Siesta, p.22
Siesta, page 22
But what had all that do to with her today? What had that to do with Branch’s going to the country? With Eliot Owens’s knowing he had gone? Nothing. Her world had suddenly shifted a little with her being left alone; it made her more conscious of it. It set her thoughts moving. That was all.…
As she was parking the car under a shade tree the telephone in the house began to ring. Her cheeks flushed. She knew who it was; she knew what he was going to say.
She walked up the front steps with deliberate slowness. If it stopped ringing that was all right.—
“I can’t make it,” she said.
“But you’ve got to. I’ll come and get you.”
“I’m going to supper at my aunt’s.”
“I’ll come there for you after supper.”
“No.”
“I want to see you.”
She picked up a pencil on the telephone table and twisted it in her fingers, saying nothing.
“I want to see you. I’m going away next week.”
“You are?”
“How will eight-thirty suit you?”
She balanced the pencil on the eraser and licked her lips.
“Make it a quarter to nine,” she said.…
She went about the rest of the day with two voices speaking in her, each offering a motive for what she was about to do; one she clung to, the other she feared. They didn’t bring up a question to be decided; she had already decided. She was going. But why? A sort of exhilarating terror swept through her veins when now and then she stopped and looked at it face to face; she could hardly imagine herself even contemplating it. What would her aunt say? Her father? The whole town? If they knew. But they wouldn’t know. She would never tell anybody. Not anybody. She could keep a secret. She had kept one before.
Of course, though, they might find out, somebody might see them, somebody might guess. Mr. Applewhite! He might already suspect something. He might guess. He might tell Branch. If Branch found out! That would be deplorable, simply deplorable; he couldn’t understand. Who could? Everything would be lost then, everything that she was trying to gain, and everything that she already had besides. If he found out, she would have to leave him; things would never be the same between them again.
But if he didn’t find out! Then everything, she thought, would be immeasurably better. They would be happy then; that was all that was standing in the way. She would bind him to her then. It would not be a marriage that was lasting simply through laziness; it would be something real and strong. The body and the soul were so inextricably interwoven; she remembered vividly the first night she had lain down beside him, but with an even greater vividness she remembered the next day and the deep yearning in her soul just to be with him, just to walk with him, listen to him, look at him, a deeper yearning for those things than she had ever known before. Now it was different, but it was different just because they were both such children; she had thought about it a great deal and she was sure. She had said to herself on many a restless night, that if the chance ever came by which she could become a little less of a child about all that she would not hesitate.… Now it had come.
She had no feeling for Eliot at all, beyond a sort of clear liking for him, for the child in him of another kind, imp perhaps. He had a sort of irrepressible exuberance about him toward any girl with a good figure; she knew that was all he saw in her. But she didn’t mind in the least; in fact that was exactly as she would have ordered it. He had put his arm round her with a mixture of impudence and real tenderness that no girl could possibly pretend to be offended at without laughing. There was a pleasant lightness about him in regard to her; it was not levity so much as a sort of tacit taking for granted that she, the good figure in question, understood and he understood that this was not something to wreck their lives over but, at the same time, being one of the buds of summer, it was worth anybody’s special consideration.
But the voices in her head kept trying to confuse her motives. This was a business proposition, as her father would say. Something had to be done about her and her husband; she loved him, she loved the potentialities of their being together. She knew what ought to be done, and she was going to do it. She understood clearly, without ever saying it to herself, that if it hadn’t been for her and her husband, Eliot would not have been of the slightest interest to her, more than as amusing company in a crowd.… And yet, was that true? Was she really doing this because she loved her husband? Did she really believe that? And if she did, wasn’t she just fooling herself? Wasn’t she just trying to justify something she wanted to do anyway? No. No! She was as sure as she had ever been of anything. She had counted on their marriage, put everything on it. It wasn’t working out; she was going to do something about it. She wouldn’t only do this, but almost anything. Anything! There were no limits to what she would do for her love. She thought of school and the February night she had broken all the rules and gone to Richmond for a birthday present; she smiled at the danger now, but then it had been intense. That was a real love then, and she had acted for it. This was her real love now.… She looked at a calendar. There was a moon in the third quarter; it would rise about ten o’clock.
Austin’s grandmother had left him a great black tray with a wide border and fluted edges and garlands of demure flowers painted on it. He had Oregon put it on the porch table before he went home, filled with tall glasses and a large bowl for ice and bottles of ginger ale and charged water; having observed Oregon over some twenty years, he attended to the detail of the corn whiskey himself.
He was in the pantry decanting the whiskey from a fruit jar as carefully as possible to keep any blemish off his brittle white suit, when Gwendolyn strolled in from the dining room with an unlighted cigarette that looked very clean and washed amidst the pearl and carmine of her fingernails.
“Got a match?” she said.
Austin put down the jar and the decanter and felt in his stiff coat pocket. He lighted her cigarette, looking at the smooth fair strands of her hair as she bent over. A host of things he wanted to say to her stampeded into the front of his mind and jammed.
She stood up, glanced at the smoke cloud, and opened the icebox.
