The Handsome Road (12 page)

“Oh my soul, mammy, I never thought of that! Take it. Throw it away.”

“Yassum, I’ll put it right in de fire.”

“Oh no you won’t either. Wool smells to heaven burning. Put it in the wastebasket.” There was a knock at the hall door. “Is that Napoleon?” Ann asked. “If they’ve sent me chicken soup again I’m going to be furious.”

Corrie May could hear the rattle of dishes. She was trembling with rage. One more minute and she’d go tell those two what she thought of them, just as soon as she could stop shaking. She heard Ann say,

“I don’t see why people can’t live tidily. The poor can be clean.”

The poor can be clean, Corrie May echoed in her mind. I wish you had to try it sometime.

Mammy said, “Yassum dey can, but dey mighty nigh always ain’t. Miss Ann, I sho wish you’d send dat girl ’bout her business. It ain’t right, her sewin’ on yo’ clothes.”

“Oh, shut up. I wish you’d stop harping on that. She looks clean enough when she comes here, and she needs work terribly.”

In the sitting-room, Corrie May sat down slowly on the little damask sofa. Of course she needed work. She needed it so much that even now she had to smile and curtsey and be grateful. One disrespectful word out of her and Ann would respond with hurt surprise, telling her with pretty words spoken in her cultured accent to go back to Rattletrap Square and starve.

Corrie May’s mouth curled with helpless rage. She dared not say so, but she knew she had been grateful for the last time. Now she simply hated them all, their casual pleasantness and their dainty charity. “I’ll work for you now,” her mouth said voicelessly as she bent to pick up the peignoir. “But I’ll be somebody before I’m dead. Some day I’ll get to where I can tell you what I think of you.” Her hands were trembling so that it was several minutes before she could hold the needle.

Chapter Five

1

W
hen the baby was a week old Denis brought Ann a medallion set in diamonds, to contain the baby’s daguerreotype on one side and a lock of its hair on the other. He sat on the bedstep as Ann turned the medallion in her fingers to examine both sides.

“Lovely,” she said. “I’ll have it made up as soon as he grows hair enough to spare some, and I’ll wear it as a breastpin.”

Denis bent over and kissed her. “How do you feel?”

“Fine. Dr. Purcell says I can get up in a few days more.”

“Don’t be in too much of a hurry, sugar,” he urged. “You’ve got plenty of time.”

“But I haven’t, really. There’s our anniversary dinner.”

“Not for three weeks.”

“Yes, but I’ve told the girls not to run up the seams of my dress till I’ve tried it on. They cut it by my old measurements, and I want to make sure it fits.” She raised a warning finger. “And I tell you right now, Denis Larne, if my figure doesn’t collapse to exactly where it used to be you can sleep in the sugar-house, for I’ll never have another baby as long as I live.”

Denis laughed at her. Sometimes Ann wished he wouldn’t laugh at her so much. But half his fondness for her sprang from the fact that he found her the most amusing person on earth. She had exclaimed to him one day shortly after their marriage, “You don’t want a wife, you want to keep me as a pet!”—a remark Denis found so funny that he repeated it with great success at a party.

Ann stretched. “Denis, let’s do a lot of exciting things this winter. I’ll be so glad to move around without feeling as if I weighed a ton.”

“I’ve been thinking,” he suggested, “we might give a ball New Year’s Eve.”

“Oh yes, let’s. We ought to do a good deal of entertaining to make up for my not having been able to give any parties this fall. There’ll be a lot of winter visitors in town.”

Denis agreed, but he added, “For the present, you’d better have a nap. The Purcells are coming to dinner with Jerry and your father, and they’re all going to want to see you.

“I’m not tired,” she protested.

“You will be,” said Denis, getting up off the bed-step, “if you try to talk to all those people without getting any rest.” He kissed her goodby. “I’m going down now.”

“All right,” she answered, finding it as usual easier to obey Denis than to argue with him. He called mammy and ordered her to draw the bed-curtains.

Ann slipped the medallion under the pillow. With the curtains drawn the bed was like a little house. From outside she could hear the crackle of the fire and the patter of rain on the windowpanes. She wondered if little Denis were asleep. She hardly knew yet what he looked like, except that he was very tiny and red as a radish. They kept him for the most part in the nursery, lest what with his crying and her talking they disturb each other. She wished she could see him oftener. Before he was born she had suggested that she would like to feed him herself, but Denis had protested in astonishment. “Darling, it’ll keep you a prisoner for months! We’ll hardly be able to go anywhere.” So she acquiesced and sent for Bertha. She didn’t want to be one of these young mothers who became so obsessed with their babies that they neglected their husbands. But even though she had seen so little of her baby it made her very peaceful to know he was there, as if she had achieved something monumental and had nothing to do now but lie back and contemplate it. She thought, “Maybe now that I’ve given her a grandchild Mrs. Larne will like me better. That painful prig of a woman! I’ve never done anything to her. I wish to heaven she’d stay in Europe. Now I suppose when she comes home I’ll have to call her mother.”

