Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  I used to watch the expression on his black face when he was waiting on Uncle Andrew at table or was helping him into his overcoat when Uncle Andrew left for his office in the morning. His careful attention to my uncle’s readiness for his next sleeve or for the next helping of greens made you feel he considered it a privilege to be doing all these little favors for a man who had done so many large ones for him. His attentions to my uncle impressed everyone who came to the house. If there was a party, he couldn’t pass through the room, even with a tray loaded with glasses, without stopping before Uncle Andrew to nod and mutter respectfully, “Mr. Andrew.” This itself was a memorable spectacle, and often was enough to stop the party talk of those who witnessed it: Uncle Andrew, so tall and erect, so bald and clean-shaven, so proudly beak-nosed, and yet with such a benign expression in those gray eyes that focused for one quick moment upon Jesse. And Jesse, stooped and purple-black and bushy-headed and red-eyed, clad in his white vestment and all but genuflecting while he held the tray of glasses perfectly steady for my uncle. It lasted only a second, and then Jesse’s eyes would dart from one to another of the men standing nearest Uncle Andrew as though looking for some Cassius among them—some Judas. (And perhaps thinking all the time only that my aunt’s eyes were upon him, denouncing him not merely as a sycophant and hypocrite but as a man who would have to answer for his manifold sins before the dread seat of judgment on the Last Day.) When he had moved on with his tray, some guest who had not been to the house before was apt to comment on what a wicked-looking fellow he was. My uncle would laugh heartily and say that nothing would please Jesse more than to think this was the impression he gave. “He gets himself up to look awful mean and he likes to think of himself as a devil. But actually he’s as harmless as that boy standing there,” Uncle Andrew would say, pointing of course to me.

  I would laugh self-consciously, not really liking to have my own harmlessness pointed out. And I wonder if Jesse, already on the other side of the room, sometimes heard my laughter then and detected a certain hollowness in it that was also there when he told me the things he would do to my uncle’s imaginary assailant. Because often, when I stood looking at the guest made uncomfortable by Jesse’s glance, I could not help thinking of those things. In my mind’s eye I would see his gestures, see him seizing his throat, rolling his eyes about, making as if to slice off his ears and nose, and indicating an even more debilitating operation. It may seem strange that I never imagined that those threats might be directed toward me personally, since I was my father’s son and might easily have been supposed to bear a grudge against my uncle. But I felt that Jesse made it graphically clear that it was some Negro man like himself he had in mind as my uncle’s assailant. When he was going through his routine he would usually be in the pantry and he would have placed himself in such relation to the mirror panel beside the swinging door there that, by rolling his eyes, he could be certain to see the black visage of this man he was mutilating.

  It was another coincidence, like their moving to Memphis just when Jesse had to be gotten out of Braxton, that my aunt and uncle decided to give up the house and move to an apartment at just the time when it was no longer feasible for them to have Jesse Munroe working at their house. Uncle Andrew was nearly seventy years old at the time. He was spending less time at his office, and he and Aunt Margaret wanted to be free to travel. During the two years I was with them, there were three occasions when Jesse was missing from the house for about a week and had to be rescued by my uncle. I didn’t know then exactly what his current outside activities were. Even Aunt Margaret preferred not to discuss it with me. She would say only that in her estimation it was worse than anything before. Later I learned that he had become a kind of confidence man and that—as in the numbers racket—his chief troubles came from his competitors. He specialized, for a time, in preying upon green country boys who had come to Memphis with their little wads of money. After I had left the house he went to something still worse. He was delivering country girls whom he picked up on Beale Street into the hands of the Pontotoc Street madams.

  It was the authorities from neighboring counties in West Tennessee and Mississippi who finally began to put pressure on the police. They threatened, so I have been told, to come in and take care of Jesse themselves. Uncle Andrew moved him to a little room on the top floor of the ramshackle old building that his cotton company was in. Jesse lived up there and acted as a kind of butler and bartender in my uncle’s private office, which was a paneled, air-conditioned suite far in the rear of and very different-looking from the display rooms where the troughs of cotton samples were. The trouble was that his “Mr. Andrew” was not at the office very much anymore for Jesse to wait on. And so most of the time he stayed up in his little cubbyhole on the top floor, and of course he got to drinking up my uncle’s whiskey. He never left the building, never came down below the third floor, which Uncle Andrew’s offices were on, and he never talked to the other Negroes who worked there. I would pass him in the hallway sometimes and speak to him, but he wouldn’t even look at me. At last, of course, he went crazy up there in my uncle’s office. It may have been partly from drinking so much whiskey, but at least this time we knew it wasn’t bad whiskey. . . . When the office force came and opened up that morning they found him locked up in Uncle Andrew’s air-conditioned, sound-proofed suite and they could see through the glass doors the wreck he had made of everything in there. He had slashed the draperies and cut up the upholstery on the chairs. There were big spots and gashes on the walls where he had thrown things—mostly bottles of whiskey and gin, which of course had been broken and left lying all about the floor. He had pushed over the bar, the filing cabinets, the refrigerator, the electric watercooler, and even the air-conditioning unit. For a while nobody could tell where Jesse himself was. It wasn’t till just before I got there that they spotted him crouched under Uncle Andrew’s mahogany desk. From the beginning, though, they could hear him moaning and praying and calling out now and then for help. And even before I arrived someone had observed that it wasn’t for Uncle Andrew but for Aunt Margaret he was calling.

