Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  Never in all her years of moving would Sylvia Harrison allow her friends to assist her or to sympathize with her about her moving. Nate’s rise in the business world of the Midsouth and Midwest was so continuous and so prodigious that it kept the family shuttling about the country for more than ten years. Yet Sylvia never complained and never willingly accepted sympathy. On the contrary, instead of ever permitting them to commiserate with her, the letters she wrote to her friends in Tennessee were likely to contain expressions of sympathy for them—not because life had kept them in Thornton and Cedar Springs or had taken them only as far as Nashville, but for a thousand disappointments and injustices they had suffered. The same kind of thing was true in her relationship with the new friends she made and with the old friends whose paths crossed hers at one time and another. And as long as Nate lived, not even he felt free to offer Sylvia advice on the subject of moving or even to lend a hand or express any sympathy when the time for packing arrived.

  After Nate died in 1939 and when Sylvia was preparing to take her family from Chicago back to Tennessee, those in her Chicago circle of friends dared not allude to the troublesomeness of moving. It had been that way, in some degree, when she left Cedar Springs, when she left Memphis, St. Louis, Detroit—everywhere. For a number of years she tried to conceal just how much furniture she did carry about the country with her, but someone—her husband, or one of the children, or even one of the servants—always let the cat out of the bag about the things she had to keep in the attic and the stuff she had to put in storage.

  Wherever the Harrisons had lived they had gone out among society people, mostly among society people with a Southern background (of which they found no scarcity anywhere in the Midwest). They were admired everywhere for their geniality, their good breeding, and simply for their attractive appearances. Sylvia, even at the time of Nate’s death when she was a woman of forty-four, was known in Chicago for her unusual prettiness, her charming manner, and for her very youthful figure. But she was also known—much to her distaste—as the poor, dear Southern woman who had had to move so often and who insisted on taking such a quantity of furniture everywhere. Such an attitude seemed uncalled-for and absurd to her. If there had ever been any scarcity of money, then it would have been a different matter. Her heart went out to people who had to move on a shoestring. The sight of an old rattletrap truck piled high with bare bedsprings and odd pieces of oak furniture could bring tears to her eyes. But in her case there had never been any risk or uncertainty about moving. There had always been more than enough money—both she and Nate had their own comfortable incomes from property back home—and there had always been the understanding that some day they would go back to Tennessee.

  Most of the women with whom Sylvia had gone to boarding school in Nashville were women who had been, no less than she, well provided for. Their misfortunes were seldom of a money kind, although there was the case of Mildred Pettigru whose husband, after he had run through her small inheritance, deserted her in Shreveport, Louisiana, without even train fare back to her home at Gallatin. (Luckily, though, another schoolmate’s husband who had done well in politics was able to procure the appointment of Gallatin postmistress for Mildred.) Except for Mildred’s husband, however, and one other rascal, who actually ended in the penitentiary, the men whom Sylvia’s friends married were responsible, energetic men who commanded the respect of everyone who knew them. Yet in the life of each of her friends there was some element or condition to touch Sylvia’s loyal and compassionate heart. “I feel sorry for Letty Russell,” she would say to Nate. “She and Harry have never had any children and while he’s away on his contracting jobs she’s stuck in the house with Harry’s mother who’s stone deaf and almost blind.” Nate might shake his head sympathetically. Or another time he might point out to Sylvia that she was always looking for reasons to feel sorry for her friends, and then he would remind her that some people were inclined to pity her for all her labors in moving. “That,” Sylvia would reply, “is something I have imposed upon myself. It is of my choosing that we travel with so much furniture, Nate.”

  Needless to say, not all of Sylvia’s girlhood friends remained in the section of the country where they were born, but it was with those who did that she corresponded most faithfully and it was the signs of unhappiness in their lives that disturbed her most deeply. At least once a year she went back to Tennessee for a visit, to see after her property there; and in that way she continually renewed her acquaintance with her friends’ manner of life. She always visited in the home of one of them, making that her headquarters, and accepted invitations to meals in the houses of innumerable others within a radius of thirty miles of Thornton. She went to their bridge parties, their church guild meetings, their sit-down teas, their Coca-Cola luncheons. She sat with them individually on their porches and in their upstairs sitting rooms talking about old times and about present times. The fact that impressed itself upon her always was that in no household did she find the kind of harmonious relationship which she and Nate enjoyed. It wasn’t that she found discord in the place of harmony. Rather, she found in place of either a vacuum. The husbands and fathers in these houses were not the tyrants of another day; they were instead . . . what were they instead? Sometimes, after such a visit, it seemed to Sylvia that the husbands had not been there at all.

