Nora, Nora

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “They’re called bataa,” she said, flushed and perspiring, pointing to the drums. “They’re ritual drums. There are thousands of different rituals you can offer, to any number of saints. The one I just danced was to Chango. The bataa is central to modern percussion. There’s literally no jazz music in the world that doesn’t exist in the bataa. Now, does anybody want to try it with me?”

  At the end of the class every teenager, black and white alike, was whirling and stamping to the bataa drums, inviting who knew what pagan entities into their lives. They loved it. In tacit agreement, none told parents or teachers. Even the dimmest among them knew that that would spell the end of their days with Miss Findlay. None wanted that. In that small arena of indolently virulent small talk and languid torpor, Nora was life. Even the cheerleader-goddesses came into her orbit. Nora agreed to be their sponsor and adviser in exchange for what she called minimally decent human behavior, and spelled out her rules in no uncertain terms. The girls rolled their eyes and tossed their lacquered flips, but they agreed. There wasn’t anyone in their lives as interesting as Nora Findlay, and besides, she let them smoke behind the gymnasium.

  As if by prior agreement, the late afternoons after the Losers Club became Nora and Peyton’s special time together. Much of it was spent up in Nora’s room, Nora with her long length curled on her bed, smoking, Peyton in the red canvas butterfly chair her cousin had brought with her, a hectic anomaly in that dim room of polished mahogany and white chenille. Trailways would desert Peyton temporarily to curl into the curve of Nora’s waist or legs and knead with his sharp claws and purr his rusty, room-shaking purr. He had become a lank, spidery adolescent with the hind legs of a jackrabbit and the long body of a dachshund and an owl-eyed face that looked, Nora said, laughing, like Pete Seeger’s.

  “Who’s that?” said Peyton.

  “Find out for yourself,” said Nora.

  They talked; they talked endlessly, but almost never about themselves. It was too soon for that. They talked about books, they talked about music, they talked about movies, they talked about clothes and food and sometimes sex. Or rather, Nora talked. Peyton had no sense of being instructed, but she knew in some way that Nora was tutoring her. She blushed often, and she fidgeted, but soon she was laughing a little and began, once in a while, to venture an opinion about whatever it was they were talking about.

  “Why do you listen to me?” she asked Nora once in a moment of small epiphany. “I don’t know anything about anything yet.”

  “You will.” Nora smiled.

  Sometimes, in the warming nights, they did things: they went, the three of them, to a movie in Atlanta occasionally, or a symphony at the Municipal Auditorium, and once to a play put on by an Atlanta company at the Women’s Club Auditorium. The play was Our Town; Nora said it was sentimental claptrap and overdone to death, but she wept along with Peyton when the dead of Grover’s Corners reached out, in vain, to the living. They went to a couple of Georgia Tech baseball games, and sometimes to the antiquated movies at the Lytton movie house, and once to a square dance at the Lytton VFW hut. Frazier laughingly refused to dance, and Peyton would not have done so if someone had held a gun to her head, but Nora danced every set and with every man in Lytton who asked her, whirling and stamping and dosi-doing with her head thrown back and her copper hair streaming, her eyes closed in joy. Peyton heard about that first thing the next morning, from Chloe.

  “Doreen heard that Miss Augusta say she gon’ speak to Mr. Frazier about Nora being a bad influence. I ain’t studying that, but maybe you ought to warn your papa. Nora, too, for that matter.”

  “My God, what would she say if it had been the Panama City Dirty Bop?” Nora said, laughing, when Peyton told her.

  “Augusta doesn’t have enough to do,” her father said when she told him.

  Once, on a tender mothy night heavy with the smell of wisteria and an afternoon rain, Nora woke Peyton in the middle of the night and they took the Thunderbird, top down, out into the country to a small lake that fed into the Lytton reservoir. It was still and pure silver in the misty light of a lopsided white moon, so silent that they could hear the plop of frogs entering the water. As if in a dream, Peyton followed Nora as she took off her capri pants and T-shirt and they slipped naked into the blood-warm water and swam under the moon until a little wind came up and the water turned chilly. Neither of them ever mentioned it, not even to each other, but it lay between them like a chalice.

