Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  “Oh, is he?” said Nora. “Well, it’s not easy to tell the ages of grown people.”

  Before the day of the move from Ritchie Court arrived, Sylvia had had other visits from Mr. Canada. Usually he made some pretense of business, but of his half-dozen visits there were at least two occasions when he forgot to mention any reason for coming. After the first day Sylvia always received him hospitably and chatted with him in the living room during the hour or more that he stayed. Her children could not understand why she tolerated his attentions, and Sylvia was not at all clear about it in her own mind. She resented his clumsy gestures about the house rent and the scholarship for Charley, and she was embarrassed before her children to have to acknowledge his obvious aspirations as a suitor. But to the children she laughed both about his gestures and about his aspirations, and she continued to let him come to the house. She continued even after the children’s amusement at the situation turned to disapproval and their good-natured teasing to accusing silence. Yet to the very end there was no change in hers and Mr. Canada’s relationship and she was ever looking forward to the time when she would see him no more.

  She looked forward to that time, she soon found, with just the same pleasure that she looked forward to the day when she would not see Leander Thompson again. For Leander, like Mr. Canada, didn’t come to see Sylvia just the one time. Actually, he turned up again on the very morning after Mr. Canada’s first call at the house, and he stayed even longer than Mr. Canada had done.

  Sylvia was still at the breakfast table when he arrived, and she waited until she and Margaret had had their second cups of coffee before telling the maid to let him come into the dining room.

  Leander began speaking before he was well into the room. “Miss Sylvia, I’ve been let go,” he said. “Those people have accused me of taking things—over there!” As he spoke he had come forward, and he stopped within a few feet of Sylvia’s chair at the table. As he said “over there” he gestured with his cap in the general direction of the house where he had been working since he left the Harrisons’ service. “Miss Sylvia, you know—and you know, Miss Margaret—that I wouldn’t take nothing that didn’t belong to me. They say I took two pocket watches and a bottle of their whisky, and you all know how sparing I am of whisky.”

  He was in such an obvious state of excitement that Sylvia asked him to sit down in one of the straight chairs that were lined against the wall. At first he refused, but Sylvia said that she would not talk to him until he had sat down and calmed himself. Once he was seated, Sylvia asked, “When did all this happen, Leander?”

  “It happened just this morning when I came in to work. They—he, Mr. Warren—said they found the pocket watches and half bottle of whisky on my shelf in their garage where I generally keep my things. But, before God, somebody else had put them there.” He spoke hurriedly, running his words together in a way totally unlike his usual, deliberate manner of speech. Presently he slumped in the chair and stared at the floor, all the while shaking his head. “What would I do with their watches or their sort of whisky?”

  A rather dazed expression came over Sylvia’s face, and it was Margaret, having observed her mother’s expression, who spoke next. “Leander, we believe you,” she said impatiently. “But you ought not to take on this way!” Margaret had never seen Leander cast aside his cheerfulness or his dignity before—not to this extent. And when he raised a beseeching gaze to her, she quickly dropped her eyes to her empty coffee cup.

  Sylvia glanced at Margaret and for a moment watched the peculiar expression which had settled about her mouth. Then she said, “Leander, how long has it been since this happened? What time was it?”

  “I’ve just come from over there, Miss Sylvia.”

  “You didn’t wait long. Didn’t you try to explain?”

  “Not over much.”

  “Did Mr. Warren threaten to have you arrested?”

  “No’m. He offered to pay me a month’s wages, but I said, ‘No, sir—nothing!’ ” Until now Leander had continued to look at Margaret, and now it was only out of the corner of his eye that he glanced at Sylvia. “I’m not making this up, Miss Sylvia,” he said.

  “I thought possibly you were,” she said.

  “No’m,” Leander said, “it’s something that happened.”

  “I might be able to persuade them to forget it,” Sylvia said, rising from her chair.

  “I don’t want you to do that, Miss Sylvia,” Leander said, also rising. “I’m through over there.” On his feet again, he seemed more himself. But Sylvia looked into his face and was aware that there was still something different about him. She told him to go out and see if their cars didn’t need a washing and to come back and talk to her again after that.

