Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  Then Uncle Jake directed me to sit down beside Brother on one of the benches, and he went to the table in the center of the room.

  As my eyes moved automatically from one face to another of those boys seated on the benches I was aware that every single face was a familiar one. They were boys whom I had seen with Brother either at school or in Sunday School. Yet tonight in their Scout suits, they were total strangers. Whenever one of them met my gaze there was no communication between us. Rather, our eyes seemed to rub against each other in the cold room.

  Though I was unable to follow the procedure of the meeting I did at first try to stand up and to raise my hand when the other boys did. And I even moved my lips when the oath was recited, feeling a kind of elevation by the lists of adjectives. But it was while I saw Uncle Jake’s lips pronounce the words “loyal, brave, trustworthy, clean, reverent” that it seemed that he too was becoming a stranger.

  After that I made no effort to understand what was being done or said. I simply watched my kind and gentle Uncle as he became more and more another stranger to me, losing himself in the role of the eternal Scoutmaster. It was later, just before the meeting was over (when the plans for Saturday’s hike were completed), that I braced myself with the palms of my hands flat on the seat beside me; and while my heart pounded so that I imagined those around me would hear or feel it, I watched Uncle Jake as he stood by his table speaking to the Boy Scouts. I realized now that Father had been right. This was Uncle Jake fulfilling himself. And to fulfill one’s self was to remove one’s self somehow beyond the reach of my own understanding and affection. It seemed that the known Uncle Jake had moved out of his body just as Aunt Grace had moved out of hers when she sang and laughed and as the Mother and Father whose hands I liked to have placed gently on the top of my head left their bodies whenever they excluded all the world from their conversation.

  To the exclusion of all the world Uncle Jake was now become a Scoutmaster. I felt myself deserted by the last human soul to whom I could turn. He, rather, had turned and hidden himself in something more serious than laughter and song and more relentless than even persistent, endless, trivial conversation with a chosen mate. He stood before us like a gigantic replica of all the little boys on the benches, half ridiculous and half frightening to me in his girlish khaki middy and with his trousers disappearing beneath heavy three-quarter woolen socks. In that cold, bare, bright room he was saying that it was our great misfortune to have been born in these latter days when the morals and manners of the country had been corrupted, born in a time when we could see upon the members of our own families—upon our own sisters and brothers and uncles and aunts—the effects of our failure to cling to the teachings and ways of our forefathers. And he was saying that it was our duty and great privilege, as Boy Scouts, to preserve those honorable things which were left from the golden days when a race of noble gentlemen and gracious ladies inhabited the land of the South. He was saying that we must preserve them until one day we might stand with young men from all over the nation to demand a return to the old ways and the old teachings everywhere.

  Allegiance

  “COME IN.” And: “Of course I remember you and knew I should the moment your voice came drawling on the wire.”

  The first one, two, three steps I take across the room are taken with trepidation. And, so to speak, in midair. I am afraid that I shall yield, for even at her age the old creature is still a great beauty. And there is about her, after all, that charm which has long been discredited in my mind.

  As she rings for tea I perceive that in her simplest gestures, in her smile, even in her old-lady dress there is that fascination about her which we, who knew her as children, have remembered as her “romantic quality.” I discover in an instant that we have been mistaken to suppose her romantic quality was either vulgar ostentation or mere shallow vanity. And now that she is before me I know that I do not remember her, for herself, at all.

  “I remember you so well, dear child, in your blue and red rompers and of course those fearful black stockings your mother would have you wear.” Now I am in the air again, treading air. I can feel myself recoil at the bare reference to a woman whom she once grievously wronged, draw back at her mention of a sister she cheated in a manner so subtle and base that we have never known nor wished to know its nature, and now never shall.

  Here in her little drawing room, the marble mantel lined with her famous figurines, the Japanese screen shielding her diminutive writing desk, and a lampshade dull gold stamped with fleur-de-lis, I feel myself withdraw momentarily to the bosom of a family that has been nursed on hatred of the mistress of this room. The tea is being served, but I feel that there is less reality to the moment and to the noise of the teacups than to many an hour I have sat with the others at coffee pondering a heritage of resentment against this elegant Londoner.

  “I remember you better than the others, I should say. You were all of you quiet children, like your mother, but there were occasions when you alone were like my garrulous self. I used to have at my fingertips bright things you had said to me—impudent things about something I wore or something I said. . . . But, alas, alas, I’ve reached an age at which the incidents of my own childhood and events of my young-ladyhood are a wee bit clearer than those of the dull years since.” (I smile to hear her say “dull years,” but she thinks I smile because I do not know her age.) “I suspect I’m a bit older than you guess. Your mother and I were sisters, you might say, in fact only. I was a young lady in Nashville the year she was born. I was always more aunt than sister to her. I am more of the generation of your cousin, Ellen Ballenger, who was a sort of double first cousin of ours. To be exact, Ellen was first cousin to Mama and first cousin once removed to your grandfather.”

