Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  But truly—I told Ned’s wife—the Dorset family was never in either of those categories. The first Dorset had come, with his family and his possessions and even a little capital, direct from a city in the English Midlands to Chatham. The Dorsets came not as pioneers, but paying their way all the way. They had not bothered to stop for a generation or two to put down roots in Pennsylvania or Virginia or Massachusetts. And this was the distinction which some people wished always to make. Apparently those early Dorsets had cared no more for putting down roots in the soil of the New World than they had cared for whatever they had left behind in the Old. They were an obscure mercantile family who came to invest in a new Western city. Within two generations the business—no, the industry!—which they established made them rich beyond any dreams they could have had in the beginning. For half a century they were looked upon, if any family ever was, as our first family.

  And then the Dorsets left Chatham—practically all of them except the one old bachelor and the one old maid—left it just as they had come, not caring much about what they were leaving or where they were going. They were city people, and they were Americans. They knew that what they had in Chatham they could buy more of in other places. For them Chatham was an investment that had paid off. They went to live in Santa Barbara and Laguna Beach, in Newport and on Long Island. And the truth which it was so hard for the rest of us to admit was that, despite our families of Massachusetts and Virginia, we were all more like the Dorsets—those Dorsets who left Chatham—than we were unlike them. Their spirit was just a little closer to being the very essence of Chatham than ours was. The obvious difference was that we had to stay on here and pretend that our life had a meaning which it did not. And if it was only by a sort of chance that Miss Louisa and Mr. Alfred played the role of social arbiters among the young people for a number of years, still no one could honestly question their divine right to do so.

  “It may have been their right,” Ned’s wife said at this point, “but just think what might have happened.”

  “It’s not a matter of what might have happened,” I said. “It is a matter of what did happen. Otherwise, what have you and I been talking about?”

  “Otherwise,” she said with an irrepressible shudder, “I would not be forever getting you off in a corner at these parties to talk about my husband and my husband’s sister and how it is they care so little for each other’s company nowadays.”

  And I could think of nothing to say to that except that probably we had now pretty well covered our subject.

  Promise of Rain

  UNDERSTAND, THERE was never anything really wrong with Hugh Robert. He was a well-built boy, strong and quick and bursting with vitality. That, at least, was the impression of himself he managed to give people. I guess he did it just by carrying himself well and never letting down in front of anyone. Actually, he was no better built than my other boys. And how is one really to know about a person’s vitality? He had a bright look in his blue eyes, a fresh complexion, and a shock of black curly hair on a head so handsomely shaped that everybody noticed it. It was the shape of his head, I imagine, that made people feel Hugh was so much better-looking than his older brothers. All the girls were crazy about him. And even if I am his father, I have to say that he was a boy who seemed fairly crazy about himself.

  When Hugh was sixteen, I kept a pretty close watch on him—closer than I ever had time to keep on the others. I observed how he seldom left for school in the mornings without stopping a moment before the long gilt-framed mirror in the front hall. Sometimes he would seem to be looking at himself with painful curiosity and sometimes with pure admiration. Either way it was unbecoming of him. But still I wasn’t too critical of the morning looks he gave himself. I did mind, however, his doing the same thing again when he got home from school in the afternoons. Many a winter’s afternoon I would already be home when he came in, and from where I sat in the living room, or in the library across the hall, I could tell by his footsteps that he was stopping to see himself in that great expanse of looking glass.

  For Hugh’s own good I used, some afternoons, to let him catch me watching him at the mirror. I thought it might break him of the habit. But his eyes would meet mine without the least shame and he would say something he didn’t mean, like “I’m not much to look at, am I, Mr. Perkins?” And he continued to stop there and ogle himself in the mirror whenever it suited him to. He would often call me Mr. Perkins like that, and call his mother Mrs. Perkins. We could never be quite sure how it was meant, and I don’t think he intended us to be. When he was being outright playful, he was apt to call us Will and Mary.

  Hugh kept his schoolbooks in a compartment of the cupboard in the downstairs hall. The cupboard I speak of was a big oak, antique thing, a very expensive piece of furniture, which Hugh’s mother had bought in Europe during our 1924 trip—ten years before. Hugh’s schoolbooks seldom got farther into the house than the hall cupboard. If I complained about this to Mary, she would refer me to his report card, with its wall of straight A’s. If I carried my attack further and mentioned the silly kinds of subjects he was taking, she would sigh and blame it on his having to go to the public school. As though I wanted Hugh to go to the public school! And as though I wanted to be home those afternoons when he came in from school! It was just that Hugh Robert grew up during bad times for us, which, as I see it, was no more my fault than it was his. Those were years when it seemed that my business firm might have to close its doors almost anytime. I couldn’t afford to keep a boy in private school. And as for myself, I just couldn’t bear to hang around the office all of those long, dead winter afternoons at the bottom of the Depression.

