Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  Jesse didn’t, as I have already said, come out and open the door. But at some point, which I didn’t mark, he became quieter. Now there were only intermittent sobs and groans. After a while my aunt stopped speaking. She was searching again for his hiding place in there. Presently, Uncle Andrew appeared again. He came over to her and indicated that if she would stoop down she could see Jesse under the desk. He watched her very intently as she squatted there awkwardly before the door.

  If it had seemed strange for me to see her running, a few minutes earlier, it seemed almost unbelievable now that I was seeing her squatting there that way on the floor. I watched her and I thought how unlike her it was. I think I know the very moment when she saw her friend Jesse. I could tell her body had suddenly gone perfectly rigid. She looked not like any woman I had ever seen but like some hideously angular piece of modern sculpture. And then, throwing her hands up to her face, she lost her balance. My uncle was quick and caught her before she fell. He brought her to her feet at once and as he did so he called out for assistance—not from me but from Dr. Morley. Dr. Morley brushed past me in the doorway, answering the call.

  Even after she was on her feet she couldn’t take her hands down from her face for several moments. When finally she did manage to do so, all her high color and all the brightness in her eyes had vanished. As they led her away it was hard to think of her as the same woman who had rested her hand on my sleeve only a little while ago. Had she really wanted to see Jesse as he was this morning? I think she had. But I think the sight of the animal crouched underneath my uncle’s desk—and probably peering out at her—had been more than she was actually prepared to look upon. As she was led off by her husband and her doctor, I felt certain that Aunt Margaret had suffered a shock from which she would never recover.

  But how mistaken I was about her recovery soon became clear. I waited around until Dr. Morley’s men arrived and I watched them go in and take Jesse. Then I wandered through the other display rooms up to the front office, where most of the real paperwork of the firm was done and where my own desk was. The front office was really a part of the front display room, divided from it only by a little railing with a swinging gate. I knew I would find my aunt up there and I supposed I would find her lying down on the old leather couch just inside the railing. I could even imagine how Dr. Morley and my uncle, and probably one of the office girls, would be hovering about and administering to her. Yet it was a different scene I came on. Dr. Morley was seated at my desk taking down information which he said would be necessary for him to have about Jesse. He was writing it on the back of an envelope. Aunt Margaret was seated in a chair drawn up beside him. She seemed completely herself again. Uncle, standing on the other side of the doctor, was trying to supply the required information. But Aunt Margaret kept correcting most of the facts that Uncle Andrew gave. While the doctor listened with perfect patience, the two of them disputed silly points like Jesse’s probable age and the correct spelling of his surname, whether it was “Munroe” or “Monroe,” and what his mother’s maiden name had been. . . . It was hard to believe that either Aunt Margaret or Uncle Andrew had any idea of what was happening to Jesse at that very moment or any feeling about it.

  Dr. Morley had Jesse committed to the state asylum out at Bolivar. They locked him up for a while, then they made a trusty of him. Dr. Morley says he seems very happy and that he has made himself so useful that they will almost certainly never let him go. I have never been out there to see him, of course, and neither has Aunt Margaret or Uncle Andrew. But I have dreams about Jesse sometimes—absurd, wild dreams that are not like anything that ever happened. One night recently when I was at a dinner party at my uncle and aunt’s apartment and someone was recalling Jesse’s devotion to my uncle, I undertook to tell one of those dreams of mine. But I broke it off in the middle and pretended that that was all, because I saw my aunt, at the far end of the table, was looking as pale as if she had seen a ghost or as if I had been telling a dream that she had had. As soon as I stopped, the talk resumed its usual theme, and my aunt seemed all right again. But when our eyes met a few minutes later she sent me the same quick, disapproving glance that my mother used to send me at my grandfather’s table when I was relating some childish nightmare I had had. “Don’t bore people with what you dream,” my mother used to say after we had left the table and were alone. “If you have nothing better than that to contribute, leave the talking to someone else.” Aunt Margaret’s rude glance said precisely that to me. But I must add that when we were leaving the dining room my aunt rested her hand rather firmly and yet tenderly on my arm as if to console and comfort me. She was by nature such a kind and gentle person that she could not bear to think she had hurt someone she loved.

