Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  A long silence followed. Then there was a period of give-and-take between Henrietta and Cousin Annie about the illnesses and deaths of various relatives. After that, there was more silence. Cousin Johnny’s lips seemed to have been permanently sealed. But in the last miles before Nashville, his caution must have been lulled by Henrietta’s fresh chatter about the Nashville sights they would be seeing in the days just ahead. When a colossal city limits sign suddenly hove into view at the roadside, Cousin Johnny’s mouth dropped open. “Why,” he said. “It’s a funny thing. When I was just married and was still just a young fellow, I almost came here to work.” It was as if until then he hadn’t known, or hadn’t believed, where it was they were taking him. “In a shoe factory, it was. But my wife and I decided against it. I was to start at the bottom and maybe later go on the road for them.”

  How different the whole visit might have been if Cousin Johnny had not said that. Because, after that, Edmund Harper would have consented to almost any scheme of Henrietta’s to promote understanding between him and his house guest. Why, what wonderful things mightn’t they say to each other if only they could talk together man to man! In a flight of fancy that was utterly novel to him, Edmund visualized Cousin Johnny as he would have appeared today had he taken that job at the shoe factory. He saw him now as president of the shoe company after years of working up from the bottom, and saw himself as a country lawyer in Nashville on a visit with his rich relatives. Why, it was Maud Muller twice reversed! Moreover, that client Edmund was going to see in his office tomorrow morning and who had been in his office nearly every day for the past two weeks, that richest and currently most troubled of the firm’s clients, was none other than the president of a shoe company, probably the very shoe company that Cousin Johnny would have gone to work for . . . That was precisely how Cousin Johnny might have turned out. And to think it was only a difference of seventy-five miles.

  Cousin Johnny’s response to being called just plain “Johnny” was, to say the least, disconcerting. He did exactly what Henrietta said he had done when Edmund called him “Cousin Johnny.” He winced. He drew in his chin—almost imperceptibly, though not quite—batted his eyes, and gave his head a quick little shake. And then, as Edmund hurried on to finish the long sentence which he had dropped his “Johnny” in the midst of, Cousin Johnny gazed past Edmund into a fire the houseboy had just now lit in the fireplace. Plainly he was trying to decide how he liked the sound of it—the sound of his Christian name on the lips of this man, this strange kind of man who could come in from work at four-thirty in the afternoon, disappear above stairs to change from a dark double-breasted suit to a plaid jacket and gray trousers, and then reappear and settle down to a long evening, without ever mentioning the work that had kept him all day.

  Edmund had carefully waited, before springing that “Johnny” on the old man, till a moment when Henrietta and Cousin Annie were well on the other side of the living room. Afterward, he realized that Henrietta had been conspiring with him without his knowing it. She had lured Cousin Annie over there beyond the piano to see a scrapbook that she kept in the piano bench for just such moments. During the hour since Edmund came in the house, she hadn’t mentioned the subject of their telephone conversation. But she knew well enough that he was going to follow her suggestion. And he knew what her attitude would be by now; they were in this together, and she wanted to make his part as easy for him as possible—and as interesting. One quick glance told him that however much he had tried to slur his articulation of the name, Henrietta had heard it. As for Cousin Annie, whose back was toward him, he could not at the moment tell whether or not she heard. Probably he could not have told if he had had a clear view of her face. And, for that matter, the incident was to pass without his knowing what conclusion Cousin Johnny had reached—whether he did or didn’t like the sound of it.

  They went into dinner at six o’clock. At first the table talk was livelier than it had been the previous night. Cousin Annie, right away, spoke a number of complete sentences which were not dragged out of her by direct questions. She spoke with enthusiasm of the sights they had taken in that day: the Parthenon, the capitol building, old Fort Nashboro. There was, in fact, every indication that matters had taken a real turn for the better. Edmund found himself wondering if Cousin Annie weren’t going to turn out to be like all the other country ladies who had come here in recent years—vain, garrulous, and utterly susceptible to the luxuries of Henrietta’s commodious, well-staffed, elegantly appointed house. The bright look on Henrietta’s face at the opposite end of the table informed him that she was thinking the same thing. And then, as though conscious of just how far into the woods she had led them, Cousin Annie Kincaid began quietly closing in.

