Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  The truth is I felt that Letitia Ramsey was just as smart as she could be—not in school, necessarily, but in the way she handled subjects like undesirable relatives. I think she was very unusual in this. There was one of her friends, named Nancy O’Connor, who had a grandmother who had once run a fruit stand at the old curb market, up on the North Side. The grandmother lived with the O’Connors and was a right funny sort of person, if you know what I mean, and Nancy was forever apologizing for her. Naturally, her apologizing did nothing but make you uncomfortable. Also, there was Trudie Hauser, whose brother Horst was a good friend of mine. The Hausers lived out in the German section of town, where my mother hadn’t usually gone to parties in her day, and they still lived in the kind of castle-like house that the first one of the Hausers to get rich had built. Poor Trudie and poor Horst! They had not one but three or four peculiar relatives living with them. And they had German servants, to whom their parents were apt to speak in German, right before you, and make Trudie and Horst, who were both very blond, blush to the roots of their hair the way blonds are apt to do. Then there was also a girl named Maria Thomas. She had a much older brother who was a moron—a real one—and if he passed through the room, or even came in and sat down, she would simply pretend that he wasn’t there, that he didn’t even exist.

  This isn’t to say, of course, that all the girls in Chatham had something like that in their families. Lots of girls—and lots of the boys, too—had families like mine, with nobody in particular to be ashamed of. Nor is it to say that the girls who did have something of this kind weren’t just as popular as the others and didn’t have you to their houses to parties just as often. Nancy O’Connor’s family, for instance, lived in a most beautiful Spanish-style house, with beamed ceilings and orange-colored tile floors downstairs, and with a huge walled-in sort of lawn out in the back, where Nancy gave a big party every June. But, I will say, at those parties you always felt that everybody was having more fun than Nancy, all because of the old grandmother. The peculiar old woman never came out into the light of the Japanese lanterns at the party, or anywhere near the tennis court, where the dancing was. She kept always in the shadows, close to the walls that enclosed the lawn. And someone said that Nancy said this was because her grandmother was afraid we would steal the green fruit off the trees she had trained to grow like vines up the walls.

  Whether or not Nancy had a good time, her June party was always one of the loveliest events of the year in Chatham. Even though it was the Depression, we had many fine and really lovely parties, and Nancy O’Connor’s usually surpassed all others. It was there, at one of them, two nights after we had graduated from high school, that Horst Hauser and Bob Southard and I made up our minds to do a thing that we had been considering for some time and that a lot of boys like us must have done at one time or another. We had been seniors that year, you understand, and in Chatham boys are apt to go pretty wild during their senior year in high school. That is the time when you get to know a city as you will never have a chance to again if you come from the kind of people that I do. I have lived away from Chatham quite a long while now, mostly in places which are not too different from it but about which I never kid myself into thinking I know very much. Yet, like a lot of other men, I carry in my head, even today, a sort of detailed map of the city where I first learned to drive a car and first learned to make dates with girls who were not strictly of the kind I was brought up to date. And I don’t mean nice girls like Nancy and Trudie, whose parents were different from mine but who were themselves very nice girls indeed. Chatham being only a middle-sized city—that is, without a big-league baseball team, yet with almost a quarter of a million big-league fans—and being not thoroughly Midwestern and yet not thoroughly Southern either, the most definitely complimentary thing I usually find to say about it is that it was a good place to grow up in. By which I don’t mean that it is a good place to come from, or anything hateful like that.

  For I like Chatham. And I remember everything I ever knew about it. Sometimes, when I go back there for a visit, I can direct people who didn’t grow up there to a street or a section of town or even to some place out in the country nearby that they wouldn’t have guessed I had any knowledge of. And whenever I am there nowadays, the only change I notice and the only thing that gives me a sad feeling is that the whole city is so much more painted up and prosperous-looking than it used to be during the Depression. And in connection with this, there is something I cannot help feeling is true and cannot help saying. My father, who came from a country town thirty-five miles east of Chatham, used to tell us how sad it made him to see the run-down condition of the house where he was born, out there in the country. But my feeling is that there is something even more depressing about going back to Chatham today and finding the house where I lived till I was grown—and the whole city, too—looking in much better shape than it did when I called it home. There are moments when I almost wish I could buy up the whole town and let it run down just a little.

