A Southern Exposure Read online

  “Oh yes, I read all the time. It saves my life, I think.”

  “Oh, me too.”

  And they are off. Titles, favorite authors.

  The Count of Monte Cristo? Lost Horizons? The Wind in the Willows? They both disliked Little Women, The Five Little Peppers.

  “Did you ever, uh, read poetry?” Abby ventures.

  “Well, not much. Sometimes.”

  “There’s this man around here. My mother’s just nuts about him. His poetry I mean, she doesn’t know him very well. James Russell Lowell Byrd. Of all the ginky names. His kids go to my school. But I’m not going to read him, I don’t care.”

  “No reason why you should,” says Deirdre vaguely; she suddenly sounds much older.

  They have reached the path that goes up the hill, through woods. Through ghost-gray trees, dead pine-needle floor. “Deirdre, hold my hand, this is scary,” says Graham.

  In her own mother’s voice Abby hears herself say, “Maybe you’d come by where I live for a while? We could have Cokes.”

  “At the Inn? That’s not so far from my house. Well, maybe. For just a little.”

  Cynthia, meeting the girl and the little boy whom Abby brought in, has several thoughts at once, the first perhaps being: That is the most beautiful girl I ever saw, her bones and her eyes and skin, her color, her breasts and legs—it’s good she doesn’t know how beautiful she is, probably—she is just astounding-looking. (Deirdre is sitting edgily on the sofa, her lovely legs childishly crossed, one hand holding her glass of R.C. Cola, the other patting Graham, who sits nervously beside her.) Cynthia further thinks: That little boy looks so much like someone I know. But who?

  Cynthia asks Deirdre, “You’ve always lived around here?”

  “Mostly. But we moved to California just before my mom died, and I’ve just now come back. I thought for Graham—” This last seems an afterthought that she is unable to finish. Why, what for Graham? If she ever knew, Deirdre is no longer sure what she meant.

  “It’s an awfully nice town” is all that Cynthia can think of to say.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Am I old enough to be called “ma’am”? wonders Cynthia. Well, compared to this dazzling young girl, I guess I am.

  “California is more interesting, I think,” puts in Graham helpfully, at that moment.

  “Oh, I’ll bet it is!” cries out Abby, who has been sitting on a stiff small chair, more nervously even than her guests. But now, unleashed, she goes on. “This is the most boring town. I’ll bet California is just terrific. Mom, couldn’t we move to California?”

  Graham scowls. “It’s not all that great in California.”

  But in the instant of his scowling Cynthia has seen it: Russell Byrd’s face, on this child. This young woman’s much younger brother. It has to be: no man and child could look so much alike without blood ties.

  And so: the dead mother of Deirdre and Graham—Mrs. Yates was Russell’s lover, his mistress? Was she as beautiful as Deirdre is? Cynthia is consumed with a wish to know all about that woman, but who can tell her?

  She wonders if this is a shared but well-guarded town secret, if everyone knows but no one talks about it. And how very Southern that would be, she thinks. Did Russell’s wife know, the improbably named Brett? Does Jimmy Hightower know? She will ask him tomorrow; she is sure that if Jimmy does know he will tell her. (On the other hand, could Jimmy and Esther be too recent arrivals to be allowed to share in the town’s most interesting secrets? That would be very Southern too.)

  Most mysterious of all, does Deirdre herself know about her mother’s lover, the father of this supposed little brother? Very likely not, Cynthia decides; but very likely the father, Mr. Yates, at least suspects, which would be a reason for Deirdre’s return. He wouldn’t want the child around.

  The sheer interest of all this dark history is terrifically exciting to Cynthia: she is quite literally thrilled, it is better than a novel.

  “Your little brother’s very handsome,” she says, with some mischief, to Deirdre. “Does he look like your mother or your father?”

  This seems to be a question that Deirdre has heard, and for which she is prepared (she and Russ worked it out). “No’m, not either one, especially,” she says (her voice unconsciously imitating Russ’s country voice). “He sort of favors an uncle of my mother’s, Uncle Rab, lives over to Memphis.”

