But he hugged her frequently, and sometimes held her hand as they walked together, and made a small game of her graduation speech.
“Still not going to tell me?”
“No.”
“I know. You’re giving it in Japanese.”
“You’re silly.”
“Then it’s going to be in blank verse.”
“No.”
“Well, then, you’re going to tap-dance and twirl batons while you’re speaking.”
“Daddy…”
But she laughed. They both laughed. They laughed much louder and longer than the badinage warranted. If they laughed enough, Peyton could not hear the emptiness where Nora’s rich laugh should be. Once it would have been enough just to be. Once it would have been enough just to be this close to Daddy, she thought bleakly. Almost, it was.
She was still angry with Nora in those days, and not the least of her anger was for her father.
She had to know that he wanted her to stay, she thought. If she wasn’t going to be with us like she’d always been, she should have moved out so we wouldn’t have to watch her carry on with that jerk. Let him support her; Daddy shouldn’t have to do it if she’s not going to stay with us.
But then Nora would fly through again, and the house would ring with laughter and shimmer with life, and Peyton would toss away the anger swiftly and gratefully. It did not take much. She ached to rid herself of it.
Sonny came to dinner the week of graduation. Chloe had been in the kitchen all day, muttering and slamming pots and pans. Nora had asked for a completely southern meal and had presented Chloe with the menu: fried chicken, turnip greens with cornmeal dumplings, fresh corn, sliced tomatoes, biscuits, and chicken gravy. And there had to be peach cobbler for dessert. These were all the things Sonny pined for out in California, she said. He’d missed them terribly.
“They ain’t got chicken in California?” Clothilde grumped.
“Nobody in California fries anything, and they’ve never heard of turnip greens. Please, Chloe. He’s really just a southern boy at heart. I’ll clean it all up.”
Chloe relented. “Just don’t go asking for none of them bean sprouts,” she said. “I ain’t cooking no sprouts.”
“You don’t cook them; you eat them raw. And Sonny hates them. Thank you, Chloe. You’re a darling.” And Nora was off up the stairs to dress.
Promptly at six o’clock the long black limousine slid up the curb in front of the house and Sonny got out of the backseat—or one of the backseats, Peyton thought. She was watching from the screened porch, behind a big fern. There was something about him that drew the eye like fire, or a wild animal. He looked gilded, or sculpted from golden marble. He looked enormous, though he really wasn’t. He was actually rather short. Peyton did not know if he seemed bigger to her because she had seen him on television. But the sight of him was intimidating. Could Nora really laugh with and tease and sing with this colossus? Could anybody?
Sonny came up the steps and Nora stood in the doorway to greet him. She wore yellow pique and he wore a bursting blue T-shirt, white pants, and black sunglasses.
Maybe it’s so his reflection in mirrors won’t put his eyes out, Peyton thought.
Sonny nodded toward the limousine, and the unseen driver eased it soundlessly away. Peyton knew that their neighbors would be talking about it for months—but not to them.
Nora took him by the hand and led him onto the porch.
“Frazier, this is Sonny,” she announced. “He’s heard all about you. He said he was almost afraid to meet you. Sonny, this is my Cousin Frazier McKenzie.”
“We’re pleased to have you,” Frazier said, standing up and putting out his hand to Sonny. “We’ve seen a lot of you on TV.”
“The pleasure is mine, sir,” Sonny said. He took Frazier’s hand in both his own and pressed it, and looked into his eyes.
“Needless to say, you’re all Nora talks about,” he told Frazier. “You and Miss Peyton here.” He smiled over at Peyton behind her fern. His teeth were blinding white and his voice was small and high, as if he had a bee trapped in his jaws. They must do something on TV to make it sound lower, Peyton thought. She was so delighted with his voice that she came out from behind the fern and let him take her hand and bow over it and kiss it. She looked up at Nora to see if she was successfully concealing her laughter, but Nora was not laughing. She was smiling tenderly upon Sonny.