That idea grated on her nerves. Mrs. Larne was planning to live with Cynthia in a house in Dalroy this winter, and Ann knew she would have to see her frequently and pretend an affection she certainly had no reason to feel. However, she wasn’t going to bother about it; she’d be polite, and that was enough.

Ann linked her hands behind her head and looked up at the tester, trying to go over in her mind the guests who should be included in a New Year’s ball. She must find out what out-of-town people were at the hotels. Every winter there were Northern visitors down for a holiday, and she and Denis had received so much hospitality at Saratoga last summer that it was time they set about returning it. Ann made a face at the tester. The trouble with being a famous hostess was that you were so busy entertaining guests you had to entertain that it was hard to find time for the people you really wanted to see. It was very comfortable, but not, to tell the truth, very exciting, to be mistress of a great house. What was expected of you was so definite that you had very few decisions to make. Still it was good to know that if you followed a clear code you couldn’t possibly mess up your life, and wise persons accepted their destiny—what was it Corrie May Upjohn had said to her the day she came to Ardeith asking for work? “You got to be
happy
, too?” Probably that was what Corrie May had meant, envying her for being comfortably provided for instead of having to stir about and take care of herself. She’s a funny little thing, Ann thought with irrelevant amusement. So quiet; she doesn’t seem to notice very much. Very likely she’s a bit stupid. I suppose she’s had a hard life, but then she’s used to it. People like that don’t expect much in the world.

What was that darky proverb mammy was always quoting? “Blessed am dem what ’spects nuffin, for dey ain’t gonta be disappointed.” Ann felt a pang of remorse. That was her trouble. She expected too much. She wanted security and adventure both. But since she had chosen security, she had no reason to quarrel. Denis was courtly, generous and physically thrilling; and Ardeith—oh, she did want Ardeith and all it stood for, a life free of dissension and disorder, sure of itself and by its assurance given serene command over the emotions of the individuals who composed it. Ann could see herself merging from girlhood into the great lady of the plantation legend. She could do it; not everybody could. A great lady was music and moonshine, but she was also hard as steel. She was too frail to put on her own shoes and stockings but she bore ten children quietly; she had never an idea in her lovely head but she could make a hundred not necessarily congenial guests coalesce into a pleasant unit; she must always be sent upstairs to rest before the ordeal of getting dressed for a ball but she could dance till sunrise once she got there; she turned faint at the sight of blood from a cut finger but she could ride to hounds and be in at the kill; she was an angel of mercy toward the poor and afflicted but cruel as Nero toward any of her own clan who violated the code of gentle behavior; she obeyed her husband with docile respect but she got out of him anything she really made up her mind to have. Ann began to laugh. If that was what they wanted of her, that they would get. She resolved that as soon as she was up she would have her portrait done by the best painter available and hung in the great hall of Ardeith beside those ancestors of the Larnes who had helped create the legend. There was already a picture of one Sheramy woman in the hall, that quaint old portrait of Judith Sheramy who had married Philip Larne before the Revolution. That had been in the days when the archetype of the Southern lady was in the making. Now the tradition was made. One merely had to live up to it.

“You know,” Ann thought drowsily, “I wouldn’t own this out loud for worlds, but I believe I’m a coward. I believe I want to be safe more than I want anything else. Nothing very exciting will ever happen to me, but I’m so marvelously, beautifully
safe
!”

2

She was up as soon as the doctor allowed, for she had a thousand things to do. Once she got through the dinner in celebration of her wedding anniversary and the christening party for little Denis she had to get ready for the holidays. She wrote invitations for her New Year’s ball till her fingers ached, and in her dreams she saw her hand tracing “Mr. and Mrs. Denis Larne request the pleasure of the company of …” She arranged with the overseers to have a Christmas barbecue for the Negroes in the field-quarters, and she ordered their Christmas tree set up in the cotton storehouse with tinsel and lights and a present for every Negro on the place, heavy knitted shirts for the men, dresses for the women and a toy for every child. She would distribute them herself Christmas morning. There would be a group playing banjos and singing by the tree, and then they would come up to the big house and sing for the little master’s first Christmas before they went off to the barbecue. “It sho is good havin’ a young missis on de place again,” the darkies told her as she hurried around, and Ann laughed and told them to get lots of cane cut and thus earn their holiday.

