Alma would be patient, try to tell her why, or else say, “You’re lookin’ peaked just now, Mrs. Glencross. Wouldn’t want you to swoon to the floor and bruise. You got such good skin.”
On shopping days Alma would stride toward the square with a canvas tote bag and a small wad of money. She liked the meats from Jupiter Grocery, the produce from Widow McLean’s, and bought bread at the Greek’s down the avenue. When the Greek’s opened, Alma had resisted the place for months but relented, and on her first attempt to shop there she felt the Greek was trying to get an advantage on her in the amount of seven cents. She’d eyed him coldly, coin purse clenched unopened in her hand, then said, “You do me thisaway, mister, and you ain’t skinnin’ me at all—you’re skinnin’ Mr. Arthur Glencross. You best ask a friend who that is.” In the early gloaming of that evening the Greek called at the Glencross house with a heavy sack of hard candy, two loaves of bread, black olives and a long low nod for Alma. The Greek’s bread quickly became so highly regarded by the gentry that all the maids were relieved of bread-making duty, and though their gratitude to the Greek went unspoken, they became forever loyal to the store. The four and sometimes five or six maids who worked near the square tried to meet at the Greek’s between dusting time and lunch. They fingered the jars of interesting foods, smelled the coffee beans, and gathered on a bench outside in the shade where they could observe the avenue but were unlikely to be overheard as they sat there telling the truth in whispers or laughing about it with their faces turned to the sky.
Ruby DeGeer didn’t mind breaking hearts, but she liked them to shatter coolly, with no ugly scenes of departure where an arm got twisted behind her back by a crying man, or her many failings and damp habits were made specific in words shouted out an open window. Accepting boredom did not come easily to her, and some men could bore her beyond courtesy before the first drink was drained or the key rattled into a hotel room door, but if she liked a fella, then he knew unleashed marvels until she didn’t anymore and in their fresh agony the heartbroken twisted her arm crying or yelled her business to the street. She’d known poverty from birth but been blessed with pizzazz and understood early that life was a fight and she couldn’t win even one round if she kept her best hand tied behind her back. If men were smitten by her lyric eyes and fluctuating mounds and scented sashay, well, let them display their feelings in meaningful ways: clothes, hats, rent, a big weekend at the Peabody in Memphis, a morning visit on Christmas Day when they ought to be home with their wives and children but couldn’t stay away, just couldn’t do it, just can’t.
“Bring me somethin’ adorable I want when you come round again.”
She’d part from them one by one as the men grew too complicated with their appetites and plans or her dance card became too full with the newly smitten, who tended to splurge more readily anyhow. She’d soon sink the new beneath her blunt desires and work them and work them until the pump handle started to stick, then spring a farewell moment and move along. The money never amounted to all that much, but it now and then bought a few items of worth, some to be worn, some to be polished and saved in a drawer for pawning later, fed her fairly regular meals, helped her rent a private room. It was not prostitution in her view because she did not extract a payment for each intimacy, never did that, never would, but only accepted something more like a sneak tithing from fellas she called friends. “That’s just romancin’,” she’d say. Wives disagreed and she’d been assaulted a few times, called a dirty-leg whore, bimbo, tramp, had her hair pulled, been kicked blue in the shins, slapped in the face. Alma almost lost her job when she hunted the wife who’d bloodied Ruby’s nose on the square and made the lady say “Snuff” with her face pushed against a store window, then suggested in whispers as she pressed from behind that who the lady ought to be hitting was wearing pants and a mustache. (There’d been calls from friends of the whupped lady for Alma to be dismissed, but Mrs. Glencross heard about the encounter, the vulgarity and vigor displayed by women tussling in a public place, the sunlight brilliant on exposed skin, and flushed with secondhand excitement as she listened, then said, “Valiant, so valiant,” to describe Alma’s defense of Ruby, and that was that.) Such moments were what made sisters special to sisters, and Ruby shared her spoils from the field of amour with Alma and the Dunahew boys whenever she had any surplus. Alma did not like the way Ruby lived, had often said so in the sternest tones, but understood too well, too well her baby sister’s ravenous need for the comforts and adulation that men provided her, and the savage joy that bounced in her soul whenever she dumped a stricken beau and went out once more dancing alone.
