Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  Sylvia started downstairs that morning with the intention of dismissing her two callers immediately. But, by the time she was halfway down the straight flight into the back hall, she had witnessed—in the hall below—a spectacle that would change her plans for that day and for many another after it. What she saw was actually only a little scene between Leander and Mr. Canada, but she recognized it at once as a scene from which enormous meaning for herself might be drawn. At first glance she observed only that the two men were standing in conversation with one another at the far end of the hall. Yet even that was enough to arrest her momentarily on the stairs. Somehow, even that filled her with sudden alarm—an emotion to which she was almost a total stranger. When she saw, a moment later, that their conversation was by no means a civil one, that both were talking at once and shaking their heads (if not quite their fists) at one another, the sight filled her with such consternation that she dropped the heavy slipcover on the steps.

  As she stooped to gather the slipcover into her arms again, it occurred to her first to turn back up the steps. Deciding against that, her next impulse was to call out to Nora to stay upstairs out of harm’s way. She did neither, however. When she presently realized that Nora had, of her own accord, lingered above, she proceeded very slowly down the steps with her eyes fixed on the two men. They were standing near the doorway that led into the front part of the house. Apparently neither of them realized that it was she who was approaching. If aware of anyone’s presence they probably thought it was Nora returning with messages for them. Only when she was almost at the foot of the stairs, Sylvia saw Mr. Canada glance at her for the first time. Seeing her, he dropped his eyes to the floor and commenced backing through the doorway and into the dark center hall beyond. His face, already flushed with anger, grew even redder, and Sylvia knew that he would be overcome with embarrassment at having seemed to invade her domestic privacy. Leander, on his part, appeared to understand what Mr. Canada’s withdrawal meant. Without looking at Sylvia he turned and walked directly into the kitchen, his head literally bowed down.

  At the foot of the stairs Sylvia stopped again. She knew now that she was still not ready to order either Leander Thompson or Mr. Canada away from the house, even knew that she would need them there that day until the very last piece of furniture was loaded on the last van. That neither of them would be of any assistance whatsoever in the business of packing and loading she knew also, and knew, in fact, how much they would be in the way. She might even have predicted—so clear was she, in a sense, about the turn events were going to take—how Leander in the course of the day would manage to break out a window light in the library (when trying to get out of the way of the movers) and would upset a huge bottle of cleaning fluid on the parqueted floor of the hall. Or how Mr. Canada would have to be asked, time and again, to get up from a comfortable couch or chair that the movers were ready to load. But any hindrance or inconvenience which their presence would be to actual moving seemed unimportant. The important thing was the fact that Leander’s and Mr. Canada’s quarreling there in the doorway had filled her with consternation and alarm.

  Until now Sylvia had supposed that the two men represented for her the two sides of a rather simple question, the question of whether or not it was wise of her to be taking her family back to Tennessee. On one side Mr. Canada seemed to represent everything that was against her doing so. Not since the first time he came to see her had he made any direct reference to the subject, but his talk had always been about things pertaining to Chicago. Sometimes it was about the business world in which Nate had lived, sometimes about the civic enterprises to which he nowadays devoted much of his time, sometimes about his own career and the opportunities which Chicago offered “a young man with good connections and a head for business.” For a while after each of his visits Sylvia had been able to think of almost nothing but her own selfishness.

  In her selfishness she had never made any effort to understand Nate’s business career and thereby to share his greatest interest in life. In her selfishness she had insisted always upon the temporariness of their life away from Tennessee, had lived as though the great facts of their life were that they had come from Cedar Springs and that they would someday return there. And now in her selfishness she was about to take her children away from a place which perhaps meant the same to them that Tennessee did to her. . . . On the other side, Leander seemed to represent everything that favored the move. Although he refused any job she found for him, still he didn’t go on trying to persuade her to take him with her to Cedar Springs. Instead, he talked to her about other moves he had made with the family. He recalled the number of flat tires they had had the day they left Cedar Springs and drove to Memphis, and how helpful the country people had been along the way. He recalled times when one or another of the children had cried over leaving some house and how Sylvia would always say, “I have no feeling about this house. This house isn’t home to us.” But he talked even more about Cedar Springs itself, about the colored people and the white people there. He spoke of having written his sister-in-law that the Harrisons were coming home and of her having replied that “every colored person in Logan County” was hoping to work for them. He reminisced about members of Nate’s family in Cedar Springs, asking her which of them were still alive. And he asked about her own brother in Thornton and her brother in Nashville. He said he supposed they would look after her land and money for her and that that was probably her big reason for going back. He said it was good to have kinfolk to fall back on. He said it was good to live in a place where they knew who you really were. There wasn’t anything in the world like living in a place where there were no questions you didn’t know the answers to.

