Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  The unfavorable comparisons that Bessie made between herself and Lilly Belle were much more severe than those she made between Corinna and Mary Elizabeth. Yet, quite naturally, Corinna was able to think of Lilly Belle as a heroine of pure romance, whereas she saw Mary Elizabeth as a “pampered, spoiled, stuck-up thing.” The worst of it was, Corinna was subject to wearing hand-me-downs from Mary Elizabeth. There was no need for it, of course, but Mr. Caswell and Daddy were that close. Or perhaps Bessie Calhoun was still that close to the Caswell family. The dresses would just appear in Corinna’s closet and be allowed to hang there for her to ignore until she could resist them no longer. Once she had taken them down and begun wearing them, they became her favorite dresses. She may have managed to forget who it was they had belonged to. Or, without admitting it to me and perhaps to herself, she may have remembered how lovely Mary Elizabeth had looked in them; because Corinna had never lacked opportunity for observing Mary Elizabeth Caswell firsthand. The older girl and Corinna were in the same school together until Corinna was ten. After that, Mary Elizabeth went off to finishing school for two years, but even so she was home for all the holidays, and she and her father and the stepmother would be at our house for meals or we would be at their house. Daddy, during these two years, had begun going about with a very stylish-looking young widow, who was a close friend of Mr. Caswell’s second wife. Corinna and I knew this lady then as Mrs. Richards. It was not to be long before she would become our stepmother—a fact that deserves mention only because it explains why our family and the Caswells were now thrown together still more than formerly.

  Bessie Calhoun had a clear recollection of every mark Mary Elizabeth ever received in the lower grades at Mary Institute. “Because of Mary Elizabeth,” said Corinna, “I have to live in mortal dread of not making the honor roll.” At an early age, Mary Elizabeth could cook and sew in a way that promised to rival the arts of Lilly Belle. This information cost Corinna many precious hours that might have been spent with her “little cousins.” And because Mary Elizabeth had had a little pansy garden of her own, Corinna was sent “grubbing in the earth” every spring. On the other hand, Mary Elizabeth was almost certainly not the reader that Corinna was, or not the reader of novels—the old best-sellers on the shelves of what had been our mother’s sitting room. One day Corinna inquired after Mary Elizabeth’s reading habits. Bessie didn’t answer right away—something unusual for her. “At your age that child read the Bible, honey.” Corinna opened her mouth in astonishment and then she closed it again without saying anything. This was one time when both she and I doubted Bessie’s veracity, but Corinna let it pass. There was a limit to what she would undertake. She never raised the question again.

  We knew perfectly well why we were being taken to the Veiled Prophet’s Ball. This was the year that Mary Elizabeth Caswell was going to be presented. As a matter of fact, Corinna had nagged Daddy about it one Sunday afternoon in the early fall. Since Mary Elizabeth was to be one of the debutantes this year, didn’t he think Bessie might take us to watch from the balcony? (“Mary Elizabeth ought to be good for something to us,” she had said to me in private beforehand.) But Daddy replied, “Don’t be silly. You couldn’t either of you stay awake that late. You can come downtown and watch the parade from my office the night before. One school night out will be enough.” And, of course, we did go down and watch the parade. In fact, we went downtown for dinner with Daddy and Mrs. Richards, and the Caswells and some other grown-ups joined us at the office afterward. They all had a party, with drinks and hors d’oeuvres, while we tossed confetti out the window and watched the floats go by. I hadn’t even realized that Mary Elizabeth wasn’t present until Mrs. Caswell came over to the window where we were and said, “Mary Elizabeth’s out with some of her own crowd, Corinna. But she told me to give you her love and say she would be thinking about you tomorrow night. She’s dying for you to see her dress.”

  Suddenly Corinna leaned so far out the window that I thought she was sure to fall, and I grabbed hold of her.

  “Stop it, stupid,” she hissed. “Here comes the Prophet’s float. The parade’s nearly over.”

