Superior Women (35 page)

Even in the outlying country cabins where the black people live, those small clapboard boxes raised up from the dirt on brick stilts—even out there, that day, Peg has been aware of more resistance, more possible hostility than usual. Innately polite, these country people always masked suspicion as a lack of interest. “I’m just not studying to vote,” they would say, with warm, evasive smiles. Today, though, at three separate houses, all reached after miles and miles of impossibly rutted, narrow roads, Peg and Vera were summarily turned away. “We don’t want to hear nothing ’bout that,” they were told, just before the firm flat final closing of the door.

Now, on the hard white road, in the warm August night of no stars but strange white looming clouds, a night unnaturally still, Peg is scared. The sweet-smelling, ancient roadside privet could conceal anyone; and what better place for an ambush than the tobacco barn itself?

Sternly, Peg tells herself that this is very foolish indeed; for one
thing she is simply not that important, to anyone. She also tells herself that she does not really need a cigarette or a drink. She could perfectly well, with perfect safety, turn around and go back to the big safe house behind her. Which she almost does.

She is alone because Vera said she was just too tired; she couldn’t wait to go to bed. Another man, Charlie, who also lives at the Sawyers, has gone to Atlanta for a meeting of some sort. The most recent arrival in the house is someone named Henry Stuyvesant, whom Peg has barely met, and they have not talked at all. In any case, Peg is not sure at this moment where he is.

She and Vera were too late for dinner, and instead made sandwiches in the kitchen; one of the generous customs of the house is a constant supply of sandwich makings, sliced cold chicken and tomatoes, homemade mayonnaise and good crusty bread.

Henry Stuyvesant (what a silly name, Peg thinks) could be anywhere at all. He could in fact be out in the barn, where Peg is headed. Thinking of that possibility, Peg very much hopes not. He seems nice, but something about him terrifies her: he is so serious, so intent, with an air of seeing everything at once, and judging, probably. And so tall, taller than Cameron, even, thinner, more elegant. The possibility of Henry Stuyvesant is almost more scaring than that of being alone.

And there ahead of her is the century-old barn, on its lonely knoll, darker against the dark night sky. A staunch survivor. Its windows emit no sound, its face is blank.

There is a prearranged signal so that none of the workers will scare each other, nor be scared: three whistled notes, whip-poor-will. Peg does this now, standing outside in the thick sweet darkness, and as no one answers, she thinks, I just won’t bother going in, looking for the jug of booze, bourbon that I surely do not need. I’ll just have a quick cigarette, right here, right now.

But someone in white clothes, a white person, at that moment emerges from the barn’s open front door, ghostly, in the shadows. For an instant Peg is frozen in panic, which then becomes more ordinary fear, actually shyness, as she sees that it is Henry Stuyvesant.

“Oh,
hi,
” they say to each other, in much the same tone.

And then Henry says, “How very nice. I really wanted a drink but I was holding off. Wanting some company.”

“Oh, me too,” Peg says, feeling choked. But she follows him in, follows his white back into the cool shadowy room, the big space that is darker than the night. Big clumsy Peg, who at that moment wishes that she were anyone else at all.

The bourbon and a supply of paper cups are kept in a hollowed-out place under one of the long stone benches. Henry gets them out, as Peg, shaky-fingered, lights her cigarette, and sits down close to the door. As far from him as she can.

With a small flourish Henry hands her the half-filled paper cup; he says, “Well, cheers. I needed this. How about you?”

Is
he smiling? In the darkness, she can’t tell. Peg makes a sound that is intended as assent.

Very likely sensing her unease, Henry is quiet for a while; then, in a slow, undemanding way he begins to talk, almost as though to himself. He remarks on the similarities between this north Georgia countryside and Chapel Hill, where he teaches. The two areas are more alike than not, he says, and both of course are vastly unlike the New England countryside where he grew up. He then mentions Cambridge.

At which Peg, who is breathing more easily by now, can say, “Oh yes, Cambridge. I was there for four years. In school. I loved it.”

At Radcliffe?

Yes.

Which gets them almost immediately to Lavinia. (Although, as Peg remarks later to Vera, you do not exactly expect to find a friend of Lavinia’s doing civil rights work.)

