Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  Aunt Grace was never gentle with people the way Uncle Jake was. She would tell Mother and Father that they were real fools to be so critical of Virginia Ann, who she said was one of the brightest, cleanest girls she had ever known. Hadn’t this daughter of theirs had the finest average in her junior class? And wasn’t she studying practical things even in high school (business administration, accounting, shorthand!)? Father and Mother would nod and smile. Father would be put in such a grand good humor by Aunt Grace’s admiration of his daughter that he would begin to tease her about some unmarried man or other in their acquaintance. Or he would take off his spectacles and smile benevolently at her as she ranted, she now making a show of her outspokenness: Wasn’t Virginia Ann’s behavior with her beaux above all suspicion? she would ask. Certainly she was one of the few young girls who never— Never once! Aunt Grace could vouch for it. She had the girl’s confidence—never stepped outside the front door to say good night to her date.

  “Poor Grace!” Father and Mother would sit for a long while after one of these outbursts and lament the hard lot that had been Aunt Grace’s. Uncle Basil was such a hopeless ne’er-do-well, really a drunken scoundrel whose vanity and social ambitions had been his ruination; and yet they believed that deep in her heart Grace loved him still. And that was going to make it hard for her ever to marry again. How sad it was. She was still a comparatively young woman. “Today women of thirty-eight are looked upon as quite young, you know,” one of them would say.

  And, for all she had been through, they agreed, Aunt Grace showed her years remarkably little. Who would ever have guessed that she was actually only five years younger than dear, sweet Jake? She had a certain girlish prettiness about her that would always deny her age.

  Yet it wasn’t that Uncle Jake’s own sad life told on him (“No one has ever borne such sadness as his with so fine a spirit”), but, Father explained, Jake had had a motherless daughter to raise and to nurse through a fatal illness at the age of nineteen, and that had kept him old-fashioned. Even if this motherless daughter of his had not been a prig and a fanatic— His daughter had died at nineteen from a skin disease she had caught in her social work. Her name had been Margaret, but he had always called her “Presh” for “precious”—even if she had not been such a one, Uncle Jake would have remained old-fashioned, Father explained, because just raising a child did that for one.

  Aunt Grace stayed with us for six weeks after she had gotten her divorce. The morning that she left for her job in Birmingham I came and sat beside her on the porch swing. She pulled me up close to her and beckoned to Brother to come and sit at her other side. “I’ve stayed here on you forever,” she said to Mother and Father who were seated about the porch with Virginia Ann and Uncle Jake, “and these two rascals are not the least of my reasons for it.” Simultaneously she pressed Brother and myself so tightly to her that we found ourselves face to face, each with a cheek lying against the blue linen cloth of the suit she and Virginia Ann had been sewing on for a week. Brother had just reached the age to join Uncle Jake’s Boy Scout troop, and it occurred to me that if Aunt Grace was so very young Brother would soon be old enough to marry her himself. I looked into his eyes to see if he were going to cry about her going away. But he was looking back at me with a grin on his face. Presently he stuck out his tongue, curled it up on each side till it looked like a tulip, and before I could pull away from Aunt Grace’s embrace he had blown a spit bubble in my face.

  A fight ensued right across Aunt Grace’s lap. It was a furious, noisy scuffle and it left the new linen skirt in a hundred creases and wrinkles. Yet Aunt Grace’s good humor remained unruffled. And as Uncle Jake’s large and gentle hands pulled us apart I caught a quick glimpse of my aunt’s face. Her head was thrown back, as to avoid the blows. Her soft creamlike complexion seemed to have just a little more color than usual. Her big blue eyes, matching her blue hat and her blue suit, were squinted as they always were when she laughed. Between her bursts of laughter she was saying, “Look! Look! Look at the little demons. See them! I wish you could see their eyes flashing.”

