by Peter Taylor
Watching his face closely, though without hope of understanding what was going on in his mind, she continued, “We’re not going, but the furniture is going, as planned, and there’ll be a place for you.” As she spoke, it came over her that whether he was now drunk or not, the character of this man had suffered real degradation of some kind during the time since he first came begging her to take him back to Tennessee. Instead of the disdain and the contempt which his abject, groveling manner inspired in her she wanted to pity him and blame herself for his pathetic condition. Tears did come to her eyes momentarily, but they were not for Leander, and she hadn’t the illusion that they were. When at last Leander looked up he seemed in no wise moved by her tears. Their eyes met for one meaningless moment and then each turned away, he in the direction of the van outside the door, she, her eyes dry again, toward Mr. Canada, who was still leaning against the console table and staring at her. “Would you happen to know of a place,” she said to Mr. Canada in a tone of utmost indifference, “a temporary place . . .” Mr. Canada moved toward her mechanically. She read in his face that he was trying to decide something—some such question as whether he should exercise his authority in an apartment building that he owned or perhaps use his influence elsewhere to find a suitable place for her and the children. A certain brightness came into his eyes, as it had that day when he mentioned the scholarship for little Charley, but not the same brightness exactly. This and a sudden color in his face and a quickness in his step made him seem less an old man than she usually thought of him as being. But instead of an effect of youthful ardor and naïveté there was one of shrewdness and of a relish for this opportunity to show his powers and resources for their own sake. His eyes shone, Sylvia observed, but not with love for her.
In only a minute or two he was leaving to arrange for a place for her to take her family that night. “Anything but a hotel,” she said as he turned away.
“I think I know what you want,” he said, not looking back. His phrasing and the tone of his voice were precisely those she had heard from the mouths of a hundred real-estate agents, and as he went down the cement steps to the street Sylvia found herself watching him with just such indifference as she would have watched one of those agents. Yet, somehow, the way he slipped into his jacket going down the steps, his agedness, his obvious loneliness, even the very fact of his considerable wealth all seemed to Sylvia deserving of her pity—of that at least. And she was, at this moment, conscious of her guilt for having permitted him to continue coming to see her. She would no more have been capable of shedding tears for Mr. Canada, however, than she had been for Leander. And possibly nothing in the whole world except the sight which awaited her when she turned back into the hall could have evoked from her the torrent of tears, the violent, uncontrollable sobs which then, for minutes that seemed hours, wrenched and shook her physical being. . . . She had turned back from the doorway and had caught, in a mirrored panel on the opposite wall, one miserable glimpse of her own image.
As she wept, she hardly knew why she did so. Yet she did comprehend now that it was because she was too full of sympathy for herself that she had not felt sympathy for Leander or Mr. Canada. She kept thinking of the hurt she had done them both and it occurred to her that she might be about to hurt her children by remaining in Chicago, where, for them, there might conceivably be the same obstacles for understanding that there had been for her in Tennessee. But how could she know? One knew too pitiably little about what one did to one’s self, without trying to know what one had done to others. She didn’t at all understand the full meaning of the decision she had made this afternoon. But she believed that in time an understanding of it would come to her. It would come without her knowing it, perhaps while she slept. She knew, at least, that in the future she would regard the people she loved very differently from the way she had in the past. And it wasn’t that she would love them less; it was that she would in some sense or other learn to love herself more.
When the children came in, one by one, and Sylvia told them of her decision that the furniture should go on but that they should stay in Chicago and move into new quarters, each of them seemed more stunned and at the same time more overjoyed than the one before. Even the knowledge that their new quarters would be in an apartment house which Mr. Canada owned did not dampen their enthusiasm. And when finally the vans pulled away from the house, they all stood in the street laughing at the sight of Leander’s feet which were all that could be seen of him as he lay, already asleep, amid the furniture.
Her family slept that night in an apartment whose windows overlooked Lake Michigan. There were seven large rooms, all without furnishings of any kind except the beds which Mr. Canada had had sent up from the basement of the building. Next morning the four children woke early, and they were all still excited by the unexpected change of plans. Sylvia did not wake early, however. She slept until almost midday, and the children, knowing how exhausted she would be from the strain of yesterday, went tiptoeing and whispering about the bright, empty rooms, careful not to wake her from her sound sleep. They took their turns going out to breakfast so as not to leave her to awake alone in a strange place.
When Sylvia woke at last it was after 11:30. The door to the room where she slept was closed. Beyond it she could hear the lowered voices of the children. Upon waking there was no moment of confusion for her, as there probably had been for each of them that morning. She knew at once where she was. And she did not immediately let them know that she was awake. She got out of bed and walked barefoot to the window that opened on the Lake and for some time stood gazing upon the scene outside. She knew that the day and the hour had come when she must think of herself not as one bereaved but as a being who had been set free. Presently she would face her children in the empty rooms of this strange apartment and they would see her still as the widow of Nate Harrison, but Sylvia knew that that did not describe who she was today or who she would be in days ahead. Barefoot and clad only in her silk nightgown, her figure in the window could almost have been mistaken for that of a little girl. She looked diminutive and fragile and defenseless. And as she stared out over the treetops along Sheridan Road and at the vast green waters of Lake Michigan, she didn’t fail to be aware of her own smallness. But she was aware too that the discovery and the decision she had made about her life in the past twenty-four hours constituted the one important discovery and the one important decision that anyone, regardless of sex or age or physical size, could make. Nothing could alter that certainty. It had no relation to one’s sex or to the times in which one lived or to one’s being a woman from a country town in Tennessee or to one’s being the mother of four grown children established in an apartment on Lake Shore Drive. It was not diminished, either, by any thought of the boundless and depthless waters of the lake or the endless stretches of the city.
