Perhaps a crowded room, whatever is added, always looks the same. One wall was exactly the same. Above one bookcase hung her father’s stick-framed map of the county—he had known every mile; above the other hung the portraits of his father and grandfather, the Confederate general and missionary to China, as alike as two peaches, painted by the same industrious hand on boards too heavy to hang straight, but hanging side by side: the four eyebrows had been identically outlined in the shape of little hand-saws placed over the eyes, teeth down, then filled in with lamp-black.
She saw at once that nothing had happened to the books. Flush Times in Alabama and Mississippi, the title running catercornered in gold across its narrow green spine, was in exactly the same place as ever, next to Tennyson’s Poetical Works, Illustrated, and that next to Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. She ran her finger in a loving track across Eric Brighteyes and Jane Eyre, The Last Days of Pompeii and Carry On, Jeeves. Shoulder to shoulder, they had long since made their own family. For every book here she had heard their voices, father’s and mother’s. And perhaps it didn’t matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight. Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful. In the other bookcase, which stood a little lower—maybe because of Webster’s Unabridged and the McKelva family Bible, twin weights, lying on top—there was the Dickens all in a set, a shelf and a half full, old crimson bindings scorched and frayed and hanging in strips. Nicholas Nickleby was the volume without any back at all. It was the Gibbon below it, that had not been through fire, whose backs had come to be the color of ashes. And Gibbon was not sacrosanct: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes looked out from between two volumes. Laurel dusted all of them, and set them back straight in the same order.
The library was a little darker now that one of the two windows that looked out on the Courtland side of the house was covered by Judge McKelva’s office cabinet. This was jammed with lawbooks and journals, more dictionaries, his Claiborne’s Mississippi and his Mississippi Code. Books, folders, file boxes were shelved with markers and tapes hanging out. Along the cabinet top his telescope was propped extended, like a small brass cannon.
Laurel slid back the glass doors and began to dust and put back neatly what she came to. His papers were in an order of their own—she thought it was that of importance to unimportance. He had kept civic papers dating from the days when he was Mayor of Mount Salus, and an old dedication speech made at the opening of the new school (“These are my promises to you, all the young people I see before me: …”). The promises had made them important to him. There was a bursting folder of papers having to do with the Big Flood, the one that had ruined the McKelva place on the river; it was jammed with the work he had done on floods and flood control. And everybody had already forgotten all about that part of his life, his work, his drudgery. This town deserved him no more than Fay deserved him, she thought, her finger in the dust on what he’d written.
Laurel took her eyes away from words and stood for a moment at the window. In the backyard next door, Miss Adele was hanging something white on the clothesline. She turned as if intuitively toward the window, and raised her arm to wave. It was a beckoning sort of wave. She beckons with her pain, thought Laurel, realizing how often her father must have stood just here, resting his eyes, and looked out at her without ever seeing her.
Yet he loved them as a family. After moving into town from out in the country, the Courtlands ploughed the field behind the house, and back of that, in the pasture, kept cows. In Laurel’s early memory, Mrs. Courtland had sold milk and to Judge McKelva’s disturbance had had her children drink it skimmed blue so she could sell all the cream.
It was not until that night when Dr. Courtland told her, that Laurel ever heard he owed part of his medical schooling to her father. Never had Judge McKelva been well off until the last few years. He had come unexpectedly into a little oil money from a well dug in those acres of sand he still owned in the country—not a great deal, but enough, with his salary continuing for life, to retire on free of financial worry. “See there?” he had written to Laurel—or rather dictated to Dot, who loved underlining his words on her typewriter. “There was never anything wrong with keeping up a little optimism over the Flood. How well would you like to knock off, invite a friend for company, and all go see England and Scotland in the spring?” The next thing she heard, he was about to marry Fay.
She’d been all around the room, and now there was the desk. It stood in the center of the room, and it had been her father’s great-grandfather’s, made in Edinburgh—a massive, concentrated presence, like that of a concert grand. (The neglected piano in the parlor seemed to have no presence at all.) Behind the desk yawned his leather chair, now in its proper place.