“Didn’t I tell you they were special?” she said.
“Better than the Cleavers, even,” Sonny said, and he laughed at his little joke. His laughter was not much lower than his voice.
It was an awful dinner. Peyton felt as if it went on for eons; she felt that she had been listening to the bee buzzing in her ears for ages. Perhaps she had. Sonny did most of the talking. He began the moment they sat down.
The table was set with pink linen and flowers, and her mother’s silver candlesticks held pale-pink candles, and Sonny had brought some white wine that he said was the hottest thing in Hollywood: he had brought a bottle with him in his suitcase because you never knew when you’d need a really good bottle of wine. To Peyton it tasted like sour grape juice, but she finished a glass of it. Nora and her father had several. Sonny himself drank only Chloe’s iced tea with fresh mint.
He drained his first glass and smiled broadly at Clothilde when she brought in the pitcher. And when she came in with their plates, he rolled his blue eyes and mimicked a swoon. When Chloe had left again, he turned to Frazier and said, “It’s what I’ve missed most, this good old-fashioned southern cooking. And nobody does it like these good old Negro mammies, do they? You be good to her; she’s worth her weight in gold.”
At first Peyton thought she had not heard correctly. Then she looked at her father. He was looking down at his plate with interest. She looked at Nora. Surely she would demolish him with the cold knife of her tongue. “Mammies” indeed!
But Nora merely smiled and said, “She’s the best cook I’ve ever known. She’s teaching me and Peyton, isn’t she, Peyton?”
“I guess,” Peyton said. She could not look at anybody.
From then on the talk was a monologue. Sonny talked of Hollywood and the show; he talked casually and knowingly of people whose names they had only heard and read; he talked of the artificiality of Los Angeles and his need to get back home to his roots. He tossed out words and phrases like production schedule and hiatus and ratings and syndication. It was a foreign language to Peyton. Sonny spoke it fluently and lovingly. Her father looked gravely interested. Nora looked as if she were hearing an Ave Maria.
What is wrong with her? Peyton thought incredulously. He’s a jerk.
When Chloe came to clear away the dishes and bring the cobbler he said, “I wish I could steal you away to Hollywood, Chloe. I wonder, do you know anybody who can cook like this who could take care of my mother? I’ve been looking around, but nobody has quite suited yet. It’s a big house, but Mother has a housecleaner, so whoever it was would only be doing the cooking. It would be nice if she could live in, though. Mother needs somebody with her, and the housecleaner won’t even consider it. I thought maybe an unmarried girl.…”
“I don’t believe I know anybody,” Chloe said, and she turned to go.
“Chloe, what about Doreen?” Nora called after her. “She’s not married, and I know she can cook like an angel. You told me that yourself.”
“Doreen working at McDonald’s,” Chloe said, not looking back.
“I’d pay her enough so she wouldn’t miss McDonald’s,” Sonny said. “I think it’s safe to say that I could offer her more than any of the”—he did not say “Negroes,” but it hung in the air—“domestics around here could ever hope to make. And she’d have a beautiful room and bath to herself. It looks over the pool.”
Will you let her use the pool? Peyton thought. I bet you will, just like Aunt Augusta let her use the bathtub.
“She night supervisor now,” Chloe said to Sonny. “She thinks she can be a
manager in a year or two. She wants to save enough to go on to school.”
“Well, providing she’s clean and honest—and of course she is, if she’s your niece—she’s as good as hired, and I can tell you she’ll never once look back at McDonald’s or school, either.”
“I don’t think she gon’ want to live in,” Chloe said.
“Oh, Chloe, I bet she would,” Nora said. “In that beautiful house? Anybody would. And she wouldn’t have that awful commute, and she could save up for a little car.…”
“Mother has two cars,” Sonny said. “I just bought her a new one. She’s never going to use the old Fairlane again. I think I could promise your niece the use of that.”
“I tell her,” Chloe said, and she went out.