In the midst of her preparations she heard news that South Carolina had seceded. Ann was surprised; she had heard secession talk all her life and had never believed anybody would really do anything about it. Now they said all the Southern states would go out and set up a government of their own. At first she was interested, but after a succession of dinners at which the gentlemen talked nothing but politics she found the whole subject a great bore. Though she tried to understand what all the fuss was about, to save her life she couldn’t see why the same government they had had since before they were born wasn’t still good enough. Some of the gentlemen tried kindly to point out that it was really no longer the same government, and when she exclaimed, “But it’s still American!”—they smiled indulgently and told her she was too pretty to try to be a bluestocking.

Denis was enormously interested, but she still could not understand when he tried to make it clear. She knew nothing about the tariff, the 1850 Compromises or the Kansas riots, and finally concluded that while secession might sound ominous to politicians it was no concern of hers. Besides, she was too busy to think. After New Year’s she ordered the gown for her portrait, a strikingly simple evening dress of light blue silk with little sleeves of figured lace and a lace kerchief crossed low on her bosom, so low that she saw disapproval in the eyes of her mother-in-law. But she ignored Mrs. Larne, as she was sufficiently proud of her bosom and shoulders to want them recorded for her posterity.

Denis liked the dress, and the artist, who had been imported from New Orleans, said gallantly that it had been long since he had had the good fortune to have so charming a subject. He painted her standing at the foot of the spiral staircase, her hand resting on the pillar of the balustrade, and enough of the stairs showing behind her to leave no doubt of the identity of the famous structure. What with posing for the portrait, supervising a new outfit for little Denis to wear when he outgrew his prenatal wardrobe, and making up for the entertaining she had not been able to do in the fall, Ann was so occupied she rarely looked at a newspaper and found it hard to remember which states were in the Union and which out of it. She hardly saw Denis these days. He was in town, he was on the wharfs, he was down at the sugar-mill urging speed, for Northern contracts must be filled while trade was still unimpeded. Ann protested that she wished he would stay at home more, but he told her that though Louisiana had guaranteed free passage of the river this guarantee might any day be revoked and tariff barriers thrown up between the North and South, so she sighed and said she thought the whole business was silly, just as if they hadn’t been getting along all right the way they were.

But in early spring the political dissension interrupted her life in a manner that was seriously irritating. She went shopping and was met with the announcement that the regular spring openings had been indefinitely postponed. Ann was dismayed: she cried, “But we can’t wear woollens and velvets after March!” The salespeople shook their heads dolefully. Establishments from New York to New Orleans had countermanded their orders because of the crisis, they said, and they showed her the fashion chit-chat in Godey’s Lady’s Book, which was mainly a lament that there was virtually nothing in the way of style news to report. Ann sighed in exasperation, “Show me what you have anyway. I’ve got to get something for hot weather.”

The head salesman gave her a bow. “Yes ma’am, certainly. What sort of materials are you interested in? Where do you expect to spend the summer?”

Without thinking, Ann returned, “Why, I’ve always gone North for at least part of the summer—” then she stopped, sat down abruptly on the stool before the counter and said, “Damn!”

With consummate courtesy the salesman turned away, pretending not to have heard a perfect lady swear, and began to take some bolts of goods from the shelves. Ann was so wrathful she did not particularly care whether he had heard her or not. She bought some yards of lawn and went home in a state of profound annoyance, intending to finish reading “The Curse of Clifton” and so relax, but the housekeeper met her with a new instrument of tribulation.

It was the guest-list for a dinner she was planning. Mrs. Maitland said the master had just come in, and he had told her the order of seating the guests as directed by the mistress would not do at all. Many of them were visitors from out of town, and it seemed that when you entertained nowadays diners must be seated in the order in which their states had seceded, those from South Carolina in the places of honor. Snatching the list from Mrs. Maitland Ann ran into the back study where Denis was going over his accounts.

“This is the most absurd thing I ever heard of!” she stormed.

Denis leaned back from the desk with amused agreement. “You’re quite right, honey. But everybody’s seating them that way, and they’ll be hurt if we don’t.”

Sighing, Ann dropped into a chair and began to look over the list. “My cousins from Savannah—shall they be seated ahead of the local people?”

“Yes, Georgia went out before Louisiana.”

“Well, I’m certainly glad it did. It would look very discourteous not to put visitors ahead of home folks. And the Prestons—they’re from Virginia.”

“Virginia hasn’t gone out. They’ll have to be placed toward the end.”

“Very well. I don’t see what I can do about it. And the Delaneys. They live in Wilmington, Delaware. Is Delaware still in the Union?”