  She is pouring the tea now, and this is absentminded talk. I listen but I am thinking all the while of how strange it is to hear old familiar relationships rehearsed so easily in her rather too broad English speech. She seems to have lapsed for a moment into the character of an uninteresting old Britisher recalling certain family ties of her people down in Devon or Dorset. But now she looks up to hand me my tea, saying, “Or do we still say ‘first cousin once removed’ in Tennessee?”

  Her face colors a little as our eyes meet. Then she laughs and nervously she jingles the gold bracelets on her wrist; I observe that life has aged her more than I had at once perceived. For she has just now become utterly engrossed in the pleasurable reiteration of those old family ties.

  But her laughter, which for one second has seemed as remote a sound as was the look in her eyes abstracted, is now present in the room again. Her eyes shine again with a light that is expressive and responsive. “How wicked of me to treat you so, to bore you with tedious things you know by heart. The longer you sit there the better I do remember you. It’s a rather shocking transformation, you’ll grant, from red rompers with a scalloped collar to the olive drab. It was not until I was addressing my note to you that I pictured you in uniform. Even with the war all about us here I had not connected events at all. I knew merely that you were in this country. (Dear old Mr. Gordon enclosed the address with my last American check.) And so, you see, it was not wartime sentiment that moved me to ask you here. Further, hadn’t I put myself out on a limb, rather? I was not certain that you would bother to come.” (Yet she had presumed to think I might. She has thought that one of us might have a change of heart after many years.) “I was not certain that you would bother to come, for very often young men haven’t much interest in their kin. Perhaps you have given up something you would like to do this afternoon only to come here. . . . But there I go playing the old lady again.”

  And now I have the sense of being ignored, or of having my rudeness ignored. I feel an express shame, not of my rudeness, but of all the uncertainties of my mind as I sit in the presence of one so self-possessed. The direct and attentive gaze of her eyes is modest, even shy in a sense, yet she seems as conscious of the engaging qualities of her personality as of the
pleasant effect of this little drawing room she has arranged with the light now falling from the west windows across the patterns of the carpet. While she talks I study the burgundy roosters in the patterns and once again the figurines of Louis Napoleon and Nell Gwynn and John Brown with their little china backs reflected in the mirror over the mantel. She is perceiving that I am “quiet” like my mother, and she is set now to support the conversation alone. I hear her. I raise my eyebrows. I nod agreement. I frown. Or I smile so genuinely that she is silent a moment to enjoy the satisfaction of her jest. I even remark on the irony of something, but my sentence is complete in itself and she has no illusion that I’m going to be a real talker after all. She doesn’t try to draw me out. But while she speaks and while I listen I am also thinking that at some point I have betrayed, or at some point I shall betray, someone or something.

  I am remembering little notes that my mother used to read aloud, notes placed unanswered on the fire in the parlor at Nashville. Now I can visualize their being penned at this little desk shielded by the Japanese screen. I can picture her counting such notes among correspondence that she must “take care of” on a day when the weather isn’t fine. Mere polite inquiries they were into the health of us all with a few chatty words at the end about how early a spring London was enjoying that year or some amusing and endearing household incident—something about her ancient, now dead, but once ever-ailing English husband or about her adored stepchildren. They were notes written in an even hand and there was never any rancor or remorse in them. And there was no reference, ever, to my mother’s failure to reply. Their tone presumed it to be simply a matter of temperament. She was a person who did write letters, my mother a “quiet” person who didn’t. But my mother used to say, “It’s beautiful, beautiful. Her selfish ends are long since accomplished. Now she develops a sort of mystical, super­human ignorance of what has been transpiring.”

  My aunt’s figure is thin and erect, though her clothing is draped to conceal her thinness. Presently in the midst of her portrayal of three English types that are to be avoided (if one is to admire Englishmen), I realize that she is not ignoring me or my rudeness or even my innocent silence. These are things that she is coping with. It is only that I am suffering still from the shock of the greater ignorance she pretends to. I am no longer asking how did she dare to presume that I should not return her invitation unopened (as all the other notes since my mother’s lifetime have been returned). I am no longer asking how or why; for her manner, her personal appearance, even her little drawing room all bespeak her confidence in and her concern only for what is actual. What is more, they express as well her faith in the actual’s being but the sum of a thousand accidents.

  And that our meeting is a circumstance that she has ardently desired and wished to bring about there can be no doubt. I am certain, further, that she has known it could come about in just such a form as would allow all the privilege she is now exercising—namely, the privilege of assuming all such ignorance as should seem fitting—only by accident or by a series of accidents. In some corner of her mind there has ever been an awareness that these accidents might currently be casting themselves one upon the other. And so it must have appeared to her through the years that any little message which she could so easily scratch off might be the last, the efficient accident that the rest of the world would put down as the cause of our meeting.

