A Southern Exposure (22 page)

“Well, honey, are you sure?”

“Jimmy darling, good news. I met this brother of Helen’s, Stephen Ludwig, and he’s real interested in your book. Says he can’t promise anything, of course not, not even having seen it. Except a sympathetic reading. Seems he spent some time in Oklahoma a long time ago, and it’s my impression he has some romantic memories.”

“Must have been a long way back.”

“Well, he said why don’t you send it on up to him, and then the next time you’re up here for a visit you-all could talk.”

“Be pretty embarrassing if he doesn’t take to it.”

Esther hesitates. “I have to admit I thought of that. But you know, he’s been in this business all his life. He must have ways of handling situations.”

Jimmy laughs. “The last thing I want to be is a publishing ‘situation.’ But I guess I’m old enough to take bad news, if that’s how things turn out.”

Esther sighs, a sigh that is audible to Jimmy all those hundreds of miles from New York to the middle South. “Things aren’t so great around here,” she says. “The more it looks like war, the less we think we can get anybody out at all. Already some cities—like Lisbon, for one—are getting totally jammed with folks who want out, and most passages on the big boats are all booked, months ahead of time.” She says then, “Jimmy honey, I’m sort of scared. I really wish you’d come on up here, book or not.”

“Okay then, that’s exactly what I’ll do, baby doll. The book’s not the most important thing, after all.”

But to Jimmy, actually, it is the most important thing. And these two conversations, including his promise to come right on up to New York, have left him uneasy and anxious. Against some cooler and possibly better judgment, he decides to call Russ—who, surprisingly, says why not come over for a Coke later on in the afternoon.

“Things are a little confused around here,” Russ begins by explaining. “We seem to have these folks coming up again. Oh, you met them. The doctor Clyde Drake, and his wife, uh, Norris. SallyJane says that she enjoys having them but I’m not at all sure that’s true; she just works herself harder and harder, and the maid we’ve got now is no real help at all. But Ursula, the lady we met in Kansas when I ran over her pig, Ursula’s coming out again to stay for a while, and help out—sort of a housekeeper deal. SallyJane’s never been able to deal with help and now she’s considerably worse. Clyde Drake says, she doesn’t get better soon we’ll have to reconsider the shock. But here I am rattling on like a tired old woman about all my personal problems. I guess the truth is, Jimmy, old man, I don’t know what to tell you about your novel. These days I can hardly think
about my own stuff, much less anyone else’s. I’ve got about as much sense about books as I do about women.”

All in all, this was a most remarkable and uncharacteristic speech from Russ, and Jimmy does not know what to make of it. Except to gather that neither Russ nor SallyJane is in very good shape. In different ways, of course. Jimmy senses a certain desperation in Russ; he sees, or hears a man whose life has run out of control, who is helpless among the major passions of women. Helpless and hopeless there in his very large house.

“Well, he can’t hurt anything but my feelings, and I’m too old to worry about a thing like that” is how Jimmy put it to Esther, speaking of Stephen Ludwig, the publisher. “So I reckon I’ll come on up there, with my manuscript under my arm.”

He has not told Esther about his most curious interview with Russ; he will never tell anyone. It occurs to him, strangely, to call Cynthia Baird, and to say that he is worried over Russ, but he decides against it. There are already too many women meddling in Russ’s life, Jimmy feels. SallyJane, and this Ursula, coming to be their sort of housekeeper, and now the Norris Drake woman—seems like she’s all over the place. He feels that either Esther or Cynthia, or the both of them, would have something sharply accurate to say about Russ, and whatever it would be Jimmy knows that he doesn’t want to hear it. Just as he has never even thought of showing his novel to Esther, who reads a lot, and who presumably has good sense about novels, books. As, for that matter, does Cynthia, who also reads all the time. He could not have explained his reluctance to let these women see his book.

•  •  •

Russ was drinking; that was the first surprise, the afternoon when Jimmy went over to see him. Russ was not a drinking man, which was just as well, since he famously had no head for the stuff, none at all. Everyone said that that was one of the reasons SallyJane’s father, President Caldwell, did not approve at all of Russ for his daughter. “The man can’t hold his liquor, he drinks like a darkie.” (He also regretted the fact that Russ was what was called a “self-help” student, which of course meant poor. “You don’t have to marry into poor these days,” said Ernest Caldwell. “But trust my daughter. Does not have the sense she was born with.”) But that afternoon Russ was slopping bourbon into his Coke—sweetening it, as he put it. “You sure you won’t have some, Jim, old man?” “I’m sure.”

