Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  I climbed the steps till I stood directly in front of her, level with her shut eyes and blocking the late sun which had made her this year the same as every year the color of bright old pennies that made us all pretend she was an Indian when we were children and spy on her from behind doors and think she knew things she wasn’t telling. I wasn’t sure she was awake until she said, “Good evening to you,” and I said, “Good evening, Aunt Zimby. How are you getting on?”

  “Mighty well for an old woman,” she said, “with all this good-feeling sunshine.”

  “Yes, it is good weather,” I said. “We’ll be calling for a little rain soon though.”

  “Maybe you all will,” she said, “but it’s the sun and not the rain that helps my misery. And if you just step out of my light, please sir, I can take the last of it.” So I sat down on the top step by her feet that were in what was left of last year’s shoes, and the sun spread back over her face, and whatever it was my great-grandfather thought the Warrior Princess Ozimba looked like, it must have been something like that.

  When she spoke again it seemed to confirm she knew somebody was with her. “I been setting here wondering is my mulberries ripe yet?”

  I looked down at her knobby little tree and said “No, not yet.”

  “My white folks that I works for, they littlest boy named Phil, and he do love the mulberries. One day his Mama was going off somewhere, and she say to him, ‘Phil, don’t you eat n’er one of them mulberries.’ So he say, “No ma’m’ like he swearing in court. Well, I give him his dinner, and he go streaking off down the back of the lot. That afternoon I setting on the kitchen steps, resting my feets, and Phil he come up towards me through the yard, no bigger than a mosquito, and ask me, ‘Aunt Zimby, what you studying about?’ I say to him I just wondering if them mulberries back yonder is fit to eat yet. And he don’t do nothing but stand there and turn up that face of his, round as a dollar watch and just as solemn but with the mulberry juice ringing round his mouth bright as any wreath, and he say, ‘I expect they is.’”

  I thought she was going to laugh—I did, softly—but suddenly she was still as before, and then a smile broke out on her mouth as if it had taken that long for the story to work from her lips into her mind, and when the smile was dying off, she jerked her hand that was almost a great brown bird’s wing paddling the air once across her eyes. It was the first time she had moved, and coming quick as it did, it made me think for a minute she had opened her eyes with her hand and would be turning now to see who I was. But the one move was all, and she was back in her age like sleep so deep and still I couldn’t have sworn she was breathing even, if there hadn’t been the last of the sun on her face and the color streaming under the skin.

  I sat for a while, not thinking of anything except that it was cooling off and that I would count to a hundred and leave if she hadn’t moved or spoken. I counted and it seemed she wasn’t coming back from wherever she was, not today, so I set the shoe box by the side of her chair and got up to go. Vesta would see them when she came at dark to lead her mother in. I was all the way down the steps, going slow, hoping the dog wouldn’t bark, when she spoke, “You don’t know my Mr. Phil, does you?”

  I walked back so she could hear me and said No, I didn’t believe I did. There was no use confusing her now and starting her to remembering my father and maybe crying. Nobody had told her when he died.

  She felt for the tin can beside her chair and turned away from me and spat her snuff into it. (She had said before that if she was going sinning on to her grave after dips of snuff, it was her own business, but she wasn’t asking nobody else to watch her doing it.) Those few slow moves as gentle and breakable as some long-necked waterfowl brought her to life again, and when she had set her can down, I thought I ought to say something so I got back onto how nice the weather was.

  But she held her eyes shut, knowing maybe that if she had opened them and hadn’t been blind anyhow, she would have seen I wasn’t who she had expected all year long. “Yes sir, this here’s the weather you all wants for your dances, ain’t it?”

  I said, “Yes, it would be ideal for that.”

  “Well, is you been dancing much lately, Mr. Phil?”

  She seemed to think she was talking to me so I said No, there wasn’t much of that going on these days.

