The Handsome Road (40 page)

He patted her hand, and for awhile they said nothing else. It was like old times.

“That Miss Loring down at the office can’t make up letters as good as yours,” Fred remarked at length.

“I expect she’ll learn. I didn’t know much about it when I started.”

“She hasn’t got your education. I reckon I’ll have to look around for a girl who’s been to college.”

Eleanor smiled lovingly. Fred’s respect for college was always touching. “If you ever get into a really tight place, dad, let me know. I’m sure Kester could spare me for a day or two.”

“No, I guess I’ll manage. I always have. But not many girls have got your brains.”

“Not many girls have fathers like mine to get them from.”

He chuckled, then grew sober again. “What was it Kester said that day?—the revenge of the chromosome. I got the idea but I wasn’t right sure what chromosome meant. I had to look it up. And I had a devil of a time finding out how to spell it. But it reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to tell you.”

“Yes, dad?” She pressed the hand that was still holding hers. “I’m not angry with you any more. I’ll listen.”

“Well, it’s kind of complicated. But I mean, you’re like me in so many ways I can see where you’re liable to get mixed up, and I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to think what you do think, that you can get everything you want out of the whole world.”

“I’m afraid,” she said, “I don’t quite understand.”

“Well, it’s like this,” said Fred. “Nothing is as wonderful as you think this is going to be. There always do come times when things go to pieces on us. We’ve got to be ready for it.” He looked into her eyes intently. “Honey, I know now, but I didn’t always. The first time a levee of mine went down before the river it mighty near killed me. I’d built that levee myself from the ground up and I
knew
it was right. Then I had to learn that sometimes things go down. All you can do is the best you can. Do you believe me?”

“Why yes, of course,” said Eleanor, in a happy voice that told him as well as herself that she did not.

Fred shook his head. “Anyway, try to. It makes things easier to stand. Eleanor, I don’t care what you’ve got, somehow it always stops this side of glory. Now remember that. Not for me. For you.”

“Yes, dad.” She leaned forward and put her arms around his neck. “You’re a very superior person, dad, and I love you very much. But don’t have any sad premonitions about me. I’m going to be all right. I’m so happy—I’m going to be so happy with Kester—”

“Yes, honey, I hope you are,” he said. “God bless you, Eleanor.”

The next day Eleanor and Kester were married. It was the last week in May. They went down to the Gulf Coast, too happy to think of anything but that they were together.

Chapter Three

1

T
he Gulf was like a sheet of purple glass. Beyond the beach the palms waved their fans and feathers around the hotel, which in the sunlight glittered white as the sand. The days followed one another in dazzling succession. Eleanor and Kester swam and hiked, or lay on the beach in their tremendous space of sand and sun and purple water, looking at each other, saying little or sometimes for hours on end saying nothing at all. The miracle of their being together was endless. Eleanor wondered if all the years of her life would be time enough for her to get used to it.

It was her first acquaintance with tranquillity. She had been a busy, decisive person, wanting this and that and driving ahead to get it, bored with leisure, forever looking around for something to use up her tumultuous energy. But here she had drifted into quiet. Remembering the tension of the last months at home she wondered now if its cessation were not due less to her escape from Fred’s disapproval than to her present physical release. She smiled sometimes as she recalled how little she had really known of that, though she had thought herself so wise. Kester was a magnificent lover. But she was too aware of happiness to care much about examining it.

There were the mornings when she would realize through her sleep that Kester had kissed her throat, and she would open her eyes and look at him in serene adoration. There were the long hot days when they went out and swam in the sea, and he brought her fruit punches while she lay on the wharf with her hair spread out to dry, the wide skirt of her bathing dress billowing in the wind and her legs in their long black stockings flashing as she swung them over the edge. “You’re very beautiful like that,” he would say to her, as he sat down by her and they sipped their drinks quickly before the sun could melt the ice. There were the evenings when they danced in the lounge and she found that he was an excellent and tireless dancer who never seemed out of breath even in the fastest contortions of the turkey-trot. When she remarked that many people were horrified at these wild new dances Kester asked, “Didn’t you ever read about the shudders they had a hundred years ago when the waltz was new?” She had not; it was always Kester who brought up such amusing scraps of information strewn in his memory by the library his ancestors had accumulated at Ardeith. Even if she had not loved him she would have found him the most enjoyable companion she had ever known, but she loved him with an intensity that increased by its own exhilaration, and at night when she went to sleep with Kester’s arm under her and her head on Kester’s shoulder she could feel herself asking with her last conscious thought, “Oh dear God, is there anything, anything more wonderful than this?”

