by Peter Taylor
The sergeant leaned forward, craning his neck.
“I’m just going to tell you what happened to me downtown the other day,” she persisted. “I was standing looking in a store window on Broad when a soldier comes up behind me, and I’m just going to tell you what he said. He said he had a hotel room, and he asked me if I didn’t want to go up to the room with him and later go somewhere to eat and that he’d give me some money too.”
“I know,” the sergeant said. “There’s a mighty rough crowd in town now.”
“But I just told him, ‘No thanks. If I can’t make money honest I don’t want it,’ is what I told him. I says, ‘There’s a girl on that corner yonder at Main that wants ya. Just go down there.’ ”
The sergeant stood looking down the track, shaking his head.
“He comes right up behind me, you understand, and tells me that he has a room in a hotel and that we can go there and do what we want to do and then go get something to eat and he will give me some money besides. And I just told him, ‘No thanks. There’s a girl on that corner yonder at Main that wants ya. Just go down there.’ So I went off up the street a way and then I come back to where I was looking at a lot of silly clothes, and a man in a blue shirt who was standing there all the time says that the soldier had come back looking for me.”
The sergeant stretched out his left arm so that his wristwatch appeared from under his sleeve. Then he crooked his elbow and looked at the watch.
“Oh, you have some wait yet,” she said.
“How often do they run?”
“I don’t know,” she said without interest, “just every so often. I told him, y’see, if I can’t make money honest I don’t want it. You can’t say that for many girls.” Whenever his attention seemed to lag, her speech grew louder.
“No, you can’t,” he agreed.
“I save my money. Soldier, I’ve got two hundred and seven dollars in the bank, besides my insurance paid up for next year.” She said nothing during what seemed to be several minutes. Then she asked, “Where do your mother and daddy live?”
“In West Tennessee.”
“Where do you stay? Out at the camp?” She hardly gave him time to answer her questions now.
“Well, I stay out at camp some nights.”
“Some nights? Where do you stay other nights?” She was grinning.
“I’m married and stay with my wife. I’ve just been married a little while but we have rooms up the way here.”
“Oh, are you a married man? Where is she from? I hope she ain’t from here.”
“She’s from Memphis. She’s just finished school.”
The woman frowned, blushed deeply, then she grinned again showing her wide gums. “I’d say you are goin’ to take her the flowers. You won’t have to buy her any.”
“I do wish you’d take some of them back.”
The woman didn’t answer him for a long time. Finally, when he had almost forgotten what he had said last, she said without a sign of a grin, “I don’t want ’em. The sight of ’em makes me sick.”
And at last the streetcar came.
It was but a short ride now to the sergeant’s stop. The car stopped just opposite the white two-story house. The sergeant alighted and had to stand on the other side of the track until the long yellow streetcar had rumbled away. It was as though an ugly, noisy curtain had at last been drawn back. He saw her face through an upstairs window of the white house with its precise cupola rising ever higher than the tall brick chimneys and with fantastic lacy woodwork ornamenting the tiny porches and the cornices. He saw her through the only second-story window that was clearly visible between the foliage of trees that grew in the yard.
The house was older than most of the houses in the suburban neighborhood along this ridgetop, and an old-fashioned iron fence enclosed its yard. He had to stop a moment to unlatch the iron gate, and there he looked directly up into the smiling countenance at the open window. She spoke to him in a voice even softer than he remembered.
Now he had to pass through his landlady’s front hall and climb a crooked flight of stairs before reaching his rooms, and an old-fashioned bell had tinkled when he opened the front door. At this tinkling sound an old lady’s voice called from somewhere in the back of the house, “Yes?” But he made no answer. He hurried up the steps and was at last in the room with his wife.
They sat on the couch with their knees touching and her hand in his.
Just as her voice was softer, her appearance was fairer even than he had remembered. He told her that he had been rehearsing this moment during every second of the past two hours, and simultaneously he realized that what he was saying was true, that during all other conversations and actions his imagination had been going over and over the present scene.
She glanced at the sweet peas lying beside his cap on the table and said that when she had seen him in the gateway with the flowers she had felt that perhaps during the time they were separated she had not remembered him even as gentle and fine as he was. Yet she had been afraid until that moment by the window that in her heart she had exaggerated these virtues of his.
The sergeant did not tell her then how he had come into possession of the flowers. He knew that the incident of the cleaning woman would depress her good spirits as it had his own. And while he was thinking of the complete understanding and sympathy between them he heard her saying, “I know you are tired. You’re probably not so tired from soldiering as from dealing with people of various sorts all day. I went to the grocery myself this morning and coming home on the bus I thought of how tiresome and boring the long ride home would be for you this evening when the buses are so crowded.” He leaned toward her and kissed her, holding her until he realized that she was smiling. He released her, and she drew away with a laugh and said that she had supper to tend to and that she must put the sweet peas in water.
While she was stirring about the clean, closet-like kitchen, he surveyed in the late twilight the living room that was still a strange room to him, and without lighting the table or floor lamps he wandered into the bedroom, which was the largest room and from which an old-fashioned bay window overlooked the valley. He paused at the window and raised the shade. And he was startled by a magnificent view of the mountains that rose up on the other side of the city. And there he witnessed the last few seconds of a sunset—brilliant orange and brick red—beyond the blue mountains.
