A Southern Exposure Read online

A long pause followed this authoritative statement. It was Betsy Lee who broke it, in a very high voice, asking what was in all their minds: “You mean you-all played doctor with colored kids, in Connecticut?”

  “Why sure, what’s the difference? We were all doing it, sometimes.”

  “If my mother heard a story like that, she would absolutely, positively have a great big stroke. She surely would.” Betsy giggled, rather faintly.

  “Well, don’t tell her. Actually there was mostly just this one Negro boy, and he was a friend of all of ours. His father was the janitor in the school.”

  A long pause. A silence.

  “Do you all plan on staying down here a long time?” Archer Bigelow, a Southern boy to his core, managed to ask this politely, at the same time with the shadow of a threat.

  “You mean at the Inn, or down here in Pinehill?”

  “I still think we should play some game. This silly party could last all night. You know how they get.”

  “We might as well do something.”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Archer’s is crooked. Did you ever see such a thing?” Billy laughed, mildly hysterical with daring.

  “Crooked Archer. That’s really funny, I think.” Abby too laughed, more loudly.

  “If you ever say that again—”

  “Don’t threaten me, little boy. Even if you have got a crooked cock.”

  “Ooooh, some words you Yankee ladies use.”

  “Well, it’s silly to call it a thing. I think.”

  “I’m going to tell my mother!”

  “But if Deirdre comes will she stay this time, do you think?”

  “Silly to come all the way from California if she isn’t.”

  “Do you reckon, when they’re all out there in California, that Russ and Brett and Deirdre ever get together?”

  “Do they even know each other?”

  “They wouldn’t just run into each other. There’s a whole bunch of miles between Hollywood and San Francisco.”

  “Is that where Deirdre’s been? I never—”

  “Deirdre’s the most beautiful, most perfectly lovely young woman I ever laid my eyes on. Bar none.”

  “Jimmy, you better lay off that iced tea.”

  “Did you hear that Brett ran over this little child out in Texas?”

  “She is just the worst driver ever. Ever!”

  “But Russ was driving. You know Brett’s always in back with the kids. Russ wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  “Do you reckon Deirdre’s as pretty as she was—what is it now, five years ago?”

  “How could she be?”

  “And it wasn’t any child that Russ ran over, it was this little old pig, in Kansas.”

  “She’s bringing her little brother, little Graham.”

  “I never could get the straight of that. Her brother?”

  “It’s simple. Sad and simple. You remember Emily Yates? Deirdre’s mom. She died having that baby right after they moved to California. So sad. She had this idea about California being this real healthy place, and she talked Clarence into going out there, once he got her pregnant.”

  “What do you reckon the kids are doing down there, all this time?”

  “Oh, you know kids. Just making friends, some way they’ve got of their own.”

  “Jimmy, where’s Esther?”

  “She’s home, poor thing, with one of her migraines.”

  “Poor Esther. Hitler—”

  “Yes, every time.”

  “Funny, her being from Oklahoma and all.”

  “Well, I guess she’s more Jew than Oakie.”

  “Will you take a look at that dress on Miss Dolly?”

  “She said she was whipping up a little something for today, but mercy sakes—”

  “Esther thinks we should go to war with that Hitler. Stop how he’s treating those Jews. A war!”

  “Dolly, you are just the smartest thing. I don’t know another person who could get away with colors like that. That purple with the pink.”

  “It’s like the colors in our suite. I just can’t tell you how attractive I think it is, I think my husband said—” Cynthia’s attempt to join the group was tentative—and largely ignored.

  “Such a lovely party, a perfect day.”

  “And no one’s getting drunk, have you noticed?”

  “That’s partly because old Jimmy’s not holding his end up. One way to put it.”

  “And poor Esther with those Hitler migraines of hers.”

  “Seriously, you think we’re going to have to go to war with that terrible man?”

  “Seriously I do, but don’t you quote me on that or I’ll say you’re a liar.”

  “I declare, that Irene Lee’s the prettiest thing this old town ever saw.”

  “Since Deirdre left.”

  “Well, Deirdre, but she’s so young. Hardly counts when you’re not even twenty yet.”