Laurel walked around to it. There used to be standing on the desk, to face him in his chair, a photograph of her mother, who had been asked to stop what she was doing and sit on the garden bench—this was the strongly severe result; and the picture was gone. That was understandable. The only photograph here now was of herself and Philip running down the steps of the Mount Salus Presbyterian Church after their wedding. Her father had given it a silver frame. (So had she. Her marriage had been of magical ease, of ease—of brevity and conclusion and all belonging to Chicago and not here.)
But something had been spilled on the desk. There were vermilion drops of hardened stuff on the dark wood—not sealing wax; nail polish. They made a little track toward the chair, as if Fay had walked her fingers over the desk from where she’d sat perched on its corner, doing her nails.
Laurel seated herself in her father’s chair and reached for the top drawer of his desk, which she had never thought of opening in her life. It was not locked—had it ever been? The drawer rolled out almost weightless, as light as his empty cigar box, the only thing inside. She opened the drawers one after the other on both sides of the huge desk: they had been cleaned out. Someone had, after all, been here ahead of her.
Of course, his documents he had placed in the office safe; they were in Major Bullock’s charge now, and his will was in Chancery court. But what of all the letters written to him—her mother’s letters?
Her mother had written to him every day they were separated in their married lives; she had said so. He often went about to court, made business trips; and she, every summer since she had married him, had spent a full month in West Virginia, “up home,” usually with Laurel along. Where were the letters? Put away somewhere, with her garden picture?
They weren’t anywhere, because he hadn’t kept them. He’d never kept them: Laurel knew it and should have known it to start with. He had dispatched all his correspondence promptly, and dropped letters as he answered them straight into the wastebasket; Laurel had seen him do it. And when it concerned her mother, if that was what she asked for, he went.
But there was nothing of her mother here for Fay to find, or for herself to retrieve. The only traces there were of anybody were the drops of nail varnish. Laurel studiously went to work on them; she lifted them from the surface of the desk and rubbed it afterwards with wax until nothing was left to show of them, either.
That was on Saturday.
3
“LAUREL! Remember when we really were the bridesmaids?” Tish cried as they sat over drinks after dinner. It was Sunday evening.
While the bridesmaids’ parents still lived within a few blocks of the McKelva house, the bridesmaids and their husbands had mostly all built new houses in the “new part” of Mount Salus. Their own children were farther away still, off in college now.
Tish’s youngest son was still at home. “He won’t come out, though,” Tish had said. “He has company. A girl came in through his bedroom window—to play chess with him. That’s what she said. I think she’s the same one who came in through his window last night, close to eleven o’clock. I saw car lights in the driveway and we
nt to see. They call him every minute. Girls. He’s fifteen.”
“And remember Mama at the wedding,” Tish said now, “crying when it was over, saying to your father, ‘Oh, Clint, isn’t it the saddest thing?’ And Judge Mac saying, ‘Why, no, Tennyson, if I had thought there was anything sad to be said for it, I should have prevented it.’ ”
“Prevented it? I never saw a man enjoy a wedding more,” said Gert.
“Wartime or no wartime, we had pink champagne that Judge Mac sent all the way to New Orleans for!” one of the others cried. “And a five-piece Negro band. Remember?”
“Miss Becky thought it was utter extravagance. Child-foolishness. But Judge Mac insisted on it all, a big wedding right on down the line.”
“Well, Laurel was an only child.”
“Mother had a superstitious streak underneath,” Laurel said protectively. “She might have had a notion it was unlucky to make too much of your happiness.” From her place on the chaise longue by the window, she saw lightning flickering now in the western sky, like the feathers of a bird taking a bath.
“Judge Mac laughed her out of it, then. Remember the parties we had for you!” Gert gave Laurel a lovingly derisive slap. “That was before the Old Country Club burned down, there never was another dance floor like that.”