  But after Leander’s visits it had been just the same as after Mr. Canada’s. Sylvia could think of nothing but her own selfishness. She had judged herself, she had condemned herself, yet she had never considered giving up the move. She could no more have thought of that than she could have thought of trying to change the sequence of the seasons. It sometimes seemed queer to her that after hearing both sides of the argument, so to speak, she experienced exactly the same sensations. And she wondered exactly what position Leander represented in the argument. That is, it was easy for her to associate Mr. Canada with Nate and thus make him represent one side. But was it possible to make Leander the symbol for what might be called her side of the argument? While she was still paused at the foot of the back stairs she realized that this had indeed not been possible by any ridiculous stretch of the imagination. And now the cause for her alarm and consternation became clear to her.

  She had no side, no voice in the argument, and had never had one. The two voices she had been listening to for weeks past had both been Nate’s voice. They were voices she had heard for years and years. The two men, quarreling in her back hall, seemed to represent the two sides of Nate. He had, through all the years, wanted her to want to go back to Tennessee. That was what his tolerance had meant. Her own wishes had never entered into it. That was what Nate’s tolerance had meant. It had meant his freedom from a part of himself, a part of himself that would have bound him to a place and to a past time otherwise inescapable. He had wanted her to insist upon taking all that furniture everywhere they went. That was what his tolerance had meant. She felt now an immense weariness, felt as though she had been carrying all that absurd furniture on her back these twenty years. And for what purpose? Why, so that Nate might be free to live that part of life in which there somehow must be no furniture. His selfishness, for the moment, seemed so monstrous to her that she almost smiled at the judgments she had passed upon herself.

  It was not then, however, that Sylvia made her decision which so baffled everyone. Perhaps there was no actual moment of decision. But as she went about the duties which that moving day held for her she found herself imagining a life totally different from any that she would have before been capable of imagining. She envisioned herself not as a widow living alone in the City of Chicago, not even as
a woman living in an American city, but merely as a Person alive in an Unnamed City. The nameless streets of the Unnamed City were populated with other Persons who were all sexless, ageless, nameless; and in some unaccountable way she seemed to excel everyone there in their very sexlessness and agelessness and namelessness. This vision kept returning to her all day long, interrupting her efforts to concentrate on the tasks she had set herself, sometimes so disconcerting her that she could not answer the questions of the moving men. Yet whenever it faded from her mind’s eye her one thought was that she must recapture it. And nothing helped so to keep it before her as the presence of Leander and Mr. Canada.

  Their presence was so indispensable to her that there was no promise she would not have made to keep them there that day. As for the trouble between them in the hall, she had guessed its cause before she had exchanged a word with either of them. While waiting for her they had met, and each had regarded the other as an intruder. They had met, as it turned out, in the so-called center hall, by the telephone. Mr. Canada, wishing to call his office, had had to wait several minutes while Leander finished a casual conversation with someone whom he addressed in terms of endearment. In the closeness of that little passage where the telephone was situated (actually a windowless area under the broad landing of the front stairs) the smell of whisky on Leander’s breath was unmistakable to Mr. Canada. And so, in Sylvia’s interest, Mr. Canada felt obliged to ask him the nature of his business in the house today. Leander, resentful of being questioned by a stranger in the Harrison house, replied that he would like to know the same of Mr. Canada. Then, by mutual consent, they had stepped into the back hall to settle the matter.

  The details of the incident were revealed to Sylvia in the course of the day; but the details interested her little, and neither did the whole incident itself once she had guessed its cause. The behavior of the two men became more and more clownlike as the day progressed. Mr. Canada’s manner with the movers became more imperious each time he was asked to rise from a comfortable chair, and there were moments when Sylvia feared that one of those big, burly men, sweating through their khaki coveralls, might lay hand on the old gentleman.

  With the moving men Leander was humility itself, particularly with those of his own race. Yet he impeded the general progress by forever getting in the way and by the more insidious means of sharing his whisky with some of the movers themselves. After Sylvia explained Leander’s history to Mr. Canada and explained how his rags and even his drinking were supposed to draw her sympathy, and after she assured Leander that Mr. Canada was not there in the role of the landlord evicting a tenant, each of them became reconciled to spending that day under the same roof with the other.

  Toward the end of the afternoon, only a short while before her scattered children began to gather in, Sylvia stood just inside the front door of the house watching the last of her furniture being loaded on the last van. Behind her in the big entrance hall were her former chauffeur and her former landlord. Mr. Canada was leaning against the oak console table, which was the only piece of furniture left in the hall and on which the dozen roses he had brought Sylvia had been placed in a large watering can. At the rear of the hall Leander sat on the bottom step of the stairway, his elbows resting on his knees, his face buried in his hands. Though neither of the men had been allowed to lift a hand in the moving, both were in shirt sleeves and both appeared to be in a state of near-exhaustion.

