Love in a Dry Season

by Shelby Foote

  “Like always,” Amy said, and they turned away.

  From time to time, while they waited for the minister to begin, the widow would rise from her chair and cross the room to the casket. Looking down through a mist of tears, she would put out her hand, wrist stiff, and pat the corpse’s forehead, stirring the little wilted plume of hair. “Poor you,” she kept saying; “poor you.” Then the eldest of her three stepsons by the dead man’s first marriage (two of whom were older than she) would come forward and take her arm and lead her back to her chair. Soon, though, she would be up again, at the casket, her face wrung with grief. “Poor you; poor you.”

  “I wish she wouldnt do that,” a voice said, loud against the silence. Turning, Amy saw that it was the youngest of the three stepsons. Past forty, he had an infantile, indeed a stupid face. He was the brains of the business now. “Tell her to leave him lone,” he said, like a spoiled child when a visitor plays with his toys.

  Then the minister rose and began to pray. At first the drone was punctuated by strangled sobs, but soon the widow controlled herself or perhaps was merely exhausted; there was only the murmurous monotony of words all run together, rising and falling. Above the mantel the portrait of the grandfather, the patriarch, looked down in his middle-aged prime, the mouth not so much cruel as sardonic, the eyes clear blue, one hand grasping the carved knob of the chair-arm like a claw; this was his son they were gathered to bury. A fine strong man, the minister was saying. By such was the nation built, made powerful. “Amen,” he said, and Amy believed for an instant that she saw the portrait smile.

  The family filed out and the pallbearers took position by the door. Coming down the sidewalk toward the hearse, two of them to each of the six silver handles, they staggered with their burden; lines of strain appeared at the corners of their mouths and the cords of their necks stood out, as if the old man had all his gold with him in the box. At the cemetery, when the patented rollers slacked the straps and the coffin began to sink, the widow suddenly pitched from her chair, her knees on the bright green artificial grass at the lip of the grave. The two older stepsons, flanking her, leaned forward and caught her arms. “A fine display,” the youngest said from down the line. “She thinks she’s back on Broadway where he found her.”

  Afterwards, at the conference when the family lawyer read the will, she was quite different. She had her own lawyer there—a young Jew, though her husband had been violently anti-Semitic in his old age. Her grief was over, apparently consumed by its own violence, like some highly inflammable, highly volatile substance that leaves not even ash or smoke. At forty-two, strapped and corseted, she was still Venus-shaped, with breasts a little smaller than (but quite as hard as, and curiously even shaped like) footballs; the paraffin injections had been continued and increased. Her hair had not changed either; it had the same hard bright metallic glint, as if each strand had been burnished individually with brass polish—you could smell it, or you believed you could, oily and acid. But her eyes were no longer dewy. Having watched her husband die, she was afraid she too would die like that some day. Meanwhile she was determined to enjoy her inheritance: her earned inheritance, she said, intending the emphasized word as a reproach to the stepsons, who had done nothing to get the money but be born. She wanted more than was left her in the will.

  Her lawyer did the talking, apologetic and deferential. “We dont want litigation,” he kept saying. This was his trump card and he played it periodically. “Who can say, gentlemen, how long the estate would be tied up once we let it get into the courts?”

  Jeff and Amy did not much care what settlement was made. Nor did the two older brothers, one of whom was a model-railroad enthusiast and the other an alcoholic, both to the exclusion of other interests. The youngest did the arguing, the holding out: he spoke with the authority of comparative virtue and outrage. Yet finally he gave in, as he must have known at the start he would have to do. The widow—Mama—won all she had asked at the outset, and something in addition for her lawyer, who had earned it. This was six months later. Jeff and Amy got a million dollars; anyhow Jeff did. They came home to Briartree on a hurried packing trip, and one week later took the train back East and sailed for Europe.

  They sailed in August and were gone five years. Now there was no more waiting for dividends or quarterly payments, which usually had been spent by the time they arrived. In a perverse application of noblesse oblige—which they translated as an obligation inherited by the rich to behave as the poor expected, if only for the sake of giving the poor an opportunity to envy the rich by reading of their doings in the highlife magazines—it seemed wrong not to spend at least a part of it flamboyantly. Mississippi gave scant opportunity for such spending, Carolina not much more. So they sailed for the old world, after the honored custom, and it was flamboyant enough for the most avid reader of the slick-stock magazines whose photographs gave an impression that their subjects’ wardrobes were limited to riding clothes, evening wear, and abbreviated swimsuits.

