Siesta, p.2
Siesta, page 2
Atlanta 171.6 miles
DUE WEST
Georgetown 26.7 miles
Not long now, he said to himself, and pulled his shirt sleeves up from his damp wrists with two or three little tugs at the elbow. Though he didn’t really care; he was uncomfortable, but after all summer was summer and trains were trains. It was worth no further consideration.
What he was really concerned about was his sister Martha’s child, Nora. Nora needed a hand. He wasn’t sure but that his concern carried with it quite a heavy coating of sentimentality, but this possibility didn’t bother him; he was fifty-eight and used to going his own way sentimental or not.
Nora, according to his calculations, was twenty-four. She believed. He knew by her eyes, even before she had said a word; he knew the very moment that she walked into the door of his apartment. He hadn’t seen her since she was ten; he loved his relations with a good deal of old-fashioned affection but he could never seem to make himself take the slightest interest in them. Even his sister in Georgetown he had never visited and he thought he would probably hardly have seen her at all if he had not lived so conveniently close to the shops on Fifth Avenue; she stopped in once or twice a year on her way between Georgetown and Lord & Taylor’s. He had intermittent news of Nora, whom he pictured now as an enlarged ten; she was at school in Connecticut, then at Smith, then at a music school in Boston. She passed through New York going to and fro for some eight or nine years and never even called her uncle on the telephone; which, however, he thought he understood perfectly, that being more or less what he would have done under the same circumstances.
Then one morning a little after twelve she rang his bell and was shown in. He was in a velvet jacket, twirling the black ribbon of his glasses round his first finger as he moiled about his library dictating to his crisp amanuensis (a patient young woman of thirty-five who had taken down some nine hundred thousand words on the Christian religion as observed by her employer). He looked at the girl in the library door, tapping the glasses against one of the flares of his wing collar.
He took her to lunch at the Plaza and to a matinée at the Metropolitan of the Coq d’Or; then he gave her tea and put her on a seven o’clock train for Georgetown. That was in the early spring and she had just finished her last year at the music school. Piano. He left his taxi at Forty-second Street and walked up the avenue in the twilight, wondering about her, about youth and ashy age, about his fifty-eighth birthday next September, about her expectant eyes, her believing eyes,—about how she should have happened to come to see him now. He still didn’t quite understand that. He went up to the library in the University Club and drew letters close round him again as if he had been enticed out beyond them and found it a little uncomfortable; the wind always seemed to be blowing out there.
He wondered if perhaps she had been somewhat at loose ends, school finished, nothing else begun, the dead center sort of thing; it wasn’t quite clear. He somehow got the idea, though, that she needed a hand. She had said she wanted to go to Vienna.
“Good,” said Mr. Applewhite.
“Oh, but I don’t think I can.”
“Why not?”
She looked at the cigarette in her fingers, moving the lighted end pensively over the edge of the ash tray. She had been away a long time; her brother John was married now; she was the only one left; her mother wanted her at home—
“Oh, good Lord!” said Mr. Applewhite. “That’s no reason.”
“Well, after all,” she said with a little smile, “we do owe something to our parents, don’t we?”
“Well, I wonder about that. I wonder.”
“I don’t see how you can deny that,” she said, the smile gone.
“I don’t deny there is a debt,” said Mr. Applewhite, lifting his pink chin out of the V of his collar. “But I sometimes wonder if you oughtn’t to pay it to your children instead of to your parents. Pay it to them by letting them not owe you anything.”
She tilted her head slightly to one side.
“All I mean is that if you want to go to Vienna you ought to go to Vienna.”
He thought, remembering her, that her beauty was not the obvious kind. All the swift loveliness of twenty-four she had, the eager ear, the quick smile, but you looked twice before you saw the harmony in her face. Then you saw it, a delayed quality, a quietude, like some of the early mosaics he had seen in Roman churches. He thought she was almost too thin, though; maybe she hadn’t been idle enough. He was in favor of judiciously wasting a good deal of time.
