Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  “All I know,” said Cornelia, taking the last bite of her trout, “is that my young ladyhood was a misery under that woman’s roof and in that town.” She glanced dreamily out the window. The train was speeding through the same sort of country as before, perhaps a little more hilly, a little more eroded. It sped through small towns and past solitary stations where only the tiresome afternoon local stopped—Rossville, Collierville, Bailey, Forest Hill. Cornelia saw a two-story farmhouse that was painted up only to the level of the second story. “That house has been that way as long as I can remember,” she said, and smiled. “Why do you suppose they don’t make them a ladder, or lean out the upstairs windows?” Then, still looking out at the dismal landscape—the uncultivated land growing up in sweet gum and old field pine, with a gutted mud road crossing and recrossing the railroad track every half mile or so—Cornelia said, “I only got away by the skin of my teeth! I came back from Ward’s with a scrapbook full of names, but they were nothing but ‘cute Vanderbilt boys.’ I would have been stuck in Grand Junction for life, nursing Mama and all the hypochondriac kin, if I hadn’t met Jake. I met him in Memphis doing Christmas shopping. He was a bank teller at Union Planters.” She laughed heartily for the first time since she had come into the diner. “It was an out-and-out pickup. Jake still tells everybody it was an out-and-out pickup.”

  “I don’t like Memphis,” said Miss Patty. “I never have.”

  “I’ve never felt that Memphis liked me,” said Miss Ellen.

  “It’s a wretched place!” Cornelia said suddenly. And now she saw that she had unwittingly shocked her two friends. The train had passed through Germantown; big suburban estates and scattered subdivisions began to appear in the countryside. There was even a bulldozer at work on the horizon, grading the land for new suburban sites. “It’s the most completely snobbish place in the world,” she went on. “They can’t forgive you for being from the country—they hate the country so, and they can’t forgive your being a Jew. They dare not. If you’re either one of those, it’s rough going. If you’re both, you’re just out! I mean socially, of course. Oh, Jake’s done well, and we have our friends. But as Mama would have said—and, God knows, probably did say about us many a time—we’re nobody.” Then, for no reason at all, she added, “And we don’t have any children.”

  “What a shame,” Miss Ellen said, hastening to explain, “that you have no children, I mean. I’ve always thought that if—”

  “Oh, no, Ellen. They might have liked me about the way I liked Mama. I’m glad that when I die, there’ll be no question of to mourn or not to mourn.”

  “In truly happy families, Cornelia, there is no question,” Miss Ellen said softly. She stole a glance at Miss Patty. “I’m just certain that Miss Bean had a very congenial and happy family, and that she loved them all dearly, in addition to being naturally proud of the things they stood for.”

  Miss Patty had produced a wallet from somewhere on her person and was examining her check. She slammed the wallet on the table, turned her head, and glared at the diminutive Miss Ellen. “How I regarded the members of my family as individuals is neither here nor there, Miss Watkins.”

  But Miss Ellen raised her rather receding chin and gazed directly up at Miss Patty. “To me, it seems of the greatest consequence.” Her voice trembled, yet there was a firmness in it. “I am mourning my mother today. I spent last night remembering every endearing trait she had. Some of them were faults and some were virtues, but they were nonetheless endearing. And so I feel strongly about what you say, Miss Bean. We must love people as people, not for what they are, or were, in the world.”

  “My people happened to be very much of the world, Miss Watkins,” said Miss Patty. “Not of this world but of a world that we have seen disappear. In mourning my family, I mourn that world’s disappearance. How could I know whether or not I really loved them, or whether or not we were really happy? There wasn’t ever time for asking that. We were all like Aunt Lottie, in yonder, and there was surely never any love or happiness in the end of it. When I went to Washington last week to fetch Aunt Lottie home, I found her living in a hateful little hole at the Stoneleigh Court. All the furniture from larger apartments she had once had was jammed together in two rooms. The tables were covered with framed photographs of the wives of Presidents, Vice-Presidents, senators, inscribed to Lottie Hathcock. But there was not a friend in sight. During the five days I was there, not one person called.” Miss Patty stood up and waved her check and two one-dollar bills at the waiter.