  It was a strange interlude in a strange marriage. Some of their experiences got back even to Jordan County, in one garbled form or another. In Paris (though he had just come four thousand miles from the river where it was born, though Bessie Smith herself had sung at a Negro dance ten miles from Briartree while they were packing for their trip abroad, and though Duff Conway, the greatest horn man of his time—for whose scratched and worn recordings Jeff was to pay as high as fifty and sixty dollars apiece—had been born and raised in Bristol, son of the cook in the Barcroft house on Lamar Street) Jeff discovered jazz. He fell among the cultists, the essayists on the ‘new’ American rhythms, including the one of whom Eddie Condon, when asked for an opinion, later said, “Would I go over there and tell him how to jump on a grape?” From Paris on, wherever Jeff and Amy went their record collection went too, packed in hundred-and-fifty-pound cowhide boxes that made the bellboys earn their tips. The phonograph would be set up, the boxes opened—Jeff had the contents cataloged in his mind—and from then on, as long as they stayed, their wing of the hotel would pulse with the thump and throb of drums, the wail of clarinets, the moan of saxophones, the scream of trumpets, all building up to a climax known as ‘ride out.’

  In Vienna they both underwent psychoanalysis, but it was a failure: the doctor was a small, squeak-voiced, almost hairless man, and since neither could effect a transference they moved on. In Brussels Jeff broke a leg in a taxi collision and lay for a month on a hotel sunporch, playing records, his leg suspended in a traction device. When it had almost knit he broke it again, stumbling and crawling the length of the suite because he thought he heard Amy in the bedroom with a man who was undressing her and calling out the name of each article of clothing as it came off. Jeff might at least have wondered how she came to be wearing six pairs of stockings, for when he managed to push the door ajar the ‘man’ turned out to be a deep-voiced chambermaid helping Amy get up the laundry list, and Jeff spent another month with his leg in traction. In Italy there was trouble with the carabinieri—something to do with disrespect to the State; they never understood just what, except that Amy had got into some sort of argument with a customs official about the jazz collection and called him a goddam spick. Back home the election was over; the country had a new president: ‘Mr Roosevelt’ he was called at first, then ‘Roosevelt,’ then ‘that Roosevelt,’ and finally just ‘he’ or ‘him’ by mouths that twisted bitterly on the pronoun, for the westering boats were crowded with expatriates—“A traitor to his class,” they said. By then the new inheritance tax laws had been enacted; Jeff and Amy heard what they had escaped and, looking back, saw that old Carruthers had been a businessman to the last: he had even died on schedule, financially speaking. They were in Berlin when Hindenburg appointed a chancellor; Amy had seen him in Munich the year before, on a café terrace drinking beer with a group of men wearing trenchcoats in clear weather; “He looks like Charlie Chaplin,” she had said, and the waiter had smiled as if he knew a secret. In the Swiss Alps the
re was trouble about a ski instructor, a tall wide-shouldered Austrian browned by snowglare. This time it was no deep-voiced chambermaid heard in the night and Jeff had wanted to fight him. “A blind man?” the instructor said. “Fight a blind man? Excuse me, Sir—and Madam,” he said, standing beside the bed; he made a shallow bow, quite dignified, and sidestepped Jeff and went out, walking naked down the hall with his clothes in his arms, including ski boots. Jeff sat on the bed and began to weep. For a while Amy watched him over the edge of the sheet, her face solemn, her head cocked sideways, speculative, bemused. Then she tried to comfort him, stroking the furry cap of hair through which the windshield scars showed.

  “Seeing Europe—” Jeff said bitterly, wagging his head. “All I’m doing is collecting a bunch of stinks. I want to go home.”

  “Youre just wrought-up,” Amy told him. Her arm was across his shoulders now. “It’s been too long. Dont you want me to get you a girl somewhere? Or a boy? I will.”