Finally Sylvia turned back to her new room and to the sound of her children’s adult voices. As she walked toward the door leading to the other rooms she began thinking of the immediate need to furnish the apartment. She would go shopping today—this very afternoon. She would bring into her new quarters only what was new and useful and pleasing to the eye. She thought with new pleasure of being surrounded only by what she herself had selected. Everything would be according to her own tastes, and even of that there would be only enough to serve the real needs and comforts of the family. There must be nothing anywhere in the apartment to diminish the effect of newness and brightness or to remind her of the necessity there had been to dispense with all that was old and useless and inherited.
1939
TWENTY YEARS ago, in 1939, I was in my senior year at Kenyon College. I was restless, and wasn’t sure I wanted to stay on and finish college. My roommate at Kenyon was Jim Prewitt. Jim was restless, too. That fall, he and I drove to New York City to spend our Thanksgiving holiday. Probably both of us felt restless and uneasy for the same reasons that everyone else did in 1939, or for just the obvious reasons that college seniors always do
, but we imagined our reasons to be highly individual and beyond the understanding of the other students.
It was four o’clock on Wednesday afternoon when we left Gambier, the little Ohio village that gives Kenyon its post office address. We had had to wait till the four o’clock mail was put in the Gambier post office, because each of us was expecting a check from home. My check came. Jim’s did not. But mine was enough to get us to New York, and Jim’s would be enough to get us back. “Enough to get back, if we come back!” That became our motto for the trip. We had both expressed the thought in precisely the same words and at precisely the same moment as we came out of the post office. And during the short time it took us to dash back across the village street, with its wide green in the center, and climb the steps up to our room in Douglass House and then dash down again with our suitcases to the car, we found half a dozen excuses for repeating our motto.
The day was freakishly warm, and all of our housemates were gathered on the front stoop when we made our departure. In their presence, we took new pleasure in proclaiming our motto and repeating it over and over while we threw our things into the car. The other boys didn’t respond, however, as we hoped they would. They leaned against the iron railing of the stoop, or sat on the stone steps leaning against one another, and refused to admit any interest in our “childish” insinuation: if we came back. All seven of them were there and all seven were in agreement on the “utter stupidity” of our long Thanksgiving trip as well as that of our present behavior. But they didn’t know our incentive, and they couldn’t be expected to understand.
For two years, Jim and I had shared a room on the second floor of old Douglass House. I say “old” because at Kenyon in those days there was still a tendency to prefix that adjective to the name of everything of any worth on the campus or in the village. Oldness had for so many years been the most respected attribute of the college that it was natural for its prestige to linger on a few years after what we considered the new dispensation and the intellectual awakening. Old Douglass House was an oldish house, but it had only been given over for use as a dormitory the year that Jim and I—and most of our friends—came to Kenyon. The nine of us moved into it just a few weeks after its former occupants—a retired professor and his wife, I believe—had moved out. And we were to live there during our three years at Kenyon (all of us having transferred from other colleges as sophomores)—to live there without ever caring to inquire into the age or history of the house. We were not the kind of students who cared about such things. We were hardly aware, even, of just how quaint the house was, with its steep white gables laced with gingerbread work, and its Gothic windows and their arched window blinds. Our unawareness—Jim’s and mine—was probably never more profound than on that late afternoon in November, when we set out for New York. Our plan was to spend two days in Manhattan and then go on to Boston for a day with Jim’s family, and our only awareness was of that plan.
During the previous summer, Jim Prewitt had become engaged to a glorious, talented girl with long flaxen hair, whom he had met at a student writers’ conference somewhere out West. And I, more attached to things at home in St. Louis than Jim was to things in Boston—I had been “accepted” by an equally glorious dark-eyed girl in whose veins ran the Creole blood of old-time St. Louis. By a happy coincidence both of these glorious girls were now in New York City. Carol Crawford, with her flaxen hair fixed in a bun on the back of her neck and a four-hundred-page manuscript in her suitcase, had headed East from the fateful writers’ conference in search of a publisher for her novel. Nancy Gibault had left St. Louis in September to study painting at the National Academy. The two girls were as yet unacquainted, and it was partly to the correcting of this that Jim and I meant to dedicate our Thanksgiving holiday.
The other boys at Douglass House didn’t know our incentive, and when we said goodbye to them there on the front steps I really felt a little sorry for them. Altogether, they were a sad, shabby, shaggy-looking lot. All of us who lived at Douglass House were, I suppose. You have probably seen students who look the way we did—especially if you have ever visited Bard College or Black Mountain or Rollins or almost any other college nowadays. Such students seem to affect a kind of hungry, unkempt look. And yet they don’t really know what kind of impression they want to make; they only know that there are certain kinds they don’t want to make.