“Hungry?” he said.
“Thirsty.”
He poured two drinks.
“Has Eliot gone for Maybelle?”
“Yes.… You know, Eliot’s got quite a yen for that girl. I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.”
Austin turned back to the fruit jar. “Do you want my advice?”
“What?”
“Get even with him. Pretend you’ve got quite a yen for—somebody else.”
She laughed. “Who?”
“Oh, there’re lots of people.”
“Oh, Austin!… I am fond of you, too.” She came over beside him and patted the hand holding the neck of the decanter. Then she lifted the corner of a damp cloth that covered a silver platter. “Sandwiches!”
Austin had been about to stammer something, but her irrelevant discovery of the sandwiches offended him. He put the stoppers in the bottles and carried them into the dining room in silence. He returned to the door and said to her somewhat formally, “Shall we go outside where it’s cooler?”
She bit a sandwich in half and as she passed him held the other half out to him. For a very brief moment he considered saying No-thank-you, but he decided against it almost at once and was glad. She popped it into his mouth.
They walked out on the porch.
“I’m glad Nora isn’t coming,” she said.
“Don’t you like Nora?”
“No.… I’m jealous.”
Austin laughed with a film of bitterness. “I don’t believe you-all know what jealousy means. I had a little talk with Eliot this afternoon. He brought up the subject. He said, ‘Well, how do you like Gwen?’ I was flabbergasted, you know; feeling as I do about you, you know. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t like to say I loved you; I didn’t know just how he might take it. I was born and raised down here in Alabama, which ranks, in just about any list you can find, either at the bottom or next to the bottom, with Georgia and South Carolina running neck and neck. I mean this is a backward country; we still think of a husband’s getting a little angry if someone says he loves his wife. I didn’t want to make him mad. I said, ‘I think she’s beautiful.’ Then he said, ‘I rather had an idea you fancied Gwen.’ When he put it that way, I said, ‘Well, now that you mention it, I rather do.’ He said, ‘I thought so.’ I didn’t know just how he meant that; I didn’t know but that he was getting mad, but I thought I’d better make a clean breast of it now that it had gone this far, so I said, ‘As a matter of fact, old fellow, I’m in love with your wife.’ And he said, ‘Everybody is; she’s never yet made a try for a man and missed.’… He’s mighty proud of you, Gwendolyn.”
She laughed. “Of course he is.”
“But doesn’t jealousy mean anything in you-all’s lives?”
“Certainly. I’m jealous of Nora.”
“Why are you jealous of Nora?”
“Because you like her.”
He laughed incredulously, trying to make the incredulity hide his contentment. “Why, I’ve never thought about Nora for two minutes in my whole life!”
“You like her just the same.”
“Of course I like her. She’s so absolutely A-one you have to like her, but—I don’t know.”
“I know.… She doesn’t give you goose-flesh the way I do.”
She allowed him to pull her toward him with a half-resisting smile.
“Maybe so.”
Then she pulled back. “Well, I’m sick of giving people goose-flesh.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“I am. Sick of it!” She freed herself petulantly. “I’m sick of being propositioned by every pair of male eyes I run into.”
Austin thought bitterly of all the male eyes in Georgetown. “No resistance at all?” he said, with some irony.
“No.… Practically none.”
“Who’s the practically none?… Mr. Applewhite?”
“I’m not going to tell you.”
“Well, of course if you’re going in now for octogenarians—”
“You’re making me mad again, Austin.”
“Who is this man with the iron will?”
“You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing you could possibly do would make me tell you!”
“Well—”
“I’m not in love with him. I just appreciate somebody’s looking at me as if I were an honest woman.”
“But how do I look at you?”
“Spare yourself being told!”
“Oh, wait a minute. I look at you as if you were a human being. Have you ever read Anna?”
“There’s somebody coming up the front steps. Maybe it’s Eliot and that girl.”
Austin went to the iron railing and looked down. “Hello, Lee,” he said unenthusiastically.
“Austin,” said Mr. Lee Hill, “I’ve just discovered what’s the matter with Georgetown.—Good evenin’, ma’am.—There’s no place to sleep in Georgetown. Now and then a lady will invite me to supper, but that’s all. I break bread with her and go my way. And yet our Savior himself has said, ‘Man cannot live by bread alone.’… I’m a po-o-or little sheep with no place to sleep—”
“There they are now,” she said.
“Who is that, ma’am?”
“Eliot and Maybelle.”
“Fix yourself a drink, Lee.”
“I’m a po-o-or little sheep—”
“I’m glad to see you,” said Mr. Applewhite earnestly to Pavinovsky as they walked out of Mrs. Eubanks’s white gate and got in Pavinovsky’s car; he thought the boy seemed a little subdued. “How are you standing the summer?”
“Um,—I don’t like it. I’m sorry, but I really don’t like it. I don’t think I like small towns.”
“You’d better be careful how you say so.”
“You have no privacy. It’s like living in a boarding house.”
“That’s true.”
“Excuse me if I—”
“Don’t mention it. If I weren’t living in one I might not realize how right you are.”
