Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  I stood too much in my childhood and said to myself too long nobody and nothing will ever defeat me, and nobody and nothing ever will. William told me I was the toughest girl he had ever known. Shy with a streak of steel, he said. But in steeling myself, something else closed up inside me. Nothing has dissolved it until you came along.

  With all the strength she possessed, she had fought to reach the safety and security of Matagorda, Hal, and Daddy. And here I am, Laurel thought.

  Back on one of her visits, Daddy said he did not believe Hal had ever liked farming. She not only thought him wrong but that he had held Hal back. Then he said that evening, “I believe Hal’s problem’s been, he’s afflicted with immaturity.” She had looked off, knowing Hal had changed in prison and knowing, too, how much he loved this land. He had told her that as a child, if he saw a boll weevil in the house he’d jump on it in a mad frenzy. And that evening she had looked out across the old grass tennis court which kept sprouting Johnson grass, so Mama simply set a birdbath in its center, and been amused.

  That evening, Daddy excused himself to take a shower. She thought he went upstairs. What prompted her, what was in her, that made her sit there sipping continuously from a decanter of creme de menthe—until, sickish, she went to the downstairs bathroom? There Daddy was just stepping from the shower—upstairs, there was only a tub—wet and naked. He drew a towel up to himself. He smiled and said, “Come in,” and was not at all his usually extraordinarily shy self. She remembered that most clearly, his blue eyes laughing. Perhaps he was only able to pass off an awkward moment. She moved on forward, in a kind of blind but wanting manner. They only clung together there a moment, his wetness pressing onto her; she could feel the faintest stirring of his organ beneath the towel, like the waggling of a small boy’s: two lonely, frustrated people. She reasoned that out later. She hurried upstairs to bed. He said that next morning they’d never mention the incident again. He had said, his eyes again holding the blue light of mischief, “You don’t know how many planters I know, about whom it’s said, his grandchildren are his children.” She understood that now, living on a plantation that was a world of its own and where there was so much proximity to one another.

  On those visits Daddy used to tell her maxims he believed in: “A man on land is rootless neither in society nor the universe.” “A man not able to work land any longer loses the fundamental basis of his dignity and authority.” She then assumed he included his son. She and Hal were secure about having the answer to living—a life of intellect and the land.

  In the orchard, Savano’s tractor ground away over branches. We don’t have either thing, she thought. The fact was as difficult to swallow as both gall and oysters.

  When her moving van arrived at her house across the orchard, she was already exhausted from dismantling the house in Connecticut, with only her mother’s anguished help. Wordlessly, day after day, they packed up. William had asked for mercy in what she took. She had said Hal had no money to buy furniture either. She ransacked the house, her loyalty with her new husband. Rick pleaded, “Not my bureau, Mom! I’ll pay you for it. How much does one cost?” Her mother said, “You can’t take his TV.” And she could wonder now how she had done all she had.

  Daddy silently watched her moving van being unloaded. Then she heard his quiet voice. “You certainly took everything on trust, Laurel.” Seeing everything she owned being carried into that old farmhouse, her family left behind, not knowing a single person herself in the entire Delta, seeing herself through Daddy’s eyes, she nevertheless wanted to say, But, Daddy, you are the MacDonalds. Who was it he didn’t trust? she wondered later.

  Once she and Hal settled into their own house, he said one night, “If it hadn’t been for you, I’d have joined the Foreign Legion.” Along with Gary Cooper? she had wanted to laugh. What did he mean? That she had drawn him into a female spider’s web and prevented him from going, to his secret regret? Or was it a compliment: if it had not been for her rescuing him, he’d have had no life but to cop out? She still did not know.

  She thought back to prison, when he suggested their living in Delton. His friend Preston up there would give him a job in his hardware company. If he was going to live in Delton and sell hardware, she needed to rethink the whole goddamned thing! she told him. Didn’t he realize that was the kind of life she left Delton in the first place to escape? Then he considered going there to work in the fine men’s store where he ordered his jeans, Pettibone’s. He liked clothes, he said. That’s all your ambition? she cried out in another letter. Sheepishly, he reported he thought a job selling might lead to something in retailing. She was to let William and his family know she married a hardware or clothing salesman? Jesus God, she said. What about farming? He wrote he agreed, the answer to living would be “a life of intillect and the land.” How did you get through Chapel Hill without knowing how to spell? she finally asked.

