Siesta, p.10
Siesta, page 10
3. Rain Cloud
Friday, July 3
It was about six o’clock when Dr. Troupe closed his office door and set out to see his patient. The high sun glared down Broad Street like the blast from a furnace, but he didn’t notice it; he was digging in his memory for perhaps one more detail of her stay in the office that he might not yet have relived. He was still somewhat dazzled by all of it; during the afternoon he would have decided that the whole thing had been a dream, but there on the rack was the towel with the pink smear on it where he had wiped his lips after she had gone. There was no denying that. And he hadn’t seen her at the airport; he remembered an open plane with a red and yellow fuselage and a metal propeller, but he hadn’t seen any women at the field at all.… He crossed over to the shady side of the street.
The traffic was mostly outbound. All along the row of parked cars he could hear the grinding of starters; there were spaces in the line; people were going home.
As he crossed the baked convexity of Broad Street the sun’s light changed to a reflected lividness; the air seemed to settle into a still sheen like a pool as the pebble sinks. He looked about him for the cause; up the street to the west beyond the dome of the water oaks, he saw a great bruised canopy of clouds, heavy with rain. He paused a moment on the corner to watch it.
“Looks like we’re going to get it this time,” a stranger said to him, stopping too.
“We certainly need it.”
“It’ll break up this heat.”
A line of lightning split the curtain without a sound, the sun faded out, and a soft noise drifted in as of a chest pushed across the bare floor of the room above.
He left the corner as fast as he could walk; if he hurried he might be able to get to Dr. Abercorn’s before it broke. A spiral of wind on the sidewalk ahead of him twirled some pieces of paper into the air. He started running.
He stopped in the areaway under Dr. Abercorn’s steps and looked back, the perspiration pouring down his cheeks. The clouds had already shifted to the north; almost as he watched, they moved into the northeast and the sun appeared again, as if the town had been a dirigible that had changed its course to go round the storm. He took off his hat and wiped his wet forehead while the purple diminished perceptibly into the northeast. A pedestrian across the street slowed down to a walk. A blind man tapped his way out of the shelter of an old livery stable door. With a disappointment almost personal, Dr. Troupe turned about and went into the waiting room.
There was no one there, but a fan on a marble-topped table swung its beacon slowly over the empty chairs. Then he remembered that in his haste he had come in the wrong door; the doctor was upstairs. He took a step toward the hall, then paused; they had evidently forgotten to shut off the fan. For a moment he considered going on, then he went back into the room and cut it off; the humming died away into silence while the blades were still whirling.
He went upstairs.
4. Telfair & Co.
Friday, July 3
Down in that part of Georgetown where B.C. means, not Before Christ, but Bales of Cotton, there was not as much activity as there used to be. A good deal of cotton still passed through the town, but there were not quite as many mule-drawn vans clattering up and down Cotton Row and not quite as many cotton factors tilted back in front of the board in the Exchange. Cotton was still, however, the principal crop of the countryside and trading in it still the principal business of the city. The old warehouses still lined the river bank and their worn red walls, pierced here and there by the great square portals into the yards, still rose up with some dignity behind the water oaks along the Row. The gravel yards were comparatively little used, but the ponderous barrels of black water, “For Fire Only,” still sat ready on bricks round the court and the red round-bottomed buckets still hung above them on their old wire hooks. Telfair & Company’s warehouses ran all the way through the block to the spur track on the river bank.
At nine-fifteen, when Showers took off his hat and walked through the office, Mr. Telfair hadn’t come in. This meant that Mr. Telfair had taken himself out to the clay mine; he drove out every now and then to make sure things were getting along all right. Mining clay wasn’t Mr. Telfair’s business; he had cussed all day when old man Baker sent word he couldn’t pay him and he would have to take the clay mine or nothing; he took it, though, and he was making money out of it; Mr. Telfair knew how to make money. When he went out to the mine it also meant that at about ten-thirty he would drive his car up on the sidewalk in front of the warehouse and call for Showers to come wash all that country dust off it.
