"Always see it when I pass your yard," Virgie called back.
"Virgie! I know how you feel. You'll never get over it, never!"
They called from car to car, running parallel along the road with the loose gravel from the unpaved part knocking loudly, bounced from one car to the other.
"Well. You come."
"I guess it takes a lot of narcissus to spell Catherine," Virgie called, when Cassie still did not pass her.
"Two hundred and thirty-two bulbs! And then Miss Katie's hyacinthus all around those, and I've got it bordered in violets, you know, to tell me where it is in summer!" Cassie's voice, growing louder, grew at the same time more anxious and more reverent. She was not hurt, not suspecting, only anxious. But it was for Cassie that Virgie had turned her car toward town, to not let her see. "Now you come. We were friends that summer—" (Virgie remembered Cassie and herself in the revival tent, pulling light bugs off each other's shoulders while singing "Throw Out the Life Line.") "You could come play my piano, nobody does but my pupils."
Virgie, and Cassie too, circled the cemetery and drove back the length of Morgana. Then, "Where are you going? Are you going somewhere, Virgie?"
Virgie slowed for a minute as Cassie turned in at her own house. The Morrisons' looked the same as always, except, as the MacLain house had had before it—when Miss Eckhart was there—it now had a flylike cluster of black mailboxes at its door; it had been cut up for road workers and timber people. In the upstairs corner room, where they tried to keep poor Mr. Morrison, the shade was still down, but she felt him look out through his telescope. Across the front yard stretched the violet frame in which Mama's Name was planted against the coming of spring.
Virgie lifted her hand, and the girls waved.
"You'll go away like Loch," Cassie called from the steps. "A life of your own, away—I'm so glad for people like you and Loch, I am really."
Virgie drove on, the seven winding miles to MacLain, and stopped the car in front of the courthouse.
She had often done this, if only to turn around and go right back after a rest of a few moments and a Coca-Cola standing up in Billy Hudson's drugstore. MacLain pleased her—the uncrowded water tank, catching the first and last light; the old iron bell in the churchyard looking as heavy as a fallen meteor. The courthouse pleased her—space itself, with the columns standing away from its four faces, and the pea-green blinds flat to the wall, and the stile rising in pepper grass over the iron fence to it—and a quail just now running across the yard; and the live oaks—trunks flaky black and white now, as if soot, not rain, had once fallen from heaven on them, and the wet eyes of cut-off limbs on them; and the whole rainlighted spread roof of green leaves that moved like children's lips in speech, high up.
Virgie left the car and running through the light drops reached the stile and sat down on it in the open shelter of trees. She touched the treads, worn not by feet so much as by their history of warm, spreading seats. At this distance the Confederate soldier on the shaft looked like a chewed-on candle, as if old gnashing teeth had made him. On past him, pale as a rainbow, the ancient circus posters clung to their sheds, they no longer the defacing but the defaced.
There was nobody out in the rain. The land across from the courthouse used to be Mr. Virgil MacLain's park. He was old Mr. King's father; he used to keep deer. Now like a callosity, a cataract of the eye over what was once transparent and bright—for the park racing with deer was an idea strangely transparent to Virgie—was the line of store fronts and the MacLain Bijou, and the cemetery that was visible on the cedar hill.
Here the MacLains buried, and Miss Snowdie's people, the Hudsons. Here lay Eugene, the only MacLain man gone since her memory, after old Virgil himself. Eugene, for a long interval, had lived in another part of the world, learning while he was away that people don't have to be answered just because they want to know. His very wife was never known here, and he did not make it plain whether he had children somewhere now or had been childless. His wife did not even come to the funeral, although a telegram had been sent. A foreigner? "Why, she could even be a Dago and we wouldn't know it." His light, tubercular body seemed to hesitate on the street of Morgana, hold averted, anticipating questions. Sometimes he looked up in the town where he was young and said something strangely spiteful or ambiguous (he was never reconciled to his father, they said, was sarcastic to the old man—all he loved was Miss Snowdie and flowers) but he bothered no one. "He never did bother a soul," they said at his graveside that day, forgetting his childhood. And all Mr. King's family lay over there, Cedar Hill was bigger than the courthouse; his father Virgil in the Confederate section, and his mother, his grandfather—who remembered his name and what he did? The name was on the stone.
