Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  Now, in the dining room of their apartment, he was looking into the same flushed little face and suddenly he saw that the eyelashes were wet with tears. He was overcome with shame.

  His wife must have discovered the tears at the same moment. He glanced at her and saw that she, too, was now filled with pity for the child and was probably thinking, as he was, that they were all of them keyed up this morning of their last day before starting home.

  “Oh, it’s all right, sweetie,” said his wife, putting her hand on the top of the blond little head and pointing out the milk to Marie. “Accidents will happen.”

  Squatting down beside his daughter, he said, “Don’t you notice anything different?” And he stuck his forefinger across his upper lip.

  “Oh, Mama, it’s gone!” she squealed. Placing her two little hands on his shoulders, she bent forward and kissed him on the mouth. “Mama, you’re right,” she exclaimed. “He is beautiful!”

  After that, the spilled milk and the baby’s gyrations were events of ancient history—dismissed and utterly forgotten.

  A few minutes later, the little girl and Marie were beside the playpen chattering to the baby in French. His wife had wandered off into the bedroom, where she would dress and then throw herself into a final fury of packing. She had already asked him to make himself scarce this day, to keep out of the way of women’s work. His duties, she had said, would begin when it came time to leave for the boat train tomorrow morning. Now he followed her into the bedroom to put on a tie and a jacket before setting out on his day’s expedition.

  She had taken off her housecoat and was standing in her slip before the big armoire, searching there among the few dresses that hadn’t already been packed for something she might wear today. He stopped in front of the mirror above the chest of drawers and began slipping a tie into his collar. He was thinking of just how he would spend his last day. Not, certainly, with any of his acquaintances. He had said goodbye to everyone he wanted to say goodbye to. No, he would enjoy the luxury of being by himself, of buying a paper and reading it over coffee somewhere, of wandering perhaps one more time through the Luxembourg Gardens—the wonderful luxury of walking in Paris on a June day without purpose or direction.

  When he had finished with his tie, he discovered that his wife was now watching his face in the mirror. She was smiling, and as their eyes met she said, “I’m glad you shaved it but I shall miss it a little, along with everything else.” And before she began pulling her dress over her head she blew him a kiss.

  IL PENSEROSO

  The feeling came over him in the Luxembourg Gardens at the very moment he was passing the Medici Grotto at the end of its little lagoon. He simply could not imagine what it was that had been able to depress his spirits so devastatingly on a day that had begun so well. Looking back at the grotto, he wanted to think that his depression had been induced by the ugliness and the triteness of the sculpture about the fountain there, but he knew that the fountain had nothing to do with it. He was so eager to dispel this sudden gloom and return to his earlier mood, however, that he turned to walk back to the spot and see what else might have struck his eye. Above all, it was important for it to be something outside himself that had crushed his fine spirits this way, and that was thus threatening to spoil his day.

  He didn’t actually return to the spot, but he did linger a moment by the corner of the palace, beside a flower bed where two workmen—surreptitiously, it seemed to him—were sinking little clay pots of already blooming geranium plants into the black soil, trying to make it look as though the plants honestly grew and bloomed there. From here he eyed other strollers along the path and beside the lagoon, hoping to discover in one of them something tragic or pathetic which he might hold responsible for the change he had felt come over him. He would have much preferred finding an object, something not human, to pin it on, but, that failing, he was now willing to settle for any unhappy or unpleasant-looking person—a stranger, of course, someone who had no claim of any kind on him. But every child and its nurse, each shabby student with satchel and notebooks, every old gentleman or old lady waiting for his terrier or her poodle to perform in the center of the footpath appeared relatively happy (in their limited French way, of course, he found himself thinking)—as happy, almost, as he must have appeared not five minutes earlier. He even tried looking farther back on the path toward the gate into the rue de Vaugirard, but it availed him nothing. Then his thoughts took him beyond the gate, and he remembered the miserable twenty minutes he had just been forced to spend trying to read his paper and enjoy his coffee in the Café Tournon, while a bearded fellow American explained to him what was wrong with their country and why Americans were “universally unpopular” abroad.

