A Short History of a Small Place (6 page)

Daddy said Wallace Amory jr. was an accomplished piddler. He could engage himself for days on end in the sorts of chores an average man could dispatch with in an afternoon. And he was not ashamed to piddle, Daddy said, but made himself conspicuous at it. He said Wallace Amory could squat on his lawn grubbing weeds for three days running, or drag a mattock and a shovel out of his cellar and tell every passerby how he was digging a drainage ditch off from the house, or announce to his carpenters how he planned to help them hang doors or lay shingles. And Daddy said his lawn was always as ragged with weeds as it ever was, and he said a little ground might get cut up but the ditch was never dug, and the carpenters told how Mr. Pettigrew would get him a hammer and a nail apron and then occasionally finger a door hinge and sometimes set foot on the roof. But he waltzed divinely, Momma said, and made delightful conversation. And Daddy said it was a good thing.

Then the war came and everything stopped. Daddy was twenty in 1941 and he wanted to be an air cadet, but he said when he was standing outside the induction center in Texas, he saw a fighter plane and a B-17 collide over the airstrip and fall to the ground in a fiery heap. So when the sergeant called him in and said, “Air corps?” Daddy said, “No sir. Infantry,” and Daddy said that’s how he got to tour Europe clinging onto the outside of a tank. He saw action in France and Belgium and got wounded in Paris when a buddy dropped his rifle and it went off and creased Daddy’s calf. Daddy loved to tell that story and he would just cackle, but Momma lost a cousin at Corregidor and a neighbor of hers got drowned coming off a troop transport at Sicily, so she never laughed when Daddy talked about the war.

Momma said that in the war years Neely was full of little boys and granddaddies and old worn-out women and young worn-out women, and she said there was nothing in the world to do but wait for the mailman to come and pray that he wouldn’t. Momma said the postmen in Neely had never worn neckties until the war, had never worn their grey wool uniforms with stripes down the trouser legs, had never worn their postal issue caps, had never been so severe and proper until the war came along to make them extraordinarily significant. They would knock on doors, Momma said, and out would come mothers and wives and sisters already on the raw edge of agony, and the postman would extend the notice towards them and he would not say, “I’m sorry,” or “Forgive me,” or “If there’s anything I can do,” but simply “Ma’m.” And Momma said nobody who got one ever opened it right off, but clutched it and bent it and worked it through their fingers and never neglected to say, “Thank you.” Kissing the axe, Daddy called it.

Daddy said Wallace Amory jr. didn’t go to war but went only as far as Georgia where he got attached to the personal staff of a colonel at Fort Benning. He was charged with the responsibility of being handsome and diverting at formal functions, and Daddy said Mr. Pettigrew built himself a reputation as a man with a rarified knowledge of the intricacies of the German mind. But after the war was over and everybody had either come home for good or not come home at all, Mr. Pettigrew told Daddy that everything he knew about Germany he had gotten from a man he’d once shared a table with in a restaurant, including the only two sentences he could utter in the language: “The weather is pleasant though cool” and “Bismarck was a remarkable fellow.”

Momma said he came home to Neely about once every six weeks, and he and Myra Angelique (Sister, he called her) would stroll arm in arm down the boulevard, Wallace Amory in his snappy dress uniform and Miss Pettigrew done up in a simple frock and hair ribbons so as to seem, Momma said, almost inadvertently lovely. They would chat with people on the sidewalk and stop into the shops and businesses, and Momma said Mr. Pettigrew would talk in the most lighthearted and careless way about “our little European engagement,” or “our little continental flare-up,” or just “our little skirmish.” And he was jolly, Momma said, offhanded, and seemed always to assume that everyone was as untouched and unscathed by the war as he was. She said he gave pain to some folks, especially to those men and women who had lost a son or a brother or a husband and who had not quite gotten out of the habit of listening for troop trains and watching for that familiar scrawl in the letterbox. They didn’t want to hear about skirmishes and flare-ups, but they let Mr. Pettigrew tell them and they let him laugh and be casual about the war, probably, Daddy said, because he was Mr. Pettigrew of the Pettigrew fortune and the Pettigrew mansion and the Pettigrew heritage, all of which assured him of the sort of respectability that he would sometimes fail to live up to.