Didn't he kill a man, or have to, and what would be the long story behind it, the vaunting and the wandering from it?
And Miss Eckhart was over there. When Miss Eckhart died, up in Jackson, Miss Snowdie had her brought here and buried in her lot. Her grave was there near to Eugene's. There was the dark, squat stone Virgie had looked for yesterday, confusing her dead.
Before her ran rain-colored tin and red brick, doors weathered down to the whorl and color of river water. The vine over the jail was deep as a bed with brown leaves. At the MacLain Bijou, directly across from Virgie on the stile, there was a wrinkled blue sheen of rain on the two posters and deeper in, the square of yellow card ("Deposit Required for Going In to Talk") hung always like a lighted window in a traveler's gloom. She had sometimes come alone to the MacLain Bijou after Mr. Nesbitt let her go in the afternoon.
Footsteps sounded on the walk, a white man's. It was Mr. Nesbitt, she thought at first, but then saw it was another man almost like him—hurrying, bent on something, furious at being in the rain, speechless. He was all alone out here. His round face, not pushed out now, away from other faces, looked curiously deep, womanly, dedicated. Mr. Nesbitt's twin passed close to her, and down the street he turned flamboyantly and entered what must have been his own door, splashing frantically through a puddle.
Virgie, picking the irresistible pepper grass, saw Mr. Mabry too. It was really himself, looking out under his umbrella for somebody. How wretchedly dignified and not quite yet alarmed he looked, and how his cold would last! Mr. Mabry imagined he was coming to her eventually, but was it to him that she had come, backward to protection? She'd have had to come backward, not simply stand still, to get from the wild spirit of Bucky Moffitt (and where was he? Never under the ground! She smiled, biting the seed in the pepper grass), back past the drunk Simon Sojourner that didn't want her, and on to embarrassed Mr. Mabry, behind whom waited loud, harmless, terrifying Mr. Nesbitt who wanted to stand up for her. She had reached Mr. Mabry but she had passed him and it had not mattered about her direction, since here she was. She sat up tall on the stile, feeling that he would look right through her—Virgie Rainey on a stile, bereaved, hatless, unhidden now, in the rain—and he did. She watched him march by. Then she was all to herself.
Was she that? Could she ever be, would she be, where she was going? Miss Eckhart had had among the pictures from Europe on her walls a certain threatening one. It hung over the dictionary, dark as that book. It showed Perseus with the head of the Medusa. "The same thing as Siegfried and the Dragon," Miss Eckhart had occasionally said, as if explaining second-best. Around the picture—which sometimes blindly reflected the window by its darkness—was a frame enameled with flowers, which was always self-evident—Miss Eckhart's pride. In that moment Virgie had shorn it of its frame.
The vaunting was what she remembered, that lifted arm.
Cutting off the Medusa's head was the heroic act, perhaps, that made visible a horror in life, that was at once the horror in love, Virgie thought—the separateness. She might have seen heroism prophetically when she was young and afraid of Miss Eckhart. She might be able to see it now prophetically, but she was never a prophet. Because Virgie saw things in their time, like hearing them—and perhaps because she must bel
ieve in the Medusa equally with Perseus—she saw the stroke of the sword in three moments, not one. In the three was the damnation—no, only the secret, unhurting because not caring in itself—beyond the beauty and the sword's stroke and the terror lay their existence in time—far out and endless, a constellation which the heart could read over many a night.
Miss Eckhart, whom Virgie had not, after all, hated—had come near to loving, for she had taken Miss Eckhart's hate, and then her love, extracted them, the thorn and then the overflow—had hung the picture on the wall for herself. She had absorbed the hero and the victim and then, stoutly, could sit down to the piano with all Beethoven ahead of her. With her hate, with her love, and with the small gnawing feelings that ate them, she offered Virgie her Beethoven. She offered, offered, offered—and when Virgie was young, in the strange wisdom of youth that is accepting of more than is given, she had accepted the Beethoven, as with the dragon's blood. That was the gift she had touched with her fingers that had drifted and left her.
