Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  Josie smiled and said that she was glad he had enjoyed himself. George raised his eyebrows and cocked his head to one side. She kept on smiling at him, and made no movement toward taking the drink that he held out to her.

  George set the glass on the little candle stand near her chair and switched off the victrola.

  “George, I was listening . . .”

  “Ah, now,” he said, “I want to tell you about the cockfight.”

  “Let me finish listening to that piece, George.”

  George dropped down into an armchair and put his feet on a stool. His pants and shirt were white, and he wore a blue polka dot tie.

  “You’re nice and clean,” she said, as though she had forgotten the victrola.

  “Immaculate!” There was a mischievous grin on his face, and he leaned over one arm of the chair and pulled the victrola plug from the floor socket. Josie reached out and took the glass from the candle stand, stirred it slightly with a shoot of mint, and began to sip it. She thought, “I have to take it when he acts this way.”

  At the dinner table George said, “You’re in better shape tonight. You look better. Why don’t you go easy on the bottle tonight?”

  She looked at him between the two candles burning in the center of the round table. “I didn’t ask you for that mint julep, I don’t think.”

  “And you ain’t gettin’ any more,” he said, winking at her as he lifted his fork to his lips with his left hand. This, she felt, was a gesture to show his contempt for her. Perhaps he thought she didn’t know the difference, which, of course, was even more contemptuous.

  “Nice manners,” she said. He made no answer, but at least he could be sure that she had recognized the insult. She took a drink of water, her little finger extended slightly from the glass, and over the glass she said, “You didn’t finish about the niggers having a fight after the chickens did.”

  “Oh, yes.” He arranged his knife and fork neatly on his plate. “The two nigs commenced to watch each other before their chickens had done scrapping. And when the big rooster gave his last hop and keeled over, Ira Blakemoor jumped over the two birds onto Jimmy’s shoulders. Jimmy just whirled round and round till he threw Ira the way the little mare did you this morning.” George looked directly into Josie’s eyes between the candles, defiantly unashamed to mention that event, and he smiled with defiance and yet with weariness. “Ira got up and the two walked around looking at each other like two black games before a fight.” Josie kept her eyes on George while the story, she felt, went on and on and on.

  That yellow nigger Henry was paused at the swinging door, looking over his shoulder toward her. She turned her head and glared at him. He was not even hiding this action from George, who was going on and on about the niggers’ fighting. This Henry was the worst hypocrite of all. He who had slashed Amelia’s wrist (it was surely Henry who had done it), and probably had raped his own children, the way niggers do, was denouncing her right out like this. Her heart pounded when he kept looking, and then George’s story stopped.

  A bright light flashed across Henry’s face and about the room which was lit by only the two candles. Josie swung her head around, and through the front window she saw the lights of automobiles that were moving through the yard. She looked at George, and his face said absolutely nothing for itself. He moistened his lips with his tongue.

  “Guests,” he said, raising his eyebrows. And Josie felt that in that moment she had seen the strongest floorwalker weaken. George had scorned and laughed at everybody and every situation. But now he was ashamed. He was ashamed of her. On her behavior would depend his comfort. She was cold sober and would be up to whatever showed itself. It was her real opportunity.

  From the back of the house a horn sounded, and above other voices a woman’s voice rose, calling “Whoohoo!” George stood up and bowed to her beautifully, like something she had never seen, and said, “You’ll excuse me?” Then he went out through the kitchen without saying “scat” about what she should do.

  She drummed on the table with her fingers and listened to George’s greetings to his friends. She heard him say, “Welcome, Billy, and welcome, Mrs. Billy!” They were the only names she recognized. It was likely the Billy Colton she’d met with George one night.

  Then these were Memphis society people. Here for the night, at least! She looked down at her yellow linen dress and straightened the lapels at the neck. She thought of the women with their lovely profiles and soft skin and natural-colored hair. What if she had waited on one of them once at Jobe’s or, worse still, in the old days at Burnstein’s? But they had probably never been to one of those cheap stores. What if they stayed but refused to talk to her, or even to meet her? They could be mean bitches, all of them, for all their soft hands and shaved legs. Her hand trembled as she rang the little glass bell for coffee.