  Guests

  THE HOUSE was not itself. Relatives were visiting from the country. It was an old couple this time, an old couple who could not sleep after the sun was up and who began yawning as soon as dinner was over in the evening. They were silent at table, leaving the burden of conversation to their host and hostess, and they declined all outside invitations issued in their honor. Cousin Johnny was on a strict diet. Yet wanting to be no trouble, both he and Cousin Annie refused to reveal any principle of his diet. If he couldn’t eat what was being served, he would do without. They made their own beds, washed out their own tubs, avoided using salad forks and butter knives. Upon arriving, they even produced their own old-fashioned ivory napkin rings, and when either of them chanced to spill something on the tablecloth, they begged the nearest Negro servant’s pardon. As a result, everybody, including the servants, was very uncomfortable from the moment the old couple entered the house.

  Edmund Harper, their host, was most uncomfortable of all. What’s more, he had to conceal the fact from his wife, Henrietta, because otherwise he would be accused of “not seeing her through.” Henrietta was a planner, an arranger, a straighten-outer—especially of other people’s lives. Somehow she always managed to involve Edmund in her good works, and never more so than when it was a matter of relatives from the country. Cousin Johnny and Cousin Annie, for instance, had clearly not wanted to make this visit. In fact, they had struggled valiantly against Henrietta’s siege. But they couldn’t withstand Henrietta’s battering for very long. Henrietta knew that neither of them had ever set foot in the capital city of Nashville; and she couldn’t bear the thought of the poor old souls’ not seeing Nashville before they died. It ended by Edmund’s going with Henrietta in her car to bring the unwilling visitors bodily into Nashville.

  Some weeks before the visit, Henrietta had written a letter suggesting that she might enter the old couple’s house and do their packing for them—that is, if Cousin Annie didn’t feel up to it. And this was what finally made Cousin Annie run up the white flag and pretend to accept Henrietta’s terms. Come what might, the old lady’s little clapboard Gothic citadel, with its bay windows and gingerbread porches, was not going to be entered. In its upright posture on the rockiest hill of Cousin Johnny’s stock farm—a farm where the land was now mostly rented out and the stock disposed of, because of Cousin Johnny’s advanced years—the house was like Cousin Annie’s very soul, and it would be defended at all costs. The morning that Henrietta’s new Chrysler car turned through the stone gateposts at the bottom of the hill, the old lady not only had herself and her husband thoroughly packed up, she had them fully dressed for their journey, their hats on their heads, and, with the door to the house already stoutly locked, they were seated side by side on the porch swing—rigid as two pieces of graveyard statuary. As the car pulled up the hill, turning cautiously between the scrub pines and the cedar trees, Edmund Harper saw Cousin Annie rise slowly, in one continuous, wraithlike movement, from her place in the swing. Once on her feet, she stood there still and erect as a sentinel. In the swing, which until now had remained motionless, Cousin Johnny permitted himself a quick, little solo flight, so short and tentative that he must barely have touched his toe to the porch floor. Edmund interpreted this motion a
s a favorable sign. But then, almost immediately, he saw the old lady’s hand go out to one of the swing’s chains. The mere touch of her gloved hand was enough to halt the swing, but for several moments she kept her hand there on the chain. And the figures of the two old people, thus arranged, made a kind of tableau vivant, which Edmund was to carry in his mind throughout the visit.

