A Southern Exposure (24 page)

“Of course not. How could it?” He stares at her. “There was one case I heard about up in Boston, but that was a person with a heart defect. Properly administered, no risk at all.”

My heart is probably not so good, with all this fat,
thinks SallyJane. Very likely the shock will kill me. And then she thinks, Good, that will save me the trouble of suicide.

Which makes her begin to laugh. She laughs and laughs. She is aware that Clyde is staring at her, that he is disturbed, but still she can’t stop.

“Washington’s already at war. Last night in the Shoreham, nothing but uniforms. I don’t care what Roosevelt says, we’re in this war. And I have to admit, it’s pretty goddam exciting. Cynthia, you’ve got to be up here. I miss you terrifically, to put it mildly. I don’t want you as my distant pin-up girl, I want you here. And there’s some houses in Georgetown, you’d really like them. Lots of style. This is crazy, the way we’re living now. We wanted to be young and rich again, and we did get away from all that bad stuff in Connecticut, and now we’re almost rich and we’re still pretty young, and God knows we’re both good-looking, and we’re not even living in the same town. Think about it. It does not make sense. Last weekend was terrific, but I don’t want you just on weekends. Christ! you’re my wife.
I’ll bet the Hightowers would like to come back to their house. Just ask old Jimmy. And D.C. is full of good girls’ schools, even if it does have to be private. We can afford that now. Please, darling Cynthia. I’m not dumb enough to give you an ultimatum, but think about it. If this keeps up, we could both end up having stupid love affairs, and wrecking everything. People do. That’s not a threat, exactly. But. The real point is that I need you. And you’d like it here. And I love you. I want you. I miss you.”

Certainly that very strong missive from Washington gave Cynthia a great deal to think about. And, chiding herself even as she did so, she focused on last points first. “We could end up having stupid love affairs.” Did that mean that Harry had someone in mind? Was he warning her, or possibly telling her that he had already fallen in love, or at least had a crush on someone? All these thoughts were quite intolerable to Cynthia. (Although, she had to admit, they were dimly, inadmissibly exciting.) And so she forced herself to hear the more positive notes: I miss you, I love you.

Georgetown, though. For reasons that she cannot entirely fathom, Cynthia finds the idea of a move to Georgetown very frightening. She is filled with a sort of stage fright at the prospect, a fear that she does not remember experiencing on the move down to Pinehill. But that had to do, in part, with a difference in scale: they were moving from the much larger Connecticut-New York arena to a very small town, a pond in which they hoped to be big frogs. And they mostly succeeded, Cynthia felt; they had had a certain impact, that was clear. But to move to Washington would be to walk out onto a very large, very crowded, and important stage indeed.

They could easily get back into some of the same old Connecticut troubles, debts and drinks, and damaging flirtations.

But even as she thinks all this, as she takes these negative soundings on the move, Cynthia understands that in this curious way she is actually preparing to go. She has to: D.C. is where Harry is, and she wants to be with him, she wants the marriage. She really does not like the time that she spends alone in Pinehill, despite certain friendships (she is thinking especially of Dolly and of Jimmy) and the comforts of their borrowed house. Nor does she like, at all, the idea of handsome Harry alone in Washington.

She does wonder about all these private schools for Abby, who is just beginning to be happy in the local public school. Or so it seems to her mother. She is very involved with friends, and even getting good grades. Such a relief, when the first few months she seemed so lonely and isolated, so angry at her parents for having brought her down there. All that business about wanting to go to a Negro school: Cynthia is fairly sure that there will be no Negroes in the private schools that Harry has in mind.

“I will not move to Washington,” Abby is shrieking, her blond face red, tears flying. “I won’t! You and Harry go, I’ll stay here. I could live with Deirdre and Graham, they have an extra room. Or with Melanctha and her parents, they’ve got lots of extra rooms.”

“But, Abby, we’re your parents, we want you—”

“You do not, you’re selfish, you don’t care where I am. You just want to be together, and you want a lot of money and new friends.”

“Abby, you’re being extremely unfair, not to mention rude.”

“Rude! That’s what you say about anything you don’t like. I could be a lot ruder if I wanted to. I won’t go!”

