Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  But Cousin Mamie didn’t even let them inside the house. It was a hot summer day, and she had all the blinds closed and the whole L-shaped house shut up tight, so that it would be bearable at night. She received them on the long ell porch. Later, they moved their chairs out under a tree in the yard, where Cousin Mamie’s cook brought them a pitcher of iced tea. While they were chatting under the tree that afternoon, they covered all the usual topics that are dealt with when talking to an old lady one doesn’t know very well—the old times and the new times, mutual friends and family connections, country living and city living, and always, of course, the lot of woman as it relates to each topic.

  “Where are you and John R. living?” Cousin Mamie asked Helen Ruth.

  “We’re still at the Vaux Hall, Cousin Mamie.”

  “I’d suppose the trains would be pretty bad for noise there, that close to the depot.”

  “They’re pretty bad in the summer.”

  “I’d suppose you had a place out from town, seeing how often John R.’s name’s in the paper with the hound and hunt set.”

  “That’s John R.’s life,” Helen Ruth said, “not mine.”

  “He runs with a fine pack, I must say,” said Cousin Mamie.

  Nancy Tolliver and Lucy Parkes nodded and smiled. Lucy said, “The swells of Nashville, Miss Mamie.”

  But Cousin Mamie said, “There was a day when they weren’t the swells. Forty years ago, people like Major Lovell didn’t know people like the Brantleys. I think the Brantleys quarried limestone, to begin with. I guess it don’t matter, though, for when I was a girl in upper East Tennessee, people said the Lovells started as land speculators hereabouts and at Memphis. But I don’t blame you for not wanting to fool with Brantleys, Helen Ruth.”

  “John R. and I each live our own life, Cousin Mamie.”

  “Helen Ruth is a woman with a mind of her own, Miss Mamie,” Nancy Tolliver said. “It’s too bad more marriages can’t be like theirs, each living their own life. Everyone admires it as a real achievement.”

  And Lucy Parkes said, “Because a woman’s husband hunts is no reason for her to hunt, any more than because a man’s wife sews is any reason for him to sew.”

  “Indeed not,” Cousin Mamie said, actually paying little attention to what Lucy and Nancy were saying. Presently, she continued her own train of thought. “Names like Brantley and Partee and Hines didn’t mean a thing in this state even thirty years ago.”

  What Lucy and Nancy said about her marriage that day left Helen Ruth in a sort of daze and at the same time made her see her situation more clearly. She had never discussed her marriage with anybody, and hearing it described so matter-of-factly by these two women made her understand for the first time what a special sort of marriage it was and how unhappy she was in it. At the time, John R. was away on a fishing trip to Tellico Plains. She did not see him again before she took the babies and Carrie to Thornton. She sent a note to his office saying that she would return when he decided to devote his time to his wife and children instead of to his hounds and horses. While she was at Thornton her letters from John R. made no mention of her note. He wrote about his business, about his hounds and horses, about the weather, and he always urged her to hurry home as soon as she had seen everybody and had a good visit. Meanwhile, he had a room at the Hermitage Club.

  When Helen Ruth returned to Nashville, their life went on as before. A year later, the third boy, Robbie, was born, and John R. bought a large bungalow on Sixteenth Avenue, not too far from the Tarbox School, where they planned to send the boys. Carrie was with them for three years after the separation, and though her work did not improve, Helen Ruth found herself making excuses for her. She began to attribute Carrie’s garrulity to “a certain sort of bashfulness, or the Negro equivalent to bashfulness.” And with the three small boys, and the yard to keep, too, there was so much more for Carrie to do than there had been before! Despite the excuses she made for her, Helen Ruth could see that Carrie was plainly getting worse about everything and that she now seemed to take pleasure in lying about the smallest, most unimportant things. But Helen Ruth found it harder to confront Carrie with her lies or to reprimand her in any way.

