Benton's Row

by Frank Yerby

  “Is this thing serious?” he said. “Are they having an affaire?”

  “Damned if I know,” Nat growled. “I don’t think so. Stone’s having trouble with his wife. I think he’d like to divorce her and marry Pat. But there ain’t but two grounds for divorce in Louisiana: desertion and adultery. Either way, Hope gets Roland. And that’s what’s got Stone hooked. He’s crazy about that kid. Ain’t the faintest chance of pinning anything on Hope. She doesn’t even want to sleep with Stone, let alone another man. And she’s still in love with him after her peculiar Yankee fashion. So if anybody causes a divorce, he’ll have to. Make a mighty big mess if he does. You know how strait-laced folks are hereabouts.”

  “What—about Pat?” Jeb whispered.

  “Pat’s a lady. You ought to know that. She’ll marry Stone if he gets himself out of this. But she’s not going to help him, and start her life out under a cloud. And I don’t think she’s fool enough to accept back-street living. But you can’t tell about a girl when she’s in love.”

  “Nor a man,” Jeb said miserably. “Come on, Nat, let’s ride down to Tim’s and have a drink.”

  “Right,” Nat said.

  When they entered the building, Nat clutched Jeb’s arm and pointed to the glass doors of the tea-room.

  “Lord God!” he whispered, “look at that!”

  She moved among the tables, clad in the trim black uniform with the frilled white apron and cap that Tim insisted upon for his waitresses. Her red hair was drawn up in a chaste bun on the back of her neck.

  Even now, twenty-five years after that day, Jeb could remember all of it, the grey-green of her eyes, her lips full, a trifle pouting, the way she walked, the combination of small details that changed the aspect of a beauty really exquisite, made it something else. In repose the girl could have sat for a painting of a Madonna by a pre-Raphaelite master; but the moment she raised her heavy-lidded eyes and looked at them, the first time she moved half a yard, that illusion was gone, completely destroyed, and another had taken its place.

  “Ought to be a law,” Nat breathed, “against a woman like that ever getting out of bed!”

  “She’d probably kill a man in half a night,” Jeb observed blandly; “I know that type.”

  “O death,” Nat grinned, “where is thy sting?”

  Nat must have waited around all evening until she came out, Jeb mused, thinking about it now, so many years afterwards. It’s a pity he didn’t have more sense; but then I don’t suppose it would have made any real difference.

  He was right. It wouldn’t have. In the next few weeks Benton’s Row was rocked by excitement as profound as even the wave of feeling that swept over it four years later at the news of the sinking of the Maine.

  Tim’s receipts from the tea-room tripled, quadrupled. For the first time since he opened it, the majority of its clientele became male. Even the number of women patrons increased. They came out of curiosity to see ‘that awful creature’, as they called her.

  Red herself was overwhelmed with invitations to go driving, picnicking, boating, by all the town’s young blades. There were bloody fights over her; but she, driven by the same instinctive shrewdness that had made her resist all Big Belle’s offers to make her number one girl at the Parlour House, realising even then that her indisputable assets were worth far more than they could possibly command in that mass market—realising that, and also that the road into which Belle and so many others were trying to drive her led only one way, down; while she, in the very back of her brain, had the idea, the desire, and the ambition to go up, to become, indeed, mistress of this town, live finally in a great white house under the oaks, receiving the same women who now sneered at her—conducted herself with such circumspection that Tim was able to say very truthfully to the Baptist Ladies who came, demanding that he fire her:

  “On what grounds, ladies? She’s a good, hard worker, and honest as the day is long. You talk about the men staring at her and fighting over her; but tell me the truth—have any one of you heard one breath of scandal attached to her name? She behaves herself. All my girls do, or out they go, and they know it. That girl, since she came here, has conducted herself with more propriety than certain other young ladies from some of our best families, whom I wouldn’t dare mention by name. I always try to be obliging, but I can’t fire Saralee just because some of the younger bloods in this town haven’t any self-control. It just isn’t fair.”

  Nor could they budge him from his stand.

  At Jeb’s elbow the telephone jangled. He picked it up.

