Refuge

by Dot Jackson

  Upon these pagan altars he refused to lay any but the brass among his treasures. At the musicales he would play for Mama to sing Strauss waltzes ill-fitted up with words, and stuff from Lehar operettas. It satisfied them both. She loved them; he despised them. The guests applauded. When the house was empty, he would shut the French doors of the parlor and soothe his wounds with the salve of Schubert.

  Inevitably, starting with several other ladies of the Episcopal choir, pupils presented themselves. He would get exasperated with them sometimes, but I never knew the man to be really unkind. Not in English. I am not as ’shamed as I ought to be to say that I got to where I could mimic these lessons admirably, only at low volume, in the safety of the kitchen. I could make the proper tremulous tones by holding the table and jiggling my leg, and interrupt that artistry with explosions of “Himmel, fummon! Breet! Breet! Mit der belly breet!” Aunt Mit tried to keep a respectful face. “Dat ol’ man, he gwine ketch you,” she would say. But Camp would laugh himself double, till the tears would flow.

  Sometimes for the Doctor’s salvation we would spend a season in New York. That would brighten him. One thing that plagued him, he was arthritic and his fingers hurt.

  In one of the real old houses in our neighborhood there was a family that Mama had always known. Their name was Lamb. Actually, the man of that house, Mr. Hubert Pettigrew Lamb, Senior, was absent and presumed deceased. By some. Stamped clearly on my mind was the day he turned up missing. I remember Miss Lilah, his wife, laid back on the settee in our sun room, with her arms flung out and her eyes rolled back, just prostrated. Somebody had seen Mr. Lamb, who was a cotton broker, walking toward his office that morning, with his valise. And strangely, and suddenly, he had turned and started running for the railroad, just as a slow-moving freight hit the crossing. No, he was not ground to pieces by the wheels. The witness reluctantly reported that Mr. Lamb had saved himself by grabbing hold of the ladder, on the side of a car, and swinging on, with his free hand. His hat had blown off, in that act of desperation, and was returned to the “widow.”

  “Snatched away! Just snatched away,” Miss Lilah lamented. “Criminals have got him in they clutches, right this minute. Po’ Mister Lamb…”

  Courageous Mr. Lamb, Mackey said, when Mama and Camp had seen Miss Lilah sadly home. Mackey detested Miss Lilah. He called her “harmless as a serpent and wise as a dove.” It must be noted, but behind one’s hand and only once, that Miss Lilah had “married up.” As dressmaker to the ladies Lamb, she was often in that household, when Mr. Lamb was young and easily misled. The advent of Louise, who turned out to be a blue-blood, clearly, when her mother, clearly, was not, confirmed that matrimony by coercion had probably been justified.

  But, then, Mama’s uncle had been married to Mr. Hubert Pettigrew Lamb’s half-sister Margaret. So we were connected. And whether we cared much for Miss Lilah or no, she and her issue were due some loyalty.

  Her issue were two. The baby was about two years older than I was; he was named Hubert Pettigrew Lamb for his father, but outside the sanctity of his home he was generally known as Foots. That was one of the sidelights of everybody in a family being named the same thing; it didn’t matter what your name was, you probably weren’t ever called that anyway. Foots was Foots; it was just his lot. But I remember a mammy was still pushing him in a baby carriage when I was walking to the candy store all by myself. Miss Lilah didn’t want him to have to walk. I remember my father saying, with her very same expression, “Him little foots mus’ nevah touch de groun’.”

  I guess Foots was about seven or eight when his father crossed the bar, so to speak. His sister Louise was nine years older. Louise was my friend. She was very thin, she had dark reddish hair that curled but she pulled it back tight into a bun, on the back of her neck, and she had great, beautiful gray sad eyes.

  Louise played the piano extremely well. Never in public; she rarely ever went out in public, and when she did, she slipped around as quietly as a shadow. Miss Lilah cautioned her constantly about her heart. Like, “You know Louise you cain’ nevah tell when yo’ heart will make you faint.”

  Louise was an epileptic. That was a disgrace.