  During the last months before Carrie quit, she would talk sometimes about the night work she did for a Negro undertaker. To make Helen Ruth smile, she would report things she had heard about the mourners. Her job, Carrie always said, was to sweep the parlors after the funeral and to fold up the chairs. It was only when she finally gave notice to Helen Ruth that she told her what she professed was the truth. She explained that during all those months she had been learning to embalm. “Before you can get a certificate,” she said, “you has to handle a bad accident, a sickness, a case of old age, a drowning, a burning, and a half-grown child or less. I been waiting on the child till last night, but now I’ll be getting my certificate.”

  Helen Ruth would not even let Carrie go to the basement to get her hat and coat. “You send somebody for them,” she said. “But you, you get off these premises, Carrie!” She was sincerely outraged by what Carrie had told her, and when she looked at Carrie’s hands she was filled with new horror. Yet something kept her from saying all the things that one normally said to a worthless, lying servant who had been guilty of one final outrage. “Leave, Carrie!” she said, consciously restraining herself. “Leave this place!” Carrie went out the kitchen door and down the driveway to the street, bareheaded, coatless, and wearing her kitchen slippers.

  After Carrie, there was old Sarah, who stayed with them for six years and then quit them to get married and go to Chicago. Sarah was too old to do heavy work even when she first came, and before she had been there a week, John R. had been asked to help move the sideboard and to bring the ladder up from the basement. He said it seemed that every minute he was in the house, he was lifting or moving something that was too much for Sarah. Helen Ruth replied that perhaps she should hire a Negro man to help in the house and look after the yard. But John R. said no, he was only joking, he thought Sarah far and away the best cook they had ever had, and besides business conditions didn’t look too good and it was no time to be taking on more help. But he would always add he did not understand why Helen Ruth babied Sarah so. “From the first moment old Sarah set foot in this house, Helen Ruth has babied her,” he would say to people in Helen Ruth’s presence.

  Sarah could neither read nor write. Even so, it took her only a short while to learn all Helen Ruth’s special recipes and how to cook everything the way the Lovells liked it. For two weeks, Helen Ruth stayed in the kitchen with Sarah, reading to her from How We Cook in Tennessee and giving detailed instructions for every meal. It was during that time that her great sympathy for Sarah developed. Sarah was completely unashamed of her illiteracy, and it was this that first impressed Helen Ruth. She admired Sarah for having no false pride and for showing no resentment of her mistress’s impatience. She observed Sarah’s kindness with the children. And she learned from Sarah about Sarah’s religious convictions and about her long, unhappy marriage to a Negro named Morse Wilkins, who had finally left her and gone up North.

  While Sarah was working for them, John R. and Helen Ruth lived the life that Helen Ruth had heard her friends describe to John R.’s Cousin Mamie. It was not until after Sarah had come that Helen Ruth, recalling the afternoon at Cousin Mamie’s, identified Lucy Parkes’s words about a wife’s sewing and a husband’s hunting as the very answer she had once given to some of Carrie’s impertinent prying. That afternoon, the remark had certainly sounded familiar, but she had been too concerned with her own decision to leave her husband to concentrate upon anything so trivial. And after their reconciliation, she tried not to dwell on things that had led her to leave John R. Their reconciliation, whatever it meant to John R., meant to her the acceptance of certain mysteries—the mystery of his love of hunting, of his choice of friends, of his desire to maintain a family and home of which he saw so little, of his attachment to her, and of her own devotion to him. Her
babies were now growing into little boys. She felt that there was much to be thankful for, not the least of which was a servant as fond of her and of her children as Sarah was. Sarah’s affection for the three little boys often reminded Helen Ruth how lonely Sarah’s life must be.

  One day, when she had watched Sarah carefully wrapping up little Robbie in his winter play clothes before he went out to play in the snow, she said, “You love children so much, Sarah, didn’t you ever have any of your own?”

  Sarah, who was a yellow-skinned woman with face and arms covered with brown freckles, turned her gray eyes and fixed them solemnly on Helen Ruth. “Why, I had the cutest little baby you ever did see,” she said, “and Morse went and killed it.”