  “That Miz Baird, though. Even if pretty’s not quite the word I’d use.”

  “Have you noticed? Yankees aren’t hardly ever exactly what you’d call pretty, now, are they?”

  “Well, come to think of it. But how about that debutante, that Brenda something? All over the rotogravure.”

  “Brenda Diana Duff Frazier. And you know she’s not pretty, she’s purely gorgeous. A raving, tearing beauty.”

  “But did you hear she’d had her legs fixed? Slimmed down by some old New York doctor?”

  “Lord, it’s so hard to know what to believe these days.”

  “Look, I guess the Bairds are going. Is that their little girl with them?”

  “I guess so. Plump little thing. Looks mad.”

  “Oh, Yankee children.”

  Safely out of all that, in her parents’ car, Abby burst out: “Did you know that Negro children go to different schools?”

  “Well, I guess we did, but we just didn’t think about it.”

  “Well, in that case I want to go to a Negro school.”

  “Abby, you know perfectly well that’s impossible. Now calm down, we’re going home now.”

  “One of those boys’ things is crooked.”

  “Abigail!”

  “Well, that’s how they are. Those Bigelow twins. They don’t know any games but doctor, I think they’re dumb. God, I’d much rather go to the Negro school.”

  “Abby, I’ve told you, don’t say God.”

  “Well, they’re all dumb, those kids. I don’t want to go to their school. One of them said Mr. Roosevelt was a Yankee Jew. Is that what they teach in their dumb old schools down here? Yankee Jew! Roosevelt! They’re so dumb.”

  6

  From the low plateau on which the town of Pinehill is built many roads wind down, and down and out in various directions: toward the coast, or the western mountains, or north, up to New York, Boston, Canada, all that. Going east, the coastal direction, is a fairly new two-lane highway. (This state is famed for its highway system; much more money is spent on highways than on schools, as local professors are fond of pointing out, shaking heads and muttering of the future.) On both sides of this eastern drive are deep and seemingly infinite woods, pines and oaks and maples and poplars, and a rich, indistinguishable undergrowth of bushes and thick vines. Recently, a dirt road has been built that goes back into these woods. Not very far out of town. At the end of this road, in an old refurbished farmhouse, Russ Byrd and Brett and all those children live. A marvelous spread, which a great many people in town have never seen; the Byrds are known for anti-sociability.

  Most people don’t mind. That is how the Byrds are, how it suits them to be. Too late to change, and besides, why should they?

  Among those who do mind, in fact the single person who minds passionately, uncontrollably (especially when a little drunk), is Jimmy Hightower. One clear reason for this mania of disappointment being that he came to Pinehill, bought a lot on the road leading out to Russ Byrd’s house, and built his own big fancy “modern” house there, purely and shee
rly in the hope—well, the certainty—of getting to know Russ. Being friends. Drinking buddies, although an early, minor disappointment had been the news that Russ was not much of a drinker.

  And, eventually, they were to be writing buddies.

  For Jimmy wants to write, more than anything in the world, more than years ago he craved to make money he now wants to write. And not just to write, of course, but to publish books, have his picture in the paper, book reviews in the Times and the Herald Tribune.

  All that time in the oil business—and he was good: Jimmy Hightower, the wildest wildcatter west of the Mississippi—all that time he was actually a writer, in his mind. Clean and famous. Sober, most of the time. With a big modern house in the country, near this nice little college town.

  Near Russell Byrd.

  Russell Byrd, who now, very occasionally, will wave from the big Hollywood Cadillac that he drives so fast on the narrow white dirt road, just barely slowing down, not to add a hello or anything like that to the wave, just to lower the dust, probably. Leaving Jimmy standing there staring, his tentative hand caught in a semi-wave. It felt like—and Jimmy suddenly but conclusively knew what it felt like, the acknowledgment almost felled him—it felt like being hot for a girl who couldn’t see you for dust. Yes, that is how it feels. Some impossibly tall glamorous blonde girl from New York, in black summer clothes and dark sunglasses, out visiting in Tulsa, someone’s college friend who could barely remember the little guy named Jimmy High-tower who had asked her to dance at a party (of course she’d said no, too busy). But watching Russell Byrd drive by, Jimmy is seized with the same fierce humiliated longing—for notice; he just wants Russell Byrd to acknowledge that he is there. A neighbor. Someone to talk to. All the stuff about writing could come much later on. Just as, with the New York girl, he wasn’t so much dying to kiss her (he would not even have aspired to the thought of kissing) as to have her remember his name. At the next party to have her say, “Oh, Jimmy. Hi,” in that easy cool Yankee way.