  “Graham’s named after the creek, Graham Creek,” Abby supplies, rather proudly; these are, after all, her friends, it was she who brought them home.

  And it is for just that reason a curious social situation. Cynthia thinks this: There are no contemporaries present, all the ages represented have wide gaps. Abby is so much older than Graham (at their ages four or five years seems enormous), Deirdre is much older than Abby is, and Cynthia herself is a great deal (she feels) older than Deirdre. No wonder Cynthia has such a sense of imbalance, of insecurity about what to say to whom. She finds herself strongly wishing that Harry would come home. His easy, foolish, graceful banter would save them all.

  But just as she is thinking this Deirdre gets up to leave. “I like to feed him real early,” she explains. “That way he sleeps better and I do too.”

  Cynthia, even as she gets up and smiles goodbye, has an instant glimpse of such solitude, a beautiful young woman all alone in her house with a little boy. A woman sleeping alone, every night.

  “I want you to come to see me real soon,” says Deirdre then—to Abby, to no one else. Not to Cynthia, although she smiles vaguely in Cynthia’s direction and says, as vaguely, “I thank you for the Coke.” But Deirdre clearly establishes that she feels her connection to be with Abby, and Abby only, by which Cynthia is both pleased for Abby and just slightly chagrined for herself. She would like to know Deirdre too, to make a friend of her. But mostly she is pleased for Abby, who is looking radiant.

  Deirdre tells Abby where her house is. “We don’t have a phone yet,” she says. “I’m not even sure I want one. Who’d call?” She laughs, with a little sadness, but no self-pity; she is simply stating a fact.

  Cynthia laughs too. “I hope you get one. After all, you could always call us, we’d love to hear from you. And to see you.”

  This earns blank looks both from Deirdre and from Abby: they want to be friends, with no intrusion from Cynthia, the grownup.

  But Cynthia keeps trying. Once Deirdre is gone, “What a beautiful woman,” she says to Abby.

  “I guess.”

  “Would you like me to have them over for supper sometime, when Harry’s here?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Abby pauses, seeming to meditate. “I think I’ll go over there tomorrow,” she tells her mother.

  12

  “The rich get richer,” says Esther to Jimmy Hightower, on a late November morning, in their kitchen. “Even in the middle of a Depression. But I never expected to be living proof of that fact myself,” and she gives a small sad laugh.

  Their kitchen table is covered with papers. Some are letters, some visibly legal documents. Large, steaming, just-filled blue coffee cups sit, so far untouched, a judicious distance from all the documents.

  “Well, it couldn’t happen to a more deserving lady.” Gallant Jimmy, whom Esther had accused of getting more Southern all the time.

  So that now she cries out at him, “Don’t give me that Southern blather! Christ, Jimmy! Almost everyone deserves it more than I do. Needs it, is more to the point.”

  “Well—”

  Dead seriously she tells him, “Listen, unless I do something really, really important with this money, I’m done for. Do you know what I mean?”

  Very slowly he tells her, “I know what you’re saying. I hear you.”

  They exchange a look of extreme intimacy. Of comprehension that is absolute.

  This is what has happened. A great-aunt, one of Esther’s enormous, labyrinthine, and variegated family, has died in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and her bequest to her “admirable and beloved niece Esther Goldman High
tower” amounts to something over a million dollars—1930 dollars.

  “I’ll have to go and set myself up in New York,” muses Esther.

  “What?” And leave me here? Jimmy does not say this last, but he might as well have.

  “You could rent out the house and then we’d have even more money.” Esther has said this as a joke, with a small denying laugh: she does not mean it, but Jimmy takes it up. “How long would you go for?”

  “A year?” Making this a question, as though asking his permission, Esther adds, “I don’t see how I could get anything done in much less.”

  “You’ve got definite ideas about what you’d do?”

  “Well, there’s this group that Cynthia of all people told me about, and they sound really good. She said she’d write to this friend of hers for me. Some Rothschild.”

