Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  “He means he’s got him a young wife now, about your age, Mr. Ferguson,” Uncle Sydney said. “And a new baby on the way.”

  Suddenly I remembered the man’s name was Rudolph, but we were already getting out of the elevator, and there was Great-Uncle Will waiting to go down in the elevator and telling me that Great-Aunt Marietta would want to see me.

  We went to Great-Uncle Louis’s office, and from there we went first to see Uncle John and then Great-Uncle Will’s namesake, who was president of the company and whom everybody in the family called Prez. As I went into Uncle Prez’s office, I was still escorted by Father, Uncle Grover, and Uncle Sydney, and, of course, now by Uncle John as well.

  Uncle John had had very little to say to me while we were in his office. “Hello, my boy, it is indeed good to have you with us again,” he had said when I first came in, but the rest of the time he was flustering with papers on his desk, putting away a manila folder, opening and shutting drawers. He was the oldest brother, and right after my grandfather died, there had been a period of tension in the family because Uncle John so obviously expected to be made president. That was all forgotten now, but still they took me to see Uncle John before Uncle Prez. While Uncle John was ordering his papers, or whatever he was doing, Uncle Sydney commenced pointing out to me that Uncle John’s office had been redecorated that fall, calling attention to the new monk’s-cloth draperies. Uncle John didn’t acknowledge the admiration that I expressed rather feebly. Father and Uncle Grover were silent, but Father looked warningly at Uncle Sydney.

  The moment we entered Uncle Prez’s office, Uncle John began talking a blue streak. “Here is the white hope of the Ferguson firm,” he said. He put his arm about my shoulders. “Here is the young fellow we are all counting on, Mr. President. Here is the young man who is going to bring us the ideas of the new generation.”

  Uncle Prez got up from the roll-top desk that had been my grandfather’s and shook my hand. His smile and his handshake were gentler than his brothers’, but there was not the warmth in the expression about his eyes that the others had. He was plainly a man who would have been satisfied to work his whole life in the sixth-floor blocking room if that had been his lot. “Sit down,” he said, addressing all of us. “As soon as Miss Hauser comes back from lunch, we can all go somewhere and get a bite ourselves. Wherever we go, I’m going to have some hot black-bean soup to start with.” He turned toward the window. “Just looking out that window makes me cold,” he said.

  “We’re going to the University Club,” Uncle Grover said.

  Uncle John cleared his throat thoughtfully. “Let’s see, let’s see, now. Why go all the way out there? How about the Statler?”

  “The Club’s on the way home, John,” Father said decisively, and added, smiling, “This boy, here, seems to be in a sort of hurry to get home and see his mammy. The table service will be quicker out there,” he said for my benefit, “and we’ll just have a bite.”

  I had a good idea of how long that “bite” would take, and, suddenly spying Uncle Prez’s telephone, I picked up the receiver and called our home number. When they heard the number I called, they began to laugh.

  “I believe college has made him a mother’s boy,” Uncle Grover said. “I don’t remember he ever was before. I understood he was quite a ladies’ man at John Burroughs School last year.”

  Then Uncle John began talking about some business matter in a deafening voice.

  It took me a moment to realize that I was getting the busy signal. I put my finger on the receiver hook and looked at my watch. It was nearly twelve-thirty, long past the time when Mother did her telephoning. “The servants!” I said to myself angrily, but at once I began to wonder why I felt such a passion to get home and talk to Mother. Uncle Grover was right when he said that I had never been a mother’s boy when I was growing up, and even as I got off the train that morning I had thought the person I most wanted to see was a certain girl who was a senior at John Burroughs School that year. “What has come over me?” I asked myself. My urgency somehow seemed to come from the impression that Father and my uncles had made on me when I stepped off the train—the impression that seeing them was only a continuation of dormitory life at Kenyon—and, as a matter of fact, nothing had happened since I arrived to alter that first impression.

