by Frank Yerby
“I put it to her,” he whispered. “She just laughed and said: ‘Don’t worry, Nat—I’m going to marry a Benton all right. Just as soon as I can figure which one—’ Now she’s gone. She wasn’t killed. I found pieces of dress on the briars, like she’d gone through that wood in a hurry. I even got the dogs. They went plumb to the railroad-tracks. Then they just ran back and forth, yelping. She’s gone. But I’m going to find her, by God. And when I do—”
But it was Pat who explained it best, who formulated what was to him, at least, the most acceptable explanation:
“She loved him. She looked hard; but she wasn’t. Not that hard, anyway. There is a man somewhere, some time, who can reach any woman—any woman at all.”
Jeb stood there, looking at his bride.
“He must have broken with her. He was a pretty decent sort at heart. He’d decided to give her up. For Nat’s sake, most likely. Or maybe even for the sake of Hope and little Roland. Anyhow, something happened inside her heart and mind. She forgot all her schemes to marry a rich man, especially a Benton. She plain forgot and let herself be a woman, hurt and rejected, and blazing mad. Then she whipped that horse. Lord God, Jeb, one of the men with your dad told me he’d never seen such marks on an animal in his life.”
“She murdered him,” Jeb said.
“No. Not deliberately. She was just crazy mad. If she thought about it at all, I think she intended to die with him. Poor thing.”
“You pity her?” Jeb said.
“Yes. Her and every woman born in sorrow, I pity her, and I’m grateful to her, because she gave me—you.”
“She? Good God!”
“Yes, love. She did it the night I came upon Stone in a buggy with her, pawing at her like a drunken beast. The same night you asked me to marry you. I couldn’t then. It took me nearly a week—then one morning I woke up, and I was free. It felt like a mountain had been lifted off my heart. I wanted to laugh, to sing, to cry. Then I got up and flew over to your house. Your dad told me you had gone to New Orleans, and I said: ‘Oh, my God, I’ll never find him now!’ ”
“What did dad say?”
“He sort of grinned at me. Then he said: ‘If I were a young lady looking for a young man whose heart I’d just broken, I’d make a tour of the saloons. He’s probably drunk as an owl.’ And you were, too! Only I didn’t expect to find you with one of those horrible creatures. Tell me, Jeb, what was she like?”
“I don’t know,” Jeb said honestly. “I just looked up and there she was.”
“I don’t believe you,” Pat said tartly.
“Any more than I believe there was nothing between you and Stone,” Jeb said angrily. And there it was, in the open, the quarrel that had stayed with them for twenty-five years, that might even have destroyed their union but for little Hank’s almost unseemly haste in appearing on the scene one year and five days almost to the hour that they started on their honeymoon.
He got up from his chair and started for the stairs. There wasn’t any more to it, not any more that he had been there to remember. All the rest was history told by others: Hope’s startlingly swift decline into illusion, into madness—swift that is, until, upon talking to the negroes, his father learned how long it had gone on before, starting, actually, upon the first night of her marriage to Stone, when that all-male Benton had insisted upon exercising his husbandly prerogatives in spite of her quivering terror, thus inducing what the little doctor in far-off Vienna was already beginning to call Trauma. Her condition improved after a time, but deteriorated with the agony she suffered giving birth to Roland, and afterwards fluctuated with the alternations of tumult and quietude that were quite normal in any Benton household. Stone’s death, of course, was the thing that caused the irreparable damage to her delicate mental equilibrium.
Nat vanished, to reappear only in uniform, home on leave, on his way, finally, to Cuba and death. And finally Sarah insisted, old as she was, in her seventies then, upon taking care of the orphaned Roland. “I won’t be lonely then,” she had said; “besides, I know boys.”
The only Benton left, Jeb thought, as he climbed those stairs. Except me—and I don’t count. Hank would have been the one to carry on. Never thought what it would lead to when I took him down to see that first air meet in New Orleans—when was it? December, nineteen—nineteen ten. Hank was fifteen. That was what started it—Roland sneaking off to Marblehead and Newport News all during his years at college, learning to fly. Missed his own graduation to test a new type of machine for Tony Dexter.