  When he had gone and she and Margaret had passed from the dining room into the living room, Sylvia said: “You certainly behaved in a queer fashion, curling your lip at poor Leander.”

  “I couldn’t help it, Mother,” Margaret protested. “I honestly couldn’t. I was suddenly filled with revulsion and loathing for him. He’s so obviously schizophrenic! He stole those things just so he would be caught. You must have felt the same way I did. He’s pathetic, but any real psychopath is repulsive to a normal person.”

  “You’re mistaken, Margaret,” Sylvia said with emphasis.

  “You don’t think he took those watches and that whisky?”

  “Of course he did. But he’s not crazy. He’s only hell-bent upon going back to Tennessee with us.”

  “So hell-bent that it’s made him lose contact with reality.”

  “Leander’s not crazy, Margaret; he’s only willful. I’m not a bit surprised he’s done this. When we left Cedar Springs, Margaret, I let it be known among the Negroes that I wanted a married couple to take with me. Leander wasn’t married, but he got married on two days’ notice! You’ve heard me tell that. And he married the stupidest girl he could find just so he could be sure we’d send her back home pretty soon . . . as, of course, we had to do.”

  Margaret, who knew this story of Leander’s marriage quite well, hardly listened to her mother now. Evidently Sylvia had convinced her of Leander’s sanity, and by so doing had robbed the incident of all psychological interest. Her thoughts returned to something more substantial—that is, to the impression which Leander’s physical appearance had made on her. “When he looked up at me with that dopey look in his eyes it was all I could do to keep from shuddering,” she said. “And he looks like a different person with that mustache shaved off.”

  “Oh, that’s what’s different,” Sylvia said. “His mustache is gone.”

  “He looked silly with it,” Margaret said thoughtfully, “but even worse without it, after all.” Leander had grown his mustache only since he left the Harrisons’ full-time employ, and when it first appeared there had been a good deal of fun made of it by the Harrison children. He had told one of them at the time that “somehow” he always got so he looked like whomever he worked for, and his new employer wore a small black mustache.

  “He looks naked without it,” Margaret said with finality. “That’s it—naked and perfectly ghastly.”

  “One thing is certain,” Sylvia said with a faint smile. “He didn’t stop to shave his mustache after they accused him of stealing this morning.”

  When Leander returned from washing the cars he gave Sylvia a second, slightly more detailed account of his dismissal. Sylvia showed little interest. She heard him out, but when he had finished she made no comment. And from that moment both she and Leander were satisfied to make no further reference to the incident. They talked together for nearly an hour that morning, and on each of Leander’s subsequent visits to the house they talked for as long a time. The scene of their talks was usually the plain, square little servants’ dining room behind the kitchen. They sat on opposite sides of the room, facing one another across the brown oak table, each in a straight chair against the buff-colored wall. The avowed topic of their conversations was always the problem of
finding Leander another suitable job, but Leander’s many digressions and parentheses—the latest news he had had from Cedar Springs or some anecdote he remembered from his years with the Harrisons—were so frequent and lengthy that only Sylvia’s persistence kept the purpose of their talks before them.

  The many calls which Leander and Mr. Canada paid could hardly have escaped comment from Sylvia’s children. The very number of times the two men came was enough to draw comment, but it was the regularity with which the visits of the two men were alternated that inspired the children’s real efforts at wit. Wallace was off in Virginia, but even his letters were filled with references to his mother’s “two suitors,” about whom his younger brother had kept him posted.

  Margaret and Nora called Sylvia a “wicked two-timer” and warned her that sooner or later she would get her dates mixed. Sylvia entered into the fun and occasionally referred to her callers as the Black Knight and the White Knight. Yet despite all the fun and teasing, Sylvia could, almost from the beginning, detect a growing dislike on the part of the children for the two men as individuals and could detect their increasing disapproval of her continuing to let them come to the house. And their dislike and disapproval, strangely enough, seemed to increase her own unwillingness, or inability, to put an end to the visits.

