Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  While Dwight and the judge waited for him to speak up, Henry sat with a vague smile on his lips, staring at the basket of fruit, which was placed on a little cherry washstand at the far end of the porch. He saw the two children, Susie and her little brother, slip out of their chairs and go over to the washstand. He heard his sister tell them not to finger the fruit. Suddenly he imagined he was seeing the fruit, the peaches and apples and pears, through little Dwight’s eyes. How very real it looked.

  “The basket of fruit,” he said at last, “is a petty, ignoble, womanish consideration. And we men must not waste our minds on such.” Intuitively, he had chosen the thing to say that would give them their golden opportunity. But before either of the men could speak, he heard his mother say, “Now, Henry,” in an exasperated tone, and under her breath.

  V. THE JUGGLER

  Judge Parker rested his two great white hands limply, incredulously on the table. “Henry,” he said, “are you attempting to instruct your brother-in-law and me in our domestic relations?” He gazed a moment through the wire screening out into his flower garden. He was thinking that Henry always left himself wide open in an argument. Even Dwight could handle him.

  “If that isn’t an old bachelor for you,” Dwight said, rising from his chair. He wished Henry would wipe the foolish grin off his face. He supposed it was there to hide his disappointment. He had observed Henry, all during the meal, trying to work up some antagonism between his father-in-law and himself—about the roads, about religion, about politics.

  The judge was getting up from the table now, too, but he had more to say. “While we discussed all manner of things that you might be expected to know something about, you maintained a profound silence. And then you felt compelled to speak on a subject of which you are profoundly ignorant.”

  “‘Our universities are riddled with them,’ ” Dwight said, savoring his joke, feeling that nobody else but Kitty would get it. “Old bachelors who will tell you how you can live on university pay and how to raise your children. I know one, even, that teaches a marriage course.”

  “You might try that, Henry,” said the judge. And then he said, “We’re only joking, you know. No hard feelings?” He had thought, suddenly, of the extra liquor that Henry was supposed to have brought up from Nashville for the party. Then he remembered that Jane had already asked Henry. It was locked in the trunk of his old coupé.

  “Henry knows we’re kidding,” Dwight said.

  Kitty was helping her mother clear the table. Mrs. Parker was protesting, saying that she had nothing else to do all day. Presently, she said to Henry, “Henry, would you take the famous basket of fruit out front? I haven’t given up.” She hadn’t given up. How really wonderful it was, Henry thought. And Kitty, too. She could so easily have agreed to take the whole basketful along, could so easily have thrown the whole thing out once they got down the mountain. But it wouldn’t have occurred to her.

  “Will you gentlemen excuse me?” he said to the two men, smiling at them. And the two men smiled back at him. They felt very good.

  When they were all gathered out on the lawn, beside Dwight’s car, Kitty looked at her mother and father and said, “It’s been a grand summer for us. Just what we needed.”

  “It’s been grand for us,” Mother Parker said, “though I’m afraid it’s spoilt us a good deal. We shouldn’t have let you do so much.”

  “But we hope you’ll do it again,” Dad Parker said, “whenever you feel up to it.”

  “I never dreamed I’d get so much done on my book in one summer,” said Dwight, really meaning it, but thinking that nobody believed him. He saw that brother Henry was pulling various little trinkets out of his pockets for the children. He had bought them in Nashville, no doubt, and they would be godsends on the trip. Henry knew so well how to please people when he would. He was squatting down between the two children, and he looked up at Dwight to say, “You’re lucky to have work you can take all over the world with you.”

  “Well, I’m sure it requires great powers of concentration,” Mother Parker said. She went on to say that she marveled at the way Dwight kept at it and that they were all proud of how high he stood in his field. As she spoke, she held herself very straight, and she seemed almost as tall as her husband. She had had Henry set the basket of fruit on an ivy-covered stump nearby. It was there to plead its own cause. She would not mention it again.

  At breakfast, the children had been so excited about setting out for home that Kitty had had to force them to eat. In fact, even the night before, their eagerness to be on the way had been so apparent that Dwight had had to take them aside and warn them against hurting their grandparents’ feelings. Yet now, at the last minute, they seemed genuinely reluctant to go. They clung to their uncle, saying they didn’t see why they couldn’t stay on a few days longer and let him enjoy the tiny tractor, the bag of marbles, and the sewing kit with them. It seemed to Dwight that their Uncle Henry had done his best to ignore the children during all his weekends at the mountain, but now at the last minute he had filled their hands with treasure. And now it was Uncle Henry who was to have their last hugs and to lift little Dwight bodily into the car. When he turned away from the car, with the two children inside it, Henry took Dwight’s hand and said, “I’m sorry we never had that chess game. I guess I was afraid you would beat me.” It was as if he had seized Dwight and given him the same kind of hug he had given the children. Probably Henry had really wanted to play chess this summer, and probably he had wanted to be affectionate and attentive with the children. But the old bachelor in him had made him hold back. He could not give himself to people, or to anything—not for a whole season.

