Peace, p.9
Peace, page 9
Eleanor and my aunt Olivia had always been particular friends, in any event—perhaps partly because their good looks (they were strikingly attractive women) so complemented each other; and partly, too, from a similarity of temperament, for Eleanor, though she was several years younger than my aunt and kept house for her father, was as outspoken as the judge’s favorite author could have wished, and not least in her admiration for Olivia Weer and Olivia’s independence.
None of this, naturally, went through my mind as I crept downstairs and concealed myself in an alcove within easy hearing of the parlor. From my seat by the sill of my bedroom window I had watched Miss Bold come up the walk, and I supposed that I was to be arrested—at the very least—and perhaps that my aunt’s house was to be taken away. Any knowledge, I felt, would be better than an awful ignorance, but I was prepared to hear the worst.
Ten minutes or more were spent in the usual feminine greetings, the inquiries after friends and relations (though in this case certain parties were diplomatically omitted), the admiration for each other’s clothes, and the criticism of each’s own. Then: “I have” (I heard Miss Bold say) “a surprise for you.” I could not see her, but I feel certain that at this point she leaned forward to touch my aunt’s knee. “You asked Sophie Singer if she knew Em Lorn, the minister’s wife at the Approved Methodists out toward Milton.“
My aunt must have nodded.
“Well, she doesn’t, but I do now; Saturday I went to the Approved Methodists’ July picnic.”
“Eleanor, you didn’t!”
“Yes, I did. Sophie mentioned it to me, and I’ve been keeping it in the back of my mind—you know the way you do? So then Dick Porter asked if I didn’t want to go, because he had to. Because of his mother. I know he thought I was going to say I wouldn’t—I hate those churchy things, and I wouldn’t know anyone there—so when I said I would just love to he nearly fell over and now he thinks I’m sweet on him—”
“Eleanor, you are a minx! You don’t know how I’ve missed you this summer.”
“So we went, and it was as bad as I expected, or worse, with everyone drinking lemonade and playing horseshoes, and Dick picking up mine for me—every blessed time—and wiping them off with this handkerchief; but Em Lorn was there, and I must say I was exceedingly charming to her and extremely sweet. By the time the mosquitoes made us want to go home—mosquitoes are all Baptists—well, I had her to where I don’t think she was able to sleep that night, for wanting you and Mr. Macafee to come out and see her.”
“She knows what we want to come for?”
“Indeed she does, and she’s ready to sell it, too, if she can get what she thinks is a good price. By the time Dick Porter took me back, we were talking about the things she might be getting with the money.”
There was a pause; then I heard my aunt say, “What kinds of things?”
“Oh, a lot of things; a sewing machine was one. She wants a new sewing machine—she sews a lot for the missions.”
“Eleanor!”
“But I haven’t told you the best part yet: you won’t have to pay for it; Mr. Macafee’s going to buy it and give it to you for your birthday. He told us.”
“He told you?”
“Poppa and I. He comes to our house, too, sometimes, you know. To have dinner and play chess with Poppa and talk about Dickens and Anthony Trollope. And the last time, at dinner— Clara had just served the sweet potatoes, I remember—he mentioned the egg, and my father said, ‘Oh, yes, the famous egg; Eleanor heard about it from Sophie Singer,’ and he—I mean Mr. Macafee—looked right at me and said he intended to buy it and give it to Olivia Weer. For your birthday.”
Another pause. Then, “Please tell Mr. Macafee—I mean—you know—”
“Just let it slip,” Eleanor suggested helpfully.
“That’s right. Just let it slip that I want the egg for his birthday.”
“Vi! You’re not serious.”
“Tell him that. When did he say he wanted it for mine?”
“I told you, just—”
“Not that; what day?”
“Thursday.”
“We’ll go out Sunday afternoon. Is he coming to dinner again this week? Well, tell him then, if you can.”
“Vi, I thought you wanted it yourself.”
“I do. He wanted you to tell me—you said yourself he looked right at you.”