“What kind of dancer was Phil, Polly? I forget!” Tish lifted her arms as though the memory would come up and dance her away to remind her.
“Firm,” said Laurel. She turned her cheek a little further away on the pillow.
“Your daddy knew how to enjoy a grand occasion as well as we did—as long as it stayed elegant, and as long as Papa didn’t get too high before it was over,” Tish said. “Of course, Mama should have saved all her tears for her own child’s wedding.” Tish was the only divorcée, as Laurel was the only widow. Tish had eloped with the captain of their high school football team.
“But Miss Becky would rather go through anything than a grand occasion,” said Gert.
“I remember once—it must’ve been the Bar Association Meeting, or maybe when he was Mayor and they had to function at some to-do in Jackson—anyway, once Judge Mac himself bought Miss Becky a dress to wear, came home with it in a box and surprised her. Beaded crepe! Shot beads! Neck to hem, shot beads,” said Tish. “Where could you have been, Laurel?”
Gert said, “He’d picked it out in New Orleans. Some clerk sold it to him.”
Music started up from off in another room of the house. Duke Ellington.
“The young don’t dance to him. They play chess to him, I suppose,” Tish said aside to Laurel. “And Miss Becky said, ‘Clinton, if I’d just been told in advance you were going to make me an extravagant present, I’d have asked you for a load of floor sweepings from the cottonseed-oil mill.’ Can’t you hear her?” Tish cried.
“She wore it, though, didn’t she?” one of them asked, and Tish said, “Oh, they’d do anything for each other! Sure she wore it. And the weight she had to carry! Miss Becky told Mama in confidence that when she wasn’t wearing that dress, which was nearly a hundred per cent of the time, she had to keep it in a bucket!”
The bridesmaids laughed till they cried.
“But when she wanted to justify him, she wore it! With an air. What floored me, Laurel, was him getting married again. When I saw Fay!” said Gert. “When I saw what he had there!”
“Mama, for his sake, asked at the beginning if she wouldn’t be allowed to give some sort of little welcome for her—a sitdown tea, I believe she had in mind. And Fay said, ‘Oh, please don’t bother with a big wholesale reception. That kind of thing was for Becky.’ Poor Judge Mac! Because except when it came to picking a wife,” Tish said, smiling at Laurel, “he was a pretty worldly old sweet.”
“Since when have you started laughing at them?” Laurel asked in a trembling voice. “Are they just figures from now on to make a good story?” She turned on Tish. “And you can wink over Father?”
“Polly!” Tish grabbed her. “We weren’t laughing at them. They weren’t funny—no more than my father and mother are! No more than all our fathers and mothers are!” She laughed again, into Laurel’s face. “Aren’t we grieving? We’re grieving with you.”
“I know. Of course I know it,” said Laurel.
She smiled her thanks and kissed them all. She would see the bridesmaids once more. At noon tomorrow they were coming for her, all six, to drive her to her plane.
“I’m glad there’s nobody else for you to lose, dear,” Miss Tennyson Bullock said staunchly. She and the Major had driven over, late as it was, to tell Laurel goodbye.
“What do you mean! She’s got Fay,” Major Bullock protested. “Though that poor little girl’s got a mighty big load on her shoulders. More’n she can bear.”
“We are only given what we are able to bear,” Miss Tennyson corrected him. They’d had such a long married life that she could make a pronouncement sound more military than he could, and even more legal.
Laurel hugged them both, and then said she intended to walk home.
“Walk!” “It’s raining!” “Nobody ever walks in Mount Salus!” They made a fuss over letting her go. Major Bullock insisted on escorting her.
On this last night, a warm wind began to blow and the rain fell fitfully, as though working up to some disturbance. Major Bullock shot his umbrella open and held it over Laurel in gallant fashion. He set the pace at something of a military clip.