  Miss Ellen sat watching the check and the two bills with a stunned expression. But Cornelia twisted about in her chair excitedly. “Your aunt was Mrs. Hathcock!” she fairly screamed. “Oh, Patty, of course! She was famous in her day. And don’t you remember? I met her once with you at the Maxwell House, when we were at Belmont. You took me along, and after supper my true love from Vandy turned up in the lobby. You were so furious, and Mrs. Hathcock was so cute about it. She was the cleverest talker I’ve ever listened to, Patty. She was interested in spiritualism and offered to take us to a séance at Mr. Ben Allen’s house.”

  Miss Patty looked at Cornelia absent-mindedly. Her antagonism toward the two women seemed suddenly to have left her, and she spoke without any restraint at all. “Aunt Lottie has long since become a Roman Catholic. Her will leaves her little pittance of money and her furniture to the Catholic Church, and her religious oil paintings to me. The nurse we brought along has turned out to be an Irish Catholic.” She glanced in the direction of their Pullman car and said, “The nurse has conceived the notion that Aunt Lottie is worse this morning, and she wanted to wire ahead for a Memphis priest to meet us at the Union Station. She knows there won’t be any priests at Thornton.”

  Cornelia, carried away by incorrigible gregariousness, began, “Ah, Patty, might I see her? It would be such fun to see her again, just for old times’ sake. It might even cheer her a little.”

  Miss Patty stared at Cornelia in silence. Finally she said, “My aunt is a mental patient. She doesn’t even remember me, Cornelia.” She snatched a piece of change from the waiter’s tray and hurried past the steward and out of the car.

  Miss Ellen was almost staggering as she rose from the table. She fumbled in her purse, trying to find the correct change for the waiter. She was shaking her head from side to side, and opening and closing her eyes with the same rhythm.

  Cornelia made no move toward rising. “Depend upon me,” she said. “Did you know?”

  Miss Ellen only increased the speed of her head-shaking. When she saw Cornelia still sitting there, casually lighting a cigarette, she said, “We’re approaching Buntyn. I imagine you’re getting off there.”

  “No, that’s the country-club stop. I don’t get off at the country-club stop.”

  “There’s not much time,” Miss Ellen said.

  Presently Cornelia pulled a bill from her purse and summoned the waiter. “Well, Ellen,” she said, still not getting up, “I guess there’s no way I could be of help to you at the station, is there?”

  “No, there’s nothing, dear.”

  In her lethargy Cornelia seemed unable to rise and even unable to tell Miss Ellen to go ahead without her. “I suppose you’ll be met by a hearse,” she said, “and Patty will be met by an ambulance, and—and I’ll be met by Jake.” For a moment, she sat behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. There was a puzzled expression in her eyes, and she was laughing quietly at what she had said. It was one of those sentences that Cornelia began without knowing how it would end.

  Uncles

  I SHALL try to keep the great-uncles out of this. The plain uncles are enough. I was seventeen and had been away at college for three months. When I got off the train in St. Louis, my father and two of his brothers were there to meet me. It was Christmas time, and they were all three wearing gloves, overcoat, scarf, black shoes, and the fuzzy sort of fedora, with what Father called “the new nutria nap,” that they always wore when the weather was extremely cold. My first t
hought upon seeing them there together was that you wouldn’t have to be a member of the family to know they were manufacturers of men’s hats. Had no one ever thought of calling them the mad hatters? Then, as the three of them came toward me, I remembered that there was absolutely nothing mad about the men in the hat-manufacturing Ferguson family.

  My father and all four of his brothers were among the sanest men who ever lived. I say were not because my father or any of my uncles are dead now but because they are older, and as they get older, they become less resolutely sane. That is why my great-uncles can be kept out of this story. By the time I went away to college, they were old men. Only two of them—there had been seven altogether—were still active in the family business, and they kept irregular office hours. I did see those two great-uncles the morning I returned from college, but they had little to say to me; Great-Uncle Louis asked me what I was hoping to get for Christmas, as though I were still in knee breeches, and Great-Uncle Will, who was leaving the office as I came in, said only that Great-Aunt Marietta would want to see me.

