Lucinderella, p.3
Lucinderella, page 3
I felt sorry for her; being a plain girl at a state university is no joke, plain and opinionated too. Maybe books interested her as a refuge, or maybe there was some peculiar carry-over of interest from her great-grandmother’s sister who had written and published a novel in 1848. She showed me a copy of it once, a photostat from the copy in the Library of Congress. “There are millions and millions of people in the Library of Congress,” she said, the photostat setting her off. I said well, I doubted if the payroll was that large even in a Government agency, she paying no attention and running on with “Hamlet and Lorna Doone and Ivanhoe and the Wife of Bath and Pendennis and Nausicaa and Falstaff and Alice and Huckleberry Finn and Peggotty and Anna Karenina and poor Dr. Bovary——” The only way to end it was to walk away when you had had enough. I don’t think she made any distinction between Dickens and Copperfield or Melville and Ahab or Homer and Ulysses, about as much evidence for one as the other, she seemed to think, and in some cases more. “Did the old Don attack the windmills?” she said once. “I saw him when he did it! I’ve only heard that Columbus discovered America.”
I was surprised to find myself remembering her so often on my subsidized trip to Italy (it seemed as if every time I got scared I reached for Lucinda) and I was quite upset to get back and see she wasn’t at all what I had been remembering. The delicate features were there all right, narrow-boned nose, thin-skinned cheeks, the almost black eyes and their hummingbird movement—flit, still, flit—and the overall effect seemed somehow less plain than before, quite appealing in fact, but I had forgotten what she could do with words, the interpretations she could put on things, the blowing everything up bigger than it was. I guess I had been fancying myself with tales of moving accidents by flood and field, fancying her pliant ear devouring up my discourse; I had forgotten the way she could look through what you were saying at why you were saying it (and at what she was going to turn it into). Even so she seemed glad to see me and I made the most of it, the most not amounting to anything much, partly because I found her such an innocent she scared me and partly because at about that time Savannah had differences with one of her young men and, swinging her wide-eyed rabbit gaze round her, saw me. This didn’t amount to much either, arising largely from her general principle that sauce for one gander was sauce for another; when soon afterwards Lucinda left, vanished, it weakened my magnetism in Savannah’s eyes, though she sometimes went out with me (to let no embers die for want of breathing on them). I mean to say there had been nothing intimate enough in our past, Lucinda’s and mine, to account for my interest in meeting her bus.
In fact I hardly realized the interest myself until I saw my hand coming at me with the shaver and, a few minutes later, heard the ring of my dime in the phone at The Chicken Coop and then the voice saying there was a bus in from Raleigh at 6:34. I called the other station and there was one about nine. She might have been on either but the 6:34 had left Raleigh (I figured it was Raleigh because Cousin Amon lived there—he has a discreditable walk-on bit toward the end of Act Two) at just about the moment Uncle Brownell had been talking to New York and I thought there was a good chance Lucinda might have been phoning her agent while she waited to board the bus—closing out some big deal or other, maybe she was on a lecture tour with a ten-inch cigarette holder—and had told him to call Uncle Brownell, not having time to do it herself. Or nerve.
This was reading a lot into it but not too much I thought and I set out on foot for the station, only two or three blocks away, asking myself as I stumbled along (none of our politicians walk anywhere and the sidewalks are rougher than the streets) why I should be doing it. To find out for sure what she was up to? Yes, but I was already satisfied as to the general predatory nature of it. How long she would be there? Yes, but I knew it wouldn’t take her very long to load up with us. To get a head start on the others with the visiting celebrity? Maybe. But there was something else.