  “Yes?” he said. “Why, yes, Grandma. Pat’s packing right now. Of course we’ll come by to see you before we leave. Yes, Grandma. Sure thing, old dear, we’ll write every week—come back to see you on vacations. Don’t worry your pretty head about it—’bye now, sweetheart—’bye.”

  I don’t like to leave her, Jeb thought gloomily. Roland is as wild as Nat and Stone were then—I wonder how Stone got to Red? Everybody else failed. But that Stone was a true magician when it came to women—I remember how easily he charmed Pat. And afterwards—Red. He sat there, holding the stub of his cigarette, thinking about it.

  He had gone driving several times with Pat that summer of 1894, not as often as he would have liked; but often enough, because, as she told him later, Pat was already gradually bringing herself to the point of a final break with Stone. She already knew it was no good; that Stone would never leave his wife so long as he was bound by his love for his child; but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it—for Stone, more than even Nat, had that magical quality of Tom Benton’s, complete assurance, combined with vast animal vitality, and a kind of charm all the more appealing because he was totally unconscious of it.

  During those drives Jeb had come to grips with himself; and weeks before the final explosion he was already sure. He loved Pat Henderson. He was going to marry her if it were humanly possible—which made the situation all the more maddening, to be balked thus by a man who could not have her except in a way that Jeb was prepared to die to prevent any man from accomplishing.

  She laid a gentle hand on his arm the night he asked her.

  “Please, Jeb,” she said, “I can’t—not now. I like you very much. Sometimes I think I love you. Then he comes along and—”

  “And I’m gone, pouf, like that,” Jeb said.

  “Wait, Jeb. Listen to me. I’ve got to have time. Time to get this craziness out of my system. It wouldn’t be fair for me to come to you with a divided heart. I’ll tell you this, though—if I ever do marry anyone, it’ll most likely be you.”

  “Thanks,” he said bitterly, “thanks for nothing, Pat.”

  He turned the sorrel from her house and drove away to have it out with his half-brother, without troubling to reckon the danger involved in bearding a Benton, knowing in his heart that this was one of the things he had to do, if he wanted to be able to go on living with himself.

  Hope herself opened the door.

  “No,” she said, all the enormous dignity of her New England ancestors implicit in her tone, “he’s not here, Jeb.”

  “Have you any idea—” Jeb began.

  “You might try the Hendersons,” Hope said quietly.

  So, Jeb thought, you know, too. I should have known you would. There’s no escaping it.

  “No,” he said, thinking that in this at least he could comfort her, “I just came from there; I just took Pat home from a drive.”

  “Then I haven’t any idea. Won’t you come in, Jeb? Perhaps he’ll come back.”

  “No, thank you. If I don’t run into him tonight, I’ll stop by, tomorrow morning.”

  “As you like, Jeb,” Hope Benton said.

  But he did find Stone that night, becoming thus the first person in Benton’s Row to know what soon everyone knew, the basis for the feud between the twins that threatened, before the unpredictable element of chance entered into it, to end in the death of one or the other of them—and this at his own brother’s hand.

>   He came back to Broad Acres, not by the big gates, but by the bayou road that led past the old Henderson place, crumbling into ruin and decay now; and heard, almost as an echo, an answering whinny to the sound his own horse made. He pulled the sorrel up and got down, going on foot towards that house in which he himself had been conceived, although he did not know that then. And, as he came up behind it, he saw Stone’s buggy, the horse hitched to one of the crumbling fences.

  He hung there dizzily, feeling something inside him ripping, something bursting inside his heart, and the pain surging upward into his throat on a rush of brine and fire.

  Pat didn’t go inside her house, he recalled savagely. She was still standing there when I left. Waiting—for him. This is the end of it. I’ll go back with Aunt Stormy. And maybe, one day, when I’m a hundred years old, I’ll forget.

  He turned back towards his own buckboard. He had almost reached it when it came to him that he actually did not know it was Patricia in that house with Stone. He turned in a wild surge of hope, and came back, running, making no effort to move quietly, pounding up on to the veranda, calling:

  “Stone! Stone!”