Hank was never anything but Roland’s satellite. Followed him into the jaws of death itself. Only Roland came out again, and my boy didn’t. He had to die, and in a way so bad that Roland won’t even talk about it.
He came into the room just as Pat snapped the last bag shut. She whirled as he entered, and came close to him.
“If I may quote Athene,” she whispered, “let us be happy, Jeb. Let us be happy—please!”
3
YOU’RE going to do it, Grandma,” Roland Benton said.
“Just like you told me when I left. You’re going to live to be a hundred—maybe more.”
“Don’t count on it, boy,” Sarah said loudly. “I don’t care much no more. I just told you that so’s you wouldn’t be so worried. You’d come back from Harvard the end of February, remember, and there it was nigh on to the first of May, and you was still hanging around ‘cause you didn’t want to go way and leave me. You was dying to get to France—mainly ‘cause you wanted to study some more of that flying foolishness—I know that now. So I told you I had decided to live to be a hundred, smack dab up to 1923, and that I’d took it up with the Lord. And you believed me, ‘cause you knew anything I set my mind on doing I always managed to do. So you went and got caught over there by the war.”
“You also told me to be careful of Frenchwomen, too— remember?” Roland grinned.
“That I did,” Sarah snapped. “Should of known, seeing as how you’re a Benton, you wouldn’t take my advice. But then, all I knew about them then was what I read in books. And I never realised they had girls like Athene over there. Kind of daughter I always wished I’d had. Really sweet. Yep, boy, you done yourself proud that time. I’m glad, ‘cause there’s just one thing I’m waiting for now.”
“What’s that, Grandma?” Roland asked her.
“To see one more Benton come into the world,” Sarah said. Roland looked away from her, out over the sun-washed yard.
“There’s some things a body hasn’t any control over,” he said. “Some people never have any children.”
“Bentons do,” she snorted. “Only one I ever heard tell of who never had no kids was your Uncle Nat—and he never even got married, poor boy. You sure you’re doing your part?”
He turned, stared at her.
“Why do you ask me that, Grandma?” he said.
“I’m a plain-spoken woman. Maybe too plain-spoken, but I have to tell the truth as I see it. That girl don’t act like no satisfied wife, and that’s a fact, Roland Benton.”
Roland didn’t answer her. He stood up, looking towards the big gates.
“Here they come now,” he said.
Grace Dupré’s Ford T came rattling into the yard, drew up before the house and stopped in a furore of coughing and shaking. Grace all but fell from behind the wheel, and collapsed on the porch steps, overcome with laughter.
Athene climbed sedately down out of the car, and stood there staring at her.
“Is it that I have done something really terrible, Grace?” she said.
“Roland,” Grace hooted, “she’s priceless! She’s absolutely priceless! Where on earth did you find her?”
“Paris,” Roland said. “What’s she done now?”
“She has sent Doc Meyers seven cases of near apoplexy—maybe more. When she walked in the door in that dress with her hair cut like that, Harriet Major dropped her cards on the floor. Lord, it’s cute—I’m having mine cut just like it tomorrow!”
; “Doggoned practical,” Sarah said, “hot as it gets down here. When I think of all the years I’ve wasted a-brushing and a-brushing with my mouth half-full of hairpins . . .”
Athene looked from one of them to the other with big, wondering eyes.
“Was I brusque with them?” she said. “I did not mean to be—but they seemed to find everything I said shocking.”
“It was when they got around to their favourite subject, ‘How I manage my husband’, that she really floored them. Know what she said? And in that cute little trick accent of hers that keeps them hanging on every word: ‘But of course I do not manage mon Ro—land; that would be unthinkable. If he could be managed I could not love him, because then he would not be a man at all, but a thing, and it is very difficult to love a thing, n’est-ce pas?’ And when she said ‘a thing’ I kept lining them up in my mind: little old Henry Tolliver with his skinny legs and little round pot-gut, old man Major wheezing along, fatter than a brood sow—and . . .”
