A Southern Exposure Read online

  He agrees. “It’s been pretty.”

  “Beautiful.”

  Pretty or beautiful, all the days of this month have been warm and clear, so far. Golden days, clear blue days, and high against the sky the pine boughs sigh and sing, bright green, bedazzled with light. Golden poplar leaves rustle in the breeze, and in the long cool shadowed evenings there are more rustling leaves on the hard dirt sidewalks and paths of the town. Driving out that wooded road to the Hightower house, Cynthia is thinking, Tonight I’ll meet him, he’ll be there. Russell Byrd. And maybe we’ll walk outside for a while in Esther’s garden. Maybe. In the magic October night. She says, “It is my favorite month.”

  In the garden the acrid scent of dying chrysanthemums, mingled with the livelier smells of rich, moist loamy fall earth, fills the cooling night air.

  Russell Byrd, who is unaccountably, uncharacteristically drunk, asks Cynthia Baird, whom he has just met, “Ma’am, you ever smell fresh-killed pig?”

  Arriving about an hour after the late arrival of the Bairds, and alone, Russell was seized by Jimmy and introduced to Cynthia. Russell then muttered that he must have some air. The garden? Cynthia chose to take this as an invitation, although he did look a little unstable, and she followed along.

  Politely she answers what she believes him to have said, although his very thick accent and the heaviness of his speech make it difficult. “Why, I don’t believe I have,” she says. “Have you? I mean, often?” It is her sense that if she stops talking he will talk about something she does not want to hear, not at all.

  As he does.

  “Stinks,” says Russ. “Stinks terrible. A putrid god-awful unforgivable unforgettable stink that I can’t get out of my nostrils, my whole goddam head, whatever. The rest of my life. I’m now condemned to writing pig-shit plays. Oh, pardon me, ma’am, I forgot.”

  “It’s quite all right,” Cynthia vaguely, distantly tells him. She turns slowly back toward the house, the party.

  Esther Hightower, upstairs in her bedroom, also smells the dead chrysanthemums, the loamy earth; she even hears the drunken voice of Russell Byrd going on about pig excrement—but who on earth is he talking to? Esther imagines a beautiful, shocked woman—but these perceptions occupy only the smallest part of her consciousness. Her absence from the party has been explained by Jimmy, “a sick headache”; actually her headache is worse than sick, she is worse than sick, she is mad with fear, and pity. Demented. She is living in Germany, and what she smells is the scent of human panic from those boxcars going nowhere, and what she hears are words in German. Incomprehensible but terrifying. And she thinks, because she is one of them, of those thousands of terrified people. Those who wait for voices in the night, and the angry clomping footsteps on their stairs.

  Esther sits there, in the cool October starry Southern night, in the dark, and she tells herself where she is: Pinehill, America—but this stops nothing that is happening there, in Germany, at this very moment. And in her mind.

  Esther wonders: If she simply got up and went downstairs, could she pretend to be okay? Could wishing make it so? Could she successfully pretend to be just an ordinary (Jewish) woman from Oklahoma, with a lot of oil money and a husband who is a little crazy, who wants to write, who came here to write, who has nothing to do with Germany, with Hitler and Jews? Esther sighs, and she decides that no, she could never carry it off, such deception. No one would think that she was okay.

  Steps.

  At that moment she hears them on her stairs, the sound of footsteps. But certainly not boots, nothing heavy. And then her door is opened, and a light, small, but definite voice is saying, “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I guess I’m lost,” and she adds, “I’m Cynthia Baird.” And then, “Oh, Esther, it’s you.”

  Does Esther not, then, look as she usually does, not look like herself? They have only met two or three times before, these two women, but still Esther knows that she would recognize Cynthia anywhere. Although they have never had a conversation.

  Esther explains, “This is actually the guest room, but sometimes I—I had some sort of headache. It’s better now.”

  “Oh good, but I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay. Would you like to use the bathroom? It’s right there.”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  The trail of Cynthia’s perfume across the room has obliterated the ominous scents in Esther’s mind: the dead flowers, the dirt. The fear.