  But mostly Nora seemed to want simply to be in the house on Green Street. Sometimes, after dinner, instead of watching television, she would read to them out of whatever esoteric book she was reading, and once in a while she made martinis before dinner and she and Frazier had one. Peyton ate the olives.

  Peyton knew via the grammar school jungle drums that almost none of the female teachers at Lytton High liked Nora, and that most of the male ones did, and that almost every unmarried male teacher had asked her out. But she never talked about it, and she never went out on a date.

  “You should get out some,” Frazier said. “It’s just not right for you to sit in this old house all the time when you should be out getting to know people, meeting people your own age.”

  “Maybe later,” Nora said. “Right now I’d rather just be here with you all. You have no idea how tired of flitting around I am.”

  “Didn’t you date in Florida and Cuba?” Peyton asked her in one of their late-night talk sessions on Nora’s bed, where Nora sometimes let her have a drag of a Salem. In her head, Peyton had invented a lavish, exotic life for Nora back in those fabled cities she had left. Men were a large part of it—handsome, mysterious men unlike any she knew in Lytton. There must have been men. Nora gave off a musk of unconscious sensuality that even Peyton could smell and feel.

  “She’s had hundreds of affairs,” Peyton told the Losers Club. “She had lovers in every city, but eventually she got bored with them and left. I think she still gets letters from some of them.”

  “Tell about that,” Boot said, enchanted, but Ernie only sniffed.

  “If she had all those lovers it seems to me one of them might have finally married her,” he said.

  “She doesn’t want to be tied down,” Peyton said. “She told me that.”

  Nora had done no such thing, but Peyton thought it was entirely true. She did not consider that she had told the Losers Club her first lie.

  Nora would not talk about Cuba or Miami or Key West, at least not about the men she had known there, except to say that of course she had had dates, but for right now no one was as interesting or fun as the people in this funny old house. Peyton could not imagine why anyone would think her or her father interesting, but she was warmed as she could not remember being in her life. She mattered, at last, to someone who did not have to love her; her father, at last, was young and funny. She was afraid to look at this happiness full square, but she would glance at it obliquely, from the corner of her eye. She waited for it to vanish, but each time she looked, it was still there, shimmering like a mirage.

  “You know, Chloe,” Nora said one morning, “I promised you and Doreen that I’d tutor her in the afternoons so she can get her high school equivalency certificate. Would you tell her that now would be a good time for us to start?”

  Chloe looked down at the sinkful of tomato peels.

  “Doreen ain’t around afternoons no more,” she said. “She got a job up in Hapeville at the McDonald’s. They likes her a lot. Look like she be able to be an assistant manager in a year or two. Might be one day she could manage.”

  Nora stared at her.

  “Chloe, she doesn’t need to sling hamburgers all her life!” she said. “No telling where she might go if she gets that certificate. Why on earth did she leave Mrs. McKenzie’s? I know she’s awful, but at least Doreen had enough free time to study.”

  Chloe was silent, and then she said, “She ain’t leave. Miss Augusta fired her. Didn’t even give her no notice.”

  “Why?” Nora crie
d. “Who on earth wouldn’t want Doreen working for them?”

  “She come home from church early and found Doreen sittin’ in the bathtub,” Chloe said without looking at Peyton or Nora. “She like to bust a gut. She tell Doreen to put on her clothes and get out and not come back. She didn’t even give her time to dry off. Doreen come home with her clothes all wet.”

  “Oh, Chloe,” Nora said, stricken.

  “Thing is, Doreen ain’t never had no bathtub,” Chloe said. “We always washed in washtubs. I guess she just wanted to see how it felt to sit down in that hot water. It ain’t like Miss Augusta was going to catch anything from her. Doreen is a clean girl. You can get mighty clean in a washtub.”