  While I sat determinedly not listening to the men’s business talk and calling the number again every two minutes, I realized that all semester I had been yearning for some relief from what seemed the one-dimensional, exclusively masculine view of life held by college boys and college professors, and, I found now, by businessmen. Looking at my father and my uncles, I thought again of how my mother’s morning must have been. While she was playing the piano, she had been making all sorts of decisions about the housekeeping; while she was making sure that the peony beds were covered, she had decided what was to be done about Nora’s algebra troubles; in the sewing room, she had sung so loud that you could hardly have heard the noise of the sewing machine (what if the seams did have to be done over?); and while she was talking on the telephone, sometimes screaming with laughter at her friends’ foolishness, she had been jotting down plans for meals or making her grocery list. Or perhaps she had let the decisions and the grocery list go. If she had enjoyed her morning sufficiently, she might have left the decisions to Grandmother and the servants, or if she had had to put in the orders herself, a grocery list could always be made on the spur of the moment, out of her head, after she had called the number of the grocery store.

  “Quit being so fidgety,” Father said, finally. “You know how long your mother talks on the telephone.”

  “She doesn’t talk on the phone at this time of day.”

  “Well, anyhow, you must be driving that operator crazy,” he said.

  “If I were that operator,” Uncle Sydney said, “I wouldn’t give you the number at all. You’re a college man now, and I’d make you wait till you got home to talk to your mother.”

  To myself, I said, “I know you would! You certainly would!” Actually, I knew that he meant not if he were the operator but if he were my father. And I could see that Father knew it, too, because he changed the subject at once.

  But it was really a worse subject that Father changed to. “Before we leave and go to lunch, there is an important piece of business we must attend to,” he said. Only Uncle John looked at him seriously. The others knew as well as I that it was going to be something that related to me.

  “What is it, Herbert?” Uncle Prez asked.

  “We’ve got to outfit this boy with a hat, the right sort of hat, one he’ll like.”

  “You mean he doesn’t have a hat?” Uncle Prez said.

  “Not with him.”

  “I’ll bet he has a closetful at home,” said Uncle Sydney.

  “He does,” Father said.

  “But you mean he travelled without a hat?”

  “He certainly did.”

  “He came all the way from Kenyon without a hat?”

  I listened to them. They were joking. I could tell how glad they all were to see me, but I couldn’t joke with them. The thought of their selecting a hat for me and forcing me to wear it to the University Club made my wrists and ankles begin to sweat.

  “He got off the train bareheaded,” Uncle Grover said.

  I lifted the telephone receiver. “And I’m going to get back on the train bareheaded,” I said. Then I called the number again. It was still busy.

  “Suppose you take him down to the first floor and find him something,” Uncle Prez said. “And we’ll be down as soon as Miss Hauser comes in.” They had been joking, but now I could see they were all becoming quite serious.

  “Uncle Prez,” I said, “I’m not going to get a hat.”

  “Oh, leave the boy alone,” Uncle John said. “Every one of you knows that college boys don’t wear hats.”

  “Of course, it’s really all right for college boys not to wear hats,” Uncle Sydney said. “But, you know, seriously,
there’s something about most men who don’t wear hats. Women can get away with it, but not men.”

  “Yes, it’s the old story any merchandiser knows,” Uncle Prez said. “You tell a man everybody in town’s wearing this particular sort of thing and he buys it. You tell a woman that and she goes away without buying. She looks for something else.”

  “That’s right,” Uncle Grover said. “There’s always something phony about men who dress flamboyantly, or even about those who go to the other extreme.”

  “I’ve never seen one come to much,” Uncle Prez said. “They end up clerking for some haberdasher or—”

  “Or they go off to New York or Hollywood,” Uncle Grover said.

  “Now, there is that exception,” Father said. “People in California do dress differently.”

  “Actors and artists are the only men like that who make any sort of success of themselves,” Uncle Sydney said, “and they’re not really men. It’s more than just the way such guys dress.”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” Uncle John agreed. “They’re usually just not very intelligent.”