The second surprise was Russ’s conversation—or, rather, his monologue.

He was going off to a monastery, Russ told Jimmy, in a blurry, slurred, but intensely serious voice. There was one in California that he had heard about, down near the Mexican border. That would take anyone—“even old sometimes-married Protestants.” Just prayers and working in a vegetable garden. Just monks. No women around, not even nuns.

“I have purely and simply got to get away from women. All women. They all play the devil with me, eventually. I can’t stand women. They make me crazy. If I could just never see one. The things they say. What they want. Intolerable to a man.”

And more like that. Genuinely shocked and upset, Jimmy was relieved to see that no response was expected from him. He was not sure that Russ really knew he was there, or even who he was. He certainly would not have known what to say. “But, Russ, I like women a lot, especially my wife.” Under the circumstances that would have sounded ridiculous.

And so, even had he wanted to, which, loyally, he did not, there was no way Jimmy could have described that conversation. To anyone.

Stephen Ludwig looks like a publisher in a movie. Pipe-smoking and handsome, grizzled, ruddy, with the dark red nose of a heavy drinker. And his office is a movie-set book-lined study; in the spaces without books there are etchings, and a few framed photographs of famous writers, just famous enough for Jimmy to recognize their faces.

They shake hands, Jimmy and Stephen Ludwig, and Jimmy is motioned to sit down.

For several moments, which seem very long to Jimmy, they are silent, smiling politely, examining each other. And then Ludwig says something amazing. He says, “To put it mildly, I really liked your book. I think it’s—well, terrific. A little work here and there, but nothing major. I hesitate to say this, but I just think we might have a very, very big success on our hands.”

Jimmy is there in Ludwig’s office for at least another half hour, but that is all of the conversation that he can recall, as he later tries to put it all together and tell Esther.

They are sitting on the terrace of the Hotel Brevoort, on lower Fifth Avenue.

“He said he’d only read it once so far,” Jimmy adds to his recital. “But that’s going pretty far out on a limb, wouldn’t you say? To go as far as he did? I mean, he can’t afford to talk like that to every person who sends him in a book.”

Even as he says this, though, all these self-congratulatory, self-reassuring sentences, and as Esther responds with a pleasure that is surely genuine, Jimmy has a strong sense of unreality. Even their setting, this attractive restaurant in an expensive neighborhood, where well-dressed
couples are out walking their dogs or just walking home, enjoying the warm clear spring night—all this seems as unreal as Stephen Ludwig, with his tweeds and his writer photographs, his pipe and (it seems to Jimmy) his farfetched optimism. None of it quite makes sense; it doesn’t mesh with what Jimmy thinks of as his real life, though he would find it hard to define that either; he hasn’t been near the oil fields of his young manhood for many years. But all that has happened today has seemed more like a movie,
Jimmy Hightower Goes to New York
, one in which he is not entirely comfortable. It would be better for Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper. One of those very tall guys.

He even has this aberrant and quite unusual thought: Do I really want to be a successful writer? Lord, just look at Russ. Russ, who might have been much happier as a small-town college professor, with maybe a play of his put on every now and then by the local company, and poems published in some quiet places, the
Sewanee Review
, the
Virginia Quarterly
(Jimmy can suddenly see this very clearly, as if it were another movie, another life of Russell Byrd). Does he, Jimmy, want all that money and fame, that kind of success, when he probably should have stayed home and tended his garden, and his investments?

He says to Esther, “It still could all not happen—you know that as well as I do. Just this one fellow’s starting enthusiasm.”

“Of course. And I think you’re very, very wise not to take him too seriously.” Esther, despite her new cloche hat over smartly bobbed short hair, and her pretty spring navy silk dress, still seems to mirror Jimmy’s own suddenly downward mood; she looks out of place in this handsome, festive, pre-dinner crowd in New York. As out of place as he himself feels.

They talk then for a while about other things, of their daughters and schools, new friends of Esther’s here in New
York, and Esther’s work. But as they talk Jimmy finds himself more and more aware of the mood of the crowd around them, there on the terrace and passing on the sidewalk. It is a festive crowd, on the whole, but Jimmy senses somewhere an edge of panic—or hysteria, perhaps—in the midst of celebration. At first he attributes this insight to his own private mood of joy mixed with apprehension; but then he thinks, No, it’s not just me. We’re on the edge of a war, and no one knows how it will go, and we’re really scared, all of us.

