Homeplace

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Later that afternoon, she stopped in to see Priss Comfort.

  “How did you find Lytton?” Priss asked, over coffee and strawberry Pop Tarts. “Changed much?”

  “Not at all, except that I don’t know anybody anymore,” Mike said. “Oh, there are some new stores, and a few more traffic lights, but it looks just as quaint and adorable and Brigadoony as it did in 1964. The Lyttons of the world don’t change. Especially for the blacks. I’ve been all over town, and I could swear integration hasn’t gotten here yet. Nobody’s gotten the word. The only black faces you see are in the supermarkets or somebody’s kitchen or backyard, like J.W. and Lavinia Lester. I didn’t see a single black face in a single restaurant, or at the library or the bank or city hall … not even the car wash. Not even the laundromat, that great leveler of men. They don’t even call them blacks; it’s still Negroes in Lytton. Or worse. Much worse, at my house. And J.W. God, he’s about to ‘yassum’ me to death. What’s the matter with J.W., Priss? Why didn’t he get out of here while he had the chance? He must hate it here. He’s in virtual bondage to my father. Why does he go along with this yard-boy shit?”

  Priss Comfort regarded Mike in silence for a while and then sighed.

  “This is his home, Mike,” she said. “This town is his; it’s all he knows. It’s him. How can he hate it? He goes along because he has to get along. You’re looking just at surfaces, just at the bad side of us; you haven’t had time to see the good yet, even if you’re able. And it’s here. There’s great good in Lytton; there always was, no matter what you thought … and think. Of course, there’s plenty of not so good, too. Lord, sometimes I think … we’ve known the best and worst of the South, you and I. One day maybe the worst will be just a … sliver, like a waning moon. Each generation that comes along moves us further from our darker side. Sometimes I’m afraid we’ll move too far and lose the sweetness and bite of the South, along with the rot. But move we must. Don’t hate Lytton, Mike. It’s you, just like it’s J.W. Cromie.”

  “I wish you’d take to drink again,” Mike said. “This metaphysical wisdom is more than I can stand. I will not be swayed.”

  “Oh, you will be.” Priss grinned evilly at her. “I have only just begun to work on you.”

  They sat in silence for a while, and the white cat came stretching his bulk out from Priss’s bedroom and jumped up into Mike’s lap. He butted his large head against her hand until, laughing, she petted him, and he settled down comfortably in her lap and began a rusty, rumbling purr. Priss beamed at them like a fond parent with a precocious child.

  “Are things any better with you and John?” she said presently.

  “I guess they’re as good as they’re going to be,” Mike said. “He’s doing his dead-level best to provoke me, and I’m not letting him do it. He’ll probably stop if I just don’t respond, which I don’t. You know, Priss, we’ve done a complete switch. He never paid half this much attention to me when I was little; I’d almost have welcomed this then. It would have been better than what he gave me. But now, it’s like he’s trying his best to drive me away. I could understand it after that last business, when I left home; he did say he never wanted to see me again, after all. And that suited me just fine. But now everybody’s saying that he’s the one who asked for me to come back. So here I am. And as far as I can tell, he doesn’t feel one shred of sentiment of any kind for me. Or anything else, for that matter. Except that old house, of course.”

  Priss frowned. “People think old people are sentimental, but they’re not,” she said. “We’re ruthless, most of us. We’ve had to say good-bye to too many things to afford sentiment. At best we’re ruthlessly selective. No matter what your father might feel for you, he can’t show it, not even to himself. He’s lost you once.”

  “And whose fault was that?”

  “I know,” Priss said. “Old people aren’t rational, either. Mainly it bores us. Too many years of trying to make rationalization work like it’s supposed to. Finally we just stop trying to make sense. The point is, John stands to maybe lose that house now, and he knows he’s going to lose his life sooner rather than later. He’s not a fool. So I think he figures to see if he can run you off again before you go on your own. And you will, you know. You said so yourself.”

  “Well, this was never meant to be permanent, Priss. I’ve made that plain to everybody. As soon as we see how Mrs. Lester is going to work out …”

  “I know, I know,” Priss said impatiently. “You’re off after the brass ring again. Only it strikes me that maybe it’s not what or where you thought it was.”

