Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  Kitty had to be a sympathetic figure, too, in the old bachelor’s eyes. Kitty had written her mother beforehand that they would come to the mountain only if she could be allowed to take over the housekeeping. Yet her mother had “frustrated” her at every turn. She wouldn’t keep out of the kitchen, she wouldn’t let Kitty do the washing. Further, Henry agreed with his sister that the cottage had suffered at their mother’s hands, that it had none of the charm it had had when they were growing up. It was no longer a summer place, properly speaking. It was Nashville moved to the mountain. There was no longer the lighting of kerosene lamps at twilight, no more chopping of wood for the stove, no more fetching of water from the cistern. The interior of the house had been utterly transformed. Rugs covered the floors everywhere—the splintery pine floors that Mother so deplored. The iron bedsteads had disappeared from the bedrooms; the living room rockers were now used on the porch. Nowadays, cherry and maple antiques set the tone of the house. The dining room even ran to mahogany. And, for the living room, an oil portrait of the Old Judge had been brought up from the house in Nashville to hang above the new mantelpiece, with its broken ogee and fluted side columns. With such furnishings, Kitty complained, children had to be watched every minute, and could not have the run of the house the way they did when she and Henry and their visiting cousins were growing up. It was all changed.

  As for the lot of the two men this summer—well, he should worry about them. When thinking of them, he couldn’t quite keep it up as the sympathetic old bachelor who took other people’s problems to heart. What was one summer, more or less, of not having things just as you wanted them? Next summer, or even tomorrow, or an hour from now, each of them would have it all his way again. And by any reasonable view of things that was what a man must do. A man couldn’t afford to get lost in a labyrinth of self-doubts. And a man must be the head of his house. They were the heads of their houses, certainly, and they knew what they wanted, and they had their “values.” Both of them knew, for instance, that they hated lying about small domestic matters, and tomorrow, or the next hour, would likely find them both berating their wives for having involved them in something that was “against their principles.” Henry sighed audibly, took out another cigarette, then put it back in the package. If they but knew how practiced he was—without a wife—at lying about small domestic matters! If they knew his skill in that art, they wouldn’t be worrying lest he make some faux pas at the breakfast table.

  Finally, Henry bestirred himself. He crossed the porch and opened the screen door. Passing from the light of out-of-doors into the long, dark hall, which ran straight through the cottage to the back porch, he was reminded of something that had caught his attention when he was leaving Nashville, yesterday afternoon. As he was entering a railroad underpass, he glanced up and saw that there was something scrawled in large black letters high above the entrance. He had driven through this same tunnel countless times in the past, but the writing had never caught his attention before. It was the simple question Have you had yours—with the question mark left off. Perhaps it had been put there recently, or it might have been there for years. Some sort of black paint, or perhaps tar, had been used. And it was placed so high on the cement casement and was so crudely lettered that the author must have leaned over from above to do his work. Somehow, as he drove on through the tunnel, Henry had felt tempted to turn around at the other end and go back and read the inscription again, to make sure he had read it correctly. He hadn’t turned around, of course, but during the eighty-mile drive to the mountain the words had kept coming back to him. He thought of the trouble and time the author had taken to place his question there. He supposed the author’s intention was obscene, that the question referred to fornication. And he had the vague feeling now that the question had turned up in his dreams last night; but he was seldom able to remember his dreams very distinctly. At any rate, the meaning of the question for him seemed very clear when it came back to him now, and it did not refer to fornication. The answer seemed clear, too: He had not had his. He had not had his what? Why, he had not had his Certainty. That was what the two men had. Neither of the two seemed ideally suited to the variety of it he had got; each of them, early in life, had merely begun acquiring whatever brand of Certainty was most available; and, apparently, if you didn’t take that, you took none at all. Professor Dwight Clark was forever depending upon manuals and instruction books. (He even had an instruction book for his little Ford, and with the aid of it could install a new generator.) And Professor Clark had to keep going back to Europe, had literally to see every inch of it in order to believe in it enough to teach his history classes and do his writing. And the judge’s garden, while it contained only flowers and combinations of flowers that might have been found in any ante-bellum garden, was so symmetrically, so regularly laid out and so precisely and meticulously cared for that you felt the gardener must surely be some sweet-natured Frankenstein monster. And the decisions that the judge handed down from the bench were famous for their regard for the letter of the law. Lawyers seldom referred to him as “Judge Parker.” By his friends he was spoken of as “Mr. Law.” Amongst his enemies he was known as “Solomon’s Baby.” . . . But what was Henry Parker known as? Well, he wasn’t much known. He was assistant to the registrar of deeds. He was Judge Parker’s son; he was a Democrat, more or less. At the courthouse he was thought awfully well informed—about county government, for one thing. People came to him for information, and took it away with them, thinking it was something Henry Parker would never find any use for. He had passed a variety of civil-service examinations with the highest rating on record, but he had taken the examinations only to see what they were like and what was in them. He did his quiet, pleasant work in his comfortable office on the second floor of the courthouse. The building was well heated in the winter and cool in the summer. Two doors down the corridor from him, Nora McLarnen was usually at her typewriter in the license bureau. Their summers, his and Nora’s, were all that made life tolerable. With his parents at the mountain, and her two sons away at camp, they could go around together with no worry about embarrassing anyone that mattered to them. Their future was a question, a problem they had always vaguely hoped would somehow solve itself. That is, until this summer.

