Love in a Dry Season

by Shelby Foote

  Descending the gangplank, then clicking her heels on the concrete quay that passed for the soil of her native land, Amy felt at once an almost mystical elation. After five years of the old world she had returned to the new, where sin was mostly unintentional, or anyhow artless, and covered by a sort of invincible ignorance like that which protected some of the saints when they were wild young men. Mouths were filled with magnificent teeth; the very sidewalks glittered; the taxi seemed to run on silk. When the driver turned his hard, high-blooded American face, speaking out of the side of his mouth with the harsh accent of Brooklyn, Amy shrieked with pleasure: “Jeff! We’re home!” And without waiting for his usual ‘Whats it like?’ she began to describe all she saw, turning from side to side on the seat and leaning across his knees to peer through the opposite window.

  Home, she said. It was a word she seldom used in even its vaguest sense. But the following night, at one of the brassy nightclubs off Times Square, a quartet of young Negroes, in white tuxedos whose satin facings shimmered under the spotlight, sang Walking in Jerusalem (Just like John) and halfway through it Amy suddenly reached across the table; she gripped Jeff’s wrist, her nails like drops of blood against his cuff. “Let’s go home,” she said. Jeff thought she meant the hotel, but there was a quality of urgency in her voice. It was not yet midnight. Back at the room she called Pennsylvania Station and made the reservation; she even got most of the packing done that night, though they had all day tomorrow before traintime. That made twice she had said ‘home’; but now she meant the Delta, she meant Briartree.

  By the first of September, which fell on a Sunday that year, they were there. The trip south had been like traveling backward through time: they left the flare and haze of early fall and rode into late summer, the hottest week of the Mississippi year. All the servants had been kept on; the house was little changed. Amy was somewhat disappointed, though. In her first taste of homesickness she had remembered it as being even grander. Consequently they had no sooner arrived than she was ready to resume her search, her casting about for excitement, and the following Sunday evening they rode up to Bristol, to the country club.

  A change had come. They had missed technocracy and the apple sellers, the terrible ten-inch snow of ’33, the foreclosures and the rather desperate laughter at poverty jokes. That was all over now, or almost over; at least it was in the process of being over—there was not even a crap game on the terrace. What remained was not so much a true sobriety, however, as it was a lack of franticness; people had the apparent calm that sometimes comes with fright. This was reflected in the dancing Amy saw when she came out of the powder room and took Jeff’s arm again. Five years ago the ballroom would have been crowded to the walls—or would have appeared so, at any rate, due to the ubiquity of the dancers prancing tangle-footed, lifting their knees and shaking their shoulders, performing sudden sidelong rushes and unpredictable retreats. But now they made only a handful on the floor. Dancing with an almost comical concentration, stiff-backed like automatons, as if everything depended on precision and economy of motion, they had what Gogol calls a hemorrhoidal aspect.

  Whatever else it was, it was certainly dull. Toward the climax of the evening, about eleven, Amy had had enough. She went looking for Jeff. Knowing that he would be in either the locker room or the taproom, she decided to try the latter first, since that would not involve a messenger. Meantime something had happened; people were collecting in scattered groups and talking excitedly. She heard scraps of conversation.

  “Shot him.”

  “Shot who?”

  “Huey Long.”

  “No!”

  It had come over the radio. Then she was past and there was another group, further along with the news and less excited.

  “What kind of doctor?”

  “Medical doctor.”

  “Named Wise, you say?”

  “No: Weiss.”

  The name was hissed and she went on; Huey Long meant very little to her. For a moment she stood in the taproom doorway, looking over heads and through the smoke. Then she saw Jeff. Smiling, he sat with a tall blond man at a table in front of an electrical music machine equipped with what at first appeared to be some fantastic kind of cow-catcher or radiator grille consisting mostly of glass tubes filled with bubbles in slow motion and neon in all the colors of the spectrum: juke boxes, people were learning to call them, though Amy had not been back long enough to know this. Dorsey’s Marie throbbed from it; dawn was breaking and theyd be waking to find their hearts were aaaching, Marie. Jeff had about two dollars’ worth of nickels in front of him on the table, and from time to time he would turn in his chair and punch one into the machine, between whiles shuffling them with one hand—he had learned it from a Monte Carlo croupier on vacation at one of their hotels near the Italian border—making two stacks, then one stack, then two stacks, over and over.