  There was the sound of someone moving within. Jeb put his hand on the door, shook it furiously, crying:

  “Open, damn you! I know you’re in there!”

  The door crashed open. Stone stood there in the light of the risen moon, clad only in a pair of trousers, his feet bare. His hand shot out, catching Jeb by the shirt-front, and the muscles of his arm knotted, lifting the younger man clear of the floor.

  “You dirty little sneak!” he spat. “I’ve got a good mind to—”

  Then he saw that Jeb was looking past him, over his shoulder, oblivious to danger, or to fear. There was an odd expression in Jeb’s eyes, and after a moment Stone saw that it was joy.

  “Put me down, Stone,” Jeb said softly. “I’m sorry I broke in. You see, I thought—it was Pat in there.”

  Looking at his watch, as he drove away from there, Jeb was surprised to see it was only eleven o’clock. Tim’s bar at the Central Hotel would still be open, and every anguished nerve in his whole body cried out for a drink.

  At the bar he joined his half-brother.

  “ ‘Lo, Nat,” he said.

  “Hiyuh, kid,” Nat said morosely. “What’re you drinking?”

  “Bourbon. But it appears to me you’ve had enough.”

  “Ain’t drunk,” Nat muttered. “Ain’t drunk a-tall. Just sick, kid. All my life I’ve been able to take my women or leave them. But not now. Lord God, not now!”

  “What the devil are you talking about, Nat?” Jeb growled.

  “Red. Was just a game at first. Thought I’d take her out a few times, have myself some fun—a little roll in the hay, and that would be that. Only it wasn’t.”

  Dear God! Jeb thought.

  “I’m hooked. Can’t get her out of my system, kid. I got to have her for keeps.”

  “God, no!” Jeb whispered.

  “I’m going to marry her, kid. Going to marry her and make a decent woman of her. I know it’ll damn near kill Grandma, but I can’t help it.”

  Jeb stood there, holding the whisky glass between his hands. It was neither the time nor the place to reason with Nat, and he knew it.

  “Let’s go home, Nat,” he said. “We can talk about it tomorrow. Things will look a lot different by daylight.”

  Nat reached over, took Jeb’s untasted drink from between his hands, and tossed it down at a gulp.

  “It’ll never be any different,” he said.

  And it wasn’t. Even now, in this year of Our Lord 1919, twenty-five years afterwards, Jeb didn’t know the why of it. He knew, in a general way, and that only in part, what had happened. Of the people who knew more of it, only Stormy Benton was alive to tell it—she, and perhaps the woman, Red, herself; but no one in Benton’s Row knew where Red was, or had even heard whether or not she was alive or dead.

  By late autumn everybody in the Row knew about it: that intense, terrible rivalry of two brothers over the same woman, fought out with cold ferocity; though, in sober fact, one of them had no right to her; nor, perhaps, even the other, for no man has a right to his own destruction.

  Jeb was caught in the very middle of it. He was arbiter between his brothers, cursed at and berated by them both; torn, at the same time, by the spectacle of Patricia’s helpless grief, having to watch the object of his adoration suffer from an emotion she was powerless to control, kept from him, who had every right to her, by this insane barrier of feeling, watching this thing mount up, until even the love the twins bore one another was no longer enough, and Death himself stood between them, spectrally waiting.

  It was too much for him finally. He had to get out of it, had to change something, had, in fact, to end this hiatus in his existence, begin once more to live. He rode to the Hendersons’; but Patricia was not there. He whirled his horse and pounded down the bayou road. Long before he reached the old house, he met her coming back, riding sidesaddle, her face whiter than the moonlight, paler than dead dreams or lost hope.

  “You were with him,” he snarled at her. “God in heaven, Pat, I—”

  She shook her head.

  “No,” she said, “I wasn’t. She was.”

  They sat there, like that, on the horses, looking at each other.

  “Pat,” he whispered.

  “Yes, Jeb?” she said tiredly.

  “Marry me,” he said. “Now—tonight. I’ll take you away from here. New York, Paris—anywhere you want. I’ll be good to you. I don’t care what you’ve done.”