  Emerging from the bathroom, Cynthia asks, “You, you really feel any better? Can I get you something?”

  “Oh no, thank you. I’m coming right down. I just—” She looks up at Cynthia, at perfect blonde beautiful Cynthia Baird, in her perfect black. Esther is about to explain, when to her horror, out of control, she bursts into tears. Her face tightens as her hands fly up to cover it, and then in a moment it is all over, and Esther sits there, still holding her face. Entirely humiliated. Feeling so ugly.

  The perfume comes closer, and Esther hears the soft voice say, “Oh, Esther, I’m so sorry, is there anything I can do?”

  Esther drops her hands from her face, and for no reason that she can later deduce, she says what she has actually said to no one before, “It’s what’s going on in Germany,” she says. “What they’re doing to Jews. I can’t stand it. I keep thinking I’m there. I’m Jewish, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “But that’s no excuse—lots of Jews don’t act like this. My being so neurotic, so irrational is really no help to anyone. There’s a place where I send money, to help some families that come over here. I sent a lot more than Jimmy knows about. But that’s not enough. I just can’t stop thinking—”

  Cynthia says, “Oh, I know, I can’t stand to read about those things. I read a novel, This Mortal Storm?—something like that—and afterwards I had nightmares …” Cynthia now has perched on the bedside chair, as though she would stay for as long as Esther needed her there.

  Hesitantly, Esther tells her, “I’m so glad you came in. I feel better. I don’t know why I have to get so, so crazy.”

  Surprisingly, Cynthia laughs, a light little rueful laugh. “Talk about crazy. I just had a sort of conversation with Russell Byrd that was really nuts.”

  “Oh? With Russ?”

  “He was talking about dead pigs, and how they smell. Can you believe it? Really, so much for my romantic fantasies. Poets!”

  Suddenly, as suddenly as Esther’s tears came, the two women begin to laugh.

  “Russ is such a damn fool,” says Esther at last. “I know he’s a genius, and a great poet and all that, but he’s a fool too.”

  “He’s pretty drunk, I think.”

  “That’s unusual, he doesn’t drink much usually.” Esther looks at her watch, which is tiny and gold, on her narrow, blue-veined wrist. “Long about now poor Brett’ll be taking him home,” she says.

  “She’s not here, he came by himself.”

  “Oh, well, that’s some of the problem. He hates to go out without Brett,” explains Esther.

  “Brett seems an odd name for a Southern woman, it sounds more sort of English.”

  “He gave it to her. Russ named her. When they got married, she got a whole new name. Brett Byrd. That was one of the first things I heard, when we moved back here. Some change, from SallyJane Caldwell.” Esther has moved from her bed to the dressing table, where she sits and smooths down her lively black hair with a brush, and dabs powder on her nose. As she frowns, she thinks, I really hate my dark sad face, I wish I looked like Cynthia.

  “Your hair is really beautiful,” Cynthia at that moment says.

  “Oh, but yours—”

  “Mine is so flimsy.”

  They smile at each other, acknowledging, maybe, the tentative start of a friendship.

  • • •

  By the time the two women come downstairs together, the throng below has thinned out considerably. Russell Byrd is gone, and the Bigelows. Some eight or ten people are clustered around the bar, which is a l
ong carved heavy antique table.

  In fact, as Cynthia’s practiced eye had noted when she and Harry first arrived, almost all the furniture in the Hightower house is antique, and really good antiques, the real stuff. And pictures: Hudson Valley oils, also real. Here and there are what look to be family photographs in heavy silver frames. From Oklahoma? All in all a puzzling house, so peculiarly “modern,” and furnished so conservatively, off in the Southern woods. If she didn’t know better, Cynthia thinks, she would guess that one of the High-towers, probably Esther, came from what her mother calls “real money.” What Mrs. Cromwell herself came from—for all the good that did her in the Crash.

  Harry is quite obviously waiting to take her home. But he does wait until they are in the car to ask, “So? How was your walk with the poet?”

