Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  “Well, well, have a seat,” Son said, extending his left hand to her.

  His manner was casual, as was that of the others—studiedly so. For they wanted to make her comfortable. Even Miss Prew­itt restrained her attentions, pretending to be absorbed in the cards although she was dummy. “The girls have given us a good trimming tonight,” she said.

  When Miss Prewitt spoke, Harriet observed that she had extremely crooked teeth which had been brought more or less into line probably by wearing bands as a child. Her face was rather plain but her cheeks had a natural rosiness to them and her eyes, though too small, were bright and responsive. She wore no makeup and was redolent of no detectable perfume or powder. And before she sat down in the chair which Sweetheart drew up for her, Harriet had perceived that the girl took no pains with her hair which hung in a half-long bob with some natural wave.

  “We’re teaching these Yankees a thing or two,” Helena said, winking playfully at Kate.

  “Will you listen to that?” Miss Prewitt smiled and revealed to Harriet a pleasant manner and an amiable, ladylike nature. “Your daughters keep calling their own brother and myself Yankees. But of course it’s partly his fault, for I learn that he didn’t write you that I’m from Little Rock, myself, and that I’m on my way home for a visit.”

  “Isn’t that manlike?” Harriet said.

  Now Son dropped his last three trumps on the table and proclaimed that that was “game.” He suggested that they quit playing, but Harriet insisted that they complete the rubber. Helena began to deal the cards. For a time no one spoke. Harriet pretended to gaze about the room but she could hardly keep her eyes off Miss Prewitt. For though she found her extremely agreeable she perceived that the possibility of any romantic attachment between her and Son was out of the question. The tie between them was doubtless what the girls called an intellectual friendship. In her own girlhood people would have called it Platonic, but then they would have laughed about it. Mama had always said there could be no such relationship between young men and young women. Sweetheart always showed the smutty and cynical side to his nature when such things were discussed. Yet in some matters Son surely knew more than either Mama or Sweetheart. She had of course never, herself, known such a friendship with a man and just now she was really trying to imagine the feelings that two such friends would have for one another.

  Until Miss Prewitt had spoken and thus started that train of thought in her mind Harriet had been wondering how dinner came off and whether Mattie served the chicken necks. But now her thoughts had been diverted and her nerves were somewhat relieved. It was she who finally broke the silence. “For Heaven’s sake,” she said, “let’s not be so reserved. You’re all being so careful of my feelings that Miss Prewitt will think I have a nervous ailment. My dear, that’s the first time in my life I’ve ever carried on so. You just mustn’t judge me by that scene I made. I have no sympathy with women who carry on so.”

  Then Sweetheart and the children did begin to tease her and make light of her carryings-on. Presently the conversation became animated and she was soon calling Miss Prewitt “Ann” as the girls did. Helena and Kate, she had never seen more cordial to a stranger than to Ann. She had never, indeed, seen them sweeter with one another. It was not until they had played their last card and had shaken hands across the table in acknowledgment of their complete victory that the strangeness of their behavior occurred to Harriet. It had been many a day since they had sat down at the same bridge table, for if they were partners they usually ended by calling each other “stupid” and if they were not partners they not infrequently accused each other of cheating.

  Now Harriet felt herself trembling again and she was unable to follow the conversation. After a few minutes she said, “I think what we all need is a good night’s sleep.” The girls agreed at once, and so did Sweetheart. But Son suggested that he and Ann would like to sit up and talk for a while. Nobody seemed to take exception to this but Sweetheart who gave a little frown and shrugged his shoulders. Then he led Harriet off to their room, and the girls followed inquiring if there was anything they could do for Mother. As Harriet left the parlor she glanced back and observed that Ann’s legs were as large and graceless as two fireplugs.

  Sweetheart was in bed before her and lay there watching her own preparations at the dressing table. She felt that she was barely able to conceal from him the difficulty she had in rolling her hair and pulling on the net. But when she turned to put off the light she found him fast asleep.

