by Shelby Foote
Meanwhile his position began to rankle, touching his pride. For it was always Amy who called to make their assignations; it was she who determined what nights they were together and what nights he spent alone on his bachelor bed. “I’ll call you,” she would say each time he broached the subject of another meeting. She even addressed him by his last name, like a servant. It was as if that original advertisement he had imagined in the newspaper, under the Personals—Gentleman available as dinner guest and so forth—had been much simpler, shorter, in bolder type: AT STUD: H. DREW.
That was the state of affairs, the pass he had reached when Florence Barcroft died in late September, and that was what was on his mind when four days later, in early October, he found Amanda’s letter on his desk. He waited until he returned from lunch to open it, for though he knew already what the letter would say, he knew himself to be so tenderhearted that, faced with the actual words of her appeal, he would lose his appetite. Not that he had a decision to make: he had made it long ago, back at the very start when he told himself he would catch the next train out if Florence died before the major did, thus avoiding a painful explanation and farewell. The truth was—like many men who have reason to suspect (without believing) that they are scoundrels—his nature was essentially so kind and considerate, he could never bear to inflict an injury face to face, not even when he stood to profit by it. He could be ruthless at a distance, either in space or time, for then, not having seen it, he could manage somehow not to believe in the resultant suffering; thus he was able to lay all sorts of plans for exploitation and even carry them through, up to a point—he had come far. But then, brought face to face with his victim in the moment of final action, he closed his eyes or turned his head or, womanish, merely ran. It is unlikely that any man was ever a pure scoundrel, despite the evidence of history and fiction.
He came back early from lunch, the bank quiet with the lull preceding the rush that always followed the noon hour, and took up the envelope. Except for the address below his name, it might have been a facsimile of the one nine years ago. For a moment he felt the weight of all those years piled on his back, like a ruined millionaire looking at old stocks and bonds issued by corporations long defunct; this too was an investment that had failed. The death of Florence had made no difference, really: it had merely forced a showdown. That original intention to call off the engagement if this happened had been confirmed and reinforced, but altered. Now he would not leave: he could not leave. This time he would have to stay and see. As the Carruthers financial adviser he knew the estate to a penny. It was at least twice the size of Major Barcroft’s holdings, which were vague at best, especially since the major had stopped banking in Bristol; and what was worse, there had been rumors of reverses on the cotton market, as well as an old story (heard by chance) concerning the purchase of German Reichmarks after the war. And that was only the financial side of the picture. There was also the comparison, the choice to be made between Amy and Amanda, which requires as little comment as Drew required time to make it. So the need for a decision lay not in that direction; he had already made it, even before the death of Florence abrogated the possibility of choosing. What he had to decide was whether to meet Amanda at all, whether to stage a final scene and make some sort of explanation.
As he had predicted, the envelope flap sprang open at a touch. He read the letter rapidly: I dont need a greiving time. Come now, then put it back in the envelope; it was just as he had expected and there was no change of expression on his face. Sitting in the vaulted, cavernous gloom, looking down at the rectangle of stationery, slightly yellowed with age but pale against the dark green of the blotter: “A tryst,” he said, stroking the under side of his mustache and the corners of his mouth, first left then right, with the knuckle of one forefinger. This was an accustomed gesture with him lately, almost a tic—though it would have been difficult to identify as troubled or exalted, decisive or indecisive: Laocoön without the snakes, as Browning said, might appear to be yawning.
Then the postnoon rush was on; Drew plunged into work. He pushed the letter aside. It was as if he had forgotten it—as in a sense he had. For he had decided; he had made up his mind, and therefore he could forget it for a time. He would meet her at seven as she asked. This seemed to him the lesser of two cruelties, and he prided himself for basing his choice on this. He said to himself it had been thus all along: her feelings, her probable reactions had been his consideration from the outset, and anything that concerned just the two of them (which ruled out anything concerning him and anyone else—Amy for instance) had been planned with Amanda’s best interests in view. That her best interests were also his was incidental, or at least nonabrogating. He told himself that, and at least in a sense it was true. He told himself something else as well: ‘If I hadnt come along, probably no one would.’ And that was also true, or probably true. It gave him a good deal of comfort anyhow.