  With Father at the station were his two younger brothers, Uncle Sydney and Uncle Grover. I took hold of Father’s gloved hand, gripping it firmly, and he put his other hand on my shoulder and looked me straight in the eye. Then I turned to my uncles. They didn’t offer their hands.

  “Hello, college boy,” said Uncle Sydney.

  “Hello, freshman,” Uncle Grover said.

  I smiled at them, though they were not smiling, and said nothing. If they had said anything at all, I could have thought of some answer to make. But I had only a few hours before left Kenyon College, which is not coeducational, and where being a freshman, in the middle thirties, seemed a most degrading experience. A few minutes later, I wished that I had thought to say, “Hello, old grads!,” because it was only freshmen who were more despised than old grads by Kenyon upperclassmen. But I said nothing.

  Presently, Father said, “Where’s your hat, son?”

  “I don’t wear a hat,” I said, and I began looking for my two pieces of luggage.

  We were in the car and several blocks from the station before I had a chance to ask about my mother and my grandmother and my little sister, Nora. The thought of them and of our house, out in Parkview, filled me with sudden delight. I looked at my wristwatch and, seeing that it was nearly lunchtime, I knew that Mother would be downstairs reading the morning paper, which she always saved for that dull interval just before lunch. After breakfast, she had, I was sure, played the piano for an hour. Sometimes, forgetting time, she played right through the first two hours of her morning, and would have played all morning except that someone always called her on the telephone. But this morning she would not have forgotten time. I imagined that she had got up from the piano and gone for her morning’s turn about the yard. (Even in winter, she went prying about the shrubbery and the bare flower beds every morning.) Then she had gone up to the sewing room and, if it was not a day when Mrs. Knox, the sewing woman, came, she had run up a few seams, which Mrs. Knox would undoubtedly have to take out and do over. After that, she had done her telephoning, and soon it had been time to go down and read the paper. “I don’t know what becomes of my mornings,” I had heard her say, “but I reckon it’s not something I’ll have to reckon for at Judgment.”

  “And what was the score against you in the Lansford game?” Uncle Sydney asked me. It was the last of a series of questions about Kenyon’s pathetic football record that year. I had been answering their questions with the Kenyon coach’s own excuses, and this one was one of the easiest to answer: “Lansford has football scholarships—Kenyon has literary scholarships.”

  “This freshman knows all the answers,” Uncle Grover said.

  There was a pause, and I turned from my uncles, who were in the back seat of the car, to my father, who was driving the car and beside whom I was sitting. “How’s Mother?” I asked casually. “Grandmother and Nora all right?”

  “Your mother and your grandmother are all right,” he said. “Nora’s failed her algebra.”

  “She did!” I exclaimed. “The goose!”

  “Oh, well . . .” Father began. He put his hand out the window as he turned in to the Olive Street traffic, and seemed to forget what he had been going to say.

  “Nora’s getting to be a little beauty,” Uncle Grover said. “She looks right grown-up.”

  “Well, she’s evidently not getting any smarter,” I said, still looking at Father.

  “She’s smart enough,” Uncle Grover said. “She’s cuter than a barrel of monkeys.” He and Uncle Sydney each had two little girls of their own, younger than Nora. My other two uncles also had daughters, older than I, and I had heard my parents laugh about how sensitive all my uncles were to any reflection upon little girls. Being of a big family of boys, they had expected sons for themselves, and they could not understand why it had turned out otherwise. As it was, I was the only boy in my generation of Fergusons. It would have pleased me to hear Uncle Grover praising Nora except that I knew it had nothing to do with his feelings about her and was only an echo of his defensiveness about little girls in general.

  Father had now adjusted his driving to the heavy traffic, and he said, “She ought to have passed her algebra, of course.”