  She was standing in the dark for a moment and she heard the voices of Son and Ann out on the porch. Without even considering her action she stepped to the window and listened to their lowered voices.

  “She’s a very pretty and attractive little woman,” Ann was saying, “but from things you had said I was not quite prepared to find her such a nervous woman.”

  “That’s true. But I don’t think she really is a nervous woman,” Son said slowly. “I believe nobody was more surprised than herself at what happened this afternoon.”

  “It’s not just what happened this afternoon. She was trembling most of the time in the living room tonight.”

  “I can’t imagine what it is. Something seems to have come over her. But there’s no visible change. She hasn’t aged any. I looked for it in her hair and in the skin about her neck and in her figure.” It hardly seemed possible to Harriet that this was Son talking about herself.

  “She’s certainly past her menopause, isn’t she?”

  “Oh, certainly. Years ago when I was still in school.”

  “That’s rather early.”

  “Yes . . . Yes.”

  “The girls are much more conventional than I imagined, much less independent, more feminine—”

  “Something,” Son emphasized, “seems to have come over them, too.”

  “They’re too young for any sort of frustration, I suppose.”

  This whispered but clearly audible conversation caused Harriet to feel herself alienated from all around her. It was Son’s disinterested tone and objectiveness. Her mind returned to Mattie. She wondered how she and B.T. would behave through the weekend. And now looking out into the backyard where the moon was shining on the shingled roof of the cabin and through the trees to the porch steps, she considered again the words she had used to Mattie out there this afternoon.

  The girls had planned a small party for Monday night, which was July Fourth. It was not to be at the Country Club, where they had always before preferred to entertain, but at the house. But on Sunday night one of Son’s old friends named Harry Buchanan had invited the group to supper at the Club. Harry was married and had two small children.

  At the breakfast table Sunday morning Helena said to Ann, “We didn’t plan anything for last night because we knew you two would be tired from traveling. But we’re having a few friends to the house tomorrow night, and tonight the Buchanans”—she hesitated and closed her eyes significantly—“have asked us to supper at the Club. I don’t know why some people must entertain at clubs and hotels.”

  “It all sounds quite festive,” Ann said.

  “Yes, I’m afraid ‘festive’ is the word,” said Kate. “When people ask you to a hotel or a club, instead of to their home, if the occasion’s not ‘festive’ or ‘gala,’ what can it be? I don’t take such an invitation as a great compliment.”

  Ann said nothing. Son looked over his pink grapefruit, perplexed. Harriet was completely mystified now by the things her daughters were saying. It sounded like pure nonsense to her although she was pleased to see them in such accord. She could not say that she disagreed with them, but it did sound like nonsense because it was the very reverse of ideas they usually expressed. Perhaps it was because they were growing older and more like herself. “One never realizes when one’s children are growing up,” she thought. But whether or not she agreed with them in principle she did think it ungracious and unkind of them to speak that way about Son’s friend who was entertaining them tonight.

>   “Kate,” she said, “the Buchanans have two small children and their house is so small.”

  The two daughters laughed. “Dear, dear Mama,” Helena said, “you’re such a Christian. You wouldn’t say anything against anybody on Sunday, would you?”

  “Let me ask you this, Mama,” said Kate. “Would your mother have liked entertaining visitors at a golf club?”

  Harriet shook her head. “That was long ago when Mama entertained, and it was not the custom then.”

  “There you are. We’re only thinking as you’ve taught us to think, Mama, when we think that many of the customs and ways that used to pertain in Nashville were better than what is replacing them.”

  Harriet asked herself if that was what she had taught them to think. She didn’t know she had taught them to think anything. But her only real interest in the matter was the defense of Harry Buchanan whose wife’s mother, she presently said, was a dear friend of hers and was from one of Nashville’s loveliest families and certainly knew how to “do.” Then Helena asked with apparent artlessness what her dear friend’s maiden name had been. And the question led to a prolonged discussion between the girls and their mother and even their father of the kinship of various Nashville families. Nothing yet had amazed Harriet more than the knowledge of those kinships and connections which Helena and Kate proceeded to display.

