Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  But now Clifford was hurrying up the stairs again. He was on the landing outside the open study door. It was almost despite himself that the old man cleared his throat and said hoarsely, “The news will be on in five minutes, if you want to listen to it.” Then as though he might have sounded too cordial (he would not be reduced to toadying to his own boy), “But if you don’t want to, don’t say you do.” Had Cliff seen his glasses slip down his nose? Cliff, no less than the others, would be capable of laughing at him in his infirmity.

  “I wouldn’t be likely to, would I, Papa?” Cliff had stopped at the doorway and was stifling a yawn as he spoke, half covering his face with the envelope and the folded sheet of paper. Old Ben nodded his head to indicate that he had heard what Cliff had said, but also, to himself, he was nodding that yes, this was the way he had raised his children to talk to him.

  “Just the hourly newscast,” Old Ben said indifferently. “But it don’t matter.”

  “Naw, can’t make it, Papa. I got to go and write Sue Alice. The stupid woman staying with her while I’m away bores her pretty much.” As he spoke, he looked directly into the dark lenses of his father’s glasses, and for a brief second he rested his left hand on the doorjamb. His manner was self-possessed and casual, but Old Ben felt that he didn’t need good sight to detect his poor son’s ill-concealed haste to be off and away. Cliff had, in fact, turned back to the stairs when his father stopped him with a question, spoken without expression and almost under his breath.

  “Why did you come at all? Why did you even bother to come if you weren’t going to bring Sue Alice and the grandchildren? Did you think I wanted to see you without them?”

  Clifford stopped with one foot on the first step of the second flight. “By God, Papa!” He turned on the ball of the other foot and reappeared in the doorway. “Ever travel with two small kids?” The motion of his body as he turned back from the steps had been swift and sure, calculated to put him exactly facing his father. “And in hot weather like we’re having in Texas?”

  Despite the undeniable thickness in Clifford’s hips and the thin spot on the back of his head, his general appearance was still youthful; about this particular turning on the stairs there had been something decidedly athletic. Imperceptibly, behind the dark glasses, Old Ben lifted his eyebrows in admiration. Clifford was the only boy he had who had ever made any team at the University or done any hunting worth speaking of. For a moment, his eyes rested gently on Cliff’s white summer shoes, set wide apart in the doorway. Then, jerking his head up, as though he had just heard Cliff’s last words, he began, “Two small kids? (Why don’t you use the word brats? It’s more elegant.) I have traveled considerably with five—from here to the mountain and back every summer for fifteen years, from my thirty-first to my forty-sixth year.”

  “I remember,” Cliff said stoically. Then, after a moment, “But now I’m going up to my room and write Sue Alice.”

  “Then go on up! Who’s holding you?” He reached for his smoking stand and switched on the radio. It was a big cabinet radio with a dark mahogany finish, a piece from the late twenties, like all the other furniture in the room, and the mechanism was slow to warm up.

  Clifford took several steps toward his father. “Papa, we’re due to leave for the Club in thirty minutes—less than that now—and I intend to scratch off a note to my wife.” He held up the writing paper, as though to prove his intention.

  “No concern of mine! No concern of mine! To begin with, I, personally, am not going to the Club or anywhere else for supper.”

  Clifford came even closer. “You may go to the Club or not, as you like, Papa. But unless I misunderstand, there is not a servant on the place, and we are all going.”

  “That is, you are going after you scratch off a note to your wife.”

  “Papa, Ben Jr. and I have each come well over five hundred miles—”

  “Not to see me, Clifford.”

  “Don’t be so damned childish, Papa.” Cliff was turning away again. Old Ben held his watch in his hand, and he glanced down at it quickly.

  “I’m not getting childish, am I, Clifford?”

  This time, Clifford’s turning back was not accomplished in one graceful motion but by a sudden jerking and twisting of his shoulder and leg muscles. Behind the spectacles, Old Ben’s eyes narrowed and twitched. His fingers were folded over the face of the watch. Clifford spoke very deliberately. “I didn’t say getting childish, Papa. When ever in your life have you been anything but that? There’s not a senile bone in your brain. It’s your children that have got old, and you’ve stayed young—and not in any good sense, Papa, only in a bad one! You play sly games with us still or you quarrel with us. What the hell do you want of us, Papa? I’ve thought about it a lot. Why haven’t you ever asked for what it is you want? Or are we all blind and it’s really obvious? You’ve never given but one piece of advice to us, and that’s to be direct and talk up to you like men—as equals. And we’ve done that, all right, and listened to your wrangling, but somehow it has never satisfied you! What is it?”

  “Go on up to your letter-writing; go write your spouse,” said Old Ben.

  The room had been getting darker while they talked. Old Ben slipped his watch back into his vest pocket nervously, then slipped it out again, constantly running his fingers over the gold case, as though it were a piece of money.

  “Thanks for your permission, sir.” Clifford took a step backward. During his long speech he had advanced all the way across the room until he was directly in front of his father.

