A Southern Exposure (3 page)

“I guess—”

“Oh, Russ, come on.”

He does.

“And then there’s the suite,” says the clerk at the Pinehill Colonial Inn, after a pause during which Harry and Cynthia have considered other offerings—a double room, with two beds; two single rooms, connected; or a double room with a single room down the hall. None of which were very appealing. Also, Harry is already having trouble with what he takes to be the local accent. At first he thought this young man was kidding, dragging out his words that way and seeming to make fun of certain words even as he spoke them, but then Harry realized that this was how he, the clerk, talked: when he said “suite,” in three or maybe four syllables, he may have been kidding the concept (Southerners, as the Bairds are soon to learn, are quick to knock pretense of any sort; anything that smacks of “airs” invites
derision), but a suite is what this young man meant. “There’s this sitting room and two—I think three—little bitty bedrooms, and then there’s this sort of a breakfast room. And a kitchen. But I think y’all better take a look.”

Their first “y’all.” Harry and Cynthia exchange glances.

The “suite,” reached at the end of a very long hall and up a small creaking flight of stairs, has turned out to be amazingly pretty. “Attractive,” which is Cynthia’s usual word, even uttered at its most intense, did not seem sufficient. It was Abigail who, standing on tiptoe to look out from a narrow window, turned back to gasp, “This is beautiful. We could stay here forever. Have people over all the time.”

Abigail was right. The rooms were beautifully proportioned, and the furniture, instead of the anticipated shabby pseudo-Victorian, or some other bogus Sears antique, was very plain and comfortable. In fact it all looked handmade, beautiful wood all polished, and upholstered in obviously handwoven wool and linen of a remarkable spectrum of color, colors in amazing combination, as in a garden. A small fireplace had as its mantel some of the same plain dark and resinous wood. Next to the hearth were large unpainted clay pots, which Cynthia’s ready imagination instantly filled with roses or, perhaps in another season, clusters of bright leaves.

“Well,” said Cynthia and Harry, in almost identical tones, simultaneously. “It’s really nice. We’ll take it.”

Cynthia in her mind has already peopled the room with a small dinner party, one of her elegant but unpretentious ventures. A simple French casserole, a little salad. Herself and Harry, in their elegant old clothes, last year’s—but who would know? Some terribly nice new people, just two or three nice new couples. Mr. and Mrs. James Russell Lowell Byrd.

In Harry’s mind a cocktail party has formed in that
very same room, a good-sized crowd, on maybe a cold October football day, people all packed around the fire. Pretty women in tight sweaters. Lots to drink.

Abigail’s fantasy removes all the grownups from the scene; she is there with a nice big group of brand-new friends, all girls from school. The grownups are all off at a party somewhere, and she brings out Cokes and cookies for the girls, and they laugh and tell secrets about the boys and the other, uninvited girls.

“…  these here rooms are mainly Miz Bigelow’s doing,” the clerk is saying. “And she’ll be real glad to hear that you folks approve. Mr. Duke, he’s the owner, he just told her to go ahead and do any old thing she felt like doing in these rooms, and I don’t think he’s had any cause to regret it.”

Daylight shifts and brightens the colors of those rooms, adding, from long windows, vistas of the town: church steeples and tree-lined streets, gravelled sidewalks, a two-story brick business area, small stores with offices above. And houses: everywhere, shyly glimpsed between those huge green trees, behind hedges there are houses. Large white clapboard houses with heavy front porches; small gray-shingled cottages, daintily decked out in vines. From this distance all the Depression shabbiness is quite invisible—no matter that new paint is needed everywhere, and repairs to those sagging porches, those broken flagstone steps.

Off to one side a cluster of large square pillared buildings, many overgrown with what must be Virginia creeper, now red-leafed, thick. This group is surely the local college, with its yellowed areas of grass, walled off in brick—and, at the moment, its uninhabited look: no school just yet, only here and there a stray professor or an eager freshman
makes his way to the library, or the bulletin board at the Y.

In another direction darkly wooded hills rise up; there too small bits of houses can be seen, a peaked roof here, an ornamental cornice there. A grape arbor, a tennis court, and a twinkling blue swimming pool.

“Goddam place looks like a movie set” is Harry’s comment, on their first morning.

“I can’t wait to start looking at houses,” Cynthia tells him.