  She rang it, and no one answered. She rang it again, hard, but now she could hear Henry coming through the breakfast room to the hall, bumping the guests’ baggage against the doorway. Neither Amelia nor Mammy, who cooked the evening meal, would leave the kitchen during dinner, Josie knew. “I’d honestly like to go out in the kitchen and ask ’em for a cup of coffee and tell ’em just how scared I am.” But too well she could imagine their contemptuous, accusing gaze. “If only I could get something on them! Even catch ’em toting food just once! That Mammy’s likely killed enough niggers in her time to fill Jobe’s basement.”

  Josie was even afraid to light a cigarette. She went over to the side window and looked out into the yard; she could see the lights from the automobiles shining on the green leaves and on the white fence around the house lot.

  And she was standing thus when she heard the voices and the footsteps in the long hall. She had only just turned around when George stood in the wide doorway with the men and women from Memphis. He was pronouncing her name first: “Miss Carlson, this is Mr. Roberts, Mrs. Roberts, Mr. Jackson, Mrs. Jackson, and Mr. and Mrs. Colton.”

  Josie stared at the group, not trying to catch the names. She could think only, “They’re old. The women are old and plump. George’s wife is old!” She stared at them, and when the name Colton struck her ear, she said automatically and without placing his face, “I know Billy.”

  George said in the same tone in which he had said, “You’ll excuse me?” “Josie, will you take the ladies upstairs to freshen up while the men and I get some drinks started? We’ll settle the rooming question later.” George was the great floorwalker whose wife was old and who had now shown his pride to Josie Carlson. He had shown his shame. Finally he had decided on a course and was following it, but he had given ’way his sore spots. Only God knew what he had told his friends. Josie said to herself, “It’s plain he don’t want ’em to know who I am.”

  As Josie ascended the stairs, followed by those she had already privately termed the “three matrons,” she watched George and the three other men go down the hall to the breakfast room. The sight of their white linen suits and brown and white shoes in the bright hall seemed to make the climb a soaring. At the top of the stairs she stopped and let the three women pass ahead of her. She eyed the costume of each as they passed. One wore a tailored seersucker dress. Another wore a navy-blue linen dress with white collar and cuffs, and the third wore a striped linen skirt and silk blouse. On the wrist of this last was a bracelet from which hung a tiny silver dog, a lock, a gold heart.

  Josie observed their grooming: their fingernails, their lipstick, their hair in tight curls. There was gray in the hair of one, but not one, Josie decided now, was much past forty. Their figures were neatly corseted, and Josie felt that the little saggings under their chins and under the eyes of the one in the navy blue made them more charming; were, indeed, almost a part of their smartness. She wanted to think of herself as like them. They were, she realized, at least ten years older than she, but in ten years, beginning tonight, she might become one of them.

  “Just go in my room there,” she said. She pointed to the open door and
started down the steps, thinking that this was the beginning of the new life and thinking of the men downstairs fixing the drinks. And then she thought of the bottle of whiskey on her dressing table in the room where the matrons had gone!

  “Oh, hell,” she cursed under her breath. She had turned to go up the two steps again when she heard the men’s voices below. She heard her own name being pronounced carefully: “Josie Carlson.” She went down five or six steps on tiptoe and stood still to listen to the voices that came from the breakfast room.

  “You said to come any time, George, and never mentioned having this thing down here.”

  George laughed. “Afraid of what the girls will say when you get home? I can hear them. ‘In Beatrice’s own lovely house,’ ” he mocked.

  “Well, fellow, you’ve a shock coming, too,” one of them said. “Beatrice has sent your boys down to Memphis for a month with you. They say she has a beau.”

