Peyton stood in front of hers when she changed for dinner, letting the cold wind dry the sweat from her body. It smelled dank and stale, but it felt wonderful.
I think I’ve been hot half my life and never knew it, she thought.
“I ain’t gon’ use that thing,” Clothilde declared. “It sound like a bus coming through the window.”
But when Peyton went in for supper, the room was roaring with cool air and Chloe was spreading meringue on a lemon pie.
“First time I been able to make one of these in the heat without the meringue gettin’ soggy and sad,” she said. “Maybe this thing ain’t so bad.”
There was no question but that Nora loved hers: whenever she was in her room the roar of the air conditioner poured down the stairs to the first floor. Peyton grew used to the sound; it made their afternoons and evenings together feel like they were being spent in a hidden cave of sound. It was a nice feeling. Trailways came to love it and often lay a top the unit, his purrs drowned out by the bellowing motor. Peyton slept deeply under her old afghan, in a cave of humming cool, and did not dream.
Only her father did not use his. He said nothing, but they knew he did not. They would have heard. And then, on a night of vicious wet heat preceding a thunderstorm, Peyton, lying in her own cocoon, heard the unit in his room go on and felt its vibrations. She smiled as she fell asleep. It was as if he had capitulated in some obscure but important contest.
That Sunday Nora went to services at Saint John’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, and took Peyton with her. Peyton had gone once or twice when she was very small, with Chloe, but instead of seeming merely comical and very loud, the service this time was very nearly magical. It was stifling in the old church, and dim, and funeral-home fans waved in unison, and the choir soared from low, primal moaning to exuberant shouting and clapping and rocking, carrying the congregation with it. Soon the entire church, Nora and Peyton included, was rocking in time to the rich, dark music, and clapping, and even shouting out, “Yeah, Lord!” and “Tell me, Jesus!” The sound and motion engulfed Peyton and swept her away to a place inside her that was wild and free and entirely unsuspected, so that coming back from it seemed deflating, banal. No one seemed to mind the two white faces starring their midst; indeed, everyone, including the preacher, smiled and nodded and asked them to come again.
When they finally drifted out into the sun, Peyton felt a small cringe of shame that she had behaved with such abandon, but under it was a kind of fierce joy. For a few minutes she had been a part of something old, earthen, out of time, and it had borne her up like wings.
“We just don’t know anything, us whites,” Nora said, smiling down at her. “There’s more God in one note of one song in that church than you’ll find all year in Lytton First Methodist. The only reason I’m not going to join this church is that it would make your Aunt Augusta so happy.”
And indeed, Augusta McKenzie went into a vehement and public snit over the visit and vented her indignation upon her brother-in-law the next morning before he had even finished his breakfast.
“The whole town is talking, Frazier,” she said. “Is that what you want? Is that what you want for your daughter?”
Frazier did not answer her.
“Have a cheese biscuit, Augusta,” he said pleasantly. “Chloe’s trying them out on us.”
Aunt Augusta left, speechless and biscuitless. The next Sunday Frazier went with them to the Negro church. Peyton was amazed by the number of dark faces that lit up with real pleasure at the sight of him.
“I’ve done a little work for most of them,” he said by way of reply when Peyton remarked on it.
“All of it pro bono,” Nora said, smiling at him. “Am I right?”
The talk around the town ceased for the nonce.
It soon swelled again, though, inevitably, and spilled through the town into the house on Green Street. Peyton heard some of it from Chloe, but most she got from Ernie when she went to the Losers Club. She had not been going so often and felt guilty and somehow resentful on the days when she did. She was tired of having to make excuses to Ernie. She was aware, as she knew he was, that in those days she was lying regularly to the club when she said that Nora was tutoring her after school. It seemed that he reported on Nora’s public antics with far more venom and less delectation than usual. It occurred to her that he was punishing her with the stories. No one except Boot took any joy of them.
