Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  Her jewelry had later become a subject for much discussion, for she and her sister had a great store of their mother’s stones set in gold clips and rings, and after her sister’s death she had felt that perhaps she should “dispose” of some of it. But it was one of her vanities to take pleasure from ornamenting her simple, dark dresses with a brooch or clip of some sort at the V-neck, or from wearing a necklace of very white pearls and perhaps a pair of old-fashioned ear rings. And it became one of his pleasures to see her in these jewels.

  So after some months of discussion it was decided that she should keep the jewelry.

  In the afternoons from one until nearly five Mrs. Powell was in her room resting by order of her doctor, whose medicine she took before meals and whose office she visited monthly. Her illness she and her husband had agreed never to mention at her promise to take every possible care of herself and to visit her specialist once a month. And she had learned to administer medicine to herself that had formerly required the aid of her sister. At five she dressed and awaited on the gallery the appearance of Mr. Powell in the doorway. Then perhaps they would stroll in the formal, treeless park before the capitol or through The Arcade to purchase Mr. Powell a few handkerchiefs or Mrs. Powell a yard of ribbon. In their restaurant after dinner they would chat over their black coffee often for as long as an hour. Occasionally they would talk of some book which they were reading, or incidents from the day’s work, or they might observe some girlhood friend of Mrs. Powell who would happen in.

  But the subject for conversation which most consistently presented itself was the personality and the opinions of Benton Young, a mutual friend of their youth. Of whatever matter they talked at length sooner or later his opinion was recalled, or at least something he had said that would throw light on the subject. Sometimes his personality would be suggested by a character in a book or by some person whom they had run across during the day. At last this had happened so often that it became a joke between them, and each would laugh at himself or at the other when he began to tell that something had reminded him of Benton Young. At other times one would for no reason “just think” of Benton Young, of some trait of his, of some incident of his friendship with him.

  Later, walking home, they might continue discussion of him. Or there were evenings when they would talk of him late in the night as they lay in bed.

  Mrs. Powell’s friendship with him had come twenty-five years back when she was hardly twenty years old. It came at a time when she needed it. She met Benton Young at the reception for a young musician after his first concert. She and her sister had but a year before lost their parents, and a few years before that a family fortune. She was presented to Mr. Young by the young musician himself who introduced him as his very dear friend and benefactor. From this one evening spent in his company she knew that the musician meant that Benton Young was his benefactor because he allowed him to be his friend. And she determined then that she too must be Benton Young’s friend.

  The friendship which had followed was a result of her persistence in placing herself near him. He was twenty years her elder and a professed bachelor in the town, so she could make advances in their friendship that might otherwise have been impossible. And in their two years of association it was always she who sought him. And even until the time of their separation when he left his native city for Europe he gave her no direct advice on any matter. All she gained from him she took from observation of his way of living and his expression of objective opinions of things.

  What Mrs. Powell got from him was somewhat different from what Mr. Powell received. It came a few years later when he knew him as a fellow expatriate in Paris. Benton Young was a writer, a critic of the arts of a sort, author of two novels which caused “no stir,” and he called himself “a prosateur.” To the girl whom he had befriended with his acquaintance back in the states he had given a serious attitude toward the arts to which she had formerly only been “sensitive.” He had shown her that she could really take them into her empty life. To Mr. Powell he had shown that such things could really mean something. He met Powell in Paris as a young man with “good background” and enough money to get started on. Enough money to get started on a Career as a writer. He found him a young man set only upon that Career, whose interest in ideas and ideals amounted to something like the disinterested curiosity of a journalist. In place of this interest he gave him a real love for the best in the art of writing of which he professed to be enamored. And as Benton Young said when they met for the last time in Paris, he perhaps gave him his failure in his Career; for when Mr. Powell’s income began to dwindle a few years later he had not pushed himself in the world enough, and yet had found that he was not a writer himself. So he returned to the largest city in his native state where his family connections found him “something in his line to do,” and his small income carried him along.

