Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  Jim said there were actually a few times when he managed to get Carol away from her friends. But her book—the book that had been accepted by a publisher—was Carol’s Lon Havemeyer, and her book was always with them.

  Poor Carol Crawford! How unfair it is to describe her as she was that Thanksgiving weekend in 1939. Ever since she was a little girl on a dairy farm in Wisconsin she had dreamed of becoming a writer and going to live in New York City. She had not merely dreamed of it. She had worked toward it every waking hour of her life, taking jobs after school in the wintertime, and full-time jobs in the summer, always saving the money to put herself through the state university. She had made herself the best student—the prize pupil—in every grade of grammar school and high school. At the university she had managed to win every scholarship in sight. Through all those years she had had but one ambition, and yet I could not have met her at a worse moment in her life. Poor girl, she had just learned that she was a writer.

  Driving to Boston on Saturday, Jim and I took turns at the wheel again. But now there was no talk about ourselves or about much of anything else. One of us drove while the other slept. Before we reached Boston, in mid-afternoon, it was snowing again. By night, there was a terrible blizzard in Boston.

  As soon as we arrived, Jim’s father announced that he would not hear of our trying to drive back to Kenyon in such weather and in such a car. Mrs. Prewitt got on the telephone and obtained a train schedule that would start us on our way early the next morning and put us in Cleveland sometime the next night. (From Cleveland we would take a bus to Gambier.) After dinner at the Prewitts’ house, I went with Jim over to Cambridge to see some of his prep-school friends who were still at Harvard. The dinner with his parents had been painful enough, since he and I were hardly speaking to each other, but the evening with him and his friends was even worse for me. In the room of one of these friends, they spent the time drinking beer and talking about the undergraduate politics at Harvard and about the Shelley Poetry Prize. One of the friends was editor of the Crimson, I believe, and another was editor of the Advocate—or perhaps he was just on the staff. I sat in the corner pretending to read old copies of the Advocate. It was the first time I had been to Boston or to Cambridge, and ordinarily I would have been interested in forming my own impressions of how people like the Prewitts lived and of what Harvard students were like. But, as things were, I only sat cursing the fate that had made it necessary for me to come on to Boston instead of returning directly to Kenyon. That is, my own money having been exhausted, I was dependent upon the money Jim would get from his parents to pay for the return trip.

  Shortly before seven o’clock Sunday morning, I followed Jim down two flights of stairs from his room on the third floor of his family’s house. A taxi was waiting for us in the street outside. We were just barely going to make the train. In the hall I shook hands with each of his parents, and he kissed them goodbye. We dashed out the front door and down the steps to the street. Just as we were about to climb into the taxi, Mrs. Prewitt came rushing out, bareheaded and without a wrap, calling to us that we had forgotten to leave the key to the car, which was parked there in front of the house. I dug down into my pocket and pulled out the key along with a pocketful of change. But as I turned back toward Mrs. Prewitt I stumbled on the curb, and the key and the change went flying in every direction and were lost from sight in the deep snow that lay on the ground that morning. Jim and Mrs. Prewitt and I began to search for the key, but Mr. Prewitt called from the doorway that we should go ahead, that we would miss our train. We hopped in the taxi, and it pulled away. When I looked back through the rear window I saw Mrs. Prewitt still searching in the snow and Mr. Prewitt moving slowly down the steps from the house, shaking his head.

  On the train that morning Jim and I didn’t exchange a word or a glance. We sat in the same coach but in different seats, and we did not go into the diner together for lunch. It wasn’t until almost dinnertime that the coach became so crowded that I had either to share my seat with a stranger or to go and sit beside Jim. The day had been long, I had done all the thinking I wanted to do about the way things had turned out in New York. Further, toward the middle of the afternoon I had begun writing in my notebook, and I now had several pages of uncommonly fine prose fiction, which I did not feel averse to reading aloud to someone.

  I sat down beside Jim and noticed at once that his notebook was open, too. On the white, unlined page that lay open in his lap I saw the twenty or thirty lines of verse he had been working on. It was in pencil, quite smudged from many erasures, and was set down in Jim’s own vigorous brand of progressive-school printing.

  “What do you have there?” I said indifferently.

  “You want to hear it?” he said with equal indifference.

  “I guess so,” I said. I glanced over at the poem’s title, which was “For the Schoolboys of Douglass House,” and immediately wished I had not got myself into this. The one thing I didn’t want to hear was a preachment from him on his “mature experience” over the holiday. He began reading, and what he read was very nearly this (I have copied this part of the poem down as it later appeared in Hika, our undergraduate magazine at Kenyon):

  Today while we are admissibly ungrown,

  Now when we are each half boy, half man,

  Let us each contrast himself with himself,

  And weighing the halves well, let us each regard

  In what manner he has not become a man.

  Today let us expose, and count as good,

  What is mature. And childish peccadillos

  Let us laugh out of our didactic house—

  The rident punishment one with reward

  For him bringing lack of manliness to light.