He thought she liked him, which pleased him tremendously. Several times she had looked straight in his eyes and laughed, as if she could see his picture of the world reflected there and found it entertaining. He told her in the Pennsylvania Station that four weeks in Georgetown would be enough; she could even sail the first week in June. “The first Friday midnight,” he said with a sentimental glance backward over three decades; “the whistles then have something of immortality in them.”
“Maybe I’ll do it,” she said.
He opened a letter from her two weeks later, thinking she would be setting the date and he would go down to the Bowling Green himself and make the reservation for her personally. She said how much she had enjoyed seeing him, spoke of the heat in Georgetown, of the white flowers spotting the magnolias “like the things you stand candles in on a Christmas tree,” and ended her very polite note without a word about the trip. He hardly knew what to say.
He wrote her immediately, asking her with some urgency when she was planning to sail. She answered ten days later that it looked as if the trip were off; she wanted to go, she said, but she didn’t feel that she could leave her parents now.… So he had his Filipino pack two Gladstone bags and buy a ticket to Georgetown; he felt very strongly about young people’s hopping off on their own wings, following that perhaps slightly-shady inclination,—making their trip to Vienna.
He had started out on his own pilgrimage when he was twenty-six, shortly after his sister Martha had married George Fenwick, a Southerner who had been a classmate of his at Harvard, leaving his parents in their snug little low-ceilinged house on the verdant outskirts of Concord to get along as well as they could. For several years after leaving college he had taught English grammar in the Concord High School, then his maternal grandfather, a ship owner in Salem whose father’s fortune had been acquired largely through the importation of slaves for the South and who had himself been one of New England’s most rabid abolitionists, left him some two hundred thousand dollars and young Applewhite bade his classes farewell and set out. For the next thirty-two years he was never once, to all intents and purposes, in contact with the world; he moved round over most of it, observing its inhabitants and their manners, but wherever he went he carried with him a kind of hermit’s cell, a kind of diver’s helmet, through which certain essential aspects of the world penetrated to him, but by which many other essential aspects were held safely at bay. The great trunk line of communication which connected most of humanity, the necessity of working for a living, was down in his case and the best he could do was observe. He had written several rather long books on minor points of religion, not one of which would have sold five hundred copies if it had ever been published, which of course none of them ever was. They were neither scholarly nor popular and were shot through with myriads of sidelights on the author himself, so that, though a reader perusing them for some knowledge of Mr. Applewhite might have found them highly amusing, someone going through them for instruction in their ostensible subject would more than likely have declared them completely worthless; it would have been somewhat the same if Evelyn had called his journal, “A History of the Great London Fire.”
There were four large volumes of bound typescript on Mr. Applewhite’s library shelves, and he spent an hour every morning or so adding to what would eventually make the fifth. This was more or less a study of the effect of the Christian religion on modern American life, and he hoped to show, before he got through, that the country had received from it a setback amounting, in the evolution of reasonable human beings, to some three or four centuries; it opened with this sentence:
Though Christianity has undoubtedly a great many practical uses, it is very deleterious to man’s moral and spiritual life.
A further reason for his going South was connected with this fifth opus, in that he saw clearly to attempt a treatise on the American religion without visiting Georgia and Alabama was about on a par with trying to understand the Renaissance without considering Italy.
But he had a good many friends in New York and in spite of his being a bachelor of no conceivable interest to any daughter’s mother, he went round a good deal in the social world and found relatively little time for his work.
Being possessed of considerable money and a sound constitution, he looked upon himself as a happy man. He attributed it all, however, to his having gone on his “pilgrimage to Vienna,” and he was as determined that Nora should go on hers as if he had again been talking to himself at twenty-six.