  I can see Hugh now in his corduroy jacket and sheepskin collar stooping down to slip his books always in the same corner of the same compartment of the hall cupboard. He was orderly and systematic about everything like that. His older brothers had never measured up to him in this respect. In an instant he could tell you the whereabouts of any of his possessions. He had things stashed away—ice skates, baseball gloves, and other athletic equipment, as well as sets of carpentry tools, car tools, and radio parts—had them pushed neatly away in nooks and shelves and drawers all over the house. They were all things he had been very much excited about at one time or another. Hugh would plague us to buy him something, and then when we did and he didn’t get the satisfaction out of it he had expected, he would brood about it for weeks. Finally, he would put it away somewhere. If it was something expensive and we asked him what became of it, he would say it was just one of his “mistakes” and that we needn’t think he had forgotten it. Sometimes when I was looking for something I had misplaced, I would come on one of those nests of “mistakes” and know at once it was Hugh’s. I remember its occurring to me once that it wouldn’t take Hugh Robert thirty seconds to lay his hands on anything he owned, and that he would be able in ten minutes’ time to assemble everything he owned and be on his way, if ever that notion struck him. It wasn’t a thought that would ever have occurred to me in connection with the other children.

  Our daughter and two older boys were married and gone from the house by this time, but when they were home with their spouses on a Sunday they’d say we were still babying Hugh, and say that they knew what would have happened to them if they had ever tried calling us by our first names. I suppose you really can’t help babying the youngest, in one way or another, and favoring him a little over the others, especially when he comes along as a sort of trailer after the others are already up in school. But to Hugh’s mother it was very annoying to have the older children point this out, and she would deny it hotly. If on a Monday morning, after the others had been there on Sunday, Hugh came down to breakfast and began that first-name or Mr.-and-Mrs. business, Mary was likely to try to talk to him as she used to talk to the other children, and tell him that it was not very respectful of him. It never did any good, though, and she would say afterward that I never supported her in these efforts. I don’t know. I do know, though
, that disrespectful is hardly the word for my son Hugh Robert Perkins—not when he was sixteen, not when he was younger than that, not even nowadays, when he favors us with one of his rare visits and sits around the house for three days talking mostly about himself and about how broke I was when he was growing up. Mary says he’s the only person who can remind me, nowadays, of how hard up we were then without making me mad. If that is so, it is because he seems to take such innocent pleasure in remembering it. He talks about it in a way that makes you feel he is saying, “I owe everything to that!”

  It got to be the fashion in those days for high-school boys to wear the knee bands of their golf knickers unfastened, letting the baggy pants legs hang loose down to their ankles. They went to school that way, and it looked far worse to me than even the shirttail-out fashion that came along after the war. I had never seen Hugh wearing his own plus fours that way, but I remarked to him one day that I regarded it as the ugliest, sloppiest, most ungentlemanly habit of dress I had ever encountered. And I asked him what in the world possessed those boys to make them do it. I think he took this as a nasty slam against his classmates. “I don’t know why they do it,” he said, with something of a sneer, “but I could find out for you, Mr. Perkins.” I told him never mind, that I didn’t want to know.

  Next day Hugh appeared at breakfast with his knickers hanging down about his ankles. He lunged into the room with his buckles on his knee bands jangling like spurs. Naturally, I was supposed to blow up and tell him to fasten them. But I pretended not even to notice, and I wouldn’t let Mary mention it to him. He wore them that way for a couple of days, and then seeing he wasn’t going to get a rise out of me, he stopped. He seemed dispirited and rather gloomy for a day or so. Then, finding me at home after school one afternoon, he said out of the clear, “I made a discovery for you, Dad.”

  “What’s that?” I said. I really didn’t know what he meant.

  “I found out why those fellows wear their plus fours drooping down. I tried wearing my own that way for a couple of days, though you didn’t even notice it.” And he had the cheek to wink at me in the hall mirror.

  “Well?” I said noncommittally. I remembered I had said I didn’t want to know why. But I didn’t remind him, because I knew he remembered, too.

  He had already put his books away, and he was about to take his jacket to the closet behind the stair. He stood running one finger along the ribbing of the corduroy jacket, which he had thrown over his arm, and he had a dejected look on his face. “It makes them feel kind of reckless and devil-may-care and as if they don’t give a darn for what anybody thinks of how they look.” This he volunteered, mind you. I had only said, “Well?”

  I thought he would continue, but when he didn’t I asked, “You don’t recommend it? You didn’t like the feeling?”

  “It didn’t make me feel that way. It only made me understand how it makes them feel. I didn’t get any kick out of it. I don’t blame them too much, though. Those guys don’t have much to make them feel important.”

  I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking the boy what he had to make him feel important. But I let it go at that, because I saw what he was getting at. I realized I was supposed to feel pretty cheap for having criticized the people he went to school with.

  Hugh didn’t have any duties at home. We weren’t people who lived in any do-it-yourself world in those days, no matter how bad business was. I still kept me a yardman in summer and a furnaceman in winter. I can’t help saying that in that respect I did as well by Hugh as by his older brothers. When he came home in the afternoon and had stuck his books in the cupboard he was free—free as a bird. He might have looked at himself in the mirror all afternoon if he had wanted to. Or he might have been out on the town with a bunch of the high-school roughnecks. But Hugh wasn’t a ruffian, and he wasn’t an idler, either; not in the worst sense. He was vain and self-centered, but you knew that while he stood before that looking glass unbuckling his corduroy jacket he was trying to make judgments and decisions about himself; he was checking something he had thought about himself during the day.