  “If these were normal times, nothing would please me more than to offer myself as your guide to England and the English. But how futile to speak of it even. You are in London on some terribly official business, no doubt, or on a leave so short that it will be over before you’ve got round to half the things you want to do. Likely you do not even want to understand this country. You want only to accomplish your mission and get yourself home again. I have been thinking as we sat here that you might be wondering how a person could bring herself to know . . . I know how you silent people are. You have more thoughts than the rest of us dare suppose. I should hate to have to answer all the questions in the minds of people who have sat quietly while I talked on. And if I tried I could answer this one least well of all. My answer is, I do not know. But you must have observed that everyone has some aunt or other who has simply pulled out . . . pulled out on the family with not so much as a by-your-leave. I’m just another of those aunts that people have. The world’s full of them.”

  I think: The degree of her long anxiety for the special accidental qualities which would make up the naturalness of our meeting is patent in the pleasure she takes from its realization.

  “What of my own aunts! But you never knew—perhaps never heard of—the aunts I think of, did you? Yet I remember them so much better than so many people since their time. It is incredible how long people can be dead while their voices and even the moles on their necks are remembered by someone.”

  I think: The degree of her long anxiety for this meeting without conditions, for this easy manner of meeting and her clear vision of the necessity of this ease now seem to me to have been hidden through all the years in the sensible, persistent irregularity of her notes to my mother and later to the individual children. I feel now how right were my mother’s claims that this woman could endure anything to gain her ends. For it is as though in her anxiety she has known, too, how unpredictable were her chances.

  But are her ends merely this in-person, this final, bold pretense at ignorance of her old wrong against my mother? If this is the depth of the interview’s meaning for her, then I am tired of it already. If this is all, then I have satisfied my curiosity about her appearance and her apartments and I am ready to ask for my hat. Yet I do not even steal a glance in the direction of the small chair where my coat and cap are placed. And I ask myself, is it at this point that I betray?

  Or was it when I opened her invitation (opened one of the notes our silent pact had forbidden us to do) that I betrayed? Or will it be later when I have listened? She has settled herself now in her chair. She has accepted a cigarette from my case. She is talking of those great-aunts of mine who long ago went off to Washington and St. Louis to live with their husbands, women whom even my mother could hardly have remembered. Her speech is casual, and she appears at first to be rambling through a mixture of recent events and old memories.

  Yet withal she now seems quite consciously allowing herself to become thus engrossed in things that she formerly asked my pardon for. She talks of London, and with a twinkle in her eye she speaks of the tediousness of being cut off from the Continent. Whatever are her ends I know that they are somewhere beyond a desire to play her role convincingly to the last. She seems hardly concerned with her role at all. I gasp a gasp that must be audible, because I recognize that she is still depending upon accidents, terrible accidents that are now possible within myself, in my own perceptions. She has the air of having given way to her woolgathering. After all, she is thinking, the part that I can play in making him see is too small for consideration on any level. As I read her conscious thoughts I am asking myself whether she, not subconsciously but in a consciousness too profound for such a stranger as I to read, can be attributing some magic potency to the mere actuality of this moment, to the actuality of any given moment, even to her faith in the solidness of the precious objects of her drawing room, to the sound of her own voice. If so, then, for her, each moment and indeed everything in the life and body of the world must have in itself a latent magic which might be exploited. I feel that I am in the presence of some newfangled sort of idolater and conjurer. As she speaks I become increasingly aware that she believes it is no matter now what incident or what old wives’ tale she may relate, that she considers that whatever words she uses or however her conversation may turn there is but one thing she can say and there is no predicting what turn of her mind or speech might be the singular accident that would mean my comprehension.

  But I hear only isolated sentences and snatches of sentences.

  There are moments when I feel that I have dozed.

  Yet
I am in no sense drowsy.

  Much less do I feel any boredom.

  On the contrary it is a sort of literal enchantment I am caught in where all the past and all the future and all occurrences of the exterior world are of no consequence. Even the thing she has said a moment ago or the conclusion she will presently bring out are utterly lacking in any interest for me though her actual words in that split moment when they proceed from her lips consume my whole attention. Sometimes she is speaking of people who figure, or who have figured, in her life. “Mr. Williams always remembered Merle mercifully, I think.” I wonder if I have smiled now when I should have frowned. She tells me that some other person she knows has always the air, with strangers, of himself being an angel entertained unawares. This gentleman will smile afterward, she says, and remark that the stranger was kind to him for no reason at all. It is, my aunt thinks, as if to say that he feels there is a perfectly good reason why the stranger should be kind to him if the stranger only knew who he is.

  This man is probably someone here in London. But presently it seems to be of my own grandmother who has lain for forty years in a remote and neglected graveyard in Tennessee of whom she is speaking. “She was an extremely narrow and provincial woman, but this much must be said in her favor: If she never showed any originality in her housekeeping she was as well never guilty of any superficiality. Things were always easy. She knew what she was about. There was never any silly bustling when guests came, no matter how fine.”

  Finally her voice stops, and I wish that it had not stopped. It is as though some piece of furniture in the room had suddenly collapsed, even the chair I sit in. I come to my feet without knowing why I have risen. And immediately she rises with the same suddenness. “Perhaps, you would . . .” She hesitates. But she has regained her composure almost before I recognize her loss of it. She turns with all ease, making a gesture toward the marble mantel, and this time I do steal a glance at my things on the fragile chair.