  But even this wouldn’t do. For he was as used to the ubiquitous bearded American and his café explanations of everything as he was to the ugly Italian grotto; and he disliked them to just the same degree and found them equally incapable of disturbing him in this way. He gave up the search now, and as he strode out into the brightness of the big sunken garden he quietly conceded the truth of the matter: the feeling was not evoked by his surroundings at all but had sprung from something inside himself. Further, it was not worth all this searching; it wasn’t important; it would pass soon. Why, as soon as it had run its course with him he would not even remember the feeling again until . . . until it would come upon him again in the same unreasonable way, perhaps in six months, or in a few days, or in a year. When the mood was not on him, he could never believe in it. For instance, while he had been shaving this morning he truly did not know or, rather, he knew not that he was ever in his life subject to such fits of melancholy and gloom . . . But still the mood was on him now. And actually he understood the source well enough.

  It sprang from the same thing his earlier cheerful mood had come from—his own consciousness of how well everything had gone for him this year, and last year, and always, really. It was precisely this, he told himself, that depressed him. At the present moment he could almost wish that he hadn’t finished the work on his book. He was able to wish this (or almost wish it) because he knew it was so typical of him to have accomplished just precisely what he had come to accomplish—and so American of him. Generally speaking, he didn’t dislike being himself or being American, but to recognize that he was so definitely the man he was, so definitely the combination he was, and that certain experiences and accomplishments were now typical of him was to recognize how he was getting along in the world and how the time was moving by. He was only thirty-eight. But the bad thought was that he was no longer going to be this or that. He was. It was a matter of being. And to be meant, or seemed to mean at such a moment, to be over with. Yet this, too, was a tiresome, recurrent thought of his—very literary, he considered it, and a platitude.

  He went on with his walk. The Jardin du Luxembourg was perfection this morning, with its own special kind of sky and air and its wall of flat-topped chestnuts with their own delicate shade of green foliage, and he tried to feel guilty about his wife’s being stuck back there in the apartment, packing their possessions, trying to fit everything that had not gone into the foot lockers and the duffel-bags into six small pieces of luggage. But the guiltiness he tried for wouldn’t materialize. Instead, he had a nasty little feeling of envy at her packing. And so he had to return to his efforts at delighting in the singular charm of the park on a day like this. “There is nothing else like it in Paris,” he said, moving his lips, “which is to say there is nothing else like it in the world.” And this pleased him just as long as it took for his lips to form the words.

  It wasn’t yet midmorning, but the little boys—both the ragged and the absurdly over-dressed-up ones—had already formed their circle about the boat basin in the center, and, balancing themselves on the masonry there, were sending their sailboats out over the bright water. This was almost a cheering sight to him. But not quite. For it was, after all, a regular seasonal feature of the place, like the puppet shows and the po
tted palm trees, and it was hardly less artificial in its effect.

  He was rounding the lower garden of the park now; had passed the steps that led up toward the Boulevard Saint-Michel entrance and toward that overpowering monster the Panthéon. (There were monsters and monstrous things everywhere he turned now.) He was walking just below the clumsy balustrade of the upper garden; and now, across the boat basin, across the potted flower beds and the potted palms, above the heads of the fun-loving, freedom-loving, stiff-necked, and pallid-faced Parisians, he saw the façade of the old palace itself. It also loomed large and menacing. There was no look of fun or freedom about it. It did not smile down upon the garden. Rather, out of that pile of ponderous, dirty stone, all speckled with pigeon droppings, twenty eyes glared at him over the iron fencing, which seemed surely to have been put there to protect the people from the monster—not the monster from the people. It was those vast, terrible, blank windows, like the whitened eyes of a blind horse, that made the building hideous. How could anyone ever have found it a thing of beauty? How could . . . Then suddenly: “Oh, do stop it!” he said to himself. But he couldn’t stop it. Wasn’t it from one of those awful windows that the great David, as a prisoner of the Revolution, had painted his only landscape? That unpleasant man David, that future emperor of art, that personification of the final dead end to a long-dying tradition! “Oh, do stop it!” he said again to himself. “Can’t you stop it?”