  It was Brother and I that Aunt Grace took with her in the taxi. All of the grown-ups had, of course, wanted to go with her to the station. Uncle Jake had even brought his car from the garage, and Father’s car always stayed in front of the house. But she would let neither of them drive her to the depot. She would not even let Virginia Ann—who tried with Aunt Grace to make a joke about the parting though there were certainly tears caught in the long lashes of her small brown eyes—Aunt Grace would not even let her go along. They were both very gay, but Aunt Grace’s gaiety had so much more unity and was so much more convincing and contagious that you hardly noticed Virginia Ann’s.

  When the taxi came she made everyone but the children say good-bye to her on the porch. Brother and I helped the driver take her luggage to the cab, and we waited in the backseat while she walked down the front walk with her arm about our sister’s waist. Just before they reached the cab they even skipped for a few steps and sang without any special tune, “Look out, Birmingham, here comes the widow from Nashville, Tenn-tenn-tennessee.”

  They stopped a minute at the car door and we heard Virginia Ann saying, “I’ll keep you posted on my progress with you-know-who and such stuff. It’ll be, ‘Dear Miss Dix, I care deeply for someone who . . .’ ”

  “Oh, he’ll come around,” Aunt Grace said. “I know the type—silent, serious, indifferent.”

  “I’ll write you all about it.”

  “You write me, Virginia Ann. But, Virginia Ann, here’s one parting piece from your Aunt Grace before she goes: Let the boys be fools about you. Don’t you ever be the fool. Don’t be a little fool for any boy.”

  Virginia Ann blushed and then laughed in a high, excited voice. Aunt Grace laughed too, and they kissed each other good-bye.

  It was my and Brother’s first ride in a taxicab, and we were going to ride the streetcar home, a thing which we had not done many times unless accompanied by Father. I sat gazing first at the noisy meter, then at the picture of the driver on his license that hung beside the rearview mirror. We rode for several blocks through the streets lined with the two-story residences, each approximating a square or oblong shape, each roofed with tile or slate or painted shingle, each having a porch built of the same solid materials appended to the front or the side of the house, each with a yard big enough for perhaps one, two, or three trees, every last one of these houses with features so like those of my father’s house that they failed to rouse any curiosity in me. And so finally I turned and simply looked at Aunt Grace.

  She was just then peering over the cardboard hatbox that she held most carefully on her lap, trying to see the time by her tiny wristwatch. Her white-gloved forefinger and thumb pushed the glove of the other hand from a white silk cuff (a dainty yet full cuff extending below the blue sleeve of her suit coat) and she was bending cautiously over the big round box to get a view of the dial. I climbed to my knees and myself peered over to the face of that little white gold ornament. When I saw that the tiny black hands actually told the correct time of day I experienced a breathtaking amazement.

  But I raised my eyes to Aunt Grace’s face, and no longer did it seem that the watch was the cause of my amazement. I felt myself growing timid in her presence, for she had become a stranger to me. The hatbox, the watch, the white gloves, the absurdly full silk cuffs, the blue linen suit on which she had labored so long and so painstakingly, and even the tiny brown bows on her white shoes all took on a significance. The watch seemed to have been but a key. And all of those things that once indicated that Aunt Grace was one sort of person now indicated that she was quite another sort. She was not the utterly useless if wonderfully ornamental member of the family. In the solid blueness of her eyes I was surely on the verge of finding some marvelous function for her personality. (I would have said my mother’s function was Motherhood and my father’s, Fatherhood.) I was about to find the reason why there should be one member o
f a boy’s family who was wise or old-fashioned enough to sit with Mother and Father and discuss the things they could not abide in Virginia Ann and yet who was foolish or newfangled enough to enjoy the very things that Virginia Ann called “the last word.” But it was precisely then that the cab stopped before the entrance to the dirty limestone railroad depot, and Uncle Basil stepped up and opened the automobile door.

  I hopped out onto the sidewalk and Brother after me, he taking the small suitcase and I the cardboard hatbox which I held by a heavy black ribbon that was tied in a bow knot above the side of the box. Aunt Grace followed us straightening her straw hat with her left hand, clasping her white purse under her right arm. She and Uncle Basil began to talk as though they were strangers making pleasant conversation. It seemed that Aunt Grace did not cease her chatter and her excited laughter from the time she left the taxi until we saw her on the train.

