Noon dinner was a hurried affair on the side porch where they had taken breakfast, but Mabella made it the occasion to present Leon with the chocolate pie she had baked, a part of birthday ritual since his first one at the plantation. He paid her with surprise and pleasure that never seemed less than then and remembered to stop in the kitchen to hug her and Josephine after the meal. He and Benjamin rocked and nodded on the porch until Otis rang the tower bell that signaled all hands to return to the fields for afternoon work. Sarah retired to her room to rest, Jane to her house, Nancy to the house in the Glade, and Josephine to her cabin, leaving Mabella to superintend the extra workers in the kitchen. But the pause was for less than an hour, as there was so much yet to do and see done, baths to be taken, hair brushed and curled and coiled and pinned.
Late afternoon found Benjamin and Daniel, Leon and Bobby Lee and Davy scrubbing themselves in the creek before going indoors to put on their party clothes. As dusk came on and the lamps were lighted, the whole of Beulah Land began to assume a quickening air of expectation. Sarah and Bruce found Benjamin and Leon in the big living room, and Sarah said with satisfaction as Benjamin handed glasses of wine, “We four.”
They had taken their first sips when they were joined by the Todds. Bruce giggled at Davy’s embroidered shirtfront, and he told her she was ignorant. Shortly after, Annabel’s party arrived in her carriage. She looked very fine in black brocaded silk, and she carried a new ostrich fan. She was attended by Blairs One and Three (number Two would come later with his wife Prudence in their own carriage) and brought with her Frankie and Fanny and Edna May. During the half-hour transit from Highboro, Annabel had, after telling Edna May that she was getting fat and Frankie that she was so thin as to look positively gaunt and Fanny that her left sleeve was surely shorter than her right, contented herself with speaking only to Blair Three. Frankie and the most senior Blair Saxon exchanged civilities; and Fanny assured Edna May there would be many little things she might choose from to remember the evening and preserve in her “memory” book. Forgetting her grandmother’s criticism (at eight she was too young to mind substance), Edna May set her face toward Beulah Land with the happy anticipation of the historian approaching Nineveh and Tyre.
Sarah had intended early supper as a simple one for those who lived at Beulah Land, but Annabel would have it otherwise and prevailed. “I despise arriving with everyone else; it’s common and tacky. You must feed us early and late, Auntie Sarah; and it won’t hurt you either with your army of retainers to fetch and carry. You have so many, you have so much.”
To the which Sarah replied, “Whatever we have we’ve worked for.”
“It helps to have a little ‘live’ dough as starter if you want to make bread though, doesn’t it?”
So down they sat fourteen together to enjoy Josephine’s feast of whole roast pig and asparagus and salads. When that and all the other dishes were no more and sherbets had been passed, Josephine herself bore the birthday cake in lighted triumph to the dining room to flattering exclamations and applause led by Leon. As Davy predicted, there was champagne, and Leon was wished long life and good fortune so many times that Mabella, who considered him her own boy, was overcome by emotion and had to be led away to be comforted and petted, to the derision of Josephine and the amusement of the guests.
The sensations of individual attendants of a gathering are never the same, however single the purpose of their assembling, and while some of those tonight were sincere in their regard, others were envious and bitter. Looking at Frankie with pity as she drank more than she ate, Benjamin marveled that he had once wept to lose her and expanded courtesy to courtliness until Frankie suspected him of trying to revive their old love affair. But then when she saw how often his gaze returned to Edna May, she told herself that Benjamin Davis cared for no woman, only his children by them, and that she was glad to have married Eugene Betchley. Eugene was right about those at Beulah Land: they thought they ruled the world. Their very instinct to generosity was arrogance. Having so decided, she narrowed her eyes as she listened to the laughter of her elder daughter and observed the familiar, almost familial affection in which she was held by Sarah Troy, the Davises, and the Todds.