  I was parking my car down in the alley when one of the secretaries who had already been up there rushed up to me and told me what had happened. I hurried around to the street side of the building and went up the stairs so fast that I stumbled two or three times before I got to the third floor. They made a place for me at the glass door and told me that if I would stoop down I could see him back in the inner office crouched under the desk. I saw him there, and what I noticed first was that he didn’t have on his white jacket or his shirt but was still wearing his long-sleeved winter underwear.

  Fortunately, it happened that Uncle Andrew and Aunt Margaret were not on one of their trips at the time. Everyone at the office knew this, and they knew better than to call the police. They would have known better even if Uncle Andrew had not been in town. They waited for me to come in and telephone Uncle Andrew. I went up into the front display room and picked up the telephone. It was only eight-thirty, and I knew that Uncle Andrew would probably still be in bed. He sounded half asleep when he answered. I blurted out, “Uncle Andrew, Jesse’s cracked up pretty bad down here at the office and has himself locked in your rooms.”

  “Yes,” said Uncle Andrew, guardedly.

  “He’s made a mess of the place and is hiding under your desk. He has a knife, I suppose. And he keeps calling for Aunt Margaret. Do you think you’ll come down, or—”

  “Who is it speaking?” Uncle Andrew said, as though anyone else at the office ever called him “uncle.” He did it out of habit. But it gave me an unpleasant feeling. I was tempted to give some name like “Henry White” and hang up, but I said nothing. I just waited. Uncle Andrew was silent for a moment. Then I heard him clear his throat, and he said, “Do you think he’ll be all right till I can get down there?”

  “I think so,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll get Fred Morley and be down there in fifteen minutes,” he
said.

  I don’t know why but I said again, “He keeps calling for Aunt Margaret.”

  “I heard you,” Uncle Andrew said. Then he said, “We’ll be down in fifteen minutes.”

  I didn’t know whether his “we” meant himself and Fred Morley, who was the family doctor, or whether it included Aunt Margaret. I don’t know yet which he meant. But when he and Dr. Morley arrived, my aunt was with them, and I don’t think I was ever so glad to see anyone. I kissed her when she came in.

  I came near to kissing Uncle Andrew too. I was touched by how old he had looked as he came up the stairs—he and Aunt Margaret, and Dr. Morley, too—how old and yet how much the same. And I was touched by the fact that it hadn’t occurred to any of the three not to come. However right or wrong their feelings toward Jesse were they were the same as they would have been thirty years before. In a way this seemed pretty wonderful to me. It did at the moment. I thought of the phrase my aunt was so fond of using about people: “true blue.”

  The office force, and two of the partners by now, were still bunched around the glass door peering in at Jesse and trying to hear the things he was saying. I stood at the top of the stairs watching the three old people ascend the two straight flights of steps that I had come stumbling up half an hour earlier—two flights that came up from the ground floor without a turn or a landing between floors. I thought how absurd it was that in these Front Street buildings, where so much Memphis money was made, such a thing as an elevator was unknown. Except for adding the little air-conditioned offices at the rear, nobody was allowed to do anything there that would change the old-fashioned, masculine character of the cotton man’s world. This row of buildings, hardly two blocks long, with their plaster facade and unbroken line of windows looking out over the brown Mississippi River were a kind of last sanctuary—generally beyond the reach of the ladies and practically beyond the reach of the law.

  When they got to the top of the stairs I kissed my aunt on her powdered cheek. She took my arm and stood a moment catching her breath before we moved out of the hallway. I thought to myself that she had put more powder on her face this morning than was usual for her. No doubt she had dressed in a great hurry, hardly looking in her glass. But I observed that underneath the powder her face was flushed from the climb, and her china blue eyes shone brightly. Instead of seeming older to me now, I felt she looked younger and prettier and more feminine than I had ever before seen her. It must have been just seeing her there in a Front Street office for the first time. . . . But I still remember the delicate pressure of her hand as she leaned on my arm.

  Uncle Andrew went straight to the door of his office and shooed everyone else away. I don’t know whether I saw him do this or not, but I know that’s how it was. Presently I found myself in the middle display room standing beside Aunt Margaret while Dr. Morley made pleasantries to her about how the appearance of cotton offices never changed. He hadn’t been inside one in more than a decade, and he wondered how long it had been for her. Uncle Andrew, meanwhile, in order to be sure that Jesse heard him through the glass door and above his moaning had to speak in a voice that resounded all over the third floor of the building. Yet he didn’t seem to be shouting, and he managed to put into his voice all the reassurance and forgiveness that must have been there during their private interchanges in years past. It was like hearing a radio soap opera turned on unbearably loud in a drugstore or in some other public place. “Come open the door, Jesse. You know I’m your friend. Haven’t I always done right by you? It doesn’t matter about the mess you’ve made in there. I have insurance to cover everything, and I’m not going to let anybody harm you.”