  That night in their farmhouse, he also said an uncle offered to get him a job on the Alaskan highway, where he had influence. Wanted to get you as far away as possible, she had thought, jolted. Why hadn’t he told her? She’d have gone to Alaska. Hal had already begun to drink several weeks after coming home, and said in a half-tight sneer which infuriated her, “You wouldn’t have left Rick-kk.”

  “I did leave Rick,” she reminded him. She believed Rick had enough adventuresome spirit he’d have gone to Alaska with her. Women’s lives could be formed so willy-nilly according to whom they married. “I’d have gone to the Peace Corps,” she said. Hal had not received the pardon he hoped for. Even his lawyer wouldn’t go out on a limb for him, he had said, because Ben Wray wanted to run for Governor. She thought how many times she had checked no on applications to the question, Have you ever been convicted of a felony? without expecting ever to know someone who could answer differently. Now she was married to such a person.

  With the land all rented, Hal came home to no job and had an idea. He would start a game preserve on Matagorda, a hunter’s paradise, where people shot the kind of exotic animals he’d hunted in Africa, the way vast acreage in Texas was being used. She imagined now giraffes craning long necks up out of cotton and soybean fields. Mama and Daddy did not want hunters, eland, and elephants roaming the place. He decided then merely to start up a small zoo. But they did not want Matagorda opened up, either, to any Negro or redneck with a quarter. Who would put up the money for these projects? she had asked. And she remembered Hal’s silence.

  In prison, he had begun sending her correspondence from other people, without seeming to understand how revealing some of those letters were. She should have thought harder about his older daughter’s letter, which said on her last visit to Matagorda, just before the tragedy, she had found her father to be a self-indulgent, self-pitying drunk and she hoped prison had made a man out of him. Pretty heavy stuff to write her father, she had thought. She tried to imagine Rick’s having to write such a letter. After worrying about why Hal would show her that letter, she decided it was an act of penitence. You can make me into a whole and complete man, Laurel, he said. I’ve needed you for years. If we’d been married in the beginning, I’d be rich and settled and filled with self-satisfaction instead of poor and at sea and frustrated. No one but Sallie could have made me deteriorate that way.

  Was it fair to blame another person? She stood worrying about her own deterioration, about Hal’s drinking patterns. Her efforts to intervene had been perhaps too feeble. Wasn’t this the truth? She did not want him to stop drinking completely because then she ought to. She had been such a different person, back in Connecticut, when he wrote her he phoned his older child early in the evening before he had a drink, and she had thought what a sad way to live: now it was her way. Only sometimes Rick phoned and caught her. She would hear the telephone ringing: Oh, don’t let that be Rick. Don’t let me answer. Then, propelled forward, she would hear him say, “Have you been drinking again, Mom?” Again? Again? She could not help but have pity for Hal. They lived free at Matagorda
because the plantation was incorporated, but Daddy had to give him an allowance. They lived frugally but could run short. She had paid for all the groceries the months she had been here; that had begun to irk her. Now she had different expenses, like Rick’s plane tickets. Oh, the hassles that came from divorce, she thought in irritation, were not worth it. She already longed to live again as innocently as she once had—as one family unit, no choice about which holiday your child spent with you.

  When they ran short of money, Hal had to trudge across the orchard to ask Daddy for just ten dollars to get them to the end of the month. Daddy lived in the past about the cost of living; yet how could they complain when ordinarily his son would have been on his own by now? She had one unsettling memory: another letter of Mama’s she wished she had not seen. I’m sure, darling, she wrote him, you’re not thinking of remarrying till you are settled and able to support a family. Daddy and I can’t keep on and on supporting wives and children. But couldn’t Daddy see what he was doing to a man already filled with humiliation? Laurel wondered.