The youngest Blair Saxon admired the room. It was not, of course, fashionable; still, there was a richness and a kind of decision about it that carried its own authority, none of the hesitant assertion that often betrays the new rich when their vulgarity does not. He weighed the silver in his hand and turned the crystal goblet of champagne appreciatively. There might be something worth considering in his grandmother’s suggestion that he ally himself to the girl at Beulah Land.
Sarah presently led the ladies away to the living room to drink their coffee while the gentlemen smoked and talked farming and politics. Of the one topic they knew, among them, everything; of the other little or nothing; yet they spoke cautiously about the first and conclusively on the second. Blair Three longed to be with Annabel and yawned against the cigar smoke. His eyes slipped from one face to the next. All were florid from weather or overindulgence at dinner, but he could admit that his three young male cousins were handsome, if only in a rude country way. There was, however, something almost sensitive in the nose and chin modeling of the elder Todd boy, something melancholy in his eyes, and Blair wondered what lay behind his thoughtful detachment. Bobby Lee’s thoughts were indeed at that moment detached from the company; he was speculating on the sex of the calf due to be born soon to a cow named Daisy he had taken special care of all winter.
Roman had wanted to be part of the evening and knew that discretion forbade his appearing as a guest, so he appointed himself factotum: which permitted him to wander freely about, but not to sit. As much as Sarah dared, she would never have Negroes as guests with townspeople who were not part of the family. It was all right for the annual barbecue on the Fourth of July. That was a family affair and outdoors. She knew that Roscoe and Claribell, Abraham and Luck understood the rules and wouldn’t have enjoyed the party anyway; but if Claribell and Luck had doted upon balls, they could not have been asked. And so tonight Roman, who was Sarah’s oldest friend and the only man alive who called her Sarah without a “Miss” before it, limped about fussily instructing the orchestra.
He spoke now to the violinist who led the musicians, and they began to play. The sound drew the gentlemen from the dining room and the ladies from their coffee cups into the wide hallway just as the guests from town and county began to appear. They came in anything with wheels—buggies, carriages, wagons. There were even a few bicycles. Wally and his stable boys would have a busy night of it. Sarah and Leon on one side of the door, Benjamin and Bruce on the other welcomed their guests, with Nancy behind them to direct the disposal of their wraps.
Everyone knew everyone else, but eyes tonight were ready to make fresh appraisals. China silk was argued against Japanese, the cut of a dress admired or pitied, this complexion praised, that figure deplored, manners declared to be refined or disgusting. Almost every female carried a folding fan of paper or silk; all were adept at using them. Only Annabel boasted an ostrich fan, and when her old girlhood friend Ann-Elizabeth Dupree complained that it was far too long and got in everyone’s way, Annabel replied loftily, “The length of feather depends on the size of the bird, you know.” If there was much that was comical and superficial in the yearning after alien sophistication, still it was only for an evening, and there was an exhilaration in the event enjoyed by everyone.
When she was ready for the dancing to begin, Sarah whispered to Roman and he spoke to the lead violinist. Finishing the tune they were engaged upon, the musicians paused long enough for the party to grow quiet with expectation. The leader held his violin at an alert tilt and the orchestra began the first waltz. Leon went to Sarah and bowed; she gave him her hand, and he led her to the floor. When they had danced a few bars, they were joined by Benjamin and Bruce, then Jane and Daniel. They were followed by Bobby Lee and his great-aunt Doreen, and there were whispers of
speculation as Davy bowed before Fanny Saxon and led her into the dance. With tossing head and a flutter of ostrich plumes Annabel achieved the floor with the obedient Blair Three. Laughing heartily enough to draw a pained glance from that young man, Elizabeth and Tom Cooper followed them. The ball had begun and from that moment sustained itself.
Leon knew his duty and found himself happy doing it. After Sarah he danced with his aunt Jane and his great-aunts Annabel and Doreen. Next there was Miss Joyce Kilmer, and when he bowed over the thin hand of ancient Miss Emmy Goldthwaite, she shooed him with her fan. “You are going through us old ladies like reciting the multiplication tables!” she accused him. “Go and dance with someone young—”
Leon laughed. “I love old ladies!”