  “What do you mean?” Mike said. Uneasiness swam past the glass around her like a young barracuda, distant but potentially harmful.

  “Oh, nothing really. I just had some idea that sooner or later, if you stayed long enough, you might come to write something about Lytton and the people here,” Priss said. “Just to pass the time, keep your hand in and all, since you’ve more or less got to be here anyway. It would be interesting to see what you had to say about your own folks.”

  “A, they’re not my own folks, Priss, present company and a few others excepted, and B, I don’t have anything at all to say about them. What on earth would there be for me to write about in Lytton? There’s no pivotal crisis here, no contemporary drama going on. You know that’s what I do. It’s how I’ve made my name. What on earth has anybody around here done that I would want to write about them?”

  “I’m not interested in what they’ve done … though it’s a damned sight more than you seem to think. I’m interested in what you think about them. How you feel about them. How it feels to come home again at just this time and place in history; what resonances you feel now, what speaks to you out of your time here before. It could make a pretty interesting book, you know, and from what you said, you need a book.”

  “Except that it’s already been written,” Mike said. “By Thomas Wolfe. And look where it got him.”

  “Yes,” Priss said, and she was not smiling. “Look.”

  “Oh, come on, Priss,” Mike said. “I don’t want to commit Literature with a capital L. I don’t even think I could. I’m simply too … detached, too journalistic, if you will … to handle that kind of point of view.”

  “Too scared, you mean,” Priss said. “Because it would mean opening yourself up to everything … what’s past, what’s happening right now, what’s likely to happen. It would mean going through it, experiencing it, feeling it. I guess you’re right at that, Mike. I guess you really can’t do that.”

  “Well, I told you that two days ago, didn’t I?” Mike said, irritated and oddly hurt by Priss’s words. “I’m just not interested in spill-your-guts prose. It’s … unseemly, somehow. It offends me.”

  “Just a thought,” Priss said. “Hand me that sorry cat and get on out of here, now. Your Mrs. Lester is going to want to go home; it’s past three. Mrs. Lester. Hmmm. I can remember when she was Lavinia Parrott, a skinny little thing without enough to eat, helping her mother take in wash and carry it back to folks. Smart as a whip even then. I always wished I could have gotten hold of her in my class.”

  Mike handed the limp, purring Walker Pussy to Priss and left. Priss’s talk of a book about Lytton left her feeling inadequate, chastened, slightly foolish and recalcitrant, exactly as if she had negligently done far less than her best at some assignment in class to which Priss had set her. She remembered the feeling well. Priss would never settle for mere competence from Mike. When she had protested, rightly, that not nearly so much was demanded of the other students in Priss’s classes, Priss had said only, “It’s relative, Mike.”

  “What the hell does she expect from me?” Mike said aloud, getting out of the Cadillac into the whitened heat of the Winship backyard. “I do what I do better than anybody in New York. What does Priss know, anyhow?”

  “Knows an awful lot for a maiden lady from little ol’ Lytton, Georgia, seems to me,” Sam Canaday said, materializing at her elbow and taking it sho
wily to help her from the car. “But she sure doesn’t let on that she does. A virtuous woman. She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness. Her price is far above rubies.”

  “Do you always sneak up behind people?” Mike snapped, the hot, treacherous color flooding up her neck from her chest. “Every time I look up, there you are, lurking. Don’t you ever work?”

  “Not if I can help it,” he said, grinning. “Sorry if I startled you. I was looking for J.W. No, I think there’s altogether too much toil and labor in the world. Look at you Yankees; skin and bones and stress headaches and all such; like to jump right out of your skins. You should consider the lilies of the field. They toil not, neither do they spin …”

  “And what is it with you and the Bible?” Mike asked. “Priss tells me nobody in town is speaking to you because you shot your mouth off about the Old Testament in church. Do you really think it impresses us Yankees, as you’re fond of calling us when you’re in your Jeeter Lester mode … which is most of the time?”