  Well, she was in her mid-twenties when Dr. Rehnwissel came on the scene, and timid as she was, they got to be great friends. In a little while he had her playing accompaniments for his pupils, to spare his crippled hands. He suggested then she take some piano students on her own. He also suggested that she teach them in our parlor, after he had made the curious observation that she never had a spell anywhere but at home. So she did, she took just two or three students.

  I liked having her in the house more. She was eleven years older, but she was closer than any friend I had that was my own age. She just seemed so wise. I told her all kinds of things I would never have thought of telling Mama. Things like about being in love.

  There was this boy named Siggie Bonenblume. Siggie had eyes like melted chocolate. His parents owned the biggest dry-goods store in Charleston. He played the violin. Oh, so soulfully he played the violin. We would meet each other at the ice cream parlor, and we went for walks along the Battery. We had long talks about life. When we were about seventeen we began to plan our great adventure. We would go to New York. He would go to a better music teacher than Miss Rothbard, who played with her eyes squinted and her tongue out the side of her mouth. And I would go to dancing class every day. Mostly though, we would just go to New York and get married. We were out walking one day when we decided that. Once it was agreed to, he led me behind some myrtle bushes and kissed me. It left us panting, and right sweaty.

  Aunt Mit watched things happen and took the matter to Mama. “Miss Nat, dat chile be talkin’ to dat boy. He dis won’ DO, Miss Nat. Dem peoples dey don’ believe dat Jesus Christ is riz.”

  Well, Siggie did play the violin, and it was a good bet, in Mama’s calculating mind, that he would never be poor. Her moral stance in favor of the Resurrection was pretty weak. “It might be better if you would not get serious,” she told me, discharging her Christian duty.

  Nothing was going to stop us. We walked into the store one day, hand in hand, to announce our intentions to Siggie’s mother. She was sitting on a stool behind the counter, putting down figures in a ledger. When she looked up and saw us, through her big thick glasses, her eyes looked like cold water under ice. “Mama…” Siggie said. She never said a word. She just looked. He never said another.

  Siggie’s mother wanted him to be a doctor.

  When I went to the ice cream parlor the next afternoon Siggie did not meet me. I got very embarrassed standing in the doorway, waiting, trying not to look abandoned. Then I went home and sat on the steps and watched for him to come along on his bicycle. It was drizzling rain when Louise came. I told her I was watching the gulls. But something they were doing was making tears in my eyes, and she sat down beside me, with her parasol over us, and finally I tried to tell her, and she put her arm around me, and dried my face with her handkerchief.

  “He was not the right one,” she said, making it so simple. “When the right one comes nothing will keep you apart.” Louise herself, I knew, must be waiting for the right one. Nobody yet had discovered how beautiful she was, locked up in her problems. Maybe nobody ever would. She took me to the picture show that night to see Charlie Chaplin.

  But I did not feel good for months. My stomach hurt. I had sore throats. It was not all love-sickness; it was the times. That spring and summer we went to war with Germany. Boys I had known always were going to the Army. Our house was depressed.

  Dr. Rehnwissel wore his own sorrow like a shroud. He was cut off from the lifeline of his intimates at home, and not being the most reasonable man in the universe he could see no end to it. Besides, it was not the most popular thing, right then, to be a German national in Charleston. Tacky people, who could not separate politics from art, would ask him point blank where his sympathies lay. Mama hung a big American flag on the front porch but at Halloween some bad ugly boys egg
ed the house, anyway. The Doctor refused to be consoled that they had egged some other people’s, too.

  Those things hurt him. One thing made him furious. Some of the ladies held a charity tea at our house, one day, and one of his pupils, Annie Sloan, the bank president’s daughter, was going to sing. She picked two songs by Schubert. The doctor played for her. She sang in German, sort of a reckless thing to do. After the first one, when the polite clapping had died down, one old biddy turned to another and in a voice like a goose honking she said, “You’d think since he’s a guest in ouah country he’d have mo’ respect.” Well, there was this stricken silence. And then the Doctor rose, bowed low, and said to the singer, “Annie, for this lady now you sing ’Old Black Joe.’” And he sat down and with thunderous ripples and flourishes he rendered an introduction. Annie stood there a minute and turned and fled, just mortified.

