Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  I nodded and said, “We’re on the way up there to tell her, Buck.”

  “I guessed you were,” he said. He glanced out the window at the others, and I looked out at them, too. For a second it seemed that I was seeing them through Buck Wallace’s eyes—them and myself. And the next second it seemed, for some reason, that I was seeing them through Miss Leonora’s eyes—them and myself. We all had on our business suits, our lightweight topcoats, our gray fedoras; we were the innkeeper, the druggist, a bank clerk, and the rewrite man from the weekly paper. Our ages range from thirty to fifty—with me at the top—but we were every one of us decked out to look like the same kind of thing. We might have just that minute walked out of the Friday-noon meeting of the Exchange Club. In Buck Wallace’s eyes, however, we were certainly not the cream of the Exchange Club crop—not the men who were going to get Thomasville its due. And in Miss Leonora’s eyes we were a cut above the Exchange Club’s ringleaders, though not enough above them to matter very much. To both her and Buck we were merely the go-betweens. It just happened that we were the last people left in town that the old lady would speak to, and so now we—or, rather, I—was going up to Logana and tell her she would have to accept the town’s terms of unconditional surrender.

  “You may be too late,” Buck added as I was turning away. I looked back at him with lifted eyebrows. “She was in here a while ago,” he went on to report, “getting her car gassed up. She said how she was about to take off on one of her trips. She said she might wait till she heard from the courthouse this afternoon and again she might not . . . She was got up kind of peculiar.”

  When I rejoined the other men outside, I didn’t tell them what Buck had said. Suddenly I mistrusted them, and I didn’t trust myself. Or rather I knew I could trust myself to let them have their way if they thought Miss Leonora was about to leave town. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t leave without hearing from us, and I was pretty sure they would want to head us back to the courthouse immediately and send official word up there before she could get away. It would have been the wise thing to do, but I didn’t let it happen.

  In the filling station Buck Wallace had said to me that she was “got up kind of peculiar,” and that meant, to my understanding, that Miss Leonora was dressed in one of two ways. Neither was a way that I had ever seen her dressed, and I wanted to see for myself. It meant either that she was got up in a lot of outmoded finery or she was wearing her dungarees! Because that is how, for ten years now, the old lady has been turning up at the tourist homes where she stops, and that is how, if you wanted to recognize her on the road, you would have to watch out for her. Either she would be in her finery—with the fox fur piece, and the diamond earrings, and the high-crowned velvet hat, and the kind of lace choker that even old ladies don’t generally go in for any more and that Miss Leonora has never been seen to wear in Thomasville except by a very few—or she would be in her dungarees! The dungarees are the hardest to imagine, of course. With them she wears a home-knit, knee-length cardigan sweater. And for headgear she pulls on a big poke bonnet she has resurrected from somewhere, or sometimes she stuffs her long hair up under a man’s hunting cap or an old broad-brimmed straw hat. A queer sight she must present riding about the countryside these autumn nights; and if she rides with the top of her convertible put back, as I’ve heard of her doing in the dead of winter even, why, it’s enough to scare any children who may see her and some grown people, too . . . Here in Thomasville, only Buck Wallace and a few others have seen her so garbed, and they only rarely, only sometimes when she was setting out on a trip. They say she looks like some inmate who has broken out of the asylum over at Bolivar.

  But that’s how she turns up at the tourist homes. If she is with the two old maids at Boxwood Manor or Maple Lawn, she affects the choker and the diamond earrings. She sits down in their parlor and removes the high-crowned velvet, and she talks about how the traditions and institutions of our country have been corrupted and says that soon not one stone will be left upon another. And, still using such terms and phrases, she will at last get round to telling them the story of her life and the history of the Logan family in Thomasville. She tells it all in the third person, pretending it is some friend of hers she has in mind, and the family of that friend. But the old maids know right along that it is herself she is speaking of, and they say she seems to know they know it and seems not to care . . . And if she is with the farm couple at Oak Crest, then she’s in her dungarees. She at once sets about helping with the chores, if they will let her. She talks religion to them and says there is no religion left amongst the people in the towns, says that they have forsaken the fountain of living waters and hewed them out broken cisterns that can hold no water—or something like that. And finally she gets round to telling them her story, again pretending that it is some friend of hers she is speaking of, and again with her listeners knowing it is herself. The farm couple won’t like seeing an old woman wearing dungarees, but they will catch the spirit of her get-up, and they understand what it means. For they have known other old women there in the country who, thrown entirely on their own, living alone and in desperate circumstances, have gotten so they dress in some such outrageous way. And the two old maids probably still have some eye for fashion and they find Miss Leonora pretty ridiculous. But they remember other old ladies who did once dress like that, and it seems somehow credible that there might still be one somewhere.

