A Southern Exposure Read online

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MAY 2011

  Copyright © 1995 by The Estate of Alice Adams

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2011. Previously published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 1995.

  Vintage Contemporaries is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79827-5

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  To Amanda Urban

  With love

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Part Two Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Part One

  1

  On a fine blue summer afternoon, in the distant Thirties, one of those brief and hopeful years between the Depression and the war, a once-grand wood-panelled station wagon heads south, down all those winding white concrete miles, in flight from Connecticut. The small family enclosed in that hurrying car—Harry and Cynthia Baird, and Abigail, their daughter—does not have a fugitive look; they look like rich Yankees, or maybe even movie stars; the man at the filling station where they just bought gas thought they might be from the movies. Cynthia and Harry, had they known, would have very much liked this view; it is what they wish they were, a glamorous couple—an image they hope to recover, down South, where life is much cheaper, they have heard. That is their general plan, to regain some comfort and ease of living—and in certain specific ways they are, as they might have half-ironically put it to each other, on the lam.

  Small, handsome, sandy-haired Harry’s flight is perhaps the simplest in origin: he is fleeing a job as the manager of a country club in Connecticut, on the shore. Marginal work at best, involving details that were endlessly boring to Harry: the ordering of booze and food, scheduling events, and endless glad-handing; Harry has sometimes felt his smile was deforming his face. And his rebellion took predictably dangerous forms: he often drank too much; he allowed a few backseat intermission flirtations to get out of hand, so to speak. There will be none of that in Pinehill, their destination, though, he thinks. In this pristine, uncharted region he and Cynthia will regain their innocence; once more they will be in love and rich again, as before the Crash, now almost ten years back, when Cynthia’s golden money seemed an endless stream.

  Cynthia Cromwell Baird, a green-eyed blonde, is a languid but sexy, observant, and imaginative woman. Her escape is both more furtive and more complex than Harry’s. For one thing, she owes Lord & Taylor almost three hundred dollars. Can she and Harry somehow be traced down here? Will they send someone? How incredibly embarrassing; besides, she does not exactly have three hundred dollars available. In Cynthia’s mind, which tends toward the novelistic, she and Harry are at a lovely cocktail party, perhaps out in someone’s garden, among all their nice new Southern friends; they are wearing their beautiful best clothes, which no one there could recognize as old—when suddenly: “Mrs. Cynthia Cromwell Baird? We have a warrant, will you come with us?” Would they do that, turn her into some Public Enemy Number 32, or whatever?

  Her other escape is from a handsome, bad (really low-class) man named Jack Morrissey, whom she “led on”; she knows she did, knowing all the while that she didn’t actually, ever, want to go very far with him. She just liked the kissing and the excitement. In Pinehill, however, there will be none of that, unless Russell Byrd, the local poet, whom Cynthia has read obsessively, whom she will meet—unless James Russell Lowell Byrd is as sexy as he looks. But no, she will only be polite and admiring, and maybe let him know that she has memorized quite a few lines from his work.

  Abigail Baird is a fair, deceptively stolid-looking child, who has combined her father’s opportunistic energy with her mother’s imagination—with some success. She is an interesting, secretive, plumpish child. Who does not remember the Crash, having been born shortly before it took place. But she has a certain bias against big wealth, since all the girls at her school, Miss Taylor’s, were very rich, and Abigail loathed the school, and most of the girls. Her best friend was Benny Davis, the janitor’s son. A Negro boy about her age but much taller. Abigail is tall for her age, with long blond hair in heavy braids, and a thick fringe of bangs across her forehead. She looks forward to going to the public school in Pinehill (no one has told her that there will not be Negro kids there).

  Abigail’s most hated person at Miss Taylor’s was the chemistry teacher, Mr. Martindale. As all the girls there knew, his irritation threshold was very low; it was quite possible that he disliked them fully as much as they did him. But he was not supposed to dislike these nice rich young girls, of course he was not, and so Rocky Martindale (fresh out of Yale) disguised his rage with (to Abigail, at least) the most perfectly transparent smiles. So hateful!

  But Abby took revenge: on an afternoon shortly before this trip South, she and Benny, with keys “borrowed” from Benny’s father, Dan, the janitor, went into the chem. lab, and there, in an extremely tidy and methodical way, they switched about all the compounds, one fine white powder into another’s box or bottle. So meticulous was their work that nothing would be noticed, they thought, until the first day of school next fall, when Mr. Martindale began some of his show-off experiments. None of which would work. Abigail has liked to imagine his smiles of purest rage.

  Sometimes, though, on this long drive, she has had darker imaginings: perhaps an explosion—she hates Martindale but would not wish to injure him physically. Or could she and Benny possibly have left any fingerprints, anywhere? Would they send down the FBI?

  Fugitives, then, these three, driving through the long shadowed green afternoon toward their fates, their new stories. The main point, on which Cynthia and Harry are agreed, is that they won’t have to worry over money. They can make do, easily, on what they have left, the little dribbles from unscathed stock. It will be like being rich again, and ten years younger. Abigail dreams of a wonderful public school—no rich kids and no Mr. Martindale.