  Of course, that’s an entirely selfish feeling, and I realize it. But it shows what wonderful times we had—decent good times, and others not so decent. And it shows that while we were having those fine times we knew exactly what everything around us was like. We didn’t like money’s being so tight and didn’t like it that everything from the schoolhouse to the country club was a little shabby and run-down. We boys certainly minded wearing our fathers’ cut-down dinner jackets, and the girls certainly minded wearing their older sisters’ hand-me-down evening dresses; although we knew that our party clothes looked all right, we knew, too, that our older brothers and sisters, five years before, wouldn’t have put up with them for five minutes. We didn’t like any of this a bit, and yet it was ours and the worriers among us worried even then about how it was all bound to change.

  Of course, when the change came, it wasn’t at all what anyone had expected. For it never occurred to us then that a war would come along and solve all the problems of the future for us, in one way or another. Instead, we heard so much talk of the Depression that we thought that times were bound to get even worse than they had been, and that all the fun would go out of life as soon as we finished high school, or, at the latest, after college. If you were a worrier, as I was, it didn’t seem possible that you would ever be able to make a living of the kind your father had always made. And I sat around some nights, when I ought to have been studying, wondering how people would treat me when I showed that I couldn’t make the grade and began to go to pieces. It was on those nights that I used to think about Letitia Ramsey’s uncle, whom I considered the most dismal failure of my acquaintance, and then think about how he was treated by Letitia. This became a thing of such interest to me that I was never afterward sure of my own innocence in the way matters developed the night of Nancy O’Connor’s party.

  I don’t need to describe the kind of mischief the boys in my crowd were up to that year—that is, on nights when we weren’t having movie dates or going to parties with the usual “nice girls” we had always known. Our mischief doesn’t need going into here, and besides it is very old hat to anyone who grew up with the freedom boys have in places like Chatham (especially at a time like the Depression, when all the boys’ private schools were closed down). Also, I suppose it goes without saying that we were pretty careful not to mix the one kind of wonderful time we were having with the other. To the girls we had known longest, we did make certain jokes and references they couldn’t understand, or pretended they couldn’t. We would kid each other, in front of them, about jams we had been in when they weren’t along, without ever making any of it very clear. But that was as far as we went until, toward the end of the year, some of the girls got so they would beg us, or dare us, to take them with us some night to one of our “points of interest,” which was how we referred to the juke joints and roadhouses we went to. We talked about the possibility of this off and on for several weeks. (Five years before, it wouldn’t have taken our older brothers five minutes to decide
to do such a thing.) And finally, on the night of Nancy O’Connor’s party, Horst Hauser and Bob Southard and I decided that the time had come.

  The three of us, with our dates, slipped away from the party just after midnight, telling Nancy that we would be back in about an hour, which we knew we wouldn’t. And we didn’t tell her mother we were going at all. We crossed the lawn and went out through a gate in the back wall at one of the corners, just behind a sort of tool house that Nancy called “the dovecote.” She had told us how to find the gate, and she told us also to watch for her grandmother. And, sure enough, just as we were unlocking the gate, there came the old grandmother running along the side wall opposite us, and sticking close to it even when she made the turn at the other corner. She was wearing a long black dress, and at the distance from which we saw her I thought she might easily have been mistaken for a Catholic nun.

  But we got the gate open and started through it and into the big vacant lot we had to cross to get to Horst Hauser’s car. I held the gate for the other couples, and then for my own date. While I was doing this, I kept one eye on the old woman. But I also peered around the dovecote and saw Nancy O’Connor leave the bright lights of the tennis court and head across the grass under the Japanese lanterns, walking fast in order to catch her grandmother before she reached us. And when I shut the gate after me, I could just imagine the hell the old woman was going to catch.