  “Morse killed your baby?”

  “He rolled over on it in his drunk sleep and smothered it in the bed.”

  After that, Helen Ruth would never even listen to Sarah when she talked about Morse, and she began to feel a hatred toward any and all of the men who came to take Sarah home at night. Generally, these men were the one subject Sarah did not discuss with Helen Ruth, and their presence in Sarah’s life was the only serious complaint Helen Ruth made against her. They would come sometimes as early as four in the afternoon and wait on the back porch for Sarah to get through. She knew that Sarah was usually feeding one of them out of her kitchen, and she knew that Sarah was living with first one and then another of them, but when she told John R. she was going to put her foot down on it, he forbade her to do so. And so through nearly six years she tolerated this weakness of Sarah’s. But one morning in the late spring Sarah told her that Morse Wilkins had returned from up North and that she had taken him back as her husband. Helen Ruth could not find anything to say for a moment, but after studying the large diamond on her engagement ring for awhile she said, “My servant’s private life is her own affair, but I give you fair warning now, Sarah, I want to see no more of your men friends—Morse or any other—on this place again.”

  From that time, she saw no more men on the place until Morse himself came, in a drunken rage, in the middle of a summer’s day. Helen Ruth had been expecting something of the sort to happen. Sarah had been late to work several times during the preceding three weeks. She had come one morning with a dark bruise on her cheek and said she had fallen getting off the streetcar. Twice, Helen Ruth had found Sarah on her knees, praying, in the kitchen. The day Helen Ruth heard the racket at the back-porch door, she knew at once that it was Morse. She got up from her sewing machine and went directly to the kitchen. Sarah was on the back porch, and Morse was outside the screen door of the porch, which was hooked on the inside. He was a little man, shriveled up, bald-headed, not more than five feet tall, and of a complexion very much like Sarah’s. Over his white shirt he wore a dark sleeveless sweater. “You come on home,” he was saying as he shook the screen door.

  Helen Ruth stepped to the kitchen door. “Is that her?” Morse asked Sarah, motioning his head toward Helen Ruth.

  When Sarah turned her face around, her complexion seemed several shades lighter than Morse’s. “I got to go,” she said to Helen Ruth.

  “No, Sarah, he’s got to go. But you don’t.”

  “He’s gonna leave me again.”

  “That’s the best thing that could happen to you, Sarah.”

  Sarah said nothing, and Morse began shaking the door again.

  “Is he drunk, Sarah?” Helen Ruth asked.

  “He’s so drunk I don’t know how he find his way here.”

  Helen Ruth went out onto the porch. “Now, you get off this place, and quick about it,” she said to Morse.

  He shook the screen door again. “You didn’t make me come here, Mrs. Lovellel, and you can’t make me leave, Mrs. Lovellel.”

  “I can’t make you leave,” Helen Ruth said at once, “but there’s a bluecoat down on the corner who can.”

  Suddenly Sarah dropped to her knees and began praying. Her lips moved silently, and gradually she let her forehead come to rest on the top of the rickety vegetable bin. Morse looked at her through the screen, putting his face right against the wire. “Sarah,” he said, “you come on home. You better come on now if you think I be there.”

  Sarah got up off her knees.

  “I’m going to phone the police,” Helen Ruth said, pretending to move toward the kitchen.

  Morse left the door and staggered backward toward the driveway. “Come on, Sarah,” he shouted.

  “I got to go,” Sarah said.

  “I won’t let you go, Sarah!”

  “She can’t make you stay!” Morse shouted. “You better come on if you coming!”

  “It will be the worst thing you ever did in your life, Sarah,” said Helen Ruth. “And if you go with him, you can’t ever come back here. He’ll kill you someday, too—the way he did your baby.”

  Sarah was on her knees again, and Morse was out of sight but still shouting as he went down the driveway. Suddenly, Sarah was on her feet. She ran into the kitchen and on through the house to the front porch.