  But I could take no more than the first two stanzas. And I knew how to stop him. I touched my hand to his sleeve and whispered, “Shades of W. B. Yeats.” And I commenced reciting:

  Now that we’re almost settled in our house

  I’ll name the friends that cannot sup with us

  Beside a fire of turf in th’ ancient tower . . .

  Before I knew it, Jim had snatched my notebook from my hands, and began reading aloud from it:

  She had told him—Janet Monet had, for some inscrutable reason which she herself could not fathom, and which, had he known—as she so positively and with such likely assurance thought he knew—that if he came on to New York in the weeks ensuing her so unbenign father’s funeral, she could not entertain him alone. . . .

  Then he closed my notebook and returned it to me. “I can put it into rhyme for you, Mr. Henry James,” he said. “It goes like this:

  She knew that he knew that her father was dead.

  And she knew that he knew what a life he had led—

  While he was reciting, with a broad grin on his face and his eyes closed, I left him and went up into the diner to eat dinner. The next time we met was in the smoking compartment, at eight o’clock, an hour before we got into Cleveland.

  It was I who wandered into the smoking compartment first. I went there not to smoke, for neither Jim nor I started smoking till after we left college, but in the hope that it might be empty, which, oddly enough, it was at that moment. I sat down by the window, at the end of the long leather seat. But I had scarcely settled myself there and begun staring out into the dark when the green curtain in the doorway was drawn back. I saw the light it let in reflected in the windowpane, and I turned around. Jim was standing in the doorway with the green curtain draped back over his head and shoulders. I don’t know why, but it was only then that I realized that Jim, too, had been jilted. Perhaps it was the expression on his face—an expression of disappointment at not finding the smoking compartment empty, at being deprived of his one last chance for solitude before returning to Douglass House. And now—more than I had all day—I hated the sight of him. My lips parted to speak, but he literally took the sarcastic words out of my mouth.

  “Ah, you’ll get over it, little friend,” he said.<
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  Suddenly I was off the leather seat and lunging toward him. And he had snatched off his glasses, with the same swift gesture he had used in the restaurant, and tossed them onto the seat. The train was moving at great speed and must have taken a sharp turn just then. I felt myself thrown forward with more force than I could possibly have mustered in the three or four steps I took. When I hit him, it was not with my fists, or even my open hands, but with my shoulder, as though I was blocking in a game of football. He staggered back through the doorway and into the narrow passage, and for a moment the green curtain separated us. Then he came back. He came at me just as I had come at him, with his arms half folded over his chest. The blow he struck me with his shoulders sent me into the corner of the leather seat again. But I, too, came back.

  Apparently neither of us felt any impulse to strike the other with his fist or to take hold and wrestle. On the contrary, I think we felt a mutual abhorrence and revulsion toward any kind of physical contact between us and if our fight had taken any other form than the one it did, I think that murder would almost certainly have been committed in the smoking compartment that night. We shoved each other about the little room for nearly half an hour, with ever-increasing violence, our purpose always seeming to be to get the other through the narrow doorway and into the passage—out of sight behind the green curtain.

  From time to time, after our first exchange of shoves, various would-be smokers appeared in the doorway. But they invariably beat a quick retreat. At last one of them found the conductor and sent him in to stop us. By then it was all over, however. The conductor stood in the doorway a moment before he spoke, and we stared at him from opposite corners of the room. He was an old man with an inquiring and rather friendly look on his face. He looked like a man who might have fought gamecocks in his day, and I think he must have waited that moment in the doorway in the hope of seeing something of the spectacle that had been described to him. But by then each of us was drenched in sweat, and I know from a later examination of my arms and chest and back that I was covered with bruises.

  When the old conductor was satisfied that there was not going to be another rush from either of us, he glanced about the room to see if we had done any damage. We had not even upset the spittoon. Even Jim’s glasses were safe on the leather seat. “If you boys want to stay on this train,” the conductor said finally, “you’ll hightail it back to your places before I pull that emergency cord.”

  We were only thirty minutes out of Cleveland then, but when I got back to my seat in the coach I fell asleep at once. It was a blissful kind of sleep, despite the fact that I woke up every five minutes or so and peered out into the night to see if I could see the lights of Cleveland yet. Each time, as I dropped off to sleep again, I would say to myself what a fine sort of sleep it was, and each time it seemed that the wheels of the train were saying: Not yet, not yet, not yet.