  “You mustn’t think,” she said, “that Mr. Kincaid and I can’t dine at whatever your accustomed dinner hour is.” This was very much in her usual vein—making known her awareness that they were dining earlier than was normal for the Harpers. Since the houseboy was removing the soup bowls at the time, it might have been supposed that what she said was meant for his ears and that she had phrased it with that in mind. But the old lady wasn’t long in finding another occasion to refer to Cousin Johnny as “Mr. Kincaid.” She did it a third and fourth time, even. Each time it was as if she feared they hadn’t understood her before. Finally, though, she made it absolutely clear. During the meat course, while everyone except Cousin Johnny was working away at the roast lamb and baked potatoes, she drove the point home to her own satisfaction. “It isn’t that Mr. Kincaid doesn’t like roast lamb,” she said, addressing herself to Edmund and speaking in the most old-fashioned country-genteel voice that Edmund had heard since he was a boy at home. “It isn’t that he doesn’t like roast lamb,” she repeated. “It’s that he dined alone with ladies at noon and so had to eat the greater share of an uncommonly fine cut of sirloin steak. He isn’t, you understand, used to eating a great deal of meat.” Now she turned to Henrietta. “He seldom eats any meat at all for supper . . .” Edmund, remembering the other country ladies who had sat where Cousin Annie now sat, supposed that she would continue endlessly on this fascinating subject. But once she saw that she had the attention of both host and hostess, she suddenly turned to Cousin Johnny and said genially, “You seldom eat any meat at all for supper, do you, Mr. Kincaid?” It was the voice of a woman from an earlier generation than the Harpers’, addressing her husband with the respect due a husband. How could anyone call him just plain Johnny after that?

  The meat course was finished in almost total silence, but Edmund had two things to think about. After putting her question to Cousin Johnny, Cousin Annie had turned a triumphant gaze on Henrietta, indicating that she recognized who her real adversary was. That was one thing. The other thing was Cousin Johnny’s response to being addressed as Mr. Kincaid. There was but one way to describe it. He winced. And there was but one conclusion that Edmund could draw: the poor fellow had lived so long in isolation that he would always wince when singled out in company and addressed directly by any name whatever.

  Cousin Annie and Cousin Johnny retired within less than thirty minutes after dinner. As soon as they were safely upstairs, Edmund expected Henrietta to launch into Cousin Annie’s performance. She did nothing of the kind. While he was setting up the card table and fetching the cards for a game of double solitaire, she turned on the television set and stood switching aimlessly from one channel to another—a practice she often criticized him for. She seemed to be avoiding conversation. Once they were seated at the table with the cards laid out and the television playing a favorite Western, Edmund said cozily, “They disapprove of cards, and they detest TV.” These were two points that Cousin Annie had made clear the first night.

  “I think they’re awfully sweet, all the same,” Henrietta said gently, smiling a little, and keeping her eyes on her cards.

  “Oh, I like them,” Edmund said defensively. “Everything they do or say takes me back forty years.”

  “They have real
character.”

  “Yes,” Edmund agreed. “It was pretty marvelous the way she let me have it at the table. She fairly rubbed my nose in it.”

  Henrietta looked up at him for the first time. “You mean—?”

  “I mean the name business, of course. What else?”

  “I don’t know about that. I suppose she always calls him Mr. Kincaid.”

  “Well, what else did you think I meant?”

  “Didn’t you understand what she was saying? Of course I may be wrong.”

  “What on earth?”

  “I’m afraid she was offended because you left Cousin Johnny to have lunch ‘alone’—with the ladies. What else could you make of her emphasis?”

  “She meant I should have come home to lunch today?”

  “I don’t know, darling. Maybe not.”

  “But you think I might come home tomorrow? Or take you all out somewhere?”

  She smiled at him appreciatively. “Or better still,” she offered, “take Cousin Johnny to lunch with some men downtown. I wonder if he wouldn’t like that?”

