A Southern Exposure (8 page)

“There probably is some law,” her father tells her.

“Would you like to go to a boarding school?” asks Cynthia.

“I would if they had Negro children too.”

Cynthia: “I can’t exactly write to a school and ask if they have Negro students. Or can I?”

Harry: “I don’t see why not. What I don’t see is how we’d afford it.”

“Well, there’s that. But the real point is, she’s too young to go away to school.”

“True enough.”

“But maybe one of those nice Quaker schools in Pennsylvania.”

“Are Negroes ever Quakers?”

“I don’t know. But you don’t have to be a Quaker to go to those schools.” Cynthia pauses, musing. “I think I’ll write to one of them, just in case. Some girls I knew in Connecticut went to one.”

“Cynthia, I tell you, we can’t afford it.”

“Maybe a scholarship? She has terrific grades.”

“Even with a scholarship.” Harry in his turn pauses. “We’re still thinking about a house sometime, aren’t we?”

“Oh yes, of course we are.” Cynthia utters this semi-truth with enthusiasm. It is something she says quite a lot. “We’re still thinking about a house,” she and Harry say to each other earnestly, and “We’re more or less looking at houses,” they say to new friends, with equal conviction.

The truth is that they like it where they are. Or, to put it more accurately, where they are suits them very well indeed, both their stated and their unstated, perhaps half-conscious purposes. They are comfortable in “the suite,” if just slightly crowded. But because of that very lack of ample space they are free of certain obligations that were strongly felt in Connecticut: new furniture, large parties. Also (this is the unspoken part), living as they do, as they are, allows both Harry and Cynthia a pleasant sense of privileged visiting; they do not really live in Pinehill, and are therefore subject to none of the local strictures or even customs. They could almost as well be living in Bermuda, or off on Capri.

Also, their life is much, much cheaper in that low-rent suite.

And it is rather sexy, hotel living.

•  •  •

Abigail feels this too, this lofty impermanence, but, unlike her parents, she both dislikes it and is able to articulate her discontent. “We live in a hotel,” she accurately states. “We’re not like a real family.”

Exactly, thinks Cynthia. This is not a settled, domestic life that we’re leading. I’m not exactly defined by being a wife and mother down here, and so—so whatever I do is okay.

What she is doing, at the moment, on a great many afternoons, is “looking for houses” with Jimmy Hightower. Very satisfactory. He is crazy about her, that is clear. He is so impressed, he never met anyone like her. Eventually, Cynthia supposes, some sort of payment will come due. He will make some pass, will want to kiss her, even to have an affair. And when that happens—well, she will or she won’t, she can’t tell yet. In the meantime he doesn’t so much as touch her hands, except for the barest, tiniest, but sort of sexy instants, lighting her cigarettes. He is not, though, in the least attractive. Too short, and puffy. Red-faced, almost bald. Though God knows he is nice.

But he has not, has never introduced her to Russell Byrd. Cynthia has not, of course, come right out and said, “I’m dying to meet Russell Byrd.” And is she? And if so, just what does she expect of this longed-for meeting? But Jimmy must have got the idea, at least, that she is interested in Russell Byrd. She knows a lot of his poetry; lines of it come into her head all the time down here. It must be the landscape, she thinks.

Sometimes, fairly often, Jimmy drives her out by Russell’s house, as though that were available, a house to look at. Amazingly, for a family with five children, no one ever seems to be there. Or the famous big car, the Hollywood Cadillac, is there, but no people. Once, they caught a distant view of a woman—“Brett?”—off in the garden, a large woman with a hat and gardening shears who could, Jimmy
said, be Brett. Or maybe not. But never Russ. No sign that he lived there. That he came and went on ordinary human errands—and perhaps he did not.

Cynthia on these Byrd excursions senses an excitement in Jimmy that is almost equal to her own. He’s like a kid, she thinks, with a sort of crush on an older boy. Only Jimmy is older, isn’t he?

“How old is Russell Byrd, would you say?” she asks Jimmy.

“Oh, maybe thirty-nine, forty.” Actually, Jimmy knows the precise year and date of Russell’s birth, but he chooses to make this information vague.

“Oh, that’s older than I thought.” And Jimmy must be a good deal older than forty, thinks Cynthia, who feels very young indeed at thirty-two.