  Uncle Basil’s very presence was itself shocking, but I was even more astonished to find him unchanged in appearance. Actually I must have recognized him by his smart attire—his plaid coat and white trousers—for it had been fully a year since he had been to our house. I had expected dissipation to show not only in his face but in his dress as well. He paid the taxi driver over Aunt Grace’s protests and summoned a Negro redcap to take all the luggage. Brother and I followed them into the station.

  We followed them under the high, vaulted ceiling of the lobby and into the station yard. All the while Aunt Grace’s laughter could be heard above the hum of people whom, one and all, I imagined to be taking their final farewell of one another. When we were in the station yard her laughter seemed to reach even a higher pitch.

  Finally we were waiting beside the sleeping car into which the redcap had taken Aunt Grace’s luggage. Brother and I studied the black wheels and the oily brakes underneath the car. The conductor in blue called, “Ullaboward.” I looked up and saw Uncle Basil speaking with an expression on his face that was half serious and half playful. Aunt Grace stopped laughing just long enough to say something that made him blush. She told him not to tell her that, because it made her too, too unhappy. Then she turned from him to us and stooping down, she put her arms around Brother and me and kissed us again and again. “Put these two rascals on the streetcar, will you, Basil?”

  When she stepped into the dark vestibule of the sleeping car I saw a bit of the lace that hemmed her “slip” showing from beneath her blue skirt. I felt that it was more like the wide lace on Mother’s petticoats than the little strips on Virginia Ann’s. The train began to move, and she was still in the vestibule looking over the conductor’s shoulder. Presently she began to laugh as she waved to us. I suddenly turned my face so as not to see the enormous spread of her smile, but for several seconds it seemed that I could hear the sound of her strange, high laughter above the noise and commotion of the train.

  Uncle Jake used afterward to repeat the witty things that Aunt Grace had said when she was staying with us. Oftentimes when the clock on the mantel of the upstairs sitting room chimed he would remind the other members of the family—sometimes only with a smile—of what Grace used to say about the quarter-hourly chiming. “Remember what Grace used to say, ‘I’d as soon have someone come and knock on my door every fifteen minutes of the night and say, “Fifteen minutes have passed,” as have that clock in a house of mine.’ ”

  He would talk about what a happy nature Aunt Grace had. Whenever Mother said that she worried about how Aunt Grace was getting on in Birmingham with her new job, he would say that Aunt Grace would always be happy, that she was one of those fortunate people who have a special faculty for happiness. He would sometimes recall the songs that she and Virginia Ann had sung together when they washed dishes on Sunday night. They were the only popular songs he had ever seemed to catch on to. He would speak of her as the “Sleepy Time Gal,” for she had called herself that whenever she came down to breakfast later than the rest of the family or whenever she went up to bed earlier. You could hear her on the stairs singing in a voice that mimicked the blues singers we heard on the radio:

  . . . you’re turning night into day . . .

  My little stay at home, play at home,

  eight o’clock sleepy time gal.

  At night especially her voice seemed to drift through the whole house like a wisp of smoke. Sometimes before bed she and Virginia Ann would don their most outlandishly faded and ragged wrappers and with cold cream on their faces and with their hair in a hundred metal curlers they would waltz about the bare floor of the upstairs hall singing. They would sing “I’d Climb the Highest Mountain” or “Three O’Clock in the Morning.” But the song that Uncle Jake said he could not help liking best of all was called “Melancholy Baby.” Mother and Father said it was no better than other new songs. Father would say, “I think maybe it’s even a little more suggestive, Jake, than the usual run.” But Uncle Jake said that it had more of the old-time feeling in it and that it put one in a mood the way music was supposed to do. So he would sit and listen while Virginia Ann accompanied herself and Aunt Grace on the piano:

  Every cloud must have a silver lining.

  Wait until the sun shines through.