  It didn’t do any good, though. Even in the middle room we could hear Jesse calling out—more persistently now—for Aunt Margaret to help him. Yet Aunt Margaret still seemed to be listening to Dr. Morley. I couldn’t understand it. I wanted to interrupt and ask her if she didn’t hear Jesse? Why had she come if she wasn’t even going in there and look at him through the glass door? Didn’t she feel any compassion for the poor fellow? Surely she would suddenly turn her back on us and walk in there. That seemed how she would do it.

  Then for a moment my attention was distracted from Aunt Margaret to myself—to how concerned I was about whether or not she would go to him, to how very much I cared about Jesse’s suffering and his need to have my aunt come and look at him! I took my eyes off Aunt Margaret and was myself resolutely trying to observe what a Front Street cotton office was really like when I felt her hand on my arm again. Looking at her I saw that underneath the powder her color was still quite high. While Dr. Morley talked on she gazed at me with moist eyes which made her look still prettier than before. And now I perceived that she had been intending all the time to go to Jesse and give the poor brute whatever comfort she could. But I saw too that there were difficulties for her which I had not imagined. Suddenly she did as she would do. Without a word she turned her back on us and went back there and showed herself in the glass door.

  That was all there was to it really. Or for Jesse it was. It seemed to be all the real help he needed or could accept. He didn’t come out and open the door, but he was relatively quiet afterward, even after Aunt Margaret was finally led away by Uncle Andrew and Dr. Morley, and even after Dr. Morley’s two men came and broke the glass in the door and went in for him. When Aunt Margaret had been led away it seemed to be my turn again, and so I went back there and stood watching him until the men came. Now and then he would start to crawl out from under the desk but each time would suddenly pull back and try to hide himself again, and then again the animal grunts and groans would begin. Obviously, he was still seeing the things he had thought were after him during the night. But though he made some feeble efforts at resistance, I think he had regained his senses sufficiently to be glad when Dr. Morley’s men finally came in and took him.

  That was the end of it for Jesse. And this is where I would like to leave off. It is the next part that it is hardest for me to tell. But the whole truth is that my aunt did more than just show herself to Jesse through the glass door. While she remained there her behavior was such that it made me understand for the first time that this was not merely the story of that purplish-black, kinky-headed Jesse’s ruined life. It is the story of my aunt’s pathetically unruined life, and my uncle’s too, and even my own. I mean to say that at this moment I understood that Jesse’s outside activities had been not only his, but ours too. My Uncle Andrew, with his double standard or triple standard—whichever it was—had most certainly forced Jesse’s destruction upon him, and Aunt Margaret had made the complete destruction possible and desirable to him with her censorious words and looks. But they did it because they had to, because they were so dissatisfied with the pale unruin of their own lives. They did it because something would not let them ruin their own lives as they wanted and felt a need to do—as I have often felt a need to do, myself. As who does not sometimes feel a need to do? Without knowing it, I think, Aunt Margaret wanted to see Jesse as he was that morning. And it occurs to me now that Dr. Morley understood this at the time.

  The moment she left us to go to Jesse, the old doctor became silent. He and I stood on opposite sides of one of the troughs of cotton, each of us fumbling with samples we had picked up there. Dr. Morley carefully turned his back on the scene that was about to take place in the room beyond. I could not keep myself from watching it.

  I think I had never seen my aunt hurry before. As soon as she had passed into the back display room she began running on tiptoe. Uncle Andrew heard her soft footfall. As he turned around, their eyes must have met. I saw Uncle’s face and saw, or imagined I saw, the expression in his gray eyes—one of utter dismay. Yet I don’t think this had anything to do with Aunt Margaret. It was Jesse who was on his mind. He could not believe that he had failed to bring Jesse to his senses. I suspect that when Aunt Margaret looked into his eyes she got the impression that her husband didn’t at that moment know who in the world she was. Maybe at that momen
t she couldn’t have said who he was. I imagine their eyes meeting like the eyes of strangers, perhaps two white people passing each other on some desolate back street in the toughest part of niggertown, each wondering what dire circumstances could have brought so nice-looking a person as the other to this unlikely neighborhood. . . . At last, when Aunt Margaret drew near the glass door, Uncle Andrew stepped aside and moved out of my view.

  For a time she stood before the glass panel in silence. She was peering about the two rooms inside, looking for Jesse. At last, without ever seeing where he was, I suppose, she began speaking to him. Her words were not audible to me and almost certainly they weren’t so to Jesse, who continued for some time to keep on with his moaning and praying, though seeing that she had come he didn’t go on calling out for her. The voice she spoke to him in was utterly sweet and beautiful. I think she was quoting scripture to him part of the time—one of the Psalms, I believe. Instinctively, I began moving toward the doorway that joined the room I was in and the room she was in. It was the voice of that same Aunt Margaret who had spoken to me with so much kindness and sympathy and love in the days just after my mother died. I was barely able to keep from bursting into tears—tears of joy and exaltation.