  “My permission?” Old Ben said. “Let us not forget one fact, Clifford. No child of mine has ever had to ask my permission to do anything whatsoever he took a mind to do. You have all been free as the air, to come and go in this house. . . . You still are!”

  Clifford smiled. “Free to come and go, with you perched here on the landing registering every footstep on the stairs and every car that passed underneath. I used to turn off the ignition and coast through the drive-under, and then think how foolish it was, since there was no back stairway. No back stairway in a house this size!” He paused a moment, running his eyes over the furniture and the other familiar objects in the shadowy room. “And how like the old times this was, Papa—your listening in here in the dark when I came up! By God, Papa, I wouldn’t have thought when I was growing up that I’d ever come back and fuss with you once I was grown. But here I am, and, Papa—”

  Old Ben pushed himself up from the chair. He put his watch in the vest pocket and buttoned his suit coat with an air of satisfaction. “I’m going along to the Club for supper,” he said, “since there’s to be no-un here to serve me.” As he spoke, he heard the clock chiming the half hour downstairs. And Ben Jr. was shouting to Old Ben and Clifford from the foot of the stairs, “Get a move on up there.”

  Clifford went out on the landing and called down the steps. “Wait till I change my shirt. I believe Papa’s all ready.”

  “No letter written?” Ben Jr. asked.

  Clifford was hurrying up the second flight with the blank paper. “Nope, no letter this day of Our Lord.”

  Old Ben heard Ben Jr. say, “What did I tell you?” and heard the others laughing. He stood an instant by his chair without putting on a light. Then he reached out his hand for one of the walking canes in the umbrella stand by the radio. His hand lighting on the carved head of a certain oak stick, he felt the head with trembling fingers and quickly released it, and quickly, in three strides, without the help of any cane, he crossed the room to the south window. For several moments, he stood motionless at the window, his huge, soft hands held tensely at his sides, his long body erect, his almost freakishly large head at a slight angle, while he seemed to peer between the open draperies and through the pane of the upper sash, out into the twilight of the wide, shady park that stretched from his great yellow-brick house to the pike. Old Ben’s eyes, behind the smoked lenses, were closed, and he was visualizing the ceiling fan in the barbershop. Presently, opening
his eyes, he reflected, almost with a smile, that his aunt’s cellar was not the only Nashville cellar that had disappeared. Many a cellar! His father’s cellar, round like a dungeon; it had been a cistern in the very earliest days, before Old Ben’s time, and when he was a boy, he would go around and around the brick walls and then come back with a hollow sound, as though the cistern were still half full of water. One time, ah—Old Ben drew back from the window with a grimace—one time he had been so sure there was water below! In fright at the very thought of the water, he had clasped a rung of the ladder tightly with one hand and swung the lantern out, expecting certainly to see the light reflected in the depths below. But the lantern had struck the framework that supported the circular shelves and gone whirling and flaming to the brick floor, which Ben had never before seen. Crashing on the floor, it sent up yellow flames that momentarily lit the old cistern to its very top, and when Ben looked upward, he saw the furious face of his father with the flames casting jagged shadows on the long, black beard and high, white forehead. “Come out of there before you burn out my cellar and my whole damn house to the ground!” He had climbed upward toward his father, wishing the flames might engulf him before he came within reach of those arms. But as his father jerked him up onto the back porch, he saw that the flames had already died out. The whole cellar was pitch-black dark again, and the boy Ben stood with his face against the whitewashed brick wall while his father went to the carriage house to find the old plow line. Presently, he heard his father step up on the porch again. He braced himself for the first blow, but instead there was only the deafening command from his father: “Attention!” Ben whirled about and stood erect, with his chin in the air, his eyes on the ceiling. “Where have you hidden my plow lines?” “I don’t know, sir.” And then the old man, with his coattails somehow clinging close to his buttocks and thighs, so that his whole powerful form was outlined—his black figure against the white brick and the door—stepped over to the doorway, reached around to the cane stand in the hall, and drew out the oak stick that had his own bearded face carved upon the head. “About face!” he commanded. The boy drew back his toe and made a quick, military turn. The old man dealt him three sharp blows across the upper part of his back. . . . Tears had run down young Ben Brantley’s cheeks, even streaking down his neck under his open collar and soaking the neckline binding of his woolen underwear, but he had uttered not a sound. When his father went into the house, Ben remained for a long while standing with his face to the wall. At last, he quietly left the porch and walked through the yard beneath the big shade trees, stopping casually to watch a gray squirrel and then to listen to Aunt Sally Ann’s soft nigger voice whispering to him out the kitchen window. He did not answer or turn around but walked on to the latticed summerhouse, between the house and the kitchen garden. There he had lain down on a bench, looked back at the house through the latticework, and said to himself that when he got to be a grown man, he would go away to another country, where there would be no maple trees and no oak trees, no elms, not even sycamores or poplars; where there would be no squirrels and no niggers, no houses that resembled this one; and, most of all, where there would be no children and no fathers.