“I don’t like strangers to be so close to me.”
“When are you going back?”
“I don’t know. It’s a little indefinite. Not for some time yet.… My sister shrugs her shoulders at all that, but I can’t do it.”
“You aren’t used to it.”
“Their attitude toward me, toward my art,—but let’s not talk about it.… I’d like to have you meet my sister.”
“I’d like to very much.”
“I thought perhaps we might go to see her tonight if—”
“I’d be delighted.…”
They sat out in some canvas chairs under a hackberry tree in the backyard. Judith brought a tray with some cake and a bottle of sacramental wine.
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to do something about your brother,” Mr. Applewhite said with a disguising laugh.
She looked at him quickly.
“I think he’s had about enough of Georgetown for the time being.”
“No,” said Pavinovsky, laughing; “when I’ve had enough I’ll go.”
“But do you know your capacity?” said Mr. Applewhite.
“Intimately.”
“All right, then. All right.”
“It isn’t very exciting,” Judith said. “Nothing ever happens. There’s not much for him to do—”
“You probably have plenty to do.”
“Plenty.”
“You work round on Cotton Row, don’t you?”
“Yes. I work for Mr. Telfair.”
“Do you like it?”
“Well, I never thought of it exactly that way. I’ve been there going on sixteen years. I wouldn’t want to change, if that’s liking it.… You probably know Mr. Telfair.”
“No, I don’t. I know his daughter, Maybelle.”
“He’s my idea of a real Southern gentleman. He has made lots of money too. Things are kind of slow right now, but we have made it. Georgetown used to be the second biggest inland cotton market in the world. Then the river began to get so full of sand they had to take the boat off and the railroads raised their freight rates to favor the ports. We still do a fair business though.”
“The cotton farmer seems to have had a right tough time. It seems to cost them more than twelve cents to raise it.”
“They don’t know what it costs them to raise it. They don’t know what a book-keeping system looks like. They’re always complaining. They could get a dollar a pound and they’d still complain. It’s such a gamble. They always think that maybe next week the market’s going up. We store it for them, you see, until they are ready to sell it. We lend them money against it. Sometimes they hold it for a year or more. There’s one old customer of ours up at Due West that’s still got his 1930 crop. He could have got twenty cents for it in 1930 and now he can’t get nine; he couldn’t get seven with the warehouse charges against it and insurance. But he won’t take his loss. He says it’s going up again. It don’t look to me like it ever would go up again.”
“What happens when you can’t sell it for what you’ve loaned him?”
“When it gets to a cent of what we’ve loaned him, he has to put up more against it. If he can’t do that we have to sell it.”
“You can’t lose then.”
“Can’t lose! Mr. Telfair owns three thousand acres of farm lands he has had to take in on part payment. Not counting a clay mine. One of these farmers, old man Jim Baker, put up a clay mine as security and Mr. Telfair had to take it. He runs it too. Some people would let it sit idle, but Mr. Telfair don’t believe in that.—But now he won’t credit anybody named Baker.”
“A clay mine?”
“You know, chalk, kaolin. They use it in making tires some, but most of it’s used in making paper.”
“Paper?”
“Oh, Lord, yes. His biggest customer is The Great Lakes Paper Company. They own the Daily News.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Yes, they own papers all over the South—”
“Business! Business!” said Pavinovsky. “If you don’t stop I’ll go jump in the river.”
She put out her hand and patted him on his bare forearm. “Of course, they don’t buy the clay they used to.”
“I’ve never seen a clay mine.”
“Haven’t you ever seen a clay mine? Mr. Telfair would be glad—”
They drank the sacramental wine while the moon sailed through the hackberry tree and the street noises died away. He liked them. He didn’t know why; he hadn’t very much in common with them. But they were pleasant to sit round with.
“No, sir,” she said, “Mr. Telfair won’t credit anybody named Baker. There was a man named Baker once, he wasn’t any kin to old Jim Baker, his name was Bill Baker. He lived over in middle Georgia at a little town called Sautee, and he owed Mr. Telfair seven hundred and fifty dollars. I remember the account well. Mr. Telfair had financed him one year and his crop failed; they had a cyclone that year and he didn’t make anything. But the next year was a good year; everybody said the cotton all through that section was the prettiest you ever saw. Well, September and October came round and the crop was gathered and sold, but we didn’t hear anything from Mr. Bill Baker. We began to get a little worried that maybe we wouldn’t ever get our seven hundred and fifty dollars. Once they get behind with you, you know, they’re more than likely to quit you and start doing business somewhere else. So Mr. Telfair thought maybe we’d better send somebody over there and see if Mr. Baker couldn’t pay us something.
“‘Why don’t you send Mr. Randolph Wesley?’ I said.
“‘Randolph don’t know that country,’ Mr. Telfair said.
“‘Maybe that would be a good thing,’ I said. ‘Sometimes, you know, a new man can do more with a thing like that than an old one.’
“He thought a minute, then he said, ‘Get Randolph on the telephone there, Miss Judy. Tell him I’d like to talk to him first chance he gets.’