  After Cleveland there was a four-hour ride by bus to Gambier. Sitting side by side in the bus, Jim and I kept up a continuous flow of uninhibited and even confidential talk about ourselves, about our writing, and even about the possibility of going to graduate school next year if the army didn’t take us. I don’t think we were silent a moment until we were off the bus and, as we paced along the Middle Path, came in sight of Douglass House. It was 1 A.M., but through the bare branches of the trees we saw a light burning in the front dormer of our room. Immediately our talk was hushed, and we stopped dead still. Then, though we were as yet two hundred feet from the house and there was a blanket of snow on the ground, we began running on tiptoe and whispering our conjectures about what was going on in our room. We took the steps of the front stoop two at a time, and when we opened the front door, we were met by the odor of something cooking—bacon, or perhaps ham. We went up the long flight to the second floor on tiptoe, being careful not to bump our suitcases against the wall or the banisters. The door to our room was the first one at the top of the stairs. Jim seized the knob and threw the door open. The seven whom we had left lolling around the stoop on Wednesday were sprawled about our big room in various stages of undress, and all of them were eating. Bruce Gordon and Bill Anderson were in the center of the room, leaning over my hot plate.

  Jim and I pushed through the doorway and stood on the doorstep looking down at them. I have never before or since seen seven such sober—no, such frightened-looking—people. Most eyes were directed at me, because it was my hot plate. But when Jim stepped down into the room, the two boys lounging back on his bed quickly stood up.

  I remember my first feeling of outrage. The sacred privacy of that room under the eaves of Douglass House had been violated; this on top of what had happened in New York seemed for a moment more than flesh and blood could bear. Then, all of a sudden, Jim Prewitt and I began to laugh. Jim dropped his suitcase and went over to where the cooking was going on and said, “Give me something to eat. I haven’t eaten all day.”

  I stood for a while leaning against the wall just inside the door. I was thinking of the tramps we had seen cooking down along the railroad track in the valley. Finally I said, “What a bunch of hoboes!” Everyone laughed—a little nervously, perhaps, but with a certain heartiness, too.

  I continued to stand just inside the door, and presently I leaned my head against the wall and shut my eyes. My head swam for a moment. I had the sensation of being on the train again, swaying from side to side. It was hard to believe that I was really back in Douglass House and that the trip was over. I don’t know how long I stood there that way. I was dead for sleep, and as I stood there with my eyes closed I could still hear the train wheels saying Not yet, not yet, not yet.

  The Other Times

  CAN ANYBODY honestly like having a high-school civics teacher for an uncle? I doubt it. Especially not a young girl who is popular and good-looking and who is going to make her debut some day at the Chatham Golf and Country Club. Nevertheless, that’s who the civics teacher was at Westside High School when we were growing up in Chatham. He was the brother of Letitia Ramsey’s father, and he had all the failings you would expect of a high-school civics teacher and baseball coach. In the classroom he was a laughingstock for the way he butchered the King’s English, and out of school he was known to be a hard drinker and general hell-raiser. But the worst part of it was that he was a bachelor and that the Ramseys had to have him for dinner practically every Sunday.

  If you had a Sunday afternoon date with Letitia, there the civics teacher would be, out on the front lawn, playing catch with one of Letitia’s narrow-eyed little brothers. Somehow, what disturbed me about this particular spectacle when I was having Sunday dates with Letitia was the uncle’s and the little brother’s concentration on the ball and the kind of real fondness they seemed to feel for the thing. When either of them held it in his hand for a minute, he seemed to be wanting to make a pet of it. When it went back and forth between them, smacking their gloves, they seemed to hear it saying, yours, mine, yours, mine, as though nobody else had ever thrown or caught a baseball. But of course that’s not the point. The point is that it was hard to think of Letitia’s having this Lou Ramsey for an uncle. And I used to watch her face when we were leaving her house on a Sunday afternoon to see if she would show anything. But not Letitia!

  It may not seem fair to dwell on this unfortunate uncle of a girl like Letitia Ramsey, but it was through him that I got a clearer idea of what she was like, and the whole Ramsey family, as well. They were very well-bred people, and just as well-to-do, even in the Depression. Mr. Ramsey, like my own father, was from the country, but, also like my father, he was from one of the finest country families in the state. And Mrs. Ramsey and my mother had gone through Farleigh Institute together, which was an old-fashioned school where they studied Latin so long that it made a difference in the way they spoke English all the rest of their lives.

  Anyway, though I didn’t take Latin, fortunately I didn’t take civics, either (since I was hoping to go to college if the Depression eased up), and fortunately I
didn’t go out for the baseball team. This made it not too hard for me to pretend not to notice who Letitia’s uncle was. Also, since Letitia didn’t go to the high school but went to Miss Jordan’s, a school that has more or less replaced Farleigh Institute in Chatham, it could have been as easy for her to pretend not to notice as it was for me.

  It could have been, except that Letitia didn’t want it that way. When she and I went across the lawn to my father’s car on those Sunday afternoons and her uncle and one of her little brothers were carrying on with that baseball, she would call out something like “Have fun, you two!” or “Come see us this week, Uncle Louis!” And her voice never sounded sweeter than it did then. After we were in the car, if I hadn’t thought of something else to talk about she would sometimes begin a long spiel like “I always forget you don’t really know my uncle. I wish you did. You probably know how mad he is about sports. That’s why my little brothers adore him. And he’s just as shy as they are. Look at him and Charlie there. When I’m dressed up like this to go out on a date, he and the boys won’t even look at me.”