  When Miss Leonora is at home in Thomasville, it is hard to believe she ever dresses herself up so. Here we are used to seeing her always in the most schoolteacherish, ready-made-looking clothes. After the Institute burned, she changed from the uniform that the Institute teachers wore to what amounts to a uniform for our high-school teachers—the drab kind of street dresses that can be got through the mail-order catalogues. Right up till two weeks ago, that’s how we were still seeing the old lady dressed. It was hard to realize that in her old age she had had a change of heart and was wishing that either she had played the role of the spinster great lady the way it is usually played or that she had married some dirt farmer and spent her life working alongside him in the fields.

  I even used to think that perhaps Miss Leonora didn’t really want to go off masquerading around the country—that it was a kind of madness and meant something that would be much more difficult to explain, and that all the time she was at home she was dreading her next seizure. Recently, however, I’ve come to realize that that wasn’t the case. For years, her only satisfaction in life has been her periodic escapes into a reality that is scattered in bits and pieces along the highways and back roads of the country she travels. And what I hope above all else is that Miss Leonora is stopping today at Oak Crest or Boxwood Manor and does have on her dungarees or lace choker.

  But now I must tell what makes me doubt that she is, after all, staying at one of those tourist homes she likes, and what makes me afraid that we may never see her here again.

  I left the other men down at the corner of the lane and went up the dirt driveway to Logana alone. Her car was parked at the foot of the porch steps, and so there was no question about her being there. I saw her first through one of the sidelights at the front door and wasn’t sure it was she. Then she opened the door, saying, “Dear boy, come in.” I laughed, it was so unlike her to call me that. That was not her line at all. She laughed, too, but it was a kind of laugh that was supposed to put me at my ease rather than to criticize or commend me, which would have been very much more in her line . . . I saw at a glance that this wasn’t the Miss Leonora I had known, and wasn’t one that I had heard about from her tourist-home friends, either.

  She had done an awful thing to her hair. Her splendid white mane, with its faded yellow streaks and its look of being kept up on her head only by the two tortoise-shell combs at the back, was no more. She had cut it off, thinned it, and set it in little waves close to her head, and, worse still, she must have washed it in a solution of indigo bluing. She had powdered the shine off her nose, seemed al
most to have powdered its sharpness and longness away. She may have applied a little rouge and lipstick, though hardly enough to be noticeable, only enough to make you realize it wasn’t the natural coloring of an old lady and enough to make you think how old she was. And the dress she had on was exactly right with the hair and the face, though at first I couldn’t tell why.

  As I walked beside her from the center hall into her “office,” her skirt made an unpleasant swishing sound that seemed out of place in Miss Leonora’s house and that made me observe more closely what the dress was really like. It was of a dark silk stuff, very stiff, with a sort of middy-blouse collar, and sleeves that stopped a couple of inches above the wrists, and a little piece of belt in back, fastened on with two big buttons—very stylish, I think. For a minute I couldn’t remember where it was I had seen this very woman before. Then it came to me. All that was lacking was a pair of pixie glasses with rhinestone rims, and a half dozen bracelets on her wrists. She was one of those old women who come out here from Memphis looking for antiques and country hams and who tell you how delighted they are to find a Southern town that is truly unchanged.

  Even so, I half expected Miss Leonora to begin by asking me about my family and then about what kind of summer I had had. “Now, I know you have had a fine summer—all summers are fine to a boy your age,” she would say. “So don’t tell me what you have been doing. Tell me what you have been thinking, what you have been reading.” It was the room that made me imagine she would still go on that way. Because the room was the same as it used to be. Even the same coffee cups and blue china coffeepot were set out on the little octagonal oak table, beside the plate of butter cookies. And for a moment I had the same guilty feeling I used always to have; because, of course, I hadn’t been reading anything and hadn’t been thinking anything she would want to hear about.

  What she actually said was much kinder and was what anybody might have said under the circumstances. “I’ve felt so bad about your having to come here like this. I knew they would put it off on you. Even you must have dreaded coming, and you must hate me for putting you in such a position.”

  “Why, no. I wanted to come, Miss Leonora,” I lied. “And I hope you have understood that I had no part in the proceedings.” It was what, for months, I had known I would say, and it came out very easily.

  “I do understand that,” she said. “And we don’t even need to talk about any of it.”

  But I said, “The county court has granted the writ condemning your property. They will send a notice up to you tomorrow morning. You ought to have had a lawyer represent you, and you ought to have come yourself.”

  I had said what I had promised Judge Potter I would say; she had her warning. And now I was on my own. She motioned me to sit down in a chair near the table where the coffee things were. When she poured out the coffee into our two cups, it was steaming hot. It smelled the way it used to smell in that room on winter afternoons, as fresh as if it were still brewing on the stove. I knew she hadn’t made it herself, but, as in the old days, too, the Negro woman who had made it didn’t appear or make a sound in the kitchen. You wouldn’t have thought there was one of them on the place. There didn’t seem to be another soul in the house but just herself and me. But I knew that the house was full of them, really. And there was still the feeling that either she was protecting me from them or them from me. I experienced the old uneasiness in addition to something new. And as for Miss Leonora, she seemed to sense from the start that the other three men were waiting down the lane—the three who had been even less willing than I to come, and who were that much nearer to the rest of the town in their feelings. Several times she referred to them, giving a little nod of her head in the direction of the very spot where I had left them waiting.