  Jeff raised his head with a quick motion like a skittish horse. For a moment it was as if he were looking at her, except that his eyes had lost the habit of focusing. “Youre evil, Amy.” He hid his face in his hands. “Youre wicked; youre all the way evil.”

  But they did not go home quite yet. They went to the South of France; summer had arrived down there and they could catch up on their sunbathing. Here was the scene of the final European incident. Their hotel was near Cannes, toward Juan-les-Pins. They had been there a month, both well toasted by then, and one day they were crossing the terrace when they heard a voice cry “Baby!”—“It’s Mama,” Jeff said, and Amy turned and saw her coming toward them, bearing her high hard bosom like arms to the fray.

  She had changed very little, you thought at first, until you looked closer and saw that she had changed indeed. Her skin had a hard high polish as if it had been glazed by some ceramic process in the oven of fast living. Powder lay lightly upon it, ready to be blown or flicked away as from a porcelain surface. “And Amy! Child!” she cried, closing in. She moved within a circumference of scent—Chanel Number Whatever, Amy thought: it struck them across their faces in a gust, while the widow was still ten feet away. “How wonderful! I want you to meet …” She looked around. “Where are you? There.—I want you to meet Crispin.” She had him in tow; he was being sucked along in her rearward vacuum, like a leaf behind a speeding truck.

  He was slight and olive-skinned, with a face as smooth as an egg, small blue-white teeth like a child’s, and a tiny mustache—a señorito, a refugee from Spain. His sideburns ran down almost to his jawbone. He wore thin-soled gunmetal pumps so tight on his feet that the knuckles of his toes showed through. Jeff heard about him from the widow while they were alone together on the beach, she under two umbrellas, wearing an ankle-length wrapper pinned close at the throat and a pair of enormous smoked glasses that gave her a rather startling aspect under a flop-brim hat—hardly an inch of flesh was exposed to the sun, even by radiation—and Jeff out on the dazzling sand, generally face-down to keep from sunburning his eyeballs. Amy and Crispin would be off somewhere shopping; the widow had recommended him as an adviser in the selecting of women’s clothes. She made no pretense as to their relationship. “I’m supporting his whole family and it’s worth it. You mightnt think so at first glance (—I didnt) but I tell you, baby, there never was a man like that before. European to the fingertips. You know what I mean?”

  Jeff thought he did know what she meant: so much so, in fact, that he was not surprised at what developed. He was not even much outraged—certainly not to the extent his actions seemed to indicate. He merely did what he had promised himself he would do, back at the time of the incident involving the ski instructor. That was when he bought the pistol he had carried in his phonograph ever since.

  He waited until he was sure, or almost sure. Then one afternoon he and the widow were down at the beach and when a waiter came soliciting orders for drinks: “Here,” Jeff said, speaking with the strained voice of a man who turns at last to face a crisis he has steeled himself to meet. He rose, brushing sand from his knees and chest. He put on a terrycloth robe that resembled a burnoose. “Back directly,” he told the widow (but she was asleep behind her glasses) and laid his hand on the arm of the waiter, who guided him up the beach and across the stone terrace where a dozen women sat at backgammon and mah-jongg, chattering like so many birds against the more or less constant rattle and clatter of dice and tiles. Jeff and the waiter crossed the lobby to the elevator entrance, where the waiter left him. “Three,” Jeff said, stepping into the cage.

  “Three,” the operator said. The elevator glided to a stop. “Help you to your room, sir?”

  “No,” Jeff said. He stood alone in the corridor while the elevator sank, a diminishing whine. After a short period during which he stood with his head cocked, hearing nothing, he turned to the right, walked thirty confident steps, then raised both hands like a sleepwalker and proceeded cautiously for six more steps until his hands touched the door at the end of the hall. The key was in the pocket of his robe.