  So smile, my honey dear,

  While I kiss away each tear,

  Or else I shall be melancholy too.

  Yet it wasn’t Aunt Grace alone that Uncle Jake remembered kindly. He had a good word even for Uncle Basil, if it was only to say, “Basil has a way with him that you can’t help liking.”

  Whenever Father and Mother were out for dinner Uncle Jake was likely to spend the whole meal talking to us about our good fortune at having such splendid parents. “Your father,” he’d say, “puts all of his brothers and sisters to shame, and your mother is certainly the choice of her mother’s brood. . . . There is no finer woman in the South than your mother, and no businessman in town is respected more than your father. . . . I declare I don’t know any other parents these days who live as much for their children as yours do. It’s always looked to me like they each learned secrets of happiness from their parents that none of the rest of us did. . . . You children are their whole life, and you ought to remember that.”

  After such a speech not one of us was able to speak. Virginia Ann’s eyes would always fill with tears. And one evening Uncle Jake went so far as to say that Mother and Father were just the sort of parents that his and Father’s own had been and that he sometimes woke in the night and wept at the realization that his parents were actually dead and that he could never, never make amends to them for the little worries he had caused them.

  And that night Virginia Ann did burst right out crying. She wept in her napkin and I thought she sounded like a little kitten begging to get out of the cellar or to get in the house when it was raining. I almost cried myself to think of poor Uncle Jake in his room crying, and I vowed that I should not postpone making amends to my own mother and father even till the next morning. (I waited, in fact, all that evening in the living room for them to come in, lying on my stomach before the fire. But I dropped off to sleep with my eyes set on the orange glow of the coals, and when I awoke it was morning. I was in my bed with Brother where Uncle Jake had placed me.)

  Whenever all the family were at the table Uncle Jake would often talk of the saintly nature of Uncle Louis who had died at the age of twelve from parrot fever. Neither he nor Father could remember ever having heard Uncle Louis speak an uncivil word or remember his misbehaving on any occasion. Once their father—the two of them would recall—had come through the strawberry patch behind the old house on the Nolansville Pike and found Uncle Jake and Father playing mumble-the-peg while Uncle Louis did all the berry picking. And when Uncle Louis saw his father stripping off his belt to give his brothers a whipping he ran to him and told him that he, the eldest brother, was to blame for not making them work and that he should receive the punishment. My grandfather had turned and walked to his house without another word.

  Whenever Father and Uncle Jake talked about
that incident Father would say that Grandfather walked away in disgust. But Uncle Jake would say that he walked away toward the house in order that they should not see how moved he was by Uncle Louis’s brotherly love and spirit of self-sacrifice.

  Father was not as tall as Uncle Jake when they were standing, but that was only because Uncle Jake had such long legs. When we were seated at the table they seemed to be of the same height. Each had an extremely high forehead and a pointed chin that Uncle Jake said they had got from their mother’s people. Nothing could hold my interest more keenly in those days than watching them sit together at table after dinner when Mother and Virginia Ann had gone into the living room. Sometimes they would only sit and smoke in silence. Sometimes they would talk about the old times.

  One night when they had talked about the Negroes who had worked their father’s farm, about Cousin Lucy Grimes who turned Catholic and later went completely crazy, and about the meanness of their Uncle Bennett who lost his leg at the Battle of Stones River, they turned again to the subject of Uncle Louis’s native sweetness. While they talked, I looked across the table from one to the other trying to discover why they did not really look alike since their individual features were so similar. I felt that they actually did look alike and that I was just blind to it in some way. The only differences that I could see were not ones of my own observation but differences that I had heard Mother point out now and again: Uncle Jake had lived outdoors so much with his hunting and fishing and his other activities with the Boy Scouts that his skin was considerably rougher than Father’s, who had no real life but in his office and in our house. Too, Uncle Jake’s hair was still a hard, young, brown color whereas Father’s was full of pleasant gray streaks. Yet withal there was a softness or gentleness about Uncle Jake’s eyes and about the features of his face that were not to be found in Father’s kind but strong countenance.