The Handsome Road (41 page)

The guests were already around the piano, singing while Violet Purcell played for them. Entering with a tray of drinks, Kester flung Eleanor a teasing glance. She whispered under cover of the music.

“Is it going to be all right?”

“Of course,” Kester assured her, and shouted, “Anybody want a drink?”

Nearly everybody did, and Neal Sheramy from Silverwood Plantation called, “Kester, may I dance with your beautiful wife?”

As they hopped off together in a bunny-hug Neal said to her, “It’s such fun coming to Ardeith, Eleanor!” She gathered that they must have been used to dropping in this way, and remembered what Lysiane had said about Kester’s keeping the house always full of people. Violet had started playing
The Mississippi Dippy-Dip
and Eleanor danced with Neal until they were both out of breath, when they went over to sit by Neal’s wispy little wife, who appeared too frail to indulge in these insane dances. Eleanor thanked heaven for her own rugged health and felt grateful that she could give parties. When the supper bell rang they went into the dining-room. The table held an omelet, a cheese soufflé, a dish of ham and various plates of hot biscuits and preserves; and seeing how easy it all was when everybody was used to it, Eleanor had a gay evening and later told Kester to have a party whenever he felt like it. Rather surprised, Kester answered, “Why sugarplum, I do.”

Now and then she gave a formal dinner, and sat in splendor among the silver and linen with her hair piled on top of her head and her bosom alight with antique jewelry Kester had brought up from the vault and given her to wear, but mostly the parties at Ardeith were hilarious affairs like this one, with everybody dancing while the phonograph played or Violet pounded out ragtime on the piano. Kester’s friends were a gay, insouciant group, with beautiful voices and exquisite manners. They had been friends since childhood, and much of their badinage she could not share, but she always felt that they were doing their best to make her feel at ease among them because they were all devoted to Kester. Most of them were obviously going to be like Denis and Lysiane, decorative ladies and gentlemen of no earthly use but very pleasant to have around, and Eleanor began to understand that the reverse of her father’s good qualities could be delightful. Of the lot she preferred Violet Purcell, whose cool terseness was refreshing.

She enjoyed the life she was leading and found it easy to forget that she had ever been used to any other. When Fred wrote her a description of the President’s waterways conference in Washington she found his letter almost dull, and was astonished to remember how eager she would have been a year ago to be told about the advances in levee construction. But now Kester and Ardeith filled her thoughts so that anything else seemed a needless intrusion. Kester told her a dozen times a week that he had never been so happy. They had but one argument, when Eleanor insisted on being given a regular allowance for housekeeping. Characteristically, he said, “Buy what you need and send the bills to me,” and it took her two hours to convince him that she could not spend money with any degree of wisdom unless she knew how much she had to spend. Kester asked then, “All right, how much do you want?” Eleanor sighed; she wanted whatever it took to run the house, and was aghast when he told her Cameo and Mamie had always done the ordering and he had simply paid the bills without keeping any record of their monthly totals.

At last she got out of him that Ardeith had produced about eight hundred bales of cotton last year, and that a good average price for cotton was ten cents a pound, which gave the plantation a gross income of forty thousand dollars. How much of this was clear she did not know, and it was impossible to make Kester be definite, so in despair she halved it, and though this did not seem a large income for a place like Ardeith she considered it adequate. The house was so lavishly equipped that it could be operated with no great expenditure. She asked Kester if he would give her six hundred dollars a month for housekeeping. Kester said “Certainly,” but as she was sure he would forget to do it she drove to the bank with him the next morning to see to it that he made the first deposit. She was exasperated. But he came out of the bank as debonair as usual and gave her a book showing a deposit to her credit of eight thousand dollars. She gasped, but he said, “Now you won’t pester me for a whole year, will you?”

“Are you angry with me?” Eleanor asked repentantly.

“My darling, no,” said Kester, “but you know I’d never remember to make a deposit every month and I’m not going to waste a lot of time being called names because I am the way I am. You’ve got such—what’s that new word they’re using in factories?—efficiency.”