  “You a great one for the dancing, ain’t you, Mr. Phil?” All I did was laugh loud enough for her to hear me, but she wiped her mouth with a small yellow rag, and I could see that—not meaning to, not meaning to at all—I had started her.

  She began with a short laugh of her own and drummed out a noiseless tune on the arm of the chair and nodded her head and said, “You is a case, Mr. Phil.”

  I asked her what did she mean because I couldn’t leave now.

  “I was just thinking about that evening you went off to some dance with one of your missy-girls, you in your white trousers looking like snow was on the way. And late that night I was out there on you all’s back porch, and it come up a rain, and directly you come strolling up with not a thing on but your underwear and your feets in them white shoes you was putting down like stove lids, and there was your white trousers laid pretty as you please over your arm to keep from getting them muddy. Does you remember that, Mr. Phil?”

  I said there were right many things I didn’t remember these days.

  “The same with me,” she said, “except every once in a while …” A line of black children passed up the road. They every one of them looked towards us and then towards the older tall yellow girl who led the line and who had been silently deputized to wave and say, “How you this evening, Miss Zimby?”—not looking for an answer surely, not even looking to be heard, just in respect as when you speak to the sea. “… What put me to thinking about Mr. Phil is it’s time for me some new shoes.”

  And there I was with the shoes in my hands that I couldn’t give her now and wondering what I could do, and while I was wondering she raised her own long foot and stamped the floor three times, and there was considerable noise, as surprising as if that same bird she kept reminding me of had beat the air with its foot and made thunder. Before I could guess why she had done it, Vesta came to the front door and said, “Lord, Mr. Ed, I didn’t know you was out here. Me and Lonnie was in yonder lying down, and I just figured it was Mama going on to herself.” Then she said louder to Aunt Zimby, “What you call me for, Mama?”

  It took her a little while to remember. “Vesta, when have Mr. Phil been here? It ain’t been long is it?”

  Vesta looked at me for an answer but I was no help. “No Mama, it ain’t been so long.”

  “He ain’t sick or nothing is he? Because it’s getting time for me some new shoes.”

  “It won’t be long, Mama. Mr. Phil ain’t never forgot you yet.”

  And that seemed to settle it for her. The little tune she had been thumping out slowed down and stopped, and next her head began to nod, all as quick as if she had worked the whole day out in the cotton and come home and fixed everybody’s supper and seen them to bed and pressed a shirt for Uncle Ben who drove a taxi occasionally and then fallen dead to sleep in the sounding dark with the others breathing all round her.

  Vesta and I stayed still by her till we could hear breathing, but when it began, small and slow, I handed Vesta the shoes. She knew and smiled and nodded, and I told her to go on in and let her mother sleep. I stood there those last few minutes, looking through sudden amazed tears at all that age and remembering my dead father.

  Evening was coming on but the heat was everywhere still. I took the steps slowly down, and as I expected the old dog came up, and I waited while he decided what to do about me. Over the sounds of his smelling there came a crowd of high rushing nameless notes and her voice among them, low and quiet and firm on the air, “You can see them little birds can’t you, Mr. Phil? I used to take a joy watching them little fellows playing before they went to sleep.”

  I knew it would be wrong to answer now, but I looked without a
word to where her open eyes rested across the road to the darkening field and the two chimneys, and yes, they were there, going off against the evening like out of pistols, hard dark bullets that arched dark on the sky and curled and showered to the sturdy trees beneath.

  THE ENORMOUS DOOR

  THE MONTH I was twelve, my family moved to a much smaller town than we’d lived in before. It was late in the Second World War; and in such a stable place, there were no vacant houses for the four of us. So we rented four rooms on the second floor of the small but rambling three-story hotel. My parents, my baby sister and I all slept in one bedroom; and though I’d long since discovered the pleasures waiting in my smooth body, at first I enjoyed their company. It reminded me of the ancient stories I’d grown up reading—everybody sleeping on the floor of a hut, even the animals (we had a beagle), and tasting each other’s sighs in the night.