Terribly hurt, and almost as angry as she is wounded, Cynthia still manages some control as she thinks: How
dare she? What does she know?—this eleven-year-old. She does not cry (Cynthia does not, not until she is alone, later on), she does not yell back in response. She says, “Abby, I think we should discuss this later. Besides, nothing is really decided yet.” That is all she says at the time. But in her own voice she has heard the most frightening echoes of her mother’s voice, sounds of the late Edith Stone Cromwell, saying to the child Cynthia, about almost anything at all, icily, “We’ll discuss this later.”

“I’m going over to Melanctha’s
now.
” And Abby is out the front door, unaware that her mother is running upstairs to fling herself upon her bed.

Half an hour later, her face washed, sitting in the kitchen with a cup of tea, and thinking as rationally as she can about her daughter, Cynthia notes that Abby sounded both much older and much younger than she actually is: she was like a passionate adolescent, shouting for freedom and her own friends, her own school, and at the same time she was like a two-year-old, in a tantrum, protesting life. And that is exactly where Abby is, she reflects; she is poised between childhood and adolescence, and she is stuck there, for the moment. A year or so ago she was a child, in a couple of years she will be an adolescent, dear God, with all those complications.

The phone begins to ring.

“Jimmy, how nice! Well, Jimmy, what great news, that’s absolutely marvelous! When does it come out? I literally can’t wait. Esther must be thrilled. Well, of course, in fact Harry and I have been talking about just that. But, Jimmy, anytime you want, you know that. You and Esther have been so terrifically generous. Jimmy, this is crazy but Dolly Bigelow’s ringing at the front door. Listen, can I tell? Jimmy, I’ll call you tonight. Congratulations!”

•  •  •

And so it is to Dolly, as they drive along in her upright trim green Ford, that Cynthia first tells the great news about Jimmy. “His novel’s been accepted by this big New York publishing house. Esther knew someone’s brother there. Some connection.”

“Jewish people always seem to have these connections. Usually family. Have you noticed?”

“Dolly, really. No. It’s got nothing to do with Esther, finally. It’s Jimmy’s book. I think it’s just so wonderful. You know how much he cares about being a writer.”

“Well, I don’t know as I do. Seems like a big change for an oilman from Oklahoma. Maybe too much of a change.”

“I think that’s part of the point. He wanted a change.” But Cynthia gives it up—hopeless to explain such an impulse to Dolly, even if she were sure she quite understood it herself. However, even not quite understanding, possibly, she has grasped the intensity of Jimmy’s wish, his longing to have a published book. A best-seller, he hopes.

Cynthia thinks with great warmth then of Jimmy, her friend. She reflects that it is interesting, their transition from a semi-semi-flirtation to the status and sentiments of old friends. In less than a year.

Partly to punish Dolly (she very much dislikes these small remarks about Jews, and especially now, with Esther, and everything that’s happening in Germany), Cynthia continues, “And it looks like Esther and Jimmy are anxious to come back to town. So it looks like it’s Georgetown for me and Harry.”

“But you-all could just do another house switch, you three Bairds move back to the Inn and Jimmy and Esther and the girls back to their home. Heaven knows you’ve improved it some.”

Looking over at Dolly as she says all this, Cynthia is astonished
to see real tears in those bright black eyes, as she is to hear a tremor in that voice. She is touched, and also quite unable to respond in kind.

And so she answers briskly, “Well, it won’t be for quite a while. And don’t you worry, if we do go, we’ll be back to visit all the time. You’ll get so bored with us you’ll wish we’d never—”

And Dolly recovers, as quickly. “We just might come up to visit D.C. Now, wouldn’t that be something? Willard’s got a bunch of cousins up there, and we haven’t seen them for—oh, forever!”

The weather in the countryside through which they are driving, on their way out to see Dolly’s relative who sews, has suddenly changed: what was a clear light May blue has become a heavy dark menacing gray. Storm air.

Dolly asks, “You scared of thunderstorms?”

“No, I never have been.”

“I am, I’m here to tell you. I just hope we get there first.”

“I read somewhere that a car is the safest place to be.”

“It better—”

Because the storm is suddenly upon them. Thick lashing rain across the windshield, and a cover of black clouds across the sky. Heavy thunder growls like jungle animals in the distance, and for an instant a quick streak of lightning splits the sky.

Dolly shrieks, “Oh Lord God!”

“Just pull over, don’t try to drive in all this.”