“When can I get a bike?” asks Abigail. “I’m really going to need one here.”

“I’ll take you to Sears this afternoon,” her father tells her. “Surely there is a Sears?”

His wife and daughter exhibit some surprise; it is not like Harry to be so instantly generous. What neither of them knows is the outcome of a conversation between Harry and the hotel’s owner, Mr. Duke. The “suite,” for reasons unfathomable to Harry, is so cheap (so reasonable, as he prefers to think of it) that he seriously wonders if they should ever move. It is a little small for permanent living, that is true; on the other hand, if one thinks of it as a little
pied-à-terre
, it is perfect. And who knows just how long this Pinehill phase of their lives will last? “No rush to look at houses,” he says to Cynthia. “Let’s sort of settle ourselves in first.”

Her look tells Harry a great deal; he could have described her expression as an essay in contempt, which he is all too able to read. Don’t you understand anything? she soundlessly asks him. Don’t you know that we came down here for a house, and new people to see, so that maybe we could begin to like ourselves again, with a new house and new people liking us? Not just to camp out in some
hotel.

Interestingly (and Cynthia is interesting, and contradictory),
what she says has quite another tone from her visible feelings. In a light voice she comments, “You’re certainly dapper this morning. You’re going out on the town?”

“Well, maybe I could do the shopping.” He grins, not very nicely. “Maybe I’ll pick up some new friends.”

“Daddy, can I come too? Can we look for a Sears?”

He hesitates, looking for a bare fraction of a second at Cynthia, who is fingering her long fair hair in a tentative way.

Then, “Sure, Abby-pie,” he says merrily. “Come along. We’ll find Sears, and knock the natives dead.”

Left alone, Cynthia is instantly cheered by the view, or views—by the sheer prettiness of where she is. The colors of the fabrics in the sunlight, and the throng of hopes within her own very pretty breast. Standing there, having happily kissed her husband and her child goodbye, for a while she simply relishes the moment—and her own luck: she has outwitted Lord & Taylor (so far); and it was she who found this attractive little town for them. And she who insisted on the Inn—Harry might have gone to some awful tourist camp.

It is she who is beautiful (still) and who has memorized a great deal of poetry by James Russell Lowell Byrd, whom any day now she will surely meet. Whom she will get to know.

And that is what she wants of Mr. Byrd, Cynthia in her more rational moments is aware—she is, on the whole, a highly rational woman; she wants, in a social, friendly, possibly even an intimate way to know J. Russell Lowell Byrd. She has wondered what his intimates call him. She hopes not “Jim.” Even “Russ” would be, she feels, inappropriate for a great poet. But she wants him for a friend, to lay claim to him in that way.

Her encounters—whatever one might call them—those backseat or off-in-the-countryside (once in some actual
bulrushes, so wet and terrible) with Jack Morrissey in Connecticut have been a lesson for Cynthia, she believes. A lesson in how desperately you can want something that turns out to be purely ugly, sordid. Like dousing a flame with mud. Thank God they never went further than they did, thank God they never actually did it. (Cynthia has no clear word for the sexual act, which she tends to think of in capitals, S E X.) Though God knows they came too close. “Affairs” (a word she likes) are best simply fantasized about; they should be left to novels, or poetry.

And so, if she meets—or, rather, when she meets—James Russell Lowell Byrd, if he turns out to be as compellingly attractive as she has imagined, she can write a few poems, or maybe sometimes just close her eyes and think of him. With Harry she can pretend that he is Mr. Byrd. She pretends a lot with Harry, and the awful part is that it works; Harry adores her passion, believing himself to be its genesis, its source.

Sitting down, regarding the room around her, Cynthia is struck again by its extraordinary style. Someone knows what she is doing, thinks Cynthia. Or does she? Could this Mrs. Bigelow be some entirely natural, native, untutored talent? Maybe just a woman working there in the Inn—a Negro woman, maybe? It does not strike Cynthia, a Yankee, that in that case she would not have been referred to as Mrs. Bigelow. Certainly the use of color is highly original, those pink-mauve striped pillows on the rich purple easy chair.
Vogue
magazine, collectively, would go absolutely mad; in fact Cynthia at this moment determines to bring this about, somehow, this “discovery” of hers. To bring about a meeting between Mrs. Bigelow and the doyennes of New York taste. She is surely not about to waste this Mrs. Bigelow on Lord & Taylor, despite what she has heard about their decorating department.