That night before she fell asleep, Peyton prayed. She had not done so in a long time. But now she begged, “Please, God, don’t let her go off with him. Please don’t let her leave.” She fell asleep still mumbling the words over and over.
The day after the dinner Sonny flew to New York for a few days and Nora was back in spirit as well as in flesh. It was as if she had never been away. No one remarked about it; they simply slid into their old life as if they were sliding into warm water. It felt like that, too.
On one of the days they went into Atlanta, and Frazier did some business at the courthouse while Nora and Peyton shopped. Nora had trimmed Peyton’s hair and it was back in its lustrous tousle, and they found, at Rich’s, an ivory polished-cotton sheath with a standaway collar that made Peyton look, as Nora said, like a lit candle. Even Peyton could see that it was an extraordinary dress. The girl in the mirror was no one she knew. In this dress a person could do anything, even make a speech on the stage of Lytton Grammar School. Nora bought it for her.
“My treat,” she said. “And it didn’t come from the Tween Shop, either.”
They drove home in the late afternoon, singing at the top of their lungs. Oh, yes, Nora was back.
“Do you think she’s trying to say she’s sorry about taking up with that jerk?” Peyton asked her father that night when he came in to tuck her in. He’d been doing that every night, and after the first embarrassed stiffness, both of them had enjoyed the ritual.
He was silent for a moment, and then he sat down on the edge of her bed.
“No, I don’t,” he said, looking at her. “I think she’s saying good-bye.”
“No,” Peyton cried. It came out as involuntarily as breath.
“You know she never said she’d stay,” he said, smoothing the hair off her face.
“But she wanted to, I know she did…she always talked about how safe she felt here, and how she just wanted to be with us.”
“She needs to be able to do what’s right for her,” Frazier said. “We can’t hold her if she wants to go. She might try to stay, but she’d end up resenting us, and that would be bad for everybody.”
“Do…you want her to stay?”
“I want her to do what she needs to do.”
“But do you wish she’d want to?”
He smiled. “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Let it be, Peyton. Try to be happy that she’s happy.”
“I bet she’s not. I bet it’s just his stupid money. She’d hate living in Hollywood. Can you see her out there?”
“Yes,” he said. “I can.”
On Thursday of that week Nora listened to a last run-through of the speech Peyton would give the next night. Peyton dressed for it in the ivory dress and the Cuban-heeled shoes Nora had bought her, and her mother’s pearls. The run-through was faultless.
“That was perfect,” Nora said. She was back in her old priest’s shirt, smoking, with Trailways buzzing ecstatically in the curve of her hip. “And look at you. That girl’s got the world on a string. I’m going to have to hogtie Sonny; he’ll try to make a play for you for sure.”
“Is he coming?”
“Yes. He wouldn’t miss it for the world. He’s coming back tomorrow afternoon. I’m going to meet him at the airport and we’re coming straight to the auditorium. It’s practically his last night before he has to go back to California, so you should be honored.”
“Are you going with him?” Peyton said, elaborately examining her hemline in the mirror.
“He hasn’t asked me,” Nora said.
“He will. You’ve already made yourself a real southern lady for him. He eats that stuff up. He’ll ask you.”
“Well, if he does, you’ll be the first to know. But it certainly wouldn’t mean I’d go.…”
“He’s awfully rich. You’d never have to worry about money again.”
“I don’t worry about it now. That’s not worthy of you, Peyton. Let’s drop this right now.” Her tone was chilly. As she left the room, Peyton took a last look at her reflection in the mirror. The candle’s flame had gone out.
Nora was not there the next morning.
“She gone to Atlanta to do a little shopping,” Chloe said. “She say she don’t have no decent underwear.”
“I didn’t think she wore any,” Peyton said sullenly. “What does she need new underwear for?”
“It don’t do to think about it,” Chloe said, slamming plates.
But Peyton did think about it. It was a part of the southern girl child’s catechism: Always have nice underwear. You never know when you’ll be in a wreck. “Or when somebody eligible might see you in it” was implicit.