In Virgie's reach of memory a melody softly lifted, lifted of itself. Every time Perseus struck off the Medusa's head, there was the beat of time, and the melody. Endless the Medusa, and Perseus endless.
An old wrapped-up Negro woman with a red hen under her arm came and sat down on the step below Virgie.
"Mornin'."
Occasional drops of rain fell on Virgie's hair and her cheek, or rolled down her arm, like a cool finger; only it was not, as if it had never been, a finger, being the rain out of the sky. October rain on Mississippi fields. The rain of fall, maybe on the whole South, for all she knew on the everywhere. She stared into its magnitude. It was not only what expelled some shadow of Mr. Bitts, and pressed poor Mr. Mabry to search the street—it was the air's and the earth's fuming breath, it could come and go. As if her own modesty could also fall upon her now, freely and coolly, outside herself and on the everywhere, she sat a little longer on the stile.
She smiled once, seeing before her, screenlike, the hideous and delectable face Mr. King MacLain had made at the funeral, and when they all knew he was next—even he. Then she and the old beggar woman, the old black thief, were there alone and together in the shelter of the big public tree, listening to the magical percussion, the world beating in their ears. They heard through falling rain the running of the horse and bear, the stroke of the leopard, the dragon's crusty slither, and the glimmer and the trumpet of the swan.
The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories
1955
To Elizabeth Bowen
NO PLACE FOR YOU, MY LOVE
They were strangers to each other, both fairly well strangers to the place, now seated side by side at luncheon—a party combined in a free-and-easy way when the friends he and she were with recognized each other across Galatoire's. The time was a Sunday in summer—those hours of afternoon that seem Time Out in New Orleans.
The moment he saw her little blunt, fair face, he thought that here was a woman who was having an affair. It was one of those odd meetings when such an impact is felt that it has to be translated at once into some sort of speculation.
With a married man, most likely, he supposed, slipping quickly into a groove—he was long married—and feeling more conventional, then, in his curiosity as she sat there, leaning her cheek on her hand, looking no further before her than the flowers on the table, and wearing that hat.
He did not like her hat, any more than he liked tropical flowers. It was the wrong hat for her, thought this Eastern businessman who had no interest whatever in women's clothes and no eye for them; he thought the unaccustomed thing crossly.
It must stick out all over me, she thought, so people think they can love me or hate me just by looking at me. How did it leave us—the old, safe, slow way people used to know of learning how one another feels, and the privilege that went with it of shying away if it seemed best? People in love like me, I suppose, give away the short cuts to everybody's secrets.
Something, though, he decided, had been settled about her predicament—for the time being, anyway; the parties to it were all still alive, no doubt. Nevertheless, her predicament was the only one he felt so sure of here, like the only recognizable shadow in that restaurant, where mirrors and fans were busy agitating the light, as the very local talk drawled across and agitated the peace. The shadow lay between her fingers, between her little square hand and her cheek, like something always best carried about the person. Then suddenly, as she took her hand down, the secret fact was still there—it lighted her. It was a bold and full light, shot up under the brim of that hat, as close to them all as the flowers in the center of the table.
Did he dream of making her disloyal to that hopelessness that he saw very well she'd been cultivating down here? He knew very well that he did not. What they amounted to was two Northerners keeping each other company. She glanced up at the big gold clock on the wall and smiled. He didn't smile back. She had that naïve face that he associated, for no good reason, with the Middle West—because it said "Show me," perhaps. It was a serious, now-watch-out-everybody face, which orphaned her entirely in the company of these Southerners. He guessed her age, as he could not guess theirs: thirty-two. He himself was further along.
Of all human moods, deliberate imperviousness may be the most quickly communicated—it may be the most successful, most fatal signal of all. And two people can indulge in imperviousness as well as in anything else. "You're not very hungry either," he said.