  From the word go, I loved the air of mystery in the building. The stationery proudly and rightly proclaimed “Sixty clean rooms and a first-rate kitchen.” Since my mother was a reluctant, though tasty, cook, we often ate in the tiled dining room. The good and copious country food was served by elderly black men, whose courtly air of self-respect and condescending wit would qualify them for any post today where bemused dignity is the trait desired. But my favorite part of our stay, from the first, was all those doors—sixty oak doors with brass knobs, locks and numerals, plus whatever secrets their tenants enacted in one-night stays or the thick walls’ memories of lonely men inventing the ways to bear their lives.

  When I had nothing better to do, I’d slowly patrol the carpeted halls. I’d never quite stop to peer or listen; but if I heard a muffled voice behind a door, or even the scrape of a wire coathanger, I’d find a way to pause. I’d discover I needed to tie my shoes, or I’d lean to give my socks a good pull. Sometimes a claustrophobic man, or one so lonely he could stand it no longer, would leave his door cracked open to the hall; and then I’d make an extra pass, even slower than the first, to watch him open his pint of bourbon and take a long swallow, then frown at the taste.

  Like many boys on the near edge of manhood, I had one constant flaming question—What are grown men like, truly, in secret? (I’d already given up on understanding women). I needed to study the make of men’s bodies, chiefly the distribution of hair on faces, chests, armpits, groins, legs. I needed to know if any one of them but me had learned to use himself as I did, for the furious moment of self-ignition to which I was harnessed in joy and bafflement.

  By the end of our second month there however, my hope of enlightenment was dying. The main cause was, I’d got no single useful look at a man’s whole body, a man not too much older than me—say, fifteen or sixteen. Men that young didn’t travel alone, and if they did they were sleeping in ditches. I doubt that my need, so early, was erotic. I’d have streaked for home like a shot dog if any human being, of any gender, had offered to touch me below the waist.

  In one more laser-focused way, I was hot to find a truthful glimpse of the adult world—the glimpse (I knew the secret was simple) that would say I could leave the powerless trap of dumb childhood. But all I got in the first two months were a few cold glimpses of slack-gut Bible salesmen in their undershirts, scratching at themselves, and one old circuit-judge’s bare feet as he sat exhausted on the edge of his bed and gazed my way in a smile I met with the pure revulsion that only a child in first adolescence can bear to sustain. If he could have known the force of my hate, he’d have vaporized in a puff of haze.

  So maybe it was good luck in more ways than one that, about the time I was losing hope, my parents decided I needed a bedroom. They granted that four in a room was a crowd and I agreed. But I was still so locked in self-absorption that I thought they were being kind to me. It was years before I understood they were longing for privacy of their own. And before they told me, they had the solution. We’d rent the single room, without bath, across the hall from our main door. It did have a running-water sink and a bedside phone from which I could call them at the slightest need. Would I be afraid alone?

  My relief and the thrill of a risk were so instant that I leaped at the chance. But after my father had seen me to bed on the first dark evening and shut my door—nobody locked doors in those safe days—I had second thoughts. Cold fears, to be honest. My fears at the time were all collected round the question I’ve stated. What hope on Earth did a boy like me have? I was slow at school, except for arithmetic. I was scaldingly shy with children my age, though a hit with adults, and a failure at every team sport I tried, though alone I could cut the air like a shaft; and speaking of which, I was also an archer, fast and true.

  But when I lay dark that first night alone and faced a ceiling that might as well have been infinite space, for all I could see, my panic soon swelled for another round of the bitter certainty that I, of all the boys I knew, would stay a child. I’d wind up as one of those moonmen you see on the street, forty years old but with baby-soft skin and no trace of beard. Under my arms and across my groin, I’d be as hairless as a picked chicken. And every word that left my mouth would sound as if it barely escaped from a miniature can, that boxy and high. All the gates that boys pray to pass through—the tall gates opening inward on women and their hospitable good-smelling bodies—would stay as shut as they were tonight, though I’d see them above me everywhere I turned.

