Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  Josie walked in her bare feet into the little closet-like bathroom which adjoined her room. She looked at herself in the mirror there and said, “I’ve never dreaded anything so much in all my life before. You can’t depend on what kids’ll say.” But were they kids? For all their prettiness, they were too big to be called kids. And nobody’s as damn smutty as a smart-alecky shaver.

  Josephine bathed in the little, square, maroon bathtub. There were maroon and white checkered tile steps built up around the tub, so that it gave the effect of being sunken. After her bath, she stood on the steps and powdered her whole soft body. Every garment which she put on was absolutely fresh. She went to her closet and took out her new white silk dress and slipped it over her head. She put on white shoes first, but, deciding she looked too much like a trained nurse, she changed to her tan pumps. Josie knew what young shavers thought about nurses.

  She combed her yellow hair till it lay close to her head, and put on rouge and lipstick. Someone knocked at the bedroom door. “Yeah,” she called. No answer came, so she went to the door and opened it. In the hall stood one of the boys. It was the little one.

  He didn’t look at her; he looked past her. And his eyes were as shiny and cold as those on a wax dummy!

  “Miss Carlson, my dad says to tell you that lunch is ready. And I’m Buddy.”

  “Thanks.” She didn’t know what the hell else she should say. “Tell him, all right,” she said. She stepped back into her room and shut the door.

  Josie paced the room for several minutes. “He didn’t so much as look at me.” She was getting hot, and she went and put her face to the window. The people from Memphis had come indoors, and the sun shone on the brownish green grass and on the still trees. “It’s a scorcher,” she said. She walked the length of the room again and opened the door. Buddy was still there. Standing there in white, his shirt open at the collar, and his white pants, long pants. He was leaning against the banister.

  “Ready?” he said, smiling.

  As they went down the steps together, he said, “It’s nice that you’re here. We didn’t know it till just a few minutes ago.” He was a Yankee kid, lived with his mother somewhere, and rolled his r’s, and spoke as though there was a lot of meaning behind what he said. She gave him a quick glance to see what he meant by that last remark. He smiled, and this time looked right into her eyes.

  After lunch, which Josie felt had been awful embarrassing, they traipsed into the back parlor, and George showed off the kids again. She had had a good look at the older one during lunch and could tell by the way the corners of his mouth drooped down that he was a surly one, unless maybe he was only trying to keep from looking so pretty. And all he said to the questions which George asked him about girls and his high school was “Yeah” or “Aw, naw.” When Henry brought in the first round of drinks, and he took one, his daddy looked at him hard and said, “Jock?” And the boy looked his daddy square in the eye.

  Buddy only shook his head and smiled when Henry offered him a drink, but he was the one that had started all the embarrassment for her at lunch. When they came into the dining room he pulled her chair out, and she looked back at him—knowing how kids like to jerk chairs. Everybody laughed, but she kept on looking at him. And then she knew that she blushed, for she thought how big her behind must look to him with her bent over like she was.

  The other thing that was awful was the question that Mrs. Jackson, the smallest matron and the one with the gray streak in her hair, asked her, “And how do you feel this morning, Miss Carlson?” It was the fact that it was Jackson’s wife which got her most. But then the fool woman said, “Like the rest of us?” And Josie supposed that she meant no meanness by her remark, but she had already blushed; and Jackson, across the table, looked into his plate. Had this old woman and George been messing around? she wondered. Probably Mrs. Jackson hadn’t meant anything.

  As they all lounged about the sitting room after lunch, she even felt that she was beginning to catch on to these people and that she was going to start a little pretense of her own and make a good thing out of old Georgie. It was funny the way her interest in him, any real painful interest, was sort of fading. “I’ve never had so much happen to me at one time,” she said to herself. She sat on the floor beside George’s chair and put her hand on the toe of his brown and white shoe.

  Then George said, “Buddy, you’ve got to give us just one recitation.” And Buddy’s face turned as red as a traffic light. He was sitting on a footstool and looking down at his hands.

  Jock reached over and touched him on the shoulder and said, “Come on, Buddy, the one about ‘If love were like a rose.’ ” Buddy shook his head and kept his eyes on his hands.

  Josie said to herself, “The kid’s honestly kind-a shy.” It gave her the shivers to see anybody so shy and ignorant of things. But then he began to say the poetry without looking up. It was something about a rose and a rose leaf, but nobody could hear him very good.

  George said, “Louder! Louder!” The boy looked at him and said a verse about “sweet rain at noon.” Next he stood up and moved his hands about as he spoke, and the blushing was all gone. He said the next one to Mrs. Roberts, and it began:

  If you were life, my darling,

  And I, your love, were death . . .

  That verse ended with something silly about “fruitful breath.” He went then to Billy Colton’s wife, and the verse he said to her was sad. The boy did have a way with him! His eyes were big and he could look sad and happy at the same time. “And I were page to joy,” he said. He actually looked like one of the pages they have in stores at Christmas.