  This time there was no voice from an adjoining room to lead or mislead him. He went straight to the phonograph, lifted the used-needles tray, and reaching into the nest of wires beneath, took out the pistol—a small nickel-plated automatic, one of those models designed to be carried in a woman’s handbag. He paused, feeling for the arm of the chair to get his bearings, then stepped forward with his left arm raised, and halted with his hand on the knob of the bedroom door. There was no sound beyond the panel; he did not even know if the door was locked. Yet he threw it ajar as though there could be no doubt on either count, paused for two rapid ticks of Amy’s pigskin traveling clock on the bedside table, and stepped across the threshold. He stood barefoot, wearing swimtrunks and the Arab-looking robe, the pistol pointed generally toward the bed. “Got you,” he said gruffly, like an actor. Still there was no sound. Then suddenly there was: the faint, tentative creak of a bedspring, no sooner begun than stopped. If he had had time to think, he might have doubted that he had heard it. But Amy said:

  “Jeff—”

  It was a six-shot weapon and he fired six times, as fast as he could squeeze and release the trigger—first at the sound of the little Spaniard’s voice: “Mr Crutters … Mr Crutters … Por Díos, Mr Crutters!” and then at the hurrying patter of thin-soled pumps, thinking: Dear God, he didnt even take his shoes off. Then the room was quiet as before, maybe quieter; the ticking of the bedside clock came through. He stood with the pistol hot and empty in his hand, smelling the burnt powder that swirled and banked around him, a thin, acrid smoke. “Amy?” he said. There was no answer. And suddenly a terrible suspicion came to him. “Was he doing anything unnatural with you?”

  Recovered from her fright by now, and knowing the pistol was empty, Amy rose from the floor on the far side of the bed. “Unnatural hell,” she said: whereupon, with relief and anger, but mostly from amusement, she began to giggle nervously. Jeff was left wondering; the laughter might have been sobs. What she said next resolved it, however. The laughter was plainly laughter. “You should have, should have, seen him!” she cried between giggles and gasps. “Running in those dancing pumps with bullets zinging round him!”

  Soon there was a knocking at the door: three knocks deliberately spaced, one! two! three! The house detective, Jeff thought. But the shots had not been much louder than handclaps, really, and when Amy drew on her kimono and went to the door it was the widow. She stood there for a moment in her long-sleeved Mother Hubbard, saying nothing, then marched past Amy into the room and began to gather Crispin’s clothes from the chair on which he had arranged them so neatly half an hour ago, folding them so that the creases would not be disturbed. Jacket, trousers, shirt, hand-painted tie: they made an absurdly small bundle, like doll clothes, when she turned in the doorway, holding them under her bosom as beneath a protective shelf of rock. She seemed about to speak, but gave them instead a single baleful glare, the smoked glasses like dead black target ce
nters under the flop-brim hat, and then was gone, heels thudding on the carpet down the hall. They never saw her again.

  Amy laughed. Pitched on a rising note it reached a certain climax and stopped abruptly, curiously mechanical, incomplete. In the silence that followed they heard the rattle of dice and the clatter of tiles from the terrace four stories below and a buzz of voices all run together, indiscriminate save for an Englishwoman who shrieked at more or less regular intervals: “Two bam! Four crack! East wind!” Jeff, sitting at the low end of a chaise-longue with the pistol still in his hands, listened gravely. He seemed to be trying to find some meaning, some clue. But there was nothing. This was all Europe was to him: a rattle, a clatter, a buzz. “I want to go home,” he said.

  “Mah-jongg!” the Englishwoman cried below.

  She had had enough by then herself; this time they did come home. They landed in New York the last week in August, within a couple of days of the fifth anniversary of their departure. All during the crossing she had kept to her stateroom, indifferent to everything except her seasickness, but landfall morning, suddenly cured, she came on deck. Jeff was with her; they stood gripping the rail. His cap bill dropped a shadow whose rounded edge fell across his upper lip. “Whats it like?” he said, his mouth pink in the sunshine. Ambrose Light was a disappointing bell buoy. Then off to the right lay Coney Island, its ferris wheels and scenic railway distributed in spidery silhouette. The ship’s wake described a milky curve, pale on the limitless green, and leaving the no-man’s land of sea they entered the harbor where Liberty, gigantic and bland, held up her torch. Ahead the city waited, shining white and vertical, with dissolving and renewing plumes of steam announcing noon; a long gray smear fed by stacks was banked above it like an error on a student’s watercolor; this was America, clean as slabs of marble newly quarried and set on end. The ship mooed and the tugs came out and suckled.