  Peyton watched Nora’s face in silence. It was blanched white, and there was a pinched look at the base of her nostrils. She had a hectic spot of red high on each cheekbone. She went out of the room silently and did not open her bedroom door that afternoon to Peyton and Trailways. Peyton, lingering outside the door, could hear music from Nora’s radio, but nothing else. She went back to her own room and picked up Women in Love where she had abandoned it the night before. She could read only a few pages before the scandalized blood suffused her face and chest again, and she put the book aside. But she was making headway.

  That evening Peyton heard her father’s car door slam out front, and at almost the same instant heard Nora’s bedroom door slam and her running steps on the stairs. She went to her own bedroom door, holding the writhing Trailways, and opened it an inch or so, but she did not go out into the living room. She did not want the volcano smoldering just under Nora’s surface to erupt onto her. Peyton knew fury when she saw it.

  She heard it, though.

  “Do you know what that woman has done?” she heard Nora shouting.

  “What woman? What’s the matter?” her father said. His voice was alarmed.

  “Your sister-in-law! The famous Augusta McKenzie of Lytton, Georgia, social and moral arbiter to a generation, great soldier in the fight for freedom and equality, font of compassion for the frail and lowly—”

  “Sit down,” Frazier McKenzie said. “Tell me.”

  “I hate her, Frazier,” Peyton heard her cousin say. Her voice was trembling. “She is the worst, most evil woman I have ever known; she should be stopped from doing the things she does.”

  “Nora, what has she done?”

  “She fired Doreen because she found her in her bathtub,” Nora said. “She thought Doreen had contaminated it.”

  And she burst into tears.

  There was a brief silence, and then Nora continued, her voice strangled with sobs. “You know, we said I was going to tutor Doreen in the afternoons so she could get her reading up to par and take the high school equivalency test. You were there that day at lunch. So this morning I told Chloe I’d like to start and she told me that Doreen had been fired and was working at the McDonald’s up in Hapeville. Frazier, maybe in twenty years she’ll get to manage a McDonald’s, or maybe they’ll fire her, too, for using the white bathroom or something. What future can she possibly have now? Oh, I hate Augusta, I hate that horrible woman.…”

  There was a silence in which only Nora’s muffled sobs resounded. Peyton opened her door a few more inches and peered out. Nora sat on the sofa with her face in her hands. Her shoulders were shaking. Her father sat beside her, patting her awkwardly on the back. His face looked as drawn and weary as Peyton had ever seen it.

  “Nora,” he said presently. “You need to understand about Augusta. I don’t mean to excuse her; what she did was a terrible, ugly thing. A lot of what she does and says is…not good. It ranges from simply ridiculous to downright unacceptable. But we do accept it, our family, because we know what she came out of, and we know how hard she’s worked building a life for herself.”

  “What life?” Nora cried. “It’s certainly no life for Charlie! It’s certainly no life for Peyton. What life are you talking about?”

  “She was born in a mill-village shack,” Peyton’s father said slowly. “You must know what that’s like if you’ve seen the factory and cane towns in rural Cuba. It was worse, in a way, than most of our Negro neighborhoods because the folks who live there have strong family ties and often white families who care for them. But they didn’t have that in Augusta’s little settlement. Everybody was too intent on digging his own way out to put out a hand to a neighbor. A lot of them just gave up. Augusta’s parents were like that. When Charlie met her, her father was dying of white lung and still smoking like a chimney, lying on an old sofa they had dragged out on the front porch, watching the cars go by on the way to Atlanta. Her mother was drunk most of the time; I think she stayed in bed until late afternoon. There was an older brother who had long since left and gotten into trouble in the North somewhere and was in jail, I think. And there was a younger sister, about eleven, who just stayed out of school and did whatever she pleased all day. I heard somewhere that she was going with men even then. Augusta was the pretty one, and the smart one, and she really is both of those things. She worked at the perfume counter at Rich’s in Atlanta, and she did very well because she was so pretty and so smart; she taught herself how to act like a lady and dress like one on the measly little salary she made. It can’t have been much, and she had to pay a lot of the family’s rent and grocery bills every month, and keep her little sister in clothes, because both the parents were on disability.