“You know, of course,” Ernie said one afternoon to Peyton, finishing his powdery iced tea, “that that Cro-Magnon Freddy Farmer told his fascinated little cronies at lunchtime at the high school that you were getting tits that looked like flea bites, and when everybody laughed, your dear cousin leaned over and blew smoke in his face and said that it was a real pity that his brain was as tiny as his dick. That might have been funny once. But not in front of an entire high school. At least not to me.”
Other stories followed. Nora championed the Kennedys in the bastion of conservatism that was the Lytton High School faculty lounge, saying that grace and style and compassion were obviously apparent only to those who possessed some of those traits themselves. When one outraged maiden lady squalled that everybody knew Jackie was nothing more than a whore, Nora smiled ferally at her and said, “We’d all love to know where you got your intimate knowledge of whores, Eula.”
Instead of sitting with Peyton and Frazier, Nora sat one morning at the First Methodist Church in the vacant pew beside the pregnant, unmarried teenaged daughter of a local building contractor. No one else, her father and mother included, would sit beside her. Peyton could hear the hushed swell of offense and scandal rising all around her, and she kept her eyes fixed on the back of the two heads, one red, one blond frizz, bent close together over the hymnal.
“They might as well have hung a scarlet A around her neck,” Nora said grimly at lunch that day. “Or maybe they could stone her. I remember saying that I thought Lytton was a magical little town. Maybe it still is. Maybe it’s just the people who are small and squinched-up.”
This time it was Augusta McKenzie herself who breasted Nora as she dashed into the library one afternoon. Augusta was there with her reading circle; they all waited with beaks drawn and eyes glittering.
“Nora, dear, this is not a thing we feel we can let pass,” Aunt Augusta said sweetly. “You’re a newcomer, so perhaps you don’t know, but in Lytton we don’t publicly endorse young women in the state that Marsha is in. We do not condemn her, of course, but we cannot reward her behavior, either.”
The reading club smiled, waiting for blood to flow.
“Why, Augusta,” Nora said, widening her eyes. “Don’t y’all do that here? I thought you did. There are so many of you.”
“My mama used to be a member of that circle,” Ernie said when he had done telling Peyton about it. “They may be terribly naive and proper, those ladies, but deliberately trying to shock them just doesn’t wash.”
“When you get so prissy?” Boot said. He had taken a job bagging groceries at the A&P two days a week and on Saturday mornings, and he was not at the club so often anymore. Peyton felt his loss keenly. The club felt awkward and pathetic without him, like a three-legged dog.
“I’m not prissy,” Ernie said. “I just don’t like outsiders coming in here and making fun of our town.”
“You make fun of it all the time,” Boot said.
“It’s not the same thing,” Ernie said.
The last story about her cousin that Ernie told her was the one that broke the spine of the Losers Club. Boot was not there; there was a chilly wind where he was not. Ernie told the story with loving satisfaction and corrosive venom, laying the details out with relish.
“Have you met Mr. Lloyd Huey, who lives next door to your Aunt Augusta and Uncle Charles?” he asked, and when Peyton said that of course she knew him, Ernie continued.
“Well, then, you know he owns the sawmill and has a bunch of Negroes working for him. He also has an enormous fallout shelter
in his backyard. I have to admit, the shelter is funny. But somehow Nora got the notion that he was mistreating his help, and she told him in the drugstore that if he didn’t shape up she was going to tell everybody in town that he had asked her down to see the famous shelter and then tried to seduce her. It’s the kind of talk that could ruin a man in a little town like this.”
“How could it ruin Mr. Huey?” Peyton said, honestly curious. “He’s got five children and only one leg and he’s in a wheelchair all the time.”
“Well, I guess Nora thinks that any man with breath in his body would try to seduce her, and she may be right. God knows, enough of them have.”
“I’m going home,” Peyton said, sudden anger shaking her. “You’ve turned the club into a witch-hunt against Nora. That’s not fair, and it’s not fun any longer.”
“The truth is often not much fun,” Ernie said unctuously, and he picked up his paperback. It was Absalom, Absalom.