  Jimmy hates this analogy. Russell Byrd and the New York girl of so long ago, but there it is, he has to face the truth of it. The intensity of his longing.

  One of the only bits of advice about writing that Jimmy has ever heard, from a lowly instructor in English comp., went like this: Give a lot of thought to the things you don’t want to think about at all. For whatever reasons, never mind the lowliness of the source, Jimmy took this dictum seriously; it was part of his writing credo, insofar as he had one. It makes him give a lot of thought to his Russell Byrd feelings as he vows, I’ll be a writer if it kills me.

  In his study Jimmy has a massive oval desk (several people have made remarks about Mussolini, which Jimmy does not find very funny), and in those drawers he has parts of a Western novel (80 pages of that) and a sex-and-oil novel (120 pages) and 30 pages of a newly started story, about a town somewhat like Pinehill, in which two very famous writers live and work, and are great friends.

  In the meantime, “To hell with you,” Jimmy mutters to the slowly settling clouds of dust above his jonquil bed at the end of his impressive lawn, and he goes back into his house. He is thinking by now less of Russell Byrd than of Cynthia Baird, the blonde, the new girl in town. He believes that Esther and his daughters have gone somewhere for the afternoon, but although he knows he was carefully told, he can’t remember. There is too much in his head, he knows there is.

  Where was Russ going, anyway? So fast, not looking anywhere. Could Russ have a lady somewhere, someone he drives off to see, on a secret afternoon? Who? Where?

  This thought, today’s thought, is entirely new to Jimmy, and he finds it exciting, both stimulating and scary. If Russ, the upright, the Boy Scout of American letters—if pious blue-eyed Russ has a girlfriend, then anything could happen, and probably will.

  Esther is actually in New York, he suddenly, shockingly remembers—and the girls are over at a friend’s for the afternoon. Esther has gone up for some of her committees and meetings. Joint Anti-Fascist Refugees, something like that. She always comes back sick with migraines and other strong emotional symptoms, and consumed with an urgency to tell Jimmy all about it, what the committees are doing, what the most recent news is from there, from Hitler’s Germany, the land of poor Esther’s nightmares.

  Thoughts of Esther, of Hitler and Germany fill Jimmy with an extraordinary if vague discomfort, a squirming unease. He wants so much to help her, to cheer her and make her happy again, but there is absolutely no possible way to make Esther happy until Hitler is gone. Defeated, dead. “We have to go to war with Germany,” she whispers fiercely—to Jimmy alone; no one else will listen to much of this stuff, and of course no one else is married to Esther. “Roosevelt knows it too, he’s just buying time.” Her great dark Jewish eyes are huge, filled with all the sorrows of all Jews, forever.

  However, remembering that Esther is in New York, and the girls off at their friend’s house for the afternoon, Jimmy pauses in his over-sized, over-windowed living room; he stares at the new French telephone, and he thinks of Cynthia Baird.

  “I thought if you had any free time this afternoon—I know you want to see some houses—a little drive?”

  “Oh, divine! I’d love to. I’ve been deserted by both my husband and child.”

  Cynthia’s legs are long and thin, a little too thin for Jimmy’s special taste but they are pretty, very pretty legs, he has to admit. She stretches them out in Jimmy’s new Buick’s front seat, showing off her pale silk stockings and spectator pumps. “It’s so interesting, the shape of this town, isn’t it?” she comments.

  “I guess.”

  Beside him there she chatters. Is she nervous, does he make her nervous, or is she always like this? Jimmy wonders, and decides to ask her later. When they know each other slightly better.