Alma said their early lives had been like this: Cecil DeGeer was white-haired at Alma’s birth, and owned with the bank about twenty-five acres across the road from South Turn Creek, maybe fifteen acres in timber and the rest red clay and scrub. They made a huge garden by poaching good soil from the creek bottomland of their neighbor and carrying it away in peach baskets by the light of the moon or in utter darkness. There was no fence line, making it easy to splash buckets from the creek onto row upon row of things to eat if the weather didn’t listen to the Devil and blaze or the creek flood again and wash every meal of tomorrow downstream, and run a few hogs in the brambles and timber. Their mother was a Pruitt with cancer of the nose that required a large portion be sliced off, so she seldom left the land or went among strangers, but worked long, long, long hours, as though to punish herself for whatever act or failure cost her that slice of nose. There was slim reward apparent for her relentless toiling but an eking survival and the toil itself. She was kind, made that effort, she hoped, less and less but still, she tried, on and on. As soon as Alma could wield a short-handled hoe she bent her back to work the land. Her mother begged until the girl was let go to school, and begged each year until begging ceased to be effective, and after third grade (she still couldn’t quite read or write and never would) Alma worked the dirt from daylight to dark.
Great-grandpa Cecil could not ever seem to reconcile himself to his circumstances, or want to, and sat still more often than could be forgiven. He’d been born to comfort and a fair portfolio of wealth in Texas, blown his inheritance before the age of twenty-five (he drank wildly and thought he could gamble wildly, too), gone to his kin to beseech for more, a new start, and within a year blown that as well, then become permanently estranged from his family when they would loan him no more, not a chance, don’t even bother to ask. His face flushed to a scalded red that didn’t go away and his hands quivered. The DeGeers never spoke again, nor traded letters, birth or funeral notices, and became unknown to each other. Being born to poverty one is accustomed to the degradations and neediness, hence at home in all that dinginess, while not much is worse (Cecil was certain of this) than becoming accustomed to a high station from birth only to watch yourself sink, incredulously, lower by the season, until you land bumpy-assed on rocky dirt with folks cloaked in rags and desperation who were now your peers, no arguing that, but who would never feel like equals. Cecil was basically unemployable by temperament; he quit jobs over slights no one else heard or even assignments stated too plainly, the very plainness of wording an insult to his pedigree. This arch sensitivity to social hierarchy prevented him from working steadily, a sullen employee always, even if he worked for himself, every workday a diminishment of his proper standing in the world, a daily lessening that meanly sapped his vim, rendered him forlorn and inert, while his women, made natural vassals by their gender, worked like swampers, muckers, field hands toiling for his ease. They sweated dry in sunlight and slept in stiffened calico. Cecil sat and dreamed or walked to Wilhoite’s for a jar and returned home to resume sitting, his dreaming now aided by gulps of shine. A far richer life continued hourly behind his eyes, a life painted on sky-blue panels, and in it he was again a well-to-do DeGeer from Lampasas with daily feasts, horses to the horizon, cattle spread beyond, petticoats falling in a white drift beside any bed he rested on.
Alma fled at fifteen, sorro
wful to leave Mother behind with little Ruby and that old drinking man, crying as she ran, but positive-sure she’d strangle herself before midnight with a barbed-wire strand if she didn’t start running today, this minute, get to town, tear open a new life and crawl inside.
Ruby had it worse. She was allowed no schooling at all, and Cecil in his dotage had become fond of the whip. He applied lashes to both Ruby and her mother and shouted his point of view while they ducked or cowered. Despite being half-nosed and forever working, Mother stood accused of lying with strangers, probably at creekside while Cecil slept, since he’d pondered on the porch and convinced himself that pretty little Ruby must be the spawn of a fornication that had not included him. In looks she did not favor Cecil or any kin he ever saw and that made her nothing but a mouth to feed, an ass to beat, a young body of no relation he could sometimes let his hands rub on the buds and rump and linger until his breathing thickened and he had to lie down next to the whore, her mother, for a piddling relief.