  Oftener and oftener, we would hear him singing, himself, in the shut-off haven of the music room. He had a favorite hopelessness song; it was Schubert’s “Trockne Blumen.” Dead flowers. He could put more splendid tragedy into the last line of that song than in all the rest of his repertoire. “Der Mai ist kommen, der Winter ist aus.” He sang it rasping and crackling and booming. He sang it for a lie. May was not coming. Winter was forever. Louise and I picked it up between us. In the pits, we would cry out to one another, “Der Mai ist kommen…”

  Louise knew the pits real well. She lived there. Her brother Foots—Hubert—had the Army breathing down his neck. Miss Lilah was hysterical. It was real strange—here she was so ashamed of Louise having epilepsy, and yet I do believe she’d have sworn Foots had syphilis if it would have kept him home. She couldn’t palm him off as her sole support because he’d never worked. She thought about sending him into the ministry, as an emergency measure. But no divinity school would have ever believed he was sincere. Amid the weeping and wailing, Foots had to go. Not far, just down a little way in the swamps, to a training camp. Onto those little foots that had never (or rarely) touched the ground they put some old rough army boots. Foots was always very particular about his food; he wouldn’t eat this and that. He liked pretty things; he had his mother’s habit of turning a piece of china over, at somebody else’s house, to see who had made it. Now there he was standing in line to dip his mush out of the pot, into his tin plate, like common people. He wrote his mother about the leaky tent and the mucky cot he slept in, and the coarse harshness of the people in charge. He had been assigned the duty, with some others, of digging privy pits. Miss Lilah would bring his letters to read to Mama. Miss Lilah was almost prostrated with grief.

  I was generally feeling sorry, at that time. I was sorry for Dr. Rehnwissel. And Louise. I think mainly I was being sorry for me, about being rejected by the whole world (which was one boy); just so alone. I was even right sorry for Foots. Foots couldn’t help the way he was. He was not an unattractive person. I mean in his looks. He was dark and thin and sort of angular. His features were sharp; he had been so little in the sun his skin was milky pallid, set off all the more by his black curls and deep-set black eyes. He was very vain about his clothes. Louise and his mother could be downright dowdy, but never Foots—a tailor sewed for him. In his pettedness, Foots was almost pretty. Only always it seemed like he held his mouth in a twist of shrewish discontent. It was strange. Somehow his perpetual dissatisfaction made it a challenge to please him.

  Oh, that I might never have known the effect a mosquito could have on my life. But, about six weeks after he was shanghaied away to camp, a mosquito bit Foots. Or apparently it did. Anyway he started having fevers. He shook and shivered until the Army despaired of a cure and sent him home. He had earned in that brief career—or at least he had been paid—the sum of thirty dollars and nine cents per month. Having contributed thus to home and country, he could in all good conscience retire, and devote himself to not recovering from his illness.

  When he was settled back into his room at home, his mother gave herself to attending the fallen hero until she herself collapsed. The household fell then upon Louise. They had help only irregularly, as it was circulated around the colored town that Miss Lilah was neglectful of settling her accounts. So I went sometimes to help Louise.

  She had another helper when it came to taking care of her brother. Foots had a long-time friend named Denby Turnham who was very devoted. They were logically matched; whereas Foots could be volatile, when crossed, particularly since the fevers, Denby was soft-spoken and serene. He played the organ at the Episcopal Church. In this hour of need he sat long evenings, reading to the patient or mopping his brow.

  And sometimes it fell to me to feed poor Foots, or to fetch for him. We had some amusing conversations; he disliked a great number of people and could talk about them wickedly. To be liked by Hubert Pettigrew Lamb was such an achievement as to be an ostrich feather in one’s cap. We had known each other always, of course, but had not spent such intimate times together. He seemed to be making a genuine effort to be nice.

  Only coincidentally, I noticed that the lifestyle in that household was in most ways terribly austere. The sheets were patched and fragile. Louise wouldn’t let me help her with the laundry; she hung it in the attic, and once when I went up looking for a towel there were a few shreds of female underwear hanging on the line, just tatters. Every scrap of food in that house was managed like it was gold.

