Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  “Of course I don’t mind, silly,” she said. She sounded wide awake. “I’ve had a wonderfully funny thought,” she said as he lay down beside her. “You might just go to their door and tell Cousin Annie that you won’t be able to stay home today. Then maybe she would let him get some sleep.”

  “Can she be that awful?” Edmund said. “You don’t suppose it’s anything more than just that?”

  “I suppose not,” she answered, putting her arm around him. “You know what an evil influence you are on people.” The touch of her arm was all he had needed. Once again he believed it was the voices that had waked him, and remembered that he must have his wits about him tomorrow.

  At seven o’clock nobody went downstairs to fetch the paper. Edmund had left his watch in his room, but neighborhood noises and a distant whistle told him the time. He slept again, and next time he waked he knew it was the unnatural silence in the house that had waked him. He slipped out of bed and went into his room to dress. It was seven-thirty by his watch. He dressed hurriedly, but when he went to look in on Henrietta before going downstairs, he found her also fully dressed and standing with her hand on the knob to the hall door. She had put on lipstick but no other make-up. She looked pale and frightened. He crossed over to her and they went out into the hall together.

  The door to the guest room was standing open but the blinds were still drawn and the room was in complete darkness. Presently Cousin Annie appeared out of the darkness, wearing the black dress she had worn on the trip in from the country and clutching some object in her hand. Edmund and Henrietta moved quickly toward her. As they drew near, Edmund saw it was Cousin Johnny’s watch she held. When they stood before her in the doorway, Cousin Annie said, “He’s gone.”

  “Gone?” Edmund echoed, and he almost added, “Where?” But in time he remembered the euphemism. She spoke as though they had all been waiting together through the night for the old man to be released from his mortal pain.

  He felt Henrietta lean against him. He put his arms about her, and when she turned and hid her face on his shirtfront, he had to support her to keep her from crumbling to the floor.

  “You mustn’t,” said Cousin Annie. “I did everything anyone could have done. We had known for some time he hadn’t long.”

  Henrietta’s strength returned. She drew herself away from him and faced Cousin Annie. “But why—how could you let him come if—”

  Edmund felt himself blushing. Was his wife really so shameless?

  But the old lady seemed to think the question quite in order. She even completed the question for Henrietta. “If it was unwise for him? Because he wanted so much to come, to see what it was like here . . . Like all of us, he was foolish about some things.”

  The two women stood a moment looking at each other. Without being blind to the genuine grief in Cousin Annie’s countenance, Edmund detected the glint of victory in the last glance she gave Henrietta before turning back into the dark room.

  Poor Cousin Johnny, Edmund thought to himself . . . Now Henrietta was following Cousin Annie in there, and now he heard the old lady’s first sobs and knew that she had given way, as she had to, and was letting Henrietta see after her. The battle was over, really . . . But poor Cousin Johnny, he kept thinking. Poor old fellow . . . Presently Henrietta led Cousin Annie out into the hall again, and as the two women moved toward the door to Henrietta’s room, Henrietta gave him a look that recalled him to his senses and reminded him of his obligations. Already it was time for him to begin making the arrangements. He would be at home after all today. The court would grant a postponement under the circumstances. Cousin Johnny was gone, but he was still here to see Henrietta through and make the arrangements.

  For a moment Edmund stood there staring into the dead man’s room. The door should be shut, he supposed. And when he had done this, he would have to go and telephone a doctor. Cousin Annie didn’t realize you couldn’t die without a doctor nowadays. While he waited for the doctor to arrive, he would call an undertaker. No, he was being as bad as Cousin Annie. It wouldn’t do to call an undertaker before a doctor had been there. He stepped forward and placed his hand on the doorknob. And then, as though it was what he had intended all along, he went inside the room and closed the door behind him.