It was grim living and those years made indelible memories that would never die or even fade enough to be misremembered. Flashes of recall would forever plague Ruby, those stunning jagged flashes that contain crushed feelings, certain smells, sorry pictures that fired unbidden into the mind and made her cringe, cringe, cringe, and she’d cry into her hands for an hour or go find a man she’d render weak with her smile and lead him straight to the shearing shed.
Then came the morning Cecil did not wake but stretched purple in bed, tongue lolling, and soon enough after the farm was taken by the bank and Mother’s fortitude dispersed skyward in a single beam of dimming light. She’d lost her final ounce of oomph and was moved to the Work Farm, while Ruby, at age thirteen, was sent to town and Alma’s care. In very short order Alma found a live-in job for Ruby as an apprentice laundress and general helper at the home of Mr. and Mrs. J. T. Duxton, who had a large house on a good street, two teenaged sons, and plenty for a young girl to do.
Mr. Arthur Glencross would eventually have a statue of his likeness placed in a position of honor on the town square. Glencross had many fine qualities and a pleasing manner he’d adopted as a teen and clung to throughout. He was born into a family of assistant merchants, that is, folks who did okay but spent their days as clerks in parlous (even torturous) proximity to those who owned the factory and did mighty damn well. The social distance between grated and Glencross was shaped early by the resentment his folks nurtured in private and shared with him in words, glances, facial expressions. He was a half-decent baseball player and an excellent student, one A+ (instead of a mere A–) shy of being valedictorian of his class. During deer season he went to a camp in the forest with his father and cronies, but he preferred fishing mountain streams alone. His only dates in high school were with daughters of his mother’s close friends and none was memorable or repeated. His folks did without luxuries, scrimped and saved, and he was sent to the state university at Columbia. There he lived in a quiet rooming house of dour scholars and achieved the honor roll, heard John Cowper Powys give a lecture on the meaning of art that enlarged his mind, saw Mabel Normand wave a long-stemmed rose from a touring car, and became deeply smitten with a large and brilliant girl at Stephens College who had to be reminded of his name every time they met. Business reversals required that he return home after applying two and a half years toward a four-year degree, and he did so with hangdog reluctance but quickly took a job at Citizens’ Bank.
He was a tall young man who stood at the back of crowds and blended, but Corinne Jarman spotted him kindly helping an elderly and crabby customer in bibs down the bank steps to a mule-drawn wagon and asked her father for his name. Within a month he was invited to the Jarman house for a Sunday luncheon during which he ate heartily but barely spoke. It was a spectacular room of chandeliers and crystal goblets and objets d’art that Mrs. Jarman had purchased during her second Grand Tour of the Continent. Glencross felt obliged to concentrate fully on each act of the meal so he wouldn’t break any crystal or spill on the rug, spew food while speaking that stained the beautiful tablecloth. He could not proceed with such caution through the elaborate requirements of a meal so complicated and also follow the conversation flapping around him, so he missed several opportunities to engage with Corinne.
She was tiny and thin and pale as a cloud that might be parted by a jaundiced thought. Her manners were exquisite but unforced and her eyes were compelling blue places. Each movement was as precise and fluid as those he’d seen actresses display onstage. Once the luncheon concluded she took his arm and walked with him under an umbrella into the bright garden where their courtship began when he spied a spread mimosa tree and quoted a snip from Wordsworth in response to the fragrant shade it cast. “Behold, within the leafy shade … on me the chance-discovered sight gleamed like a vision of delight.” Corinne seemed thrilled by the attempt at poetry and he seemed nervous, suddenly concerned that he might now be expected to have an apt quote for many sights or situations and he did not.