  It wasn’t very polite, leaving Nancy’s party that way and making trouble in the family—for Nancy was sure to blame the old woman for our going, somehow—but the whole point is that the girl who happened to be my date that night and for whom I had stood there holding the gate was none other than Letitia Ramsey.

  Now, there is no use in my not saying right here that all through that spring Letitia’s uncle, whom the high-school students generally spoke of as “the Ram,” had been having the usual things said about him. And there is no use in my denying that by this time I knew those things were so. For we hadn’t had our other wonderful times all winter long without running into the Ram at a number of our points of interest—him, along with a couple of his star athletes and his and their girl friends. In fact, I knew by this time that the rumors all of us had heard about him every year since we entered high school were true, and I knew, too, that it was the very athletes he coached and trained and disciplined from the day they first reported for practice, after junior high, that he ended by making his running mates when they were seniors.

  But all that sort of thing, in my opinion, is pretty much old hat to most people everywhere. The important thing to me is that when we decided to leave Nancy’s wonderful party that night and take our dates with us out to a dine-and-dance joint called Aunt Martha’s Tavern, something crossed my mind. And I am not sure that it wasn’t something I hoped for instead of something I dreaded, as it should have been. It was that this Aunt Martha’s Tavern was exactly where we were most likely to run into the Ram on a Saturday night, which this happened to be, with, of course, one of his girl friends and a couple of his athletes with their girl friends, too.

  Well, it couldn’t have been worse. We all climbed into Horst Hauser’s car and drove out west of town to Aunt Martha’s. It was the kind of place where you had to ring several times before they would come and let you in. And when we had rung the bell the second time and were standing outside under the light, with its private flock of bugs whirling around it, waiting there for Aunt Martha to have a look at us through some crack somewhere and decide if she would let us in, a rather upsetting thing happened to me. We were all standing on the stoop together, facing the big, barnlike batten door to the place. Letitia was standing right next to me, and I just thought to myself I would steal a quick glance at her while she wasn’t noticing. I turned my head only the slightest bit, but I saw at once that she was already looking at me. When our eyes met, I felt for the first second or two that she didn’t realize they had met, because she kept right on looking without changing her expression. I couldn’t at once tell what the expression meant. Then it came over me that there was something this girl was expecting me to say—or, at least, hoping I would say. I said the first thing that popped into my mind: “They always make you wait like this.” And Letitia Ramsey looked grateful, even for that.

  At last, the door was pulled open, though only just about six inches, and inside we saw the face of Aunt Martha’s old husband. The old fellow gaped at the girls for a couple of seconds with a stupid grin on his face—he was a deaf-mute and a retired taxidermist—and then he threw the door wide open. We went inside—and, of course, there the Ram was, out on the floor dancing.

  There weren’t any lights on to speak of, except around the sides, in the booths, and the curtains to some of the booths were drawn. But even so, dark as it was, and with six or eight other couples swinging around on the dance floor, right off the bat I spotted the Ram. Maybe I only recognized him because he was doing the old-time snake-hips dancing that he liked to do when he was high. I can’t be sure. But I have the feeling that when we walked into that place that night, I would have seen the Ram just as plainly even if he had not been there—seen the freckled hand he pumped with when he danced, seen the white sharkskin suit, seen the head of sandy hair, a little thin on top but with the sweaty curls still thick along his temples and on the back of his neck.

  Once we were inside, I glanced at Letitia again. And for some reason I noticed now that either before she left the party or in the car coming out here she had moved the gardenia corsage that I had sent her from the shoulder strap of her dress to the center of its low-cut neckline. When I saw this, I suddenly turned to Bob and Horst and said, “Let’s not stay here.”

  Letitia and the other two girls smiled at each other. “I think he thinks we’ll disgrace him,” Letitia said after a moment.