  “No, Jeb,” she said. “Not now.”

  “Why not?” he spat.

  “If I married you tonight,” she said quietly, “it would be for the wrong reasons. When I do, it will be for the right ones: when I’m really free to love you, Jeb. Let’s not talk about it now. I’m sick, and hurt, and terribly confused.”

  “I’ll never ask you again,” he said flatly.

  She smiled at him; but he saw the tears on her face, bright in the moon-glow.

  “Then I’ll have to ask you,” she said, “when it’s time. Come, Jeb, be sweet and ride home with me.”

  He turned the horse about and came up alongside her.

  “Very well,” he said; “let’s go.”

  A week later he was in a saloon on the edge of Storeyville in New Orleans. He was dimly aware that there was a woman with him; but he couldn’t remember what her name was or how she’d got there. He didn’t even know what she looked like. He kept peering at her owlishly, but her face kept blurring off into blobs of colour, suspended somewhere in the haze of cigar smoke.

  “ ‘Nother drink, Cookie?” she kept saying to him.

  He’d never really been drunk before. Tipsy, yes—in Paris, particularly. But not like this—never before for a whole week like this. He didn’t especially like the feeling; but it was better than not being drunk, than being alive, cold sober, and having to remember Pat’s face in the moonlight, with the tears on it, crying for his half-brother. He couldn’t get her face out of his mind; it kept getting between him and the shapeless, painted blob of the woman. He could see it now. It was very close to him. He could see the tears in her eyes. And he didn’t want to see her face. He couldn’t bear seeing it. He shook his head to clear it. But when he stopped shaking his head and opened his eyes it was still there: it, and all the rest of her, too.

  “Get rid of the whore, Jeb; I’m here,” Pat said.

  They were married the next night, after she had nursed him through one of the most formidable hang-overs in recorded history. They had a two-day honeymoon on Pat’s money, for Jeb had gone through his by then. Finally that was all gone, and Jeb wired his father for more.

  Four hours later the answer came. Jeb tore open the yellow envelope. Then Pat saw him stiffen, his lips go completely white.

  “What is it?” she whispered.

  He couldn’t answer her. He passed the telegram over.

 
“Hundred dollars waiting reception desk,” she read. “Come home at once. Stone is dead. Your Dad.”

  She stood there, holding it.

  “Jeb——” she got out.

  “Yes, Pat?”

  “You won’t mind if I cry? I’ve got to, Jeb; I can’t help it.”

  “No,” he said. “Go on and cry, Pat. Cry for both of us. I—I loved him, too.”

  He had put it together from bits and snatches gathered here and there. His father told him how his Aunt Stormy had rung the door-bell loudly in the middle of the night, then marched grimly into the house, saying:

  “You’d better come. Stone’s down on the bayou road with the buggy and a horse on top of him. I think he’s dead.”

  “Good God!” Clint whispered.

  “You’d better phone that fool Doctor whatever you call him. And some other men, too. I tried to move him, and I couldn’t. You’re going to need quite a few to get that horse off him.”

  “What happened?” Clint said.

  “Runaway. She was driving. That red-haired witch, I mean. I followed ‘em. I meant to give ‘em both a piece of my mind. I know from hard experience that that kind of peccadilloes mean nothing but trouble for all concerned.”

  “Come into the study and phone for me,” Clint said. “That’ll give me time to get dressed.”

  “All right. Clint—there’s one more thing I’d better tell you. I couldn’t see too well, but I’d swear my dying oath she threw away those reins.”

  “Why?” Clint got out. “Name of God, Stormy—why?”

  “I don’t know,” Stormy said. “I’ve been a female all my life, and I’ll be damned if I can tell you what goes on inside another woman’s mind.”

  “I asked her to marry me,” Nat told him. “She said she’d give me her answer tomorrow. I knew she’d been going out with Stone; but what could I do? You can’t kill your own brother, ‘specially not when you’ve been as close as Stone and me.”

  He looked at Jeb, his eyes dull with pain.