  Sylvia watched her furniture disappearing into the dark mouth of the van. As she did so there came to her again the vision of that strange, vague life in that strange, vague city—a city and a life which, being without names or attributes of any kind, could exist only as opposites of something else. And now, at the end of the day, that something else was somehow revealed to her. It was a particular moment in time, a situation, a thing she had experienced, a place. She thought at first it must be something that had happened at Cedar Springs, but almost at once she saw that it wasn’t the town where she had gone to live as a bride but was that neighboring town where she had lived as a girl. It was Thornton, the old, dying town on the bluffs above the Tennessee River. It was there that she had known the name and quality of everything. It was there, more than anywhere else, that everything had had a name. Not only the streets and alleys there had had names; there had been names for the intersections of streets: Wifeworking Corner, the Blocks, the Step-down. Not only the great houses and small houses had names; on the outskirts of the town were two abandoned barns known as the Hunchback’s Barn and General Forrest’s Stable. Usually the houses bore the names of the families that had lived in them longest or lived in them first. But some of the houses had names like Heart’s Ease and Robin’s Roost and New Scuppernong, and some had more than one name; there were cases where two families in town obstinately called the same house by different names because each family had once owned and given a name to it. For every little lane or path or right-of-way through the fields surrounding the town there was a name, and down along the river underneath the giant sycamores and willow oaks and poplars, just below the bluffs on which the town stood, there was that path which had been known since Indian times as the Dark Walk. On Sunday afternoons in the early spring, and in the fall after the mosquitoes were gone, courting couples from the town strolled there. In Sylvia’s grandmother’s day it had been the custom for the town’s best families to stroll there, dressed in their Sunday finery, after church. In those distant days the Dark Walk had been kept as a sort of town common or park, with the grass trimmed right down to the water’s edge. But to Sylvia’s generation it had a very different character. Vines of muscadine and fox grape reached from tree to tree, often obscuring any view of the river, and an undergrowth of pines and dogwood and Judas tree had sprung up between the walk and the steep escarpment. For the young people of that latter day there was an element of mystery and danger in the walk. It had not yet become the illicit kind of lover’s lane which it was surely destined to be in another, still later time. It was protected from that fate by the townspeople’s memory of what it had once been, and it was in a sense still considered the private property of the genteel and the well-to-do. Sylvia and her contemporaries went there with the consent—even the blessing—of their elders, and the danger and mystery of which they were aware existed only in the bright colored spiders which sometimes spun their webs across the path or in the fat water moccasins hurrying innocently across the path into the rank growth of creeper and poison ivy. Sylvia had gone there with Nate, and he had brushed aside glistening spiderwebs, had tossed a rock in the direction in which she had thought she saw a moccasin, and had asked her to marry him. To her on that day so long ago it had seemed an additional happiness that he had asked her while they strolled in that traditional spot. Then and during the many years since, she had cherished the image of herself as a young girl in white dimity repeating and sharing the experience of all the other girls to whom life had seemed to begin anew as they lingered by the ruins of an old lattice summerhouse or at the point where Thornton Creek joined the river.

  She had cherished the image. And then the last afternoon in Ritchie Court, while she stood in the doorway of the house she was about to leave, she called up the image, and she found it had changed. She and the other young girls no longer seemed to be beginning life anew in the Dark Walk. They were all dressed in black, and it seemed that the experience they had shared there was really the beginning of widowhood. From the moment they pledged their love they were all, somehow, widows; and she herself had become a widow not the day Nate was found dead in his office but the day he asked her to marry him, in the Dark Walk. It seemed to her that in some way or other all the men of that generation in that town had been killed in the old war of her grandfather’s day. Or they had been set free by it. Or their lives had been changed in a way that the women’s lives were not changed. The men of Nate’s time had crossed over a border, had pushed into a new country, or fled into a new country. And their brides lived as widows clinging to things t
he men would never come back to and from which they could not free themselves. Nate had gone literally to a new country, but Sylvia knew in her heart that it would have been the same if they had never left Cedar Springs. She could not blame him, but she could no longer blame herself either.

  When the movers began tying up the gate of the last van Sylvia turned and stepped back into the hall. Without looking at him she called Leander’s name. Leander lunged forward from his place on the steps. He staggered the length of the hall, dragging his coat and tie after him, and stopped directly before Sylvia, his eyes downcast, the very flesh of his face seeming to hang half molten from the bones. Is this Leander? Sylvia asked herself. And then: Is he really as drunk as this? Aloud she was saying to him: “I am going to arrange with the moving men for you to ride back home in the van.” There was not kindness but disdain for him in her voice, and Leander did not lift his eyes. “The children and I are not going, after all,” she said. Leander’s face registered nothing. To Sylvia this seemed to mean that he had known before she had that she would make this outrageously sudden and irrational decision.