  She looks happier and younger than she has for years. It is odd that money should make that difference for Esther, Jimmy remarks to himself, and then he reflects that it isn’t really the money that is so cheering her; it is the chance to advance in what he thinks of as her private war against Hitler. “If you take the girls, I could live in a smaller place,” he tells Esther. “Less maintenance and work for me, and I’d contribute the difference to your cause.”

  “Ah, Jimmy, you’re really good. But don’t get such a small place that I can’t come down to visit, you hear?” And then she says, “Gosh, we’re talking like this was all done, and I haven’t even begun.”

  Later, Jimmy reflects on the rapidity with which this was all, or almost all, settled. It seems to him that Esther has only been waiting for such a chance, has been wanting to go to New York to do something, something important, and that it was only a matter of time, as they say, until she found something. Or until something found her.

  “Funny you should call, Jimmy, I was just going to call you,” says Cynthia that same afternoon. “There’re all these things I want to ask you.”

  “And I’ve got some things to ask you. A whole new idea.”

  “Well.”

  “What do you feel like, a drive or a walk?”

  “Oh, let’s walk, we always drive. My daughter goes for walks all the time, she puts me to shame.”

  Jimmy ponders this last as they arrange to meet in an hour, at the Inn. Cynthia seldom mentions Abigail, but then neither does he talk about his girls—or not often, Jimmy reflects. It is as though the two of them, Cynthia and himself, have been pretending to be childless.

  And Cynthia and Esther carry on a quite separate friendship: they talk on the phone; sometimes they meet downtown, in the drugstore, for Cokes.

  • • •

  “Well, we won’t get very far with you in those heels” is the first thing that Jimmy says to Cynthia that day.

  She laughs, in her flirty Yankee way. “I thought more a town walk. We could go over to the campus?”

  They do; they walk along the hard white rutted sidewalk, past low gray stone walls that are often broken, past wide green yards with their borders of fading, dying fall flowers, and sprawling houses with their generous broad porches. Dilapidated furniture. Peeling paint. Thinking of New York, and of Esther there, as he observes this town, Jimmy is more than ever aware of its general shabbiness, its air of genteel poverty. Its air of depression, of the Depression. It is worse than Oklahoma, in a way, where things are simply poor, the people down and out.

  All of which only a war will cure. Various people have started to say this, all over, and unhappily it makes a certain sense.

  “This Emily Yates, was she very beautiful?” Cynthia asks him this question, seemingly from nowhere.

  “Who?” At first Jimmy truly cannot imagine whom she must mean.

  “You know, the mother of that beautiful girl, that Deirdre. The one who died. The mother, I mean.”

  “Emily Yates,” says Jimmy ruminatively. “No one really knew her, you know. Just to say hello to on the side-walk downtown. She’d nod, some people said she was really snobbish and felt she’d married beneath her. But Deirdre Yates, what a looker! Even at thirteen or fourteen. I guess it must have embarrassed her a little, all that attention so young. But Emily Yates, a woman you’d hardly notice, unless I really missed something.” He laughed. “How come you ask?”

  Cynthia laughs too, but evasively. “It may just be a novel I’m writing in my head. But it is odd, don’t you think? Two such ordinary people, as everyone describes them, producing such remarkable-looking children. Deirdre and that little Graham. And they don’t even look alike. Not really like brother and sister.” She laughs again, this time a girlish giggle.

  They have reached the college library, a pillared brick building with broad steep steps leading up to its narrow and quite superfluous porch.

  Automatically, because they have done so fairly often before, Jimmy and Cynthia sit down on the steps, and Cynthia stretches long silk legs, showing off her pretty, very impractical shoes. This is a place that they both like. Among the clusters of the college students who are also seated there, they feel themselves young by contagion, as it were; as young as the girls in their sweaters and pearls, their pleated skirts, their saddle shoes or loafers, and the boys in their cords or jeans, their letter sweaters or plain white shirts.