“How did you leave it with Stephen Ludwig, finally?” Esther asks.

“He’s going to present it, discuss it with the other editors and the money people, I guess he means,” Jimmy tells her. And then, wanting not to talk about all that, he asks, “How about it? Warm enough for dinner out here, do you think?”

“Sure, it’s plenty warm. And Helen says the lobster salad here is terrific.” She pauses, looking in a questioning way at Jimmy. “Something about the weather, though. It really makes me miss Pinehill, a lot.”

Her eyes are so serious, dark and intense.

And knowing that she meant at least in part that she misses him, Jimmy’s heart warms to her, and he says what she could never say to him. “I’ve missed you,” he tells her. “A lot.”

With a sort of relief, an emotional moment over, Esther laughs, and she asks him, “But how will we ever get the Bairds to leave our house?”

He laughs too, as he says, “It’s not funny, really. I’ve thought about that. It’s a funny situation we’ve got ourselves into. All my fault, actually.”

“Very funny. Really not your fault, though.”

Jimmy tries: “But maybe Cynthia will end up in Washington with Harry.”

“I doubt that. I think she’d rather end up in Pinehill with Russ.”

“Esther, whatever—?”

But Esther is given to such gnomic utterances, which he knows that she will never explain. He knows too that she does not mean “end up with Russ” in any ordinary sense.

Now she smiles, still ambiguously, and she says, “It’ll be interesting to see how Russ takes all your success.”

“Yes—” It had not before seriously occurred to Jimmy that Russ would be anything but pleased, but now he instantly and clearly sees that might well not be the case. Of course not. And he thinks, as he has before, how subtle women are; Esther is an especially subtle woman, he thinks.

He thinks then (another familiar thought) of how much he just plain likes women (how glad he is to be unlike Russ in that way!). He does not only love them romantically, and for sex, although God knows a lot of that is mixed in usually, but he likes them for friendship and conversation. Talking to a woman is often like reading a very good book. And Esther, thank God, is really the most interesting of all.

But still he tells her, as though in reproof, “We’ll see about that when it happens. My big success, and how Russ takes it.”

To Cynthia the Southern spring feels heavy; her blood is turgid, weighted. Such exuberance of bloom, such too rich smells of earth and flowers, and pines—the sweet sharp sun-heated smell of pines is everywhere, as inescapable as honeysuckle vines, and the smells of their sweet small flowers.

New England springs were cleaner, crisper, and more spare. Clean clear fast brooks, translucent, over smooth brown polished rocks, instead of dirty slow mud creeks, bordered with coarse gray sand and carrying heavily their freights of trash.

Almost overnight, it seems to her, a great circle of daffodils has sprung up in the side yard, near the porch, and out in the woods behind her house (which is not her house,
of course) the bursting of dogwood seems wild, uncontrolled. Out there in the woods she finds wild iris, yellow dogtooth violets among the thin dead leaves.

Such bountiful activity on the part of nature makes Cynthia feel lonely, somehow. Lonely and also ungrateful: she knows that what she is seeing is wonderfully beautiful, all that generous bloom, at which everyone seems to marvel. “Such a lovely spring, seems like every year it gets more beautiful.” That is what everyone is saying, and is probably true.

But I won’t be around to see it another year, is Cynthia’s involuntary thought—by which she does not mean that she will have died; her revulsion does not go so far. Rather, it expresses the vague thought of her being somewhere else. Maybe Connecticut? Maybe Georgetown, which Harry says she would surely love?

Cynthia wonders: Would Georgetown be as cheap as Pinehill is? In Pinehill they have not felt as rich, as “comfortable,” as they had hoped, but at least certain Connecticut expenses are missing: the trips to New York, which, even when they stayed with friends and ate out cheaply, always turned out to be murderous on the budget; club memberships—there are no country clubs in Pinehill; and clothes—both Cynthia and Harry have spent the year in last year’s (or earlier) clothes, feeling themselves to be very smart indeed, and Cynthia ordered all Abby’s clothes from Best’s, the Lilliputian Bazaar, where she had a charge account (if things got really bad, she could always switch to Altman’s, Cynthia thought). Georgetown, even with Harry’s new paycheck, looked very dear, and some clear instinct informed Cynthia that they could get into familiar forms of trouble there, clothes and parties and a houseful of flowers. Expensive friends. Not to mention clubs and a private school (surely necessary, there?) for Abby.