After the War (31 page)

“What does this girlish giggle mean?” Harry asked her.

“Nothing. I’m just waiting for you to tell me all about Jimmy and Lady Veracity.”

“Not much to tell. I guess they went out to dinner, and it sounds like they had a really good time. He took her to some very fancy place in New York, the Brevoort?”

“I’ve been there, it’s nice but not all that fancy. God, Harry,
we’ve
been there together.”

“Oh, I thought it sounded familiar. Sorry. Well, the next day Jimmy called me and he sounded pretty excited. Manic, you might say.”

“He’s been so depressed and sad about Esther. Manic is hard to imagine.”

Harry mused, “It’s part of the same thing, I think. I mean the same process. Mourning.”

“Oh, Harry.” She paused, and then said, with conviction, “That’s really smart of you. I’m sure you’re right.”

“The funny part is,” and Harry chuckled to himself, “and Jimmy loves this, Lady Veracity is Jewish.”

“What on earth do you mean? That’s impossible, isn’t it?”

“No, it isn’t. She is. Some distant offshoot ancestor. What’s called a drop of Jewish blood.”

“Well, I guess that is pretty funny. Esther would have liked it.”

“That’s what Jimmy said.”

Harry and Cynthia had indeed talked about Lady Veracity, and Harry’s connection with her, their “affair,” whatever one wanted to call it. Or rather, they had talked around it, around and around. Harry never quite said, I never loved her, I’ve never loved anyone but you. Although that was implied in everything he did say.

And Cynthia never actually said, I’ve had a few flings of my own. Although neither did she protest her own fidelity.

Nor did they ever arrive at the question of what next.

They did talk, though, and more or less in their old way, about mutual friends, gossip, speculation. Including about Melanctha.

“I have this fantasy about her going off with that handsome Negro boy. You remember, Abby’s friend. Ben Davis. Benny, we called him then.”

“I barely do remember. He was just a little kid.”

“Well, he’s a big kid now, and really handsome. And nice. And smart. He did terribly well at Harvard, and he was accepted at the med school, but then he decided he didn’t want to be a doctor. You know, I have this bad intuition about Melanctha, though. I think she’s really terrified
of sex. Of men. Most girls her age—well, look at Abby, practically married already to Joseph Marcus. And as for Betsy Lee—”

“With those breasts, Melanctha must get a lot more attention than she wants.”

“Oh, I’m sure. Poor girl, she hates her breasts. And I think too much attention is why she has that dog. For protection. And he’s a sort of substitute for sex.”

Harry stared at her. “I’m sure you’re right.”

They still did not sleep together.

Odessa, the only person who could have testified to this fact, refused to say a thing, although Dolly tried, and tried.

Dolly began, of course, in a roundabout way, or somewhat roundabout. She said, “You reckon Mr. Harry’s going to stay here for a while?”

“I couldn’t rightly say, Miz Bigelow.”

“Well, it must be nice for Miss Cynthia having a man in the house. Not that she’s ever exactly gone without.” Dolly giggled, with a questioning look at Odessa, asking, Now, has she? But Odessa remained impassive, absorbed in the ironing: Dolly’s handkerchiefs and cocktail napkins, often indistinguishable to anyone but Odessa.

“I guess they must be getting on lots better than they did,” Dolly next ventured, to an answering silence.

“Odessa, watch out! You’re going to scorch that lace!” Odessa had never in her life scorched anything, as the look she gave Dolly clearly stated.

Into the heavy ensuing silence, Dolly plunged yet once
more, and her voice went wrong with the effort—even to herself she sounded strained, and tight. She said, “Nice for Miss Cynthia, having him there in her bed every night.”

To which Odessa, still standing accused of scorching, gave no answering sound of any nature.

“I’m just not sure that Melanctha’s brave enough for all that.” Cynthia spoke in a discouraged way to Harry, one August night, at dinner.

It was still too hot to move, or to think. All day the sun had pressed down, intense, immobilizing. Cynthia, and very likely everyone else, felt as though her brain had melted.

“ ‘Brave’?” asked Harry.

She made an effort. “Marrying a Negro. That takes some courage still, I think.”

“Who’s she marrying?”

“Ben Davis. Of course.”

“It’s not ‘of course’ to me, it’s news. You’re saying this is going to happen?”