Toward four oclock, remembering a golf date, he called and broke it. “Sorry, George, I’m all tied up. How’s about tomorrow? All right: fine. Tell Pete and Snooky I’m sorry, will you? Fine.” He stayed on past quitting-time, clearing up some back work; he kept a supply of this on hand for days of tension and excess energy. It was after five when he left and the sun was going down beyond the levee. He parked and watched it flare rose-and-crimson, like blood on the water, with Arkansas black as a burnt-over forest beyond. He still had time to bathe before supper, and did. Dressing, he felt a strange elation—provoked no doubt by a sense of cleanliness, well-being, and appetite; this was his favorite time of the day—and as he knotted his tie before the mirror he whistled, off-key, Larry Clinton’s version of M’Appari. Then, making Grand Opera faces at himself, he broke into song, improvising the lyric from a few remembered scraps:
Martha-Martha, I adore you
And implore you to be mine.
I adore you and implore you,
Martha-Martha, to be mine.
He leaned closer, grinning at his reflection as he gave the knot a final touch. “Boo! you good-looking devil,” he said, and then instinctively glanced past his shoulder in fear of having been overheard. He was practicing golf swings with the fire tongs when the cook rapped on the door, announcing supper.
Mrs Pentecost had never known him when he was more congenial, more charming. He kept up a rapid-fire series of anecdotes and comments all through the meal, lingering when it was over, and she smiled and blinked and bobbed her head, laughing behind her napkin. At last, however, the grandfather clock in the living room made a sound as if it were clearing its throat and then began to chime. Drew paused in the middle of a story, listening with his head bent sideways while the clock pealed six forty-five. When it was over he folded his napkin hurriedly and laid it beside his plate. Unsmiling, he rose, bowed once abruptly: “Excuse me,” and was gone.
“I’m afraid Mr Drew is becoming a man of moods,” Mrs Pentecost said when the cook came in to clear the table.
“Yessum. He is that,” the cook said. She took up the plates. “Dont seem like it affect his appetite, though. That man’s a eater. He sho go make some nice little white lady a problem one these days.”
Meanwhile Drew, whose spirits had taken so sudden a drop when the clock tolled the passing of the third quarter of this final hour, was driving across town. He had not wanted this at all. Even now, almost there, his expression becoming increasingly morose as he approached Lamar Street, he considered turning back; it seemed to him that tonight of all nights he would most enjoy a hearts game at the Elks. The high spirits all afternoon, and up until five minutes ago, had been assumed to occupy his mind, keep it from considering the interview that lay ahead. Yet he went on, cursing the tenderness, the lack of moral courage, that would not let him leave Amanda waiting. He had no more than begun to convince himself that perhaps it would be kinder that way, in the long run, when he arrived. It was too late; he had to face his own cruelty, make it clear.
He parked around the corner, the same as always, and se
t out walking as if this were another of those regular first-Thursdays: which in fact it would have been if she had waited two more days. Summer was over—there was a breath of coolness in the air. At the end of the avenue, somewhere out beyond the country club, the great rose-golden ball of moon was coming up, not yet clear of the C&B railroad ramp: a little more and it would appear to be rolling along the tracks. He passed a group of children out after dark, mostly little girls, dragging at strings attached to shoeboxes with windows cut in the walls, crepe paper pasted over the windows, blue and orange and pink, and candles twinkling inside; they called them show-boats and their voices came shrill through the darkness. Then he was there, beside one of the oaks in front of the Barcroft house—the only one left undamaged now, for the other had been struck by lightning in the early spring; its top was dead and the sickness was moving down, the leaves curled tight, like little pale brown mummy fists, fragile as the ashes of burnt paper.