  Each time Leander came he appeared a little more unkempt than the time before. Patches even appeared on his coat sleeves and trousers, and he gave up his chauffeur’s cap in favor of a floppy old fedora. Sylvia’s two daughters said they “lived in dread” of meeting him when coming or going and of having to explain him to their friends. What difference did it make that it was only a pose and that he had a closet full of clothes wherever he lived? He looked and behaved like a tramp or something out of a book, bowing and scraping before them as he had never done in the past. And they were completely disgusted when they learned that though their mother had found him several jobs he refused them all because the employers were not up to his standards. “It’s plain that he’s not going to take another job,” Margaret said, “and it’s plain that you’re going to continue to feel responsible for him, Mother. So why not just give in and agree to take him back to Tennessee with us?” In reply Sylvia had opened her mouth to make one of her hard-times speeches, but they all broke into laughter. And she only laughed with them.

  Mr. Canada’s presence they found harder still to explain to their friends. What could they say upon coming into the house with some friend and finding their mother, who still wore black whenever she went out, entertaining a strange old man in the living room. It would not have been so bad if he had been someone she had always known or someone that they or she knew something about. In that case they could have at least pretended he was there to express sympathy or to offer advice.

  It was a busy season for the three Harrison children who were at home. It seemed to Sylvia that they were enjoying their friends more than ever before, were more than ever absorbed in the life from which she was about to take them. With her they were affectionate and considerate, as they had always been. Their criticism of her tolerance for Mr. Canada and Leander did not carry over into other things. It was clear that they felt no resentment of the move they were about to make, and she understood why they did not. They had been brought up always in the expectation of the family’s some day returning to Tennessee. The possibility of not returning had hardly occurred to them. Being young, they were excited by the prospect of any change, and they had no real conception of just how great a change this would be. And, in the last weeks before the move from Ritchie Court, Sylvia became aware that she was herself no longer so sensitive to remarks the children made about her and Nate and their family background. One Saturday morning she overheard Charley and one of his fourteen-year-old friends in the living room talking about the family portraits which hung there. The friend was one of a set of new friends whom Charley had just recently begun bringing to the house, and he was seeing the portraits for the first time. From the next room Sylvia could tell that the two boys were stopping before each of the four pictures in there. The first three they came to were portraits of men, dark pictures in which only the faces and white shirt fronts were immediately distinguishable. Two of these were by a “famous” itinerant painter of the 1830’s—as was also the fourth picture—and were thought remarkable for the family resemblance between the subjects. The fourth picture was much the largest and the only colorful picture of the group. It was a full-length, life-size portrait of a great-grandmother of Sylvia’s, a raving beauty according to the painter’s brush, standing in white voile and silk with her little twin daughters—not a day over three—on either side at her feet. One of the little girls was standing, holding a bouquet of flowers in her arms. The other was seated and held a bowl of fruit in her lap. Both of them were barefoot, yet they wore grownup-looking pastel dresses, décolleté like their mother’s; and their facial expressions suggested that they were making a conscious effort to look as dour and disenchanted as all their elders in the other portraits.

  The portraits of the men had brought only the briefest comment from Charley’s friend. About one he said: “That old gentleman looks like he has the sour belches.” About another he asked, “What is that supposed to be in his hand?” But when he came to the portrait of the great-grandmother he responded at once with warm feeling. It was the prettiest portrait he had ever seen! It looked exactly like something out of Gone with the Wind! That was his first reaction. A moment later, however, with astonishing abruptness he changed his tone completely. “No,” he said, “I don’t think I like it so much after all. Those two little girls give me the creeps!”

  Charley laughed when he said this. And presently his friend laughed and said: “They are funny, aren’t they? They are like two little dwarfs, not like real children.”

  “I had never thought of it, but that’s so,” said Charley.

  “Children aren’t just little grownups,” his friend continued. “They’re made differently. I’ve noticed that myself and I’m not even an artist. Why, those two little girls look like something out of the funny paper.” Then for several minutes he and Charley stood before the pictures giggling.

  Sylvia, in the dining room, only smiled a little and quietly continued with the inventory she was taking of her china.