It was difficult from the start for Glencross to accept that a local princess was truly and seriously interested in him, but he hopefully amassed a few phrases of French and read a book about table manners. He called on Corinne during a hot spell and they sat fanning themselves on the veranda where he spent all his French quips within an hour to great effect, judging by her smile, her lowered eyes, then invented on the spot much longer passages of Latinate sounds to further woo her. She seemed to believe every word she thought he’d purred to her in a Continental language and swooned. He felt masterful, nearly sophisticated, and though in the coming weeks he gave her a couple of chances to escape their involvement, to realize he was unfit for her world, she didn’t take them and an engagement was announced. Before the winter holidays of that year they were married, and while on their honeymoon to New York City she spoke to him in middling French daily just to see the captured expression it brought to his face.
Their wedding gift from the Jarmans was a huge house so splendid and grand that it intimidated his own parents whenever they visited and they never would tour the entire place but kept to the parlor with their hands held clasped on their laps. But he promptly acclimated to the new facts of his life, began to dress the part, to learn how to spend money without gnawing regret at each expensive purchase, and all was fine except for this: Glencross did not know much about sex coming into marriage (he had one night experienced a few moments of mysterious fumbling of fingers and lips and buttons and belts behind the Columbia train station with a woman who needed another dollar to get home to her mother, and though something gooey had resulted between them during that dark transaction he was never certain that he’d truly lost his virginity there) and Corinne knew less. A merely awkward coupling between them was counted as an achievement, but most encounters seemed painful, perhaps degrading in several particulars, always to be conducted furtively even within the bonds of matrimony, and certainly unnecessary to the new Mrs. Glencross. She preferred to have her mind tickled intimately and to keep her clothes on. She loved Glencross but did not love his body or her own, and he never in all their years together saw her completely nude. At the birth of the second child it was as though she’d broken the tape at the end of an arduous race, and would race no more, she had her trophies. He accepted her position and did not complain, much, but adjusted his lust to the parched conditions only with the aid of considerable liquor and long fishing trips taken alone. She seldom asked him where he might be going and that worked for them both.
Within four years as an employee and one year of marriage he was boosted to become vice president of the bank. There was some muttering, of course, that his sudden wealth and in-laws had too much rigged things in his favor, but he quickly displayed talent for the demands of his profession, was sharp at calculating relevant numbers and harvest yields from any crop, tireless, and good with people, so his youth ceased to be mentioned as an obstacle and two years later he was president. (And it was good he was there, for he saved the bank d
uring the Great Depression, all agree, held it together with sweat and personal charm, some helpful silences at key moments, but mostly hard work, inspiring confidence in depositors with his bearing and palatable grandeur—he’d still take off his fine threads and handmade shoes to go quail hunting with customers, farmer or swell, wearing ordinary clodhoppers and a cloth cap, do a little night fishing down at Gullett Lake, split a bottle of pre-Volstead scotch whisky with golfing friends. There were hundreds, including Harlan Hudkins, who believed they were personally saved from financial ruin and the Work Farm only through his business talents and integrity.) There were, however, days of coping when he silently disappeared from the bank at noon or from home after Sunday church and drove alone but for good whisky to fish the Jacks Fork, Eleven Point, Current, Twin Forks, or the Spring River on the Arkansas line.
And it was the case that Alma and Ruby did sometimes on Sundays visit Mother at the Work Farm two miles out of town. Mother no longer spoke (she would pass three months hence) but seemed to know them, and it was this sense that she yet knew them that compelled them to continue the visits even though they took all afternoon. The sisters had to walk heavily along a dusty road carrying lunch in their purses. Their step lightened on the return trip and they avoided the topic of Mother to keep it lightened. Arthur Glencross in his mud-streaked Lincoln Phaeton did, while returning fishless from a trip with an empty bottle, come upon them walking in the late glare of the day and stop to offer a ride. There was a seat beside him and a seat in back. Both women hesitated, then Ruby strode toward the passenger’s door just as Alma did the same, but Ruby elbowed her way to the handle faster and held the seat tipped forward so Alma might climb in back, then slid in front. Alma glowered from the shadowed backseat toward the front and was mystified, even frightened, by her glowering and its possible source.