  “When I think of the old days, the days when I used to have you up here—you and the others, too—I realize I was too hard on you. I asked too much of my pupils. I know that now.”

  It was nothing like the things the real Miss Leonora used to say. It was something anybody might have said.

  And a little later: “I was unrealistic. I tried to be to you children what I thought you needed to have somebody be. That’s a mistake, always. One has to try to be with people what they want one to be. Each of you tried to be that for me, to an admirable degree. Tim Hadley tried hardest—he went to college—but he didn’t have your natural endowments.” Then she took pains to say something good and something forgiving about each of the four. And, unless I imagined it, for each of those that hadn’t come up with me she gave another nod in the direction of the elderberry and sumac thicket down at the corner.

  “We were a dumb bunch, all along the line,” I said, not meaning it—or not meaning it about myself.

  “Nonsense. You were all fine boys, and you were my brightest hope,” she said, with an empty cheerfulness.

  “But you can’t make a silk purse out of—” I began.

  “Nonsense,” she said again. “It was neither you nor I that failed.” But she didn’t care enough to make any further denial or explanation. She set her cup down on the table and rose from her chair. “It’s been like old times, hasn’t it,” she said with a vague smile.

  I looked away from her and sat gazing about the office, still holding my empty cup in my hand. It hadn’t been like old times at all, of course. The room and the silence of the house were the same, but Miss Leonora was already gone, and without her the house was nothing but a heap of junk. I thought to myself that the best thing that could happen would be for them to begin moving out the furniture and moving out the Negroes and tearing the place down as soon as possible. Suddenly, I spied her black leather traveling bag over beside the doorway, and she must have seen my eyes light upon it. “I’m about to get off on a little trip,” she said.

  I set my cup down on the table and looked up at her. I could see she was expecting me to protest. “Will it be long?” I asked, not protesting.

  “I don’t know, dear boy. You know how I am.”

  I glanced at the traveling bag again, and this time I noticed her new cloth coat lying on the straight chair beside the bag. I got up and went over and picked up the coat and held it for her.

  On the way out to the car, I kept reminding myself that this was really Miss Leonora Logan and that she was going away before receiving any official notice of the jury’s verdict. Finally, when we were standing beside her car and she was waiting for me to put the bag, which I was carrying, inside the car, I looked squarely into her eyes. And there is no denying it; the eyes were still the same as always, not just their hazel color but their expression, their look of awareness—awareness of you, the individual before her, a very flattering awareness until presently you realized it was merely of you as an individual in her scheme of things for Thomasville. She was still looking at me as though I were one of the village children that she would like so much to make something of. I opened the car door. I tossed the bag into the space behind the driver’s seat. I even made sure I did the thing to her satisfaction by putting one hand out to her elbow as she slipped stiffly in under the steering wheel.

  Neither of us made any pretense of saying goodbye. I stood there and watched the car as it bumped along down the driveway, raising a little cloud of dust in the autumn air. The last I saw of her was a glimpse of her bluinged head through the rear window of her convertible. When she turned out into the lane and headed away from town toward the bypass, I knew that the other three men would be watching. But they wouldn’t be able to see how she was got up, and I knew they would hardly believe me when I told them.

  I have told nearly everybody in town about it, and I think nobody really believes me. I have almost come to doubt it myself. And, anyway, I like to think that in her traveling bag she had the lace-choker outfit that she could change into along the way, and the dungarees, too; and that she is stopping at her usual kind of place today and is talking to the proprietors about Thomasville. Otherwise, there is no use in anyone’s keeping an eye out for
her. She will look too much like a thousand others, and no doubt will be driving on the highway the way everybody else does, letting other people pass her, dimming her lights for everyone. Maybe she even drives in the daytime, and maybe when she stops for the night it is at a big, modern motel with air conditioning and television in every room. The postcards she sends us indicate nothing about how she is dressed, of course, or about where and in what kind of places she is stopping. She says only that she is in good health, that it is wonderful weather for driving about the country, and that the roads have been improved everywhere. She says nothing about when we can expect her to come home.

  UNDERGRADUATE STORIES

  1936–1939

  The Party

  SUSAN BLEW the stray lock of brown hair away from her face, shook it back into its place with a jerk of her head, and gave the pale butter three more vigorous blows. Then she turned the wooden mould upside down on the plate and pushed out a smooth pat of butter. Wiping the sweat from her forehead with the apron she wore over her best summer organdy, she leaned close to the yellow cake to see if the design on top had come out clearly. She saw that half of the sheaf of wheat was missing and, after a hurried glance at Albert, she tried to scratch the missing half from the inside of the mould.

  “You should have let Fanny do it. I told you that’d happen,” Albert said smiling and went on scraping the mud off his shoes onto the floor of the porch.