  In the hall, now, Old Ben could hear, very faintly, Ben Jr.’s voice and Laura Nell’s and Katie’s and Lawrence’s. He stepped to the door and looked down the dark flight of steps at his four younger children. They stood in a circle directly beneath the overhead light, which one of them had just switched on. Their faces were all turned upward in the direction of the open doorway where he was standing, yet he knew in reason that they could not see him there. They were talking about him! Through his dark lenses, their figures were indistinct, their faces were blurs, and it was hard for him to distinguish their lowered voices one from another. But they were talking about him! And from upstairs he could hear Clifford’s footsteps. Clifford, with his letter to Sue Alice unwritten, was thinking about him! Never once in his life had he punished or restrained them in any way! He had given them a freedom unknown to children in the land of his childhood, yet from the time they could utter a word they had despised him and denied his right to any affection or gratitude. Suddenly, stepping out onto the landing, he screamed down the stairs to them, “I’ve a right to some gratitude!”

  They were silent and motionless for a moment. Then he could hear them speaking in lowered voices again, and moving slowly toward the stairs. At the same moment he heard Clifford’s footsteps in the upstairs hall. Presently, a light went on up there, and he could dimly see Clifford at the head of the stairs. The four children were advancing up the first flight, and Clifford was coming down from upstairs. Old Ben opened his mouth to call to them, “I’m not afraid of you!” But his voice had left him, and in his momentary fright, in his fear that his wrathful, merciless children might do him harm, he suddenly pitied them. He pitied them for all they had suffered at his hands. And while he stood there, afraid, he realized, or perhaps recalled, how he had tortured and plagued them in all the ways that his resentment of their very good fortune had taught him to do. He even remembered the day when it had occurred to him to build his study above the drive-under and off the stairs, so that he could keep tab on them. He had declared that he wanted his house to be as different from his father’s house as a house could be, and so it was! And now he stood in the half-darkness, afraid that he was a man about to be taken by his children and at the same time pitying them, until one of them, ascending the steps switched on the light above the landing.

  In the sudden brightness, Old Ben felt that his senses had returned to him. Quickly, he stepped back into the study, closed the door, and locked it. As the lock clicked, he heard Clifford say, “Papa!” Then he heard them all talking at once, and while they talked, he stumbled through the dark study to the umbrella stand. He pulled out the stick with his father’s face carved on the head, and in the darkness, while he heard his children’s voices, he stumbled about the room beating the upholstered chairs with the stick and calling the names of children under his breath.

  A Wife of Nashville

  THE LOVELLS’ old cook Sarah had quit to get married in the spring, and they didn’t have anybody else for a long time—not for several months. It was during the Depression, and when a servant quit, people in Nashville (and even people out at Thornton, where the Lovells came from) tried to see how long they could go before they got another. All through the summer, there would be knocks on the Lovells’ front door or on the wooden porch floor, by the steps. And when one of the children or their mother went to the door, some Negro man or woman would be standing there, smiling and holding out a piece of paper. A recommendation it was supposed to be, but the illegible note scribbled with a blunt lead pencil was something no white person could have written if he had tried. If Helen Ruth, the children’s mother, went to the door, she always talked a while to whoever it was, but she hardly ever even looked at the note held out to her. She would give a piece of advice or say to meet her around at the back door for a handout. If one of the boys—there were three Lovell boys, and no girls—went to the door, he always brought the note in to Helen Ruth, unless John R., their father, was at home, sick with his back ailment. Helen Ruth would shake her head and say to tell whoever it was to go away! “Tell him to go back home,” she said once to the oldest boy, who was standing in the sun-parlor doorway with a smudged scrap of paper in his hand. “Tell him if he had any sense, he never would have left the country.”

  “He’s probably not from the country, Mother.”

  “They’re all from the country,” Helen Ruth said. “When they knock on the porch floor like that, they’re bound to be from the country, and they’re better off at home, where somebody cares something about them. I don’t care anything about them any more than you do.”

  But one morning Helen Ruth hired a cheerful-looking and rather plump, light-complexioned young Negro girl named Jess McGehee, who had come knocking on the front-porch floor just as the others had. Helen Ruth talked to her at the fro
nt door for a while; then she told her to come around to the kitchen, and they talked there for nearly an hour. Jess stayed to fix lunch and supper, and after she had been there a few days, the family didn’t know how they had ever got along without her.

  In fact, Jess got on so well with the Lovells that Helen Ruth even decided to let her come and live on the place, a privilege she had never before allowed a servant of hers. Together, she and Jess moved all of John R.’s junk—a grass duck-hunting outfit, two mounted stags’ heads, an outboard motor, and so on—from the little room above the garage into the attic of the house. John R. lent Jess the money for the down payment on a “suit” of furniture, and Jess moved in. “You would never know she was out there,” Helen Ruth told her friends. “There is never any rumpus. And her room! It’s as clean as yours or mine.”

  Jess worked for them for eight years. John R. got so one of his favorite remarks was, “The honeymoon is over, but this is the real thing this time.” Then he would go on about what he called Helen Ruth’s “earlier affairs.” The last one before Jess was Sarah, who quit to get married and go to Chicago at the age of sixty-eight. She had been with them for six years and was famous for her pies and her banana dishes.