  “But would Cousin Annie let him?”

  Henrietta leaned across the table and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “We could see,” she said.

  Edmund was silent. “Well, we’ll see about it,” he said finally, not promising anything but knowing in his heart that everything was already promised.

  At the breakfast table next morning, Edmund sat admiring the graceful curve of Henrietta’s wrist as she poured coffee from the silver urn into his cup. He had asked for this third cup mostly for the sake of admiring again the way she lifted the heavy urn and then let the weight of it pull her wrist over in that pretty arc. And the ruffles on the collar of Henrietta’s breakfast gown seemed particularly becoming to her, and Edmund admired the soft arrangement of her hair and the extraordinary freshness of her complexion. She really looked incredibly young. She was a beautiful woman in every sense, and nothing about her this morning was more beautiful than the way she had been so right about Cousin Annie. Cousin Annie and Cousin Johnny had already finished their breakfast, and the old lady had gone back upstairs with her husband to prepare him for his morning at the office with Edmund and his noonday luncheon at the Hermitage Club. Edmund was now waiting for Cousin Johnny to come down in his “other suit” and “good tie.”

  He wouldn’t have thought it possible for it to turn out this way. He was convinced all over again of how much more sensitive to people Henrietta was than he was. And he was so grateful to her. No sooner had he issued the invitation to Cousin Johnny than Cousin Annie became positively affable. And at once Cousin Johnny had begun nodding his head in agreement. Edmund noticed also that the old man began pulling rather strenuously at his lower lip, but all such lip pullings and winces and twitches Edmund was now willing to lump together as meaningless nervous habits. He wasn’t at all sure he wouldn’t end by having lunch alone with Cousin Johnny in a booth at Jackson’s Stable, where they could talk without interruption.

  And what a relief it was, anyway, that the thing was settled one way or the other. He had spent his last hour in bed this morning tossing about and wishing that he didn’t have to raise the question and yet knowing that he wanted to. Long before the cook came in to fix breakfast, he had heard the old couple stirring in the guest room. It had been this way the day before, too. The monotonous buzz of the two old people’s lowered voices seemed to penetrate the walls of the house in a way that no ordinary speech would have done. At that hour they seemed to feel that they must speak in the voice that one normally uses only when there is someone dead in the house or when something has gone awfully wrong. They were hard of hearing, of course, and believed they were whispering! Edmund had to smile at the thought of how carefully they concealed the fact of their deafness in company. At any rate, he woke to the drone of these old country people’s voices. And with Cousin Johnny so much on his mind, he couldn’t go back to sleep again. He knew that Henrietta was awake, too, and after a while he felt her hand on his shoulder, and he turned his head on the pillow and looked at her. “It’s awful to have to lie here quietly like this, knowing that they’re hungry,” she whispered. There was very little light in the room but he could see that while she spoke she lay perfectly relaxed, with her eyes closed. “I’d give anything if there were some way they could go on and have their breakfast,” she continued, still in a whisper. “Yet to get up and offer to fix it myself, or even to suggest they fix it for themselves, would only make them more uncomfortable, considering how they are . . . What do you think?”

  “I just don’t know,” Edmund said, trying to sound less awake than he was.

  Finally at seven o’clock they heard Cousin Johnny creep down the steps to fetch the morning Tennessean and then creep back up to the guest room again. (He wouldn’t for the world have made so free as to sit down in the living room to read the morning paper—not without being expressly asked. It was a wonder Cousin Annie would let him go down and get the paper at all.) Edmund knew, from yesterday, that from this point on the buzz of voices would be only intermittent until the time should come for the first sounds of activity down in the kitchen. Then the buzz would begin again and remain constant until someone knocked on the guest-room door and announced breakfast. And that was the way it happened. Everything went just the way he knew it would until they were all four seated at the breakfast table and he had popped the question to Cousin Johnny. From then on everything was different.