  But now the kid was perfectly sure of himself, and he had acted timid at first. It was probably all a show. She could just hear him saying dirty limericks. She realized that he was bound to say a verse to her if he knew that many, and she listened carefully to the one he said to Mrs. Jackson:

  If you were April’s lady,

  And I were lord in May,

  We’d throw with leaves for hours

  And draw for days with flowers,

  Till day like night were shady

  And night were bright like day;

  If you were April’s lady,

  And I were lord in May.

  He turned on Josie in his grandest manner:

  If you were queen of pleasure,

  And I were king of pain,

  We’d hunt down love together,

  Pluck out his flying-feather

  And teach his feet a measure,

  And find his mouth a rein;

  If you were queen of pleasure,

  And I were king of pain.

  And Josie sat up straight and gave the brat the hardest look she knew how. It was too plain. “Queen of pleasure” sounded just as bad as whore! Especially coming right after the verse about “April’s lady.” The boy blushed again when she glared at him. No one made a noise for a minute. Josie looked at George, and he smiled and began clapping his hands, and everybody clapped. Buddy bowed and ran from the room.

  “He’s good, George. He’s good,” Jackson said, squinting his beady little eyes. Jackson was really a puny-looking little guy in the light of day! And he hadn’t thought the boy was any better than anybody else did. It was just that he wanted to be the first to say something.

  “He’s really very good,” Mrs. Jackson said.

  George laughed. “He’s a regular little actor,” he said. “Gets it from Beatrice, I guess.” Everybody laughed.

  George’s wife was an actress, then! She’d probably been the worst of the whole lot. There was no telling what this child was really like.

  “How old is he, Jock?” Jackson asked. How that man liked to hear his own voice!

  “Fourteen and a half,” Jock said. “Have you seen him draw?” He talked about his kid brother like he was his own child. Josie watched him. He was talking about Buddy’s drawings, about the likenesses. She watched him, and then he saw her watching. He dropped his eyes to his hands as Buddy
had done. But in a minute he looked up; and as the talking and drinking went on he kept his eyes on Josephine.

  It wasn’t any of George’s business. It wasn’t any of his or anybody’s how much she drank, and she knew very well that he didn’t really give a damn! But it was smarter’n hell of him to take her upstairs, because the boys had stared at her all afternoon and all through supper. That was really why she had kept on taking the drinks when she had made up her mind to let up. She had said, “You’re jealous. You’re jealous, George.” And he had put his hand over her mouth, saying, “Careful, Josie.” But she was sort of celebrating so much’s happening to her, and she felt good, and she was plain infuriated when George kissed her and went back downstairs. “He was like his real self comin’ up the steps,” she said. He had told her that she didn’t have the gumption God gave a crab apple.

  Josie went off to sleep with her lips moving and awoke in the middle of the night with them moving again. She was feeling just prime and yet rotten at the same time. She had a headache and yet she had a happy feeling. She woke up saying, “Thank your stars you’re white!” It was something they used to say around home when she was a kid. She had been dreaming about Jock. He was all right. She had dreamed that together she and Jock had watched a giant bear devouring a bull, and Jock had laughed and for some reason she had said, “Thank your stars you’re white!” He was all right. She was practically sure. His eyes were like George’s, and he was as stubborn.

  It would have been perfectly plain to everybody if supper hadn’t been such an all-round mess. What with Jackson’s smutty jokes and his showing off (trying to get her to look at him), and Mrs. Colton’s flirting with her husband (holding his hand on the table), nobody but George paid any attention to Jock. And she was glad that she had smacked Jackson when he tried to carry her up the stairs, for it made Jock smile his crooked smile.

  “They all must be in bed,” she thought. The house was so quiet that she could hear a screech owl, or something, down in the woods.

  She thought she heard a noise in her bathroom. She lay still, and she was pretty sure she had heard it again. She supposed it was a mouse, but it might be something else; she had never before thought about where that door beside the bathtub might lead. There was only one place it could go. She got up and went in her stocking feet to the bathroom. She switched on the light and watched the knob. She glanced at herself in the mirror. Her new white silk dress was twisted and wrinkled. “Damn him,” she whispered to herself. “He could have made me take off this dress.” Then she thought she had seen the knob move, move as though someone had released it. She stood still, but there wasn’t another sound that night.

  In the morning when she turned off the bathroom light, she was still wondering. She looked out of the window; the high net was down. No one was in sight.

  What they all did was to slip out on her before she woke up! And in the breakfast room that morning Amelia wanted to talk, but Josephine wasn’t going to give the nigger the chance. There was no telling what they had let the niggers hear at breakfast. Amelia kept coming to the breakfast room door and asking if everything was all right, if Miss Josephine wanted this or wanted that, but Miss Josephine would only shake her head and say not a word after Amelia had once answered, “They’ve went back to Memphis.” For all she knew, George and the kids had gone too. It would have been like him to leave her and send after her, just because he had promised her she could stay a week. (He talked like it was such a great treat for her. She hadn’t given a copper about the place at first. It had been him.) But he’d damned well better not have left her. She’d got a taste of this sort of thing for its own sake now, and she’d stay for good!

  Buddy opened the outside door of the breakfast room.

  “Good morning, Miss Carlson,” he said.