During that summer she grew familiar with his sunshiny virtues and his lovable if exasperating faults. Kester knew and liked everybody and everybody liked him. Waiters and bellboys were devoted to him, and after the first day or two the other guests greeted him as if they were lifelong friends of his, while Eleanor, who could have gone from New Orleans to Shanghai without speaking to a soul, was amazed to find herself sharing the popularity Kester so effortlessly gathered. Everybody assumed that she must be like Kester, which she wasn’t, but she enjoyed it; when people said to her, “Mrs. Larne, knowing you and your husband has made this the pleasantest holiday I’ve ever spent,” she felt she was receiving a tribute that really belonged to him, but she glowed with pride at possessing such a husband. For with all his geniality Kester never said or did anything that was not impeccable. She had never encountered such habitual elegance of deportment as his. She was proud to be seen with him; she liked the admiring glances women gave him when he entered a restaurant. Eleanor was not given to self-depreciation, but there were times when she was filled with wonder that so captivating a man should have chosen
her,
and felt positively humble to be the recipient of such a favor.

But the ease with which everything came to him made Kester a stranger to the ideas of order and self-discipline she had been taught to consider important. He forgot to wind his watch, he could never remember where he had put anything, when he changed his clothes he threw things about wildly, and Eleanor often exclaimed that she spent her whole honeymoon picking up her husband’s belongings. He bought quantities of newspapers and scattered them about till the room looked as if it might have been occupied by a political committee bent on informing itself of every phase of the Balkan War and the coming Presidential election, and if she threw away one of them he lamented that it contained a most important article he hadn’t had time to read. “I believe you like disorder,” Eleanor exclaimed to him. “You don’t care whether Wilson or Taft or Roosevelt gets elected, you just like to have things lying around.” Kester laughed at her attempts at tidiness and blithely went ahead as usual. When she protested at the way he wrote checks without making out stubs for them he answered, “Why, honeybug, the bank sends a statement. That’s what they’re for.” Eleanor laughed at him rebukingly, and said, “You seem to think the angels are going to take care of you,” to which Kester retorted, “Well, they always have. And now they’ve sent you to do it, haven’t they?”

Whereupon he went to the bar and got a Manhattan cocktail, though it was mid-afternoon and the mercury was over ninety. Eleanor wondered that liquor on such a day did not make him miserable, but nothing seemed able to quench his buoyancy.

When their holiday was over they went to Ardeith. The servants and tenants were assembled in front of the house to cheer their homecoming, and Kester’s mother, with twenty of her cousins and friends, stood on the gallery to welcome Eleanor among them. Eleanor and Kester went upstairs, to the room in which Kester and his father had been born, where tulips bloomed on the marble mantel and the great fourposter bed under its canopy of crimson silk looked like a couch placed there for the begetting of heirs to a great tradition. Opening from the bedroom was a little boudoir furnished in rosewood and damask for a lady of beloved fragility; and as she looked around it, and back at the bedroom, and at the oaks beyond the windows whispering as they had whispered to many generations, Eleanor felt the tradition enfolding her, as though she were no longer an individual but part of a unit, like one stone in a castle wall.

“It’s so lovely,” she murmured to Kester. “So—important.”

Later, while her bath water was running, she stood before the old mahogany bureau and looked at herself, and thought of the other women whose reflections had come back to them from this mirror in years long past. The bureau drawer stuck slightly as she tried to open it to put in her clothes. Eleanor remembered her room at home, where the furniture was new and shining and practical. Nobody in the Upjohn family had time for drawers that stuck, or for idleness before ancient mirrors. She felt as if she had stepped into an enchanted world where nothing was quite real but everything had the vague loveliness of pleasant dreams.

2

“I am doing nothing in the most delightful fashion,” Eleanor wrote her father. “Picture me if you can, waking up in this vast fourposter, reaching up to pull an embroidered bellcord (the bells work by a system of wires and pulleys of about 1840 construction and my bedroom cord jingles something far down in the back regions where I have as yet hardly penetrated), and then lying back to contemplate the canopy over my head until a black woman in a plaid tignon and gold earrings comes in with coffee. It is not always the same woman, for we have enough servants to run the White House, but Kester says that most of them were born on the plantation and he’d have to take care of them anyway. At length we get dressed and go downstairs to a breakfast room full of flowers and mahogany, to put away quantities of hominy grits, ham and hot waffles. Meanwhile another of these ubiquitous darkies has brought the horses around, and after breakfast Kester and I go riding to look at the cottonfields. I am learning a lot about cotton. At first Kester was startled that I should ride astride, but when I told him the nicest ladies were doing it nowadays and I couldn’t learn to manage a sidesaddle anyway, he acquiesced. After awhile, leaving him in the cotton, I come indoors. On the assumption that I must be weary after my exertions, another colored girl changes me into a diaphanous dressing-gown trimmed with ostrich feathers, and I retire into my damask boudoir to sip lemonade and write letters of thanks for my wedding presents.

“As the adjustment to matronly responsibilities is assumed to be arduous enough to make assistance welcome, Kester’s mother is here for a month to carry part of my new burden. While I am riding and writing letters she is doing the housekeeping—so far I am treated like a guest who must on no account trouble her pretty head about such matters. At two o’clock I get dressed for dinner, which we eat in a dining-room the size of a state banqueting hall. The food here is divine, it’s like eating at Antoine’s every day. Suspended from the ceiling over the table hangs the long fan (they call it a besom) that a little Negro boy used to swing during every meal to blow away flies. It has no purpose in these days of screened windows, but I am beginning to have a certain tenderness for these picturesque anachronisms.