  “It’s a real plateau, isn’t it?” Cynthia continues chattily. “With those interesting sideways wrinkles all around. Roads, and then places where there aren’t any roads.”

  “This is my road,” Jimmy tells her.

  “Oh, how beautiful!—the woods.”

  Driving very slowly, approaching his own house, Jimmy is thinking that while it seems strange not to ask her in, it might seem stranger if he did. And stranger still if she should say to Esther, “Oh, I loved your house.” But of course only a Southern woman would say a thing like that; a classy Yankee like Cynthia would surely know better.

  Knowing that she will understand, he tells her, “And that’s my house. Unfortunately, Esther is in New York this week.”

  “Oh, isn’t it nice! So big, so nice and new and white.”

  She doesn’t like it. Well, what the hell, no reason why she should. And suddenly, looking through Cynthia’s stylish eyes, Jimmy doesn’t much like his big house either. The touches of “moderne,” so much glass brick, and the rounded corners, look pretentious and out of place in these woods. It looks frightened; only frightened people would live in such a defiantly new house, way out in the woods.

  He drives on. “We’re almost to the end of the road,” he says.

  “Where Russell Byrd lives?”

  “That’s right.” But how did she know that? Are there tourist maps for sale these days, with famous houses—like Hollywood, homes of movie stars? Jimmy makes an effort to control this line of thought, and tells himself in a rational way that anyone, anyone at all, anyone at that fool party could have said to Cynthia, “And that’s Jimmy Hightower, lives out on the road to Russ Byrd’s.”

  But would that person have added: “So strange, there they are practically next-door neighbors, and I don’t think they’re any more friends than anyone.” Strange indeed, thinks Jimmy, with somewhat more than his usual rancor.

  “Is he home from California yet?” asks Cynthia next—no need to identify the “he.” “Or Kansas, wherever he was.”

  “Yes. Just back,” Jimmy tells her authoritatively.

  “I suppose we’ll meet sometime,” says Cynthia vaguely, a vagueness that Jimmy recognizes as quite
fake.

  “I suppose you will,” he tells her unpityingly. “It’s a very small town.”

  “I’ve noticed.” And then. “Oh, what a marvelous house! Is that his?”

  “Well, it’s theirs. He’s got five kids, you know.”

  “Marvelous,” Cynthia murmurs, clearly not concentrating on Russ’s children.

  It is a good house, Jimmy in his heart must admit that too. To an old low-lying farmhouse, the Byrds only added a wing here and there, the new imitating the old with great success. The house seemed to love the land on which it lay; it rested there affectionately, its small discreet windows suggesting self-containment, no need of the outside world. Suggesting Russ himself, of course. And, for that matter, Brett too—a very reclusive lady, in the town’s view.

  Jimmy’s house had been built with an eye specifically to not imitating Russ’s: a defiant newness, modernity had been the aim, and how often Jimmy has wondered, has questioned the wisdom of this defiance—but only to himself, never daring to broach this regret, not even to Esther, or perhaps especially not to Esther.

  Sometime later, a mile or so after Russ Byrd’s house, after a time of silence between them, just as Jimmy begins to slow the car, to turn and go back, Cynthia points and exclaims, “Look at that old road, almost overgrown. You can barely see it. Do you want to explore?”

  “Funny thing, I never saw that road before,” Jimmy mutters, half to her, half to himself. Aloud he says, “Oh, sure, why not?”

  The road that they have been on, the Russ Byrd road (will anyone ever think of calling it the Hightower road?) simply ends, about five miles on, in a series of broomstraw meadows ringed with pines; Jimmy knows the place well. At one time he thought of buying it and putting his house there. Sometimes he wishes he had.

  But this secret road, onto which he now turns, is beautiful. All over-arched with branches through which occasional streaks of sun now break, the trembling pale green leaves illuminated. The road, almost never used, enforces a silence, a tense slowness. Jimmy feels his breath tight, as though he feared to make noise, and beside him he can feel the tension in Cynthia.

  This must be Russ’s secret road, Jimmy instantly thinks, and does not say. This is how Russ escapes; he sometimes goes off into town or wherever, without passing the Hightower house. A great puzzle to Jimmy, watching.