  “They’re not very intelligent as men,” Uncle Sydney said. “I understand that almost any Hollywood actor has to have his father or his brother or somebody look after his money.”

  At that moment, Miss Hauser and two other stenographers came in, young women wrapped in fur coats and wearing galoshes. Uncle John introduced me to them, and the other men put on their hats and began gathering up their coats and scarves.

  “I’m going to try to call once more,” I said to Father. “She will think it’s funny if I don’t call.”

  “Ah, your mother will understand,” he said impatiently. “Come along, son.” I felt that he was embarrassed by my behavior.

  I had called the number but was starting to put down the receiver when suddenly I heard Mother’s voice. “Central!” she was saying.

  And I burst out laughing. “Hello, Mother,” I said eagerly, not realizing that, though I could hear her, she could not hear me.

  “Central!” she said. Then, correcting herself, she said, “Op’rator! Op’rator!” Again I laughed aloud, thinking of how I had almost forgotten that special southern-Missouri accent of hers.

  “Hello, Little Dixie!” I screamed into the telephone. Now she could hear me, but I could no longer hear her very distinctly. It sounded as though she had moved away from the telephone. “Try to talk louder, Mother,” I said.

  “I’m screaming my lungs out, darling. How are you?”

  “Couldn’t be better!” I shouted.

  “You’re bursting my eardrums. I can’t wait to see you.”

  “I can barely hear you,” I said. “Grandmother and Nora all right?”

  She made some answer, but I couldn’t understand it.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Let’s hang up and try to get a better connection,” she said. And simultaneously Father said, “You’ve got a bad connection. Hang up and call again.”

  “No!” I shouted angrily at Father.

  Mother’s distant voice wailed, “Oh-oh, my ears! Please, Op’rator,” she said, jiggling the telephone hook, “can’t you get us a better connection?”

  The operator’s pleasant voice said, “There you are.” And then we had a normal connection.

  “Darling,” Mother was saying, “I guess Nora and I won’t see you till night. We’ve got to do some shopping, and you’re going to have lunch with the men, aren’t you?”

  “I guess I am,” I said, “but I could meet you downtown.”

  “That would be grand,” she said, “but our shopping would bore you to death. Nora’s having a hayride out at the farm tonight. Did your father tell you? I’ll bet you’ve been trying to get us—she’s been on the phone inviting people ever since breakfast. This is to be her one last fling. She’s going to tutor through the holidays. We’re all topsy-turvy—that’s why I didn’t come down to meet you.”

  “Hello,” came Nora’s voice from the upstairs extension.

  “Hello,” I said. “Flunked your algebra, eh?”

  The men in the office scowled at me.

  “I’m in love,” Nora crooned.

  Then Grandmother’s voice came from the extension on the landing. “Darling boy, we can’t wait to see you. I just won’t go shopping. Now, you hurry along home.”

  Nora began to stutter excitedly, “Gr-grandmother, you’ve got to come! I want you to see the material at Vandervoort’s. Mother’s already seen it.”

  “Then, I bid to stay home!” said Mother.

  Nora began giggling and saying that she would stay. Then they were all laughing and talking at once. It was funny hearing them and I began to laugh.

  Then I stopped laughing.

  “Darling,” Mother said. “Darling, are you still there?”

  “Yes,” I said affably, “but I’ll see you three silly women tonight.”

  “We’ll be home not a minute later than four-thirty.”

  “See you then,” I said. “Father and them are waiting on me to go to lunch.” All my resistance and my anger seemed futile and absurd to me now. “They’re going to fetch me a new hat.”

  “Something mature and very masculine, I suppose,” Mother said.

  “Oh, yes,” I said.