But Daddy said Mr. Pettigrew made up for his indiscretions once the war ended. Daddy said we needed him then, Neely needed him because folks were weary and fairly down-trodden and it would take a Mr. Pettigrew to pick them up again. So Daddy said the citizens of Neely did the only thing they could do: they made him mayor. There was no campaigning, there was not even an election. It was all very proper and fitting to the occasion and the candidate, Daddy said. The town council invited Mr. Pettigrew to become mayor and he accepted their invitation. Daddy said Buddy MacElrath was mayor of Neely at the end of the war and was very contented with his position, but he gave it up, Daddy said, gave it up without a whimper because he saw that it wasn’t a matter of politics but a matter of morale, of what Daddy called spiritual necessity. Neely didn’t need a mayor in 1945. It needed a beacon, Daddy said. And Mr. Pettigrew, with his fortune and his mansion and his heritage, was more than prominent enough for the citizens of Neely to take a heading from. Daddy said Wallace Amory jr. stunk of his daddy’s success and his daddy’s money and his daddy’s ambition, and he said it gave the people of Neely a healthy kick in the pants to point to Mayor Pettigrew and say, “That man represents us.”

Consequently, it didn’t matter that Mayor Pettigrew was a piddler since there was really nothing a mayor did that couldn’t be piddled through, except maybe presiding over commencements and openings, and Daddy said folks figured that if Mayor Pettigrew could handle a golden shovel he could manage well enough with a pair of scissors and a ribbon. So people couldn’t have known what they started when they invited Wallace Amory Pettigrew to become mayor. They couldn’t even have suspected that the job would catch fire with him. Momma said they were all surprised. Daddy said they were astounded and that he’d never seen a man so ripe with zeal, he called it.

There was a time in Neely when the mayor was treated to a swearing-in dance at legion hall #33, but Wallace Amory jr. changed all of that. He and Miss Pettigrew gave an inaugural ball at the Pettigrew mansion where they served exotic canapes and authentic French champagne in crystal glasses. Momma and Daddy went and Momma said it was exceedingly glorious. Daddy said yes, Mayor Pettigrew did indeed dance divinely and did indeed make delightful conversation. A photographer from the
Chronicle
was present, and a half dozen of his pictures appeared on the “Social Sidelights” page of the Sunday edition. There was one of all the councilmen and their wives. One of the Presbyterian minister Mr. Holroyd with his mouth full of pate. Two of the dance floor taken from up on the balcony. One of the mayor shaking hands with a man who was obliterated from the knees up by what Momma said was the knobby part of her shoulder. And one of Wallace Amory jr. and Miss Myra Angelique waltzing which carried the caption “Mayor and Sister cut the shine.”

Daddy said this was the sort of thing we wanted from our new mayor—idle pleasure, extravagance, simply something to point towards. But he said the office had a horrible and unexpected effect upon Wallace Amory jr.: it made him a politician. According to Daddy, nobody had imagined there was a politician inside of Wallace Amory waiting to get out. But there was, Daddy said. And it got out, Daddy said. He said the mayor made two speeches right off that seemed to put his career on the wing, one to the Ladies Garden Society and the other to the Neely chapter of the D.A.R. Each address was received with a riotous ovation which the mayor attributed to his political bravado, but Momma said the ladies were most likely applauding his beauty, his grace, and his fine tailored suit. She imagined very few of them had even heard the mayor. It seems he had been talking water bonds.

And that’s the way it went, Daddy said. Wallace Amory would give a politician’s speech and get a Pettigrew’s reception. He got up before the Methodist Men’s Association, and the Neely Cotillion, and the Rotary Club, and the Businessmen’s Council and was uniformly met with wild enthusiasm, which Daddy said was nothing more than overblown courtesy but which the mayor took to calling his “endorsement by the good people of this fine community.” And Daddy said Wallace Amory jr. became almost entirely unbearable. He said Neely wanted a mayor who made delightful conversation and danced divinely, not a political advocate. But Wallace Amory was burning to be an advocate, Daddy said, and he did not want to be delightful or divine, just earnest, deadly earnest. Daddy said it got to where the mayor would not talk anything but what he called Brass Tacks. Folks just have to tighten their belts, he would say. We have to take the good with the bad, he would say. The little man can’t hardly make it, he would say. Prosperity is just around the corner, he would say. Daddy said the mayor had grown particularly fond of this last one and could make it ring most impressively.