  And so for the ten years he lived alone in The Hensely House. Each morning he went to the State Library at the capitol and took notes for his weekly column in The Herald-Democrat: “Forgotten Paragraphs in Southern History.” (Eventually his column was carried in other newspapers over the state, and he would receive letters from relatives and descendents of the senators and governors whose characters he would elucidate. One letter from the most eminent woman historian of the South wished to know why “he thought” he was fitted for his position; and her letter set him wondering for several days. (His answer to it in his column gave only the qualification that he could write a good English prose sentence.) After an hour’s note taking he would go to the City Library and “do his reading.” He read Clarendon and Gibbon and Newman and the novelists of the nineteenth century. At first he had thought, of course, he’d some day write something critical on the great prose writers; later doing his reading seemed only his religious worship. He read to save his soul. During the afternoons in an upstairs room of the City Library he worked on his column or on the book reviews which he did for the Sunday Editor. After his marriage his daily life went along in the same way but that he left his pursuits a few minutes earlier to meet Mrs. Powell at their restaurant for lunch and a few minutes earlier to meet her in the lobby before dinner.

  In their parlor they read to each other on winter evenings. They read the new novels which they received from the Sunday Editor. Or they listened on their radio to campaign speeches (criticizing the rhetoric, not the politics) and to music and sometimes half way through a radio drama. They played Russian Bank—or Rummy when Mrs. Powell was very tired. Through the fall and early winter they would go to The Opera House regularly just to be seen by their friend the manager who was kind to them. When the performance was especially good they would stay through the second act, or its equivalent. But Mrs. Powell was careful of the hours she kept, and the Powells were never heard later than ten-thirty in their descants and little fits of laughter as they came down the wide, carpeted hallway to their apartment at night.

  The Augusts of their first two summers together they spent in a little denominational mountain resort a hundred miles east of the city. But they found only inconvenience in their work and the bother of being entertained by Mrs. Powell’s girlhood acquaintances who would entertain them at tea with some visiting churchman, knowing, the Powells decided, no other way to entertain “so peculiar” a couple. The third summer, therefore, they agreed that the city’s heat was preferable to the bother of the resort. Consequently their other seven Augusts they had braved the heat with after-dinner and all-Sunday-afternoon street car rides and a ceiling fan in their bed room.

  Mr. Powell was proud of Mrs. Powell’s beauty and of her taste in dress. Though these were the days of short skirts, she wore her dresses nearly to her ankles. And though even the librarians’ hair was now bobbed, she wore her hair long and stacked on the top of her head. He enjoyed walking through the hotel lobby or through The Arcade with her wearing a plain, dark dress with a diamond brooch or belt buckle or cuff buttons and perhaps tiny gold ear rings on the lobes of her ears. Her
hats, of a soft shade of green or blue malines, sat rather high on her head; in the evening she wore one with a broader brim. And the shape of her long and narrow feet was exaggerated by the low heeled pumps with the single straps that buttoned. Mr. Powell was six inches taller than she, and his greying hair could always be seen over her hat as they came through the revolving door at night, and his hand over her shoulder pushing the door for her. At every corner his white hand was at her elbow, and his narrow eyes, wrinkled at the corners, seemed solicitous of the comfort of her every step. When they had closed the door of their apartment at night, she would often take off her hat and rest her head on the blue serge cloth that covered his chest; and he would put his arms around her and hold her there, knowing that she was tired.

  Then, too, Mrs. Powell would laugh at him for many of the conventions that he observed. Once a month he wrote a letter to the Sunday Editor to thank him for the good books that they had received to review or to “be perfectly candid” about other books that did not deserve a review in a first rate publication. This, he said, made it plain “on just what grounds” he stood with the Jewish editor. At the end of each month, too, he went in detail over the bill at the restaurant at which they ate their meals, and he gave the proprietor at Christmas a “present which he could not really afford.” And this was all to make plain “on just what grounds” the restaurant proprietor stood with him. Mrs. Powell laughed at him for the regularity with which he arose each morning at seven-thirty and polished his own and her long, narrow, black shoes.

  But, as conscientiously, she arose five minutes later each morning and bathed and applied the great quantities of powder to her body that she did and drew his bath for him. And when he returned from his bath, she would have his blue serge suit and what clean linen she thought he needed laid out on the bed for him.