“After dinner I get dressed again—this time very carefully, for I am about to be put on exhibit—and go down to the parlor with Mrs. Larne and sit nicely receiving calls. She occupies her hands embroidering an altar-cloth for St. Margaret’s Protestant Episcopal Church. I occupy my hands with nothing, because if I sat holding stitchery everyone would think I was making tiny garments, and, though I am doing no such thing, any suggestion that such an event is possible would be indelicate. And the callers come. Apparently every lady in the parish thinks it necessary to interrupt her affairs during these first weeks so that my life can be enriched by her acquaintance. Most of the calls last exactly half an hour. Mrs. Larne acts as my duenna. A bride being supposedly too young and innocent to choose her friends without guidance, Lysiane drops hints into my ears—Mrs. Thingumbob comes of one of the finest families in Louisiana and is to be cultivated; Mrs. Soandso was
talked about
before her marriage, no doubt unjustly but it’s always wise to be careful. New people are generally those who have moved into the neighborhood since the Civil War. They all say ‘since the war’ as though it happened last Tuesday.

“Some of the ladies are charming, some irritating and some dull. Yesterday our butler, Cameo, announced the Durham girls. Three ancient ladies filed in, all in black, and sat weirdly in a row, surveying me so solemnly that I thanked heaven for Lysiane, who talked to them about their Sunday School classes. That evening I asked Kester why the three ladies were called girls, and with a wicked glint in his eye he answered, ‘Their house caught fire one night when they were mites of fifty or so, and recounting the accident the next day their father said, “My wife and I were perfectly calm but the children got a little excited.”’

“We have supper by lamplight. In the evening Kester’s mother tactfully removes herself—either she goes to her room to read
The Winning of Barbara Worth
or to somebody’s house to play flinch—and Kester and I can giggle over the people I’ve seen.

“I can imagine you wrinkling your nose and saying, ‘My daughter Eleanor, who can carry logarithms in her head!’ Don’t, dad. This marriage of mine is so ecstatic that there’s nothing I can tell you about it except that it’s
right.
I’m going to be one of the happy people who have no history.”

Eleanor was surprised at the number of ladies who came to call. Obviously, if Lysiane’s friends had whispered questions about Kester’s unknown bride before his marriage, the fact of the marriage was an answer. She found the formalities droll, but since she expected to live at Ardeith the rest of her life she tried to sort out her callers, though it was not always easy. The ladies seemed much alike as they sat with bright smiles in the parlor. She did manage to distinguish a few of them—young Mrs. Neal Sheramy from Silverwood Plantation, who was pretty and frail, and coughed delicately, suggesting consumption; Kester’s cousin Sylvia St. Clair, fortyish, with a scrawny neck and a face that looked like a whine, who hinted at her own unhappy marriage, gossiped about other people’s, and asked Eleanor veiled but intimate questions about hers, which Eleanor parried with a wild desire to giggle, but so adroitly that she won Lysiane’s commendation—“I must say you dealt with Sylvia better than most people do, my dear; even if she is my own second cousin I can’t deny she is a fool;” and gathering that Sylvia was one of the people who would rather go to the gallows at once and have it over with than be condemned to a lifelong agony of minding their own business, Eleanor chuckled at Lysiane and received an amused smile in return; and she remembered Violet Purcell, a dark, vivid girl who wore a lavender dress and a black feather boa, and whose conversation, spiced with epigrams, had a bitter pleasantness like an olive. Eleanor did not mind the callers as long as she and Kester could laugh about them in the evenings, for Kester’s sense of humor and his sense of people were alike so keen that he made comments far more penetrating than Lysiane’s.

After Lysiane had gone home to New Orleans, their life settled down to the leisurely plantation routine. Kester and Eleanor gave parties and went to them, or spent long evenings alone, never done with what they had to say to each other. When cotton-picking was over Kester gave the Negroes a barbecue, at which he and Eleanor, with several of their friends, acted as hosts and guests of honor, enthroned in state on cotton-bales while the darkies brought them beer and pig-sandwiches; after which they were driven in a wagon to the big house to dance through the evening. The day they got news of Woodrow Wilson’s election Kester appeared unexpectedly with a troop of guests to celebrate, and when Eleanor, not yet used to such impromptu parties, got him aside and asked how she was expected to feed so many people without notice Kester retorted merrily, “Vermont, Utah and Eleanor, all for Taft!”—and disappeared into the kitchen. Eleanor followed him, protesting that she was not for Taft, she was glad about Wilson, but supper for ten people was something else; but Kester was chattering with Mamie, the cook who had been at Ardeith ever since he could remember and who understood these things, and he shooed Eleanor back into the parlor with orders not to worry.