  “Hello,” Josie said. She did wonder what Jock had told Buddy, what he had guessed to tell him. Buddy wasn’t at dinner last night, or she couldn’t remember him there.

  He was wearing khaki riding pants and a short-sleeved shirt. He sat down across the table from her. “I guess we’re all that’s left,” he said. He picked up the sugar bowl and smiled as he examined it. The corners of his mouth turned up like in a picture kids draw on a blackboard.

  “Did Jock and George go to Memphis? Did they?”

  “Jock did.”

  “He did?”

  “Yes, he did. And Henry told me he didn’t much want to go. I was off riding when they all got up this morning. Daddy wanted me to go too, but I wasn’t here.” He smiled again, and Josie supposed he meant that he’d been hiding from them.

  “Where’s your dad?”

  “He? Oh, he went to the village to see about some hams. What are you going to do now?”

  Josie shrugged her shoulders and began to drink her coffee. Jock was gone. He might have just been scorning her with those looks all the time. She should have got that door open somehow and found out what was what. “Why didn’t Jock want to go?” she asked Buddy.

  “Our pleasant company, I suppose,” he said. “Or yours.”

  She looked at him, and he laughed. She wondered could this brat be poking fun at her? “Queen of pleasure!” she said out loud, not meaning to at all.

  “Did you like that poem?” he asked. It was certain that he wasn’t timid when he was alone with somebody, not at least when alone with her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. Then she looked at him. “I don’t like the one you picked for me.”

  “That’s not one of the best, is it?”

  Neither of them spoke while Josie finished her coffee. She put in another spoonful of sugar before taking the last few swallows, and Buddy reddened when she motioned for him to give up the sugar bowl. Amelia came and removed the breakfast plate and the butter plate. She returned for Josie’s coffee cup, and, finding it not quite ready, she stood behind Buddy’s chair and put her hands on his shoulders. The scar was right beside his cheek. Buddy smiled and beat the back of his head against her ribs playfully. Finally Josie put her cup down and said, “That’s all.”

  She went upstairs to her room. Jock had tried to get in through her bathroom last night, or he had been so on her mind that her ears and eyes had made up the signs of it. Maybe Buddy had caught Jock trying to open the door and had told George. At any rate George had sent Jock away. If he sent him away, then Jock had definitely had notions. Josie smiled over that one. She was sitting on the side of her little canopied bed, smoking a red-tipped cigarette. There was the noise of an automobile motor in the yard. George was back! Josie went to her dressing table and drank the last of her whiskey.

  She sat on the stool before her dressing table, with her eyes on the hall door. She listened to George’s footsteps on the stairs, and sat with her legs crossed, twitching the left foot, which dangled. George came in and closed the door behind him.

  “I’ve bought you a ticket on the night train, Josie. You’re goin’ back tonight.”

  So he wasn’t such a stickler for his word, after all! Not in this case. He was sending her home. Well, what did he expect her to say? Did he think she would beg to stay on? She would clear out, and she wasn’t the one beaten. George was beaten. One of his kids that he was so mortally fond of, one for sure had had notions. “Almost for sure.” George opened the door and left Josie staring after him. In a few minutes she heard his horse gallop past the house and out onto the dirt road.

  She folded her white dress carefully and laid it on the bottom of her traveling bag. She heard Buddy somewhere in the house, singing. She wrapped her white shoes in toilet paper and stuck them at the ends of the bag. Buddy seemed to be wandering through the house, singing. His voice was high like a woman’s, never breaking as she sometimes thought it did in conversation. It came from one part of the house and then another. Josie stopped her packing. “There’s no such thing,” she said.

  She went down the steps like a child, stopping both feet on each step, then stepping to the next. One hand was on her hip, the other she
ran along the banister. She walked through the front parlor with its bookcases and fancy chairs with the eagles worked in the needlepoint, and through the back parlor with the rocking chairs and the silly candle stand and the victrola. She stepped down into the breakfast room where the sunlight came through the blinds and put stripes on the brick wall. She went into the kitchen for the first time. Mammy, with a white dust cap on the back of her head, had already started supper. She stood by the big range, and Amelia sat in the corner chopping onions. Josie wasn’t interested in the face of either. She went through the dark pantry and into the dining room. She looked through the windows there, but no one was in the yard. She went into the hall.

  Buddy was near the top of the stairway which curved around the far end of the long hall, looking down at her. “Why don’t you come up here?” He pronounced every word sharply and rolled his r’s. But his voice was flat, and his words seemed to remain in the hall for several minutes. His question seemed to float down from the ceiling, down through the air like a feather.

  “How did he get up there without me hearing him?” Josie mumbled. She took the first two steps slowly, and Buddy hopped up to the top of the stair.

  The door to the kids’ room was open and Josie went in. Buddy shut the white paneled door and said, “Don’t you think it’s time you did something nice for me?”

  Josie laughed, and she watched Buddy laugh. Queen of pleasure indeed!

  “I want to draw you,” he said.

  “Clothes and all, Bud . . . ?”

  “No. That’s not what I mean!”

  Josie forced a smile. She suddenly felt afraid and thought she was going to be sick again but she couldn’t take her eyes off him.