Peyton slammed out of the shed and stamped home. A feeling of heaviness and loss hung over her that had nothing to do with the story he had told her about Nora. Great change was waiting for her, hovering near. The shadow of its wing had already claimed Boot and fallen over Ernie.
When she got home her father and her Uncle Charlie were coming out of the living room. Peyton gaped. She could count on the fingers of both hands the times Uncle Charlie had ever visited without Aunt Augusta. He saw a good deal of his older brother, but it was usually in Frazier’s office or in his own garage lair. Charles McKenzie was dressed in a stiff sports coat and slacks, looking, as Clothilde would put it, like a mule dressed up in a buggy harness, and his face was miserable. Behind him, her father’s face was set. Peyton murmured hello to both of them and slid into her room like a salamander going to earth. On this day of strangeness and endings, nothing good was going to come of this visit. She knew it.
She peered through the almost-closed door of her room at her father, thinking that she was getting quite good at spying on people and not caring. He sat down in his accustomed chair and stared straight ahead. He did not open his newspaper or turn on the television set. This was as strange to Peyton as the fact of his being in the living room at all before dinner, when daylight still filtered through the drawn blinds. This room was his nighttime place. It was their nighttime place, the three of them.
She was about to close her door and curl up with Trailways, to try and lose the uneasiness in D. H. Lawrence and warm cat fur, when she heard Nora’s light step on the porch, and the screened door creaking open and shut again.
“Well, what on earth are you doing in here in the daylight?” Peyton heard her say. There was a silence, and then Frazier said, “Come in and sit down, Nora. We need to talk a little.”
Peyton froze at her spying post. Whatever great trouble this meeting portended, she needed to know about it. She did not feel that she could bear an ambush.
Nora sat with her back to Peyton. Her father faced her. At the last minute Peyton moved back from her door so that she could hear but not see. Somehow she could handle an assault on one sense but not on two.
“Charles was here,” her father said. “He was pretty upset. I’ve never known him to tell tales on anyone, but he felt like he had to tell me about this. And he was right to do it. Nora, Lloyd Huey came over to see him this afternoon and told him what you said to him in the drugstore. Lloyd was mad and he was hurt. He thought Charlie would be the right one to tell me about it, and then he wanted me to speak to you.”
There was a silence. Peyton could imagine them sitting there, her father leaning forward with his hands clasped and resting on his knees, Nora slumping in the other chair and lighting a cigarette.
“This is pretty serious, Nora,” her father said. “I don’t think we can let it lie. I don’t think we can let it go as one more of your…escapades. The others have been on the side of the angels, even if they stirred up hornets’ nests all over town. A certain amount of that is good for Lytton. But this goes way beyond high jinks. This can really hurt Lloyd, and I think it probably already has. The whole drugstore heard it, and you can bet it was all over town by the end of the day.”
There was another silence. Then her father went on: “Nora, Lloyd is a silly man sometimes, and a loudmouth, and insensitive, to say the least. And I think he probably is tough on his help over at the mill. But I seriously doubt if he mistreats Negroes. He may yell at them, but he yells at everybody. We all know that; we let it go because it’s a tough life he’s living and because his mill has provided jobs for a whole lot of people, Negroes mostly, who wouldn’t have them otherwise. That kind of talk can hurt him in the town. Whether or not people believe it in the beginning, they’ll talk. Lloyd’s a proud man. Charlie said he had tears in his eyes when he came over.”
“Oh, Frazier,” Nora whispered, and Peyton heard the tears in her voice. “I really did hear that he abused his Negro workers physically, and withheld their pay when they displeased him, and other things. You know we can’t let that go by—”
“What is this ‘we,’ Nora?” Frazier McKenzie said, and Peyton heard the ice in his voice. She knew it would be in his eyes, too, opaque gray lake ice. She had not seen it often, but the times when she had, she had felt frozen to her very core.
“I can’t imagine you would sanction that sort of thing,” Nora said. Her voice seemed to be losing breath and force with every word.