“But—”
“My birthday isn’t until November; he knows that, and he gave me a brooch last time. Don’t you see what he’s thinking? I’ll let him buy it and he won’t have to pay a lot because I won’t be trying to get it, too. Then, when the time comes to give it to me, he can very easily give me something else that costs twice as much, and I’ll have to forgive him; anyway, he’ll say I have to marry him now to get it—I can just hear him. Jimmy is a very sharp trader.”
“Well, I don’t see what good it will do you to buy it and give it to him. When is his birthday, anyway?”
“Next month—August third. You’re a goose, Eleanor.”
“Aren’t you going to buy it?”
“Of course not. But if he thinks I really want it for him and I would have paid a lot for it, then he’ll have to give it to me— don’t you see that? He’ll see how badly I want it, and besides it won’t be easy then to give me something that costs more.”
There was another pause, during which I could hear someone pouring tea, the delicate splashing and the click of the cup the only sounds against the background noises of my own breathing and the sighing of the wind in the big elms outside. I ventured a peek around the corner, keeping my head very close to the floor, and saw my aunt Olivia just in the act of setting down the cozy-wrapped pot. Eleanor Bold said, “This is good, what is it?” and I withdrew.
“Formosa oolong,” my aunt told her. “I’ll have to have money. I’ll go down Friday and draw some out. Then I can go by the store and tell Jimmy I’ve just come from the bank.”
The next day, Wednesday, Stewart Blaine called upon my aunt. I have sometimes wondered if he was in fact the richest of my aunt’s suitors (of that period) as he seemed to be, or if it was only his atmosphere of gentility which conveyed that impression, as Professor Peacock’s carelessness, for example, and his coming by train so that he had no car in Cassionsville unless he rented one (though he owned one, as I learned much later), gave an exaggerated impression of scholarly poverty.
Mr. Blaine’s car was British, and he treated it, or at least seemed to treat it, like a horse. Not that he pulled backward on the wheel (as old farmers sometimes did, whoaing their Model T’s) when it went too fast, or kept it in a barn, so that you found bits of hay on the seats; but he talked to it, using a kind of low, gentlemanly, side-of-the-mouth voice, as though he were telling it that it could jump a fence. The steering wheel was on the wrong side, and was all of the most beautiful wood, with no iron or brass at all, and the dashboard, which ought to have been wood, was Russian leather.
Thinking about that Russian leather, I can remember the smell of it, the odor that tickled my nose when I sat between Mr. Blaine and my aunt Olivia and reached out to stroke the leather with the tips of my fingers while the gearshift banged against my knees. I remember it, but I do not know why I have chosen here to write about Blaine—save that he was one of the three men who at that period called on my aunt, so that to omit him would be to tell only a part of the story.
He was a rich man—richer, I think, than Mr. Macafee—and like most rich men he had nothing distinctive about him, the money having assumed for him the task of self-expression that, in poorer men, is assumed by the personality; so that as we remember one man as witty, another as kind, and a third, perhaps, as athletic or at least energetic or handsome, one remembered Blaine, on parting from him, as wealthy. He was tall rather than short, but not very tall; his face was long without being Lin-colnesque. His hair was of that lusterless yellow brown which is called sandy, and his money was in and of the Cassionsville & Kanakessee Valley State Bank, which he had inherited from his father, and a dozen or more farms.
We went to his house that night, which was a daring thing for my aunt to have done, at that time and in that place, although she had me with her and Blaine’s housekeeper and cook would be present. I have always remembered it as a pretentious house, though it was much smaller than this one I have built for myself —pretentious because it had a sort of round portico, with columns, instead of a porch; it was the type of house that is painted white because that is the color that makes it most closely resemble marble. Mr. Ricepie, the manager of the bank, was waiting for us as we drove up, and I could see that Blaine was not happy to see him, though he introduced him courteously to my aunt, who smiled and explained that she and Mr. Ricepie had already met.
Mr. Ricepie said, “Miss Weer is a good depositor of ours.” And Blaine: “Really, this is rather embarrassing—as you see, I have guests.”
Mr. Ricepie said that he would be happy to return tomorrow.