  And yet she observed that these same husbands exercised a kind of inhuman control over their families that their forebears had never done. The literal picture she carried in her mind of a typical, latter-day husband in Tennessee was one of a man in shirt sleeves, his tie removed, perhaps even his shoes off. He is seated in a canvas chair in the yard or in a wicker porch chair at the very end of the porch, reading The Evening Tennessean or the biweekly Cameron County Democrat. It is late afternoon and he is tired. At the other end of the porch is his wife with a group of friends. They are dressed fashionably, even elegantly. There has been an afternoon party here or at some other house on High Street or Church Street or College Street. But he, the husband, is a being who has retired from the social scene in Thornton. He is a working man—not a laborer but a lawyer or a dealer in electrical and plumbing fixtures or the manager of a chain store or even a doctor or a congressman. It doesn’t matter. He insists on his right, his necessity to be like other men. But he insists also that his wife, Sylvia’s girlhood friend, must continue to live as she always has, and he will insist upon sending his daughter to Ward-Belmont (this being before the Baptists finally took over Ward-Belmont). He is not to blame for things being the way they are, but probably he doesn’t care that they are. It was he who said to his wife before she came to Chicago to visit Sylvia: “Buy yourself some really good clothes while you’re there, but when you get back, for God’s sake don’t come near my place of business in them.”

  Nate, of course, said that Sylvia exaggerated this whole matter. But she once pointed out to him that even Isabel Sternberg, her old maid Jewish friend in Cedar Springs, shared the experience. Isabel’s old-bachelor brothers insisted that all the rituals of the table be observed at their house, yet the brothers rarely ate at home. They ate lunch and often dinner too at the Cardinal Café, which was next to the bank, and left Isabel to eat with the three old aunts and the little girl she had adopted.

  “The Jews,” Nate had said, forgetting the real topic under discussion, “are wonderful people. Especially Southern Jews. Someone ought to write a history of Southern Jews.”

  “It’s no joke to be a Jew,” Sylvia replied, thinking affectionately and sympathetically of Isabel. “Not even in the South.”

  During Nate’s lifetime there were, on some occasions, mild disagreements between Sylvia and him about the necessity for moving from one house to another in the same city. Sylvia complained that he never bothered to get a sufficiently long lease on a house. Nate said that the truth was it was not easy (especially during the ’20’s) to get more than a year’s lease on the kind of house they required. Owners were always coming back from Europe o
r deciding to sell the house. Sometimes Nate would shake his head and smile indulgently at Sylvia, which was supposed to remind her of the folly of carrying so much furniture about the country. Sometimes he would flare up as though he were about to lose his temper and threaten to buy a place, one that would hold her furniture. Then Sylvia would give in. For that always seemed to her the most impractical idea of all. When Nate made that threat, she would go to the telephone and call the transfer company.

  Any decision to move was Nate’s, but the activity itself was all hers. After their first move from Cedar Springs, Sylvia took more and more responsibility until at last she would ask Nate to make-himself-scarce during the actual operation and not meddle in a woman’s work.

  There was hardly a picture or a piece of furniture for which she did not have some special provision in time of moving. She saved all her old faded and worn-out slipcovers to protect the upholstered chairs from the danger of snags and scars. Her mother’s mahogany teacart and a certain little Chippendale night stand were always packed inside the cedar chest with the blankets and bed pillows. Somewhere she had obtained an old coffin crate into which the grandfather clock would just exactly fit. For her favorite Chinese-lacquer piece and for all the portraits and the painted tapestries there were special crates which she had had constructed before she ever left Cedar Springs. There were even a few things in the attic (or sometimes in a warehouse) which had been crated in Cedar Springs and had not been uncrated during all the years of moving.

  One of the miracles of her moving technique was the way she could get the furniture set up and arranged in a new house so that any individuality in the house itself was completely obscured. If she had papering or painting done, it was in an effort to subdue obtrusive architectural design. Long before it became fashionable, she was fond of painting doors, walls and all the wood trim in a room the same color—a dusty green, a flat gray, or an off white. By some means or other her furnishings were made to dominate whatever interior they were taken into. Within two days after the Harrisons had moved—whether into a modern suburban house or a Victorian city house—it was hard for any of them to realize how recently they had moved or actually that they had moved at all. Upstairs there would be the rosewood bed, six feet wide and nearly eight feet long, whose canopy had inevitably to be stored in the attic or in a warehouse. (Even the house on Ritchie Court in Chicago did not have ceilings high enough for the canopy.) Downstairs were the family portraits and the enormous painted tapestries representing scenes and characters from Tennessee history. (The pictures, like everything else in the house, seemed always to suggest a bigger house.) And downstairs, of course, were the heavy living-room and library pieces, and the innumerable china cabinets, chests, and sideboards overflowing from the dining room into the front and back halls. No matter if a house had all manner of built-in storage space Sylvia still preferred to keep her linens and china in the storage pieces that she brought along and to keep the family books in her own glass-fronted bookcases. This made it easier, so she said, to put her hands on things. It kept her from having to stop twenty times a day to think where she had put something the last time they moved.

  Despite Sylvia’s express wishes to be left alone, her neighbors had been known to send over whole meals for her and her family on the day of a move. “It’s as though one of us were dead,” she said on one occasion. “The wonder is somebody doesn’t send flowers.”

  One time she gave a dinner party only two days before she moved, just to prove to herself—and to everyone else, of course—that she could. It was an elaborate party, far more elaborate than she usually went in for. But in the rooms where she entertained her company all sorts of barrels and packing cases were in evidence. Guests had to talk to each other leaning over and around crates which were apparently packed and ready to be loaded. Sylvia, during most of the evening, refused to recognize the presence of the boxes and barrels. If anyone made reference to them she pretended either not to hear or to be offended by the reference.

