Nora, Nora

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Why am I not surprised?” Nora muttered.

  “Frazier, you are a good man and my brother-in-law,” Augusta McKenzie said. Her voice was burdened with lugubrious sadness. “But we believe you are not seeing this situation clearly. We think perhaps you’re…too close to it. This young woman is a troublemaker. I’ve said so from the beginning. She is a terrible influence on our young people. How can you subject Peyton to all that? It makes us all wonder just exactly in what capacity you keep Miss Findlay in your house.”

  Peyton saw her father stiffen. She heard Nora gasp. He took a deep breath to answer, and this time it was Nora who tugged at his arm. But he stepped forward and crossed his arms over his chest and looked at his sister-in-law, and then he let his gaze slide over all their faces. Many looked away.

  “Miss Findlay is in my house in any capacity she wishes to be,” he said. “And it is my fondest hope that she will remain so—in any capacity she chooses. It is you who are the troublemaker, Augusta.”

  Augusta McKenzie gasped and turned on her heel and clicked rapidly down the walk. Horace Turnipseed cleared his throat.

  “Then we have no choice but to go to the whole school board, Frazier,” he said.

  “Go,” her father said. Peyton could see that he was trembling all over, a fine shivering. Nora backed away from him and stood as still as a wild creature caught in headlights. The small crowd sensed that there was nothing more to say and melted away as silently as it had come. In a moment there was only lamplight and the smell of grass and the sound of crickets.

  Her father turned to Nora and took her by the shoulders.

  “I meant what I said,” he said. “I want you to stay. I want you with us. We need you. Don’t let these idiots run you away. Any capacity, Nora. Any at all.”

  Nora’s face was as white as a lily in the dimness. Her eyes were wide and whiteringed, and then she shut them.

  “Don’t do this to me, Frazier,” she whispered. “Don’t need me. Don’t. I can’t carry the weight of it. I can’t stay.”

  And she wheeled and ran up the stairs to her room. They heard the door shut behind her, and the air conditioner go on.

  “Daddy…” Peyton said, near tears. “Daddy, go get her. Don’t let her go.”

  “I don’t think she’ll go,” her father said. His voice was flat. “All this business upset her. I don’t blame her. She’s like a bird. You have to hold her in your open hand. I landed on her too hard tonight.”

  “Did you want her to stay…you know, like my mother or something?” Peyton could not say, “Like your wife.”

  “Go to bed, Peyton,” he said wearily. “We’ll straighten it out in the morning.”

  But they did not. Nora eluded them like a wild thing. She got up early and stayed late at school. When she was not there she was in the library. She went often to Atlanta alone and did not ask Peyton and Frazier to go with her. When they did see her, she was noncommittal and pleasant. Her face was pinched and the fire seemed to have gone out of her hair. She still rehearsed Peyton in her speech, but she did it with the mechanical capability of a paid coach.

  Peyton couldn’t speak to her of the night on the porch, mostly for fear of what she might hear. But she fretted about her speech, over and over.

  “But you’ll be there, won’t you? Nora, you will be there?”

  “Peyton, you’ve gotten so good at it that you could do it by yourself in a New York minute,” Nora said. “But yes, I’ll be there. I promised, didn’t I?”

  The silence in the house spun out. Frazier was once more in his office until all hours. Clothilde trudged heavily about the kitchen and shooed Peyton out whenever she came dawdling unhappily in. Even Trailways felt the emptiness: he stayed on Nora’s bed until far into the night, curled up, as if his leaving would mean that she would leave, too. Peyton did not show herself her movies; there was no comfort for her there anymore. But she ached for the Losers Club, at the same time knowing that even if it were still meeting, she had somehow traveled beyond it and could not go back. It was a cold, dull time. Peyton remembered the days of joy only distantly, as she might a sunny, idyllic slice of her childhood. Whenever she closed her eyes, nothingness roared under her.

  We’re all back to where we were before, she thought bleakly. Only then we didn’t know that there was any other way. Now we do, and it’s gone, and that’s a million times worse than the other way. I don’t know how I’m going to stand this.

  And then Sonny Burkholter came home, and everything changed.