“Harry, you’re so cross. And I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”

By the middle of the night the heat had lifted a little. At Cynthia’s window a faint breeze whispered in the light starched summer curtains, a breeze that Cynthia felt just barely across her face and down the single sheet that covered her damp naked skin. In a groggy, melted way, she thought, Why am I sleeping alone? Why hasn’t Harry come to my door, why hasn’t he asked to move back in with me? Oh, why doesn’t Harry love me anymore?

• • •

The next morning cooler air made the local world a little more sane. Waking, Cynthia pulled both the sheet and a light top blanket around her shoulders, and she began to think more clearly and coolly than she had for several days, or maybe weeks.

She thought: Am I really so sure that I want Harry, in bed or anywhere? Couldn’t it possibly be Derek that I still want, in spite of Deirdre? Or maybe because of Deirdre, a little.

In any case, she very firmly thought, If and when I make up my mind, I’ll tell him. Whichever one of those two it is. Or maybe it’s someone else entirely, someone I don’t even know yet. But why should I wait around for some man to decide about me?

28

“I
HAVE dibs on having the party,” was Dolly’s loud exclamation on hearing that Abby Baird and Joseph Marcus were “really getting married.” This was how everyone put it, as though they had been married in some not real way before, and in a sense they had: “Living together all that time,” as everyone said.

“And don’t you dare even try to tell me no,” continued Dolly. “My darling Abigail, the girl I first met in those long pigtails. Next thing I know, you’ll be telling me you’re getting married too.”

“Dolly, I am married,” said Cynthia. “To Harry.”

“Well, you could always get remarried. I mean to Harry.” She giggled. “I have truly heard of folks doing that. ‘Renewing your vows,’ is what they call it.”

“If Harry and I should ever do such a thing, you’ll be the first to know.”

“And I’ve got just the best idea. I’ll give the party out in Russ’s garden. You know, I’ve had it all fixed up for the sale. I’d’ve known Jimmy Hightower was going to be the buyer, I might not have gone to so much trouble, but now it’s done, and just the loveliest place for a party.”

“But I thought my house,” Cynthia objected.

“Now Cynthia, of course your house and your garden are absolutely lovely, but your garden just doesn’t have the space that Russ’s does. You reckon we’ll go on calling it ‘Russ’s house’ after Jimmy’s moved in with Lord knows who all? Another family, maybe?”

“Probably—”

“Besides, I stole Horace away from you for all my pre-sale fixing up.” Not adding, And so your garden’s a little shabby. But that unspoken judgment weighted the air.

What had happened, and all fairly quickly, within a month or so, was more or less this: Deirdre announced that she was tired of living in Pinehill; she wanted to move back to California, where she thought the schools and the
air
would be better for her little daughter, SallyJane. (“A lot Deirdre cares about schools, or air either,” had been muttered around the town, along with certain speculations as to more plausible motives. “You reckon that Derek McFall she likes so much could be out there? Seems more than likely to me.”)

Melanctha had said, Fine with her, she didn’t want this big old house anyway; she wanted a new modern house somewhere out in the country, and maybe not in this state, maybe Texas or Montana, where she’d build some kennels and raise a bunch of dogs. With what Russ had left her and her share from the sale of the house, she’d be able to do that, probably. And all the boys had similar far-reaching plans of their own.

And, not coincidentally, at just about this time Dolly decided to take a job in the local real estate office. “I’ve been thinking that I need a little more by way of occupation,” she explained. “And with the boys gone, and Willard almost retired—And anyway I thought what with the war ended and all, there’d be a lot of house reshuffling going on. Sort of a big-scale game of musical houses.”

Saying that, had she known that Jimmy Hightower was looking to buy Russ’s house, for which he’d always had sort of a hankering? Possibly she had, and certainly she had known that the new classics professor, coming to replace Willard, had a family and a yen for something “contemporary,” a perfect choice for the glass-brick Hightower house (which Esther had never really liked very much).

In any case, the sale of Russ Byrd’s house to Jimmy Hightower was a very lucrative coup for Dolly Bigelow, and one whose implications were much discussed.

“You reckon all these years Jimmy’s had this private hankering for Russ’s house?”

“Seems more’n possible. Something Esther would never have gone along with.”