“Don’t you know any Byrd kids at school? I think there’re five of them,” says Cynthia to her daughter.

“Oh, yeah. Those dopey kids. Some dumb girl named Melanctha, and four dumb boys.”

“What’s dopey about them?”

“Oh, I don’t know, nothing special. All the kids in the school are dopey, it looks like to me.”

“Oh, Abby, now really.”

“The Byrd kids come to school on a truck, but they’re not really truck children. It has something to do with where they live.”

Abigail’s own major obsession, this golden Southern fall, has been Benny, Benny and the mixed-up substances in the chem. lab, and the teacher, Mr. Martindale. What happened? Any explosion? Anyone dead?

Every morning, at first with dread, her stomach tightening, breath short, she has scanned the local paper, half expecting the headline
EXPLOSION IN CONNECTICUT SCHOOL
. On Sundays she reads
The New York Times
, which is carried by the local drugstore; Harry by now has one reserved. Abigail even reads the “Week in Review” section. It might be there.

But no, it never is. Just all this other stuff about countries arming, troops marching.

After a few weeks of such anxiety she decides that it is over; nothing worth putting in the paper happened, no cops or anyone will come down there after her, and Benny is not in any reform school. Probably.

She is not especially relieved by this realization. What she rather feels is a vast and terrible disappointment. She wanted to know what happened—and she badly wanted something to happen.

One afternoon, when both parents are out somewhere, the perfect solution comes to her: call Benny. Long distance. How simple, how perfect. How could she not have thought of it before?

“God, Abby, it was just the greatest thing that ever happened. Oh, if you’d been there! If I’d been there—I got all this poop from Muffy Montgomery, you remember her?—when I was over helping my dad last week. Anyway, she told me that old Martindale made his little speech, you know the one, the magic of chemistry. Our chemistry is going to defeat Hitler’s chemistry because it’s better. All that bull, you remember, only this year he got a lot fancier, according to Muffy. With the gestures, the cute smiles. And then, nothing worked. It was so great. Nothing happened like he said it was going to. No smells, no explosions. I
guess we’re sort of lucky that way, right? But it would have been fun if something had really gone bang, or if there’d been some great big stink he didn’t plan.”

“What did he say?” Abby asked him. Talking to Benny is so familiar an activity to Abby that she can hardly believe she is doing it.

“Oh, you know how he is. He thinks it’s okay if you smile all the time, then no one will know that you’re starting an ulcer. He smiled and smiled, Muffy said, and he said he reckoned the summer heat wasn’t beneficial, that’s what he said, not beneficial for chemical compounds. What a pill he is. What a fake.”

“God, I wish I’d been there.” I wish I were there with you. I would wish you were here, except it’s an awful place and I wouldn’t wish it on a friend, especially if the friend is a Negro. Abby says none of this to Benny; she has begun to think of her father finding this call on his phone bill. “I guess I’d better go,” she tells Benny. “This is long distance, and you know my dad.”

“Thank you for calling me. I’ll call you sometime when I get some dough. Say, I forgot to tell you, I’m applying for a scholarship to this school in New Hampshire. Exeter? The coach says they’re really interested in good ballplayers.”

“Do they take girls?”

“I doubt it. I don’t know.”

“Okay. Well, good luck if you want to go there. Any school would be better than the one I’m going to.”

“That’s too bad.”

“It sure is. Well, bye.”

Abby hangs up feeling mildly depressed. What was all that about Muffy, anyway? Whom of course Abigail remembers, this really icky black-haired girl, with all these curls.
And dumb. Benny couldn’t possibly like her.
Much.
And she is just a little depressed about Exeter, where she can’t go. Her mother wants her to go to Vassar after high school, because Cynthia got married instead of going to college at all. But she’s pretty sure Vassar does not take either boys or Negroes.

Abby’s reference to Harry’s supposed stinginess is somewhat unfair; he will only be surprised by a phone call to Connecticut not made by himself and not explained by Cynthia. With Abby he is a generous father, giving her a quarter a week, which is more allowance than most kids her age get, in Pinehill, that year.

