The Keepers of the House (22 page)

I backed away and ran upstairs, still keeping perfectly silent. I was afraid. No, it was more than that. I was just plain scared.

That was the only gesture I ever saw pass between them.

I finished high school, and my Aunt Annie took me and her grandchildren on a driving tour of the West. The whole thing was decided quickly. “You should go,” my grandfather said firmly. “Good for you.” And the very next day, Aunt Annie and four grandchildren drove over from Atlanta in a big new black Cadillac and picked me up. I was absolutely delighted. Her oldest grandson, the one who would help with the driving, was extremely handsome. Six weeks touring around the country with him sounded pretty terrific.

Later, much later, I found out why they had been in such a hurry to spirit me away. That was the summer my father came to see me. My grandfather found out his plans somehow, and off I went to the Grand Canyon and the Painted Desert. I wonder what they had to say to each other, when my father came to Madison City and found that I had been spirited away.

In a way I’m sorry I didn’t meet him, at least to see what he looked like—I had long since forgotten. (My mother angrily had not kept any pictures.) But on the other hand I wouldn’t have known quite what to say to him; you can’t very well talk about blood. Or maybe you can. … But I didn’t. I was away traveling.

All I remember of the tour is a jumble of mountains and snow peaks, ice-cold lakes and endless deserts, strange flowers and an ocean that didn’t look real. On the way home, I stopped in Atlanta. I was to buy things for my first year at college.

“Child,” Aunt Annie said, “your clothes are appalling. How could Willie let you go around looking like that?”

“I bought my own clothes, with Margaret.”

Her face went blank. “This time I think I’ll take Margaret’s place with you.”

We took Ellen, her oldest granddaughter, along—she’d been to the state university for three years and had just quit to get married. We were doing a trousseau for her, and a college wardrobe for me—it was all very wholesale and grand, like the West we had seen a few weeks before, and just as confused. My Aunt Annie was an energetic woman and she enjoyed every minute. Once when I hesitated over a sleek black suit, she bristled with annoyance. “What’s the matter now?” she said. “What are you waiting for?”

“It’s kind of expensive,” I told her.

“Child, child …” she hissed her exasperation, the way so many fat women do, “he can afford it. … But it would be just like Willie not to tell you anything. … If he complains about the bills, just you ask him about his lumber business and he’ll hush up.”

That night after dinner, she decided that I must have a car. “Living way out there, you have to have an easy way to get back and forth.”

“I can’t drive,” I told her.

“Well, learn,” she said emphatically. “Really now!” And I was quiet, because nothing like this had happened, ever before. “I’m going to call Will about it right now.” She went directly into the hall to telephone.

My Uncle Howland said quietly from his chair: “Annie is a driving woman.”

“I just never thought about it like that.”

He lifted his brandy glass. “Taste—no? You can’t hide down on that farm all your life, honey, and Willie can’t keep you there.”

“I live there.”

He waved the glass at me. The light danced on the bubble caught in the stem. “You got to be what you are, the granddaughter of one of the richest men in that state.”

I looked shocked. And he chuckled. “War money, maybe, but money all the same.”

Annie came back beaming. “Willie is such a tight stubborn man you just have to talk him down.”

Later that evening, when she too was a little flushed with brandy, she told her husband: “I asked Willie if he were fixing to come to Ellen’s wedding.”

“He said no, I reckon.”

“Too busy. … You know, Howie, I just worry about him. He doesn’t ever want to come off that place. He doesn’t want to leave that Margaret.”

“Shush,” my uncle said.

So I went to college. I had a new blue-and-white Ford convertible and a mink stole and a terrible quaking fear that woke me up in the middle of the night I would often lie in my bed in the cheerful chintzy sorority house and shiver with longing to get in that new car and drive home. I never liked college. I just got to dislike it less the longer I was there.

When I came home for my first vacation—at Christmas that year—my grandfather said: “You’re not beholden here, if there’s any place you’d sooner go.”

“Stay away for good like Margaret’s children?”

His eyes didn’t even flicker. “No,” he said, “you can come back. … You can but you might not want to, someday.”

I hugged him then, because I was sorry I’d reminded him about his other children, and because he’d begun to look old in the hard morning light I’d been up all night driving and I felt fine.