Amanda came out exactly at seven, and it occurred to Drew that she must have been standing with her hand on the knob, waiting for the clock to strike. The door came open wider than usual—for a moment he saw her in silhouette against the lighted hall, struggling with something large and square and apparently quite heavy. He realized with a pang that it was a suitcase. The door shut; the veranda was dark. She was already at the steps with her burden by the time he recovered from the shock (which, after all, he might have expected) and moved forward to help her. Their hands touched, but she did not jerk away as she had done that first time with the market basket. “Oh Harley,” she said, as she had said so many times, but this time she was panting from exertion.
“Come on,” he told her, more harshly than he intended. He had the suitcase by then and it was heavier than he had imagined; the sudden weight of it made his voice sound gruff. He would never have thought she owned so much. Staggering a bit as he came down the steps, he told himself the suitcase must contain every stitch she had worn since childhood: or else, he thought, a gross of those identical gray dresses with snaps at the throat and wrists for the collar and cuffs and a dozen of the Sunday ones thrown in for good measure. Then they were clear of the shadows; the moon was above the landline, round and full now like a disk of beaten gold, and Drew saw that what he had thought was a suitcase was in fact a sort of undersized trunk, a portmanteau they called them, mostly of wood, with metal corners and straps: obviously her mother’s, for it still held a few faded stickers from the interrupted honeymoon of more than forty years ago; Amanda must have brought it down from the attic. He set it on the ground beside the dying oak. For a moment he remained bent over, panting; I’m not in shape, he thought. Then he rose and turned to her, taking her arm. “Come on,” he said, more gently than before.
They walked a few steps and he wondered if she suspected. But no: she probably thought they were going to get the car and come back to pick up the trunk in front of the house. “Amanda …”
“Yes, Harley?”
He looked at her in the moonlight. Her eyebrows were straight and rather heavy, at a time when other women’s were plucked and arched like segments lightly struck by a twirl of compasses. Her eyes, whose color he had forgotten at that critical time, seemed black now in the shadow of her hat. Her mouth was pale, barely defined in this rich light, but ready to lend itself to any voluptuousness a lipstick offered. A virgin: he had never had a virgin, and if at times he prided himself on this, there were also times when he regretted it—especially now, when it seemed likely that he never would have one. He thought of Amy, then put the thought aside and got back to the business now at hand.
“Amanda, do you know how much I make at the bank?” He waited but she did not answer. “One hundred and seventy dollars a month,” he said. He waited for her reaction, and when it came—if indeed it could be said to come at all—it was not at all what he had expected or wanted. She obviously thought this a large amount. He continued. “All my life Ive told myself my wife would be free from all care. She’d have silver and servants, a fine big house, all the things all women want so much …” They were passing the place where the children had been playing, but the little girls had gone in for their bedtime baths; all that remained was the wreckage of one of the show-boats, which had burned. “A hundred and seventy dollars may sound like a great deal to you, Amanda, but it’s not. It’s very little.” Then they were at the usual turn-around point of their Thursday evenings and he stopped as if from habit. She stopped two steps beyond; she turned, looking up at him, watching the flicker of his lips as he spoke. “I couldnt ask you to live on that, Amanda.”
Now that he had said it he felt relief—the sort of relief a man may experience who, having decided on suicide, finally draws the razor across his throat and discovers to his surprise that he feels no pain, but rather a sudden relaxation of tension. He had looked away in midsentence, avoiding her eyes, but when he looked back he saw to his horror that she had not understood; she thought it was just one of those ‘budget conferences’ she had read of in the agony column. She smiled.
“I’m really a good manager, Harley,” she said. “I ran papa’s house on much less, including six dollars a week for the cook. Thats twenty-four dollars we’ll save right there, on that. Just wait; youll see.”