  I don’t know when she first saw her uncle. It may have been when I did, right off the bat. It being Letitia, you couldn’t tell. Or I couldn’t. The one clue I had was that when the old deaf-mute made signs for us to follow him across the floor to an empty booth, I saw her throw her little powder blue evening jacket, which was the same color as her dress, around her shoulders. It was a hot night, and before that she had only been carrying it over her arm.

  Yet it wasn’t necessarily her uncle’s presence that caused Letitia to put the jacket around her bare shoulders. It could have been just the kind of place we were in. It could have been Martha’s crazy-looking old husband, with his tufts of white hair sticking out in all directions. It seemed to me at the time that it might be only the sight of the old man’s stuffed animal heads, which were hung all around the place. You didn’t notice most of these with it so dark, but above the beer counter were the heads of three collie dogs, and as we went across the floor, the bubbly lights of the jukebox would now and again catch a gleam from the glass eyes of those collie dogs. Any other time in the world, I think the effect would have seemed irresistibly funny to me. I would have pointed it out to Horst and Bob, and afterward there would have been cryptic references made to it before girls like Letitia who normally wouldn’t ever have been inside such a place.

  We went into our booth, which was a big one in a corner, and almost as soon as we sat down, I saw two of the Ram’s athletes come out on the dance floor with their girls. The Ram had disappeared, and I didn’t see him dancing again. But every so often the two athletes would come out and dance for the length of about half a record and then go back to their booth, pushing the curtains apart just enough to let themselves slip through. None of us said a word about seeing them out there. And, of course, nobody mentioned the Ram. I guess we were all pretty uncomfortable about it, because we made a lot of uncomfortable and silly conversation. All of us except Letitia. We joked and carried on in a very foolish way, trying to cover up. But everything we said or did seemed to make my toes curl under.

  For instance: Bob pretended he was going to close the curtains to our booth, and there was a great scramble between him and his date over keeping them o
pen. And all the while, across the way, the curtains to the Ram’s booth were never opened wider than it took for one person to slip in or out.

  Also: “Where in the world are we?” one of the girls asked. That we were way out in the country, of course, they knew, but where? And it had to be explained that Aunt Martha’s Tavern was across the line in Clark County, about twelve miles due west of Chatham, which is in Pitt County, and this meant we were only about three miles from Thompsonville. Thompsonville, I knew, if some of the others didn’t, was where Letitia’s uncle and her father grew up. We were in an area that Letitia’s Uncle Louis must have known pretty well for a long time.

  And finally: There was the business about Aunt Martha. She came herself to take our orders. None of us was hungry, and the girls wouldn’t even order Cokes. But she took us boys’ orders for mixers, and while she was there, Horst Hauser tried to get her to sing “Temptation” for us. Martha wasn’t so very old—you could tell it by her clear, smooth skin and her bright green eyes—and nobody really called her Aunt Martha. But she must have weighed about three hundred pounds and she hadn’t a tooth in her head. She wore her hair in what was almost a crew cut. And she was apt to be barefoot about half the time; she was barefoot that night. She wouldn’t sing “Temptation” for us, but she talked to the girls and told them how pretty their dresses were and asked them their names—“Just your first names, I’m no good at last names,” she said—so she would be sure to remember them next time they came. “You know,” she said. “In case you come with some other fellows, and not these jelly beans.” And she gave them a big wink.

  We three boys pretended to look very hurt, and she said, “They know I’m a tease. These here boys are my honey babes.” Then she looked at us awfully close to make sure that we did know. She hung around telling the girls how her old husband had built the tavern singlehanded, as a wedding present for her, and how, after practicing taxidermy “in many parts of the world and for over forty years,” he had given it up and settled down in the country with her, and how generally sweet he was. “It mayn’t seem likely to you girls,” she said, her green eyes getting a damp look, “but they can be just as fine and just as noble without a tongue in their head as with one.” Then, from fear of being misunderstood, maybe, or not wanting to depress the customers, she added, “And just as much fun, honey babes!” She gave us boys a wink and went off in a fit of laughter.