  For twenty-five years, Edmund had been seeing Henrietta through such plans as the present one. Three country nieces had been presented to Nashville society from the Harper house. Countless nephews had stayed there while working their way through the university—or as far through it as it seemed practicable for them to try to go. And Henrietta scarcely ever returned from a visit back home without bringing news of some ailing connection who needed to see a Nashville specialist, needed a place to stay while seeing the specialist, needed a place to stay while convalescing from the inevitable operation. The worst of all this, for Edmund, was not what he was called upon to do during these visitations but what he was called upon to feel, and the moral support he was expected to give Henrietta. For something nearly always went wrong. Two of the three nieces had eloped with worthless louts from back home before their seasons in Nashville were half over. Most of the countless nephews had taken to a wild life, for which their parents tended to blame the influence of the Harper household more than that of university and fraternity life. Worse still, the convalescents always outstayed their welcome, and Edmund had to support Henrietta in taking a firm hand when it was time for each poor old creature to return to his or her nearest of kin in the country.

  In a sense, though, these larger projects of Henrietta’s had been less trying for Edmund than the smaller ones—the ones that she had gone in for in recent years. She had turned more and more to brightening the lives of people like Cousin Johnny and Cousin Annie, people whose lives didn’t seem absolutely to require her touch. It was three and four day visits from the likes of Cousin Johnny and Cousin Annie that Edmund found it hardest to adjust to—visits from people not really too far removed from his own generation. He found a part of himself always reaching out and wanting to communicate with them and another part forever holding back, as though afraid of what would be communicated. And the same seemed to be true for the guests themselves, particularly for the men.

  Cousin Johnny Kincaid was not, of course, a real contemporary of Edmund Harper’s. There was a twelve-year difference in their ages. Edmund was fifty-eight, and Cousin Johnny was seventy. It was a delicate difference. A certain respect was due the older man, but it had to be manifested in a way that would not offend him and make him feel that he was an old man and that Edmund was not. On the second day of the visit, when the old couple’s silence had already become pretty irksome to her, Henrietta telephoned Edmund at his office and said that she had a simple suggestion to make. At breakfast she had noticed that Cousin Johnny seemed to wince every time Edmund addressed him as “Cousin” Johnny. She thought he might be sensitive about his age. She suggested that that night Edmund should try calling him just plain Johnny.

  Now, this was the kind of thing that was always coming up. It seemed that every year Henrietta had to dig deeper into the kin and deeper into the country to find suitable objects for her good works. The couples were invariably rather distant kin of his or hers, people Edmund had known all his life but not known very well. Either Edmund couldn’t remember what he had called them as a boy or he had literally never called them anything. But the problem had never come into such focus as it did now. On the telephone he didn’t dispute Henrietta’s point, though it was inconceivable to him that Cousin Johnny had ever in his seventy years winced over a small matter of personal vanity—if that’s what it was. Since, at the moment of the telephone call, Edmund’s law partner was with him in his office and since the firm’s most moneyed and currently most troubled client was also there, Edmund said only, “I’ll see what I can do about it tonight.” And he wrote the word “Johnny” on the pad of paper in front of him.

  “I can tell from your voice that you’re terribly busy,” Henrietta said apologetically.

  “No, not particularly,” Edmund said.

  “I probably shouldn’t have called about something so—”

  “Oh, nonsense!” Edmund laughed. And he wound up the conversation in hearty tones meant to convince everybody in earshot of his imperturbability.

  But it was a serious matter, of course. And when he put down the telephone he still sat for a moment staring rather intently at the instrument. As a matter of fact, he was trying to think the problem through right then and there. It was his habit of mind, as a good trial lawyer, to think any question through and find a positive answer to it as soon as it came up. It wasn’t the truth of Henrietta’s observation he was debating; he had long since accepted her contention that she was “more sensitive to people” than he was, and so he had to assume that she was right about something like this. Nor was it a question of his willingness to do what she asked of him. It was a simple matter of whether or not he could bring himself to call Cousin Johnny Kincaid just plain “Johnny.” Then in a flash he saw he could. He could because—but he didn’t go into that at the time. The immediate question was answered, and he was free now to return to his client’s urgent affairs.

