Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  And so they had gone to Nashville. And Edmund was fully occupied. And perhaps that was the trouble. Who could say . . . Not that Henrietta wasn’t occupied, too. She was an enthusiastic joiner of clubs and circles and committees. Why not? What better way of getting to know people? Edmund was entirely sympathetic. But she was never satisfied until she had tried to draw Edmund into each activity, and, since she always failed, she was seldom satisfied with the activity afterward. In the early days, she was always finding something new to interest her—and him. Edmund wondered if there would have been a Nashville for the likes of Cousin Johnny and Cousin Annie to see if Henrietta hadn’t been so active in the work of preserving landmarks and setting up monuments. (Even his refusal to help iron out the inevitable legal snarls of that work had never completely destroyed her interest in it. Recently she had had a hand in preserving the First Presbyterian Church from the vandals who wanted to pull it down.) For a time she took a great interest in the home for delinquent girls. Her reports of the individual cases had interested him hugely, but not enough to make him consent to join her as a board member. He came very near to being drawn into her juvenile court work, but somehow he even escaped involvement there.

  Then, after a number of years, she began bringing in those nieces for the debutante season. Two of the girls were from his side of the family, one from hers. But that didn’t matter. They were all of them kinfolks from out home—the nieces, the nephews, the invalids, and finally, after so many years, the nearly contemporary old couples. They were his responsibility, his involvement as much as hers. There was no getting around it—not in Edmund’s mind. And so they came, and they came, and they came. Finally, he began to wonder if he and Henrietta weren’t more alike than he had ever imagined. It occurred to him that she was really fonder of these visitors and of the people she went out to the country to “see about” than she was of the friends she had gone to such lengths to make in Nashville.

  One day he spoke to her about it. And he suggested that perhaps they should think of moving back to Ewingsburg when the time came for him to retire from his practice. Henrietta had laughed at the idea. Why, she asked him, should they plan to bury themselves alive in their old age?

  Well, then, he had another idea. (He was only trying to please her, wasn’t he?) Why didn’t they invite one of her favorites from among their not too affluent relatives, or maybe two of her favorites—“It’s the kind of thing people used often to do,” he said—to come and live with them on a permanent basis? Wouldn’t that give her an even deeper satisfaction than doing only a little for this one and that one? (He didn’t say: And then the house would always seem itself.) But in reply Henrietta expressed an astonishment just short of outrage. How could he imagine that this would be the case!

  “But why not?” Edmund asked impatiently.

  Henrietta shook her head bitterly. To think that he understood so little about what her life was like, she said. And then for the first time in years she mentioned her disappointment at not being able to have children. Edmund was confused. Could there possibly be any connection? Was she merely trying to play on his sympathy? He felt his cheeks growing warm, and could tell from the expression in her eyes that she saw his color rising. But looking deeper into her eyes he saw that she, too, was utterly confused. If there was any connection, then she was as confused about it as he was. She knew no better than he what it meant or why she had dragged it in. And he was sure that, whatever it was, they would never understand it now and that, having discovered it so late, they need not do so. Their course together was set, and he had no intention of trying to change it. But he felt a renewed interest in seeing to what strange places it might yet bring them.

  Before he reached his office that second morning of the visit, he saw how salutary it had been for him to go over the whole story in his mind again. It was going to allow him to pass the remainder of the visit in comparative equanimity. From then on, it was as if he was an impartial witness to the contest between Henrietta and Cousin Annie. If, afterward, he had had to testify in court and explain why he did not intervene between them, he would have had to say that he thought it only a kind of game they were playing, and that he had had no idea of how deadly serious they were.

  There was no telephone call from Henrietta that day. Edmund tried to reach her just after noon but learned from the maid that she and “the company” hadn’t been at home for lunch. The maid happened to know the restaurant out on Hillsboro Pike where they had gone and happened to have the telephone number handy. Edmund could not help smiling as he jotted down the number. Henrietta knew he would be expecting a call from her, and knew that if it didn’t come he would call—not because he would be afraid she was pouting or because he would feel a need to apologize. She was not a woman who pouted, and she always knew how sorry he was when they had had any kind of tiff. She was wonderful, really. He would find her tonight in the best of spirits. There would be no reference made to their exchange at the side door this morning. It was past, and she had already forgotten it. She was a wonderful woman, and nothing about her was more wonderful than her serenity and the way she was certain to have another suggestion to make to him today or tonight. The only trouble was that he knew what this suggestion would be, and it was important that he give her the opportunity of making it as soon as possible. He telephoned the restaurant, but the hostess said that Mrs. Harper and her party had just left.

  Not infrequently Edmund stayed home from his office for one day of a visit that wasn’t going too well. It was usually the last day. But his staying was by no means a pattern. He could never be certain it was the thing Henrietta wanted, and he always waited for her suggestion. Tomorrow would be the last day for Cousin Johnny and Cousin Annie, and though this was a case in which Henrietta was almost sure to suggest it, it wasn’t going to be possible for him to stay. When he came in the house that night, Henrietta was still upstairs dressing. He considered this a stroke of good luck, because it would give her the opportunity he had in mind. Perhaps even it was for this that she happened still to be up there.