Thus Abby, on her new bike from Sears, is able each afternoon to get a small sundae at the Darby Dairy Products, otherwise known as the ice-cream parlor. Other kids go there too, with their nickels and dimes; the place is really crowded with kids that Abby halfway knows, from school. To whom she pays no attention whatsoever. Looking at no one except the counter boy, she pays and takes her Dixie cup of ice cream and chocolate sauce outside, to eat quickly before getting back on her bike and continuing her ride around the outskirts of the town—of which she hates almost every inch.

Unlike her daughter, Cynthia “adores” this new landscape, this climate. “I think I was born to be Southern,” she tells Harry.

“Maybe in some other life you were.”

“I really think so. Why not? Can’t you see me in a hoopskirt, on a wide veranda, fanning away?”

“All too easily, my love.”

“Harry, you know you’re really mean. All this light irony—well, you add it all up and it’s heavy. A great boulder of irony, really crushing. You make me feel terrible—”

“Cynthia, for God’s sake. Just the tiniest teasing.”

Cynthia smiles. She is sitting at her dresser, getting ready for a party, to which they are already late. Now, instead of answering Harry, she applies a great pouf of powder
to her nose, indicating that she attaches no importance whatsoever to this semi-conversation. Which she does not. But this is how, customarily, they communicate. They simply say things to each other, mostly for the sound; they like the atmosphere of conversation thus created. And each grasps some shred of meaning, at least, from the tone, the sound of the other. Harry has understood that Cynthia is impatient with him; she wants just to get on to the party. But from watching her, and her more-than-usually anxious glances at the mirror, he understands how especially anxious she is to please. To be pleasing, and especially pretty for this party at the Hightowers’. “Sometimes I think October is my favorite month,” she tells him.

He agrees. “It’s been pretty.”

“Beautiful.”

Pretty or beautiful, all the days of this month have been warm and clear, so far. Golden days, clear blue days, and high against the sky the pine boughs sigh and sing, bright green, bedazzled with light. Golden poplar leaves rustle in the breeze, and in the long cool shadowed evenings there are more rustling leaves on the hard dirt sidewalks and paths of the town. Driving out that wooded road to the Hightower house, Cynthia is thinking, Tonight I’ll meet him, he’ll be there. Russell Byrd. And maybe we’ll walk outside for a while in Esther’s garden. Maybe. In the magic October night. She says, “It
is
my favorite month.”

In the garden the acrid scent of dying chrysanthemums, mingled with the livelier smells of rich, moist loamy fall earth, fills the cooling night air.

Russell Byrd, who is unaccountably, uncharacteristically drunk, asks Cynthia Baird, whom he has just met, “Ma’am, you ever smell fresh-killed pig?”

Arriving about an hour after the late arrival of the Bairds, and alone, Russell was seized by Jimmy and introduced to Cynthia. Russell then muttered that he must have some air. The garden? Cynthia chose to take this as an invitation, although he did look a little unstable, and she followed along.

Politely she answers what she believes him to have said, although his very thick accent and the heaviness of his speech make it difficult. “Why, I don’t believe I have,” she says. “Have you? I mean, often?” It is her sense that if she stops talking he will talk about something she does not want to hear, not at all.

As he does.

“Stinks,” says Russ. “Stinks terrible. A putrid god-awful unforgivable unforgettable stink that I can’t get out of my nostrils, my whole goddam head, whatever. The rest of my life. I’m now condemned to writing pig-shit plays. Oh, pardon me, ma’am, I forgot.”

“It’s quite all right,” Cynthia vaguely, distantly tells him. She turns slowly back toward the house, the party.

Esther Hightower, upstairs in her bedroom, also smells the dead chrysanthemums, the loamy earth; she even hears the drunken voice of Russell Byrd going on about pig excrement—but who on earth is he talking to? Esther imagines a beautiful, shocked woman—but these perceptions occupy only the smallest part of her consciousness. Her absence from the party has been explained by Jimmy, “a sick headache”; actually her headache is worse than sick, she is worse than sick, she is mad with fear, and pity. Demented. She is living in Germany, and what she smells is the scent of human panic from those boxcars going nowhere, and what she hears are words in German. Incomprehensible but terrifying. And she thinks, because she is one of them, of
those thousands of terrified people. Those who wait for voices in the night, and the angry clomping footsteps on their stairs.

Esther sits there, in the cool October starry Southern night, in the dark, and she tells herself where she is: Pinehill, America—but this stops nothing that is happening there, in Germany, at this very moment. And in her mind.