  It wasn’t till several hours later that he let himself think again about this silly piece of business that Henrietta had cooked up. He was driving home from work in his hardtop convertible, and the moment he opened the subject with himself, his mind took him back to the previous day. They were making the return trip from the country, with Cousin Annie and Cousin Johnny in the car. It was a seventy-five-mile drive back into Nashville; they had to pass through sections of three counties. Since they were in Henrietta’s car, she was doing the driving, and she was providing most of the conversation, too. Cousin Annie, wearing a plain black coat and an even plainer black hat, was in the front seat beside Henrietta. In the back seat of the big car the two long-legged men sat in opposite corners, each with one leg crossed stiffly over the other. They had traveled some twelve or fifteen miles when something made Edmund glance down at Cousin Johnny’s foot. He found himself observing with great interest the high-topped shoe, the lisle sock held up by an elastic supporter, and, since it was still early April, the long underwear showing above the sock where the old man’s trouser leg was pulled up.

  Somehow to be thus reminded that there were still men who dressed in the old style was unaccountably pleasant to Edmund. At the same time it saddened him, too. For here was the kind of old man that he had once upon a time supposed he would himself someday become. And now he knew, of course, he never would. It seemed like being denied an experience without which life wouldn’t be complete. It seemed almost the same as discovering that no matter how long he lived he would never be an old man. For how could you really be old and have it mean anything if you lived in a world where you weren’t expected to dress and behave in a special way, in a world where you went on dressing and trying to behave like a young man or at least a middle-aged man till the very end? It was bad enough to be childless and therefore grandchildless, as he and Henrietta of course were, without also being denied any prospect of ever feeling or being treated like a grandfather, something which Cousin Johnny, also childless and grandchildless, must for a long time now have felt and been treated like. Edmund found the subject absorbing.

  The foot gave an involuntary little kick, and Edmund realized that this was probably what had drawn his attention to it in the first place. The twitch was presently followed by another and then, at irregular intervals, by another and another. This was bound to interest a mind like Edmund’s, especially in its present mood. With his lawyer’s eye he soon made out that the kicks occurred always when the car was passing a field where cattle grazed. He wasn’t surprised when Cousin Johnny finally came right out with it: “Seems like the livestock gets fatter every mile we pull in towards Nashville.” But as soon as he had said this the old man’s eyes narrowed and he bit his lower li
p with such vehemence that it was plain he wished it was his tongue he was biting. His utterance had been as involuntary as any of those kicks his foot was giving.

  It was as if Fate and Cousin Annie had been waiting together for such a slip from him. The car had just left a fine stretch of low ground where he had seen the herd that brought forth his comment. Now the car was climbing a long, wooded hill, and in a little clearing near the summit Cousin Annie spied a herd of bunched-up, scrawny, and altogether sorry-looking milk cows. For the only time during the long trip, she turned around and showed her face to the two men in the back seat. And it was only the profile of her face, at that. She merely turned and stared out the window, on Cousin Johnny’s side, at those cows in the clearing.

  “Yes, but—” Cousin Johnny began, exactly as though the old lady had spoken. And then, Cousin Annie having already turned her back to him again, he broke off. That was the whole of the interchange between them. When Cousin Johnny spoke again, which was surprisingly soon, Edmund felt his words had no reference to what had passed between him and Cousin Annie. He said directly to Edmund, “I guess a fellow who’s been concerned with cattle as long as I have won’t ever see much out a car window but cows, no matter where he goes.”

  It was some kind of an apology. An apology for what? For a certain boorishness he felt he had been guilty of? An apology for his own narrow interest in life. Or was it, rather, an indication of the old man’s awareness of the figure he must be cutting with Edmund?

  Edmund’s reply to the outburst and the apology was a ten-minute discourse on the history of stock farming in Middle Tennessee. Most of what he said came out of some research he had had one of the young men in his office do for a case he had tried a few years back. He wasn’t showing off. He was honestly trying to reassure Cousin Johnny and to draw him out, because already Edmund’s interest in this man and his desire to win his confidence and to find a common ground on which they could meet was considerable. But the discourse on cattle farming did not produce a single remark from Cousin Johnny.