  And a man who had no confidence in himself, she thought. Once she was free, she could not help but write him frantically about getting his own divorce. She had hated putting pressure on him, but Hal had understood:

  If it’s insecurity, angel, just let that be us because that’s the way we are. I don’t know what caused my insecurity. I’ve just always accepted it for what it was. I forced myself to fly, married to Sallie. It’s why I have so many pilot ratings, because I was determined to do it without fear. I’ve never admitted this to a living soul and don’t you tell anybody either. Just as I’ve never told anybody but you things we said in the library.

  Laurel could be astonished by what Daddy, this gentle man, had weathered so late in life; by what a man so fine had come to know. Hal’s trouble took everything out of my Hal, Mama had told her. Laurel had said about Sallie’s divorce, it seemed unfair Hal was being unfaithful while locked up in prison, before Sallie was caught doing the same thing. Frankly, she thought under the circumstances Sallie had a right to do anything she goddamn pleased. She had had the thought then: When people’s lives touched Hal’s, they often ended up hurt. Sallie was reported at the Ramada Inn’s bar late at night while Tina slept on a banquette, her schoolbooks at her side. The principal of her school wrote Hal she understood from others how he had grown in prison. She hated seeing Tina turn from a sunny, open child into a bewildered one. Sallie caused scenes at the school, and Tina tried to soothe things over. She was too young to understand the nature of her mother’s behavior and why no children were allowed to come to her house to play. Laurel’s heart went out to Tina, as she thought back to her own youthful traumas. The principal asked if Tina couldn’t be sent to summer camp, if different living arrangements couldn’t be made for her. She remembered being so glad his townspeople knew of Hal’s change and proud the principal wrote to him. But what single thing had ever been done for Tina? It seemed to her she worried more about the effects of all that happened on the child than Hal did.

  Back then, nothing released her from her compassion for Hal. Mama wrote him she was selling family silver to send money to Connie for college. And despite her own monetary situation as a divorcée, she offered to dip into her inherited stocks and send Hal money, to give him money for Tina’s camp, too. After all, soon he would be taking care of her forever, she had said. When I think of you as a contemporary locked up there, I find it hard to swallow. I feel so much for you I don’t know what to do. How in the name of God you got there is the damn thing. It makes me want to run amok sometimes, trying to save you from what has already happened to you.

  What single thing here had turned out to match her dreams for it? Laurel listened to the silence of the fields and had one answer: nothing.

  And she had worried about money once she was alone; when she and Rick went to a movie, she was outraged when one cost three dollars apiece: Easy Rider; Rick was furious the South was portrayed in a bad light. He insisted he saw familiar sights along the highway. She had to tell him the movie was not even supposed to be set in Mississippi. He loved the South so, surely he was going to move with her, she had believed. Her mother cried all the time, more worried than Laurel about the situation. One weekend when Rick and William were gone, she went to the movies alone, but the line was too long to wait. Then she had written Hal about the strange sensation of wandering about Soundport by herself on a Saturday night. She wondered what women did who were by themselves all the time. The only low-down mean thing she could think to do was to buy a package of cigarettes. She had gone home to write Hal of her longings for him, and these were made worse by his constant anguishing over her:

  I feel so strapped down in this place, Laurel. I want to be way deep inside you, and never come out. To put my mouth in your mouth, my tongue with yours, Oh, God, baby, I am torturing myself and can’t stop. I love you, Laurel. I want to kiss your eyes, taste your breasts, love them with my fingers, my lips, my tongue, I want to be drowning in you all the time. I’m loving all the rest of you. I want to entwine my legs with yours, baby, to stroke them, to wrap you round with my arms. I want to put my face on your stomach. This is senseless writing but I’ll be damned if I’m not being helped, sharing these longings with you. I may bathe you, soap you all over. My muscles are in knots. Jesus Christ, I need to get in bed somewhere, Laurel. Well, baby, if I can get that wound up sober, think how I’d be with a snootful of bourbon.