  He waited just inside the door till his eyes got used to the dark. Then he went over to the foot of the bed where she had the old man laid out. At last they were alone—he and Cousin Johnny. There was only just enough light for him to make out that she had him completely dressed, and with something that must be a handkerchief covering his face. No doubt he was wearing the very clothes—his other suit and good tie—that he would have worn to lunch at Jackson’s Stable. And would she have put him in his long underwear? Edmund speculated, not idly, and not, certainly, with humor. And the vest? And the lisle socks and the elastic supporters? Yes, she would have. That was how Cousin Johnny would be taken back to Ewingsburg for burial, was how he would be taken away from Edmund’s house where he had died. Suddenly, at the thought of it, Edmund was seized with a dreadful terror of their taking the old man away. Wasn’t there some way he could postpone it? But postponing it wouldn’t be enough. What if he should lock the door to the guest room and refuse to let them have the body! He had heard of cases in which grief had driven people to such madness, and surely his present anguish was grief—if not exactly grief for Cousin Johnny. What if he should refuse to let them have the old man’s body!

  He stood peering through the darkness at the white handkerchief over the old man’s face, the face whose features he already found it hard to remember distinctly. And he was wondering at his own simplicity—indulging in such a fantasy, giving way to such unnatural and morbid feelings! And at such a time. Soon Henrietta or Cousin Annie—or the two of them, even—might come and discover him there. That wasn’t likely, but soon he would have to go back to them and he must begin preparing himself for his return. He knew that the first step must be to begin thinking of Cousin Johnny more realistically, not as a part of himself that was being taken away forever but once again as a visitor from the country who had died in his guest room. And, all at once, it seemed to Edmund the most natural thing in the world for him to speak to his dead house guest.

  “Well, Cousin Johnny, you’re gone,” he said. That was all he said aloud. But, placing his two hands on the smooth footrail of the bed as though it were the familiar rail of a jury box, he went on silently: “What was it we were going to talk about, Cousin Johnny, in that talk of ours? Was it our wives and their wars within wars and what made them that way . . . We certainly ought to have got round to that. But it wasn’t our wives who divided us. It was somehow our both being from the country that did it. You had done one thing about being from the country and I had done another. You buried yourself alive on that farm of yours, I buried myself in my work here. But something in the life out there didn’t satisfy you the way it should. The country wasn’t itself any more. And something was wrong for me here. By ‘country’ we mean the old world, don’t we, Cousin Johnny—the old ways, the old life, where people had real grandfathers and real children, and where love was something that could endure the light of day—something real, not merely a hand one holds in the dark so that sleep will come. Our trouble was, Cousin Johnny, we were lost without our old realities. We couldn’t discover what it is people keep alive for without them. Surely there must be something. Other people seem to know some reason why it is better to be alive than dead this April morning. I will have to find it out. There must be something.”

  The Little Cousins

  TO THE annual Veiled Prophet’s Ball children were not cordially invited. High up in the balcony, along with servants and poor relations, they were tolerated. Their presence was even sometimes suffered in the lower tiers and, under certain circumstances, even down in the boxes. But, generally speaking, children were expected to enjoy the Prophet’s parade the night before and be content to go to bed without complaint on the night of the Ball. This was twent
y-five years ago, of course. There is no telling what the practices are out there in St. Louis now. Children have it much better everywhere nowadays. Perhaps they flock to the Veiled Prophet’s Ball by the hundred, and even go to the Statler Hotel for breakfast afterward.

  But I can’t help hoping they don’t. I hope they are denied something. Else what do they have that’s tangible to hold against the grown-ups? My sister and I were denied everything. She more than I, since a boy naturally didn’t want so much—or so much of what it was St. Louis seemed to offer us. Having less to complain of myself, however, I undertook to suffer a good many things for Corinna. And she suffered a few for me. We were motherless, and very close to each other at times.

  What I suffered for Corinna I suffered in silence. But the grand thing about Corinna was that she could always find the right words for my feelings as well as her own. The outrage I felt, for example, at our being always taken down to Sportsman’s Park to see the Browns play and never the Cardinals left me grimly inarticulate. But Corinna would say for me that it seemed “such an empty glory” to have box seats at the Browns’ games. “Any fool had rather sit in the bleachers and watch the Cardinals,” she said, “than have the very best box seats to see a Browns’ game.” She phrased things beautifully. At our house we had always to serve Dr Pep instead of Coca-Cola. Of this Corinna said, “It makes us seem so provincial.” But we both knew that with a father like ours we just had to endure these embarrassments. According to Corinna, Daddy was “blind to the disadvantage he put us at”—disadvantage, that is, with our friends at Mary Institute and Country Day. What’s more, she had divined at an early age what it was that blinded Daddy: It was always some friend or other of his who owned or manufactured the product imposed on us. We even had Bessie Calhoun because of one of his friends—Bessie, from Selma, Alabama, instead of some stylish, white foreign governess who might be teaching us French or German. “Except for Bessie,” Corinna said, “we would be bilingual, like the Altvaders and the Tomlinsons.”