  Henrietta’s dressing for dinner, like Edmund’s, consisted not of getting into more formal attire but of putting on something more comfortable and something more youthful than she ever wore away from home. When he came into her room, she was fresh from her bath, still moving about the room in her knee-length slip and her high-heeled mules. And right away she was bubbling with talk about the day’s events, proving that she bore him no grudge, even saying the kind of things about Cousin Johnny and Cousin Annie that she had refused to say last night. “Once in the car when we were on our way out to Traveler’s Rest—they were enchanted by Traveler’s Rest and didn’t care for Bellemeade or even the Hermitage—once I said—it was when we were talking about people from Ewings­burg who live here (and whom Cousin Annie has refused to let entertain them or even to see)—I said Bob Coppinger has gotten to look exactly like Laurence Olivier. ‘Like who?’ said Cousin Johnny from the back seat. Cousin Annie was sitting in the front seat with me and she turned around and said to him with the utmost contempt for my allusion, ‘Some moving picture star, I think, Mr. Kincaid.’ (Yes, she has continued to call him Mr. Kincaid all day today.) It was as if the old dear had read my mind. I had been thinking that even though she disapproves so of TV, we might be able to get them out to see a Western movie tonight—something real old-fashioned, like a movie. But after her remark I knew there was no chance, and that it had been silly of me to think there might be. I even marvel that she knows who Olivier is. But she knows things. She knows things you’d never in the world suppose she did. Let me tell you— Here, give me a hand with these buttons, won’t you?”

  While she talked she had gone to her closet and pulled out the dress she was going to wear. Edmund was marveling more at the pretty print of the dress material and at the mysterious row of buttons down the back than at Cousin Annie Kincaid’s knowledge of movie stars. He realized that the buttons seemed mysterious because they were at once so
unnecessary, so numerous and so large—each the size of a silver dollar—and yet were so carefully camouflaged, being covered with the same print the dress was made of. He found it most absorbing, and intriguing, and endearing. And suddenly he recognized the similarity of the whole fashioning of this dress to that of dresses Henrietta had worn when he was courting her. As he stood behind her, buttoning those buttons that began at the very low waistline and continued up to the rounded neckline, he could not resist, midway, leaning forward and kissing her on the back of her neck. Henrietta began to give him the day’s itinerary: the First Presbyterian Church, the plantation houses of Andrew Jackson, John Overton, the Harding family.

  “Every place we went,” she said, “I had a time making them get out and see the very thing they had come to see. But what I was going to tell you was that when we were on our way downtown to see the church, Cousin Annie asked me to point out the James K. Polk Apartments and Vaux Hall! Could you have imagined she would have heard of either or remembered the names? When I told her both buildings had been torn down, she only said, ‘I’m not surprised.’ . . . What I think is that those were places where friends of hers who came to Nashville a million years ago must have had apartments . . . We might have lived there ourselves if we had come ten or fifteen years before we did. Do you remember when the Braxtons lived there—at Vaux Hall?”

  But now it was time for Edmund to rush off into his room and dress. “Well, do make it snappy, dear,” Henrietta said. “Remember I’ve had them all day. You must have noticed I’m quite hoarse from doing all the talking.”

  At dinner, Edmund made a special point of carrying his full share of the conversation. Cousin Johnny, on the other hand, was completely silent tonight and ate absolutely nothing. Cousin Annie was kept busy eating two portions of everything so that nothing would be wasted on their account. It was the first time Cousin Annie had done this, but then it was the first time Cousin Johnny had gone without food altogether. Edmund wondered silently if the old man wasn’t hungry and if they couldn’t find him something in the kitchen he could eat. Yet he couldn’t ask. He began speculating on how many other discomforts the old man might have suffered in the past two days. He noticed that he had come to the table tonight without his vest. And at some moment last night he had noticed how the old man’s clothes seemed to hang on him and how he seemed thinner than when he first arrived. The answer was that he had left off his long underwear. It was the central heat in the house! They weren’t used to it. And now Edmund recalled the scene in the living room when he came into the house this afternoon. Having been detained at the office to make last-minute revisions of his brief for the shoe company case, Edmund had come home a little later than usual, but the houseboy was lighting the log fire in the living room at the usual hour. Edmund had, at the time, been scarcely conscious of one detail in the scene, but subconsciously he had made a note of it. At the moment of his entrance, the houseboy was on his knees fanning the flames of the fire, and across the room, seated beside Cousin Johnny and with him watching silently the houseboy’s efforts, Cousin Annie was fanning herself with a little picture postcard of the Hermitage.

  Until these details began to pile up in his mind, at the dinner table, Edmund had thought of Cousin Annie as waging a merely defensive war against Henrietta. Now he saw it wasn’t so. She had had the offensive from the beginning and she was winning battle after battle. Every discomfort that Cousin Johnny suffered in silence, every dish he did without, every custom he had to conform to that was “bad for him” was a victory over Henrietta, and gave the old lady the deeper satisfaction just because Henrietta might not be aware of it.