“Then you will surely go to heaven and I shall dance with you there, for we shall all be young and fair.”
To rest the musicians there were pauses and promenades through the open rooms and porches. Annabel found a moment to say to Sarah, “I’m so glad little Bruce is finding partners. Not that I thought she wouldn’t, for she is, of course, the young lady of Beulah Land; but you must watch out her head isn’t turned by someone sly who wants more than her hand in marriage!” Sarah looked at her sharply and then as the music began searched until she discovered Bruce.
“Her new partner is Blair Three. That would seem safe enough,” Sarah said.
“What a handsome young man he is,” Annabel said complacently. “I declare he is quite the favorite, so good and thoughtful too. He is getting well up in the law, you know. Judge Meldrim tells me he is amazing.”
“Annabel,” Sarah said warningly, for there was a time neither had forgotten when Annabel had tried to arrange a marriage between her son Bonard and Jane.
“How suspicious you are. Only remember—youth is fleeting and unheeding and will have its way.”
Just before midnight supper Bruce found herself with Davy. “You danced three times with Blair Three,” he told her as he might have pointed out the number of melons on a vine.
“He waltzes better than you,” she said.
“If that’s all you care about, you might as well do every turn with old Midas Mott over there. He used to teach dancing.”
Bruce giggled. “I don’t think he’s moved from his chair since they settled him in it. He must be a hundred.”
Sweeping her about in a bold swing that lifted her off the floor and caused Mr. Mott to shake his head in disgust, Davy said, “The other girls all like my new shirt.”
“Elvira Kennedy would like anything as long as there was a pair of britches below it. She stands too close to her partners.”
“I haven’t heard any of them complain.”
“I don’t know one girl her age that doesn’t purely despise her for the way she acts with boys.”
“She never wants a partner, does she?” He smiled at her smugly, and she stuck out her tongue at him.
Having satisfied his own ideas of duty by dancing with Annabel, with Sarah, and with his mother, Blair Three had proceeded to dance with whomever he pleased to ask or, as happened more frequently, not to dance at all, but to loiter and wander, ignoring females needing partners. At the punch bowl he asked Bobby Lee what he thought of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Blushing, Bobby Lee answered that he hadn’t read it and he’d thank Blair not to mention that rascal’s name where ladies were present. Setting down his empty cup, he moved away, and Blair laughed to suggest that they had enjoyed a joke together.
“An interesting book, though not universally admired.”
Blair turned; the speaker was Roman. “Have you read it, Uncle?” he asked jocularly. “Oh—you’re the one they call Roman Kendrick.” He nodded his own confirmation. “Taught in Philadelphia and all that before coming home after the war. Used to—” He stopped, remembering other things he’d heard about the old Negro man, and as he did so, saw awareness and warning in his eyes. With a shrug he moved away.
After supper, instead of joining the dancing that then resumed, Leon and Fanny left the house together, and as soon as they entered the shadows of the yard, began to run, stopping abruptly when they came to the little graveyard that had become their favorite place of tryst. Inside the iron fence, the young man fastened the gate as if doing so separated them from the world, pulled the girl to him and kissed her. After a moment Fanny pulled gently free, saying, “I wish, oh how I wish!”
“Give me a real birthday present, Fanny, better than all the others. Tell me and let me tell them when we’re getting married.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I’ve told you: Mama, Edna May. I won’t leave them with him.”
“Your mama knows how to take care of herself, I’d say.”
“You won’t understand.”
“Well, she married him; you didn’t.”
“They don’t sleep together any more, but they quarrel. The things they both say make me so afraid. He’s bad, Leon.”
“I know he is, but that doesn’t mean you have to spend your life watching so he doesn’t harm Miss Frankie and Edna May; now does it?”
“Yes.”
“What if it goes on ten years?”
“By then Edna May will be grown.”