  15

  Sonny Burkholter was Lytton’s claim to fame, its shining star. He had been born to the town’s seamstress, a nervous little woman known in Lytton simply as Miss Carrie. They lived for many years in a tiny, neat cottage beside the railroad tracks on the south side of Lytton, on old Highway 29. There had been a Mr. Burkholter, but he had apparently tired of nerves and neatness and trains early on and had disappeared, leaving Miss Carrie to bring up Sonny. She idolized him. He had the mark of greatness on him from the moment of his birth, she said repeatedly, to whoever would listen. There was no doubt in her mind that this golden changeling of hers would touch the world in a very special way.

  And he did. After an undistinguished academic career at Lytton High, during which he played so-so football and made marginal grades and went through the female population of the town like a dose of salts, Sonny cut and ran. For months his frantic mother did not know where he was. After she collapsed at the A&P, the First Methodist Church had a Krispy Kreme doughnut sale and made enough money to send Miss Carrie to a rest home for a few days. She emerged, sedated and gentle and somehow broken, about the same time Sonny surfaced. In a letter to his mother, in which he did not mention his absence or inquire after her well-being, he told her that he was in Los Angeles and had just been cast in a new Western drama as the second lead.

  I’ll see you soon, he wrote. I’m going to come back and build you the biggest house Lytton has ever seen. Watch for me Tuesday night. It’s called Pecos.

  Miss Carrie and the whole town watched, and there was no doubt in the collective consciousness that Sonny was going to be a very big television star. Besides his rather ordinary good looks—sharp, diamond-blue eyes, shock of yellow hair, square jaw, chiseled nose—Sonny had something ineffable and immediate on the little screen. As his mother said proudly afterward, “The camera loves him.” Sonny had only to grin and the set lighted up along with the hearts of half of America; when he spoke in his slow drawl sighs were heard from L.A. to Bangor, Maine. He was nineteen years old at the time. Sonny didn’t have the sense God gave a billy goat, but he didn’t need it. The role in the Western was small, and the character simple to the point of near idiocy. But it propelled Sonny into the small-screen stratosphere, and there he had stayed for all the years since, ending up the season before in a turgid drama called The Southerners, in which he played a “modern Rhett Butler born to raise hell and break hearts.” From the first episode the ratings were off the charts. Raising hell and breaking hearts became, to his adoring public, the very quintessence of southernness. Sonny played it so well that he came to believe totally the silly script, and became a southerner the likes of whom had never trod the red earth of the South. There were talks of movies, of a remake of Gone With the Wind.

  His name and photograph appeared in every tabloid and even some reputable magazines and newspapers several times a week. He was seen with more starlets than there had been on the old MGM back lot. Speculation about his love affairs was rife and lurid. But Sonny did not settle down. When he came back to Lytton for the first time since he’d left, to install his mother in the mammoth new house he had had built on an artificial lake just outside Lytton and to speak at the high school career-day program, he was unmarried, thirty years old, and richer than Croesus.

  Lytton went berserk with pride and joy. There had long been a sign at the city limits that said, “Home of Sonny Burkholter.” Now signs sprouted all over town. Welcome home, Sonny, the neon marquee
at the Howard Johnson’s up on the freeway read. “Sonny, come have a cup of the world’s best coffee,” a cardboard sign in the window of the café said. The Locksmith beauty shop put up a banner saying, “Girls! Come get ready for Sonny!” More banners and bunting went up on Main Street, and there were plans under way for a parade and a Sonny Burkholter Day, during which the mayor would present him with a key to the city. Every motel within a forty-mile radius was booked solid with media.

  But Sonny’s publicist sent word that he wanted no special treatment, no parades, no keys to the city, no marching bands and majorettes. He was, she said, coming back to find his roots and see his mother into the home they had dreamed about during the years in the cramped little railroad cottage. He would appreciate it if the town would treat him just like anybody else.

  It was an inspired public-relations ploy. It let the town worship him for his down-to-earth humility and his devotion to his old mother—“That sweet boy hasn’t changed a bit”—and laid the groundwork for Sonny to get out of town afterward as fast as his limousine would take him.