“I’d like to live here,” I told him, “all the rest of my life.”

He was pleased and I could see it but since he wasn’t demonstrative he only rubbed his chin and said: “Depend where your man’ll live.”

“I haven’t got a beau.”

“You will,” he said. “You will.”

It was crispy cool and I was wearing the new mink. I rubbed my fingers up and down the long fur. “Maybe we could live here.”

“Maybe,” he said, “if you found the right kind of fellow.”

“Won’t marry any other kind.”

“You got to be careful,” he said heavily, “your mama married for love and it ran out on her and she was left with nothing to hold her heart together.”

“Not me,” I said, “not me.”

“Well,” he said, “you need a cup of coffee. Come inside and we’ll see what Margaret’s got.”

I spent four blurred vague years at college. Green lawns, white-columned buildings, and flowerbeds. Fingers that ached with note-taking, head that ached with cigarette smoke, legs that ached with long hours in spike heels. The unfamiliar singing of alcohol in my ears, and lips that went suddenly numb. And parties.

There was a place on a TVA lake, a pretty spot with woods close all around except for the single road that led to the landing. It was called Harris Pier and it had rowboats moored in lines on each side. At the very end was a large float with a diving board. It was where you went on Saturday nights after the restaurants and cafés and clubs had all closed. It was always jammed—not that anybody particularly wanted a big group, but there was only one float and everybody crowded on it. Sometimes there’d be a guitar and we’d sing. Once Ted Anderson brought a harmonica. He didn’t play too well, not nearly like I’ve heard Negroes play. But it was good enough. And the soft sad reedy sounds drifting out over the still water and softening their edges on the pines—well, you remember things like that.

And you remember how warm bourbon tasted, in a paper cup with water dipped out of the lake at your feet. How the nights were so unbearably, hauntingly beautiful that you wanted to cry How every patch of light and shadow from the moon seemed deep and lovely. Calm or storm, it didn’t matter. It was exquisite and mysterious, just because it was night.

I wonder now how I lost it, the mysteriousness, the wonder. It faded steadily until one day it was entirely gone, and night became just dark, and the moon was only something that waxed and waned and heralded a changing in the weather. And rain just washed out graveled roads. The glitter was gone.

And the worst part was that you didn’t know exactly at what point it disappeared. There was nothing you could point to and say: now, there. One day you saw that it was missing and had been missing for a long time. It wasn’t even anything to grieve over, it had been such a long time passing.

That glitter and hush-breath quality just slipped away. The way most things do, I’ve found out. The way my mother’s life did, gently, bit by bit, until it was gone and I didn’t even have the satisfaction of mourning. And my love too. There isn’t even a scene—not for me, nothing so definite—just the seepage, the worms of time. Like those wedding dresses my cousins and I found so long ago in the old storage trunks. They looked all right. But when you picked them up, they fell of their own weight, without even a breath touching them, and even the bits of pieces you held in your fingers crumpled.

That’s the way it happened with me, during the years. Things that I thought surrounded me have pulled back. Sometimes I wonder if I am not like an island the tide has left, leaving only some sea wrack on the beaches, useless things.

I look at my children now and I think: how long before they slip away, before I am disappointed in them. …

But it doesn’t matter. Not really. Not to me. Not any more. I have come to expect no more than this. At least I am not disappointed. …

But in those days at college, everything glittered and gleamed and my nerves quivered at the slightest breeze, and I still trembled with delight when I had a chance to wear my date’s coat. After my first real dance, I didn’t sleep at all. I lay in my bed and shivered and remembered until I saw dawn break and sun pour in the window.

It was all part of it, it all went together: the slight bobbing movement of the float, the sad sobbing strains of the harmonica, the dark moon-crusted trees. Ted Anderson only brought that harmonica once. Maybe that was why it sounded so good.

I nearly died, too, one of those lovely nights.

We had been drinking on the float when somebody said: “Throw ’em in.” And they did, all the girls in their best dresses went over the edge of the float. I don’t think they’d have heard me in all the squealing and screaming, even if I had remembered to tell them. But I didn’t—until I felt the cold of the water I didn’t remember that I couldn’t swim. They had assumed everybody could. With the splashing and laughing, my yells weren’t any good. I had a great full skirt on, I remember, and lots of petticoats; they were fashionable then. For half a minute they kept me up, and that was all.