I bet he already has, she thought, and she pushed away her plate. The looming speech had sickened her before she even got out of bed. Her stomach felt as though she would throw up, but that relief did not present itself. Her head felt light and her ears buzzed. Why had Nora left her on this morning? She didn’t have to leave for the airport until late afternoon.
The day at school was agonizing. They were dismissed at lunchtime to prepare for the night’s festivities, and a raucous celebratory atmosphere held the entire building fast. It was salted with the sense of endings, of leavings. Girls hugged each other and cried. Boys pounded each other on their biceps and smoked cigarettes in the restroom. Peyton put her head down and plowed through it as if through a quagmire. Over, just let this day be over. Let this night be over. The fragile beginnings of confidence, even anticipation, that she had felt the night before dissipated like fog.
Nora was not back in the afternoon, either. Peyton stayed in her room, with Trailways fretting at the closed door. He wanted Nora’s big bed, she knew. But she hugged him close. She looked at her watch a hundred times. Finally she saw that Nora would be on her way to the airport to retrieve Sonny now, and knew that she would not see her until that night in the wings. When she had dressed and sat down to put on her makeup the way Nora had taught her, her hands shook so that she could manage only clownish red spots on her cheeks and a crazy slash of lipstick, so she washed it all off.
“You look beautiful,” her father said as they got into the car to go to the school. “I can see you when you’re grown up. It makes me a little sad.”
Me, too, Peyton thought desperately.
The honorees sat in tiered rows on the stage, on bleachers borrowed from the gymnasium. There were potted ferns at the end of each row, and swags of cheesecloth draped around the curve of the stage. The school choir sat in chairs just below them. The graduates fidgeted in high heels and stockings and dark suits. It was very hot; the auditorium had never been air-conditioned. Sweat rolled down smooth cheeks and budding Adam’s apples. Peyton could feel it dampening her hairline and her bra. She felt lightheaded and removed, stricken with terror.
The choir got up and mooed “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” That’s a lie, Peyton thought. She remembered Nora’s saying she had no idea why people thought the song was appropriate for school graduations. It sounded, she said, more like a dirge for middle age.
Nora.…Peyton slid a look under her lashes at the wings. There were the principal and the drama coach, but Nora was not there. But she had thirty minutes yet.…
They had the prayer. The
principal stood up and welcomed everyone. The salutatorian, a gangly boy with the appearance of a spectacled weed and the mind of a Fermi, got up and bade everyone think about the solemnity and portent of the occasion. The audience rustled and fanned; the smell of chalk and the oil that periodically darkened the wood floors rose cobralike in the thick air.
Nora did not come.
Peyton heard the principal telling the audience that the valedictory address would be given by Miss Peyton McKenzie, well known to them all since babyhood, and that he was sure they were all eager to hear what she had to say.
Nora did not come.
Peyton stood up and walked to the lectern. She could not feel her feet and she could not get her breath. Her hands were so wet that they left prints on the pages of her speech. She looked out into the audience and could see nothing but the dusty haze of lights. Then she made out a white blur that resolved itself into her Aunt Augusta’s face. Beside it, her father smiled. He winked and made a little victory gesture with his clasped hands. Peyton felt the floor swing and dip, and closed her eyes, and opened them again.
Nora did not come.
“More than twenty years ago Thornton Wilder wrote a play called Our Town,” she whispered. Her voice shook. In the wings the drama coach cupped her hands to her ears and smiled.
“Louder,” she hissed in a thunderous whisper.
Peyton plowed ahead. There was no sound from the audience. All she could hear was her own voice in her ears, and it was the voice of a sick child, silly and fretful and high. Bile rose in her throat.
She finished the introduction and started into the segment about the horses.
“We are horses,” she faltered. “We died fifty years ago. Our names are Samson and Delilah, and we lie now under the green fields where we worked in the summer sun and the autumn rain. Let us tell you how it was then, on the farms of Lytton, Georgia.…”
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