Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  The purpose of his coming to see Sylvia that day had been to request that she take him back to Tennessee with her and the children. Sylvia had tried to deal with the matter as quickly as possible. “Ah, no, Leander,” she said, “times are not what they were with us. It’s out of the question. But you’re looking well, Leander.”

  “No’m,” said Leander, “times aren’t what they was. That’s why I’d be thankful to go back to Cedar Springs with you.” They were standing in the servants’ dining room, behind the kitchen. In the kitchen, dinner was being prepared, but as soon as Leander and Sylvia began to speak there were no more sounds of running water from that quarter and no conversation between the cook and the maid. The awareness of an audience seemed to inspire Sylvia.

  “Listen here, Leander,” she said, raising her voice, “the good Lord hath dealt heavily with us Harrisons. We’re having to leave all this opulence behind us. There’s not the remotest possibility of my taking on the services of a chauffeur at a time when I’m having to drag my family back to the country in order to make ends meet.”

  As Sylvia spoke Leander stood nodding his head understandingly. He was a tall man with skin the color of wet sand, and he wore a small mustache. In his two hands he held his chauffeur’s cap and as he nodded his head or when he spoke he would occasionally lean forward as though under his cap his hands were resting on a walking cane. “Times are bad, Miss Sylvia,” he said, “and there’s no place like the country when hard times come.”

  “No place on earth, Leander,” Sylvia said, despite herself.

  Leander nodded and raised one hand to stroke his chin. “But I suppose you’d go back anyway, wouldn’t you, Miss Sylvia?” he asked. “Or maybe would you think the children wouldn’t like it there? As for me, I don’t think that’s so.” Sylvia looked at him blankly, as though she had heard a noise somewhere off in the house that had distracted her. “They say there’s nothing so green as a city boy in the country,” Leander continued, “but Wallace and them will take to it after a while. That’s sure, and I wouldn’t give it a thought if I was you. And for folks like you and me there’s no place like the place we was born. It’s only the ride back I’m asking, Miss Sylvia.”

  Sylvia suddenly sat down in one of the straight chairs by the table, as if thereby to express her dismay. “I don’t know why you’re bothering to say all this, Leander. If Mr. Nate felt times were so hard that he could only keep you part time two years before he died, how do you imagine I can re-hire you now?”

  “I don’t reckon you understood me,” Leander began.

  But Sylvia interrupted: “Yes, I did, Leander. But with all the luggage the children will have there won’t be a spare inch of room in either car.”

  Leander bit his lower lip, thoughtfully, and nodded his head again. A few minutes later, after Sylvia had declined his offer to serve dinner, he took his leave for that day.

  The children had laughed openly at Sylvia’s efforts at economy. Charley, who had a head for figures, made an estimate of how much more it had cost her getting the cars washed at the service station and taking taxis in bad weather than it would have cost had she kept Leander on. His mother took such teasing in good spirits. But once when Margaret implied that having a chauffeur had always been an extravagance for them and that through the years Leander had made a good thing of them, Sylvia declared that not one of her children had an ounce of practical sense. Presently she rose and left the family circle, remarking as she did so that it was just as well Margaret had stayed home from “that finishing school” where they filled her with nothing but nonsense. A day or two later Margaret tried to apologize for whatever her offense had been, but Sylvia only fixed her with an icy stare and forbade any further talk on the subject.

  This incident with Margaret was the last, not the first, of its kind. Others like it had occurred earlier, during the two months just after Nate’s death. The children had, at that time, found Sylvia particularly sensitive to any criticism of any aspect of the life she and Nate had made. They found she could not tolerate their accustomed jokes about her furniture, about her long, unbroken correspondence with relatives and girlhood friends in Tennessee, about her clinging to every Southerner she met in Chicago, or about the annual trips back home to see after the two family houses. None of her efforts to maintain a continuity with the world she had grown up in was a permissible subject for their levity. Much less could she countenance any levity about the number of times the family had moved, for this she interpreted as a reflection upon Nate’s career. A casual remark about the steel mesh industry could be the cue for a lecture to the children on Nate’s capabilities and attainments. She talked about his great “drive” and his “genius for efficiency” and how these qualities had destined him to a place of leadership in the business world. She told them that when he was a boy in Cedar Springs everyone had supposed he would take over management of the Harrison farm land and become a member of his father’s law firm, but that almost from boyhood he had had an insatiable curiosity about the “theory and management” of the nation’s big business and industry. “Nate never felt any attraction toward a country law practice,” she would say, “or toward managing and developing the land he and I inherited. He felt drawn toward things that were in a sense foreign to our Southern, country sort of upbringing. And with his energetic mind it was inevitable that he should find his opportunities and make good in them.”