  That letter sent her to Vicksburg. A turning point. Coming home from there, she had felt sorry for William, an emotion she had never expected to feel in her life. He called on their friends explaining he was staying in the house to hold the fort for Rick. William wrote people to make sure they were still friends, even her Uncle Tate and Aunt Allie. Don’t be embarrassed if you see me in the lift line, he wrote mutual skiing buddies; we can still take a run together. At that time, the wife of one of his friends at work said her husband had been telling her for years about William and she wondered why Laurel had stayed married to him. And then she regretted having been a fool for putting up with what she knew was going on behind her back.

  Rick’s escapades had gone on, landing him in Juvenile Court. It was required he have his behavior assessed by a psychologist. She and William saw him also. The doctor reported Rick was impotent with rage because of the divorce. Privately, she told him her reasons for it. And he said William had stripped her of all confidence in herself as a woman. He thought the divorce was a good thing, that Rick could use distancing from his father. He was taken aback about her future. “Is this man kinder to you?” he asked. She had said, “Infinitely. And I love him.” “It’s a good thing he likes women,” the doctor said. “Or he’d have shot his wife.”

  For the first time, she handled situations. She went to see Rick’s main teacher and counselor. In case he noticed any difference in Rick, he ought to know his parents were getting a divorce. She would never forget that man’s absolutely startled look. “I’ve always thought of Rick as a boy always laughing,” he had said. “Suddenly, Rick has stopped laughing. And I wondered why.” That was a time, she thought, looking back, she wished she had not been able to steel her nerves as she had.

  She considered then that Rick would go to college, grow up; she’d be left with William, who already had in mind leaving her for a younger woman, someday. Even if that was not true, she thought, she’d never have with him the sexual excitement she had with Hal. At that point, she had thought she did not want to look back on a life without it.

  Booze! While living in the house during the divorce, William stuck notes to the refrigerator, and she went on taking care of him. Rick had said if she did not fix his dad’s dinner, he would have to. She recalled the evening she left a potato out on a counter for William to bake himself, and she heard his roar as soon as he entered the house. Rick asked, even after so long a time, when she was going to stop sleeping in a separate bedroom. She had told him that was required by law when you were getting a divo
rce. “Then you ought to drop the divorce,” he had said. “Dad’s trying to hold the family together.”

  “Oh. Dad’s making me the bad guy,” she had said.

  “You are the bad guy,” Rick said.

  Those months, instead of playing tennis, William began spending weekends alone in the den, watching sporting events: she could not help but sometimes want to go down and watch with him companionably, the way they had been in the marriage. She felt sorry then for what seemed suddenly William’s misery, his solitude. But she stuck to her guns. She remained in her bedroom, where she remained at night when he came home. I’m caged, too, she had written Hal.

  He had hated her feeling sorry for William. He’s been too cruel to you in the past for you to be taken in now. I used to feel sorry for Sallie, but no more. The ones I feel sorry for are the souls they will continue to drag down and abuse, the way they did us.

  William never dragged me down, Laurel thought.

  Back on that dimly lit road to Swan, she wanted to say, Mama, I know just how much you hated unpacking your own trunk here. Barely had they moved to Matagorda when Daddy told Hal they were going back to Delton. “Mama couldn’t adjust,” he said. “I almost hated her.” He was still in his Tom Sawyer period. “But you stayed?” Laurel said. “Mama realized she’d never have a house anywhere else like the one she had at Matagorda.” Laurel thought her mother-in-law should have returned to the Junior League, the Delton Art Academy, people like herself, and saved her soul.

  Pris got herself out of the country by the time she was twelve: foxier than Mama. She told Laurel Pris came home from school all the time crying about how mean the teachers were to her; they were jealous of the MacDonalds back in those Depression years. They had sent Pris back to Delton to Miss Poindexter’s to board. Afterward, she went away to camps, a distant boarding school, college, and then married. She had scarcely lived in the country again and yet was filled with criticisms about how Hal’s wives had ignored Mama. “Well, she never shows her face up around here,” Laurel said. She had had to give up too quickly her dreams about being family with Pris. Pris had never been warm to any of Hal’s wives and now was perhaps just tired of changing sisters-in-law. Laurel had turned to her once and knew to expect nothing from now on, still to her regret.