“Russ either, comes to that.”

“And how about that Melanctha? You imagine that little old girl off in Montana or Texas either with a bunch of dogs?”

“And maybe a colored boyfriend.”

“Now, now, we don’t even want to think about that.”

“Folks in Montana might be a little more ‘liberal’ along those lines.”

“Bunch of Yankee Republicans, I guess.”

“Well, she’s a whole lot better off than she would be in Texas, that’s for sure.”

“Wonder what all Dolly’s going to do with that mess of money she got—her ‘commission’ is what they call it.”

“I heard she said she’d take old Willard on a bunch of vacations. England, Venice, Hawaii, all places like that.”

“First off she’s got to get him retired.”

“Oh, she’ll manage. Don’t you all worry one speck about Dolly. Seems like she’s found her true calling at last, in this life.”

• • •

None of these moves had actually taken place yet, though. By the time of the party, the Byrds were still in residence in their house, which is to say that Melanctha and Deirdre and little SallyJane were there; all the boys were at their various schools, with Graham still up at Harvard and the others scattered over various Southern schools, including the law school in Georgia, and Annapolis.

However, presumably both Deirdre and Melanctha had been consulted, and both were amenable to having the party there.

One of the things that Dolly did with some of her money was to buy an extraordinary display of flowers, for Abby’s party. Flowers everywhere. Now, with late September succeeding a couple of weeks of unremitting, bleaching, drying heat—when everyone in town had given up on gardening, on flowers, and felt not quite ready to start up fussing with bulbs—all over the large, terraced Byrd garden there were the most amazing flowers, in vases and pots. “She must’ve cleaned out every florist in the county” was frequently remarked, and, a little less frequently, in an undertone, “Sort of strange-looking, isn’t it? None of them actually growing in the ground, like real flowers do?”

“The ones in pots are growing,” stated Sylvia Marcus, who had a rather literal mind. But she had a lot to contend with that day, poor lady. Her husband, Dan, was up in Albany for some inside super-important Party meetings; he was angry that she had not come along. Never mind that it was their only son’s wedding, and that their daughter, Susan, was not there either; she had just started at NYU, so much better for her than Swarthmore, probably. In any case, already she had a
serious new boyfriend (but then Susan was always serious; she had been serious about that Negro Army man, that Ed whatever), but this was a nice Jewish boy, for a change. And so there was Sylvia, alone among all these at least superficially nice new Southern people. (God knows what their attitudes on certain basic social issues would be.) Even the Bairds, from Connecticut, were unfamiliar, actually. So—Episcopalian. Upper-crust.

The wedding, which was on the next day, had occasioned a little local trouble.

The Episcopal minister had refused to marry the couple, on the grounds that Joseph (of course) had not been christened. And was not about to be, Joseph said loud and clear. And so the ceremony would be performed by the local Presbyterian minister, known as a “liberal radical,” who supported integration, things like that. The rabbi from Hilton, a handsome young man, was to be in attendance; he came to the party and was recognized by everyone as the person who had conducted services for poor Esther. (Jimmy Hightower was absent; he had urgent business in Washington, he told several people, with a great big hinting smile.)

Joseph has never looked so happy in his life, thought his mother, with a small inward sigh. On the whole, a serious man (when he was a small child, Sylvia had worried: should a three-year-old be so intense?), today he smiled, he beamed, all day. It was as though he had decided that it was all right, at least for today, to be just purely happy. He even seemed at ease among all these strange Southern people, though once Sylvia had worried that he was so shy, not friendly and outgoing like Susan (Susan was almost too friendly, too easily) or like his father, gregarious Dan.

When Sylvia thought of Dan, which of course from time
to time she did that day of their son’s wedding, he seemed surprisingly remote, much farther away than simply Albany (just as the C.P. itself seemed remote), and she thought: This is the first party I’ve been to, it seems like ever, where there’s no one here from the Party, and the only other Jew is the rabbi, who is even younger than Joseph. She felt a surge of loneliness, of abandonment, both of which she indistinctly blamed on the goddam C.P., which had literally ruled her life,
their
life for all those years. If I can ever get out, thought Sylvia, I’ll never go back anywhere near it. I’ll have all new friends, nice friendly nonpolitical ones.