Generally speaking, we at Douglass House were reviled by the rest of the student body, all of whom lived in the vine-covered dormitories facing the campus, and by a certain proportion of the faculty. I am sure we were thought of as a group as closely knit as any other in the college. We were even considered a sort of fraternity. But we didn’t see ourselves that way. We would have none of that. Under that high gabled roof, we were all independents and meant to remain so. Housing us “transfers” together this way had been the inspiration of the dean or the president under the necessity of solving a problem of overflow in the dormitories. Yet we did not object to his solution, and of our own accord we ate together in the Commons, we hiked together about the countryside, we went together to see girls in nearby Mount Vernon, we enrolled in the same classes, flocked more or less after the same professors, and met every Thursday night at the creative writing class, which we all acknowledged as our reason for being at Kenyon. But think of ourselves as a club, or as dependent upon each other for companionship or for anything else, we would not. There were times when each of us talked of leaving Kenyon and going back to the college or university from which he had come—back to Ann Arbor or Olivet, back to Chapel Hill, to Vanderbilt, to Southwestern, or back to Harvard or Yale. It was a moderately polite way each of us had of telling the others that they were a bunch of Kenyon boys but that he knew something of a less cloistered existence and was not to be confused with their kind. We were so jealous of every aspect of our independence and individuality that one time, I remember, Bruce Gordon nearly fought with Bill Anderson because Bill, for some strange reason, had managed to tune in, with his radio, on a Hindemith sonata that Bruce was playing on the electric phonograph in his own room.
Most of us had separate rooms. Only Jim Prewitt and I shared a room, and ours was three or four times as big as most dormitory cubicles. It opened off the hall on the second floor, but it was on a somewhat lower level than the hall. And so when you entered the door, you found yourself at the head of a little flight of steps, with the top of your head almost against the ceiling. This made the room seem even larger than it was, as did the scarcity and peculiar arrangement of the furniture. Our beds, with our desks beside them, were placed in diagonally opposite corners, and we each had a wobbly five-foot bookshelf set up at the foot of his bed, like a hospital screen. The only thing we shared was a little three-legged oak table in the very center of the room, on which were a hot plate and an electric coffeepot, and from which two long black extension cords reached up to the light fixture overhead.
The car that Jim and I were driving to New York did not belong to either of us. It didn’t at that time belong to anybody, really, and I don’t know what ever became of it. At the end of our holiday, we left it parked on Marlborough Street in Boston, with the ignition key lost somewhere in the gutter. I suppose Jim’s parents finally disposed of the car in some way or other. It had come into our hands the spring before, when its last owner had abandoned it behind the college library and left the keys on Jim’s desk up in our room. He, the last owner, had been one of us in Douglass House for a while—though it was, indeed, for a very short while. He was a poor boy who had been at Harvard the year that Jim was there, before Jim transferred to Kenyon, and he was enormously ambitious and possessed enough creative energy to produce in a month the quantity of writing that most of us were hoping to produce in a lifetime. He was a very handsome fellow, with a shock of yellow hair and the physique of a good trackman. On him the cheapest department store clothes looked as though they were tailor-made, and he could never have looked like the rest of us, no matter how hard he might have tr
ied. I am not sure that he ever actually matriculated at Kenyon, but he was there in Douglass House for about two months, clicking away on first one typewriter and then another (since he had none of his own); I shall never forget the bulk of manuscript that he turned out during his stay, most of which he left behind in the house or in the trunk of the car. The sight of it depressed me then, and it depresses me now to think of it. His neatly typed manuscripts were in every room in the house—novels, poetic dramas, drawing-room comedies, lyrics, epic poems, short stories, scenarios. He wasn’t at all like the rest of us. And except for his car he has no place in this account of our trip to New York. Yet since I have digressed this far, there is something more that I somehow feel I ought to say about him.
Kenyon was to him only a convenient place to rest awhile (for writing was not work to him) on his long but certain journey from Harvard College to Hollywood. He used to say to us that he wished he could do the way we were doing and really dig in at Kenyon for a year or so and get his degree. The place appealed to him, he said, with its luxuriant countryside, and its old stone buildings sending up turrets and steeples and spires above the treetops. If he stayed, he would join a fraternity, so he said, and walk the Middle Path with the other fraternity boys on Tuesday nights, singing fraternity songs and songs of old Kenyon. He said he envied us—and yet he hadn’t himself time to stay at Kenyon. He was there for two months, and while he was there he was universally admired by the boys in Douglass House. But when he had gone, we all hated him. Perhaps we were jealous. For in no time at all stories and poems of his began appearing in the quarterlies as well as in the popular magazines. Pretty soon one of his plays had a good run on Broadway, and I believe he had a novel out even before that. He didn’t actually go to Hollywood till after the war, but get there at last he did, and now, I am told, he has a house in the San Fernando Valley and has the two requisite swimming pools, too.