So he went off to Raleigh and represented us at conferences and political gatherings of every sort, and Daddy said the
Chronicle
would frequently run photographs of the mayor holding forth on taxes or leash laws or what Daddy called the general proximity of prosperity. And sometimes him and Momma would discover Wallace Amory jr. and Miss Pettigrew on the inside of the Greensboro
Daily News
where they had been caught posing at a fund-raising dinner or taking the dance floor at a political ball. Momma said Miss Pettigrew made a radiant picture, but the mayor always looked a little bothered. Daddy called that Wallace Amory’s camera face. He said it wasn’t exactly “bothered” the mayor was after but something more like “upstanding” or “concerned.” Daddy said it was just the mayor’s way of wearing his civic conscience between his ears so as to get it into the picture.

Of course we elected him to a second term of office. Momma said it was the decent thing to do, and Daddy said it was merely a serving up of justice, the only proper answer to the mayor having campaigned so untiringly throughout the four years of his first term; according to Daddy the natives of Neely are blessed with a keen sense of this sort of even-handedness. So the mayor got his second endorsement by the good people of this fine community and Daddy said he did a remarkable thing, probably by way of celebration: he bought Miss Myra Angelique a monkey. Momma said she didn’t know Miss Pettigrew was lonesome for a pet and she didn’t imagine Miss Myra Angelique had ever expressed a desire for a monkey, but Daddy said it could have happened one evening when the mayor came home to the supper table after a long day of belt tightening and taking the good with the bad. He supposed Miss Pettigrew might have leaned over the sugar bowl and said, “Mayor,” which Daddy said was all she ever called him anymore, “I’d be pleased to have a chimpanzee.” And Daddy supposed the mayor frumped himself up a little and muddied his expression some and said, “Sister darling, your chimpanzee is just around the corner.”

“Louis!” Momma said. Daddy was hardly ever a very big hit with Momma.

We had never had a monkey in Neely before Miss Pettigrew got hers and the only one we had after was a fit-in-the-palm-of-your-hand monkey that Jimmy Roach and two of his brothers ordered out of the back of a comic book, and it wasn’t but two days and about four dozen palms later when that one gave up the ghost and had to be buried in a legal envelope in the Roaches’ backyard. Miss Pettigrew’s was a legitimate monkey-sized monkey right from the start and Daddy said it arrived in the front seat of a station wagon, uncaged and diapered. The mayor had a flagpole erected on his front lawn for it to climb on and hard by the sidewalk he staked a tether that would allow that creature to wander most anywhere inside the iron fence. Daddy said at first they called it Junious after a cousin of theirs, but later on, when they’d bought it a blazer and a plaid sportcoat and a porkpie hat and had discovered it had no love for trousers, they called it, Mr. Britches since they were the only things it was without.

Daddy said most folks in Neely had never seen a monkey before, so anytime the mayor or Miss Pettigrew turned it out of the house, an audience would collect against the fence. Of course, Daddy said, you always got the mayor along with the monkey, and the one of them would squat on the knob atop the flagpole and pick at himself while the other paced the lawn and talked issues. That was just the price of curiosity, Daddy said.

Politically, Miss Pettigrew’s monkey turned out to be quite an asset for the mayor. He was no longer very engaging on his own, but Mr. Britches made him a human interest story and he got his picture in scores of newspapers and a couple of national magazines, which Daddy said was somewhat unfortunate for Neely since the mayor always looked a little foolish with his troubled expression and his arms full of chimpanzee. But Daddy said all it took was that monkey, and the mayor became what Daddy called a figure. He got his notoriety on the coattails of an ape, Daddy would say, and Momma said where we used to see pictures of the mayor with just Miss Pettigrew or just Mr. Britches, it got so that he’d show up in a crowd of senators, or with one arm around the lieutenant governor, or in the general company of the governor himself.

Then Mr. Nance came into the picture, and I mean actually into the picture right between Miss Pettigrew and the mayor and usually with one hand on the back of Miss Pettigrew’s neck and the other latched onto the mayor’s shoulder. But it wasn’t that way right off, Momma said. She said her and Daddy first picked out Mr. Nance in the Daily News. He was off to one side of the governor along with Mayor Pettigrew and the caption made him out to be a “Notable Democrat.” Then he showed up in the Chronicle, just him and the mayor, and Momma said they were eating sociables and smirking at each other; the
Chronicle
called this “having a confab.” Momma said after that Miss Pettigrew got in on the act and her and Mr. Nance would get caught having confabs of their own or taking a turn on the dance floor or posing with congressmen’s wives or congressmen themselves, and then it was the mayor on one side, Miss Myra Angelique on the other, and Mr. Nance in between attached to Miss Pettigrew’s neck and to the mayor’s shoulder.