But that gave him over an hour. He went back to the shady platform on the river side, propped himself in the angle between a barrel of water and the brick wall, and let his heavy eyelids drop. He was badly in need of a little sleep; the night had been exciting but wearifying.…
He was awakened by somebody up front bellowing, “Showers!”
“Comin’ up!” he shouted and glided into the black warehouse. Across the building at the other end of the aisle between the walls of cotton bales lying on skids and stepped up in tiers to the high roof, was a bright line of sun beyond a partly-opened tin-covered door. In the light of it he found a bucket and threw out the water in it with one big hand; he picked up a stiff chamois skin from the end of a bale of cotton where it had been left to dry, then, with the straw hat that had belonged to Mr. Telfair in 1922 slanted forward over his eyes, he crossed the court to the broad gate and went out on the sidewalk to Mr. Telfair’s car. He put the bucket down and stood with his fists on his hip bones while a short negro, his bow legs accentuated by his trousers being clipped at the ankles for riding a bicycle, pushed his machine by close in the shade of the high russet wall.
“Wal, Pig Meat!” he said. “What you say?”
“Just tol’able, Mr. Showers,” said Pig Meat. “How’s yourse’f?”
“Oh, I’m rackin’ along.”
“Kinda hot today, Mr. Showers.”
“It’s been hot since four o’clock. The sun rose hot.” He looked off down the street after the two-wheeled cart and the tinkling bell of an ice-cream peddler. Then his manner changed: “Aw aw, boy!”
Pig Meat turned round. “Aw aw, Mr. Showers!”
“Here come sump’n, Pig Meat!”
A negro girl in a red béret and beach pyjamas, carrying a purple umbrella, had come round the corner and was walking toward them, chin up, eyes sightless.
Showers ran his fingers up the back of his head and tapped his hat forward.
“Hot dog!” said Pig Meat, as she passed between them.
“Great God, Miss Agnes!”
She walked with elaborate deafness two strides beyond them, then, on the third, managed to give her seat an almost imperceptible twitch.
Showers flopped over with a long-armed crack of his palms, a scraping of ecstatic shoes, and a ringing shout of explosive laughter. Pig Meat let the bicycle drop and butted his shoulder against the wall.
The girl looked back and flung them a wide grin, walking on and with innate artistry refraining from repeating the gesture.
“Lord, Mr. Showers, you’re a sight!”
“Mind out there, Pig Meat, for the blind man.”
“Aw aw, brother! ’Scuse me.”
“What’s the matter, brethren?” said the blind man. “’Pears like y’all enjoyin’ sump’n.”
“Dog gone, brother, I sho is sorry for you! Yo’ eyes is sho a calamity to you!”
“Go your route, Pig Meat, go your route!” Showers hitched up the crotch of his cotton-flecked trousers and went under the gate.
He came back presently dragging a leaky garden hose and sent a languid squirt at Mr. Telfair’s pink front wheels.…
Mr. Telfair paused in his sky-blue sample room, pushing his hat back on his round bald head and looking over the sky-blue slat-bottomed tables. Most of them were empty; the market, that July, had dropped to about ten cents and there wasn’t much cotton moving. On one table, though, he saw a new lot of samples.
“Whose cotton is that, Tucker?”
“Old man Ben Gray, sir.”
“He tell you to sell it?”
“Yessir. We had a letter from him this morning. Miss Judy, have you got that letter there from old man—that’s it. Thank you, ma’am.”
“He’s got a good margin, hasn’t he, Tucker?” said Mr. Telfair, pulling his starched sleeves out of his linen coat. Miss Judy reached for it; “I can hang it up, thank you, ma’am, Miss Judy. I’m not altogether ready to drop dead yet; I can still stagger to the hatrack.”
“He’s got about two cents, Mr. Telfair.”
“How did the market open?”
“October’s up about eight points.”
“I don’t see what he wants to sell it for now, he’s held it this long. That cotton’s been here two years, hasn’t it?”
“Mighty near.”