  Helen Ruth followed, calling her back. She found Sarah on the front porch waving to Morse, who was halfway down the block, running in a zigzag down the middle of the street, still shouting at the top of his voice. Sarah cried out to him, “Morse! Morse!”

  “Sarah!” Helen Ruth said.

  “Morse!” Sarah cried again, and then she began mumbling words that Helen Ruth could not quite understand at the time. Afterward, going over it in her mind, Helen Ruth realized that what Sarah had been mumbling was, “If I don’t see you no more on this earth, Morse, I’ll see you in Glory.”

  Sarah was with the Lovells for four more months, and then one night she called up on the telephone and asked John R., Jr., to tell his mother that she was going to get married to a man named Racecar and they were leaving for Chicago in the morning.

  Jess McGehee came to them during the Depression. Even before Sarah left the Lovells, John R. had had to give up all of his “activities” and devote his entire time to selling insurance. Rufus Brantley had shot himself through the head while cleaning a gun at his hunting lodge, and most of John R.’s other hunting friends had suffered the same financial reverses that John R. had. The changes in the Lovells’ life had come so swiftly that Helen Ruth did not realize for awhile what the changes meant in her relationship with John R. It seemed as though she woke up one day and discovered that she was not married to the same man. She found herself spending all her evenings playing Russian bank with a man who had no interest in anything but his home, his wife, and his three boys. Every night, he would give a brief summary of the things that had happened at his office or on his calls, and then he would ask her and the boys for an account of everything they had done that day. He took an interest in the house and the yard, and he and the boys made a lily pool in the back yard, and singlehanded he screened in the entire front porch. Sometimes he took the whole family to Thornton for a weekend, and he and Helen Ruth never missed the family reunions there in September.

  In a sense, these were the happiest years of their married life. John R.’s business got worse and worse, of course, but since part of their savings was in the bank at Thornton that did not fail, they never had any serious money worries. Regardless of their savings, however, John R.’s loss of income and his having to give up his friends and his hunting wrought very real, if only temporary, changes in him. There were occasions when he would sit quietly and listen to his family’s talk without correcting them or pointing out how foolish they were. He gave up saying “Think!” to the boys, and instead would say, “Now, let’s see if we can’t reason this thing out.” He could never bring himself to ask for any sympathy from Helen Ruth for his various losses, but as it was during this time that he suffered so from the ailment in his back (he and Helen Ruth slept with boards under their mattress for ten years), the sympathy he got for his physical pain was more than sufficient. All in all, it was a happy period in their life, and in addition to their general family happiness they had Jess.
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br />   Jess not only cooked and cleaned, she planned the meals, did the marketing, and washed everything, from handkerchiefs and socks to heavy woolen blankets. When the boys began to go to dances, she even learned to launder their dress shirts. There was nothing she would not do for the boys or for John R. or for Helen Ruth. The way she idealized the family became the basis for most of the “Negro jokes” told by the Lovells during those years. In her room she had a picture of the family, in a group beside the lily pool, taken with her own box Brownie; she had tacked it and also a picture of each of them on the wall above her washstand. In her scrapbook she had pasted every old snapshot and photograph that Helen Ruth would part with, as well as old newspaper pictures of John R. on horseback or with a record-breaking fish he had caught. She had even begged from Helen Ruth an extra copy of the newspaper notice of their wedding.

  Jess talked to the family a good deal at mealtime, but only when they had addressed her first and had shown that they wanted her to talk. Her remarks were mostly about things that related to the Lovells. She told a sad story about a “very loving white couple” from Brownsville, her home town, who had been drowned in each other’s arms when their car rolled off the end of a river ferry. The point of the story was that those two people were the same, fine, loving sort of couple that John R. and Helen Ruth were. All three of the boys made good grades in school, and every month Jess would copy their grades in her scrapbook, which she periodically passed around for the family to appreciate. When Kenneth began to write stories and articles for his high-school paper, she would always borrow the paper overnight; soon it came out that she was copying everything he wrote onto the big yellow pages of her scrapbook.