  Then she was nearer and she saw why he was smiling. The tall blond man was telling a story, something that had happened at the bank. The bank, he said: which meant that he either worked in one or owned one. Looking at him it was hard to say which, for though his clothes were good, they were not all that good. Well, anyhow, this lady came for a new checkbook (“She’s lost a dozen already this year”) but when he reproached her for carelessness (—“Not seriously, you understand: I was only joshing”) she told him there was no cause for alarm; she had prepared for such a mishap by signing all the blank checks in advance, so that no unscrupulous person could use them, she said. Jeff laughed. Up to then he had only smiled but now he laughed. It had an odd, wild sound; he laughed so seldom.

  “Want to go now?” Amy said. She was beside him and she put her hand on his shoulder, which shook with laughter. Across the table the other man was rising.

  “This is Mr Who,” she thought Jeff said. “Mr Who: my wife.” He turned his blind face from one to the other as he spoke. The tall man was still rising. Then he was up. He bowed and his hair was golden in the smoke.

  “Hel-lo,” he said.

  Mr Personality, Amy thought. She made a sound of acknowledgment—somewhere between Hi and Hm, closer to Huh; it expressed her disapproval clearly enough—and turned to Jeff. “I’m tired. I want to go.”

  “Ah, sit down. Have a drink.”

  “Yes—do,” the other said.

  “No, Jeff. Really.”

  “Now damn it, Amy—”

  But she had turned away. She spoke over her shoulder, carelessly. “I’ll get my coat and meet you at the door.”

  She took her time in the powder room, wondering if Jeff would defy her, perhaps with the other’s encouragement. But when at length she came out into the vestibule she found them waiting for her, Jeff with his hand still on the man’s arm, though they must have been here some minutes already. Now he was doing the talking, and the other the listening. Amy came past them, reaching for Jeff’s wrist. “Thank you, Mr—”

  “Drew,” the man said, smiling. “Harley Drew.”

  There was an awkward pause, almost a scene, for Jeff stood with his hand on Drew’s arm, reluctant, tugging a bit at the wrist that Amy held. Thus he made a link of flesh between them, and they looked past him at each other. In the taproom she had no more than glanced at Drew, though she had been aware that he was staring, but now they looked directly at one another for perhaps ten seconds. She observed that he wore a light tweed jacket in spite of the heat, one of those new tab collars, and a small-figured foulard tie with the knot pulled tight. His sideburns were a trifle long, as was the hair at the back of his head and on the nape of his neck, which usually here in the Delta men kept shaven. There was something outlandish about him—not uncouth, far from it: but foreign—at least in a relative sense: English or Scandinavian, she guessed. Then she looked down at his hand, extended almost rigid from the arm that Jeff still grasped. The nails were flat and pale, filed close, the cuticle pushed well back; the fingers were rather snub, with a few gold hairs just forward of the knuckles. Without being splayed or callous
, it somehow resembled the hand of a workingman. She could imagine it cupping a woman’s breast or stroking her rump, administering what was called a going-over.

  For once, however, she was angry at such thoughts. She jerked Jeff’s wrist. Tipped off balance, he let go of the other’s arm, calling over his shoulder as they went out, “Good night”; “Good night,” Drew said from inside the door. Not looking back, Amy walked fast and still kept hold of her husband’s wrist. He stumbled, finding the gravel treacherous under his shoes. “Take it easy,” he said. “For God sake, whats the hurry? Whats the matter?”

  He would be thirty in November; Amy was already thirty-two. They had been married for more than eight years, but this was her first taste of jealousy. Beginning that night—though her recognition of it was delayed, as pain may be delayed for a person shot or cut without a warning—her life entered a new phase. At first it moved slow, then fast, like a sped-up film.