  When finally they had all made their farewell speeches, had kissed and shaken hands and said again what a fine summer it had been, Dwight and Kitty hopped into the little car, and they drove away as quickly as if they had been running into the village on an errand. As they followed the winding driveway down to the public road, Dwight kept glancing at Kitty. He said, “Let’s stop in the village and buy a copy of the morning paper.”

  “Let’s not,” she said, keeping her eyes straight ahead.

  “All right,” he said, “let’s not.” He thought she looked very sad, and he felt almost as though he were taking her away from home for the first time. But the next time he glanced at her, she smiled at him in a way that it seemed she hadn’t smiled at him in more than two months. He realized that this summer he had come to think of her again as “having” her father’s forehead, as “having” her mother’s handsome head of hair and high cheekbones, and as “sharing” her brother’s almost perfect teeth, which they were said to have inherited from their maternal grandmother’s people. But now suddenly her features seemed entirely her own, borrowed from no one, the features of Dwight Clark’s wife. He found himself pressing down on the accelerator, though he knew he would have to stop at the entrance to the road.

  In the mirror he saw his two children, in the back seat, still waving to their grandparents through the rear window. Presently, Susie said, “Mama, look at Uncle Henry! Do you see what he’s doing.” They had reached the entrance to the road now, and Dwight brought the car to a complete halt. Both he and Kitty looked back. Mother and Dad Parker had already started back into the cottage, but they had stopped on the porch steps and were still waving. Henry was still standing beside the ivy-covered stump where the basket of fruit rested. He had picked up two of the apples and was listlessly juggling them in the air. Dwight asked the children to get out of the way for a moment, and both of them ducked their heads. He wanted to have a good look, to see if Henry was doing it for the children’s benefit . . . Clearly he wasn’t. He was staring off into space, in the opposite direction, lost in whatever thoughts such a man lost himself in.

  Dwight put the car into motion again and turned out of the gravel driveway onto the macadam road, with Kitty and the children still looking back until they reached the point where the thick growth of sumac at the roadside cut off all
view of the cottage, and the sweep of green lawn, and the three relatives they had just said goodbye to for a while.

  Miss Leonora When Last Seen

  HERE IN Thomasville we are all concerned over the whereabouts of Miss Leonora Logan. She has been missing for two weeks, and though a half dozen postcards have been received from her, stating that she is in good health and that no anxiety should be felt for her safety, still the whole town can talk of nothing else. She was last seen in Thomasville heading south on Logan Lane, which is the narrow little street that runs alongside her family property. At four-thirty on Wednesday afternoon—Wednesday before last, that is to say—she turned out of the dirt driveway that comes down from her house and drove south on the lane toward its intersection with the bypass of the Memphis–Chattanooga highway. She has not been seen since. Officially, she is away from home on a little trip. Unofficially, in the minds of the townspeople, she is a missing person, and because of events leading up to her departure none of us will rest easy until we know that the old lady is safe at home again.

  Miss Leonora’s half dozen postcards have come to us from points in as many states: Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky—in that order. It is considered a fair guess that her next card will come from Missouri or Arkansas, and that the one after that will be from Mississippi or Louisiana. She seems to be orbiting her native state of Tennessee. But, on the other hand, there is no proof that she has not crossed the state, back and forth, a number of times during the past two weeks. She is quite an old lady, and is driving a 1942 Dodge convertible. Anyone traveling in the region indicated should watch out for two characteristics of her driving. First, she hates to be overtaken and passed by other vehicles—especially by trucks. The threat of such is apt to make her bear down on the accelerator and try to outdistance the would-be passer. Or, if passed, she can be counted on to try to overtake and pass the offender at first chance. The second characteristic is: when driving after dark, she invariably refuses to dim her lights unless an approaching car has dimmed its own while at least five hundred feet away. She is a good judge of distances, and she is not herself blinded by bright lights on the highway. And one ought to add that, out of long habit and for reasons best known to herself, Miss Leonora nearly always drives by night.

  Some description will be due, presently, of this lady’s person and of how she will be dressed while traveling. But that had better wait a while. It might seem prejudicial and even misleading with reference to her soundness of mind. And any question of that sort, no matter what the rest of the world may think, has no bearing upon the general consternation that her going away has created here.