  Cynthia giggles, she cannot help herself. “Oh, Harry, so funny. All he could talk about was pig shit—that’s actually what he said.”

  “How romantic.”

  “Exactly.” She giggles again, moving closer to Harry. At that moment she is extremely fond of him. “As you saw, I guess, he just said he needed some air. And you know I have been, uh, wanting to meet him.”

  “I know.”

  “I guess he was drunk, he must have been.”

  Sometimes, in fact quite often, Cynthia likes Harry better than anyone. When they talk, she always feels in him an echoing understanding. She tells him now, “I’m extremely worried about Esther Hightower.”

  “You are? How come?”

  She tells him, and then she says, “Remember Anne Rothschild? That sort of secret pipeline she worked with, getting people out of Germany?”

  “Yes, but Anne’s a millionaire. Several times.”

  “I don’t think Esther’s exactly poor. I just wonder if she knows about it.”

  “Don’t know. Surely wouldn’t hurt to tell her.”

  As they pull into their parking slot and Harry stops the car, Cynthia moves over very close to him. Very softly she kisses his neck, but he turns and takes her in his arms, and kisses her mouth, then whispers, “Hold on, I’ll meet you in bed.”

  11

  By early November, Abigail Baird feels that she has worn out the town, in terms of bicycle explorations, and so she takes to hiding her bike here and there, and taking off into the woods. Then, grudgingly, she begins to feel a sort of interest in the landscape, the rustle of thin dry leaves, the crackling twigs and dead needles as she walks. The smells of that earth become almost as familiar to her as the smells of Connecticut woods. This could be home.

  One afternoon, past a thick, uneven slope of pine woods, she comes to a narrow dirt road, and then what must be a cornfield, ancient, abandoned; crumbling gray furrows and desiccated brown-gray stalks, with moldering leaves, like sad flags. Beyond this field is a dense growth of vines and trees that must mark the creek. Graham Creek. On maps it is seen to run past the town, on its long slow circuitous route to the Atlantic.

  Abigail hurries across the cornfield, sometimes stumbling, aware of dirt in her shoes, and also aware of some odd expectation: something will happen, something interesting.

  She comes first to a stand of poplars, peeling, their trunks as white as ghosts. And then past a small dirty sandbar, the swollen mud-brown creek, with its freight of leaves and sticks, of submerged and anonymous trash. The day has been mild; still, it is November, and much too cold for wading. Probably.

  Sitting on the sand, which turns out to be damp and fairly cold, Abby peels off her shoes and socks, she reaches her toes toward the water.

  Cold. It is terrifically cold. As cold as Connecticut water. Reluctantly, she decides not to wade. Brushing the sand from her feet as best she can, she starts to put her socks and her shoes back on.

  “Hey, girl, you’re not supposed to wade in that creek!”

  Suddenly accosted by this shrill and childish voice, Abby turns, but she sees no child. And then there is a child, a pale little boy coming out from behind a paler poplar tree. With his tall dark beautiful mother.

  Deirdre—for this is Deirdre and Graham, her son, who in Pinehill she must always pretend is her brother—Deirdre is as startled as Abby first was, to see this plump blonde girl on the dirty sand by the creek, where before she has only seen little colored boys with fishing poles.

  “I’m not going wading,” Abby tells them defiantly. “I’m just out for a walk and decided to take my shoes off.”

  Deirdre asks her, “You live around here?” She has recognized that Abby is not from here: her accent and her clothes are from somewhere else.

  “No, we live at the Inn. My parents and I do.”

  “That must be nice. Graham, stay back from that water!”

  “I am!”

  “Graham’s my brother. Uh, my name’s Deirdre Yates.”

  “I’m Abby Baird. Is your brother named for the creek?”

  “Well, sort of. He was born out in California.”

  “Deirdre, I saw a fish!”

  “Oh, Graham, you did not. You’re making stuff up.”

  “Well, it could have been a fish.”