Major Bullock lived through his friends. He lived their lives with them—up to a point, Laurel thought. While Miss Tennyson lived his. In a kind, faraway tenor, he began to hum as they went along. He seemed to have put something behind him, tonight. He was recovering his good spirits already.
“He rambled,
He rambled,
Rambled all around,
In and out of town,
Oh, didn’t he ramble—”
The leafing maples were bowing around the Square, and the small No U-Turn sign that hung over the cross street was swinging and turning over the wire in trapeze fashion. The Courthouse clock could not be read. In the poorly lit park, the bandstand and the Confederate statue stood in dim aureoles of rain, looking the ghosts they were, and somehow married to each other, by this time.
“He rambled till we had to cut him down,” sang Major Bullock.
The house was dark among its trees.
“Fay hasn’t come,” said the Major. “Oh, what a shame.”
“I expect we’ll just miss each other,” said Laurel.
“What a shame. Not to tell each other goodbye and good luck and the rest, it’s too bad.”
Pushing his umbrella before them, Major Bullock took her to the door and went with her inside to turn on the hall lights. His mouth knocked against hers, as though it knocked perfunctorily on a door, or on a dream—an old man’s goodnight; and she saw him out, lighted his way, then shut the door on him fast.
She had seen something wrong: there was a bird in the house. It was one of the chimney swifts. It shot out of the dining room and now went arrowing up the stairwell in front of her eyes.
Laurel, still in her coat, ran through the house, turning on the lights in every room, shutting the windows against the rain, closing the doors into the hall everywhere behind her against the bird. She ran upstairs, slammed her own door, ran across the hall and finally into the big bedroom, where she put on the lights, and as the bird came directly toward the new brightness she slammed the door against it.
It could not get in here. But had it been in already? For how long had it made free of the house, shuttling through the dark rooms? And now Laurel could not get out. She was in her father’s and mother’s room—now Fay’s room—walking up and down. It was the first time she had entered it since the morning of the funeral.
4
WINDOWS AND DOORS ALIKE were singing, buffeted by the storm. The bird touched, tapped, brushed itself against the walls and closed doors, never resting. Laurel thought with longing of the telephone just outside th
e door in the upstairs hall.
What am I in danger of here? she wondered, her heart pounding.
Even if you have kept silent for the sake of the dead, you cannot rest in your silence, as the dead rest. She listened to the wind, the rain, the blundering, frantic bird, and wanted to cry out as the nurse cried out to her, “Abuse! Abuse!”
Try to put it in the form of facts, she ordered herself. For the person who wishes to do so, it is possible to assail a helpless man; it is only necessary to be married to him. It is possible to say to the dying “Enough is enough,” if the listener who overhears is his daughter with his memory to protect. The facts were a verdict, and Laurel lived with this verdict in her head, walking up and down.
It was not punishment she wanted for Fay, she wanted acknowledgment out of her—admission that she knew what she had done. And Fay, she knew now, knew beyond question, would answer, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” This would be a fact. Fay had never dreamed that in that shattering moment in the hospital she had not been just as she always saw herself—in the right. Justified. Fay had only been making a little scene—that was all.
Very likely, making a scene was, for Fay, like home. Fay had brought scenes to the hospital—and here, to the house—as Mr. Dalzell’s family had brought their boxes of chicken legs. Death in its reality passed her right over. Fay didn’t know what she was doing—it was like Tish winking—and she never will know, Laurel thought, unless I tell her. Laurel asked herself: Have I come to be as lost a soul as the soul Fay exposed to Father, and to me? Because unlike Father, I cannot feel pity for Fay. I can’t pretend it, like Mount Salus that has to live with her. I have to hold it back until she realizes what she has done.
And I can’t stop realizing it, she thought. I saw Fay come out into the open. Why, it would stand up in court! Laurel thought, as she heard the bird beating against the door, and felt the house itself shake in the rainy wind. Fay betrayed herself: I’m released! she thought, shivering; one deep feeling called by its right name names others. But to be released is to tell, unburden it.