  Just below us was passing the last of the countless tableaux representing life in French colonial times and in the days of the Louisiana Territory. We had seen Lewis and Clark, Marquette and Joliet, Indians, fur traders, French peasant girls, river bullies from the days of the keelboat and the pirogue. The parade had begun, for some reason, with Jean Lafitte in the Old Absinthe House at New Orleans, and the final tableau was of Thomas Jefferson signing the Louisiana Purchase. Beyond Jefferson, in his oversized wig and silk knee breeches, I could see the Prophet’s float approaching. But I knew that for me the best part of the parade was already over. After so many Indians and fur traders, after the French explorers, after the pirates, the Prophet, with his veil-hidden face and all his Eastern finery, was bound to seem an anticlimax. I stood beside Corinna, hardly watching the royal float go by. As she continued to lean far out over the window ledge, I quietly took hold of the sash of her dress and, without her knowing it, held on to it tightly as long as we remained at the window.

  The night of the Ball, we had an early dinner without Daddy. He came in and went up to dress while we were still at the table. After dinner, he sent for us to come to his room, where he said that he wanted us to behave ourselves that night “as never before.” He was going out to dinner with the Caswells and Mrs. Richards and some other friends, but he would send the car and chauffeur to fetch us to the Colosseum. He didn’t tell us that Bessie wasn’t going to accompany us or that we would be sitting with him in one of the boxes downstairs.

  And Bessie herself withheld this information till the very last. When it was finally divulged, we had already been so dazzled by another piece of news that the evening before us and these unexpected arrangements seemed of little consequence. When we were both dressed, we went into the sewing room, where Bessie always sat in the evening, to have her look us over.

  “How do I look?” Corinna asked.

  “You look fine,” said Bessie. Then she saw Corinna eyeing herself in the mirror stand, and she added, “But no better than you should.”

  Corinna went up on her tiptoes and said, “I ought to have on heels.”

  “Behave yourself tonight, Corinna,” Bessie said. “And see that he does.” She didn’t look at me, even. Then leaning back in her chair she said, “I’ve got something to tell both of you.”

  “What?” said Corinna.

  “I want you to behave yourself next week, too.”

  “Oh, I thought it was something,” said Corinna.

  “It is something. They’ve sent for me down home. I’ll be gone on the train before you get home tonight.”

  Corinna stared at Bessie in the mirror. “It’s Mama?” she asked, breathless. “Tell me, Bessie!”

  Bessie nodded. “She’s dead. She’s been dead for two days. I’ve just been waiting around here to get tonight over.”

  Corinna observed a moment of silence. She knew that Mama had been “no pleasure to herself or anybody else” for several years now. Further, she knew that she had never heard Bessie say one good word for her mama, and that no commiseration was expected. But still, the respectful silence would be appreciated and would assure her getting answers to the questions she was bound to ask presently. She sat down on a wooden stool by the mirror and placed her feet, in their patent leather slippers, close together. She sat there smoothing the black velvet skirt over her knees. “Lilly Belle?” she said. “Is she engaged to Mr. Barker yet?”

  Bessie nodded again. “She already has Mr. Barker’s ring on her finger.”

  Now it was safe for Corinna to look up. “Will it be a long engagement?” she asked, still restraining herself somewhat.

  “I’m going to stay over for the wedding Sunday week.”

  Corinna sprang to her feet. “Bessie!” she said. “Let me lend you my Brownie so you can bring us some pictures!”

  Bessie shook her
head. “Never mind about that. Lilly Belle’s not going to get herself married to Mr. Barker without some high-type photographer there.”

  “Bessie, I wish I could go with you! Remember everything.”

  “When did I forget anything, Corinna? Is there anything I haven’t told you about Lilly Belle before this? I’ll tell you one thing now. She’s going to marry in her mourning, with a black veil to the floor.”

  Corinna sat down on the stool again, obviously stunned—more by the striking picture in her mind than by the impropriety. But presently she did ask, “Will that be quite proper, though, Bessie?”

  “Of course it’s proper, if black becomes you like it does Lilly Belle.”