  “Why, Miz Singer-Winship.” He beamed, hand still under Mike’s elbow. “I didn’t mean you were a Yankee. Cross my heart. Southern girl like you ought to know that all us southern boys know our Good Book, even if we don’t learn anything else. It makes us good lawyers.”

  “It sounds more like you’re on the back of a flatbed truck speaking in tongues,” Mike said.

  “Oh, I’ve done that, too,” Sam Canaday said comfortably.

  “And handled snakes, I presume.”

  “Something like that.”

  He laughed, gave her elbow a squeeze, and ran up the outside garage stairs towards J.W.’s aerie, taking the creaking wooden steps two at a time. Mike looked after him in open dislike. In the merciless sunlight, she could see that the dark blue polo shirt that he wore today strained across his back, and that it was not fat that tautened it, but packed, sliding muscle. His biceps seemed to burst with muscle, too, as did his forearms, and the open hand that gripped the weathered railing was webbed with playing muscle. It was callused and scarred too; Mike saw the glisten of tight-pulled scar tissue, as if he had been scalded or burnt, on the back of his hand and on two of his fingers. Primitive hands, powerful and broken. Not a lawyer’s hands.

  Her eyes traveled up his arm to his chest and neck, and then further, and she saw that he had stopped on the small porch outside J.W.’s door and was looking down at her. Her face flamed anew, and she turned and hurried through the heat haze over the driveway into the house. At every step she could feel his eyes on her back.

  Later that evening, after she had warmed up the excellent chicken pot pie that Lavinia Lester had left for her and her father and they had eaten it in silence, staring at the kitchen television set, DeeDee came by for a quick visit. She and Mike sat in the still-hot lavender seclusion of the wisteria bower while Let’s Make a Deal brayed from the kitchen, DeeDee fanning herself mightily and greedily attacking the peach cobbler that neither Mike nor her father had wanted. She had come to invite Mike to dinner at her house the following evening and would not take Mike’s halfhearted no for an answer.

  “Don’t be silly. You need to get out, and you haven’t ever seen my house,” she said, when Mike had protested that the little dinner party would be too much effort, with Duck’s mother needing so much attention.

  “I’ll just sweeten up her five o’clock medicine a tad,” DeeDee said, dabbing at her sweat-bedewed upper lip with the tail of her astounding coral T-shirt. “I think it’s got belladonna or something in it. She nods right off, usually. You think I’m going to let my little sister sit over here in this heat eating in front of the television set when my house is all air-conditioned and my famous Coca-Cola ham is already in the oven?”

  “Well, that’s sweet of you, and I’d love to come,” Mike lied. The thought of DeeDee’s great, fat-glistening ham, basted liberally with Coca-Cola, that she had been much praised for in high school home economics, was about as appetizing as eating boiled, rice-stuffed dog, Chinese-style.

  “Oh, I’m glad,” DeeDee bubbled, and Mike thought that she did sound glad; sounded almost excited.

  “I hope you’re not going to work yourself to death,” she said. “It’s just plain too hot to eat much, let alone cook all day.”

  “Oh, shoot, I need a little festivity as much as anybody,” DeeDee said. “I don’t ever go anywhere or do anything but church, and I don’t even do that since Mama Wingo came. This will be a real treat for me. Duck, too. You come on, hear?”

  “I will, then.”

  “And Mikie, put on something besides pants, why don’t you? Something pretty.” DeeDee said it archly, but she was looking at Mike closely, and something in her gaze reminded Mike of Sam Canaday’s eyes as they had followed her into the house that afternoon.

  Why does everybody keep looking at me? she wondered fretfully.

  “What’s wrong with pants?” she said to DeeDee.

  “Oh, nothing,” her sister said, smiling placatingly. “You just look like a skinny little boy in them, that’s all. And you could be so pretty. It sort of hurts me to see you looking so … thin and unfeminine. Not that you look bad, you understand, just …”

  “I know,” Mike smiled at her discomfort. “Thin and unfeminine.”

  She remembered what Priss had said about DeeDee, about how she must seem to her sister: slender and alien and severely chic in her narrow pants and shirts and expensive shoes.