  It was, in fact, the absence of his clothes from the bed that stopped him in the center of the room as he returned from his bath one morning. His clothes had not been laid out, and he found Mrs. Powell standing, in her lavender dressing robe, by one of the tall windows. In her heelless slippers between the long drapes her height seemed that of a child of nine or ten years. He spoke to her, and she turned to him smiling. But she had not powdered her face, and with the green draperies and her lavender robe her complexion seemed a mixture of those colors.

  “I’m not going to go over and work today,” she said, still smiling at him. Her appearance, at first childlike, now suggested a very old woman. She wasn’t yet fifty-five.

  He took a step toward her. Then, as if recalling a tacit agreement, he said calmly, “You’d better get back to bed, dear.”

  “When you have gone, I think I shall,” she said.

  “No,” he told her, and he went to her. “Now.” He helped her out of her robe, and she climbed between the covers of the bed.

  When the doctor was leaving, two hours or so later, Mr. Powell stopped with him in the vestibule. And he was told that “it might be a week, it might be a month before the end.”

  He was out of the apartment only for an hour at meals after that. He thought that she might need that much rest from the sight of him. The nurse slept on a cot in the little study that they had never used. She slept there in the day time, and he slept for a while at night. He read to his wife and talked with her and would sit for hours while she rested or slept.

  During the first week the red-headed manager of the Opera House came twice. Each time she wept as she talked to Mr. Powell in the vestibule. The Sunday Editor came once and sent flowers the next day. After this the nurse left instructions at the desk that no visitors should see either Mr. or Mrs. Powell. Mrs. Powell even wanted to let the nurse go, and she asked the doctor not to come back.

  Indeed, the doctor could do little for her and so would often not see her or Mr. Powell but would only enquire from the nurse. The nurse sat in the parlor mostly with the bed room door half open, and Mr. Powell sat by his wife’s bed holding her hand. She would drop off to sleep in the afternoons; and he would sit by her, gazing out the window at the old Confederate Bank Building. He was thinking one afternoon, as he gazed out there, of that letter of introduction to Mrs. Powell which he had once received from Benton Young. He had called on her, and she too had had a letter. It was the last either had ever heard from him and after many failing attempts to communicate with him to tell him of their marriage they had supposed him dead in some obscure village in central Europe. For there, a vague rumor had come from one of her performers through the manager of the Opera House, he was supposed to have been seen—aged and in failing health.

  It was not the first time that Mr. Powell had sat by the window during his wife’s illness and thought of the man that had directed the life of each and finally brought them together. And they had, of course, together talked of him for many hours since the morning she had had the first warning of the end as she stepped from her bath. Today by the window Mr. Powell was only wondering what had become of those letters of introduction.

  His back was to the bed, and his eyes were vaguely on the owner of the poultry store, who was closing up his store for the day. He heard his wife stir in the bed and turned to see her half sitting up, resting on one elbow. Her eyes shone and she was smiling at the doorway.

  “Benton Young,” she said.

  Mr. Powell looked at his wife and then at the half opened door. He turned back to her and sat on the bed beside her. “My darling,” he said.

  But she waved him away and kept looking through the half open doorway. “There’s Benton Young in the parlor,” she said in seemingly real amazement. “He’s coming in to see us.” Mr. Powell stood up and turned to call the nurse. And he beheld Mr. Benton Young stepping into the room.

  Mr. Powell’s head was swimming, and he took hold of one of the strong posts of the great bed in which his wife was lying.

  “Benton,” his wife said in nearly a whisper, “you haven’t changed. You haven’t aged a day.” Mr. Powell saw their old friend take a few steps forward, and he saw in the dim twilight that he appeared no older than he had been over twenty years before when Mr. Powell had left him in Paris.

  He saw Benton Young take another step forward and heard him address Mrs. Powell and himself by their given names. He heard him telling them that knowledge of their marriage had brought him great satisfaction and that he hoped the function of his acquaintance with them had been only to prepare them for the ten years of happiness that they had had. Then Mr. Powell was conscious of a soft cry from his wife’s bed, and as he turned to her he called aloud for the nurse. He held the hand of the faded woman tightly and kissed her sallow forehead, and now he saw that she had lost consciousness.

