“I visited Acton’s people from my father’s house. Why did you let her go?”
“I didn’t know about Harlan. There are obligations——”
“Mamma, do you remember your father well?” interrupted Alabama.
“Certainly. He was thrown from a race cart when he was eighty-three years old, in Kentucky.” That her mother’s father had a graphic life of his own to dramatize was promising to Alabama. There was a show to join. Time would take care of that, and she would have a place, inevitably—somewhere to enact the story of her life.
“What about this Harlan?” pursued Austin.
“O, pshaw!” Millie said noncommittally.
“I don’t know. Joey seems very fond of him. He can’t make a living. Acton is well established. I will not have my daughter become a public charge.”
Harlan called every night and sang with Joan the songs she brought with her from Kentucky: “The Time, The Place and The Girl,” “The Girl from the Saskatchewan,” “The Chocolate Soldier,” songs with two-tone lithograph covers of men smoking pipes and princes on a balustrade and worlds of clouds about the moon. He had a serious voice like an organ. He stayed too much to supper. His legs were so long that the rest of him seemed merely a decorative appendage.
Alabama invented dances to show off for Harlan, tapping about the outside edges of the carpet.
“Doesn’t he ever go home?” Austin fretted to Millie on each succeeding visit. “I don’t know what Acton would think. Joan must not be irresponsible.”
Harlan knew how to ingratiate himself personally; it was his status that was unsatisfactory. Marrying him would have meant, for Joan, starting over where the Judge and Millie had started, and Austin didn’t have racehorses to pull her background for her like Millie’s father had had.
“Hello, Alabama, what a pretty bib you’ve got on.” Alabama blushed. She strove to sustain the pleasurable emotion. It was the first time she could remember blushing; another proof of something or other, or that all the old responses were her proper heritage—embarrassment and pride and responsibility for them.
“It’s an apron. I’ve got on a new dress and I was helping fix supper.” She exposed the new blue serge for Harlan’s admiration.
He drew the lanky child across his knee.
Alabama, unwilling to relinquish the discussion of herself, went on hurriedly, “But I have a beautiful dress to wear to the dance, more beautiful than Joan’s even.”
“You are too young to go to a dance. You look such a baby, I’d be ashamed to kiss you.” Alabama was disappointed at sensing Harlan’s paternal air.
Harlan pulled the pale hair away from her face. There were many geometrical formations and shining knolls and an element of odalisque retrocession about its stillness. Her bones were stern like her father’s, an integrity of muscle structure bound her still to extreme youth.
Austin came in for his paper.
“Alabama, you are too big to sprawl on young men’s laps.”
“But he’s not my beau, Daddy!”
“Good evening, Judge.”
The Judge spat contemplatively into the hearth, disciplining his disapproval.
“It makes no difference, you are too old.”
“Will I always be too old?”
Harlan rose to his feet spilling her to the floor. Joan stood in the door.
“Miss Joey Beggs,” he said, “the prettiest girl in town!”
Joan giggled the way people do when, entrenched in an enviable position, they are forced to deprecate their superiority to spare others—as if she had always known she was the prettiest.
Alabama watched them enviously as Harlan held Joey’s coat and took her off possessively. Speculatively she watched her sister change into a more fluctuating, more ingratiating person, as she confided herself to the man. She wished it were herself. There would be her father at the supper table. It was nearly the same; the necessity of being something that you really weren’t was the same. Her father didn’t know what she really was like, she thought.
Supper was fun; there was toast with a taste of charcoal and sometimes chicken, warm, like a breath of the air from beneath a quilt, and Millie and the Judge talking ceremoniously of their household and their children. Family life became a ritual passed through the sieve of Austin’s strong conviction.
“I want some more strawberry jam.”
“It’ll make you sick.”
“Millie, in my opinion, a respectable girl does not engage herself to one man and permit herself to be interested in another.”
“There’s no harm in it. Joan’s a good girl. She is not engaged to Acton.”
Her mother knew that Joan was engaged to Acton because one summer night when it poured with rain and the vines swished and dripped like ladies folding silken skirts about them, and the drains growled and choked like mournful doves and the gutters ran with foamy mud, Millie had sent Alabama with an umbrella and Alabama had found the two of them clinging together like moist stamps in a pocketbook. Acton said to Millie afterwards that they were going to be married. But Harlan sent roses on Sundays. Lord knows where he got the money to buy so many flowers. He couldn’t ask Joan to marry him, he was so poor.
When the town gardens began to bloom so prettily, Harlan and Joan took Alabama with them on their walks. Alabama, and the big japonicas with leaves like rusting tin, viburnum and verbena and Japanese magnolia petals lying about the lawns like scraps from party dresses, absorbed the quiet communion between them. The presence of the child held them to trivialities. By her person, they held at bay the issue.
“I want one of those bushes when I have a house,” Joan pointed out.
“Joey! I can’t afford it! I’ll grow a beard instead,” expostulated Harlan.
“I love little trees, arborvitae and juniper, and I’m going to have a long walk winding between like featherstitching and a terrace of Clotilde Soupert at the end.” Alabama decided that it didn’t much matter whether her sister was thinking of Acton or Harlan—certainly the garden was to be very nice, for either or neither or both, she amended confusedly.