“No, I don’t want to wait around for you tomorrow. I know I told you to come out tonight, but I thought you would be much earlier.”
“It took quite a bit of work to get everything together,” Mr. Ricepie said. “Harper and Doyle stayed late to help me with it.”
“You see what it is having employees,” Mr. Blaine told my aunt. “I asked for a few figures, and thought I would be able to have everything done before I went to pick you up. When Ricepie didn’t come, I supposed he had forgotten about it, or fallen into a pit or some such. Now here he is with his briefcase —though why Ricepie should have a briefcase, I don’t know; he certainly isn’t an attorney—full of enough arithmetic to give me a headache for a week, and at the worst possible time.”
“You needn’t worry, Stewart,” my aunt told him. “Den and I can amuse ourselves quite happily for an hour or two. I’ll show him your library—he’s mad about books—and your stereopti-con slides.”
“Nonsense; you are my guest, and I wouldn’t dream of keeping you waiting. Besides, I have to have Ricepie to dinner now, anyway. I’ll look at his papers afterward.”
My aunt giggled at the phrase “Ricepie to dinner,” but Mr. Ricepie said, “You needn’t do that, Mr. Blaine; my wife is waiting dinner for me at home.”
“Don’t be silly.” Blaine drew out his watch. It was such a thin one I thought it might not be a real watch at all, but only a saucer of bright metal—perhaps the cover of an old watch—that Mr. Blaine carried now because his real one had broken. Save for the smoothly rounded edges it could have been a gold coin. “It’s nearly half after six. I can’t send you away from my door now, Ricepie. Come in. Everybody come in. Vi, darling?”
He started to open the door for us himself, but his housekeeper had been standing, apparently, just inside with her hand on the knob, and Blaine had no sooner reached for it than it opened with a swift, smooth motion that (possibly because the door, too, was white-painted) for some reason reminded me of the wing of a bird; and we trooped in, my aunt Olivia first and Mr. Ricepie and I last. We bumped together as we went through the doorway.
When I designed the entranceway of this house, I tried to recreate the foyer of Blaine’s—not its actuality in a tape-measure sense, but its actuality as I remembered it; why should not my memory, which still exists, which still “lives and breathes and has its being,” be less actual, less real, than a physical entity now demolished and irrecoverable?
Between this paragraph and the last, I went to look for that foyer, and for my knife, too. (Have you never thought as you read that months may lie between any pair of words?) Unfortunately I made the mistake of trying to reach it by going through the house, rather than going outside and around. I knew that that was what I should have done, but it is raining, a gentle spring rain; and though I would not mind getting wet I had a horror of looking behind me and seeing the uneven trail of my crippled leg sinking into the soft grass. As it is, I feel I have been disobeyed.
There is a Persian room, with divans and carpets and wall hangings of embroidered silk, and scimitars on the walls, and huge stone jars. I know because I have been in it, but I am certain I never told Barry Meade I wanted any such thing, and if he (or anyone) were alive to hear me I would be in a rage— as it is, why should I rage, and how can I? Barry’s dead bones will not shake because I stamp on his grave, though my own would. I have a Persian room: hookahs and curtains of beads before latticed windows overlooking—could it be Shiraz? I may as well enjoy it. I am sure I can find it again if need be. The door to the corridor opposite the picture of Dan French giving me the box (whatever it was, a silver cigar lighter or something) when I was fifty, on behalf of the employees. Down the corridor and through my aunt Olivia’s solarium, with the smell of thinner and the little glasses of brushes and the drying palette; the fourth or fifth door, I think, on the right.
But I need not find Blaine’s foyer to remember it: it was a narrow room, the ceiling very high; and though the walls, which one felt Blaine would have liked to be of marble, were wooden, yet the top of the hall table, and a low pedestal supporting a showy vase of cut fern, and the umbrella stand were all of white stone. My aunt said, “I love this hall of yours, Stewart. It always looks so cool.”
“It’s nice in summer, but rather a cold place in the winter, I’m afraid.”