The blades of fan shadows came down over their two heads, as he saw inadvertently in the mirror, with himself smiling at her now like a villain. His remark sounded dominant and rude enough for everybody present to listen back a moment; it even sounded like an answer to a question she might have just asked him. The other women glanced at him. The Southern look—Southern mask—of life-is-a-dream irony, which could turn to pure challenge at the drop of a hat, he could wish well away. He liked naïveté better.
"I find the heat down here depressing," she said, with the heart of Ohio in her voice.
"Well—I'm in somewhat of a temper about it, too," he said.
They looked with grateful dignity at each other.
"I have a car here, just down the street," he said to her as the luncheon party was rising to leave, all the others wanting to get back to their houses and sleep. "If it's all right with—Have you ever driven down south of here?"
Out on Bourbon Street, in the bath of July, she asked at his shoulder, "South of New Orleans? I didn't know there was any south to here. Does it just go on and on?" She laughed, and adjusted the exasperating hat to her head in a different way. It was more than frivolous, it was conspicuous, with some sort of glitter or flitter tied in a band around the straw and hanging down.
"That's what I'm going to show you."
"Oh—you've been there?"
"No!"
His voice rang out over the uneven, narrow sidewalk and dropped back from the walls. The flaked-off, colored houses were spotted like the hides of beasts faded and shy, and were hot as a wall of growth that seemed to breathe flower-like down onto them as they walked to the car parked there.
"It's just that it couldn't be any worse—we'll see."
"All right, then," she said. "We will."
So, their actions reduced to amiability, they settled into the car—a faded-red Ford convertible with a rather threadbare canvas top, which had been standing in the sun for all those lunch hours.
"It's rented," he explained. "I asked to have the top put down, and was told I'd lost my mind."
"It's out of this world. Degrading heat," she said and added, "Doesn't matter."
The stranger in New Orleans always sets out to leave it as though following the clue in a maze. They were threading through the narrow and one-way streets, past the pale-violet bloom of tired squares, the brown steeples and statues, the balcony with the live and probably famous black monkey dipping along the railing as over a ballroom floor, past the grillework and the lattice-work to all the
iron swans painted flesh color on the front steps of bungalows outlying.
Driving, he spread his new map and put his finger down on it. At the intersection marked Arabi, where their road led out of the tangle and he took it, a small Negro seated beneath a black umbrella astride a box chalked "Shou Shine" lifted his pink-and-black hand and waved them languidly good-by. She didn't miss it, and waved back.
Below New Orleans there was a raging of insects from both sides of the concrete highway, not quite together, like the playing of separated marching bands. The river and the levee were still on her side, waste and jungle and some occasional settlements on his—poor houses. Families bigger than housefuls thronged the yards. His nodding, driving head would veer from side to side, looking and almost lowering. As time passed and the distance from New Orleans grew, girls ever darker and younger were disposing themselves over the porches and the porch steps, with jet-black hair pulled high, and ragged palm-leaf fans rising and falling like rafts of butterflies. The children running forth were nearly always naked ones.
She watched the road. Crayfish constantly crossed in front of the wheels, looking grim and bonneted, in a great hurry.
"How the Old Woman Got Home," she murmured to herself.
He pointed, as it flew by, at a saucepan full of cut zinnias which stood waiting on the open lid of a mailbox at the roadside, with a little note tied onto the handle.
They rode mostly in silence. The sun bore down. They met fishermen and other men bent on some local pursuits, some in sulphur-colored pants, walking and riding; met wagons, trucks, boats in tracks, autos, boats on top of autos—all coming to meet them, as though something of high moment were doing back where the car came from, and he and she were determined to miss it. There was nearly always a man lying with his shoes off in the bed of any truck otherwise empty—with the raw, red look of a man sleeping in the daytime, being jolted about as he slept. Then there was a sort of dead man's land, where nobody came. He loosened his collar and tie. By rushing through the heat at high speed, they brought themselves the effect of fans turned onto their cheeks. Clearing alternated with jungle and canebrake like something tried, tried again. Little shell roads led off on both sides; now and then a road of planks led into the yellow-green.