I think I must have known all along what it was and not wanted to admit it. It was the books and the stories, and the poetry too, or rather it was the person you could see behind them. Not any Lucinda I had ever known. The characters, the scenes, the incidents she described, any one of us at The Homestead could have jotted down all that once he had worked up the don’t-give-a-damn frame of mind and was ready to pull up stakes, jotted it down a lot more accurately and true to life; but what she was thinking about them, her interpretation of them (us I should say), that was something of her own. It didn’t sound like our Lucinda but you could tell by the voice it couldn’t be anybody else. She had turned the X-rays on us, up and down, front and back, until you could read a newspaper on the other side of us but somehow she had got into the picture too; maybe she didn’t know, didn’t care, but she was in it. Shootings, cuttings, lecheries, emotional tangles that would have waked you up in a cold sweat if you had dreamed them; it was almost unbelievable that the mother of this outrageous brood could be our little stringy-haired dateless recluse but you had no alternative. She walked into her assorted bedrooms—or barns or bushes or attics or wherever—like a master mechanic lifting the hood of your car. She knew exactly where everything was and what it did and what it looked like and which wires connected this with that, all of it coming out of the page in that quiet unmistakable Lucinderella cadence that was her voice itself. It was as disconcerting as a parent turning on you with “Put ’em up, son, this is a stickup.”
And the reviewers saw a lot I didn’t see; maybe they hadn’t read every page but the pages they read they took apart. His Hawk, His Hound and His Lady Fair was reprinted in a paperback during the last symbolism flare-up and they found symbols and symptoms and signs and double meanings they had missed in the original edition and, as I say, what they didn’t find in Jessica and her garden hose wasn’t worth finding. They may have found more than Lucinda put in; there are days when I think so and days when I think not. Anyway Lucinda had clearly picked up a lot in her travels.
In one way I was almost afraid to see her at all. You got a feeling from her stories she could see your liver from across the room and had no reticence about watching it if it looked interesting, looked sick. Wading round through the scrambled smells of burned diesel oil and disinfectant and grilling hamburgers I was conscious that my eye kept returning to a beautiful blue-and-white poster of a bus on the open road as if something was trying to tell me to grab a ticket to some place and get out until she had gone. But in another way I felt particularly drawn to her; I knew her so well now. No doubt she thought she knew me but I hadn’t laid myself on the line as she had. I had read the lines and, in that old expression I had never understood before, I knew her like a book; not what she looked like any more but what she was. When the scratchy voice dribbled out of the ceiling announcing the bus I bought some chewing gum in a vending machine; I didn’t want it but I thought it would give my jaws something to do while I decided whether to run away or hold out my arms. Or decided it was the wrong bus (it very well might be) and go on home.
I felt better for a minute, just a minute, wondering how it would seem to be on her end of the double exposure, finding yourself rolling down streets that wouldn’t do quite what you had written for them to do, gazing out at somebody who might have been either Judge Fluther or Leroy, saying to yourself, “That looks a little like Lester over there. No. It’s Tunch Mapp of course.” And probably glancing out at a man on the station platform you couldn’t place, then placing him: “Why goodness me if it isn’t Cliff Maloof!” I pulled the plunger on a pinball machine and let it bang. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to leave; I stood behind a post as the thing blubbered in, partly to get a better view of the passengers as they descended and also not to seem overeager as if I had never greeted anybody important before.
I didn’t spot her in the windows but it was dark inside and hard to see through the glass. Then the doors hissed back and I put the final touches on my face for a noncommittal welcome, cordial but not effusive. An old man came down the steps one at a time, then a woman in jeans with a walking stick, then a bareheaded boy and his father, then a young woman about the size of Lucinda with a baby in her arms (at which my throat closed up—and at the thought of how strange it was that the truth always surprised you, and the thought of Bubberdarlin faced with this latest little echo of Papa Charles’s footsteps, this little tenant, this little of-course explanation of Lucinda’s homeward turn; until I realized I was watching for a Lucinda the age of the one who went away), then six soldiers, then an older woman, older than Lucinda would look I felt sure unless you allowed for a lot of wear and tear, some poor guy’s mother-in-law in for a visit. And that was all.