  During past summers, Henry had come to the mountain on weekends for the sake of his parents, or for the sake of making sure his mother had no reason to come down to Nashville on an errand or to see about him. But this summer he had come mostly for Nora’s sake. Her older boy was now sixteen and had not wanted to go to camp. He had been at home, with a job as lifeguard at one of the public swimming pools. Nora had wanted to devote her weekends to Jimmy. And by now, of course, the younger boy had returned from camp. For Labor Day, Nora had agreed to attend a picnic with the boys and their father—a picnic given by the insurance company for which John McLarnen was a salesman. All summer it had been on Nora’s mind that the boys’ growing up was going to change things. In the years just ahead they would need her perhaps more than before, and they would become sensitive to her relationship with Henry. She was thinking of quitting her job, she was thinking of letting her husband support her again, she was wondering if she mightn’t yet manage to forgive John McLarnen’s unfaithfulness to her when she was the mother of two small children, if she hadn’t as a younger woman been too intolerant of his coarse nature. She would not, of course, go back to her husband without Henry’s consent. But with his consent Henry felt now pretty certain that she would go back to him. They had discussed the possibility several times, very rationally and objectively. They had not quarreled about it, but they seemed to have quarreled about almost everything else this summer. He thought he saw what was ahead.

  He was so absorbed in his thoughts as he went down the hall that when he passed the open door to his parents’ bedroom he at first gave no thought to the glimpse he had of his father in there. It was only when he was well past the door that he stopped dead still, realizing that his father was on hi
s knees beside the bed. He was not praying, either. He was stuffing something under the mattress. And Henry did not have to look again to know that it was the newspaper he was hiding. He hurried on back to the screened porch, and, somehow, the sight of Dwight, bent over his grapefruit, wearing his traveling clothes—his Dacron suit, his nylon tie, his wash-and-wear shirt—told Henry what it was the judge had to conceal. There would be an article on the society page—something chatty in a column, probably—about those two couples who were driving up to visit the Nathan Parkers, and even a mention of the garden party on Monday.

  IV. THE APPLES OF ACCORD

  Kitty was determined that the two children should eat a good breakfast this morning, and she saw to it that they did. Mrs. Parker, who had insisted upon preparing and serving breakfast unassisted, was “up and down” all through the meal. The two women were kept so busy—or kept themselves so busy—that they seemed for the most part unmindful of the men. They took no notice of how long the judge delayed coming to the table, or even that Henry actually appeared before his father did. When everybody had finished his grapefruit, and the men began making conversation amongst themselves, the two wives seemed even not to notice the extraordinarily amiable tone of their husbands’ voices or the agreeable nature of their every remark. The only sign Kitty gave of following the conversation was to give a bemused smile or to nod her dark head sometimes when Dwight expressed agreement with her father. And sometimes when the judge responded favorably to an opinion of Dwight’s, Mrs. Parker would lift her eyebrows and tilt her head gracefully, as though listening to distant music.