  “Why, you two girls,” Sweetheart said in his innocence, “are getting to rival your mother in matters of who’s kin to who.” But Harriet was observing Son and Ann who remained silent and kept their eyes on their food. She herewith resolved that she would make it her special task during the remainder of the visit to avoid such talk since it seemed to cause a mysterious antagonism between the young people.

  After breakfast Son and Ann left for a walk about the premises in the company of Sweetheart who wanted to show them his orchards and his four acres of oats and the old cotton patch where he had had B.T. put in lespedeza this year. They were also to see his poultry and the Jersey cow whose milk at breakfast had tasted of wild onions. He urged Helena and Kate to come along and show off the vegetable garden where they had worked and directed B.T.’s labor. But the girls declined, saying that they were through with outdoor life until the weather was cool again. Harriet said to herself, “They’re perfect angels and don’t want to leave the housework to me this morning.”

  Later Sweetheart came back to the house and settled himself on the porch with the Sunday morning paper while Son and Ann walked down the pike toward the Confederate Monument. Harriet debated the question of going to church. Sweetheart advised against it in view of her nervous agitation. Then she dismissed the idea, for she dared not reject Sweetheart’s advice in such matters, though for a while there did linger the thought of how restful church service would seem. When the straightening up was done the girls went to their reading again and Harriet made a visit to the kitchen that she had been postponing all morning.

  “Mattie,” she said, “do you have everything?” Mattie was seated at a kitchen table with her back to the swinging door through which Harriet had entered, and she did not turn around. The table was in the center of the huge, shadowy kitchen. Directly beyond the table was the doorway to the back porch, through which opening Harriet could see B.T. also working at a table.

  “I reckon,” Mattie answered after a moment. There was no movement of her head when she spoke. And her head was not bent over the table. She seemed to be staring through the doorway at B.T. She was seated there on a high, unpainted wooden stool which she had long ago had B.T. make for her (though she had complained at the time of having to pay him for it out of her own stocking), and since B.T. had selfishly made the stool to accommodate his own long legs, Mattie’s stocking feet drooped, rather than dangled, above her old slippers that had fallen one upon the other on the linoleum.

  She was not wearing her white cap or white serving apron, so there was absolutely no relief to her black dress and her head of black hair. She was the darkest object in the whole of the dark old-fashioned kitchen—blacker even than the giant range stove whereon the vegetables were boiling and in which a fire roared that kept the kitchen so hot that Harriet looked about to see if the windows were open and found them all open but that window where the winter icebox was built on, and she knew Mattie would not open that window while there were so many tomatoes and heads of cabbage and lettuce to keep fresh.

  In the kitchen there was only the sound of water boiling. Through the backdoor she could see B.T. in the bright sunlight on the porch and hear the regular thumping of his knife on the table as he chopped a coconut for the ambrosia. He seemed to be unaware of or totally indifferent to Mattie’s gaze upon him. Harriet stepped back into the pantry and let the door swing shut, drawing a hot breeze across her face. The two Negroes doubtless had been sitting like that for hours without a word between them. It was a picture she was not able to forget.

  Among the family friends the Wilson girls were admired no less than Son though they were considered to have more temperament. (By this it was meant that they occasionally displayed bad temper in public.) They were spoken of as devoted daughters and thoroughly capable and energetic young women. Helena, who was known generally as the blond Wilson girl though her brown hair was only a shade lighter than Kate’s, sometimes taught classes at Miss Hood’s school during the winter. She usually substituted, and could teach mathematics, art appreciation, or modern literature to the seniors. During the winter when there were more colds and throat trouble Kate helped with the receiving and secretarial work at Sweetheart’s office.