If she was holding back until the crowd moved on I could understand that, or until she could decide where she had seen my face before or whether I was Maloof or Johnny Clint. But there was no typewriter. I searched the row of waiting luggage for a portable and there wasn’t one, and that clinched it and I said All right, Spignor, you guessed and you guessed wrong, and I got rid of the chewing gum and, both disappointed and relieved, wandered on back to Bay Street—to Papa Charles’s old hitching post with the pineapple finial, symbol of welcome (as was also in this case the Confederate naval ensign Uncle Brownell had run up on our front-porch staff), and to a taxi waiting at it and to the woman in levis with the walking stick who said, “Clamp, will you pay this man? I only have forty-five cents.” I said, “What the hell did you hire him for then?” Such was our greeting after nine not-so-long years.
I sorted out the dirtiest dollar in my thin collection and handed it to the driver while she walked over to the buckled sidewalk and looked all round, standing there in a pair of hard-used moccasins without, I think, socks. “It’s different,” she said. “What have you done to it?” She went on before I could tell her we hadn’t done anything to it, literally nothing (our costs were several lengths ahead of income and pulling out further every day). “It’s gray and it’s wrinkled and it’s out of tune. And it’s beautiful.”
I pulled my eyes away long enough to ask the driver where the luggage was, where particularly the typewriter was, and he said there wasn’t none and I said, “Where’s your luggage?” to the back of an unbelievable leather jacket such as members of motorcycle clubs wear. When I repeated the question she absent-mindedly tapped a shoulder bag dangling against the copper rivets of her left hip pocket, continuing to gaze about her and then walking on to an old warp in the bricks over a hackberry root by one of the iron fence posts and squatting down and patting it. “You loved to grab my skates, didn’t you?” she said affectionately. “And crash me. And give me scabs that lasted months. And every time I bent my knee I broke the crust and little drops of gold rosin came out as if I were a pine tree.”
I didn’t look at the driver’s expression, to spare myself. I said, “Okay,” to his belt buckle, encouraging him to get going even with the best part of my dollar. When I turned round Lucinda was still swapping reminiscences with the bricks; I walked over and touched the windbreaker. “Look, Lucinda,” I said, “suppose we pull ourselves together a little bit now and go on inside.” I didn’t want the neighbors to look out and see somebody in front of our house patting the sidewalk and talking to it; that’s the trouble with people who have been living in New York, they don’t understand what big news everybody is. They’re used to artificial theaters and professional actors taking the parts of Tom, Dick and Harry; we have Tom, Dick and Harry in person. Everybody is on stage all the time. “They’re waiting for us in there,” I said. “They all want to see you.”
She got up, standing there bareheaded studying the broad front of our old house as if peering into its eyes (no smile to any of this). She was still enough to have been counting the limbs of the hickory tree or the spokes in the second-floor balustrade. The iron gate was open, it always is, and I moved into it and waited.
But she walked away, walked to the curb and sat down on the old stone carriage block with TELFAIR carved on it, laying a hand on the side as if it had been the neck of a dog. She said in a low voice, not looking at me, “I’m not going in, Cliff.” I said, “What?” and she said, “This is as far as I’m going.”
After a silence in which I tried to absorb this on top of what I had already absorbed I said, “Nobody’s mad with you, Lucy.”
“Mad with me?”
“I don’t know why they’re not but they’re not.”
She gave me a puzzled look from under the black eyebrows. “Why should they be mad, Clamp?”
“But they aren’t. They really aren’t.”
“But why should they be?”
I hadn’t intended to get into all that, certainly not at this point, but she had pushed me into a corner and I said, “The way you wrote them up, maybe?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” I said the stories and books she had written about them, my voice probably going up a little, and she said, “I’ve never written about them.”
The things you hear if you live long enough. I said, “No?”
“Certainly not.”
“Or about me?”
“Why, Clamp, how can you say such things!”
“I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of Cliff Maloof.”
“Cliff Maloof? No.”
“You haven’t?”
“No.—Yes. Certainly, of course.”
“But what has that to do with me?”