  Drew was Assistant Vice President of their bank in Bristol, recently promoted from assistant cashier. She saw him sitting at his desk when she went in next day to cash a check, but he was busy with a farmer and did not see her. Or perhaps he did, she thought; perhaps he only pretended not to see her. She turned and did not look again in his direction until she was almost to the door, tucking a sheaf of bills into her purse. When she glanced back she saw that he was looking at her; his face was completely solemn. He smiled and it was as sudden as if he had tripped a switch to make his teeth shine. She went out.

  In the course of the next few weeks, without inquiring, she heard a good deal about him. He was forty and unmarried; he was waiting for a girl whose parents had other plans. There was some such romantic situation to explain his bachelorhood and lend him glamor; she never heard the straight of that, for people assumed that you knew all about it; they made only passing references, having long since tired of it themselves. Amanda was the girl’s name; “Amanda’s waiting,” they said. Amy knew that much. But she let it pass; she would not inquire. Whenever she was near him she felt a sharp dislike. He was too smooth, too urban. If she had wanted his kind around she would have stayed in Europe or up East, she told herself.

  The slow part lasted better than two years, during which time they were thrown more and more together. Drew was the Carruthers financial adviser, appointed by the bank. He and Jeff had one or two conferences a week: either Jeff would ride into town or Drew would come down to Briartree, his briefcase under his arm. When Amy’s shopping days coincided with her husband’s in-town conference days, they would go together in the station wagon. (It was the first such car in Jordan County. People would look at it and smile or frown and shake their heads, depending on the extent of their envy or indignation. Quoting Bob Burns, they said the Carruthers were the sort of gentlemen farmers who would put on riding breeches to plant horseradish.) On the way to town Amy would watch the blind man’s impatience mount until finally he would be sitting on the edge of the seat, leaning forward with the heels of his hands on the dashboard, perhaps from a desire that his body arrive a split second sooner, perhaps in an illogical attempt to add to the speed of the car by shoving at it. Though this had its comical aspect, it was mainly disgusting, she thought. Then they would arrive and she would escort him to the door of the bank. Later when she came back she would find him calmer, though his cheeks would still be flushed.

  The displeasure she felt on those days was nothing, however, compared to what she felt on the days when Drew came down to Lake Jordan. He got there after banking hours and if the conference lasted till dark (which it usually did: Jeff saw to that) he would stay for dinner. At table Amy would watch her husband. Disgusting, she thought as she observed the way his hands trembled with excitement; he could barely hold his fork. If she glanced across at Drew he would smile at her—a conspirator’s smile. Then she would leave them and they would retire to Jeff’s study, continuing their conference. So they said: but presently she would hear the phonograph blaring jazz and she wondered what went on in there. Granting it was what she rather supposed, she wondered just how far it went. Not far, she guessed. But she wondered.

  Drew came to the Briartree parties too, where even Amy had to admit he added to the ‘tone’ if only in contrast to the planters and the planter imitators. But the parties were different from the ones of six and seven years ago; the guests were fewer—at least they gave the impression of being fewer, for they had that same false sedateness Amy had seen at the club when she first got back. There was beginning to be a sense of history, made immediate by the fact that an English king had given up his throne for a woman: “the woman I love,” the king said and they thrilled to hear him say it, huddled about their radios as for warmth. Romance wasnt dead, they told themselves. Even in their time such things could happen—and they were on hand, almost a part of it, leaning toward the loudspeakers. Yet there was something weak and sordid about the affair: they could not help but feel this and they were vaguely dissatisfied, knowing it would not have been so in their fathers’ and grandfathers’ time.

  Amy was aware of this, since it went on around her and colored all she saw. Then too there was this situation in her home, this invasion, this alienation not of affection (for there had been no affection from the start) but anyhow of attention: that was it, an alienation of attention. But her reaction was merely a vague dissatisfaction which took the form of increased languidness, which in turn—though there was no one to read it, not even herself—signaled a coming disturbance as plainly as a falling barometer warns of stormy weather. This, then, was the low-pressure lull, the vacuum that invites the wind, and she was at dead center.