  Corinna fixed her gaze on the wastebasket in the far corner of the room. “Do you think—” she began, speaking in a tone at once admiring and suspicious. “Do you think maybe she’s kept Mr. Barker waiting just so she could marry in black?”

  “How can you ask that, Corinna? Do you suppose Lilly Belle’s as vain as you are?” Then she got up from her chair and said, “It’s time for you-all to start downstairs. That car will be here.”

  It was only after we were out in the upstairs hall that we realized she wasn’t going with us. At first, Corinna said she would refuse to go without her. It would be much more fun just to stay at home and talk, she said. “Yes,” said Bessie heavily. “I can just see us sending word to your daddy and Mrs. Richards that you’ve decided to stay home and talk to Bessie.”

  “Then you’ll have to come with us,” Corinna said. “How can we go by ourselves?”

  “Yes, ‘have’ to come with you,” Bessie said. “Can’t you just see me in my six-dollar silk sitting down there in the box with you-all and the Caswells.” That was the first we knew of where we would be sitting.

  We heard Mrs. Richards’s voice downstairs; she had convinced Daddy that he couldn’t merely have the chauffeur pick us up and have us arrive at the Colosseum by ourselves. And so there Daddy and Mrs. Richards were, waiting for us at the foot of the stairs. As Bessie helped Corinna into her Sunday coat, she said in an undertone, “Behave yourself, Corinna. Don’t act silly. Remember this isn’t just something gay tonight. I suspect you’ll see folks crying. You know, it’ll be like a wedding or funeral. There’ll be something sad about seeing Mary Elizabeth and all of those other debutantes walking out in their white dresses.”

  Then we started down, with Bessie still watching from the head of the stairs and Daddy and Mrs. Richards waiting below.

  Only a scene as strange and brilliant as that in the Colosseum could have made Corinna forget Lilly Belle altogether. But perhaps the pleasures of anticipation made her begin forgetting in the car. Or it might have been the sight of Mrs. Richards in her furs at the foot of the stairs. I had noticed before that night that with Mrs. Richards Corinna could be counted on to act more grown up than she did with anyone else. As we rode through town to the Colosseum, she and Mrs. Richards conversed, it seemed to me, with wonderful ease. Mrs. Richards had been a Special Maid at the Veiled Prophet’s Court when she was a debutante some fifteen years before. She described the excitement of it as though it had been only yesterday—how you waited behind the curtains to hear the herald call out your name, and then how you heard, or imagined you heard, the gasps of surprise from the throngs whose admiring eyes would presently be focused on you as you walked, trembling, the length of the Colosseum, and knelt before the Prophet to be crowned, and then took your place on the dais.

  For me, the Colosseum was like the most unreal of dreams. Before that night it had meant to me a wide sawdust arena with metal girders overhead and surrounded by gloomy, often half-empty tiers of seats. It was where I was taken to watch the annual horse show, the radio show, and the Boy Scout Jamboree. Now it had been transformed, by untold yards of bunting and by acres of white canvas on the floor, into a quite cheerful, if rather bathroomy-looking, ballroom. At one end were the thrones of the Prophet and his Queen-to-be, on a raised dais underneath a tasseled canopy, and they were flanked on either side by tiers of folding chairs provided for members of the Court. At the other end were the immense and immaculate white portieres through which the entrances of all persons of the first importance would be made.

  After a drill by the Prophet’s Guard of Bengal Lancers, the Prophet himself, attired in splendid medieval-Oriental garments and with his face veiled, made his duly ceremonious entrance. I was so bedazzled by the drill of the Prophet’s guards and then by the arrival of the pirates and fur traders and Indians I had seen on the floats the night before that I hardly noticed when the Matrons of Honor began filing past our front-row box. These ladies, perhaps forty of them, circled the whole arena and at last took the places reserved for them on the Prophet’s left. Even when the debutantes themselves, in white dresses and long white gloves, began to file by, I found it hard not just to sit there peering between them for glimpses of the people in costumes, who now occupied their places in the Court.