  And also coincidentally, my father had set things up so that when I turned eighteen I would begin drawing income from his estate, on my own. The stock he owned in the shipyard had done very well, during the war. None of that was a deep dark secret from our friends.

  I can’t reconstruct what happened, exactly. I couldn’t have said what was going on, quite, at the time. I just know one day Louise and her mother were both sick to death with the flu, it was a terrible winter for the flu that year, and I was too low for a germ to come near me, so I had fixed them all some soup. And I took Foots his, and he looked so forlorn, with nobody to cater to him, and I sat down by him, in a chair by his bed. And he told me all about how awful it had been in the swamp, about the frightful corns his boots had made, and the shovel-blisters on his hands that got infected. And about how horrible it was to be night and day with men so crass and common. I had never known anyone crass or common; the experience did sound tragic.

  And I was moved to share the story of my own recent sorrow, of love and disappointment and rejection. There was no future for me, I said. No, and none for him, either, he said. He was troubled for his mother and his dear, afflicted sister. Now that he was incapacitated, what would become of them? And we sighed, and with a faint flutter he reached out his thin pale sensitive hand, and our futureless prospects were welded.

  Late that winter I married Foots. Friends our age were dying in the war; neighbors were dying of the flu. Propriety spared us the horror of a big flashy wedding. I remember standing in front of the preacher, in the archway between the parlor and the music room, answering what I had to answer, and all the while I was thinking right there in that corner is where they had put Mackey’s casket. It was like I could see it; it distracted me. Maybe it was all the flowers that reminded me. All the somber people. Louise stood up with me; I could hear her valiantly trying not to cry out loud. Denby Turnham stood up with Foots and cried out loud. But then Denby cried at baptisms and installations of the vestry. Miss Lilah sniffed dutifully into her hanky. My mother did not cry at all; she had fretted in suspicion that Hubert was not solvent. But then, there was no bluer blood in Charleston than came down through the departed Mr. Pettigrew Lamb.

  I would have a good name at last. A very good name.

  My mother owned that nice house on James Island that had come from her family. She and Dr. Rehnwissel moved into it and let us have the house where I grew up. We didn’t live in it alone, of course. The week we came back from Palm Beach the creditors moved in on Miss Lilah, discreetly, and the old Lamb place became the property of the Bank of Charleston.

  I didn’t know mu
ch about what to expect out of being married so I didn’t expect much. So for a while we got along fairly well. There did seem to be a good many things Foots needed; he went right away to the tailor’s and had him make some new silk shirts and summer suits. He had never had a car and it occurred to him that he needed one. A friend of their family died; Foots paid a duty call upon the widow and bought himself the old man’s Cadillac. Camp had to teach him to drive the thing; the happiest I ever saw him, though, was when he would sit in the back and have Camp drive him places.

  He mostly spent his days at the Bon Homme Club, smoking and talking big money and playing cards. He spent a lot of evenings at Denby’s. We did go to a good many parties; he was a good dancer, and the ladies found him droll and entertaining, especially the ones who didn’t know him well. At home he tended to be restless; boredom was his hobby. He was not a reader; no interest much consumed him, except gossip. He spent a good bit of his time, I found, studying the mirror, polishing expressions of aloofness and shrewdness and disdain, pulling in the waist seams of his jacket and sucking in his cheeks.

  As for our private encounters, they were not particularly rewarding. Not to either party, I am sure. And not terribly private, either; Miss Lilah had assigned herself the next room so she could appear in an instant, should Foots be “stricken.” Appear she would, often, and with no warning. “I-o-wa thought I heard Hubut mekkin’ a noise,” she would say.

  “He was snorin’,” I would say, as was generally the case. Come to think of it, he was oddly free of “fevers” for the first few weeks. He was the picture of health until one morning I got out of bed feeling horrible, myself, like I had swallowed a bug in my sleep. I didn’t get to the bathroom till I’d thrown up in the floor. Foots raved, he was so disgusted. His mother came gallumping in and stepped in the mess and howled. “Louweeeese! Louweeeeeeese! Call fo’ de doc-toah! Hubut’s lost his stomach!”