers, yellowing paperbacks. Peyton recognized some of the titles—Tropic of Cancer, Women in Love, Ulysses—and blushed. Weren’t they banned or something? But most had no meaning for her: some were in French, others in Spanish. Big, bursting scrapbooks—“I’ll show you someday”—and an ornate cigar box holding the voodoo charms, which proved to be merely small carved figures and bound clumps of feathers, mirrors, and what looked to be bone, and a dead chicken’s foot.
“Yuck,” Peyton said.
“Yeah, well, it’s got power, no matter how it looks,” Nora said. “Chickens are powerful carriers in vodun. That’s what they call voodoo in Haiti. The Cubans have got a slightly different pantheon, but the charms look almost the same. This chicken foot will absolutely protect you from duppies and were-tigers. That’s probably why you never see them in the South, all those chickens.”
Peyton grinned unwillingly. The hurt of her father’s defection eased slightly. “What’s that?” she asked, looking at a beautifully carved ebony box with a lock. It looked very old.
“That’s my private stuff,” Nora said. “The things that only I see. The things that mean the most to me. Photos, and my journal, and letters…do you keep a journal, Peyton?”
“No,” Peyton said, suddenly on fire to open the box and let Nora’s secrets fly out into the room like Pandora’s furies.
“Well, that’s one thing you simply have to do, no ifs, ands, or buts,” Nora said. “Every writer keeps a journal. Some have done it all their life. How will you know what you think if you don’t write it down? How will you remember who you were? I’m going to get you a good leather one the next time I’m in Atlanta.”
The green dusk was falling down outside. The rain had stopped, and long, stabbing rays of brilliant red sun were piercing the clouds at the horizon.
“Look at that. Red as sin,” Nora said. “Does your father usually come in for dinner? If he doesn’t, I’ll fix us something.”
“He always does,” Peyton said, the pain welling back. “Always. I don’t know why he’s acting like this.”
Nora was silent for a moment and then said, “I do. He’s mad at me. I think I shouldn’t have gone out to the garage with your Uncle Charles, though God knows what your father and your aunt thought we were doing out there. You stay here and look through this stuff, if you want to. I’m going out there and talk to him.”
She pulled a sweatshirt over her thin T-shirt and padded out of the room, her panther’s gait more apparent in the soft moccasins that she wore. Peyton sat still on the bed for a time after she left, nudging the snoring Trailways with her toe and looking into the middle distance at nothing at all. Then she got up and went down the stairs and out the back door to the foot of the stairs that led up to her father’s office over the garage. This time Peyton meant to listen. It crossed her mind that she had eavesdropped on Nora or on people talking about Nora for the past three days. She had no compunction about that. This was about her, too, and it was a safe bet that no one was going to tell her what transpired.
She was motionless, crouching in the fresh, green-smelling cold.
“…if I’ve broken any of the house rules, I’m sorry, Frazier,” Nora was saying. “But you’ll have to tell me what they are. I can’t read your mind, and I’d hate to have you running out here every time I cross some border I don’t know is there.”
“I don’t want to set rules for you, Nora,” her father said evenly. “But I should think it would be apparent that young women don’t go off with men and stay an hour and come back smelling like whiskey.”
“Maybe not in Lytton,” Nora said. “But they do in the places I’ve lived, Frazier. In those places, it has always been an honor to be shown someone’s private treasures. Couldn’t you see how proud Charles was of that shotgun? He wanted somebody to see it—you, preferably, but anybody, I guess. I doubt if Augusta has ever set foot in that garage since he’s taken to hiding his bourbon out there. And yes, I did have a drink with him. Just one, but a drink. In the Latin countries, it’s an insult to refuse someone’s hospitality.”
“You’re in a small southern town now, Nora. There’s nothing Latin about it.”
“Nothing Latin in Lytton,” Nora said, and Peyton could hear laughter in her voice. “No, there certainly isn’t. But Frazier, don’t you see what she’s made of him? He’s like a photographic negative, or like a ghost afraid to haunt his own house. How can a woman do that to a man? I wanted to give him back something….”
“Nora, I’m glad you’re here. I thought it was a good idea, and I still do. But there are some things that I just can’t have Peyton learning.”
“What? Like racism? Like the fine art of inflicting humiliation? Like castration?”
“Nora…”
“Frazier, your daughter is withering before she even blooms. She knows nothing, she expects nothing, she doesn’t even know how to laugh, as far as I can see. It breaks my heart. It may well be that I’m not the right person to teach her, but someone must do it, someone besides Augusta. I’ve spent a long time finding out the way I want to live, and if I’m not free to live that way, I just can’t stay. I can accommodate some of your rules, of course, but if I do, you’ll have to accommodate some of my un-Lyttonly notions. But first we have to be able to talk. If you find you just can’t do that, then that’s all right; I can easily find another job and a place to live. I’m used to that. But I have to know what your…rules for living are.”
“I guess I just never thought about it,” her father said. His voice was low.
“Then how on earth do you know who you are?”
Abruptly the door leading to the landing opened, and Nora stepped out into the dusk. She took a few deep breaths and looked around her as if she had no idea how she had come to this place. Peyton ducked behind the big camellia bush that sheltered the side of the garage. After Nora went into the house, she crept out and tiptoed through the kitchen and into her small room. She curled herself under her afghan. She did not turn on any lights.
Later—much later, it seemed—she heard her father come into the living room and click on the television set.
“Is anybody home?” he called. “Anybody who wants some supper? Chloe left us something, but all of a sudden I feel like Howard Johnson’s fried clams. Have I got any takers?”
She heard Nora’s step coming down the stairs, and her voice answering. Peyton skinned out of bed and into her jeans and a sweater, light and warmth flooding back as if it had never been dark.
9
The next morning Nora said at breakfast that she planned to spend the day getting to know the inside of Lytton.
“What inside?” Peyton said, feeding the clamoring Trailways bits of her bacon under the table. He promptly launched an effort to scale the table leg and get closer to the source of the bounty. He kept sliding back down, but he did not cease the attempt. Peyton bent to pick him up, but Nora shook her head.
“Don’t. He’ll get there eventually, and then he’ll know how. If get old and fat still howling to be picked up. You’ve got to let people and cats find out how to do things for themselves…. You know, the insides of places and the people who run them. The library. The bank. The hair place. The luncheonette. Who knows? Maybe the cemetery and the pool hall and the barbershop.”
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