  Henry’s first impression was that there had not, after all, been a crying need for his presence. His father and his brother-in-law, who a few minutes before had been hiding behind their papers to avoid talking to each other, were now bent upon keeping up a lively and friendly exchange. The judge was seated at his end of the table, with Henry at his left and with Dwight on the other side of Henry at Mrs. Parker’s right. Across the table from Henry and Dwight, Kitty sat between the two children.

  The first topic, introduced by Dwight, was that of the routing to be followed on his trip. Dwight thought it best to go over to Nashville and then up through Louisville.

  “You’re absolutely right, Professor,” the judge agreed. “When heading for the Midwest, there is no avoiding Kentucky. But keep off Kentucky’s back roads!”

  Henry joined in, suggesting that the Knoxville-Middleboro-Lexington route was “not too bad” nowadays.

  “I find the mountain driving more tiring,” Dwight said politely, thus disposing of Henry’s suggestion.

  “And, incidentally, it is exactly a hundred and fifty miles out of your way to go by Knoxville and Middleboro,” the judge added, addressing Dwight.

  Then, rather quickly, Dwight launched into a description of a rainstorm he had been caught in near Middleboro once. When he had finished, the judge said he supposed there was nothing like being caught in a downpour in the mountains.

  But the mention of Knoxville reminded the judge of something he had come across in the morning paper, and his amnesia with regard to his hogging and hiding the first section was so thoroughgoing that he didn’t hesitate to speak of what he had read. “There’s an editorial today on that agitator up in East Tennessee,” he said. “Looks as though they’ve finally settled his hash, thank God.”

  “I’m certainly glad,” said Dwight. It was the case of the Yankee segregationist who had stirred up so much trouble. Dwight and the judge by no means saw eye to eye on segregation, but here was one development in that controversy that they could agree on. “That judge at Knoxville has shown considerable courage,” Dwight said.

  “I suppose so. Yes, it’s taken courage,” said Judge Parker, grudgingly, yet pleased, as always, to hear any favorable comment on the judiciary. “But it is the law of the land. I don’t see he had any alternative.”

  Henry opened his mouth, intending to say that the judge in question was known to be a man of principle, and if it had gone against his principle, Henry was sure that he would have . . . But he wasn’t allowed to finish his thought, even, much less put it into words and speak it.

  “Still and all, still and all,” his father began again, in the way he had of beginning a sentence before he knew what he was going to say. “Still and all, he’s a good man and knows the law. He was a Democrat, you know.” His use of “was” indicated only that it was a federal judge they were referring to, and that he was therefore as good as dead—politically, of course.

  “No, I didn’t know he was a Democrat,” Dwight said, hugely gratified.

  Here was another topic, indeed. Dwight and the judge were both Democrats, and it didn’t matter at the moment that they belonged to different wings of the party. But Dwight postponed for a little the felicity they would enjoy in that area. He had thought of something else that mustn’t be passed up. “I understand,” he said, pushing the last of his bacon into his mouth and chewing on it rather playfully, “I understand, Judge, that the Catholics have gotten the jump on everybody in Nashville.”

  The judge closed his eyes, then opened them wide, suppressing a smile—or pretending to. “They’ve integrated, you mean?”

  The machinations of the Catholic Church was a subject they never failed to agree on. “Not only in Nashville,” Dwight said. “Everywhere.”

  “Very altruistic,” said the judge.

  “Ah, yes. Very.”

  “If the other political parties were as much on their toes as that one, politics in this country would still be interesting.”

  Henry felt annoyed by this line they always took about the Catholic Church. Perhaps he should become a Catholic. That would give him his Certainty, all right. He grimaced inwardly, thinking of the suffering Nora’s being a Catholic had brought the two of them. He realized that he resented the slur on the Church merely because the Church was something he associated with Nora. Silly as it seemed, Nora still came in the category of “Nashville Catholics.” She was still a communicant, he supposed, and yet this proved that you could be a Catholic without developing the Certainty he had in mind . . . But he didn’t try to contribute anything on this subject. He had already seen that contributions from him were not necessary. Perhaps his father and his brother-in-law were no longer consciously trying to keep him silent, but they were in such high spirits over their forthcoming release from each other’s company that each now had ears only for the other’s voice. And, without knowing it, they seemed to be competing to see who could introduce the most felicitous subject.