“Yes, honey. What?”
“Who’re you kidding, Lucy, you or me?” I said it quietly, a simple hands-in-the-pocket question seeking an answer.
I couldn’t tell what sort of shaking of her head it was, amazement at the question, sadness at my lack of understanding, weariness at the difficulty of trying to explain something so complicated, I don’t know. I was sorry the subject had come up. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” I said. “They’re proud of you. They would have had the Mayor at the bus but didn’t know what time you were coming.” I tried to imagine Lester’s free orchids at the shoulder of the windbreaker.
She waved it aside, gazing up the lane of hackberry trees with her toes moving up and down thoughtfully in the flexible moccasins that fitted her like mittens. “You don’t write a story about somebody outside,” she said. “A story’s about the people in the story.”
“I see.”
“They don’t exist until you write them.”
I said, “Some of us thought we did.”
“And they last much longer than the people outside. If you write them well they sometimes last for thousands of years. It is very peculiar. The Library of Congress is a sort of Heaven where they go if they’re good.”
“And Cliff Maloof is going to outlinger old Clamp Spignor.”
“But yes, honey. Certainly.”
I didn’t want to hear about Cliff Maloof, dead or alive, any more than I’d want somebody to twist my broken finger and I said, getting back to the main point, “They’re waiting for us, Lucy,” and trying to make her smile, “They’ve chased the roaches off Dr. Jim’s teapot.” I thought from her stories she might like this kind of thing but she didn’t seem to, just shook her head again, the meaning clear enough this time. I said, “But why, Lucy?” and she snapped at me, “I don’t know who’ll be there that’s why, now leave me alone!”
“Just family. Nobody but family.”
She mumbled “Which family?” half to herself. I suppose she meant the Library-of-Congress family or the other one, I don’t know, but her hand was shaking and I gave her a cigarette to steady her and she lit it before I could reach a match, flipping out a gold lighter that was burning as it came, her thin cheeks sucking into deep gray hollows. I looked round about with the same feeling you have looking for a phone when you’ve run out of gas. It was hard for me to put together: on top of the world; “Lucinda Fannin” at this moment on the boards in front of the Martin Beck (small—only the playwright—but there); and she hunched over on our old carriage block with the stick between her blue knees, the cigarette twitching in her fingers, and owing me eighty-five cents.
It occurred to me all of a sudden she might have lost her luggage or had her pocketbook stolen and I said something like that. But she waved her wrist in a lackadaisical negative. “I never carry any money. Five or six dollars is all I need and I used that on the bus.” “But I thought the play was a big success,” I said. “Oh, it is. I have lots of money. But you don’t have to tote it round with you. Grant handles everything, pays all the bills, my agent. You send him your bill and you’ll get a check in the next mail, he’s very prompt.—How are you, Clamp?”
I accepted the change of subject if that was what she wanted and said I was fine (she would level off in a minute, I argued). She said, “And the garage?”
Usually in the South when somebody says something you don’t understand you just answer a few words anyhow. You don’t ask for a repeat; it makes almost anything sound foolish to have to repeat it, particularly with us who talk generally on the scatter principle of a shotgun, lots of little shot rather than a New England bullet that hits and expands after it gets in. I wanted to say “Fine” again but somehow this time I couldn’t say it. “What garage, Lucy?”
She said the garage where I worked, she couldn’t remember the man’s name, and I said I had never worked in a garage. “I work for Uncle Otis at the hotel,” I said. “Maybe you’ve forgotten.” She looked a sort of “But” at me and I said, “Cliff Maloof worked in a garage.”
“Of course. Oh, dear!” She bit her lip. I thought she was going to cry but after she had studied a white sycamore root for a few long breaths she seemed all right. I certainly didn’t want to press the thing. I said, “Where’s your typewriter, Lucy?” Maloof reminding me of it though it was on my mind anyway, one of the details that puzzled me most. I had pictured a little foreign job with a special keyboard.