  By now the girl and the woman are standing together on the bank, just back from the sand where the little boy stirs at the creek with a long bent stick. Each is aware, both Deirdre and Abby, of a strong surge of liking for the other. Deirdre thinks: What a funny little Yankee girl, with her blond bangs and braids, like a little Dutch girl. She’s cute, but not cute, really, she’s interesting. I wonder if her folks know Russ.

  As Abby in her turn thinks, This older girl is really beautiful, and she’s nice. But she’s lonely-looking, and a little scared. Her little brother is probably a big pain in the neck. I’m glad I don’t have one.

  Abby has been acute in ascribing loneliness to Deirdre. This is a terrible, confused, and painful time of Deirdre’s life, a time when nothing makes sense to her, least of all this move back to Pinehill, where she was never happy, even before she knew Russ, and got pregnant, all that. Before Russ, before Graham, and her mother dying and California. She supposes that she came back because Russ wrote and called and said that the house was hers now, and because she couldn’t live anymore in California with her father; she had never got on with him, and he really never went along with the plan of claiming the child as his and Emily’s, and after Emily’s death he was worse than ever, mostly cross about the boy. The least thing, the smallest noise would set him off, but he was cross at Deirdre too, pushing at her to go out and get a job when everyone knew that almost the whole country was out of work. And now here is Deirdre in Pinehill, with some money to live on (Russ gives money for her to the bank). And a house. But nothing to do. And no friends. She never had friends back here, but now even the people she knew she feels that she has to avoid. Just earlier this afternoon she saw a boy she used to sort of like, but she didn’t think he saw her; anyway they didn’t speak.

  And Russ. Deirdre has no words for what she perceives as the dark and mysterious death of love. For going from such a dazzling of all her senses—his slightest touch on her hand could make her tremble then—from that to not touching at all. To heavy guilty silences, and to barely seeing each other. To not wanting to see him either, and only doing it for the boy. Her son, their son. Her “brother.” A lie that, in the way of old lies, has come to seem true. The terrible last months of her pregnancy were so linked, for Deirdre, with the terrible last months of her mother’s sudden illness, that Graham does indeed seem to have risen from Emily. To be Emily’s child. Except that Russ is all through him, in his dark blue deep-set eyes—and he even acts like a poet, or Deirdre’s idea of a poet: Graham imagines things, he is selfish and lives all alone in his own mind, not needing anyone. He is an unchildish child, whom Deirdre in an automatic way tends to treat as her brother, asking his advice about what to do next (ridiculous, a four-year-old), where to go for walks. What to have for dinner.

  Sometimes he seems less like a brother than like some distinguished guest.

  Deirdre is too unh
appy, though, to think very clearly about these strange facts of her life. She gets through each day as best she can with household tasks and books, and walks, long walks through the town and out in the woods, with Graham, always with Graham. She cannot for the moment even think of her life taking off in some other direction. She does not think of Graham older, herself older, and maybe getting some kind of a job somewhere. Maybe even married. She does not imagine any change between herself and Russ, not thinking, as she used to, of the two of them in Hollywood or San Francisco, or Paris, or New York. Sometimes, simply and despairingly, she thinks of Russ: He doesn’t love me anymore. But another part of her mind, her intelligence, knows that it is not that simple.

  By now the three of them, Deirdre and Abby and the little boy, Graham, are walking companionably across the desiccated cornfield. In the distance, above a jagged lonely line of pines, an ember-red November sunset burns, and burns, and fades with infinite slowness.

  Deirdre asks, “You go to school in town?”

  “Yes, and I really hate it, it’s awful.”

  Deirdre laughs, a little. “I went there, and all the way through I guess I pretty much hated it too. Poor Graham, he’s got all that coming.”

  “The teachers seem really dumb, and mean. They’re especially mean to those big kids that live out in the country. You know, the truck children.”

  “Lord, I used to think that too. They can’t be all that dumb.”

  Abby is aware of an excitement in her chest, a surge of warmth. This is the happiest she has been since they moved down here; she recognizes happiness in her eagerness to go on talking. This beautiful older girl with the nice quiet little boy, who is very handsome, really, for a boy that age. She asks Deirdre, “Do you like to read?”