They ate at a little table that she drew out from the wall in the living room. “How have I merited such a good cook for a wife?” he said and smiled when the meal was finished. They stacked the dishes unwashed in the sink, for she had put her arms about his neck and whispered, “Why should I waste one moment of the time I have you here when the days are so lonesome and endless.”
They sat in the living room and read aloud the letters that had come during the past few days.
For a little while she worked on the hem of a tablecloth, and they talked. They spoke of their friends at home. She showed him a few of their wedding presents that had arrived late. And they kept saying how fortunate they were to have found an apartment so comfortable as this. Here on the ridge it was cool almost every night.
Afterward he took out his pen and wrote a letter to his father. He read the letter aloud to her.
Still later it rained. The two of them hurried about putting down windows. Then they sat and heard it whipping and splashing against the window glass when the wind blew.
By the time they were both in their nightclothes the rain had stopped. He sat on a footstool by the bed reading in the heavy, dark history book. Once he read aloud a sentence which he thought impressive: “I have never seen the Federal dead lie so thickly on the ground save in front of the sunken wall at Fredericksburg.” This was a Southern general writing of the battle fought along this ridgetop.
“What a very sad-sounding sentence,” she said. She was brushing her hair in long, even strokes.
Finally he put down the book but remained sitting on the stool
to polish his low-quartered military shoes. She at her dressing table looked at his reflection in the mirror before her, and said, “It’s stopped raining.”
“It stopped a good while ago,” he said. And he looked up attentively, for there had seemed to be some regret in her voice.
“I’m sorry it stopped,” she said, returning his gaze.
“You should be glad,” he said. “I’d have to drill in all that mud tomorrow.”
“Of course I’m glad,” she said. “But hasn’t the rain made us seem even more alone up here?”
The sergeant stood up. The room was very still and close. There was not even the sound of a clock. A light was burning on her dressing table, and through the open doorway he could see the table lamp that was still burning in the living room. The table there was a regular part of the furnishing of the apartment. But it was a piece of furniture they might have chosen themselves. He went to the door and stood a moment studying the effect she had achieved in her arrangement of objects on the table. On the dark octagonal top was the white lamp with the urn-shaped base. The light the lamp shed contrasted the shape of the urn with the global shape of a crystal vase from which sprigs of ivy mixed with periwinkle sprang in their individual wiriness. And a square, crystal ashtray reflecting its exotic lights was placed at an angle to a small round silver dish.
He went to the living room to put out the light. Yet with his hand on the switch he hesitated because it was such a pleasing isolated arrangement of objects.
Once the light was out he turned immediately to go back into the bedroom. And now he halted in the doorway again, for as he entered the bedroom his eye fell on the vase of sweet peas she had arranged. It was placed on top of a high bureau and he had not previously noticed it. Up there the flowers looked somehow curiously artificial and not like the real sweet peas he had seen in the rough hands of the woman this afternoon. While he was gazing thus he felt his wife’s eyes upon him. Yet without turning to her he went to the window, for he was utterly preoccupied with the impression he had just received and he had a strange desire to sustain the impression long enough to examine it. He kept thinking of that woman’s hands.
Now he raised the shade and threw open the big window in the bay, and standing there barefoot on a small hooked rug he looked out at the dark mountains and at the lines and splotches of lights in the city below. He heard her switching off the two small lamps at her dressing table. He knew that it had disturbed her to see him so suddenly preoccupied, and it was as though he tried to cram all of a whole day’s reflections into a few seconds. Had it really been the pale flowers that had impressed him so? Or had it been the setting of his alarm clock a few minutes before and the realization that after a few more hours here with her he must take up again that other life that the yellow streetcar had carried away with it this afternoon? He could hear the voices of the boys in the barrack, and he saw the figure of the woman by the stone wall under the chinaberry tree.
Now he could hear his wife moving to switch off the overhead light. There was a click. The room being dark, things outside seemed much brighter. On the slope of the ridge that dropped off steeply behind the house the dark treetops became visible. And again there were the voices of the boys in the barrack. Their crudeness, their hardness, even their baseness—qualities that seemed to be taking root in the very hearts of those men—kept passing like objects through his mind. And the bitterness of the woman waiting by the streetcar tracks pressed upon him.
His wife had come up beside him in the dark and slipped her arm about his waist. He folded his arms tightly about her. She spoke his name. Then she said, “These hours we have together are so isolated and few that they must sometimes not seem quite real to you when you are away.” She too, he realized, felt a terrible unrelated diversity in things. In the warmth of her companionship, he felt a sudden contrast with the cold fighting he might take part in on a battlefield that was now distant and almost abstract.
The sergeant’s eyes had now grown so accustomed to the darkness inside and outside that he could look down between the trees on the slope of the ridge. He imagined there the line after line of Union soldiers that had once been thrown into the battle to take this ridge at all cost. The Confederate general’s headquarters were not more than two blocks away. If he and she had been living in those days he would have seen ever so clearly the Cause for that fighting. And this battlefield would not be abstract. He would have stood here holding back the enemy from the very land which was his own, from the house in which she awaited him.