  They had large, round, pleasant faces which often seemed identical to strangers. Their voices were considered identical by everyone outside the family, even by close family friends who often remarked that they didn’t speak with the vulgar drawl that so many Nashville girls have adopted. Their vocabulary and their accents were more like those of their mother. They pronounced girl as “gull” as all Nashville ladies once used to do. And so it was often shocking to a stranger after hearing their slightly metallic but very feminine and old-fashioned voices to turn and discover both girls were over six feet tall. Their ages were “in the vicinity of thirty,” as was Son’s, and they too never seemed to have considered matrimony.

  As Harriet was returning from the kitchen her ear recognized Kate’s familiar touch at the piano. It was by the bass that she could always distinguish the girls’ playing; Kate’s was a little the heavier but with more variations. She was playing accompaniment to the ballad “Barbara Allen,” and presently Helena’s straining-falsetto could be heard. Then as Harriet passed through the hall she saw through the open front door Son and Ann walking up the straight driveway from the pike. Son wore white linen trousers and a white shirt open at the collar. Ann looked very fresh and youthful in a peasantlike shirtwaist and skirt, though the flare of the skirt did seem to accentuate the heaviness of her legs. They walked over the white gravel beneath the green canopy of the trees and the picture was framed in the semicircle of lavender wisteria that blossomed round the entrance to the porch. The prettiness of it made Harriet sigh. It seemed that her sorrow over Son’s going into the Army would not be so great if she could believe that he and Ann were in love. This old house and the surrounding woods and pastures had always seemed to her the very setting for romance. From the time when her girls had first begun to have a few beaux she considered what a felicitous setting the swing on the front porch or the old iron bench down by the fence stile would be for the final proposal; and during her walks with Sweetheart in the evenings she would sometimes look about the lawn trying to fix upon the best spot for a garden wedding. Now the sight of Son and Ann in this pretty frame only reminded her of their unnatural and strange relationship. They were walking far apart and Ann was speaking with deliberation and gesturing as she spoke. But apparently at the first glimpse of Harriet, Ann broke off speaking. And Harriet perceived in an instant that there was at least a trouble of some kind in their relationship. She recollected now that t
hough Son had not been talking he had been shaking his head from side to side as though in exasperation.

  Kate was still playing and Helena singing (after her fashion) when they entered the parlor. Son was not long able to restrain his laughter although he had actually pressed his hand over his mouth. When his laughter finally did explode the two girls sprang up from the piano bench. Their mother stood paralyzed, expecting a greater explosion of temper from them. But they only smiled with a shamefaced expression that was utterly artificial. Ann had turned to Son and was remonstrating with him. “I really should think you’d be ashamed,” she said.

  “Why, he’s completely shameless and unchivalrous,” Helena said with the same false expression of tolerance and good nature on her face. It was this expression which the faces of both girls were affecting that stunned and mystified Harriet beyond all bounds. She knew now that they were in league to accomplish some purpose. She could see that they were fully prepared for Son’s reaction and that it was even desired.

  “Hush, Son, you idiot,” Kate smiled. Then turning to Ann: “That old ballad is one Mama taught us when we were children. Of course none of us have Mama’s music, but we weren’t expecting an audience.” And finally she addressed her sister, “The only trouble is, Helena, you were not singing the right words—not the words Mama taught us.”

  “No,” Son derided, “you were singing from The Oxford Book of Verse.”

  “I know,” Helena admitted with her feigned modesty and frankness. “But, Mama,” she said to Harriet, “sing us your version—the real Tennessee version.”

  And they all began to insist that Harriet play and sing. At first she would not, for she felt that she was being a dupe to her two daughters. It was for this that the whole scene had been arranged! If she could avoid it she would not assist them in any of their schemings. If there was to be antagonism between her children she was not going to take sides. At breakfast the girls had led her to support their criticism of country-club life and modern ways by bringing in Mama’s opinions. Now her singing of an old ballad would somehow support their cause.