  From the subject of Nashville Catholics it was such an easy and natural step to Senator Kennedy, and so to national politics, that Henry was hardly aware when the shift came. Everybody had finished eating now. The men had pushed their chairs back a little way from the table. Dwight, in his exuberance, was happily tilting his, though presently Kitty gave him a sign and he stopped. Neither the judge nor Dwight was sure of how good a candidate Kennedy would make. They both really wished that Truman—good old Truman—could head the ticket again. They both admired that man—not for the same reasons, but no matter.

  Meanwhile, Kitty and her mother, having finished their own breakfasts and feeling quite comfortable about the way things were going with the men, began a private conversation at their corner of the table. It was about the basket of fruit, which Mrs. Parker still hoped they would find room for in the car. In order to make themselves heard above the men’s talk and above the children, who were picking at each other across their mother’s plate, it was necessary for them to raise their voices somewhat. Presently, this mere female chatter interfered with the conversation of the men. Judge Parker had just embarked on an account of the Democratic convention of 1928, which he had attended. He meant to draw a parallel between it and the 1960 convention-to-be. But the women’s voices distracted him. He stopped his story, leaned forward and took a last sip of his coffee, and said very quietly, “Mother, Dwight and I are having some difficulty understanding eac
h other.”

  Mrs. Parker blushed. She had thought things were going so well between the two men! How could she help them understand each other?

  “Is the question of the basket of fruit really so important?” the judge clarified.

  Mrs. Parker tried to laugh. Kitty rallied to her support. “It’s pretty important,” she said good-naturedly.

  Henry hated seeing his mother embarrassed. “I imagine it’s as important as any other subject,” he said.

  The judge’s eyes blazed. He let his mouth fall open. “Can you please tell me in what sense it is as important as any other subject?”

  Dwight Clark laughed aloud. Then he looked at Henry and said, unsmiling, “Politics is mere child’s play, eh, Henry?” And, tossing his rumpled napkin beside his plate, he said, “Oh, well, we must get going.”

  “No,” said the judge. “Wait. I want to hear Henry’s answer to my question.”

  “I do, too,” said Dwight, and he snatched his napkin from the table again as if to prove it.

  “We’re waiting,” said the judge.

  “At least theirs is a question that can be settled,” Henry said, lamely.

  “Oh,” Dwight rejoined in his most ringing professorial voice, “since we can’t, as individuals, settle the problems of the world, we’d best turn ostrich and bury our heads in the sand.”

  “That won’t do, Henry,” said Judge Parker. “We’re still waiting.”

  So they had needed him, after all, Henry reflected. A common enemy was better than a peacemaker. He understood now that his own meek and mild behavior on the front porch had assured both men that he was not going to spill their beans. And in their eyes, now, he saw that they somehow hated him for it. But, he wondered, why had they thought he might do it, to begin with? Why in the world should he? Because he was an old bachelor with no life of his own? He knew that both the men, and the women, too, were bound to have known for years about his love affair with Nora McLarnen. But to themselves, of course, they lied willingly about such a large and unpleasant domestic matter . . . He was an old bachelor without any life of his own! Oh, God, he thought, the realization sweeping over him suddenly that that’s how it really would be soon, when he told Nora that she had his consent to go back to John McLarnen. He thought of his office in the courthouse and how it would seem when Nora was no longer behind her typewriter down the corridor. And he realized that the rest of his life with her, the part that had been supposed to mean the most, didn’t matter to him at all. He couldn’t remember that it once had mattered, that once the summer nights, when his parents and her children didn’t have to be considered, had been all that mattered to him. He couldn’t, because the time had come when he couldn’t afford to remember it. All along, then, they had been right about him. All his hesitations and discriminations about what one could and could not do with one’s life had been mere weakness. What else could it be? He was a bloodless old bachelor. It seemed that all his adult life the blood had been slowly draining out of him, and now the last drop was drained. John McLarnen, who could sell a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of life insurance in one year, and whose wife could damned well take him or leave him as he was, was the better man.