  The year Corinna and I were finally taken to the Ball, the project was kept a secret from us until the last moment—or practically. I came in from school at five-thirty, and Corinna had got home two hours before that, as usual. At the side door, which Bessie made us use on all days but Sunday in order to save “her floors,” Corinna was waiting for me with narrow eyes and pursed lips. “You and I are going to the VP tonight,” she said, “but they couldn’t permit us the pleasures of anticipation. Isn’t that typical?” The news had been broken to her when she came in from school and told Bessie she was going down the block to play. Corinna was already twelve at this time, and though at school she would never deign to associate with girls in the lower grades, out of school she spent most of her time playing with the younger children in our block. The little girls adored her, and I used to watch her sometimes, mothering them and supervising their games. She never seemed happier than then, and she often spoke of the younger children as her “little cousins.” This, I suppose, was in fond allusion to all the tales we had listened to from Daddy, and from Bessie, too, about the horde of first, second, and third cousins they each had grown up among—Daddy in Kentucky, Bessie in Alabama. At any rate, when Bessie told her she had to stay in and do her homework that afternoon, Corinna wasn’t satisfied until she had wrung the reason out of her, and then, of course, she was indignant.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before, Bessie?” she said. “Two other girls in my class were lording it over everybody else today because they’re going.”

  “That’s it,” said Bessie. “I didn’t want you lording it over everybody you saw today. That’s not the way I’m bringing you up. And I didn’t want you being flighty about your lessons.”

  Corinna knew that Daddy must have told her not to tell us. Or she knew at least that Bessie had got his approval. Yet Bessie always pretended to do everything absolutely on her own authority. And this made life more difficult. This made us forget that she was merely someone hired to take charge of us. It made us try to reason with her about things, made us pretend to be sick sometimes in order to break down her resistance, made us nag at her continually for all kinds of privileges. Bessie’s utter disregard for what we considered justice and reason was something else that made us forget who she was, and she never showed any fear of our telling on her or going over her head. Her favorite answer to our “whys” was “Because I said so” or “Because I said to.” And if one of us gobbled up his dessert and begged for a share of the other’s, Bessie was as apt as not to make the other one share. She was illogical, and she was inconsistent. When we were disobedient, she would hand out terrible punishments—dessertless days and movieless weekends—but then sometimes she would forget, or weaken of her own accord at the last moment. You could not tell about her.

  There was her brutal frankness, too. Though she was as blind as Daddy to any need of ours to have our egos bolstered—such as by serving our friends the right drink—and as blind as he to our deep moral and intellectual failings—failings that we ourselves were aware of and often confessed to each other—still she never failed to notice the least sign of vanity in either of us. Corinna was beginning to worry about her looks, and when she asked Bessie whether she thought she would grow up to be as beautiful as a certain Mary Elizabeth Caswell, Bessie said, “Your legs are too thin. You’ll have to do a lot of filling out before you can talk about that.” I was proud of my drawing ability, and I tried to get Bessie to say she thought I might grow up to be an artist. “Do you like nature?” she said, and I had to admit what she already knew: Flowers and trees had little attraction for me. Bessie only shook her head and gave me a doubting look.

  Yet when I was sick in bed with mumps or measles she would often read my palm, and, among other glories, she saw that I would be a great musician. I objected that the singing teacher at school said I couldn’t even carry a tune. “What does he know about how you may change if you keep trying? I know how little teachers know.” It was when we were sick that we discovered Bessie’s real talents and saw how indulgent she could be when she had a mind to. This made us sick a good deal; and pretended illness was one of our moral failings that Bessie was blind to. I never knew her to doubt a headache or a stomachache or even “a funny feeling all over.” When we were sick, she played cards with us, told our fortunes, read to us.