  In the mirror Hugh’s blue eyes would seem to study their own blueness for a time, and then, not satisfied, they would begin to explore the hall—the hall, that is, as reflected in the glass, and with himself, of course, always in the foreground. If I had purposely planted myself in the library doorway, that’s when his eyes would light on me. He would look at me curiously for a split second—before he let his eyes meet mine—look at me as he did at everything else in view. The first time it happened, I thought the look meant he was curious and resentful about my being home from the office so early. Next time, I saw that this wasn’t so and that he was merely fitting me into his picture of himself. I remember very well what he said to me on one of these occasions: “Mr. Perkins, even among mirrors there’s a difference! Especially the big ones. They all give you different ideas of how you look.” He rambled on, seemingly without any embarrassment. “I saw myself in a big one downtown one day and there was a second when I couldn’t place where I’d seen that uncouth, unkempt, uncanny individual before. And at school there’s a huge one in the room where we take typing—don’t ask me what it’s there for. It makes me look like everybody else in the class, with all of us pecking away at typewriters. We all look so much alike I can hardly find myself in it.” When Hugh finished that spiel, I found myself blushing—blushing for him. I hated so to think of the boy gaping at himself in mirrors all over town the way he did in that one in my front hall.

  During the summer after Hugh turned seventeen I had the misfortune to learn, firsthand, something about his habits away from home—that is, when he did take a notion to use his freedom differently and go out on the town with his cronies from the high school. I am not speaking of nightlife, though there was beginning to be some of that, too, but of the hours that young people have to kill in the daytime. The city of Chatham, which is where we have always lived, is not the biggest city in our state. Since the Second World War it has grown substantially, and the newspapers claim that there are now half a million people in the “municipal area,” by which they mean almost the whole county. But twenty-five years ago people didn’t speak of it as being more than half that size. For me to encounter my son Hugh downtown or riding along Division Boulevard couldn’t really be thought a great coincidence—especially not since, almost without knowing it, I had developed the habit of keeping an eye out for that head of his.

  I would catch a glimpse of him on the street and, with my mind still on some problem we had at the office, wouldn’t know right away what it was I had seen. Often I had to turn around and look to be sure. There Hugh would be, his dark head moving along in a group of other youthful heads—frequently a girl’s head for every boy’s—out under the boiling July sun, in a section of the city that they couldn’t possibly have had any reason for being in. There was at least one occasion when I was certain that Hugh saw me, too. I was in the backseat of the car, and when I turned and looked out the rear window, Hugh was waving. But I was crowded in between two hefty fellows—two of my men from the office—and couldn’t have returned his wave even if I had tried. On that occasion, we were riding through a section of town that used long ago to be called the Irish Flats. The men with me were both of them strictly Chatham Irish, and as we rode along I commenced teasing them about how tough that section used to be and how when I was a boy a “white man” didn’t dare put foot in that end of town.

  Perkins Finance Company, which was the name of our firm before we reorganized in 1946, used to make loans on small properties all over Chatham. Since the boys took over—my two older boys and my daughter’s husband—they haven’t wanted to deal much in that kind of thing. We have bigger irons in the fire now, and the boys have even put a cable address on the company stationery, along with the new name: Perkins, Hodgeson Investments. (The Hodgeson’s for my daughter’s husband.) But our small loans were what saved us in the Depression. The boys weren’t with me in the fi
rm then, of course. When they came back from college up East, just at the time of the Crash, I wouldn’t let them come in with me. I got them jobs in two Chatham banks which I knew weren’t going to fail. They were locked up down there in their cages all day and went home to their young wives at night without ever having any notion of the kind of hide-and-seek games Hugh and I were playing in our idleness. What I would often do—when I didn’t go home in the afternoon—was to ride around town with some of my men and look at the property we had an interest in. Aside from any business reason, it did something for me—more than going home did, more than a round of golf, or going to the ball game even. It did something for me to get out and look at the town, to see how it had stopped building and growing. The feeling I got from it was that Time itself had stopped and was actually waiting for me instead of passing me by and leaving me behind just when I was in my prime. At the time, I already had a son-in-law and two daughters-in-law, but I wasn’t an old man. I had just turned fifty. In the hot summertime of the Depression I could sometimes look at Chatham and feel about it that it was a big, powerful, stubborn horse that wouldn’t go. I was still in the saddle, it seemed—or I had just dismounted and had a tight grip on the reins near the bit and was meaning to remount. Perhaps I even had in mind beating the brute somehow, to make it go; for I was young enough then to be impatient and to feel that I just couldn’t wait for the town to begin to move again. I knew I had to have my second chance. Hugh could take whatever pleasure and instruction he would from exploring the city as it was in those days and getting to know different kinds of people. It corresponded to something in his makeup. Or it answered some need of his temperament. Anyway, he seemed to be born for it. But, as for me, I could hardly wait for things to begin to move again and to be the way they had been before.