“Nonsense, Mrs. Perkins always has a fire going then, don’t you, Mrs. Perkins?”
The housekeeper smiled and said, “It is not my duty to lay fires, but I see that one is kept there. Yes, I do.”
I looked at the marble fireplace and wondered who had cleaned it; only deep in the wall, where the marble gave way to sandstone, could I see any traces of fire, and these were slight black stains so light they appeared brownish. Blaine said, “I don’t know what I’d do without Mrs. Perkins, Vi. You know what I am, the typical impractical man, with money I never made. If I had to clean my own silver, I think I’d starve.”
“You could eat with it yellow,” my aunt said. “That’s what I do. I won’t use that tin stuff they sell that gets all rusty if you leave it in the sink.”
The doorway through which we passed had an immense fanlight.
“Dinner at eight,” Blaine said, waving toward chairs. “It doesn’t suit my country ways, but meantime we might as well make ourselves comfortable.”
I sat with the others, very miserable at the thought of having to listen to more than an hour of parlor conversation; but after a moment Blaine turned to me and said, “Wouldn’t you like to see the stock, Alden? Queenie’s had a family.” He turned back to my aunt. “All children like puppies, don’t they, Vi? You ought to know. And Alden could ride Lady. I’ll have Mrs. Perkins turn him over to Doherty.”
Doherty, gardener and hostler, wore an old soft cap from which his carroty hair (even then, I think, beginning to gray) stuck out all around; he had a wide mouth and smelled of a strange, strong smell I did not then know was veterinary liniment. Queenie was a Dalmatian who seemed to understand Doherty perfectly when he talked like a chicken—a talent of his —but who looked rather puzzled when he said to me, “You must only brush ’em the right way, if you understand me, for that spreads the spots apart farther and it’s that the judges crave. But if you run your hand against their hair you’ll drive every spot on the dog up to his ears, and that’s as good as to drown him. Have you a cur or two yourself? I see you’re not afraid of them.”
I told him I did not, but that my aunt had two in the house and nine more in a kennel in the back yard.
“In the house, does she. My own mother’s mother, the old Kate, she did that and never trained them to go outside at all, so she said. Friends would pay a call and see it in piles all over the floor, and the old creature would explain she had to let all the mess sit three days before it was hard enough to pick up— ah, you think that’s funny, do you?”
I nodded, sitting in the straw in a mixture of my best and worst clothes (my aunt Olivia paid no attention to the way I dressed, leaving that to my own taste, which was shaky to say the least) with a pair of spotted puppies cuddled to my heart.
“Well, and I believed it myself until I was about as old as you. Then, as the devil would have it, I ran ahead of my mother one day and saw the old Kate out in the garden pickin’ it up for us. It give people something to talk of, she said; besides that she rode on the ice wagon with Pat O’Connell. But wouldn’t you yourself like to be riding Lady now?”
Lady was a steady old mare, and I, no horseman, rode her at a walk until it was time for dinner, then went into the house again—this time through the kitchen rather than by the narrow side door through which I had been led out—to sit between my aunt and Mr. Ricepie at a table on which every inedible thing not silver was the color of snow or of ice. We had a spicy soup that looked like tea, and a green salad threaded with little strips of salty fish. My aunt Olivia admired the chandelier, and Mr. Blaine told her that it was supposed to be the first crystal chandelier ever taken west of the Alleghenies, and that it had been made in Venice to order.
“Your family has lived here a long time,” I said.
“So has yours,” he told me. “There is properly no history, Alden, only biography. When your—what would it be, great-great-grandfather?—came here, he bought land to build a mill from an ancestor of mine. Do you know what he paid? A barrel of whiskey, three rifles he’d brought with him from Pennsylvania, and twenty dollars. And he promised to grind free for my ancestor for three years. You can see that the old boy—his name was Determination Blaine—drove a hard bargain. Today that land is probably worth a hundred times more, but I’d’ve given it to him for the whiskey alone if Ricepie didn’t stop me—wouldn’t I, Ricepie? And yet a man is only the bundle of his relations, a knot of roots.”