Almost as soon as they are halted there, precariously, on the red clay shoulder of the highway, the storm begins to clear. The rain lets up and becomes a gentle patter. The black clouds part, like great bulls moving aside, to reveal a clear blue sky.

“Ooooo-eeeee!” is Dolly’s comment. “At least that was
a real quick one. I remember some summers down in Mississippi, those great big storms that went on for hours. All of us children hiding under the beds.”

The cousin’s house, reached shortly after the storm has ceased, is large and spreading, surrounded by a deep veranda on which there are swings and hammocks. The yard is bare, except for a bed of hyacinths next to the house, and a clump of blue hydrangeas at the steps. “Lillian never did know the first thing about flowers,” Dolly whispers to Cynthia as together they mount the stairs. “I used to tease her about her black thumb, drives her crazy!” She chuckles with satisfaction.

But: “Your hydrangeas are just the loveliest things!” is the first thing that Dolly says to her cousin. “I never could get mine to grow so full.”

The cousin, Lillian, is as tall and pale as Dolly is small and dark. And her house is large and pale and immaculately, shiningly clean; Cynthia finds it hard to believe that children and a working tobacco-farmer husband live here too. Hard to believe in fact that this porcelain woman has ever been touched by the man or by a child, with her perfect skin and long smooth sculptured hands.

Dolly and Cynthia are ushered into what must be the parlor, a shaded room in which all the furniture is upholstered in green velour, like a train. As they sit down, Cynthia observes Lillian taking careful note of the floor behind them, as though they might have tracked in dirt.

Her napkins and doilies are spread out on a card table in the middle of the floor.

Fortunately, since Lillian seems extremely shy of Cynthia, unwilling to smile or to make any sort of contact, Dolly keeps up her steady prattle. “The most wonderful things, honestly, Lil. You must have almost put your eyes out working on these little bitty cocktail napkins. And the
lace on these pillow slips! You just don’t see this kind of work anymore, not anywhere.”

Cynthia reports that night to Harry. “What was so interesting,” she tells him, “was not one word about the old sore issue, selling things in the same store with Negro women. Not one word, after all that hysteria.”

“Maybe she and Dolly settled that between themselves.”

“Maybe, but somehow I don’t think so. My hunch is that they just stopped talking about it, and sugared the whole problem over, like frosting on a cake. Southern women!—honestly.”

Harry laughs, and then he says, “It could be the money. It really could. The idea of earning any at all. Don’t forget, we’re still in a depression.”

“You’re probably right. But her stuff is really incredible. Lillian’s. I think my grandmother did things like that. Remember the sets of linen hand towels we used to have?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, good. I felt terrible when they got lost in the laundry. Anyway, it was a very strange day, all in all. But isn’t that good news about Jimmy Hightower?”

“Terrific. And the best part is that they want their house back. I’ll be down next weekend, and we can start to plan.”

“Yes, and you can talk to Abby. Oh, I forgot to tell you the bad news. SallyJane’s back down at Clyde Drake’s.”

If SallyJane dies, I will marry Deirdre Yates, thinks Russell Byrd, miserably.

If she dies, I will run off to Mexico with Norris Drake.

I will have a terrific affair with Cynthia Baird.

He thinks, If SallyJane dies, I’ll die.

I must stop this. It’s only the rain, and the blackness, he thinks.

For this is a strange dark rainy day in June, the hot air all stifled with blanketing black clouds, the woods and flowers and even the birds immobilized. If he were in California, Russ imagines, everyone would be saying it was earthquake weather, remembering the big one, in Long Beach, in ’33. But here in Pinehill there isn’t going to be an earthquake. There’s not going to be anything.

Against his better judgment, he has sent off a draft of his long verse drama, the Kansas pig story, to Oscar, the Hollywood agent. Sent it off knowing that he should not. Knowing that nothing good but only destruction will come of Oscar’s reading it. And now whenever the phone rings he imagines that it is Oscar, with bad news.

Or Clyde Drake, with bad news of SallyJane.

For that too was against his better judgment, sending SallyJane back to stay with Clyde. To have the shock treatment that Clyde is so confident will work. Finally. Russ does not think it will work; he does not think that SallyJane’s huge sorrow, her heavy sadness could be blasted off with shock. He is often tempted to call Clyde Drake and say, Don’t do it. You must not tamper with my SallyJane in that way. Let her be as sad as she wants, if that is what is necessary for her now. Besides, it sounds dangerous.