  Cousin Johnny had gone up to put on his other suit and his good tie, and Cousin Annie had gone with him. Presently Edmund, thinking he heard Cousin Johnny coming down the stairs, rose from the table and went round and kissed Henrietta’s cheek. He meant to join Cousin Johnny in the hall and to take him directly to the car, which had already been brought up to the side door. But when he went out into the big front hall, it was Cousin Annie he saw. She had already come three quarters of the way down the stairs, and when she saw Edmund she stopped there, with her hand on the railing. Even before she spoke, Edmund felt his heartbeat quicken. “It’s a pity you’ve had to wait around,” she said. “He’s so changeable.” Edmund said nothing. Cousin Annie descended the rest of the flight. At the foot of the stairs she said, “He had already changed to his good clothes. But he doesn’t, after all, want to miss the sights Henrietta and I will be seeing. He’s getting back into his other things now.”

  Henrietta, hearing Cousin Annie’s voice, had come to the dining-room door. “Cousin Johnny’s all right, isn’t he?” she asked.

  “Of course he’s all right,” said the old lady with a shade of resentment in her voice. “It’s that he doesn’t want to miss that Presbyterian church or Bellemeade Plantation.” Then she made her way into the dining room where she had left her coffee to cool.

  Edmund went off in the other direction, making his way across the hall and into the dark corridor that led to the side entrance. He knew that Henrietta was following him, but he couldn’t trust himself to discuss the situation. He hoped to reach the outside door before she caught up with him and merely to wave to her from the car. But he had forgotten his hat and coat. When he was at the entry door he heard a coat hanger drop on the floor of the cloak closet, which opened off the corridor, and he knew that Henrietta was fetching his things for him. He had to wait there and submit to her helping him on with his coat. Still he would have left without saying anything had she not at the last minute put her hand on his arm and said, “Darling, you mustn’t mind.”

  “I think I really hate that woman,” he said.

  “Oh, Edmund,” Henrietta whispered, “it may really have been Cousin Johnny’s decision. And what difference does it make? Why else do we have them here except to let them do whatever they will enjoy most?”

  “Yes, why do we?” he said angrily.

  Henrietta removed her hand from his arm and stepped back, away from him. With her eyes lowered she said, “We’ve been over that.” Then she looked up at him accusingly: he wasn’t seeing her
through.

  They had been over it, certainly, some two or three years before this. And he had thought, as she had, that he would never ask this question again. As he raced along the corridor, he had known he would ask it if he let her overtake him. That’s why he had made such a dash for the car. He might have reached into the closet and grabbed his hat—to hell with the coat!—but he hadn’t had his wits about him. And for that you always had to pay.

  Finally, though, he kissed Henrietta goodbye again, and he waved to her from the car.

  All the way to town this morning, he went over and over the foolish business. It had never been so complicated before. She had always managed to involve him in her good works among the relatives—having discovered his weakness there, she had abandoned most of her other good works—but this time he was involved in a way or in a sense that Henrietta didn’t dream of. Or maybe she did. He shouldn’t underestimate her. Was it really only a difference in degree this time? In some degree he was always affected by these country visitors as though it were something more than a visit from relatives. With them he had often felt there ought to be more to say to each other than there ever seemed to be. But never about anyone, before Cousin Johnny, had he felt: Here is such a person as I might have been, and I am such a one as he might have been.

  Now he could not resist going back to what he considered the real beginning. It was Henrietta who had urged him to leave Ewingsburg, the county seat where they had grown up and where he first practiced law. He hadn’t wanted to leave and had argued against it, and, despite the fine opportunities offered him by firms in Nashville, she hadn’t begun urging him to go until they had been married for five years and had learned pretty definitely that there would never be any children. When he used to come home for lunch in Ewingsburg and would be lingering over his second cup of coffee, it got so he would catch Henrietta sometimes stealing furtive glances at him. She suspected him of being bored with his life. And yet when he talked of buying up more farm land and joining Uncle Alex and Uncle Nat in their lespedeza venture—aiming for the seed market—Henrietta thought he would be frittering away his life. He ought to be in a big place, she told him, where he could have a real career and be fully occupied.