  Half an hour of flinging in that direction, and I was ready to reach for the phone and yell for company. I knew better than to barge back in on my parents; they’d even moved my sister’s crib to the kitchen when I left. My father was the finest man alive, but he had his limits. Beyond them, he never got mad or mean; he walked away slowly, looking very much like a would-be suicide bound for the bridge. If I called now, he’d come.

  He’d check my closet, look under the bed and swear I was safe. He’d even lie down on the bed beside me and wait till I slept, if I asked that much. But since I’d never confessed my fear, and he’d volunteered no word of manly assurance, I couldn’t speak now. He’d leave me at midnight, sadly confirmed in what I suspected was his new fear—this son had stopped and would not be strong enough to guard his old age, which he often laughed about as my duty.

  But another ten minutes and I actually had the heavy old-time earpiece in my hand. Before the senile desk-clerk could answer, I heard a line of beautiful music, in a man’s clear voice maybe six feet away. I knew two useful things at once—it was not my father, and it meant me no harm. I lay in a warming pool of calm and listened closely. I must have been nearer to sleep than I thought since, try as I did, I couldn’t come up with a name for the voice, not to mention the tune. But that didn’t scare me. Though the voice was a deep clear baritone, it went on carving the air between us in kindly shapes.

  In maybe five minutes, I thought I could trust my legs enough to get up and try to find the man. On my bedside was a gooseneck lamp; but in my bravest choice so far, I didn’t turn it on. I let my bare feet roam about to find where the voice was strongest or—whoa now!—the actual mouth that made it. The risky thrill had me glowing in the dark.

  No luck though—nothing. I’d got as far over as the door to the hall, so I laid my ear against it. Maybe some young man was singing out there on the second-floor landing. In a dry town and county, there were still cheerful drunks; I’d seen more than one already in the lobby, mostly tired salesmen with sample cases. They’d mill around in the public space, praising the old-maid switchboard lady who quit at nine or calling me over to flip me a quarter for no better reason than that I might have parted my hair in the middle for comic effect or to give me a harmless pat on the butt and say something useless like “Be a finer person than me now, son.”

  When I heard nothing from the second-floor landing, I even silently cracked the door and looked across to the old leather chairs and the amber lamp—empty and sad. It was only when I’d shut myself in again and stood in place for my eyes to reopen that I saw the small light in the opposite door. By then the singing
had stopped entirely. I’ve failed to mention an adjoining door between my room and the next room’s bath. It was firmly locked of course from both sides; but now I discovered that somebody, sometime, had bored a hole low in the panel of the door.

  The hole was no bigger than a robin’s eye; it was about hip-level to me, and I was tall for twelve. Before I got down anywhere near it, I thought of how good an idea it would be. Young as I was, I well understood how one man could want to watch others in secret. I calculated, correctly I think, that the hole was drilled from my side inward—anyone looking from the other side into my room would have seen nothing more exciting than a door to the hall.

  In the time it took me to work that far, the song recommenced with deeper swoops and sudden high lunges. At once I could feel its waves through the space. The young man was now in the bathroom beyond me. The lighted pinhole was aimed at him. The fact that the hole was still shining bright must mean that he was not looking through at me.

  Still, crouching as I did and duck—walking three long steps to the hole was as reckless a deed as I’d put on permanent record till then. I started looking with my eye held back, five inches away. I could just see movement, something fast and white that flickered in the air. To close the gap and press my face to the actual wood was a further leap on the order of tasting a flaming sword. I closed the gap with chilling pride and waited for my eye to focus itself.

  A man, buck-naked, was standing less than a yard away. I could see his body from the hipbone down. He was drying himself with a small white towel, and yes he was singing on and on. Now I could hear occasional words. Or a single word, over and over—Darling at several pitches and speeds, mostly deep and slow. Now there were also quiet stretches when his voice would soar in a wordless line that sounded the way the best birds look.