  “Okay, Dee,” she said. “I promise. The ruffledy-est thing I’ve got. Scarlett O’Hara wouldn’t be caught dead in it.”

  “Good,” DeeDee said, waddling heavily across the parched grass to where her battered little Volkswagen beetle squatted under one of the great water oaks. It had a huge orange daisy fastened to the end of its radio antenna.

  “You’ll be glad you did,” she called back over her shoulder.

  “Sure I will,” Mike called back. “And Mama Wingo will be enchanted.”

  “She won’t be the only one,” DeeDee caroled gaily, and got into the beetle and closed the door tinnily.

  Mike went back into the house and shut the front door against the exhausted evening air. At a quarter of eight, the thermometer beside the front door read ninety-four degrees.

  17

  THE FIRST THING SHE THOUGHT WHEN SHE SAW HIM WAS THAT she should have known from DeeDee’s behavior the previous night that he would be here. The second was that he had become the only kind of man possible to him: that he had been genetically programmed at birth to look like this in his fortieth year.

  “Hello,” she said. Her voice sounded faraway and fragile in her own ears. “I might have known I’d find you here.”

  And then, because it sounded so rude and abrupt, she flushed violently and was so embarrassed by the flood of heat on her neck and face that she reddened a second time.

  “Hello,” said Bayard Sewell. “I did know I’d find you here.”

  He rose from the La-Z-Boy recliner in the Wingos’ stunted, pine-paneled den and walked across the orange shag carpet toward her, hand outstretched, as she had last seen him in the foyer of her father’s house on a summer night two decades before. He moved as lightly as always, like a hip-hung jungle cat, and as deliberately, and Mike thought that she might have watched him walk toward her in just that way only hours before, instead of years. She put out her hand, and he covered it with his.

  “Cat got your tongue?” He smiled, his teeth flashing white in the sun-dark of his face. He had said it to her many times, she remembered, when anger or some other strong emotion had silenced her temporarily. He bent and kissed her cheek, and Mike made the ridiculous, automatic air-kissing motion that she had learned long ago in Manhattan beside his ear. He smelled of starched cotton and gin and something indefinable that had always been Bayard. Had she been long blinded, Mike would have known that it was Bayard Sewell who kissed her by the smell of him.

  “It’s good to see you, Bay,” she said. “Priss told me you were still here. I was
a little surprised. You look … just like you always did.”

  What in God’s name is the matter with me? she thought detachedly, still smiling her cool social smile at him, her hand still in his. My brain has turned to syrup. He doesn’t look in the least like he always did. He is the best-looking man I have ever seen.

  He was not, of course, but he was undoubtedly an arresting man. Heads would and undoubtedly did turn after him frequently in public places. He had the sort of visual impact that certain celebrities have, and heads of state; something indefinable that stopped the eye and breath without any debt to conventional handsomeness. On a trip to Washington with her sophomore class, Mike had seen President John Kennedy rise to throw out the first ball at a Senators’ game, and had felt the same leaping wildfire force about his sheer physical presence. Bayard Sewell was as apparently unaware of his aura as the young president had been.

  He was lean to thinness, and his thick, dark hair was frosted now with gray, and there were deep creases in his narrow face, the kind that pain leaves, and webs of fine wrinkles beside his eyes that stood out like white cross-hatching. He wore sharply creased khakis and a blue oxford shirt open at the throat, sleeves rolled up to expose his forearms. His feet were thrust sockless into age-softened Topsiders. It was the uniform of her rime and caste, as familiar to her as any other accoutrement of her world in the East, but it seemed on Bayard Sewell as if some cosmic tailor had fitted him alone in the twentieth century to wear it. His hand over hers was warm, almost hot, and a small pulse leaped in the hollow of his throat. Otherwise, he might have been carved of ebony and blue ice and some sort of golden wood.

  “You don’t,” Bayard Sewell said, leading her across the hideous carpet to the pine-and-leather sofa between the twin recliners, at the end of the room. “You look better than you ever did, and just as good as I thought you would. I like you in ruffles. You never used to wear them.”