  “So one day Charlie went into Rich’s to buy Mother some perfume for Christmas, and he took one look at her, and that was that. She sold herself right along with the perfume. They were married not three months later. They went to Atlanta to a justice of the peace’s office and then left that night on a honeymoon to Miami. She came back every inch a Lytton lady and hell-bent on staying one. None of us could blame her. I guess she thought she was marrying way up with Charlie, but I think if she’d known him a little longer she’d have realized that what she saw in Charlie was what she was going to get. He never went any further than that in his life, and he’s not going to now. I love Charlie; he’s my brother and he’s a sweet man. But I know, and he knows himself, that he’s no Prince Charming, no rescuer of maidens. Augusta never got over that. She’d seen herself as totally safe and secure, the most socially sought-after woman in this part of the county, the absolute oracle of manners and propriety and elegance and whatever. But I guess she’s known for a long time now that she’s only as safe as Charlie’s last paycheck, and the only people she can lord it over are her servants and sometimes my daughter. She hardly speaks to Charlie anymore, and I think she’s forgotten that he gave her two things she’d never have had without him: a ticket out of the mill village and his love. He really loves her. Always has. Don’t think he doesn’t know how disappointed in him she is.

  “Anyway, it’s made her mean. We all know that. Most of us have learned just to overlook the silliest of her pranks and dodge the really hurtful ones. I sometimes think she really does care about Peyton and me, but I can’t think why.…”

  “Oh, God, Frazier!” Nora said. “If you can’t think why, then you’re more oblivious than I thought. It’s just so obvious that she’s got an awful crush on you, and she’s trying to get at you through Peyton.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Frazier said doubtfully. “But you’re right about this thing with Doreen. I don’t think we can let that go. I’ll try to talk to her about it. Maybe she’ll take Doreen back. If she won’t, maybe I can find her something closer to home that will give her time to study, and maybe we can help her out a little financially.…”

  “Frazier McKenzie,” Nora said, tears in her voice again. “You are maybe the best man I’ve ever known.”

  “Then God help you,” Frazier said. Peyton could hear the smile in his voice. “Will you at least try to think a little better of Augusta now?”

  “No,” Nora said. “She’s a bitch, and I hate her. But I’ll lay off her unless she does something else this bad, which she’ll probably manage to do tomorrow.”


  Peyton went into the bathroom and washed her face for dinner. She felt lighter than air. She knew that whatever bonds kept her tethered to earth, they were never again going to be of Aunt Augusta’s making.

  As if she felt the house to be a rock-solid island of safety, Nora began to venture out from it into the town in a way that she had not before. Many of her forays were solo, as if she needed to test new-fledged wings, but Peyton went with her on others. She announced, one sweltering late-April day, that there were two things in the South that nobody thought you could do anything about, and they were the heat and segregation, and she intended to do something about both. She borrowed Frazier’s big car and drove alone to Atlanta and came back with four window air-conditioning units in the trunk and backseat.

  “I will drip sweat at school and I’ll drip sweat watching television, but I will not drip sweat when I’m trying to sleep,” she said. “Chloe’s next-door neighbor Carlyle is going to come and put them in. Whoever doesn’t like them can just lug them back to Atlanta.”

  “There’s never been an air conditioner in this house,” Frazier said. “I remember my father’s saying that if you had thick walls and high ceilings and an attic fan and big trees for shade, you’d never need air conditioning. I never thought the heat was too bad.”

  “Well, you don’t have to turn yours on,” Nora said. “But it’s going up there. Nobody in this house is going to sleep in a puddle of sweat anymore. And Chloe isn’t going to cook in one, either.”

  Carlyle did come in and lug the bulky units up the stairs and into the kitchen and Peyton’s room, and presently he plugged in the last plug and turned them on, one after another, for a trial run. The units roared into rattling life, sending years-old dust flying from heavy curtains and driving Trailways under the bed, tail stiff, ears skinned back like a stoat’s. Cool air poured into the rooms almost instantly.