  Before he thought of Benton Young again it was eight o’clock, and the doctor and the nurse had sent him out to breathe the cold night air and to get himself a cup of coffee. But by the time he had finished half a cup of coffee he had forgotten the strange appearance of the man in his apartment that afternoon. He returned to the hotel and sat by his wife’s bed all that night.

  In the middle of the next morning he was by her side looking at her weary features when his wife’s eyes opened and looked at him. She smiled feebly, and he came close to her.

  “I’ve something to tell you,” she whispered.

  “Are you sure that you want to,” he asked, “that you’re up to it?”

  She nodded to him and then told him that he knew all that she was going to tell him but that she wanted to say it to him before she died. “We’re two peculiar old people, dearest. The things we’ve wanted no one else has seemed to value. The strangest things either ever wanted were the other and a life centering around this old hotel.” He tried to stop her, protesting that he did know all of this and that she mustn’t use her strength. “But it’s about our lives before that I want to tell you,” she continued. “It seems that it was nothing but a preparation for these ten years. I could have asked for no more. I could never have guessed there might be this much for someone as small as I
. In those years before I knew you I often wanted to whip myself into a commoner mould.” She hesitated for what he knew would be her last sentence. “I’m only glad that I kept myself peculiar through those years for our marriage.”

  In the afternoon Mrs. Powell lost consciousness again, and in the old hotel on that twilight she drew her last breath.

  In a few days Mr. Powell stopped at the desk and asked the manager and clerk if a Mr. Benton Young had enquired at the desk for his room number during Mrs. Powell’s illness. The bald-headed clerk was certain that he had not. And he told his favorite guest that he had never left the desk before midnight during Mrs. Powell’s illness. Mr. Powell then saw him write down the name of Benton Young on his white pad as he said that he would keep an eye out for him and notify Mr. Powell immediately if Mr. Young called. Mr. Powell didn’t question the nurse, for he could consider the doctor and nurse only as the mechanics of death. And he did not enquire at the desk again, and he felt no urge to seek further knowledge of his old friend. He was not interested in the physical fact of whether Benton Young was alive or dead.

  CHRONOLOGY

  NOTE ON THE TEXTS

  NOTES

  INDEX OF TITLES

  Chronology

  1917

  Born Matthew Hillsman Taylor Jr. on January 8 in Trenton, Tennessee, the fourth child and second son of Matthew Hillsman “Red” Taylor and Katherine Baird (Taylor) Taylor. (Before Red and Katherine’s wedding, in 1908, the two Taylor families were unrelated. His were the “West Tennessee Taylors,” based for generations in Trenton, the seat of Gibson County, a city of twenty-five hundred about a hundred miles northeast of Memphis, in what was then cotton country; hers were the “East Tennessee Taylors,” based along the Nolichucky River, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, near the border with North Carolina. Red Taylor, b. 1884, a former All-Southern tackle for the Vanderbilt Commodores, was junior partner in Taylor & Taylor, his father’s Trenton law firm. In 1909, at the age of twenty-four, Red was named the youngest speaker in the history of the Tennessee House of Representatives, which he served through 1915. He then became attorney general of the Thirteenth Judicial District. Katherine Taylor, b. 1886, a graduate of the Belmont School, in Nashville, was a skilled musician and a charismatic raconteur. She was the daughter of the late Robert Love Taylor [1850–1912], a luminary of the Democratic Party remembered throughout Tennessee as “Our Bob.” Bob Taylor was three times the governor of the state, in 1887–91 and in 1897–99, and then a U.S. senator from 1907 until his death. He was also a popular lecturer on the Chautauqua circuit.) Matthew Jr., born at home, is nicknamed “Pete” by a next-door neighbor, and the name sticks. His sisters are Sarah Baird “Sally” Taylor (b. 1910) and Mettie Ivie Taylor (b. 1912); his brother is Robert Love “Bob” Taylor (b. 1915). The family resides in a Queen Anne cottage at 208 High Street, the first of three Trenton houses that Taylor will live in during his first seven years. They worship together, at Red’s insistence, at the city’s First Methodist Church, where Katherine, a convert from the Disciples of Christ, is the organist.