  “And in the morning,” one said, “your sister Kate’s sending them down here. She asked us to bring them, and then decided to keep them one night herself.”

  “You’d better get her out, George.”

  George laughed. Josie could hear them dropping ice into glasses.

  “We’ll take her back at dawn if you say.”

  “What would the girls say to that?” He laughed at them as he laughed at Josie.

  “The girls are gonna be decent to her. They agreed in the yard.”

  “Female curiosity?” George said.

  “Your boys’ll have curiosity, too. Jock’s seventeen.”

  Even the clank of the ice stopped. “You’ll every one of you please to remember,” George said slowly, “that Josie’s a friend of yours and that she met the girls here by appointment.”

  Josie tiptoed down the stairs, descending, she felt, once more into her old world. “He’ll slick me some way if he has to for his kids, I think.” She turned into the dining room at the foot of the stairs. The candles were burning low, and she went and stood by the open window and listened to the counterpoint of the crickets and the frogs while Henry, who had looked over his shoulder at the car lights, rattled the silver and china and went about clearing the table.

  Presently, George had come and put his hand on her shoulder. When she turned around she saw him smiling and holding two drinks in his left hand. He leaned his face close to hers and said, “I’m looking for the tears.”

  Josie said, “There aren’t any to find, fellow”; and she thought it odd, really odd, that he had expected her to cry. But he was probably poking fun at her again.

  She took one of the drinks and clinked glasses with George. To herself she said, “I bet they don’t act any better than I do after they’ve got a few under their belts.” At least she showed her true colors! “I’ll keep my eyes open for their true ones.”

  If only they’d play the victrola instead of the radio. She liked the victrola so much better. She could play “Louisville Lady” over and over. But, no. They all wanted to switch the radio about. To get Cincinnati and Los Angeles and Bennie this and Johnny that. If they liked a piece, why did they care who played it? For God’s sake! They wouldn’t dance at first, either, and when she first got George to dance with her, they sat smiling at each other, grinning. They had played cards, too, but poker didn’t go so well after George slugged them all with that third round of his three-dollar-whiskey drinks. Right then she had begun to watch out to see who slapped whose knee.

  She asked George to dance because she so liked to dance with him, and she wasn’t going to care about what the others did any more, she decided. But finally when two of them had started dancing off in the corner of the room, she looked about the sitting room for the other four and saw that Billy Colton had disappeared not with his own wife but with that guy Jackson’s. And Josie threw herself down into the armchair and laughed aloud, so hard and loud that everybody begged her to tell what was funny. But she stopped suddenly and gave them as mean a look as she could manage and said, “Nothin’. Let’s dance some more, George.”

  But George said that he must tell Henry to fix more drinks, and he went out and left her by the radio with Roberts and Mrs. Colton. She looked at Mrs. Colton and thought, “Honey, you don’t seem to be grieving about Billy.”

  Then Roberts said to Josie, “George says you’re from Vicksburg.”

  “I was raised there,” she said, wondering why George hadn’t told her whatever he’d told them.

  “He says you live there now.”

  Mrs. Colton, who wore the navy blue and was the fattest of the three matrons, stood up and said to Roberts, “Let’s dance in the hall where there are fewer rugs.” And she gave a kindly smile to Josie, and Josie spit out a “Thanks.” The couple skipped into the hall, laughing, and Josie sat alone by the radio wishing she could play the victrola and wishing that George would come and kiss her on the back of her neck. “And I’d slap him if he did,” she said. Now and again she would cut her eye around to watch Jackson and Mrs. Roberts dancing. They were at the far end of the room and were dancing slowly. They kept rubbing against the heavy blue drapery at the window and they were talking into each other’s ears.

  But the next piece that came over the radio was a hot one, and Jackson led Mrs. Roberts to the center of the room and whirled her round and round, and the trinkets at her wrist tinkled like little bells. Josie lit a cigarette and watched them dance. She realized then that Jackson was showing off for her sake.