  “Now, Bert,” Uncle Sydney said, “what earthly difference can it really make?” He was the youngest brother and more inclined to argument than the others. “There’s one thing I’ve never been able to see, and that’s a smart woman. A smart woman is not actually very smart—not as a woman. They tell me that this Gracie Allen is really one of the smartest women alive, and look how she talks. Look what she’s done, and she’s not even good-looking.”

  “She has good-looking legs,” Uncle Grover said, grinning.

  “You would know,” Uncle Sydney said, in parenthesis, and then continued, “And you take even this Gypsy Rose Lee, a strip-tease girl. They tell me that she’s an intellectual, in reality. She reads Shakespeare and Socrates and all such serious stuff because she really likes it. But she’s too smart to let anybody know about it.”

  “At least she doesn’t bare her soul, eh?” Uncle Grover said. The two of them laughed, and Father smiled because he knew it was a joke.

  “Your Uncle Grover’s keen today,” Uncle Sydney said. “But seriously, it’s true. Of course, they’re just show women, but the same principle applies. Now, for instance, who would want a Mrs. Roosevelt for a daughter, or a wife, either?”

  “Who wants a Mrs. Roosevelt at all?” Uncle Grover said.

  “Who wants a Mr. Roosevelt?” Father said, and they burst into laughter again.

  I hadn’t quite realized that Father was not taking me home until he turned in to the parking lot next to the Ferguson Building. As soon as he began pulling the steering wheel to the right, I said, “Aren’t we going home?”

  “No,” he said, looking at me in surprise. “We have to run by the House”—“the House,” to my father and his brothers, meant their place of business—“and then we thought you’d go with us to the University Club for lunch.”

  “I’d rather go home,” I said. But the colored boy in the parking lot was already opening Father’s door. As I stepped out of the car, I somehow got a cinder in my shoe, and I used getting it out as an excuse to lag behind the others. I was really very angry at their not taking me right home, and even after I had removed the cinder, I hesitated a moment to be sure I wouldn’t have to walk to the side door of the building with them. When I started across the lot, they were already waiting for me at the door, standing very close together in their nearly identical hats and coats and light scarves. They looked for all the world like three big brown beavers huddling together to keep warm. Worse than walking to the door with them, I now had to traverse the distance of about thirty feet with their bright eyes watching me intently. I walked with my chin in the air, looking up toward the dirty brick building as though I were estimating its value while really I was observing a few scattered snowflakes that we
re falling.

  When I came up to the three men, Uncle Grover took my hand and began shaking it. “Welcome to the House of Ferguson,” he said.

  Uncle Sydney clapped me on the back as he ushered me through the doorway ahead of them and said, “Welcome home.”

  I felt that those were the first friendly words I had heard since I got off the train, but as I went up the metal steps to the main-floor level, I said to myself indignantly, “Home!”

  They seemed different men once we were inside “the House.” They were all friendliness. At the head of the steps, Father began helping me off with my polo coat. “We keep it pretty stuffy in here,” he said.

  “Old fellows like us have to be careful about our rheumatism,” Uncle Sydney said.

  “I’ll bet you haven’t been in this joint more than a dozen times in your life,” Uncle Grover said. “Pretty soon we’ll have to begin showing you the ropes.”

  I waited while they removed their coats and their scarves and their gloves (they kept their hats on until we were upstairs), and then we walked toward the elevator, between the long rows of showcases where the season’s hats were on display. As nearly always, the main floor was completely deserted except for the doorman at the front door and the old Negro who operated the elevator. For some reason, I couldn’t remember the old Negro’s name, but I shook hands with him and, on the way up, I asked him about his wife, whose name I did remember, because she had once cooked for us. He and his wife had come from my mother’s home, out in Columbia. “Cora’s gone back to Columbia,” he said. “She left me.” There was a silence. The elevator passed the floors where men and women were working, either standing over the long belts that brought out the carroted fur or tending the big blowing machine. At the sixth floor, we could hear the steam escaping from the blocking machines. All at once, the three white men in the elevator began laughing, and then the old Negro was laughing, too. Just before we got to the top floor, where the offices were, he looked at me, still smiling, and said, “I got me another wife now, Mr. Ferguson.”