Thus these last four words returned to plague him, who had said them so often himself to reassure her. Everything was going all wrong—Drew looked at her and shook his head. She had trusted him so completely for so many years that her trust was carried forward by a sort of secondary inertia, irresistible and blind. Nothing he had said could make her confidence falter. She did not even wonder, much less question, why he took her arm and led her back the way they had come, following the routine of all those first-Thursdays—over two hundred of them—except that tonight he did not stop to kiss her. Returning they walked faster. He spoke of taxes, clothing, gasoline, the rising cost of living, of all the things that were not included in her present household expenses, but none of them made any impression at all. “I’m a good manager, Harley,” she kept saying; “youll see. Others seem to get along—young couples. I guess we will too. Ive even been taking cooking lessons from Nora. She says I’m doing better all the time.”
He was getting nowhere and he knew it. Faced with the necessity for a cruelty beyond anything he had foreseen, he panicked: he threw caution and even consideration to the winds. They were almost back to the house by now. Drew hurried forward, crouched beside the oak, and rising with the portmanteau in his arms, staggered across the sidewalk, up the steps, and crossed the veranda at a stumbling run. He put it down beside the door, not caring how much noise disturbed the major.
“What is it, Harley? Whats the matter?” Amanda was coming up the steps. The moon was higher, silver now through the blasted limbs of the oak. He went past her, then turned, halfway down the steps; she stood above him and he flung his last words at her just before he turned again and ran.
“I wont marry you!” he cried.
THREE
7. Death of a Soldier
She got the trunk in somehow, as far as the foot of the stairs at least, though it seemed twice as heavy now—as if to its original weight had been added all the grief that was to flower from those four words, “I wont marry you,” flung at her from scarcely three feet away but in a voice as faint and distant as if he were already halfway down the block: which soon he was, walking fast, heels clicking, then out of sight, gone perhaps forever, and she was left alone on the veranda, the sidewalk pale and empty in the moonlight, pointing straight as any arrow: He went that way. But this was as far as she got, the foot of the stairs; she sat on the bottom step and looked at the trunk, like Sisyphus and his rock. Thus far her eyes were dry, her motions curiously lethargic, like a boxer dealt a knockout blow or a soldier shot through the heart, who staggers before his mind realizes the damage. “I wont marry you,” she said, sitting on the bottom step and looking at the trunk; the words sounded as faint and faraway as when Drew said them. Then for the first time
she began to weep, leaning her forehead against her knees.
“Amanda—”
She did not hear it; she had her hands to her face and the sobs, though soundless, racked her. It came again, sharper. “Amanda!”
This time she heard it. For a moment she froze: this might be Drew, come back with a speech of apology. But when she looked up she saw her father standing in the doorway of the hall that led back to his study, and she realized that he must have heard the clump of the trunk when Drew set it down outside the door; he had come to see what was the matter, had been standing there all this time, watching her, and had even heard her repeat Drew’s words, “I wont marry you,” corroborating the packed trunk and the tears.
His face seemed kinder, softer—she had an impulse to hurry to him, to throw herself into his arms for comfort. But then he spoke again and she saw that what she had taken for softness in his expression was due to the fact that she saw through a haze of tears. She blinked and the major’s face was as stern as ever, or sterner. ‘I told you so,’ he seemed to be saying: whereas in fact what he really said was “Never mind that,” not bothering to indicate the trunk; “Nora will tend to it tomorrow morning. Go to your room. Dont sit there crying like that.”
She went, not looking back. The staircase seemed as steep as a ladder, each step requiring an exertion out of all proportion to the gain involved; for though she had left the trunk, as her father instructed, she had not left the heavier burden of those four words, “I wont marry you,” containing her grief packed tight like petals in a bud—Drew was the only one who could relieve her of that, and he was gone. Then she was at the top. She looked down and saw that the major had come out into the hall: he was standing there, foreshortened, watching, angry because a Barcroft had been humbled. She went quickly into her room and locked the door.