  She read to us a lot even when we were well. She had taught school in Alabama before she came north and went into service, but it wasn’t the kind of stories we were used to in St. Louis schools that she read to us. She read “Unc’ Edinburg’s Drowndin’ ” and “No Haid Pawn,” and her favorites were the Post stories by Octavus Roy Cohen. When she read us those stories, she would sometimes throw back her head and laugh and slap her thigh the way she never did about anything else. We loved hearing her read, but we didn’t ourselves think the stories were so funny. “Never mind,” said Bessie. “You don’t have to think they’re funny.”

  In conversation Bessie had only two real subjects, and one of them was Mary Elizabeth Caswell. Mary Elizabeth was the bane of Corinna’s existence. Bessie had brought up Mary Elizabeth to the age of thirteen. When our mother died, Mr. Caswell had sent Bessie over to us—supposedly for only a few days. I was five at the time and Corinna was eight. Mr. Caswell came to our house on several occasions during those first days and had long conferences with Bessie; it was finally decided between them that she would stay with us. Probably Mr. Caswell felt that Daddy’s need was greater than his own. Though Mary Elizabeth was motherless, too, it was already known that Mr. Caswell was going to marry again within a few months. Besides, not only was Mary Elizabeth a big girl then, but her mother had been of an old family in the city and there was an abundance of aunts and other female relatives to guide her. And so we got Bessie, with the result that Corinna had to “spend her life,” as she said, listening to unfavorable comparisons of herself to Mary Elizabeth.

  Bessie’s other subject was her own family down in Alabama and, more particularl
y, her half sister, Lilly Belle Patton. Lilly Belle was a saint. Bessie assured us that Lilly Belle was nothing like her, had none of her bad temper and selfish ways, was always doing for others and asked nothing for herself. Lilly Belle was the finest-looking, the smartest, and the best-natured of all Bessie’s mama’s eleven children. Yet she hadn’t insisted on going through high school, the way Bessie had, and she hadn’t married. Bessie not only went through school and took to teaching afterward but the money she made teaching she spent foolishly—not on her mama, who was pretty greedy about money anyway, but on first one husband and then another. But Lilly Belle was content to stay at home and help Mama, who was certainly never much help to herself. Lilly Belle took in washing and looked after her little half brothers and sisters, of which Bessie was next to youngest, and even “adopted-like” two orphaned cousins. She was a hard church worker, a beautiful seamstress and laundress, she was the best cook in the whole town of Selma, she kept a garden that was the envy of everyone.

  Corinna and I never tired of hearing about Lilly Belle, but for Corinna the most interesting part always was Lilly Belle’s courtship. Lilly Belle never felt she could go off and marry while the younger children were still at home to be looked after, and by the time the younger ones were up and gone (“gone to the bad, most of them”) Mama was too old to leave at home alone. But Lilly Belle had a faithful suitor, who had been waiting for her through all the years. He was, in fact, still waiting, and Lilly Belle wasn’t even engaged to him. Sometimes Bessie had letters from a neighbor friend telling her she ought to make Lilly Belle have pity on Mr. Barker. It seems that on summer evenings he and Lilly Belle kept company sitting together on her front porch. Neighbors would hear their voices over there, and sometimes they would hear Mr. Barker break down and cry as he begged her “at least to get engaged” to him. But Lilly Belle knew what was right; she had taken a vow not even to get engaged while Mama lived. Sometimes, too, there would be a letter that Lilly Belle had asked the neighbor friend to write Bessie, warning her that Mama was “low sick.” Bessie always “reckoned” Mama was really going this time. And Corinna would be on tenterhooks about it for days. She would try to linger in the mornings till the postman came, and she would rush home from school in the afternoon to see if there was any news. “If Mama goes this time,” she would ask, “will Lilly Belle really get engaged to Mr. Barker?” And Bessie would reply, “Of course she will. She hasn’t kept him waiting for nothing.”