  But still he couldn’t. The palace was a tomb. The park was a formal cemetery. He was where everything was finished and over with. Too much had already happened here, and whatever else might come would be only anticlimactic. And nothing could be so anticlimactic as an American living on the left bank of the Seine and taking a morning walk in the Jardin du Luxembourg. He remembered two novels whose first chapters took for their setting this very spot. Nothing was so deadening to a place as literature! And wasn’t it true, after all, that their year in that fourth-floor walkup had been a dismal, lonely one? Regardless of his having got his work done, of his having had his afternoons free to wander not only through the streets where his heroes had once lived but also through the Louvre and the Musée Cluny and through the old crumbling hôtels of the Marais? Regardless of the friends they had made and even of the occasional gay evening on the town. Wasn’t it really so that he had just not been willing to admit this truth until this moment? Wasn’t it so, really, that he had come to Paris too late? That this was a city for the very young and the very rich, and that he, being neither, might as well not have come? What was he but a poor plodding fellow approaching middle age, doing all right, getting along with his work well enough, providing for his family; and the years were moving by . . .

  Suddenly he turned his back on the boat basin and the palace, and started at a brisk pace up the ramp that leads toward the great gilded south gate. And immediately he saw his daughter in the crowd! She was moving toward him, walking under the trees.

  He saw her before she saw him. This gave him time to gather his wits, and to recall that his wife, as soon as she got him out of the apartment, was determined to get them out, too, so that there would be no one to interfere with her packing. And now, during the moment that she did not see him, he managed to find something that he could be cross with her about. She was ambling along, absent-mindedly leaning on the baby’s carriage—that awful habit of hers—and making it all but impossible for Marie to push the carriage. She had come out from under the trees now, and as she skipped and danced along, her two bouncing blond ponytails, which Marie had fixed, one directly above each ear, were literally dazzling in the sunlight. “Daddy,” she said, as she came within his shadow on the gravel path. Her eyes were just exactly the color of the park’s own blue heaven. His wife’s mother had said it didn’t seem quite normal for a girl to have such “positive blue” eyes. And her long little face with the chin just a tiny bit crooked, like his own!

  He took her hand, and they went down the ramp toward the row of chairs on their left. “If we sit down, you’ll have to pay,” she warned him.

  “That’s all right,” he said.

  “I’ll sit on your lap if you’ll give me the ten francs for the extra chair.”

  “And if I won’t?”

  “Oh, I’ll sit on your lap anyway, since you’ve shaved that mustache.”

  The old woman who collected for chairs was hot on their heels. He paid for the single chair and tipped her the price of another.

  “I saw how much you gave her,” his daughter said reproachfully. “But it’s all right. She’s one of the nice ones.”

  “Oh, they’re all nice when you get to know them,” he said, laughing.

  She nodded. “And isn’t it a lovely park, Daddy? I think it is.”

  “It’s too bad we’re going home so soon, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Daddy, we just got here!” she protested.

  “I mean going back to America, silly,” he said.

  “I thought you meant to the apartment . . . But we’re not going back to America today.”

  “No, but tomorrow.”

  “Well, what difference does that make?”

  He saw Marie approaching with the carriage. “Let’s give our chair to Marie, since I have to be on my way,” he said.

  “Then you have to leave now?” she asked forlornly.

  He gave her a big squeeze with his arms and held her a moment longer on his knee. He was wondering where his dark mood had gone. It was not just gone. He felt it had never been. And why had he lied to himself about this year? It had been a fine year. But still he kept thinking also of how she had interrupted his mood. And as soon as she was off his knee, he began to feel resentful again of the interruption and of the mysterious power she had over him. He found that he wanted the mood of despondency to return, and he knew it wouldn’t for a long while. It was something she had taken from him, something she had taken from him before and would take from him again and again—she and the little fellow in the carriage there, and their mother, too, even before they were born. They would never allow him to have it for days and days at a time, as he once did. He felt he had been cheated. But this was not a mood, it was only a thought. He felt a great loss—except he didn’t really feel it, he only thought of it. And he felt, he knew that he had after all gotten to Paris too late . . . after he had already established steady habits of work . . . after he had acknowledged claims that others had on him . . . after there were ideas and truths and work and people that he loved better even than himself.