“I wouldn’t sanction that sort of thing if it were true, but it can’t possibly be,” her father said. “I’ve known Lloyd since we were kids. He’s all bluster and no action. If he was seriously abusing his Negro help it would have gotten out way before now. The Negroes have a better grapevine even than Augusta. I’m not going to ask you where you heard it because I don’t want to know. But the fact is that you’ve jumped to a bad conclusion, and you’ve taken way too much on yourself. You cannot just come into this town and set yourself up as an avenging angel. It hurts people, and it will hurt you.”
“So what do you want me to do?” Nora whispered.
“I want you to go over and apologize to Lloyd,” her father said, ”and I want you just to stop with the…eccentricities. Just give it all a rest for a while. Even if I agree with you, and sometimes I do, I just don’t have the energy to go on cleaning up after you.”
Nora gave a small gasp of hurt and leapt out of her chair and ran up the stairs. Peyton heard the door to her room close and the air conditioner go on. But before that, she heard the ragged catch of a sob. She turned on her own air conditioner and crawled under her afghan with Trailways and lay there until suppertime. Nora did not come down, and her father did not speak. They ate in silence, and he went out to his office over the garage, and Peyton went back to bed and cried. She could not bear the trouble humming in the air.
For a couple of days Nora avoided all of them, eating her meals standing up at the refrigerator at odd times of the day and night, leaving for school early in the morning, and staying away somewhere until very late. The Thunderbird was not often at the curb. Peyton’s father ate his meals silently, the newspaper unfolded before him, and went early to and stayed late in his office. Chloe did not sing, or linger to talk, or make special desserts. It was as if a choking black-dust plague had fallen on the house. Peyton went back to showing herself her movies at night.
On the fourth day Peyton heard her cousin’s steps clicking rapidly up the walk and into and through the house to the back door. She pulled aside her curtain and looked. Nora, windblown and scarlet-cheeked, ran up the steps to her father’s office and rapped smartly on the door. When she saw the door open, Peyton dropped the curtain and burrowed under her afghan again. This was nothing to spy on.
Nora and her father did not come down for a long time. Peyton was foraging hungrily in the kitchen when they did, lifting the lids of the pots Clothilde had left on the stove, rummaging in the pantry for cold biscuits. Nora was red-nosed and pouchy about the eyes, but the vivid life was back. Coming into the kitchen, she crackled wit
h it. Peyton looked sidewise at her father. His face was still grave and level, as it almost always was, but the ice had gone from his eyes, and the crinkles at their corners looked freshly incised, as if he had been smiling. Peyton’s heart, for days bound and shut down in her chest, now broke free and soared. All right, it was going to be all right.…
“What are you doing in here munching like a goat?” Nora said teasingly. The rich music was back in her voice. “The least you could have done was heat up supper and set the table.”
“I don’t know where all that stuff is,” Peyton said, pretending it was ordinary talk on an ordinary day. “I don’t know how to work the stove.”
“That’s absurd,” Nora said. “I could cook when I was ten years old. Knowing how to cook well is a very sexy thing. This coming Saturday you’re going to start learning.”
She set the green beans and new potatoes to warm and wrapped the chicken in foil and put it in the oven. Then she made martinis. Peyton heard them laughing desultorily at something when she went in to change for dinner. She snatched up Trailways and danced him around her room and squeezed him until he growled. Then she went into the living room to warm herself in deliverance and eat olives. She would never know what had passed between Nora and her father in his office that evening, nor whether Nora finally apologized to Mr. Lloyd Huey. Whatever it was, it sufficed.
Two nights later her father came home early from the courthouse in Atlanta. She heard Nora’s steps come down to meet him, and something low being said between them, and her father’s laugh, and then Nora called, “Peyton! Get out here! Your days of innocence are over!”
Peyton went cautiously into the living room. Nora had been almost manic since the trouble had passed; a shimmering like heat lightning was on her. It made Peyton want to hug her and pull away from her at the same time. Nora could burn you as easily as she could warm you, she thought.
Nora had brought her portable phonograph downstairs. She stood in the middle of the room, grinning. Her fresh-washed hair almost gave off sparks. Peyton’s father sat in his chair, smiling faintly at her.
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