I held my breath when I sank and fought my way up to the surface, got a new breath and went down again. It seemed forever, up and down—and then I made a mistake. I broke water so briefly that I hadn’t filled my lungs and I couldn’t resist the impulse to take a breath going down. Once you have water in your mouth, once you start coughing under water, it doesn’t take long. I remember only a couple of coughs and then I passed out.

They said later that they found me a couple of feet under the surface, floating face down, and that they had a devil of a time hauling me up on the float with all my wet petticoats getting in the way.

I remember coming to, noticing that water was pouring out of my mouth and that an awful pressure on my back was jamming my breast into the canvas-covered deck of the float.

I struggled to turn over. “Stop pushing me,” I said. “The floor’s hard. It hurts.”

Somebody said: “She’s all right.”

“My God,” somebody else said, “I need a drink. Scared me sober.”

“Take your time,” the first voice said. “I’ll take care of her.” And then somebody picked me up. I could have opened my eyes to see, but it seemed like too great an effort.

I did, finally. I was lying on the back seat of a car, and there was only a little tiny glow from the light that went on when you opened the door. The people who had brought me—I heard them begin to walk away, heard them talking: “Where’d you leave the bottle?” “Out on the float.” “Harry had it.”

I didn’t want to be left alone. I jerked up, reaching for the door. The first thing I touched was a dripping-wet shirt that had a warm body inside it. And a pair of wet arms grabbed me hard.

I recognized him: Tom Stanley. “Where the hell do you think you’re going now?” He held out a cup of whiskey. I drank it quickly, noticing for the first time the cold in my body, the cold of near-death. I shivered, hard. “Take another one.” He poured it. “What happened, for God’s sake?”

“I can’t swim,” I said, and my voice was hoarse and broken.

He was silent for just a moment. Then he sucked his teeth softly. “We never thought of that,” he said. “We just plain never thought of that.”

I drank his whiskey. My mouth tasted awful, as if I’d been throwing up. I wondered if I had, but I didn’t dare ask.

“You never learned to swim?” he repeated. “Where the hell’d you grow up?”

“Why the hell’d you throw me in?”

I put my face into the wet front of his shirt and began to cry. The more I cried the harder I held on to him, and by the time I felt better, I had crawled all over him, and had my face jammed into his Adam’s apple and my arms wrapped around his neck. When I finished and started scrubbing at my face with my hands, he gave me his handkerchief.

“I’ll drive you home,” he said. “I’ll go tell them we’re leaving.”

He walked back to the float, and I decided to move to the front seat. I got out all right, but then I nearly fell, my legs were so shaky. I had to hold on to the back door and fumble with the front latch. When I finally did get into the seat, I felt like I’d really done something. I wasn’t even able to close the other door. Tom slammed it when he came back.

It was a long drive back, seven or eight miles over dirt roads that wound and twisted across the very top of the ridge. After a mile or so, he stopped—right in the middle of the road, there wasn’t a car anywhere around—and said: “I want a drink. You?”

“Yes,” I said, and my voice was getting less hoarse. “I sound better.”

“You’ll live,” he said.

He offered me the bottle and I hunted around on the floor until I found the paper cup that I had dropped earlier. I poured the whiskey in that. He drank directly from the bottle. We hadn’t any water or ice; that was all back at the float with the party. But still, liquor helped. I stopped shivering. Soon there was a nice warm alcohol glow out along my fingers.

“I’m sorry I crawled all over you,” I said. “I was pretty scared and you were the only thing around and I just had to grab hold.”

“Any time.” He started the car and we drove slowly and carefully along, the engine laboring in low gear on the steepest places.

The slopes of these hills were heavily wooded on both sides, but the crest was natural open meadow. The road ran directly across it for about half a mile. Behind us you could see dark thick woods and the sharp metallic glint of the lake. On the other side, there were the same trees and beyond them, far beyond them, the town and the college. You could see house lights—a few people were still up. You could see neon signs, red mostly with a bit of green in them. You could see street lights, straight rows of yellowish lamps, obscured by their own trees.