  Sometimes during this period, Nate’s business associates would drop by. She would talk to them, in the presence of the children, about Nate’s business career. In these accounts she seldom made any reference to herself, and those she did make were only parenthetical. She would say: “After Nate finished college in Nashville (where he and I met and first went-together) he took a master’s degree in economics at Yale.” Or another time: “Probably a man of Nate’s abilities could not have hidden himself so far in the country that the world would not have found him. After his year at Yale (when he and I had married and settled at Cedar Springs) it did seem for a while that his interest in finance and industry might turn out to be just a hobby, like his father’s concern with Roman history; but actually Nate was only waiting for the right opportunity. He had turned down other things, but when the right thing came along he didn’t hesitate. Part of his success, I guess, was his being able to make the right decisions.”

  She would talk of Nate’s having gone first to Memphis, then for a short time to Cincinnati, then to Detroit, and so on. But in this connection she never referred to the actual moves which Nate’s career had entailed for her. It was as though Nate had gone to all those places alone.

  The Harrison children tried very hard not to say things that their mother could construe as criticism. They were ever gentle and considerate with her during this time and wanted to be whatever help and comfort to her they could. With their father all four of them had had a happy and affectionate relationship, and his death was a shock and grief to them individually. Yet being—each of them—of a normally happy and adjustable temperament they soon became absorbed again in the interests and excitements of their daily lives. Wallace returned to college in Virginia. The two younger children missed less than a week of school. Margaret did not go back to New York, but she began seeing her friends quietly and played in a tennis tournament at the Saddle and Cycle that spring. Their years of moving from city to city had not had the effect upon them that one might have supposed it would. Instead of giving them a sense of not belonging it had defined for them, to a degree beyond that enjoyed by most children, the kind of world they felt they did belong in. Wherever they had lived they had attended private schools, had gone to fortnightly dancing classes, had spent their leisure hours at the Country Club or in other houses like their own. Though they sometimes had shed tears at leaving a neighborhood or a city, they were never in much doubt about what life would be like in the next place. Unlike many of their friends they had no illusions about their school or their club’s being the only one of its kind in the w
orld. And somehow, as a result, they had in common among them an appreciation and enjoyment of life as they knew it which was more binding than any mere bond of kinship.

  It was just exactly a week after Sylvia had gone to her landlord’s office that she received a telephone call from him. At the time of her visit to him he had hardly been willing even to glance over the list of articles that had been in the house when Sylvia came there. But now he wished to come to the house and have a look at a few of his things. He had decided that since she was moving he should take the opportunity of disposing of the odds and ends of furniture he had left there. He wondered would it be convenient for him to come by that very afternoon. Sylvia, after a moment’s hesitation, said, yes, she supposed it would be.

  In order to make sure that Mr. Canada found his things Sylvia stayed home from a piano recital in which her younger daughter, Nora, was playing that afternoon. It was half past three when Mr. Canada arrived. She was waiting with the list in her hand when her maid showed the old gentleman through the broad doorway at the end of the living room. She was standing by the fireplace at the other end of the long room and she began at once to walk toward him. She greeted him in a polite, businesslike manner but without asking him to sit down. Her thought was that they would begin their inspection at once.

  “The first thing,” she said, “is the great console table in the hall. We left it where it was and have used it mainly because it was too heavy to move.”

  But before she had finished speaking she recognized an expression of confusion on Mr. Canada’s face. Presently he said, “The console table? Yes. Oh, yes.” Sylvia was a moment trying to account for his sudden confusion and abstraction. Then she did—to her own satisfaction at least—account for it. He had been suddenly moved, she reasoned, by the sight of this room where he once had been so happy but which he had not entered for several years now.

  “Oh, won’t you sit down, Mr. Canada,” she said quickly, with apology in her voice. He was only her landlord, but his age and the circumstances, she reflected, did entitle him to more than mere civility from her. “My mind was so on this list,” she began, “that I . . .”

  He interrupted, saying, “It’s more than kind of you to have let me come at all. I sincerely hope I didn’t interfere with any plans.”

  “Indeed not,” she said. “I seldom go anywhere these days.”

  Together they walked out of the living room and into the main hall of the house. As they entered the hall they faced a wall which was covered by three of Sylvia’s painted tapestries. Sylvia guided Mr. Canada directly toward that wall. Two of the tapestries were impressive for their great size and height if for nothing more. Within their narrow, gilded frames were represented human figures of considerably more than life size and with a distinctly allegorical look (despite their nineteenth-century dress). Hung between these two was a horizontal pastoral picture, and below it stood Mr. Canada’s table—a heavy Jacobean oak reproduction.

  Sylvia and Mr. Canada stopped a few feet from the wall and stood there in silence for a moment, like two people before an altar. At last Mr. Canada said in a voice full of mystification: “They were here, you say, when you came? They’re larger than I remember them, certainly.”