Athene came up to Roland and took both his hands in hers.
“You have not shame of me, my heart?” she said. “I would not have you have shame for anything in the world.”
“No,” Roland said. “No, little pigeon. You only gave them what they had coming to them a long time. I’m proud of you.”
“Then,” Athene laughed, shaking her small, bright head, “I do not care a fig for them! They are only droll types and of no importance at all—”
Cora came waddling out on the veranda.
“Dinner’s ready,” she said. “Y’all better come’n’git it, ‘fore hit gits cold.”
Seated at the table, Roland saw Athene looking at the food with wide-eyed dismay. He did not blame her. If, in sober truth, the best that can be said for most American cooking is that it is mediocre, any adjective short of ‘abominable’ applied to the culinary art of the Deep South becomes a kindness.
She tasted a little of everything, then pushed her plate away.
“What’s the matter, child?” Sarah said hopefully. “Feeling squeamish?”
“No,” Athene said. “I hope I do not again seem brusque, Grandmère—but this dinner is unfit for human consumption.”
“Dad-blame it, child,” Sarah snapped, “if these vittles ain’t fit to eat, I like to see what is!”
“Tomorrow I will prepare déjeuner for you, Grandmère,” Athene said firmly, “if you will be so genteel as to keep those nègres incroyables out of the cuisine and let me attend to everything.”
Grace leaned over close to Roland.
“Do you know what?” she whispered. “She’s right. This is lousy food!”
Roland smiled; but he had already moved out and away from there, the question of food providing the bridge over which his mind sped backward in time to another lunch, five years ago now, to the day of his arrival in Paris in 1914, in May, before the world had become unalterably changed; that day of enchantment in which he had met both Athene—and Martine.
On the boat-train coming down from Le Havre to Paris, that long-lost day, Roland could feel the excitement mounting within him. Everything was heightened, everything pleased him.
Even the uproar at the Gare Saint Lazare pleased him. He was delighted to find he could understand every fourth or fifth word of the conversation of passers-by. He realised at once that his grand-aunt, Stormy Benton Rafflin, was not there to meet him; so he pushed his way out of the doors and engaged a taxi.
The driver exercised the immemorial privilege of taxi-drivers: that is, hearing the thick accent, he promptly took Roland the long way, for which Roland for ever afterwards blessed him; for on that drive he found the second great love of his life—Paris.
It all delighted him, all of it. It meant something, was indicative of something, of how far the tribe of Benton had come, perhaps, that Roland could give way to the feeling that the cool, serene beauty of Paris called up in him, even to the limited extent he did give way to it. Tom Benton at the same age would not have understood his own responses, would, in fact, have been both puzzled and angered by them. But Roland, descending from the cab, laughed aloud and said:
“You’re one hell of a fine old town, aren’t you? Something tells me that you and I are going to get along just fine!”
“Comment?” the taxi-driver said.
Roland tried to explain it, but it was beyond his powers. The two of them laughed together, and the old pirate was so touched by so much youth and good humour that he only charged Roland double the usual fare, instead of triple, as he had intended to. Roland tipped him extravagantly, and went up to the house.
A maid in crisp black and a stiffly-starched white apron and cap opened the door.
“M’sieur?” she said, then: “Ah, but it is certainly the grand-nephew of Madame!”
Roland stared at her. She was, he decided at once, absolutely stunning.
“M’sieur?” the girl repeated calmly.
“Benton,” Roland said.
“M’sieur will have the goodness to follow me?” the girl said.
That, Roland thought, does not take goodness, bébé. In fact, his mind added as he watched the sinuous motion that served her for a walk, that’s the last damned thing on earth it does take.
He followed her through rooms crowded to the point of congestion with furniture, lovely old pieces individually but obscured by the French conviction that, if a thing is good, two are at least twice as good, so that Roland’s bewildered eyes could not rest on anything long enough to decide what it looked like.