  But Edmund had no premonition of how far she might be prepared to go—or perhaps already had gone—until after dinner, when Cousin Johnny and Cousin Annie were going up the stairs together. They ascended very slowly, and Edmund realized that her footsteps were every bit as heavy as Cousin Johnny’s. He recalled having mistaken her for the old man on the stair this morning. Very likely it had been she, after all, who had come down to fetch the paper each morning. Was climbing the stairs perhaps bad for Cousin Johnny?—the stairs in this house and in all the landmarks he had been taken to see? And when he went upstairs this morning, had it really been that he couldn’t come back down and go with Edmund to the office? Suddenly Edmund could visualize the old fellow lying on his back in the bed, or even on the floor, before the old lady helped him onto the bed and made him comfortable and then came downstairs to say that he had changed his mind.

  When their guests had gone upstairs for the night and Edmund was setting up the card table in the living room, Henrietta still hadn’t mentioned tomorrow and the possibility of his staying at home. But after they had arranged their cards and had begun to play, the suggestion wasn’t long in coming. By now, however, his concern for Cousin Johnny had driven that problem out of Edmund’s mind, and, because of this, his reply to Henrietta was more abrupt than it might otherwise have been.

  “There’s one thing I do hope,” she had said with considerable force, “and that is that you are going to be able to stay at home tomorrow.”

  “I can’t possibly.” That was all he said. For a minute they sat looking at each other across the card table.

  “But I’ve told them you’d be here,” she said.

  “I wish you had asked me earlier,” he said, in a softer tone now.

  Her voice was still full of confidence. “I had counted on it,” she said. “And they have gone up to bed thinking you’ll be here.”

  “Tomorrow is Friday,” he said, as if speaking to a child. “I’ll have to be in court all day. It’s the shoe company case. There’s no chance.”

  “Oh,” said Henrietta. She knew that this meant there really was no chance.

  “I’m truly sorry, Henrietta,” he said. “Fortunately, there will be no court on Saturday. I’ll be able to go with you to take them home. But there’s nothing I can do about tomorrow.”

  “Of course there’s not. I understand that,” she said, smiling at him. She was already recovering from her disappointment. Quietly they began, playing out their game of cards. During the rest of the time they sat there, it seemed to Edmund that Henrietta played her cards as though she were performing some magic that was going to change everything—in her favor. And he couldn’t bring himself to tell her about the sudden insight he had had at the dinner table, or about the ridiculous but genuine and quite black apprehension that he wasn’t able to rid himself of.

  At some hour in the night he heard the old woman’s voice distinctly. He tried to think he had only dreamed it and that some other noise had waked him. But then he heard her again and heard Cousin Johnny. The familiar, funereal tones were unmistakable. He only managed to get back to sleep by assuring himself that it meant it must be nearly morning, by reminding himself that he had to have his sleep if he was to have his wits about him in court today.

  The next time he woke, he put on the light and looked at his watch. He was sleeping alone in his own room. The two previous nights he had been with Henrietta in her room, but tonight she hadn’t suggested it. His pocket watch was lying on his bedside table, with the gold chain coiled about it. It had been his father’s watch and had the circumference and the thickness of a doorknob. Before he fastened his eyes on the Roman numerals to which the filigreed hands pointed, he remembered noticing that Cousin Johnny’s watch, which the old man took out and wound before going up to bed each night, was almost identical with this one of his father’s. It occurred to him that Cousin Johnny’s would be resting now on the bedside table in the guest room with its chain coiled around it. This neat coiling of the chain about the watch was a habit Edmund had picked up from his father and one that his father had no doubt picked up from his own father. When finally Edmund focused his attention on the face of the watch, he found the very hour of the night itself alarming. It was half past three. From that moment, he didn’t hear Cousin Johnny’s voice again; it was only the old lady he heard. He was certain no
w that the old man was really very sick. He waited, sitting on the side of the bed with the light on. There were silences, broken always and only by Cousin Annie’s voice. At last he got up and switched off the light and felt his way through the bathroom into Henrietta’s room.

  “Do you suppose something is really wrong?” Henrietta said from her bed. He was hardly through the doorway, and the room was pitch dark. Something in the way she said it made him answer, “I suppose not.”

  “The light’s been on in their room for some time. You can see it on the garage roof. Do you think you might just go and make sure—or I could.”

  “What good would it do? It would only make matters worse, considering how they are.”

  “Well, what do you think?” she said, meaning, Then why are you here?

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Is it that case today?”

  “No, but I thought I might sleep better in here.” He was sitting on the side of her bed now. “Do you mind?” He didn’t know what he would do if she said, yes, she minded. He knew only that he couldn’t go back to his own room and bed before morning. He felt that it hadn’t, after all, been the voices that waked him, and that there had been a dream—the kind of dream that could never be remembered afterward.