  Past thirty she was approaching her very prime, the period of smoothest articulation when the flesh of the belly and arms and thighs has softened but has not begun to sag—that was a good five years away, with care. The bobbed hair of the Twenties had grown shoulder length, worn ‘page boy’ now, with the ends curled under and bangs clipped low on the forehead. Her eyes were darker, as with ripeness, and she had this peculiarity, that when she smiled the corners of her mouth turned down, giving her face that suggestion of ‘craft,’ of latent cruelty—or anyhow meanness—which men find so attractive on short acquaintance, looking at them across a ballroom, say, or from the pages of a magazine or off the motion picture screen, but which on further intimacy (especially the dreadful, bone-deep intimacy of marriage) they learn to regret and hate and blame for all their woes: the immemorial face, that is, of Lilith or Helen or, in our time, Joan Crawford.

  Observe her, then, as she sat on an evening in late February beside a log fire in the living room at Briartree, wearing a turtle-neck cashmere sweater, a tweed skirt, silk stockings, and gillie ties, her chair between two stacks of magazines, one with the top and binding edges neatly squared, the other not so much a stack as a pile, the magazines looking as if they had been dropped all at once from a height, spread-eagle and crumpled. She wet her thumb to turn the pages, going rapidly, hardly pausing for even the illustrations, and when she came to the end of one she tossed it to the right, reaching simultaneously with her left hand for a fresh one from the stack on that side of the chair. From time to time she did pause, but this was not for anything in a magazine. She would raise her eyes and look at the closed door on the far side of the entrance hall—Jeff’s study—from behind which, faint and faraway, with an almost subterranean murmur, came the wail and throb of jazz; then she would return to her thumbing. Finally, though, she lifted her chin abruptly, at once alert; the music had stopped—she did not know how long ago. For almost a minute she sat listening to the silence, her mouth drawn in a lipless line. Then suddenly she rose, tossing the unfinished magazine aside. “I’ll break it up,” she said, and moved to do so, thus demonstrating that what sometimes passes for a deep feminine wisdom, ‘intuition,’ even forthrightness—the absence of conflicting thought which so often clouds the interval between conception and execution—may be nothing more than (as in Amy’s case) a lack of mental equipment.

  But
she had taken no more than half a dozen steps toward the study door when it came slowly open; Drew stood holding it ajar. She stopped. For a moment he was looking gravely at her. Then, smiling, he moved aside and she saw Jeff in the armchair beside the phonograph, his chin on his chest, both arms dangling limp outside the chair arms. Fingers curled half into fists, his hands were just clear of the carpet, one of them still holding the little complexion brush that he used to dust his records before and after each playing. He was snoring faintly and the phonograph lid was raised. “He fell asleep,” Drew said in a low voice, almost a whisper.

  “How long ago?” She said it for lack of anything else, and when she had spoken she was surprised at the words. They had the sound of encouraging conversation, which was not at all what she had intended. Also she had whispered, which added to the air of conspiracy she believed Drew had been trying for more than two years to establish between them. What was worse, she had smiled: was smiling still, returning his smile. But as soon as she discovered this she stopped.

  “I thought I’d leave without waking him,” Drew said, ignoring her question.

  Then she came forward again, walking slowly, still with her ‘I’ll break it up’ in mind: so that what followed was based not on desire (though it certainly reached that shortly) but on something quite the opposite. Drew had turned to take his coat and hat from the table beside the study door. When he turned back, surprised to find her standing almost at his elbow, she smiled at his surprise and they moved together toward the outer door.

  Though she could see that he was intensely conscious of her beside him down the length of the hall, past the long refectory table with the two brass lamps eight feet apart on a strip of velvet the color of dried blood and stitched with gold, it was only after they reached the door, after Drew’s hand was on the knob and the door was even a bit ajar, clear anyhow of the resistance of weather-stripping, that he turned and looked at her. She stood her ground, quite close; her face had the open-eyed seriousness of a child’s. That was when he made his move. With the suppressed despair of a gambler deep in a losing streak, he took hold of her upper arm, feeling beneath the softness of cashmere the resilience of flesh. Amy looked down at the hand, and remembering all she had thought of it the night of the Long assassination, she smiled her slow down-tending smile. When she looked up again she saw that, though he kept his grip, he expected her to strike him; his face was even set for it, jaw muscles bunched, lips tense.