“O, Lord! Why can’t I make money?” protested Harlan.
Yellow flags like anatomical sketches and pools of lotus flowers, the brown and white batik of snowball bushes, the sudden emotional gush of burning brush and the dead cream of Joey’s eggshell face under her leghorn hat made up that spring. Alabama understood vaguely why Harlan rattled the keys in his pockets where there was no money and walked the streets like a dizzy man traversing a log. Other people had money; he had only enough for roses. If he did without the roses he would have nothing for ages and ages while he saved until Joan was gone or different or lost forever.
When the weather was hot they hired a buggy and drove through the dust to daisy fields like nursery rhymes where dreamy cows saddled with shade nibbled the summer off the white slopes. Alabama stood up behind and brought back the flowers. What she said in this foreign world of restraint and emotion seemed to her especially significant, as a person will imagine himself wittier than usual in an unfamiliar tongue. Joan complained to Millie that Alabama talked too much for her age.
Creaking and swaying like a sail in a swelling gale, the love story breasted July. At last the letter from Acton came. Alabama saw it on the Judge’s mantelpiece.
“And being able to support your daughter in comfort and, I believe, in happiness, I ask your sanction to our marriage.”
Alabama asked to keep it. “To make a family document,” she said.
“No,” said the Judge. He and Millie never kept things.
Alabama’s expectations for her sister envisaged everything except that love might roll on using the bodies of its dead to fill up the craters in the path to its line of action. It took her a long time to learn to think of life unromantically as a long, continuous exposition of isolated events, to think of one emotional experience as preparation to another.
When Joey said “Yes” Alabama felt cheated out of a drama to whi
ch she had bought her ticket with her interest. “No show today; the leading lady has cold feet,” she thought.
She couldn’t tell whether Joan was crying or not. Alabama sat polishing white slippers in the upstairs hall. She could see her sister lying on the bed, as if she had laid herself down there and gone off and forgotten to come back, but she didn’t seem to be making a noise.
“Why don’t you want to marry Acton?” she heard the Judge say kindly.
“Oh—I haven’t got any trunk, and it means leaving home, and my clothes are all worn out,” answered Joan evasively.
“I’ll get you a trunk, Joey, and he is well able to give you clothes and a good home and all you will be needing in life.”
The Judge was gentle with Joan. She was less like him than the others; her shyness had made her appear more composed, more disposed to bear with her lot than Alabama or Dixie.
The heat pressed down about the earth inflating the shadows, expanding the door and window ledges till the summer split in a terrific clap of thunder. You could see the trees by the lightning flashes gyrating maniacally and waving their arms about like furies. Alabama knew Joan was afraid of a storm. She crept into her sister’s bed and slipped her brown arm over Joan like a strong bolt over a sagging door. Alabama supposed that Joan had to do the right thing and have the right things; she could see how that might be necessary if a person was like Joan. Everything about Joan had a definite order. Alabama was like that herself sometimes on a Sunday afternoon when there was nobody in the house besides herself and the classic stillness.
She wanted to reassure her sister. She wanted to say, “And, Joey, if you ever want to know about the japonicas and the daisy fields it will be all right that you have forgotten because I will be able to tell you about how it felt to be feeling that way that you cannot quite remember—that will be for the time when something happens years from now that reminds you of now.”
“Get out of my bed,” said Joan abruptly.
Alabama wandered sadly about, in and out through the pale acetylene flashes.
“Mamma, Joey’s scared.”
“Well, do you want to lie here by me, dear?”
“I’m not scared; I just can’t sleep. But I’ll lie there, please, if I may.”
The Judge often sat reading Fielding. He closed his book over his thumb to mark the end of the evening.
“What are they doing at the Catholic Church?” the Judge said. “Is Harlan a Catholic?”
“No, I believe not.”
“I’m glad she’s going to marry Acton,” he said inscrutably.
Alabama’s father was a wise man. Alone his preference in women had created Millie and the girls. He knew everything, she said to herself. Well, maybe he did—if knowing is paring your perceptions to fit into the visible portion of life’s mosaic, he did. If knowledge is having an attitude toward the things we have never experienced and preserving an agnosticism toward those we have, he did.
“I’m not glad,” Alabama said decisively. “Harlan’s hair goes up like a Spanish king. I’d rather Joey married him.”
“People can’t live off the hair of Spanish kings,” her father answered.
Acton telegraphed that he would arrive at the end of the week and how happy he was.
Harlan and Joan rocked in the swing, jerking and creaking the chain and scraping their feet over the worn gray paint and snipping the trailers off the morning glories.
“This porch is always the coolest, sweetest place,” said Harlan.
“That’s the honeysuckle and star jasmine you smell,” said Joan.
“No,” said Millie, “it’s the cut hay across the way, and my aromatic geraniums.”
“Oh, Miss Millie, I hate to leave.”
“You’ll be back.”
“No, not any more.”
“I’m very sorry, Harlan——” Millie kissed him on the cheek. “You’re just a baby,” she said, “to care. There’ll be others.”