  Sylvia drew away from him a little and looked directly up into his eyes. “The pictures, Mr. Canada? Why, they’re ours, I assure you—mine, that is!” Her eyes shone and her lips had already parted to pronounce the absurdity of his claim when he suddenly burst into hearty laughter.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I thought you were pointing them out as something that was mine.” He continued to laugh, and it was not too hard to see that he was laughing partly at his mistake but partly too at Sylvia’s show of temper.

  Sylvia didn’t share his amusement. “It is the table that is yours,” she said.

  “Well, now,” he said, checking his laughter and leaning forward to put his hand on the dark surface of the table top, “so this is a console table. To tell the truth, Mrs. Harrison, I haven’t the slightest recollection of it, though I suppose it does belong to me.”

  “It’s all yours, Mr. Canada,” Sylvia said sulkily, employing the slangy phrase of her children to express both disparagement of the table and resentment against its owner for taking up her afternoon this way.

  But Mr. Canada, instead of taking notice of Sylvia’s tone of voice, commenced praising the tapestries, insisting that he did really have some vague recollection of pictures like them—not among his wife’s possessions but in his father’s old house over in the Western Reserve.

  Sylvia assured him that she didn’t think the pictures were works of art but said that they were of historical interest to people from Tennessee. One of them pictured Davy Crockett making his way through the wilds of West Tennessee wearing a swallow-tail coat, a black shoestring tie, and on his head a coonskin cap. Its companion picture represented Bonnie Kate Sherrill, the heroine of East Tennessee, holding hands with gallant young John Sevier, presumably just after he had rescued her from the Indians at Fort Loudon. Sylvia identified these figures and prolonged the incident further by pointing out the quaint anachronisms in their dress and by telling how her father had commissioned the painting of the pictures by a small-town house painter who, though totally illiterate, was steeped in the legends of pioneer days.

  But it was not vanity that had set her to talking about the tapestries. Mr. Canada’s refusal to notice her rudeness and his giving himself so to praise of her pictures had finally made her see that it was not to look at his possessions he had come there today. She understood that the sooner she ceased to treat him like an ordinary tradesman the sooner she would learn his real motive.

  From the hall she led him to the far corners of the house, checking off the articles in the order in which they appeared on her list. In less than half an hour she and Mr. Canada had returned to the living room where Sylvia had invited him to join her for tea or for a Coca-Cola. In the course of their inspection her manner toward him grew more courteous, but by the time they came to the living room she was beginning to despair of discovering an ulterior motive. They sat down in two chairs about midway in the long room, and she spoke again in her business voice: “I presume it will be all right if we don’t move exactly on the first of the month, Mr. Canada. My younger children’s schools don’t let out until the fourth or fifth of June.”

  Mr. Canada suddenly blossomed with smiles. He was a man whose general manner and appearance attested to his seventy years. But at a moment like this one the years seemed to fall away from him. The color rose in his face, and in his eyes shone an ardor and a naïveté that were youthfulness itself. “Your question hardly needs an answer from me,” he said. “The longer you stay, the more it is to my advantage. And by the way,” he said, the words now spilling out, “speaking of your children, I happened to lunch recently with Louis Norris, who is principal of your younger boy’s school. He says your boy’s a good student and that a scholarship could be arranged for him if you decided not to leave. He said it would be a shame . . .”

  But here Sylvia interrupted. And now it was she who burst into laughter. “Mr. Canada,” she said, “how very kind of you. And how transparent!”

  “I don’t quite follow you,” he said with dignity and without appreciation of her humor.

  “Let’s not speak of it again,” said Sylvia, suddenly looking very serious.

  “I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said.

  Sylvia didn’t answer. She was content now to let him think her offended. That was the easiest way of changing the subject. Presently she began to talk to him about things that she would have talked to any other visitor about. How changeable the weather had been lately—“summer one day and winter the next.” What a dreadful train wreck that was down in Englewood yesterday! . . . But as they talked and drank their Coca-Colas Sylvia kept thinking of how long Mr. Canada had waited for her to mention the children and how, after all that waiting, he had given himself away by pouncing so upon his oppo
rtunity. Like Nate, she reflected, casually, this old gentleman seemed incapable of using his intelligence for anything outside the sphere of business.

  Just when Mr. Canada was leaving the house that afternoon Sylvia’s daughter Nora returned from her piano recital. At the front door Sylvia introduced them to each other and then detained Nora to ask how the recital had gone. “You didn’t miss a thing, Mother,” Nora said. “You should be glad something came up to keep you away.” She said this in Mr. Canada’s presence, and when he had gone Sylvia reprimanded Nora for the rudeness. “Why do you care?” Nora asked, taking off her jacket. “Is he trying to court you, Mother?”

  “Nora!” Sylvia said, with exasperation. “How absurdly you are behaving. The man is old enough to be my father.”