  He and Nora collided like meteors. After they met, in the high school cafeteria on Career Day, Sonny decided to stay awhile.

  Peyton heard about it from Chloe. Chloe had heard it from her cousin’s daughter, who worked in the school cafeteria and witnessed the whole thing. Peyton thought bitterly that by the time she heard it, half the town knew. She burned with resentment. Nora should have told her herself.

  As local legend had it, Sonny was escorted to the cafeteria where he had once eaten hot dogs and baked beans by the tongue-tied president of the student body and the grinning principal. He went through the line “just like anybody else,” spoke to all the servers, ate his meal seemingly unaware of the breathless giggles chiming around him, and pronounced the lunch the best thing he had had since he left home.

  “There’s nothing in the world beats good old-fashioned southern cooking,” he said, crinkling his blue eyes and smiling his white smile. This was perhaps a stretch, since the school had sprung for flaccid gray steaks and uniformly yellow frozen French fries in his honor, but it was appreciated and widely quoted all the same. He was just getting an Eskimo pie—“We used to call ’em hunkies”—out of the freezer when Nora came into the room.

  “She had on that yellow thing that makes her look like a birthday candle,” Chloe reported, “and somebody had brought her a yellow daylily, and she’d stuck it in her hair. That boy put down that hunky and got up and walked straight over to her and said, ‘Will you have lunch with me?’ And she said, ‘Sure,’ just like he was one of the teachers or something. And they sat down together and he ate lunch all over again. They left together, too. Maureen says somebody saw ’em going off in that little pink car. Maureen say it just like something in the movies.”

  Before the day was out, Nora was back with them. Not the coltish Nora who had climbed Peyton’s tree in the beginning, not the gleeful Nora who had outraged and overjoyed Lytton in equal parts. And not the languid Nora who had coiled herself bonelessly on the porch glider with them in the spring nights, listening to and telling stories, smoking. But nevertheless, Nora. The dulled, dimmed stranger of the past few days was gone.

  This Nora was not often in the Green Street house, nor at home for meals, and spent virtually no evenings with Peyton and Frazier. She dashed in and out, hair a brazen banner behind her, green eyes sparkling, face flushed underneath the russet freckles. She sang in the bathroom and gave Peyton whirlwind hugs on her way out to meet Sonny and paused to kiss Frazier on the cheek and straighten his tie, and rubbed Trailways’s stomach until he bit her in an excess of bliss. There was about her an electricity that was unlike her usual cheeky vibrance. She seemed to give off sparks. Looking at her, Peyton had the notion that if Nora stuck her finger into a light socket, all the fuses in the house would blow. Despite the hugs and kisses and laughter, there was something about her that was out of control, almost dangerous.

  “Fly too high toward the sun and you gets your wings burned off,” Chloe muttered, watching as Nora whirled through, grabbed a biscuit, and ran out into the fresh morning.

  “That’s Icarus,” Peyton said. “We studied him. He was this Greek who had wings made of wax, and he flew too high near the sun and they melted.”

  “I ain’t studyin’ no Icarus, and there ain’t no Greek gods around here. That’s for sure,” Clothilde said.

  Chloe disliked Sonny Burkholter and was not polite about it.

  “He look like an ol’ yellow pug dog, with that squished-up nose,” she said after Nora made her watch Sonny’s TV program. “And he don’t act like no southerner I ever seen. Who you seen lately kissin’ hands all over the place, or tippin’ that hat what looks like a lady’s?”

  “That’s a plantation hat.” Nora smiled, refusing to be baited. “People used to wear them on the big plantations.”

  “Ain’t no plantation around here I ever seen.”

  “Well, you just wait till you see the house Sonny built his mother. It’s got everything: columns, oak alleys, white fences, horses, everything.”

  “She gon’ keep slaves?”

  “Don’t be a butt,” Nora said, and hugged her, and dashed out in a flurry of skirts and petticoats.