“Mamma, that smell is the pear trees,” Joan said softly.
“It’s my perfume,” said Alabama impatiently, “and it cost six dollars an ounce.”
* * *
From Mobile, Harlan sent Joan a bucket of crabs for Acton’s supper. They crawled about the kitchen and scurried under the stove and Millie dropped their live green backs into a pot of boiling water one by one.
Everybody ate them except Joan.
“They’re too clumsy,” she said.
“They must have arrived in the animal kingdom just about where we have in mechanical development. They don’t work any better than tanks,” said the Judge.
“They eat dead men,” said Joan.
“Joey, is that necessary at table?”
“They do, though,” Millie corroborated distastefully.
“I believe I could make one,” said Alabama, “if I had the material.”
“Well, Mr. Acton, did you have a nice trip?”
Joan’s trousseau filled the house—blue taffeta dresses and a black and white check, and a shell-pink satin, a waist of turquoise blue and black suede shoes.
Brown and yellow silk and lace and black and white and a self-important suit and sachet pads of rose filled the new trunk.
“I don’t want it that way,” she sobbed. “My bust is too big.”
“It’s very becoming and will be so useful in a city.”
“You must come to visit me,” Joan said to her friends. “I want you all to come to see me when you come to Kentucky. Someday we’ll move to New York.”
Joan held excitedly to some intangible protestation against her life’s purpose like a puppy worrying a shoestring. She was irritable and exacting of Acton, as if she had expected him to furnish her store of gladness with the wedding ring.
They put them on the train at midnight. Joan didn’t cry, but she seemed ashamed that she might. Walking back across the railroad tracks, Alabama felt the strength and finality in Austin more than ever. Joan was produced and nourished and disposed of; her father, in parting with his daughter, seemed to have grown the span of Joan’s life older; there was only Alabama’s future now standing between him and his complete possession of his past. She was the only unresolved element that remained of his youth.
Alabama thought of Joan. Being in love, she concluded, is simply a presentation of our pasts to another individual, mostly packages so unwieldy that we can no longer manage the loosened strings alone. Looking for love is like asking for a new point of departure, she thought, another chance in life. Precociously for her age, she made an addendum: that one person never seeks to share the future with another, so greedy are secret human expectations. Alabama thought a few fine and many skeptical thoughts, but they did not essentially affect her conduct. She was at seventeen a philosophical gourmand of possibilities, having sucked on the bones of frustration thrown off from her family’s repasts without repletion. But there was much of her father in her that spoke for itself and judged.
From him, she wondered why that brisk important sense of being a contributory factor in static moments could not last. Everything else seemed to. With him, she enjoyed the concision and completion of her sister’s transference from one family to another.
It was lonesome at home without Joan. She could almost have been reconstructed by the scraps she’d left behind.
“I always work when I’m sad,” her mother said.
“I don’t see how you learned to sew so well.”
“By sewing for you children.”
“Anyway, won’t you please let me have this dress without sleeves at all, and the roses up here on my shoulder?”
“All right, if you want. My hands are so rough nowadays, they stick in the silk and I don’t sew so well as I did.”
“It’s perfectly beautiful, though. It’s better on me than it ever was on Joan.”
Alabama pulled out the full, flowing silk to see how it would blow in a breeze, how it would have looked in a museum on the “Venus de Milo.”
“If I could just
stay this way till I got to the dance,” she thought, “it would be pretty enough. But I will all come to pieces long before then.”
“Alabama, what are you thinking about?”
“About fun.”
“That’s a good subject matter.”
“And about how wonderful she is,” teased Austin. Privy to the small vanities of his family, these things so absent in himself amused him in his children. “She’s always looking in the glass at herself.”
“Daddy! I am not!” She knew, though, that she looked more frequently than her satisfaction in her appearance justified in the hope of finding something more than she expected.
Her eyes trailed in embarrassment over the vacant lot next door that lay like a primrose dump through the windows. The vermilion hibiscus curved five brazen shields against the sun; the altheas drooped in faded purple canopies against the barn, the South phrased itself in engraved invitation—to a party without an address.
“Millie, you oughtn’t to let her get so sunburned if she’s going to wear that kind of clothes.”
“She’s only a child yet, Austin.”
Joan’s old pink was finished for the dance. Miss Millie hooked up the back. It was too hot to stay inside. One side of her hair was flattened by the sweat on her neck before she had finished the other. Millie brought her a cold lemonade. The powder dried in rings around her nose. They went down to the porch. Alabama seated herself in the swing. It had become almost a musical instrument to her; by jiggling the chains she could make it play a lively tune or somnolently protest the passage of a boring date. She’d been ready so long that she wouldn’t be any more by the time they got here. Why didn’t they come for her, or telephone? Why didn’t something happen? Ten o’clock sounded on a neighbor’s clock.
“If they don’t come on, it’ll be too late to go,” she said carelessly, pretending she didn’t care whether she missed the dance or not.
Spasmodic unobtrusive cries broke the stillness of the summer night. From far off down the street the cry of a paperboy floated nearer on the heat.
Save Me the Waltz: A Novel Page 3