  When George came with a tray of drinks he said, “Josie, move the victrola,” but Josie sat still and glared at him as if to say, “What on earth are you talking about? Are you nuts?” He set the tray across her lap and turned and picked up the little victrola and set it on the floor.

  “Oh, good God!” cried Josie in surprise and delight. “It’s a portable.”

  George, taking the tray from her, said, “It’s not for you to port off, old girl.”

  The couple in the center of the room had stopped their whirling and had followed George. “We like to dance, but there are better things,” Jackson was saying.

  Mrs. Roberts flopped down on the broad arm of Josie’s chair and took a drink from George. Josie could only watch the trinkets on the bracelet, one of which she saw was a little gold book. George was telling Jackson about the cockfight again, and Mrs. Roberts leaned over and talked to Josie. She tried to tell her how the room seemed to be whirling around. They both giggled, and Josie thought, “Maybe we’ll get to be good friends, and she’ll stop pretending to be so swell.” But she couldn’t think of anything to say to her, partly because she just never did have anything to say to women and partly because Jackson, who was not at all a bad-looking little man, was sending glances her way.

  It didn’t seem like more than twenty minutes or half an hour more before George had got to that point where he ordered her around and couldn’t keep on his own feet. He finally lay down on the couch in the front parlor, and as she and Mrs. Roberts went up the stairs with their arms about each other’s waists, he called out something that made Mrs. Roberts giggle. But Josie knew that little Josephine was at the point where she could say nothing straight, so she didn’t even ask to get the portable victrola. She just cursed under her breath.

  The daylight was beginning to appear at the windows of Josie’s narrow little room when waking suddenly she sat up in bed and then flopped down again and jerked the sheet about her. “That little sucker come up here,” she grumbled, “and cleared out, but where was the little sucker’s wife?” Who was with George, by damn, all night? After a while she said, “They’re none of ’em any better than the niggers. I knew they couldn’t be. Nobody is. By God, nobody’s better than I am. Nobody can say anything to me.” Everyone would like to live as free as she did! There was no such thing as . . . There was no such thing as what the niggers and the whites liked to pretend they were. She was going to let up, and do things in secret. Try to look like an angel. It wouldn’t be as hard since there was no such thing.

  It
was all like a scene from a color movie, like one of the musicals. It was the prettiest scene ever. And they were like two of those lovely wax models in the boys’ department at Jobe’s. Like two of those models, with the tan skin and blond hair, come to life! And to see them in their white shorts spring about the green grass under the blue, blue sky, hitting the little feather thing over the high net, made Josie go weak all over. She went down on her knees and rested her elbows on the window sill and watched them springing about before the people from Memphis; these were grouped under a tree, sitting in deck chairs and on the grass. George stood at the net like a floorwalker charmed by his wax manikins which had come to life.

  It had been George’s cries of “Outside, outside!” and the jeers and applause of the six spectators that awakened Josie. She ran to the window in her pajamas, and when she saw the white markings on the grass and the net that had sprung up there overnight, she thought that this might be a dream. But the voices of George and Mrs. Roberts and Phil Jackson were completely real, and the movements of the boys’ bodies were too marvelous to be doubted.

  She sank to her knees, conscious of the soreness which her horseback ride had left. She thought of her clumsy self in the dusty road as she gazed down at the graceful boys on the lawn and said, “Why, they’re actually pretty. Too pretty.” She was certain of one thing: she didn’t want any of their snobbishness. She wouldn’t have it from his two kids.

  One boy’s racket missed the feather thing. George shouted, “Game!” The group under the tree applauded, and the men pushed themselves up from their seats to come out into the sunlight and pat the naked backs of the boys.

  When the boys came close together, Josie saw that one was six inches taller than the other. “Why, that one’s grown!” she thought. The two of them walked toward the house, the taller one walking with the shorter’s neck in the crook of his elbow. George called to them, “You boys get dressed for lunch.” He ordered them about just as he did her, but they went off smiling.