  The road over which they are passing is two-lane, white concrete. On either side rise banks of eroded red clay, finely crumbling, in delicate long lines. On top of the banks begin fields of yellow-brown broomstraw, and waving dark green pines. Occasionally there are deep rich thickets, an impenetrable interweaving of branches and twigs and leaves; and sometimes flowers, wild, and promiscuously, beautifully flourishing there by the highway—ragged Queen Anne’s lace, and tiny bluets. Unlikely roadside companions.

  They cross a bridge, more white concrete, that spans a shallow brown creek, bordered by a narrow beach of dark
, dirty-looking sand, and bursts of honeysuckle vines, thickly tangled, suggesting caves, and secrecy. Hiding places, away from the sun.

  And then the road begins its long slow almost imperceptible climb toward the town, as the hills surrounding spread their wide green gentle waves. That vast and until recent years unpopulated countryside surrounding the town of Pinehill is some hundred or so miles inland from the Atlantic; it is said to have once been underneath the sea, in some prehistoric formation. And the infinitely slow, grand undulations of those green hills do indeed suggest a subaquatic history, to scientific minds as well as to poetic temperaments. The local poet, Russell Byrd, whom Cynthia plans to meet, has frequently been inspired by this notion, and both the geology and the botany departments of the local college are fond of field trips. There are even rumors of whale bones, though none have actually been found. There are the ghosts of whale bones, possibly.

  To anyone living in these parts, except perhaps for Russell Byrd, this landscape is most ordinary. It is what you expected, driving through the South, along with the bare brown yards of lonely farmhouses, built up from the dirt on stilts, where chickens graze and half-naked babies or skinny-legged older children play and hide. But to the Baird family (the fugitives!) it is all as exotic as a dream terrain, or a movie.

  “There’s so much wide open land” is how Cynthia expresses it. Then, trying again, “I mean, I think of what we’re used to, even in the suburbs, and then the Hoovervilles, all those people crowded in packing crates, under the George Washington Bridge.” She sighs. “If only people could be redistributed some way.”

  “The Russians are trying that out,” her husband, Harry, reminds her. “It’s not working too well, I don’t think. Their famous Five-Year Plans.”

  “I think it’s really beautiful,” from the backseat Abigail informs her parents, who often tend to forget that she is there. “Like a big green ocean,” she adds.

  “ ‘Green prehistoric undulations,’ ” murmurs Cynthia, from one of the Byrd poems that she has learned by heart.

  “What?”

  She does not explain.

  2

  Missing the hills of his homeland, the endless undulations of green and the small rise of Pinehill itself, which is now at least a thousand miles ahead, Russ Byrd (James Russell Lowell Byrd) in his oversized Hollywood Cadillac drives fiercely across the flat scorched plains of western Kansas. He succeeds in blocking out the five screaming children (his) who are fighting on the backseat and on the car’s wide floor, and in also blocking out the woman who sits beside him, Brett—his wife, whom he himself named, changing her from SallyJane Caldwell Byrd to Brett Byrd, a whole new person, a poet’s wife and mother of five. Brett is of course the one to cope with the children. As best she knows how.

  Russ is speeding toward Pinehill as fast as he can, at the very same moment as the Bairds, too, are approaching the town. Only, in Kansas it is still earlier in the day; the sun is higher and much hotter.

  “I hate you, I wish you were dead.”

  “Dead—you too!”

  “Anybody wanna buy a duck?”

  “That’s not funny, Joe Penner is not funny.”

  “You shut up, you damn fool.”

  “I’ll cut off your head with scissors.”

  “Is everybody happy?”

  “You look like Olive Oyl.”

  “You look like a dumbhead dodo.”

  “I hate you!”

  “Children!”

  Russ is thinking of home, is concentrating on that known loved landscape, but every now and then all those voices successfully intrude, and what he thinks then is: Damn them, there’s not a scrap of poetry in a one of them, not even Melanctha and certainly not in my boys, Brett’s boys (there is also a secret child of whom he never thinks). Lowell, Walker, Justin, Avery, Melanctha. None of these kids even look like Russ, they all favor fair fat Brett; they are bland and blond, with quick ugly tempers just beneath their peaceful surfaces. Only Melanctha has something about the eyes that makes people say, “Well, she surely does favor you, James Russell. Do you reckon that little old girl could be a poet too?”

  Russ does not think so, nor does he see the link between his own famously intense, deep-set, dark blue eyes, and the small blue dots on either side of his daughter’s tiny nose.