“Oh yes,” Peg now gasps, “I knew her very well. Or, I mean I spent a lot of time with her. She was the most beautiful girl around, I always thought. I mean, I sometimes thought we must have looked sort of funny together. Like some beautiful small white monkey and a big, uh, elephant.”

“My so-called friends at prep school used to say I looked like a giraffe,” Henry tells her. He is smiling—she can see him now.

“Oh, really?” Quickly seeing the accuracy of this (he does; he
looks tall and awkward, and his eyes, like giraffes’ eyes, are beautiful), Peg laughs, very much in the old jolly Peg way—although to herself it has the sound of someone else laughing, some ghost.

“In a way I sort of took care of her, I guess,” she continues, speaking of Lavinia. “Mothering. I must have been practicing up to actually be a mother. And then I was supposed to be in her wedding but I was home having another baby.”

Henry asks, “You have a lot of children?”

“Oh yes, four. But the oldest two, the twins, they’re nineteen, and they’re pretty nice girls, usually. I bribed them to help Cornelia so I could come here this summer, and I bribed Cornelia to stay with all of them for the summer. Cornelia’s the, uh, maid.” Two hundred dollars apiece for the girls, Candy and Carol, a crazy sum, she knows that perfectly well; Cameron would have a stroke if he found out. And even worse, from Cameron’s point of view, two thousand to Cornelia, which he will never know about though. Especially since it will let Cornelia quit work in the fall, when Peg gets home, and go to the Teachers’ College.

Peg has said none of this last to Henry, of course; she only thought of it, fleetingly. She now tries to go on about Lavinia. “They came to see us, Lavinia and Potter, a few years ago,” she tells Henry, “and Lavinia was wonderful, and beautiful, and such a help. I had been sick, a nervous breakdown, I guess you’d call it. She was really nice, and we wrote letters, but some things I can’t explain to her.”

“Coming down here, for example,” says Henry, in a quiet way.

“Well yes, exactly. Only for me it’s up, not down. We live in Texas. Midland,” she explains. She is thinking that because in this strange, still shadowy darkness Henry’s face is still almost invisible to her, he is less frightening than he might be, if she could see him. What comes clearly across to her though is his niceness; he is nice and kind and intelligent, remarkably so. And Peg is not so foolish as to believe that everyone she meets in Georgia, everyone in the Movement, in “good works,” is necessarily nice, or kind or even smart.

Out of some odd necessity, she now tries to explain further about Lavinia. “I don’t mean to say that there’s anything really
wrong between us now,” she tells him—but perhaps she is over-explaining, is talking to herself? “Although of course,” she quickly continues, “she’s so polite that even if there were something the matter I wouldn’t know that there was, not necessarily. If you know what I mean.” This has been a new thought, to Peg, the notion of the deceptiveness of Lavinia’s “politeness.”

Henry laughs, in an understanding way, and for no good reason it then flashes through Peg’s mind that he and Lavinia could have been lovers, have had an affair. But then Peg thinks, Oh no, Lavinia would never do that, she would not sneak around.

(Does Lavinia like to, uh, “do it?” Peg has wondered about this of course; does she cry out, like women in D. H. Lawrence, a few other writers? Peg herself of course does not, she cannot, ever, something wrong. She is not at all sure what it would be that women would do together, but she thinks about it.)

In his quiet voice Henry asks, “Your husband didn’t mind your coming here this summer?”

“Well, actually he did mind quite a lot.” Peg is surprised to hear herself saying this, to a relative stranger. She is so surprised that she goes right on. “But a few years ago when I was sick, with my, uh, nervous breakdown, I was really off my nut, if you want to know the truth. And that made him a little afraid of me, if you see what I mean.”

Henry does see; she can tell that from the quality of his listening, his silence, his murmured, Oh.

“Also, this is a funny thing to say,” Peg goes on, “but I have more money than he does. My family, I mean. And when I got to be thirty my trust fund went up a lot, to more than he makes, even in oil. Although of course he is going to be very rich. But now he thinks that my money makes me a powerful person. Which must be the whole point, don’t you think?” She gives a sudden big jolly-Peg laugh, echoing in the lofty barn, in the silent dark.

Henry laughs too, but in a surprisingly sad way. “Well, I’m sure it beats being poor.”