He disliked profoundly the ‘making yourself light’ sensation of staying in somebody else’s house, particularly his own sister’s, and without saying anything further either to her or to Nora, he secured from a wire to the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce the name of a gentlewoman who took boarders (a Mrs. Eubanks on Davis Road), had himself and his bags put into an open taxi one warm June morning and went to the Pennsylvania Station. He followed his long-armed porter down the iron stairs and back to the last car; here he paused a minute on the platform by the door to give an indulgent smile at a lighthearted group of young men and women at the end of the train cheerfully submitting to the cameras and pencils of the press. He thought then it must be a wedding party, but later, when the train started, the young man with the black hair came into the coach from the rear door alone. He was tucking a large handkerchief into his pocket with his first finger and a smile still glimmered on his face.
Mr. Applewhite gave no further thought to him until night, down in Virginia, when, returning to the smoking compartment in his car after dinner, he found him bending over a basin with his sleeves rolled up, his suspenders making a black cross below his shoulders against his pastel shirt. He sat down on the hard divan by the window and carefully pinched the end of a cigar. In the pocket of the coat hanging on what he had often thought must have been the nearest thing to a nail that the Pullman Company engineers could devise at the time, he saw the top of a green fountain pen. He smiled inwardly; it was the kind of inconsequential little detail that the author in him enjoyed thinking he had not overlooked.
The young man nodded in a friendly way. “Warm,” he said with a rueful smile, not as if he thought the remark mattered but as even a good chess player will not disdain the conventionality of opening with his pawn to king four.
“It really is, isn’t it?” said Mr. Applewhite. “But I suppose it’ll be worse tomorrow.”
“You must be going all the way to New Orleans.”
“No,” said Mr. Applewhite, “I’m going to Georgetown. It’s a little town on the Georgia border of Alabama.”
“I know,” he laughed. “I was born there.”
“Were you really!”
“I haven’t lived there in years. But it remains,” he smiled, “the home town.” He put on his coat, glancing at the green pen in his pocket; then he said, wiping the perspiration off his upper lip with his silk handkerchief, “This isn’t the best time of year for Georgetown.”
“The heat, you mean.”
“It’s hot and dull. Nothing happens. Everybody goes away who can. It’s really quite deadly. I think of the summer burying the South like the ashes burying Pompeii.” He laughed. “They say it’s very nice in winter, though.”
“I think, as a matter of fact, I’d rather see it in the summer.”
“Maybe you like hot weather. I don’t.”
“Not so much that, but I think a place has its formative season. In New England it’s winter; it’s the cold weather that has built the houses, the cold weather that’s so marked on the people’s instincts.”
The other gave him the kind of look that is equivalent to the drawing of a finer focus.
“It’s their uphill season, their pulling season. In the South it’s the opposite.… Theoretically. I’ve never really been South before.”
“I don’t know, maybe you’re right. I just find it hot and dry and dull.” He put both hands deep into his trousers pockets, took two steps toward the door, swaying with the motion of the train, and paused. “Do you remember in The Wizard of Oz how they got lost in the field of poppies and were all overcome with sleep? All but two very significant exceptions: the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, who couldn’t smell.” He laughed and pulled aside the green curtain. “It’s like that. You’re taking your life in your hands.…”
The next morning Mr. Applewhite was looking through the smoke-caked mesh of his window screen at the town of Due West, Georgia. Across a broad space of gray sand his eye was just sweeping the weather-stained wooden shed with the rust-streaked corrugated iron roof in front of the store of Ben Gray & Co.; on one upright was a blue tin rectangle advertising The Georgetown Chemical Company, Makers of Acid Phosphate and High Grade Fertilizers. Under an old Ford a dusty hound lay in the shade, his nose lifted in languid indifference at the arrival of the mail bag. A lean man with a brown straw hat forward over his eyes sauntered toward the head of the train, his hands stuffed in the waist of his khaki trousers.
Mr. Applewhite looked out with a slight contracting of his eyebrows, running his thumb and finger pensively down the black cord of his pendent glasses.
“Good morning.”