  Then, just as the party was breaking up, she called for everyone’s attention, and she proceeded to go about opening barrels, crates, packing cases—revealing that all but one of them were empty and that she had not really even begun her packing. The one box that was not empty was filled with presents for the guests, presents prettily wrapped in tissue paper and tied with colored ribbons but which when opened turned out to be only absurd white elephants that Sylvia had not cared to move. . . . She had done this, of course, in a spirit of fun and gaiety. And whenever mention was made of it in later years, she would point out that it had happened in the Era of Practical Jokes, back in the ’20’s when she was young and energetic and full of all kinds of foolishness. It had happened when she and Nate lived down in Memphis and at a time when they were only moving from one house to another, not from one city to another. Fifteen years later, after Nate was dead and when Sylvia was making the last of all her many moves, she could hardly consider that move from one Memphis address to another a move at all.

  Nate always professed to be as baffled as everyone else by Sylvia’s untroubled and independent spirit at moving time. He would tell about that party she gave in Memphis and how astonished and perplexed he had been by her behavior. Or he would tell about their first move from Cedar Springs to Memphis, not about Sylvia’s crying that morning but about how well she had borne the hardships of that awful trip. When they left the town square they had two hundred and eight miles of bad roads between them and the city limits of Memphis. Here and there was a ten-mile stretch of blacktop, but most of the roads were gravel and there were frequent stretches of unimproved dirt roads. All day long they had pushed toward Memphis. But at sundown they were still forty miles northeast of the city. They had had every conceivable kind of delay. One part of the road was so rough that little Wallace became car sick, necessitating a long wait by the side of the road. Twice Nate took a wrong turn, and once when he got too far ahead of the other car the Negro man, whose name was Leander, took a wrong turn. . . . Once they had to travel for two miles over a new levee road that was still wet from a rain the previous night; and because Nate was afraid the car might slide off into the swamp water he made Sylvia and the children get out and walk for at least half the length of the levee, Leander’s wife getting out with them to carry little Margaret who was only a toddler at the time. In addition to these delays they had, between the two cars, nine flat tires.

  Nate said they would certainly have sought shelter at nightfall except that Sylvia wouldn’t hear of it. She spent half the day leaning over the back of the front seat administering to the children who alternately fought each other, cried for something to eat, bumped their heads on the arm rest, and even vomited. Yet it was Sylvia who urged the party on. When they stopped for supper she insisted that she felt as fresh as she had at breakfast. And she reminded Nate that every piece of trouble had been made easier by the kindness of friendly people who happened along just at the right moment. . . . An old Negro farm woman had brought Wallace a glass of lemonade when he was car sick. When they waited at the fork of the roads for Leander to discover his mistake and rejoin them, the people from the nearest house came out and invited them into the house to rest themselves. Sylvia even caught a cat nap lying across the feather bed in one of the big downstairs rooms of that unpainted farmhouse; and Wallace joined in a game of kick-the-can which he had to be torn away from when Leander reappeared. Sylvia pointed out that during the entire day Nate and Leander had not changed a single tire or patched one inner tube without practical assistance from farmers—white and colored—who left their work in the fields to help them.

  After supper in the hotel at Brownsville, Sylvia would not hear to stopping for the night. “The way people have treated us,” she said, “I don’t feel we’ve really left home yet.”

  Ever afterward Nate described Sylvia as a real trouper that day. He exaggerated the hardships of the trip and pictured her as a sort of pioneer heroine. But he always concluded by saying, with a b
road smile on his face, that Sylvia’s courage and endurance had had special inspiration on that occasion. Never until that day, he said, had she imagined that human kindness and friendliness might exist beyond a fifty-mile radius of Middle Tennessee. And, besides, to urge her on she had always before her the image of her precious furniture in the hands of those rough moving men from Memphis.

  Once in 1934 when they had been living in Chicago for nearly a year Sylvia and Nate came home from a party on a snowy winter evening and stayed downstairs to talk for a while. They began by discussing the party they had been to, but they ended, as they often did at such times by talking about . . . the furniture.

  Sylvia had actually started up the stairs. Nate had put out all the lights except those in the chandelier that hung above the stairs from the ceiling of the second floor. On the third step Sylvia looked over her shoulder and said, “Wasn’t that Mr. Jackson witty tonight. And weren’t Nellie’s stories about the Gold Coast charming? It was a delightful party. Everybody responded so well to everybody else’s stories.” By the time she had finished speaking she had turned all the way round on the steps. Nate, from the foot of the stairs, was offering her a cigarette. She wasn’t a habitual smoker, but she accepted the cigarette, bringing one bare arm out from under her velvet cape to do so. Then, throwing back her dark cape, she reached for the banister rail with her other hand and let herself down onto the carpeted step. Nate lit her cigarette and his own. He stood with one foot on the first step and leaned against the heavy newel post. “People did listen to other people’s stories more than usual tonight,” he said. “It was a good evening.”