Eleanor kept house with the exactness she liked, balancing her account books every week and doing the best she could to prevent Mamie from feeding her husband and children out of the Ardeith kitchen. Mamie was a trial, but she was a cook in a thousand and knew her power. They had eleven servants, which Eleanor considered about five too many, but she yielded to Kester’s importunities and retained them, along with sundry black boys who kept turning up from the plantation ostensibly to ask if there wasn’t something the young miss wanted done and actually to get some cold biscuits from Mamie’s generous hands. Eleanor put these down under the heading of “Foolish but Unavoidable Expenses,” and let it go at that. As long as Kester adored her as he did she was willing to compromise with everything else.

“You’re an astonishing girl,” Violet said to her. “Don’t give me that innocent look out of your eyes, either, as if you didn’t know you were married to the most consummate heartbreaker in the United States. Remember what Washington Irving said?”

Eleanor shook her head.

“It’s about a man, but reverse the sexes and it applies to you. ‘He who wins a thousand common hearts is therefore entitled to some renown, but he who keeps undisputed sway over the heart of a coquette—’ something about his being a real hero. My dear, how
do
you do it?”

Eleanor laughed and said she didn’t know, but privately she was rapturous. That she should love Kester so passionately seemed to her to require no explanation; she did not know how any woman could help loving him. But that he should love her seemed a perpetually recurring miracle. She liked every evidence of it. Kester made frequent trips to New Orleans, sometimes with and sometimes without her, and brought back absurd and expensive presents—rhinestone combs for her hair, frilled camisoles, taffeta petticoats that made an enticing racket when she walked. At Christmas he gave her a watch to be worn on a long chain about her neck and tucked under her belt, with a card saying “I love you” in nine languages, the preparation of which had taken him a whole morning in the Tulane library.

After the opening of the new year Eleanor discovered that she was going to have a baby. She recognized it with some dismay, for though she had assumed that she would have children she had not intended to have any till she had been married a year or two and was tired of her carefree life, and besides, she was dubious about Kester’s reaction to the responsibilities of fatherhood. Kester had said he liked children, but she suspected that he thought of babies as being like the curly angels on Christmas cards, and as the eldest of six Eleanor had been required to play nursemaid too often to have any such cherubic misconceptions.

But when she told Kester, he was thrilled. He immediately told everybody he knew, with the artless joy of a little boy promised a bicycle. He went up to the attic and brought down the carved rosewood cradle where the infant Larnes had kicked and squalled for a hundred years, and set it up in the old nursery six months before it would be needed. Eleanor’s new acquaintances called with congratulations, bringing presents of silver thimbles and yards of muslin, which, as she couldn’t sew, she put away in a drawer, and ordered a layette from New Orleans. Altogether, in spite of her amused and sometimes annoyed protests she found herself relegated to the place of a Brave Little Woman, and to her surprise she discovered it was not an unpleasant place to be. It was agreeable to be worshiped and waited on, and to receive Kester’s delighted tributes. He brought her anything his eye fell upon with favor, without regard for whether or not she would have any use for it, and apparently believing that she was now too delicate to move he had an extension telephone installed by her bed to save her going downstairs to answer rings. As if this were not enough, he asked her nearly every day if she wanted anything, so eagerly that Eleanor was at last emboldened to make a request that had been lying in the back of her mind ever since they came home from their honeymoon trip.

Kester’s untidiness irritated her and she had observed that her endless picking up irritated him. She was beginning to foresee that if they continued to occupy the same bedroom their mutual annoyance was going to result in a storm. “I don’t want to quarrel with you about anything so unimportant,” she pled, “but I can’t, Kester, I can’t live in a place that always looks as if the Chinese army had just marched through! If there was no help for it I’d try to be patient, but in a house with nine bedrooms I don’t see why I have to. Would you mind very much if I had a room of my own?”

They were undressing. Kester’s shirt was dangling from the chandelier and the floor was strewn with his undergarments. Eleanor stood in the middle of the room surveying its confusion with a look of despair. Kester began to laugh.

Of course she could have her own room, he exclaimed. He would be glad to be relieved of her eternal neatness. Only she mustn’t move, he would. He’d take the room across the hall, which though less grand than this was every bit as comfortable. She thanked him joyfully.