But first they must meet Mrs. Bigelow, which in a town
of this size should be easy enough. As Harry set off with Abigail, she even said to him, “Maybe you’ll run into Mrs. Bigelow in the A&P. Keep your ears open.”

Harry, however, had a much better idea. After settling Abigail into a chair in the lobby of the Inn—as always, she carries a book; today it is
Five Cousins
—he goes over to the desk clerk.

“Afternoon.”

“Afternoon.”

They exchange bland smiles before the pause that precedes Harry’s getting down to business.

He says, “You know that Mrs. Bigelow, the one you said did up our suite so pretty?” To his own ears, even, Harry’s speech sounds odd, for Harry is an automatic mimic; having recovered from his initial shock at this desk clerk’s diction, now quite unconsciously and uncontrollably he apes it, along with the general style of delivery.

“Yes sir, Dolly Bigelow. Husband Willard’s head of the Greek department, or Latin, something along those lines. But Dolly, she’s a newfangled unique lady. Unusual! She is—”

“Do you think she’d mind? I’d love to tell her how much I like—
we
like the things in our room.”

“Why, she’d be just as pleased as punch! Just plum delighted. Here now, I can get you her phone number easy as pie, and the phone’s right over there.”

“Mrs. Bigelow, we haven’t met but my name’s Harry Baird.” (Harry himself is now pronouncing it “Baaad,” in three syllables.) “And my wife and I are staying over to the Inn, in the suite, and I cannot tell you how much
we admire your colors—it’s just plain beautiful, what you’ve done.”

“Well, Mr. Bad, I am just plain delighted to hear that. And you-all are the first folks bothered to call! Sometimes I’ve heard, you know, like
rumors
, but no one has actually—I think you must be an exceptionally nice person. And your wife too, I’m sure she’s a lovely woman.”

“Matter of fact, she is. And she is just crazy about those colors in that room. You must meet Cynthia. I know she’d be just so proud if she could meet you.”

“Well, I’d rightly admire to meet her, you can tell her that.”

A pause while both Harry and Dolly Bigelow consider options.

Mrs. Bigelow, with a decisively drawn breath, takes the initiative. “Well, I don’t know if you are busy Sunday week, but Willard and I, we’re having this little party—”

In Kansas, at the Willistons’ tourist home, Brett is sick. Very sick. Bleeding, cramps. A fever. She knows what is wrong but she cannot tell anyone. Russell takes the children over to see Ursula and her grandchildren, and that seems to work out. So that all day Brett lies there dozing, alone on the long sleeping porch, in bed, while outside late September heat weighs down the remaining leaves on the sycamore trees, presses grass to the ground. Stills breezes.

“But you have to see a doctor, I’ll get one.”

“No—”

“Brett, come on. Be sensible.”

“I’m not sensible. I’m sick. I know it’s all my fault.”

“Don’t give me that Presbyterian craziness. Forget your catechism.”

“ ‘And there is no health in us.’ ”

“That’s right, that’s what I meant. Brett, I’m bringing a doctor.”

And so it is to the doctor, a mild bald man with silver spectacles, that she whispers, “I had an abortion. Two weeks ago in San Francisco.”

Sitting on a bench on the Santa Monica pier, in the blazing, endless, and unnatural August sunshine, with her stupid white frilled parasol and her even more stupid hat (a white cloche) and dumb high white shoes, Brett knew from the quick rush of bile to her throat: she was pregnant. Well, of course she knew—after five? And never one miscarriage. The air smelled of dead fish, and candy, and gin; earlier they had all been drinking Pink Ladies from a shaker that someone had brought. Brett swallowed quickly and looked around, her first thought having been that no one should know. Her second, as improbable as the first, is that she will not have this child. (But of course eventually Russ will know, and they will have six children.)

“Darling Brett, what heaven.” Flounced down on the bench beside her, suddenly, there is an apparition: Fleurette Fresnaye (née Edith Framer), an aspiring English actress, not doing too well, despite studio-ordered platinum hair and the nutty name. Lovely though weak large blue eyes, and a hopeless chin. Impossibly affected, but nevertheless somehow nice, Brett has felt. The two women instinctively like each other, perhaps in part because both feel themselves displaced, out there in California, in Hollywood, or Santa Monica.