But here the sergeant stopped and smiled at himself. He examined the sergeant he had just imagined in the Confederate ranks and it was not himself at all. He compared the Confederate sergeant to the sergeant on the field this afternoon who had stood a moment puzzling over the tracks that twelve rookies had made. The sergeant is I, he said to himself desperately, but it is not that morning in September of ’63 when the Federal dead were lying so thick on the ground. He leaned down and kissed his wife’s forehead, and taking her up in his arms he carried her to their bed. It is only a vase of flowers, he remarked silently, rhetorically to himself as his wife drew her arms tighter about his neck. Three bunches from a stand of sweet peas that had taken the lady’s garden. As he let her down gently on the bed she asked, “Why did you look so strangely at the vase of flowers? What did they make you think about so long by the window?”
For a moment the sergeant was again overwhelmed by his wife’s perception and understanding. He would tell her everything he had in his mind. What great fortune it was to have a wife who could understand and to have her here beside him to hear and to comprehend everything that was in his heart and mind. But as he lay in the dark trying to make out the line of her profile against the dim light of the window, there came through the rainwashed air outside the rumbling of a streetcar. And before he could even speak the thoughts which he had been thinking, all those things no longer seemed to matter. The noise of the streetcar, the irregular rumble and uncertain clanging, brought back to him once more all the incidents of the day. He and his wife were here beside each other, but suddenly he was hopelessly distracted by this new sensation. The streetcar had moved away now beyond his hearing, and he could visualize it casting its diffused light among the dark foliage and over the white gravel between the tracks. He was left with the sense that no moment in his life had any relation to another. It was as though he were living a thousand lives. And the happiness and completeness of his marriage could not seem so large a thing.
Impulsively, almost without realizing what he was doing, he sat up on the other side of the bed. “I wasn’t really thinking about the flowers,” he said. “I guess I was thinking of how nicely you had arranged things on the living-room table.”
“Oh,” she said, for by his very words I guess it was apparent that she felt him minimizing the importance of his own impressions this evening and of their own closeness. In the dark he went to the small rocking chair on which his clothes were hanging and drew a cigarette from his shirt pocket. He lit it and sat on the edge of the little rocker, facing the open window, and he sat smoking his cigarette until quite suddenly the rain began to fall again. At the very first sound of the rain he stood up. He moved quickly to the window and put out his cigarette on the sill near the wire screen. The last bit of smoke sifted through the wire mesh. The rain was very noisy among the leaves. He stumbled hurriedly back through the dark and into the bed where he clasped his wife in his arms.
“It’s begun to rain again,” she said.
“Yes,” the sergeant said. “It’s much better now.”
The Scoutmaster
THAT YEAR all the young people in Nashville were saying, “Don’t tell me that, old dear, because it makes me too unhappy.” It was the answer to almost anything that could be said.
You could hear Virginia Ann saying it to her beaux in the parlor up in front. She had her own special way of saying it and would sometimes give new emphasis to the irony by saying “too, too, t
oo unhappy” or by beginning with “Please, please don’t tell me that.” Whenever she said it loud enough for Father to hear her all the way back in the sitting room, he would say that he could not bear to hear her using that expression, though he said he didn’t know why he could not. “I can’t abide it,” he would say. “That’s all there is to it.”
In the hall there was a picture of Father at the age of six, still wearing what he called his kilts but large enough to be holding the reins of a big walking horse on the back of which was seated Uncle Jake. My Uncle Louis, too, in his first pants, was in the picture. He was seated on the grass underneath the horse’s belly with his arms about the neck of a big airedale. (But Uncle Louis had died of parrot fever when he was only twelve.) Virginia Ann would show the picture to her beaux as they were leaving at night. It was always good for a laugh, especially if it was a new beau that had just met Father or Uncle Jake, who was living at our house then. “Really,” she would say, harking back to the thing that all the young people had said last year, “I think that picture is truly a sugar.” And she would point out Father’s long curls and the lace on the hem of Uncle Jake’s dress. Father would say that he could not abide that expression either.
I used to hear Uncle Jake asking Father very gently why he was so “hard on” Virginia Ann and asking if he didn’t know that all “modern girls” were like that. And I would sit and wonder why he was so hard on her. Father would say sometimes that he couldn’t explain it even to himself.
Mother found just as much fault with Virginia Ann, but she never worried about explaining what it was that was wrong. She would tell Uncle Jake and Aunt Grace (who was not Uncle Jake’s wife but Mother’s own sister, staying with us then after her divorce from Uncle Basil)—she would tell them that as each of her children passed seventeen she intended either to give them up as a bad job or, if they didn’t all turn out as Virginia Ann had, to sit back and rest on her laurels. Yet Mother’s groans were as loud as Father’s when they heard Virginia Ann greeting her date at the front door with “Well, well, well, if it isn’t my country cousin!” I would turn my eyes to her and Father as soon as I heard Virginia Ann say this, for I knew it was one of the things they could not abide.