  Jimmy speaks in a stern low voice to Cynthia. “Now look, dear girl. If you’re manufacturing romances involving poor Emily Yates, just forget it. That poor dim lady. Condemned to dull Clarence for life, and then cursed with this freakishly ravishing daughter, whom she hadn’t a clue what to do with.” He adds, half-seriously, “Just leave the fiction to me, dear girl.”

  He has, actually, been thinking of a Deirdre Yates type in the Western novel that he is writing. A beautiful girl with no idea of how to use her beauty. A shy girl, more intelligent than anyone around her. But there would be no Emily Yates. In his book the girl would hardly have a mother.

  Cynthia frowns. “But—” And then she decides to leave it alone. Jimmy is simply not as observant as she thought he was; he probably won’t be a writer, after all. Men in general are not very observant, she has noticed. And then a more subtle, interesting thought occurs to her, which is that Jimmy could be entirely in the know; in some way he could have found out about Mrs. Yates and Russ Byrd (easy enough, they live so close; he could have seen them), and for Boy Scout reasons of his own is protecting them—protecting Russ, his hero. Cynthia gives Jimmy a long, speculative look, and a smile of complicity—a look and a smile that Jimmy does not quite understand.

  Eventually, Cynthia is sure, Jimmy can be persuaded to share this information with her, to tell her all he knows.

  For the moment, though, she reverts to a more familiar theme. “I really love it more here every day,” she says, sighing. “Don’t you? I mean, when you and Esther first came, did you talk all the time about how great it was?”

  “Not exactly all the time. But we liked it fine. We still do.”

  “I think New York makes more of a contrast than Oklahoma, probably. Even Connecticut. But I have some friends in Sneden’s Landing, that’s across from the George Washington Bridge, and every time we go across I look down and see all those people living in orange crates. I mean it, literally. I couldn’t bear it. I mean, I know the colored people down here are really poor—”

  “And a lot of white ones,” Jimmy reminds her. “Drive out to Robertsville, you want to see poor whites. Or out on these farms, for God’s sake. Shacks with broken outhouses, and no floors. Just red clay.”

  “Abby’s always talking about these poor white kids from farms. ‘Truck children,’ she calls them. Abby, by the way, has struck up this great friendship with Deirdre Yates. It’s too perplexing.”

  “Not really. Deirdre’s always been a loner. I don’t think she likes it around here very much. It’s funny she came back, actually.”

  “And that’s how Abby feels, so far. She’s become a sort of loner too. She says she hates the kids at school.”

  Cynthia is actually thinking less of the lonel
iness of Abby than of her own innocent pleasure in being with Jimmy. In just this short time they have become true friends, she feels. At first there was some little, very minor flirting going on, but now that seems to have passed (she thinks), and they are quite simply the greatest friends. And eventually he will tell her everything.

  As though reading her mind (almost), Jimmy leans toward her. “There’s something I want to discuss with you.” He laughs. “It’s almost a proposition.”

  “Well, heaven knows I’m open to propositions. Pretty free for anything fancy.”

  They both laugh, sitting there in the November sunlight. Feeling young, as young as the college youth surrounding them on those steps.

  “Seriously, though,” Jimmy tells her, “I had an idea.”

  And he explains his plan, which goes like this: Esther and the girls will go to New York, and he, Jimmy, will be all alone in that big house. “Not that it isn’t a comfortable house. It is, extremely,” he says. But he just won’t need all that room.

  So why don’t he and Cynthia—and Harry and Abigail, of course—simply trade? He likes their little apartment, their suite at the Inn; it’s in many ways perfect for him—though it must be getting to seem just a little small for the three of them? Cynthia admits that this is so.

  They could have a year or so anyway to look around and enjoy life, to make decisions about whether to buy or build, all that. He gives her a short, oblique look. “And think of your neighbors,” he says. “Your new ones, that is.”

  Of course he has hit on the very thing that Cynthia thought of first, at his suggestion: Russ Byrd, just down the road.

  “But, Jimmy, that’s too generous of you. We really couldn’t—”

  “It’s not all that generous. I’ll charge you some rent. How about making it the same as whatever you’re paying at the Inn?”