  “Handsome” is not a word generally applied to Russ; certainly he does not see himself as a handsome man—thank Christ! he might have added. His face is extreme, is striking in its contrasts: very white skin and very dark, very thick curling brown hair, and those dark, dark intense blue eyes, so deep-set, so fierce. Wide thin red mouth, and deeply cleft sculptured white chin. A large, slow-moving man, Russell speaks slowly too, as though imitating the farm boy he used to be, and still claims as his true self (Russ has in fact several accents, or modes of speaking), so that the wild darts, sometimes lethal, from his intelligence elicit shock. Did Russ Byrd actually say that, just when you thought he was sleepily inattentive, even not quite catching on? Yes, Russ did say that, and those who read his poetry with any care found, buried in those rural landscapes, some messages that were somber indeed.

  With the part of her mind that is not occupied with her screaming children (a large part), and her distant-seeming husband, Brett (SallyJane) Byrd considers Kansas. She compares Kansas to Santa Monica, the house just left behind, and she easily decides that of the two she likes it better in Kansas. She hated California: Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Palm Springs—all that she saw out there she disliked. All those furry-mouthed refugee intellectuals, so-called, and the fast-talking New York types—impossible to understand a word that anyone said. And all those skinny dyed-blonde women hanging all over the men with their boobs hanging out of their pale pastel silk clothes. The weather was pale and pastelly too, no zip to it, never a bite or scent in the air from anything real.

  Whereas Kansas looks real, as real as hell. The way-off little farms, dirt farms, and dirt poor they looked to be; and the just plain miles and miles of nobody’s land, furze land, burned grassland. And every now and then on the highway a Model T, or an old-timey hauling wagon pulled along by a brace of mules. Sometimes whole families piled up on a wagon, with their beds and babies and everything, heading to California to pick grapes, probably. Like in that new book, Mr. Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, that Russ made her read. A lot of it made her cry with sorrow for those folk.

  Of course Russ is driving too fast; he must be hitting sixty, anyway, so it’s hard to get a fix on anything she sees. She almost wishes that something would force them to stop, like an accident, or a vomiting child. She sighs as she thinks, Could I have wished that, wished sickness on one of the children? Oh, God will surely punish me for that. And then she smiles as she thinks, It’s good I quit going to church when I did.

  “You dumb fool!”

  “Melanctha is Alice the goon!”

  “Justin is a doodoo.”

  “Avery makes poopoo in his bed.”

  The shrieks are laughter now, not tears, though it hardly matters, and at least no one is throwing up. Not yet.

  Russell likes Los Angeles, Hollywood, all that, although back in Pinehill he pretends that he hates it. He even pretends with Brett, alone. But she knows better, she sees his face when the telegrams come, and the long-distance phone calls, summoning him out there. She sees that farm-boy smile spread from his mouth to his eyes, and when he gets off the phone to tell her what the plan is, she can hear it in his voice, pure pleasure. The country boy who’s won a prize at the fair. For his corn. (Brett snickers to herself at this very private joke.)

  And the way he talks when they’re out there; it’s a scandal. His “ma”s and even “suh”s come as thick as summer rain, those mean little eyes of his opening wide and innocent, talking so slow and country it’s a wonder anyone can understand.

  “But don’t you get worried at all? Russell meeting all those sex-queen movie stars and going to parties, swimming with them and all?” Several of the dumber women in Pinehill
have asked Brett that question, each phrasing it a little differently, but the message is always the same. Aren’t you jealous, aren’t you worried, and if you’re not, why not?

  “Because I know Russ” is what Brett would like to say, to the nosey, fake-sympathetic, censorious ladies of Pinehill, and to some of the men. I know Russ; he’s scared to death of those real live movie stars. My Russ is a total coward when it comes to women. He was scared of me a long time ago, when I was the university president’s daughter, over in Hilton, and he was the scholarship boy, what was then called a “self-help” student, meaning that he waited tables in the dorm and took odd jobs on weekends. Russ was scared to death of me. I had to do almost everything to get him to look; I used to lie out sunbathing when he came over to fix a fence in our back garden, my fat breasts spilling out of my bathing suit, usually, and then I’d trot out lemonade and cookies to him (now there’s an original trick), and then it was me bought tickets and asked him to the May Frolics, and then the Sunday Germans. Pretty bold, I was, back then. But I really wanted Russell Byrd. I wanted a husband and a poet, and a father. I wanted Russ.

  Russ is driving too fast. He is dying to get back home, Brett knows, just as when they’re heading west, to L.A., he’s dying to get out there. It’s always the next place, with Russ. The thing ahead. The new poem. The unborn child.

  Too fast.

  Sometimes beside the road there are people walking along, bums with their clothes on a stick—or, less frequently, women with kids. Farm women, from the look of them; gaunt and bony-faced, maybe heading west for some fruit- or some cotton-picking. They all look up as the big car passes them in the wrong direction, and then, seeing all the kids, sometimes they smile. You’ve got your troubles too, is what Brett hopes they’re thinking, not just ugly mad jealous thoughts about rich folks in too large cars. “We’re not all that rich,” is one thing Brett would like to say to them. “But here, here’s what I’ve got in my bag”—and she imagines a flutter of dollar bills trailing after the car, a woman and child bending down to pick them up, and then going on walking to the next town for a couple of good big meals.