A messenger leaned his bicycle against the door post and handed Tucker a telegram.
“Well, go on sell it, Tucker, if that’s what he wants—”
“Here’s a wire from old man Gray now. He wants to know what you think about selling.”
Mr. Telfair read the message and walked on into his office. In a few minutes he turned to Miss Judy, “Take a telegram to Mr. Ben Gray at Due West, Georgia. October stronger this morning don’t want to advise you because I may be wrong but feel generally more optimistic about price outlook. Get that off right now—”
He was interrupted by Miss Judy’s releasing the buzzer that in fifty seconds would bring the messenger. She flung back the typewriter carriage with a slight cocking of the head and finished the line in a dry flurried clatter.
Mr. Telfair took a cigar out of a drawer.
“Write a letter, Miss Judy, to Mr. Charles R. Snelling, President. The Great Lakes Paper Company, 205-9 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, Michigan. Dear sir. Make that Dear Mr. Snelling. In reply to your favor of the eleventh regarding the four notes of your company to The Alabama Clay Company, due July fifteenth, two of which you are paying and two which you would like to carry over unrenewed to be met by you October first or prior, would say this will be quite satisfactory to us. The mortgage we hold we consider adequate security, and any little thing like this we can do to help a good customer weather these hard times we are glad to do. We are pleased to learn that prospects look brighter for you and that you expect to clean the notes up in the early fall. Paragraph. We enclose two of the notes stamped paid. With kind personal regards, we remain, yours very truly. Just run that off on The Alabama Clay Company stationery—”
“I understand perfectly, Mr. Telfair.”
She was the only woman stenographer on Cotton Row. It was a tradition in Georgetown that the cotton business was for men; there were women in the real estate offices and in the brokers’ offices, but until he hired her there had never been a woman in a Georgetown cotton office. She herself was proud of the distinction, but there were times nowadays when he was not so satisfied; he thought she was one of the best stenographers that had ever hung up hat and pocketbook but she somehow bothered him. Now and then she would catch his eye and hold it a split second longer than necessary, and he would begin to wonder all over again what in the world was he going to do with this woman; in one split second the past fifteen years were summed up and tossed back in front of him with a sly laugh. She had proficient eyes, dark with a richness suggestive of her Jewish father, and her hair, now going gray at the sides, had once undulated beyond the sensitive corners of Mr. Telfair’s eyes in raven-black waves.
He had seen her first behind the counter in Pavinovsky’s Shoe Hospital on Marbury Street. It was his habit to let his chauffeur Sam take care of his shoes, and he might never have seen her had not Sam carried the shoes one day and early the next asked permission to go down to Meyer’s Mill to his brother-in-law’s funeral; so on the way out to dinner he stopped for the shoes himself. She called him by name, which pleased him, and gave him the package with a smile. Having an eye for such things, he thought that the upper part of her figure, all that was visible above the counter, was really of exceptional charm, and its gracious and living curves remained with him half way home. He felt that he would like to do something for her and a few days later he sent Sam out to ascertain however he could where she lived, if she were married, and things like that, having in mind the possibility of eventually offering her an apartment on lower Walton Way or perhaps even a bungalow in Highland Court. Sam brought him the news that she was Miss Judith Pavinovsky and that she was usually met at the door, both at noon and at five-thirty, by a Mr. Jebby in an old Ford. So Mr. Telfair desisted.
But he didn’t forget her and when, one afternoon about a quarter to six, he saw a pliant figure waiting for a street car near Marbury Street, he scrutinized the curve of her bust accentuated by the flatness of her abdomen and, hoping it might be she, he offered her a ride home.
He thought she was about twenty-two, but she was nearer thirty, and she was positive in her outlook. She said she had been a stenographer in Atlanta, but when her father died the year before she had come back to work in the business and be near her mother.
“Stenographer?” said Mr. Telfair. “Are you good?”
“Pretty fair,” she said, giving him the look.
“How would you like to go in the cotton business?”
She laughed an honest knowing laugh.