“Oh, hello,” said Mr. Applewhite. The young man was standing in the aisle, his damp fingers spread apart gingerly on his hips; he was still wearing his coat. “I looked for you at breakfast.”
“I’m always late for breakfast.” He sat down sociably on the rough cushion across from Mr. Applewhite. When the train almost imperceptibly began to roll, he said, “It’s funny the things you remember from when you were a child. Down here they always seem to start the trains quietly. It’s probably because the trains are light, but it will always be one of the little things that remind me I’m not far from home.”
“You’re going back now to live.”
“Oh, no. My mother has been sick. I think she’s going to have to have an operation. There’s nobody there but my sister. I’ll probably be down a month, maybe six weeks. I don’t like it.”
“There’s just your mother and your sister?” Mr. Applewhite asked him paternally.
“Yes.” He paused, then added, “My sister has the distinction of being the only woman stenographer on Cotton Row.”
Mr. Applewhite smiled at him sympathetically. “Cotton Row?”
“It’s where the Cotton Exchange is and the warehouses and the offices, the sky-blue offices.”
He spoke out with much the ingenuousness of a child. He gave the impression of having lived among people who understood him; he seemed to make no allowance at all for being misinterpreted. He seemed artless, but Mr. Applewhite could not decide whether it was the artlessness of the simple or the great.
“Are the offices blue?” said Mr. Applewhite; he somehow felt attracted to the boy.
“Sky blue. It seems almost ironical to me that people so absolutely lacking in a sense of beauty should have been tricked by a commercial necessity into painting their offices a lovely color.” He looked at Mr. Applewhite. “It’s as if even in their ignorance God wouldn’t let them starve,—sending the ravens into the desert to feed them.”
Mr. Applewhite sat up.
“The blue sets off the cotton samples, you see. But it really makes them look like balls of cloud against a summer sky.”
“You haven’t a very Southern accent,” said Mr. Applewhite, referring in his own mind more to the substance of what the boy was saying.
“I haven’t been in Georgetown in four years. It seems a little odd sometimes, not being there any more than I am, that I still think of it as home.”
“A man needs to think of some place as home,” said Mr. Applewhite. “You need to have some place in the world where you know you will be accepted without question for what you are, where you can give your name and have people know all about you.”
He smiled. “Well, I don’t know.… I mean I don’t find I am taken for what I am. Home, to me, is just where I become once more the shoemaker’s boy. Elsewhere I am Sergey Pavinovsky; in Georgetown I am the shoemaker’s boy. So I don’t come back often.” He laughed. “I don’t mind so much being thought of as the shoemaker’s boy, you understand, but they make it color everything I say or do. After a few weeks of it I wake up one morning and find I am becoming the shoemaker’s boy—”
“Excuse me, but did you say your name was Sergey Pavinovsky?”
“Yes.”
“But don’t you dance in The Metropolitan Ballet?”
“Oh, yes.”
“I saw you in the Coq d’Or!”
“Oh, did you?”
“But you are very, very good!”
Pavinovsky laughed. “That’s very kind of you to say so.”
“I was there with my niece. We were both charmed.”
“I have been offered something very good for next year. Nikelief saw me and liked me and he offered me a very good thing in Paris. He has promised me a pas seul. Of course I am extremely pleased.”
“I should think you would be,” said Mr. Applewhite in blind sympathy, somewhat amazed at the simplicity with which Pavinovsky spoke of himself and his plans; there was something a little unaccountable in his face and in the graceful angles that his fingers assumed, even in the light of his being a dancer, but Mr. Applewhite thought of it only half-consciously. “You must have lived away from Georgetown a long time.”
“I was sixteen when I went away,” said Pavinovsky. “I had to go. I was very unhappy. I have never been so unhappy since. Never. Now I live and life is exciting and I am well thought of in the profession and already my name is on the bills outside and on the street people are beginning to know who I am. It is very thrilling.” He laughed again.