“Oh, God, of course. Honestly, I’m not that silly. I know you have to have money,” she tells him piously. “I only meant that money gives me a kind of, uh, hollow power over Cameron, my
husband.” This need of hers to overexplain things, in an apologetic way, is something that Peg and her doctor have discussed, but it is still very hard for her not to, sometimes.

The oddity of being with Henry, so comfortably, as easily as old friends, or cousins, then strikes Peg with such force that she stops talking. (For one thing, nonsexual friendships between men and women were so very rare, in those days.) Peg, the big old cow, and dark, distinguished Henry. But, she next thinks, that is exactly the point. If I were good-looking, pretty, we would not be here like this. Henry would have to make a pass at me, if I looked like Lavinia, for example. Even if I looked like Megan, with those breasts, and her pretty blue eyes.

At that moment Henry laughs, so that Peg searches around in her mind for whatever it was that she last said; surely nothing about Megan’s breasts?

“Hollow power,” is what Henry next says, as though he were quoting her. “That’s good. It’s what I think I’ve always had, people responding to something that has nothing to do with me, like my name. It makes me nervous.”

His tone has made Peg giggle, its wry self-deprecation, even some sly self-pity.

“You’re right, it’s really funny,” he tells her then. “And in a way of course I’ve loved it.”

With no idea what he has meant, Peg is quiet, and reaches for another cigarette.

Even in the dark, Henry has sensed or felt her gesture, and he reaches to light it for her, so that for a moment his face is illuminated—just long enough to intimidate her (again) with its authority. He is not so much handsome as impressive; so dark, so defined.

Now really scared of him, and shy, Peg gets to her feet. “Oh, I didn’t realize how late it was,” she mumbles foolishly, and she looks at her watch.

Sensing her shift in mood Henry tells her, “I think I’ll have another smoke out here. You can get back to the house okay, by yourself?”

“Oh
yes.
” Peg stubs out her just-lit cigarette, and she mutters, “Well, bye,” and she hurries up the path. She is thinking, Well, of course we can’t really be friends, how silly to think that, even for a minute.

But she is wrong.

Waking early, on the following morning (August 5, 1964), Peg is the first person in the kitchen; already, just past 6
A.M.
, the air is heavy with threatened heat, maybe rain, maybe thunderstorms. She has just put on the kettle for coffee, and a saucepan for boiled eggs, and is about to slice some bread when Henry comes in. He first looks surprised at seeing her there, and then he smiles widely; he is pleased to see her, clearly happy. “Oh, how great! Good morning,” he says. “But you should have stuck around last night. I began to feel sorry for myself, and I had another drink, which I really didn’t need. It’s all your fault. While you were there I wasn’t thinking about myself, or not much,” and he laughs, in a friendly-brother way. His eyes are a little red, Peg sees, as he takes off his glasses, and his dark, dark hair is uncombed.

Feeling a blush, Peg asks, “Can I boil you an egg? Two eggs?”

“Sure, two. I’ll do the toast. Lord, it’s almost too hot for toast already, don’t you think?”

In this incredibly companionable way, they are having breakfast together (which Peg might have known, had she thought about it, would be broken by some disaster), both in their unironed white cotton shirts.

When Vera comes in.

Pale brown-skinned great-eyed Vera. She says, or rather she croaks out (her voice is terrible, broken): “You guys hear the news last night? They’re dead. All three of them. They found them yesterday. All three murdered.” By now she is weeping—as is Peg, as Henry is. “They found them buried in the dirt,” says Vera.

In the early sixties, before it became fashionable, Adam Marr developed an obsession with the war in Vietnam. That distant and to most people, including the President, alien conflict pervaded his mind, his conversation—and his plays. Previously he had written dramas that were described as “psychological,” or “contemporary,” having to do with love and sex, marriage and divorce, an occasional violent death, a murder—and so far his plays had been immensely successful. The few bad reviews, the dismissals of Adam as “melodramatic,” “sensation-seeking,” or, routinely, “pornographic,” did nothing to hurt Adam at the box office—any more than did his very public, fairly frequent brawls in bars, his hinted-at liaisons with young actresses and “models.”

But especially after President Johnson’s Tonkin Resolution, Adam’s style and mode entirely changed. He wrote a series of one-act plays that were all either overtly or sometimes indirectly about the war. Even when the ostensible subject was a soccer match in Australia, he was writing and preaching against the war.