  It was Corinna who brought me down to earth and reminded me of where my attention ought to be directed. She didn’t do it intentionally, with a nudge or a cross whisper, but by her erratic behavior. She was sitting on the edge of her chair and leaning halfway across my lap trying to see the faces of the debutantes, who were now emerging from a small gateway on our side of the arena. I felt that she ought to wait and see them when they passed before our box.

  “Stop,” I said, trying to push her from in front of me.

  “Oh, hush,” she said, not budging.

  She and I were in the very front row, and I glanced over my shoulder to see if Daddy had noticed her behavior. I discovered that he, along with everybody else in the box, was beaming at her. I was glad they couldn’t see her face, or couldn’t see it as well as I could, or at any rate didn’t know what her narrowed-eyes-and-pursed-lips expression meant. Everything suddenly became clear to me. I knew what all the adults’ smiling indulgence meant. Mary Elizabeth Caswell was going to have a place of honor in the Prophet’s Court, and they expected Corinna to be thrilled by this. But I knew what tortures Corinna was suffering. Probably she was wishing I had let her fall out of that window last night. For, after this, how could she hope to measure up to Mary Elizabeth? It was hopeless. Now I began watching the faces of the girls as intently as she.

  When the last debutante had passed us, Mrs. Richards leaned forward, smiling, and said to Corinna, “I didn’t see Mary Elizabeth, did you?” And somehow, probably just because it was Mrs. Richards, Corinna managed to give her a very knowing, grown-up smile. When she turned around and faced the arena, she sat staring straight ahead with a glazed look.

  After this came the separate entrances of the four Special Maids, each summoned individually to the Court of Love and Beauty by the Prophet’s herald, each making her entrance between the great portieres and walking the length of the arena with measured steps and drawing after her a wide satin train. How I prayed each time that the next would be Mary Elizabeth! But already I knew that Mary Elizabeth would be nothing less than the Queen. Corinna knew it, too. By the time that awful announcement came, Corinna was even able to turn and smile at Mr. and Mrs. Caswell.

  “His Mysterious Majesty, the Veiled Prophet, commands me to summon to his Court of Love and Beauty to reign as Queen for one year . . . Miss Mary Elizabeth Caswell.” That was all. The Queen’s subjects came to their feet. Between the white portieres Mary Elizabeth appeared, arrayed in her white silk coronation gown, its bodice and its wide skirts embroidered all over with pearls and sparkling beads, her slender arms held gracefully, if just a little too stiffly, away from her body and encased in pure white kid so perfectly and smoothly fitted that only the occasional trembling of Mary Elizabeth’s hands could suggest there were real hands and arms beneath; and her hair, her head of golden blond hair, fairly shimmering under the brilliant lights that now shone down on her from somewhere up among the panoplied steel girders. The orchestra, perched in a lofty spot directly above the portieres, began to play. To t
he strains of “Pomp and Circumstance,” Mary Elizabeth moved across our vision, with four liveried pages holding up the expanse of her bejeweled train—moved across the white canvas floor of the Colosseum toward her throne.

  When the brief coronation ceremony was finished, the Prophet took his Queen’s hand and led her out onto the floor for their dance. After only a few measures, the guards broke their formation, each of them going to seek the hand of one of the debutantes as a dancing partner. The Ball had officially commenced.

  Very soon, Daddy and Mrs. Richards went out on the floor, with the Caswells, to congratulate the Queen and to join in dancing themselves. Corinna and I were urged to come along, but I rejected the idea even quicker than Corinna did. We would wait in the box and find a chance to congratulate Mary Elizabeth later.

  In almost no time, the floor was crowded with dancers. All but those who sat in the balcony were free to participate. Corinna and I sat with our elbows on the rail of the box, staring into the crowd. It was curious to see the Prophet’s guards dancing in their heavy shoes, and it was most curious to me to see in how many instances there was a person in costume dancing with someone in ordinary evening clothes. I was seeking among the dancers for Mary Elizabeth and the Prophet.