Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  “Can’t hear it thunder,” she said, and all at once she laughed. Then she let out a long moan, and next thing she was crying.

  “Mrs. Mayberry,” the sheriff said, “I am sure sorry.”

  “No,” she said, and she stopped crying just as quick as she had begun. “When somebody says they’re sorry about it, I say no, it’s a blessing. My kids ain’t never going to hear the jukebox play all night, and no banging on doors, neither. It’s a blessing, I say, all they won’t hear, though it’s a responsibility to me. But I won’t be sitting up wondering where they are, the way you’ll likely be doing with your young’uns, Sheriff. It’s a blessing the good Lord sends to some people. It’s wrong, but it’s something. It’s something I got which most people ain’t. Till the day they die, they’ll be just as true to me as the old man there.”

  Just then, one of the sheriff’s men called him from outside to say they’d better get going, and I couldn’t help being glad for the sheriff’s sake. “Hell,” he said to Martha, “it’s too bad, but one of you has to come with me.”

  I was glad for us, too, because we were about to smother in there and be sick at our stomachs. The sheriff went on out then, taking one of the Mayberrys along. Everything was quiet after that, except for the motor of the sheriff’s truck starting up. At first, we couldn’t even tell for certain whether it was Martha or the old man who had gone with the sheriff. We waited a couple of minutes, and then, from the way the floor was creaking overhead, we knew it was Martha who had stayed. In the excitement, and after her outburst, she had forgotten all about us and had gone tiptoeing upstairs to see about her little deaf children.

  All at once, Bob Southard said, “Let’s get out of here,” and he turned the key. We burst out onto the dance floor, and the first thing my eyes hit on was Martha’s two brown loafers on the pine floor at the end of the counter. They were the first thing I saw, and about the only thing for a minute or so, for we stood there nearly blinded by the bright lights, which the sheriff’s men had turned on everywhere and which Martha hadn’t bothered to turn out.

  It was awful seeing everything lit up that way—not just the mess the place was in, which wasn’t so bad considering that there had been a raid, but just seeing the place at all in that light. Those stuffed animal heads of the old man’s stared at you from everywhere you could turn—dogs, horses, foxes, bulls, even bobcats and some bears, and one lone zebra—leaning out from the walls, so that their glass eyes were shining right down at you. We got out of there just as quick as we could.

  The front door was standing wide open. We didn’t stop to pull it to after us. We went outside and around the corner toward the parking lot, and when we showed ourselves there it was the signal for about twenty or thirty people to begin coming out of the woods, where they had been hiding. Some of them came running out, and others kind of wandered out, and at least one came crawling on his hands and knees. With the sky still that nasty gray, we couldn’t have seen them at first except for the broad shafts of light that came from the open doorways of the cabins. It was a creepy sight, and the sounds these people made were creepy, too. As they came out of the woods, some of them were arguing, some of them laughing and kidding in a hateful way, and here and there a woman was crying and complaining, as though maybe she had got hurt jumping down from one of those high little windows.

  We knew that as soon as they climbed into their old jalopies, there would be a terrific hassle to get out of that parking lot, and so we made a dash for Horst’s sedan and all piled into it without caring who sat where or who was whose date. And we were out of that lot and tearing down the road before we even heard a single other motor get started.

  All the way to Chatham, and then driving around to take everybody home, we just kept quiet except to talk every now and then about Martha and her old husband’s children, about how unfair and terrible it seemed for them to be born deaf, and how unfair and terrible it was to bring up children in a place like that. Even then, it seemed to me unnatural for us not to be mentioning what had happened earlier. But I suppose we were thankful at least to have the other thing to talk about. I was sitting in the back seat, and Letitia was sitting up in the front. I watched her shaking her head or nodding now and then when someone else was talking. There was certainly nothing special I could say to her from the back seat. But when we finally got to her house and I took her up to her door, I did make myself say, “We certainly owe your uncle a lot, Letitia.”

  “Yes, poor darling,” she said. “But it’s a good thing he was there, isn’t it?” That’s all she said. The marvelous thing, I thought, was that she didn’t seem to hold anything against me.

  I was away from Chatham most of that summer. The first of July, I went down to New Orleans with a friend of mine named Bickford Harris, and he and I got jobs on a freight boat and worked our way over to England and back. We got back on the fourteenth of September, which was only about a week before I had to leave for college. I had seen Letitia at several other parties before we went off to New Orleans, and had called her on the telephone to say goodbye. I sent her a postcard from New Orleans and I sent her three postcards from England. I didn’t write her a letter for the same reason that I only telephoned her, instead of asking her for a date or going by to see her, before we left. I didn’t want her to think I was trying to make something out of our happening to be put together that night, and didn’t want her to think it meant anything special to me. But when we got back in September, I did ask her for a date, and she gave it to me.