  As I put down the receiver, it came over me that I would never again be able to talk to Mother or to Nora or to Grandmother except in the specific role of a man. It suddenly became clear that everything clever, gentle, and light belonged to women and the world they lived in. To men belonged only the more serious things in life, the deadly practical things—constructive ideas, profitable jobs, stories with morals, jokes with points. In my innocence, I felt that I was stupid not to have understood this before, and felt, or tried to feel, a new passion to adjust myself and assimilate these things that were to be mine. Yet all that afternoon, at the University Club and, afterward, when I went back to the office with Father to pick out a hat, I was waiting only for the proper moment to come to go home. It seemed almost that the time would never come. Looking back on it, it seems that until that day I had never known what it was to wait. It was like waiting for a furlough, or even like waiting for the war to be over.

  Two Ladies in Retirement

  SOME NASHVILLE wit had once said, “When I look at Miss Betty Pettigru, I’m reminded of an old, old baby.” Others thought she looked more like the Home-Run King himself. She was a short, plump woman, not fat but with an individual plumpness to all her limbs and to her torso, her breasts, her hands, and even to the features of her moon-shaped face. She was a lady well known in Nashville, during a period of twenty-five years, for her Sunday-night parties and for her active role in the club life of the city. Miss Betty’s face and figure and her parties and her active role seemed so much a part of Nashville that hardly anyone could believe it when, in the spring of 1926, word finally got around that she was definitely going to move away and go to live in St. Louis.

  At first they all said, oh, it would be merely another of her protracted visits to St. Louis, and she would come back talking of nothing but her little nephews, who, of course, weren’t really her little nephews at all. She was only going for another stay with some of that Tolliver family she was kin to. Miss Betty’s enemies were particularly skeptical. “Miss Betty Pettigru leave Nashville? The scene of all her victories? Nonsense! Never!” And they kept asking what on earth made her even talk of leaving. “I think I’m going to St. Louis to watch my irresistible nephews grow up,” she said. “But you know me. Womanlike, I seldom know my own mind or what my reason is for doing anything.”

  By everyone, her talk of leaving Nashville was considered “completely and entirely absurd.” But then it came out in the Sunday paper that Miss Betty Pettigru had sold her house on West End Avenue—came out not on the society page but in the real-estate section—that convinced everybody. Soon they learned that she had actually sold her lovely big limestone house, disposed of all but a few pieces of her furniture, and had left for
St. Louis in the company of her cousin and close companion of many years, Mrs. Florence Blalock. In Nashville, it seemed the end of an era!

  During ten years, Miss Betty and Mrs. Blalock had been paying visits together to their St. Louis relatives, the James Tollivers. Their visits were frequent and long, yet as guests they had always had to have their stockings “rinsed out” by the maid and their breakfasts brought to their rooms, and had to be given little parties, which had been made up of mothers and aunts of the Tollivers’ friends. At last, and quite unexpectedly, too, they had been told by Mr. James Tolliver himself that their visits were a bad length. Either they should come for shorter visits or they should come and live the year around as members of the household. Miss Betty had burst into tears on the spot—from pure shock, as she said afterward. James Tolliver, a very gentle and businesslike man of about forty, had tried immediately to relent. But there was no relenting once such a thing was said, and the decision had to be made.

  How could anyone who had followed Miss Betty’s social career imagine that she would make the choice in favor of St. Louis? The answer, of course, was that nobody but her cousin Mrs. Blalock could. Mrs. Blalock remembered the warmth with which Miss Betty had welcomed her into her house thirty years before, how she commenced calling her Flo Dear at once, how she talked of the longing she had always felt for a sister whom she could love. And, what was more, Flo Dear remembered how Miss Betty’s kindness and generosity toward her continued even after she realized that her poor cousin could not supply the sort of family affection that she craved. Flo Dear knew that at the Tolliver fireside it would be a different story.

  To the Tolliver boys, it seemed that Auntie Bet and Flo Dear had always lived in St. Louis and occupied those two rooms at the end of the upstairs hall. Before the two ladies had resided in the Tollivers’ house six months, the boys would speak of something that had happened during last year’s visit as though their “aunts” had already been living with them then, and they would have to be reminded that it was otherwise.