She stepped into a small room and announced him, and he heard the crisp, decisive voice of his grand-aunt snap:
“Send him in, Martine! We’ve been waiting for hours.” The first thing he saw when he entered the small salon was his grand-aunt. At seventy-one, Stormy Benton Rafflin was a true grande dame, complete with lorgnette, black ribbon about her sagging throat, and a formidable hair-do. Her white hair still bore traces of its original black, and her face, which had weathered into granite, showed force, decision, clarity. She still had the figure of a woman half her age, and her gown was completely à la mode.
“So,” she said, “you’re Roland. You’re a Benton all right—except you have Mother’s hair. Hmmn—you’ll do. Handsome rascal, isn’t he, Athene?”
Then Roland saw who the second person in the salon was:
She was a girl of no more than nineteen, he guessed; blonde, exquisite, chic rather than beautiful; but so very artfully, perfectly Parisienne that the whistle his lips formed almost escaped them.
“I’m waiting to be introduced, Auntie,” he said.
“All Benton,” Stormy laughed. “Very well. Mademoiselle Yvonne Athene Josette Langeais, Vicomtesse du Bousquier, may I present my nephew, Roland Benton?” She turned to Roland: “She’s free at the moment and can show you about.”
“Great,” Roland grinned. “I can’t think of anything nicer than being shown about by so lovely a guide.”
“It will be a pleasure,” Athene said prettily; “but I will only be here a month. Mon fiancé takes his brevet at the Ecôle d’Aviation Militaire at Pau next month, and of course I must be there to wish him luck.”
“Your fiancé?” Roland said. “Oh, damn!”
“But it is natural to have a fiancé, is it not? You must have one in America, is it not so?”
“It is not so,” Roland said. “I’ve never had much time for girls—that is, up to now. But,” he added, speaking very rapidly out of the side of his mouth, “this fiancé of hers is going to have one hard row to hoe from now on, Auntie.”
“I’m with you, boy,” Stormy laughed, “all the way!”
“What does it mean, all this so very rapid talk?” Athene said.
“Nothing,” Stormy said, “except that you’re having your usual effect upon the male of the species, Athene—come on, you two. Sit down. I’ll have Martine bring apéritifs. I’m starved.”
She pulled the bell-cord, and Martine appeared so fast that Roland was sure she had been l
istening outside the door.
“Bring the Martini rouge,” Stormy told her, “and the Cinzano. Oh yes, a Pernod, too.”
“Yes, madame,” Martine said.
“I do not like this girl,” Athene said when Martine had left the room. “I do not understand why you keep her, madame.”
“Why not, child? She has to work somewhere, and she’s a good maid. Of course she looks like a seasoned poule and probably was; but I fail to see what difference that makes as long as she does her work and doesn’t bother me.”
“Maman,” Athene said primly, “would never permit such a creature inside our house.”
“Clarice,” Stormy said, “has your father to contend with—and your brothers. They’re men, and, what’s worse, Frenchmen. I don’t have that problem.”
Athene smiled.
“Ah, but you have now,” she said. “You have him.”
“I,” Stormy said flatly, “will break his head if he tries any tricks. And throw Martine out of the house.”
Martine came back with the bottles and glasses on a tray.
Stormy poured the sweet red Martini for Athene and Roland, and a pastis for herself. It was the first time Roland had ever tasted the popular French aperitif. It tasted exactly like the cough syrup his grandma had given him as a child.
“Your fiancé’s a flyer?” he said. “That’s wonderful. I’d like very much to meet him. You see, I am too.”
“You mean to tell me you risk your neck in those crazy things?” Stormy said.
“Yes,” Roland laughed; “but then I’ve an awfully tough neck, Auntie. Please, Mademoiselle, tell me all about it.”
It was, all in all, a day of pure magic. They were like children, fresh and happy and innocent, walking hand in hand. Athene was better than a professional guide, because she pointed out the sights to him with love and pride, as well as a marvellously exact knowledge of their history.
They had supper at the Café de la Paix, with violins playing about their table. They came out into the starlight, and Athene looked at her watch.