  The skirts were new. They were not the blazing tropical prints that most of Nora’s others were, nor were they willowy and snug, like the rest. They were wide and sprigged with small flowers, or made of candy-striped seersucker. Nora had abandoned her T-shirts and peasant blouses for neat white sleeveless blouses or oxford-cloth shirts. She had not worn her shorts or her Jesus Is Coming T-shirt in a week, and she no longer slouched about barefoot. Most amazing and troubling of all, she had stopped smoking, except in her room late at night. It made Peyton crawlingly uneasy. She could never have imagined that Nora would alter her own essential Noraness for Sonny Burkholter or anyone else, but it seemed that she had.

  Peyton knew about the smoking only because she smelled the cool, sweet smoke—forever Nora’s smell—drifting down the stairs and into her room. They had not spent an afternoon or evening together in Nora’s room since Sonny came home. Pride and pique kept her from begging Nora to rehearse her on the speech, but anxiety about it mounted daily.

  Finally she said, “Could you possibly listen to my speech tonight? It sounds funny to me and it’s only a week away.”

  “I can’t tonight, kiddo,” Nora said, shinnying into a new white dress that drifted around her like a snowbank. “We’re taking Sonny’s mother into Atlanta to Emile’s. She’s never had dinner in Atlanta, much less at a French restaurant. Besides, it’s time for you to rehearse alone now. You’ll be alone when you give it, and you really need to get used to it.”

  “But you’ll be there.…”

  “Sure, but I can’t give the speech for you. Now’s as good a time as any to start standing alone. You can do it.”

  No, I can’t, Peyton said inside her head. She was suddenly very angry at her cousin. This was to have been her special time with Nora, but Nora had given it all to Sonny without a backward glance.

  “You’re going to look pretty silly, all of you jammed into that little car,” she said.

  “We’re taking Sonny’s limo. He hates to use it, but with his mother and all, he has to, and besides, his driver is dying of boredom.”

  “He could always watch TV.”

  Nora shot her a look.

  Peyton could not leave it alone.

  “I’d have thought a big TV star could drive his own car,” she said. “Can’t he drive?”

  “Of course he can, but he doesn’t like to drive the limo around here. He thinks it looks ostentatious. Knock it off about Sonny, Peyton. He’s a nice guy. You’ll see when you meet him.”

  “I don’t want to meet him.”

  “Well, then, you can sit in your room all night, because I’ve invited him to dinner.”

  “Daddy’s just going to love that. Did you ask him? What did he say?”

  “
He said he’d be honored to meet any of my friends, and by all means to ask him.”

  Peyton thought of the night on the porch when her father had taken hold of Nora’s shoulders and said, “I meant what I said. I want you to stay. I want you with us. We need you.…Any capacity, Nora. Any at all.” She remembered his face as he said it. He had looked younger by far than she had ever seen him. He had looked happy. He did not look young now, or happy. He looked like an actor playing a part.

  “I bet he didn’t mean it,” she said to Nora.

  “Well, if he didn’t he’ll never let me know about it, because he’s a gentleman, and the kindest man I’ve ever met.”

  Then why isn’t that enough? Peyton said in her head. Her heart hurt as if someone had hit her in the chest.

  Still, Nora’s sheer vivacity animated them. She swept them all up with her energy. Once again they flew high with it. Only now, Peyton felt the breath of the abyss beneath her. If she misstepped, she would fall forever.

  She plowed stolidly on with her rehearsing. At first the space where Nora was not swallowed her voice and her will, but after a few days she saw that given no mishaps, she could probably read the speech competently. The magic and music had gone from it, though. But Nora would be there in the wings, and perhaps the magic would come back.

  The judge and his coterie were as good as their word. Nora was dismissed only days after the confrontation on the front steps. She never spoke of it, did not seem to remember that she had had a job. She lived entirely in the wake of Sonny Burkholter. A day came when Peyton could not really remember a time when she had not.

  Her father did not, this time, shut Peyton out or pull away from her. He spent his nights with her on the porch or in front of the TV, and he never missed breakfast or dinner with her, and sometimes he teased her gravely. She could tell he was trying manfully to enter her world, to make himself one with it. He asked about her days and she answered, trying desperately to inject some particularity, some glamour, into them. But it was Nora who had done that. Peyton imagined that it must be a great struggle for her father to maintain his concentration on her affairs, and she felt guilty about it. Why should he try so hard? There was nothing of interest there.