  Wherever Miss Leonora Logan is today, she knows in her heart that in the legal action recently taken against her in Thomasville there was no malice directed toward her personally. She knows this, and would say so. At this very moment she may be telling some newfound friend the history of the case—because I happen to know that when she is away from home she talks to people about herself and her forebears as she would never do to anyone here. And chances are she is giving a completely unbiased version of what has happened, since that is her way.

  The cause of all our present tribulation is this: The Logan property, which Miss Leonora inherited from one of her paternal great-uncles and which normally upon her death would have gone to distant relatives of hers in Chicago, has been chosen as the site for our county’s new consolidated high school. A year and a half ago, Miss Leonora was offered a fair price for the three-acre tract and the old house, and she refused it. This summer, condemnation proceedings were begun, and two weeks ago the county court granted the writ. This will seem to you a bad thing for the town to have done, especially in view of the fact that Miss Leonora has given long years of service to our school system. She retired ten years ago after teaching for twenty-five years in the old high school. To be sure, four of us who are known hereabouts as Miss Leonora Logan’s favorites among the male citizenry refused to have any part in the action. Two of us even preferred to resign from the school board. But still, times do change, and the interests of one individual cannot be allowed to hinder the progress of a whole community. Miss Leonora understands that. And she knows that her going away can only delay matters for a few weeks at most. Nevertheless, she is making it look very bad for Thomasville, and we want Miss Leonora to come home.

  The kind of jaunt that she has gone off on isn’t anything new for the old lady. During the ten years since her retirement she has been setting out on similar excursions rather consistently every month or so, and never, I believe, with a specific itinerary or destination in mind. Until she went away this time, people had ceased to bother themselves with the question of her whereabouts while she was gone or to be concerned about any harm that might come to her. We have been more inclined to think of the practical value her trips have for us. In the past, you see, she was never away for more than a week or ten days, and on her return she would gladly give anyone a full and accurate account of places visited and of the condition of roads traveled. It has, in fact, become the custom when you are planning an automobile trip to address yourself to Miss Leonora on the public square one day and ask her advice on the best route to take. She is our authority not only on the main highways north, south, east, and west of here, in a radius of six or eight hundred miles, but even on the secondary and unimproved roads in places as remote as Brown County, Indiana, and the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Her advice is often very detailed, and will include warnings against “single-lane bridges” or “soft shoulders” or even “cops patrolling in unmarked cars.”

  It is only the facts she gives you, though. She doesn’t express appreciation for the beauty of the countryside or her opinion of the character of towns she passes through. The most she is likely to say is that such-and-such a road is “regarded” as the scenic route, or that a certain town has a “well-worked-out traffic system.” No one can doubt that while driving, Miss Leonora keeps her eyes and mind on the road. And that may be the reason why we have never worried about her. But one asks oneself, What pleasure can she ever have derived from these excursions? She declares that she hates the actual driving. And when giving advice on the roads somewhere she will always say that it is a dull and tedious trip and that the traveler will wish himself home in Thomasville a thousand times before he gets to wherever he is going.

  Miss Leonora’s motivation for taking these trips was always, until the present instance, something that it seemed pointless even to speculate on. It just seemed that the mood came on her and she was off and away. But if anything happens to her now, all the world will blame us and say we sent her on this journey, sent her out alone and possibly in a dangerous frame of mind. In particular, the blame will fall on the four timid male citizens who were the last to see her in Thomasville (for I do not honestly believe we will ever see her alive here again) and who, as old friends and former pupils of hers at the high school, ought to have prevented her going away. As a matter of fact, I am the one who opened the car door for the old lady that afternoon and politely assisted her into the driver’s seat—and without even saying I thought it unwise of her to go. I thought it unwise, but at the moment it was as if I were still her favorite pupil twenty years before, and as if I feared she might reprove me for any small failure of courtesy like not opening the car door.

  That’s how the old lady is—or was. Whatever your first relation to her might have been, she would never allow it to change, and some people even say that that is why she discourages us so about the trips we plan. She cannot bear to think of us away from Thomasville. She thinks this is where all of us belong. I remember one day at school when some boy said to her that he wished he lived in a place like Memphis or Chattanooga. She gave him the look she usually reserved for the people she caught cheating. I was seated in the first row of the class that day, and I saw the angry patches of red appear on her broad, flat cheeks and on her forehead. She paused a moment to ­rearrange the combs in her hair and to give the
stern yank to her corset that was a sure sign she was awfully mad. (We used to say that, with her spare figure, she only wore a corset for the sake of that expressive gesture.) The class was silent, waiting. Miss Leonora looked out the window for a moment, squinting up her eyes as if she could actually make out the Memphis or even the Chattanooga skyline on the horizon. Then, turning back to the unfortunate boy, she said, grinding out her words to him through clenched teeth, “I wish I could throw you there!”