“I’m in the shoe repair business.”
“There’s a better future in the cotton business.”
“And besides, my boy friend wouldn’t like for me to be in the cotton business, and besides—”
But she came and she stayed.
She liked the way he addressed her, the way he smoked his cigar, the monograms on his shirt sleeves, the whiteness of his canvas shoes in the summer. He never rolled up his sleeves and only on the hottest days would he take off his coat. He wore a clean shirt every morning. Her father had never done that; Jebby didn’t do that. She realized with a quiver that she was associating with something better than she was used to; she was shocked at herself to remember that she had once been considering marrying Jebby. That winter when she moved into the apartment at the Oglethorpe Arms, Jebby threatened to shoot himself and her and Mr. Telfair; but at just that moment he was offered a job as linesman by a friend of Mr. Telfair’s in the Atlanta office of The Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company, and he was persuaded to accept that alternative.
She lived contentedly in the apartment for nearly twelve years and she knew good things to eat and good manners and good clothes. She was philosophic about Mr. Telfair; he treated her like a lady and she loved him for it; she thought he showed her far more respect than her father had shown her mother. She knew him through and through and her eyes sometimes filled with that removed expression of tenderness that a mother has for her one boy. Whatever he said was compact with truth and wisdom, and anything he recommended her doing was as good as done. The prime quality of his linen vouched for his opinions. She had even on one occasion made $40,000 for him by extending her hospitality at his bidding to a gentleman from Liverpool who represented the English firm with which Mr. Telfair traded the next day when he bought 10,000 bales of cotton in Liverpool on the very friendly and confidential assurance of this Englishman that his country was going off the gold-standard; when that happened forty-eight hours later, Liverpool cotton jumped $4.00 a bale and Mr. Telfair sold. In return for this he built a neat bungalow of what he thought was Spanish design in the lower part of town and gave it to her and her mother. He kept the apartment, but they used it only spasmodically. She made no attempt to deny to herself that now, after fifteen years, she was something of a nuisance to Mr. Telfair.
He said to her on one of these occasions, standing in front of the fire, his Commerce and Finance on the mantelpiece behind him, speaking in his manner of mock brusqueness that she liked so much,
“Woman, I want you to get married.”
“Who am I going to marry?” she said; she had learned the solecisms permitted a lady.
“Who! My God, there are plenty of people. You are good-looking, you’ve still got one of the best figures in Davis County.”
She shook her head with a little smile and went on with the monogram on one of his shirt sleeves.
“I can’t marry you, you know,” said Mr. Telfair.
“I don’t want you to marry me.”
“But suppose I want to marry somebody else.”
“That’s a widower’s privilege.”
“I’d feel better about it, though, if you got married.”
“You don’t have to worry about me.”
“But you think it over, will you?”
She laughed a little and shook her head again.…
Mr. Telfair lighted the cigar and turned to his morning mail. She reached for a fly-killer and smacked one on a corner of his desk. He frowned but read on: “Dear Sir, In reply to yours—”; “Dear Mr. Telfair, My Cotton—”; “Gentlemen, Answering your favor—”; “My dear Mr. Telfair—”; “Dear Sir—”; “Gentlemen—”; “Darling—”!
He jumped back as if someone had just told him the Cotton Exchange had closed.
DARLING,
I love you. I have always loved you. I will forgive everything if only you will marry me—
Mr. Telfair looked at the signature but “Jeb” meant nothing to him; he bit down on his cigar and reached toward the waste basket to see the address on the envelope.
“I’ll get it for you, Mr. Telfair.”
“Get an envelope from the—The Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company, Atlanta. This ain’t for me.”
She leaned quickly over his shoulder. “May I see it, Mr. Telfair?”
Mr. Telfair shoved it at her and went on with his mail.
When he had finished he picked up the morning copy of the Daily News, announced that he was going to step up to the exchange a minute, took a key with a Dennison tag on it out of a drawer and retired, via the exchange, to a private cabinet in a corner of the warehouse adjoining his office.