Leon groaned. “And we’d be old! Fanny! How can you think of it? Everybody wants you here; you belong here. But that isn’t it, that doesn’t begin to say it. I want you, Fanny. I lie awake thinking about you, us together. I could cry some of those times. How can I think about farming with you on my mind every minute!”
“Well, I’m sorry if I interfere with the cotton, I’m sure!”
“You’re just stubborn,” he said.
“You’re bossy. You can’t order me around the way you would a field hand—”
“You know I don’t do that,” he said sternly.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. She found his hand and held it against her until he put his arms around her again. He was reaching with his lips to kiss her when she said, “Let’s go back in.”
“Oh, my God,” he said, “do you have to be such a girl?”
“You’d like it better if I was a chicken?”
He tried not to laugh and laughed. “If I’m not to have you, at least let us stay here a little longer.”
They sat on the cool tombstone of Selma Kendrick and held hands until the sound of music ceased and then began again. Then without a word they rose, still holding hands, and returned to the house.
7
“Good night, good night, good night!” Frankie caroled facetiously after Annabel’s carriage as it rattled away, leaving her and her daughters at their front gate. Frankie stumbled twice on the brick walkway but recovered herself without help from Fanny or Edna May. In the dim light of the oil lamp Molly had left burning in the entrance hall Frankie looked her normal self, no worse than pale and tired, and when Fanny asked if she might help her undress, refused curtly and said the girls must go directly to bed. The three climbed the stairs with Frankie, lamp in hand, leading the way. She merely nodded when her daughters told her good night—they never kissed—and entered the room they shared. The house was large enough for them all to have separate rooms, and Fanny was of an age to want her own, but she knew Edna May was nervous alone and sometimes woke at night, scared.
Fanny found matches and lighted their own lamp, turning it high for cheer so that it smoked the glass chimney briefly before she adjusted the flame. They smiled at each other, glad to be by themselves. Looking at the little mantel clock Leon had given Fanny her last birthday, Edna May marveled, “It’s a quarter to three! I’ve never been up so late, indeed only to just after midnight before, to say I’d welcomed the new year.”
Undressing, Fanny teased her sister. “How you begged the first time you were allowed to, saying, ‘What if I die in the night and never see the new year?’”
Edna May smiled to think she could ever have been such a child. “There wasn’t as much to bring away as you said there’d
be but look. This bud will press well; it isn’t too thick, is it? And here’s a ribbon bow, two colors—”
“Get ready for bed.”
They shook out their dresses and hung them carefully in the wardrobe they also shared, then began brushing their hair; but Edna May yawned and her strokes became languid, stopping altogether. Fanny finished tying her own hair and, taking Edna May’s brush, started brushing briskly, which brought the younger girl awake again.
“Do you like dancing with Leon?” Edna May asked.
“Of course.”
“More than with anyone else?”
“Much more.”
“He’s very handsome, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think him the handsomest boy in the world?”
“I don’t know all the boys in the world, do I?”
“Well, of the ones you do know.”
“Mama and Grandma both think our brother better-looking.”
“Brothers don’t count. What about Roger Shields?”
“Well,” Fanny said, “he’s nice-looking too.”
“I can’t tell Marvin and Garvin Cooper apart, so I don’t know if I danced with both of them or one of them twice. The young’uns were dancing out on the porch, you know. Sometimes. Only the boys don’t really like to, and you have to dare them to get them to do it. Marvin and Garvin are always playing jokes at school because they look alike. One of them took a whipping due the other last year, so they tell.”
“That will do.” Fanny laid down the brush and found a ribbon.
“Do you think Nigras can be pretty if they’re girls and good-looking if they’re boys?”
Fanny laughed. “Yes. I think Luck is pretty.”
“That’s because she’s your friend. I mean ordinary Nigras. I think they can only be good-looking to each other. The way some cats like some cats and don’t like others, so it must be how they look.”
The Legacy of Beulah Land Page 38