  III

  Even if Sylvia had wanted them there the Harrison children could hardly have been kept at home on the day of the move. Nora stayed until noon, but she was there because most of her friends lived in the neighborhood. Even she was in-and-out during the morning, and at noon she was to dress herself in her most grown-up clothes and set out for a luncheon being given for her in the next block. The other children had left the house soon after breakfast on their last rounds of visits with friends. Wallace, just back from Virginia, had an all-day date with “a certain Hollins College girl who lived up in Evanston.” She and he would make his rounds together. And the two other children—Margaret and Charley—each had a variety of appointments to keep.

  Not one of them had left the house without apologizing for not staying to help, but Sylvia had laughed at them and said having them out of the way was good riddance. She required only that they get in touch with her in the early afternoon, by which time she expected to be able to gauge the hour the vans would be loaded. “Before nightfall,” she had told them at breakfast, “we’ll be on our way to Tennessee.” They would spend the night somewhere along the way in Illinois. They would set out, as she and Nate and their whole tribe had set out from Cedar Springs so many years before, in two cars. But this time there would be no servants and no pets, and probably there would not be so many flat tires along the way. Wallace would be driving the Packard limousine, and she and Margaret would take turns at the wheel of the roadster.

  At about ten o’clock that morning Sylvia happened to be in the sewing room, which was one of the little rooms that opened off the back hall upstairs. She had, at the last minute, discovered a tear in one of the old summer slipcovers th
at she always put on the living-room furniture when she moved; and now, though the movers were already putting some of the heavier pieces in the vans, she was taking time out to mend that tear.

  She had just finished this job of mending and was closing the sewing machine when she heard a hurried tiptoeing on the back stairs. She knew at once it must be Nora, since all the other children were already gone. Presently Nora stood in the sewing-room doorway, all out of breath. After a moment she said, “Mother, Leander’s downstairs and says he still wants to go with us. . . . And so is Mr. Canada.”

  “Well, Leander can’t,” Sylvia said almost before Nora had stopped speaking. “And I don’t dream Mr. Canada wants to!”

  “I didn’t mean Mr. Canada did,” Nora said in a whisper. “He has some sort of flower in his buttonhole, and he’s brought you a dozen roses, I think.”

  Sylvia was gathering up the bulky slipcover that she had mended, not looking at Nora. “Mr. Canada is a very nice old man,” she said.

  Nora said nothing for a moment. Then she whispered, “But what shall I say to Leander? I think he’s been drinking.” Nora was now a girl of fifteen. She looked quite grown up and was already allowed to go to parties with boys sometimes. But her whispering and this carrying of messages between adults were things she still seemed to take a childish pleasure in.

  “Why, my child,” her mother answered, stuffing the electric cord into the machine and looking squarely at Nora for the first time, “say to Leander that he can’t. I don’t want to see him. He knows I haven’t time to fool with any of his foolishness today. Tell him to go off somewhere else and sober up. It is our prerogative as one of the newly poor not to have to fool with the likes of Leander.”

  So saying, Sylvia gathered the slipcover under one arm, asked Nora in which room Mr. Canada was waiting, then, slipping past Nora, she walked toward the head of the staircase. Her step was light and quick. As she passed a wooden packing case in the center of the hall she stretched out her free hand and ran her fingers lightly along one side of it, barely touching its rough surface with her fingertips. It was a graceful, youthful gesture, plainly inadvertent, and plainly indicative of how absorbed she was in her thoughts of the moment. There was nothing about the way she walked or about any of her movements now to suggest the precise, deliberate, middle-aged manner in which she had dealt with her sewing machine and with her daughter. Even the matronly styled housedress she had put on this morning did not altogether conceal the still youthful lines of her figure. And suddenly, as she reached the head of the back stairway, the serious, staid expression on her face gave way to one of amusement. Waiting downstairs to see her were two persons whom she had been fully expecting to arrive at the house sometime during this day. What amused her, suddenly, was the thought of their arriving at the same moment. Each had come, she knew, because in the goodness of his heart he wanted to be of help to her in the move. They honestly imagined—it seemed incredibly funny to Sylvia—that she needed the help of a man at such a time . . . she to whom moving had been a life’s work.