  A Friend and Protector

  FAMILY FRIENDS would always say how devoted Jesse Munroe was to my uncle. And Jesse himself would tell me sometimes what he would do to anybody who harmed a hair on “that white gentleman’s head.” The poor fellow was much too humorless and lived much too much in the past—or in some other kind of removal from the present—to reflect that Uncle Andrew no longer had a hair on his head to be harmed. While he was telling me the things he would do, I’d often burst out laughing at the very thought of my uncle’s baldness. Or that was what I told myself I was laughing about. At any rate, my outbursts didn’t bother Jesse. He always went right ahead with his description of the violence he would do Uncle Andrew’s assailant. And I, watching his obscene gestures and reminding myself of all the scrapes he had been in and of the serious trouble my uncle had got him out of twenty years back, I could almost believe he would do the things he said. More than one time, in fact, his delineations became so real and convincing it took my best fit of laughter to conceal the shudders he sent through me.

  He was a naturally fierce-looking little man with purplish black skin and thick wiry hair, which he wore not clipped short like most Negro men’s hair but long and bushed up on his head. It was intended to give him height, I used to suppose. But it contributed instead to a general sinister effect, just as his long, narrow sideburns did; and my Uncle Andrew would always insist that it was this effect Jesse strived for. He wasn’t, actually, such a little man. He was of medium height.
It was because he was so stoop-shouldered and was so often seen beside my Uncle Andrew that we, my aunt and I, thought of him as little. He was extremely stoop-shouldered, though, and his neck was so short that the lobes of his overlarge ears seemed to reach almost to the collar of his white linen jacket. Probably it was this peculiarity along with his bushy hair and his perpetually bloodshot eyes that made me say at first he was naturally fierce-looking.

  He wasn’t naturally fierce-looking. My Uncle Andrew was right about that. It was something he had achieved. And according to my uncle, the scrapes he was always getting into didn’t really amount to much. My Aunt Margaret, however—my “blood aunt,” married to Uncle Andrew—used to shake her head bitterly and say that Negroes could get away with anything with Uncle Andrew and that his ideas of “much” were very different from hers. “Jesse Munroe can disappear into the bowels of Beale Street,” she would say in Jesse’s presence, “knowing that when he comes out all he did there will be a closed chapter for ‘Mr. Andrew.’ ” Jesse would be clearing the table or laying a fire in the living room, and while such talk went on he would keep his eyes lowered except to steal a glance now and then at my aunt.

  I was a boy of fifteen when I used to observe this. I was staying there in Memphis with my uncle and aunt just after Mother died. The things Aunt Margaret said in Jesse’s presence made me feel very uncomfortable. And it seemed unlike her. I used to wish Jesse would look at Uncle Andrew instead of at her and spare himself the sight of the expression on her face at those moments.

  But it was foolish of me to waste sympathy on Jesse Munroe, and even at the time I knew it was. For one thing, despite all the evenings we spent talking back in the pantry during the two years I lived there, he never seemed to be really aware of me as a person. Each time we talked it was almost as though it was the first time. There was no getting to know him. Two years later when I had finished high school and was not getting along with my uncle and aunt as well as at first, I didn’t live at their house anymore. But I would sometimes see Jesse at my uncle’s Front Street office where I then had a job and where Jesse soon came to work as my uncle’s special flunky. Uncle Andrew was a cotton broker, and it wasn’t unusual for such a successful cotton man as he was to keep a factotum like Jesse around the office. I would see Jesse there, and he wouldn’t even bother to speak to me. I am certain that if nowadays he is in a condition to remember anyone he doesn’t remember me. I appeared on the scene too late. By the time I came along Jesse’s escapades and my uncle’s and aunt’s reactions to them had become a regular pattern. It was too well established, over too many years, for my presence or my sympathy one way or the other to make any difference. It was the central and perhaps the only reality in Jesse’s life. It had been so since before I was born and it would continue to be so, for a while at least, after I left the house.