  And, of course, Letitia hadn’t changed a bit—or only a very little bit. I could tell she hadn’t, even when I talked with her on the telephone to make the date. She said she loved my postcards, but that’s all she said about them, and it was plain they hadn’t made any real impression on her. She told me that she was going to be leaving within a couple of weeks, to go to a finishing school in Washington, D.C., and the next summer she was going to Europe herself, before making her debut in the fall. She talked to me about all these plans on the telephone, and I knew that when a girl in Chatham begins talking about her plans to make her debut, she already has her mind on meeting older guys. That’s the “very little bit” I mean she had changed. But she did give me the date—on a Monday night, it was. I was awfully glad about it, yet the minute I walked into her house, I began wishing I had left well enough alone.

  For right off the bat I heard her uncle’s voice. He was back in the dining room, where they were all still sitting around the table. And I had to go in there and tell them how I’d liked working on a freight boat and how I’d liked England. I also had to shake hands all around, even with the Ram, who was already standing up when I came in, speaking rather crossly to Letitia’s three little brothers and hurrying them to get through with their dinner. When I shook his hand, I could tell from the indifferent way he looked at me that he didn’t know he had ever seen me before. And suddenly I said to myself, “Why, all he knows about me is that I’m not a Ramsey and I’m not a baseball player.”

  Most of the time I was in the room, he was still hurrying Letitia’s little brothers, under his breath, to finish their dinner. Everyone else had finished, and he was waiting to take her brothers somewhere afterward. I knew what he had been doing since June, when he found out he wouldn’t be teaching at the high school in the fall. He had landed a soft daytime job with one of the lumber companies in Chatham, which had hired him so it would have him to manage the company’s baseball team. As we were going out through the living room, I heard his voice getting louder and very cross again with the boys, the way it had sounded when I came in. Letitia heard it, too, and only laughed to herself. Outside, when we were walking across the lawn toward my car, she explained that her uncle was taking her little brothers to a night baseball game, in the commercial league, and that there was nothing in the world they loved better.

  Letitia and I had a nice time that night, I suppose. It was just like other dates we’d had. We ran into some people at the movie, and w
e all went for a snack somewhere afterward. The thing is I don’t pretend that I ever did get to know Letitia Ramsey awfully well. As I have said, it was only by chance that she and I were put together for Nancy O’Connor’s dance that year. We simply ran with the same crowd, and in our crowd the boys all knew that they would be going to college (or hoped so), and the girls that they would be going off to finishing school, up East or in Virginia, for a year or two and then be making their debuts, and so we tended not to get too serious about each other. It wasn’t a good idea, that’s all, because it could break up your plans and your family’s. The most that usually happened was some terrific crushes and, naturally, some pretty heavy necking that went along with the crushes. But there was never even anything like that between Letitia and me. I never felt that I knew her half as well as I did several of her friends that I had even fewer dates with.

  Still, I do know certain things from that evening at Aunt Martha’s Tavern. I know how Letitia looked at an uncle who never had—and never has yet—amounted to anything. And I know now that while I watched her looking at him, I was really wishing that I knew how to make a girl like her look at me that trusting way, instead of the way she had been looking at me earlier. It almost made me wish that I was one of the big, common fellows at Westside High who slipped off and got married to one of the public-school girls in their class and then told the teachers and the principal about it, like a big joke, after they’d got their diplomas on graduation night. But the point is I didn’t know how to make a girl like her look at me that way. And the question is why didn’t I know how?

  Usually, I tell myself that I didn’t because I was such a worrier and that I wouldn’t have been such a worrier if there hadn’t been a Depression, or if I had known a war was going to come along and solve everything. But I’m not sure. Once, during the war, I told this to a guy who didn’t come from the kind of people that I do. He only laughed at me and said he wanted to hear more about those other times we were having that year. I pointed out that those other good times weren’t the point and that a girl like Letitia Ramsey was something else again. “Yea,” he said, looking rather unfriendly. “That’s how all you guys like to talk.”

  But the worst part, really, is what it’s like when you see someone like Letitia nowadays. She may be married to a guy whose family money is in downtown real estate and who has never had a doubt in his life, or maybe to some guy working on commission and drinking himself to death. It doesn’t matter which. If it is a girl like Letitia who’s married to him, he’s part of her family now, and all men outside her family are jokes to her. And she and this fellow will have three or four half-grown children, whom nobody can believe she is really the mother of, since she looks so young. Well, the worst part is when you are back home visiting and meet her at a dinner party, and she tells you before the whole table how she was once on the verge of being head over heels in love with you and you wouldn’t give her a tumble. It’s always said as a big joke, of course, and everyone laughs. But she goes on and on about it, as though it was really something that had been worrying her. And the more everybody laughs, the more she makes of it and strings it out. And what it shows, more than any number of half-grown children could ever do, is how old she is getting to be. She says that you always seemed to have your mind on other things and that she doesn’t know yet whether it was higher things or lower things. Everyone keeps on laughing until, finally, she pretends to look very serious and says that it is all right for them to laugh but that it wasn’t funny at the time. Her kidding, of course, is a big success, and nobody really minds it. But all I ever want to say—and don’t ever say—is that as far as I am concerned, it isn’t one bit funnier now than it was then.

  Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time

  THEIR HOUSE alone would not have made you think there was anything so awfully wrong with Mr. Dorset or his old-maid sister. But certain things about the way both of them dressed had, for a long time, annoyed and disturbed everyone. We used to see them together at the grocery store, for instance, or even in one of the big department stores downtown, wearing their bedroom slippers. Looking more closely, we would sometimes see the cuff of a pajama top or the hem of a hitched-up nightgown showing from underneath their ordinary daytime clothes. Such slovenliness in one’s neighbors is so unpleasant that even husbands and wives in West Vesey Place, which was the street where the Dorsets lived, had got so they didn’t like to joke about it with each other. Were the Dorsets, poor old things, losing their minds? If so, what was to be done about it? Some neighbors got so they would not even admit to themselves what they saw. And a child coming home with an ugly report on the Dorsets was apt to be told that it was time he learned to curb his imagination.

  Mr. Dorset wore tweed caps and sleeveless sweaters. Usually he had his sweater stuffed down inside his trousers with his shirt tails. To the women and young girls in West Vesey Place this was extremely distasteful. It made them feel as though Mr. Dorset had just come from the bathroom and had got his sweater inside his trousers by mistake. There was, in fact, nothing about Mr. Dorset that was not offensive to the women. Even the old touring car he drove was regarded by most of them as a disgrace to the neighborhood. Parked out in front of his house, as it usually was, it seemed a worse violation of West Vesey’s zoning than the house itself. And worst of all was seeing Mr. Dorset wash the car.

  Mr. Dorset washed his own car! He washed it not back in the alley or in his driveway but out there in the street of West Vesey Place. This would usually be on the day of one of the parties which he and his sister liked to give for young people or on a day when they were going to make deliveries of the paper flowers or the home-grown figs which they sold to their friends. Mr. Dorset would appear in the street carrying two buckets of warm water and wearing a pair of skin-tight coveralls. The skin-tight coveralls, of khaki material but faded almost to flesh color, were still more offensive to the women and young girls than his way of wearing his sweaters. With sponges and chamois cloths and a large scrub brush (for use on the canvas top) the old fellow would fall to and scrub away, gently at first on the canvas top and more vigorously as he progressed to the hood and body, just as though the car were something alive. Neighbor children felt that he went after the headlights exactly as if he were scrubbing the poor car’s ears. There was an element of brutality in the way he did it and yet an element of tenderness too. An old lady visiting in the neighborhood once said that it was like the cleansing of a sacrificial animal. I suppose it was some such feeling as this that made all women want to turn away their eyes whenever the spectacle of Mr. Dorset washing his car presented itself.

  As for Mr. Dorset’s sister, her behavior was in its way just as offensive as his. To the men and boys in the neighborhood it was she who seemed quite beyond the pale. She would come out on her front terrace at midday clad in a faded flannel bathrobe and with her dyed black hair all undone and hanging down her back like the hair of an Indian squaw. To us whose wives and mothers did not even come downstairs in their negligees, this was very unsettling. It was hard to excuse it even on the grounds that the Dorsets were too old and lonely and hard-pressed to care about appearances any more.

  Moreover, there was a boy who had gone to Miss Dorset’s house one morning in the early fall to collect for his paper route and saw this very Miss Louisa Dorset pushing a carpet sweeper about one of the downstairs rooms without a stitch of clothes on. He saw her through one of the little lancet windows that opened on the front loggia of the house, and he watched her for quite a long while. She was cleaning the house in preparation for a party they were giving for young people that night, and the boy said that when she finally got hot and tired she dropped down in an easy chair and crossed her spindly, blue-veined, old legs and sat there completely naked, with her legs crossed and shaking one scrawny little foot, just as unconcerned as if she didn’t care that somebody was likely to walk in on her at any moment. After a little bit the boy saw her get up again and go and lean across a table to arrange some pap
er flowers in a vase. Fortunately he was a nice boy, though he lived only on the edge of the West Vesey Place neighborhood, and he went away without ringing the doorbell or collecting for his paper that week. But he could not resist telling his friends about what he had seen. He said it was a sight he would never forget! And she an old lady more than sixty years old who, had she not been so foolish and self-willed, might have had a house full of servants to push that carpet sweeper for her!

  This foolish pair of old people had given up almost everything in life for each other’s sake. And it was not at all necessary. When they were young they could have come into a decent inheritance, or now that they were old they might have been provided for by a host of rich relatives. It was only a matter of their being a little tolerant—or even civil—toward their kinspeople. But this was something that old Mr. Dorset and his sister could never consent to do. Almost all their lives they had spoken of their father’s kin as “Mama’s in-laws” and of their mother’s kin as “Papa’s in-laws.” Their family name was Dorset, not on one side but on both sides. Their parents had been distant cousins. As a matter of fact, the Dorset family in the city of Chatham had once been so large and was so long established there that it would have been hard to estimate how distant the kinship might be. But still it was something that the old couple never liked to have mentioned. Most of their mother’s close kin had, by the time I am speaking of, moved off to California, and most of their father’s people lived somewhere up East. But Miss Dorset and her old bachelor brother found any contact, correspondence, even an exchange of Christmas cards with these in-laws intolerable. It was a case, so they said, of the in-laws respecting the value of the dollar above all else, whereas they, Miss Louisa and Mr. Alfred Dorset, placed importance on other things.