That removed her last vexation. As the summer poured its hot richness upon Ardeith Eleanor passed her days in pleasant indolence. Young Dr. Bob Purcell, brother of Violet and son of the old doctor who had assisted Kester and Kester’s father into the world, dropped in once or twice a week, but his visits were more social than professional. He and Kester sat drinking juleps and talking about the cotton crop, varieties of good whiskey and the doings of the neighborhood. Eleanor liked Dr. Purcell, who was both wise and humorous, and enjoyed his visits.

The three old Durham girls called to see her, with great interest in her preparations for the baby. Eleanor was not used to gentle old ladies with nothing to do, but she tried to be pleasant. One of them brought her an elaborately briar-stitched sacque and another a pair of crocheted bootees, while the third sister, Miss Agatha, explained bashfully that she had adhesions and couldn’t stoop, but she brought an illustrated volume of fairy tales. Eleanor began to be aware that any one of the three sisters would have bartered her soul for a baby, and she was filled with sympathy and kissed them all. They told her they were happy that dear Kester had married such a sweet girl. It was the first time anybody had ever called her sweet.

Only once was she roused to look at herself, when Fred came to Ardeith at a time when his business brought him upriver for a few days. Beholding Eleanor, in a white satin dressing-gown, reclining on a sofa in her little boudoir, Fred was alarmed, embraced her tenderly, and asked why she had not let him know all was not well with her. When Eleanor exclaimed that she was perfectly well, and wanted to know what nonsense Kester had been telling him, Fred looked her up and down in astonishment. Then what, he demanded, did she mean by this ridiculous performance?

Suddenly, looking at his face, Eleanor saw herself as he saw her and she burst into uncontrollable laughter. Fred continued to stare.

“Darling,” she said at length, “you don’t understand. I’m a flower of the Old South about to produce an heir.”

“Do you really feel all right?” Fred repeated.

She nodded vehemently. “Yes, dad, I’m perfectly all right.”

“When you weren’t with Kester in the car at the train,” said Fred, still unconvinced, “I began to be worried.”

“At the train?” Eleanor gave him a look of mock horror. “My dear Mr. Upjohn, you don’t think a lady in my condition would show her figure past her own front gate?”

“You mean they won’t let you go out? But what do you do for exercise?”

“I cut flowers in the garden,” she told him wickedly, “with one of the maids following me around to make sure a grasshopper doesn’t frighten me.”

Fred sat down on one of the dainty little chairs. “I declare to my soul,” he said blankly. Then he added, “Before you were born your mother was cooking three meals a day for six men.”

“My mother,” said Eleanor, “was not married to Kester.” She began to laugh again. “Dad, get that look off your face. I’m smothered in magnolias, and I love it.”

Fred sat forward in the little chair, awkwardly, as though afraid it was going to crack under his weight. “This don’t seem a bit like you,” he said slowly.

Eleanor bit her finger, laughing at him.

“And you the smartest girl I ever did see,” Fred added.

How sad it is, she thought, that we should be so inarticulate that we have to laugh at our profoundest joys. She could not explain to Fred the happiness that was hers when her eyes met Kester’s across the room and they exchanged a fleeting smile. She and Kester teased each other, laughed at each other’s eccentricities, pretended to scold each other’s faults, with an unspoken understanding; she could not tell Fred about the moments when she had lain in Kester’s arms sobbing with the ecstasy of loving him. But Fred should have comprehended it. That he appeared not to comprehend puzzled and hurt her. I’m the first person who ever proved him wrong, she thought, and he can’t be sporting about it. She was relieved when he left, and it made her feel guilty.

3

The baby was born in October. Kester, of course, behaved as anybody might have foretold he would behave: he paced the hall, refused to eat, got sick from the fumes of chloroform, kept coming in at inconvenient moments to make sure Eleanor was not dying, and in general made a nuisance of himself; and about six o’clock in the afternoon when the nurse came to inform him that the baby was a girl he groaned “Thank God she’ll never have to go through this,” rushed into the bedroom and had to be forcibly restrained by the doctor from smothering Eleanor with his kisses. And when Eleanor murmured, “Please go away and let me rest,” he was persuaded that she did not love him any more and without having laid eyes on his daughter he went downstairs in anguish to call up his cousin and chum Neal Sheramy, and the two of them went out and got drunk and at sunrise had to be assisted to bed by Cameo.