A Southern Exposure (11 page)

Cynthia frowns. “But—” And then she decides to leave it alone. Jimmy is simply not as observant as she thought he was; he probably won’t be a writer, after all. Men in general are not very observant, she has noticed. And then a more subtle, interesting thought occurs to her, which is
that Jimmy could be entirely in the know; in some way he could have found out about Mrs. Yates and Russ Byrd (easy enough, they live so close; he could have seen them), and for Boy Scout reasons of his own is protecting them—protecting Russ, his hero. Cynthia gives Jimmy a long, speculative look, and a smile of complicity—a look and a smile that Jimmy does not quite understand.

Eventually, Cynthia is sure, Jimmy can be persuaded to share this information with her, to tell her all he knows.

For the moment, though, she reverts to a more familiar theme. “I really love it more here every day,” she says, sighing. “Don’t you? I mean, when you and Esther first came, did you talk all the time about how great it was?”

“Not exactly all the time. But we liked it fine. We still do.”

“I think New York makes more of a contrast than Oklahoma, probably. Even Connecticut. But I have some friends in Sneden’s Landing, that’s across from the George Washington Bridge, and every time we go across I look down and see all those people living in orange crates. I mean it, literally. I couldn’t bear it. I mean, I know the colored people down here are really poor—”

“And a lot of white ones,” Jimmy reminds her. “Drive out to Robertsville, you want to see poor whites. Or out on these farms, for God’s sake. Shacks with broken outhouses, and no floors. Just red clay.”

“Abby’s always talking about these poor white kids from farms. ‘Truck children,’ she calls them. Abby, by the way, has struck up this great friendship with Deirdre Yates. It’s too perplexing.”

“Not really. Deirdre’s always been a loner. I don’t think she likes it around here very much. It’s funny she came back, actually.”

“And that’s how Abby feels, so far. She’s become a sort of loner too. She says she hates the kids at school.”

Cynthia is actually thinking less of the loneliness of Abby than of her own innocent pleasure in being with Jimmy. In just this short time they have become true friends, she feels. At first there was some little, very minor flirting going on, but now that seems to have passed (she thinks), and they are quite simply the greatest friends. And eventually he will tell her everything.

As though reading her mind (almost), Jimmy leans toward her. “There’s something I want to discuss with you.” He laughs. “It’s almost a proposition.”

“Well, heaven knows I’m open to propositions. Pretty free for anything fancy.”

They both laugh, sitting there in the November sunlight. Feeling young, as young as the college youth surrounding them on those steps.

“Seriously, though,” Jimmy tells her, “I had an idea.”

And he explains his plan, which goes like this: Esther and the girls will go to New York, and he, Jimmy, will be all alone in that big house. “Not that it isn’t a comfortable house. It is, extremely,” he says. But he just won’t need all that room.

So why don’t he and Cynthia—and Harry and Abigail, of course—simply trade? He likes their little apartment, their suite at the Inn; it’s in many ways perfect for him—though it must be getting to seem just a little small for the three of them? Cynthia admits that this is so.

They could have a year or so anyway to look around and enjoy life, to make decisions about whether to buy or build, all that. He gives her a short, oblique look. “And think of your neighbors,” he says. “Your new ones, that is.”

Of course he has hit on the very thing that Cynthia thought of first, at his suggestion: Russ Byrd, just down the road.

“But, Jimmy, that’s too generous of you. We really couldn’t—”

“It’s not all that generous. I’ll charge you some rent. How about making it the same as whatever you’re paying at the Inn?”

“Of course I’ll have to talk to Harry, but it sounds the most divine plan.”

“Harry, it does sound the most divine plan.”

“It’s generous, all right. I hope Esther gets along with those Rothschilds of yours.”

“Oh, she will. Pipsy Rothschild couldn’t be more adorable. And Esther will get such a sense of doing good, it’s just what she needs. And Pipsy will find them a place to live and a school for the girls, she’s terrific at all that stuff.”

He laughs at her. “And we’ll give a lot of parties and assume our natural social role in Pinehill, and very subtly redecorate the Hightowers’ house.”

To the considerable surprise of her parents, Abby likes this new idea. “I’m tired of the Inn,” she tells them, which is not a surprise. “And it’s embarrassing telling people you live in a hotel. It makes us sound so rich. But the Hightowers’ house will be good. I can go to school on the truck, and I know a sort of secret road between out there and into town.”

“How on earth—?”

“Deirdre told me, and showed me where it is.”

“Dolly, it’s Cynthia Baird. Well, we’ve been wanting to see you too. I don’t know where this fall has gone.”

She is beginning to sound like them, Cynthia thinks. She is as bad as Harry, imitating accents. Is it a sort of infection, Southern speech? Southern attitudes?

“Well, yes, a lot certainly has happened. We’ve been really busy. Especially this move. Yes, we love this house, just crazy about it. Esther and Jimmy really did themselves proud. But you know, this sounds a little crazy, I suppose, but we really miss our little old suite at the Inn. Yes, we really do. And it’s most of all your colors that we miss. What you did there was just so beautiful.… No, no, no, you’re much too modest. Harry and I used to say to each other almost every day, ‘That Dolly Bigelow is a genius,
she purely is.’ We still do say that, honestly we do. Anyway, we miss it, and that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. We were just wondering if you could, just possibly, do a little something like that over here at the Hightower place. Maybe just some pillows, and some kind of a slipcover for the velvet sofa. You know, after all that color we’re used to, this place just seems real dark. Maybe if you could just come over some morning and we’d have some coffee and maybe you’d just get some ideas.… Well, next Tuesday would be just wonderful, absolutely wonderful.… Well, no, I haven’t got anyone in yet to help, but there’s no need for you to bring Odessa, just for coffee.… Oh, I see. Oh yes. Well, if she actually can help you, of course, yes. Bring her along.”

“I honestly don’t get it,” says Cynthia to Harry, later on; she notes that at least when she speaks to Harry it is not in a Southern voice. “She insists on bringing her maid, for coffee. I never heard of such a thing. So nineteenth century, ladies going about with maids. But whatever will I do with her while Dolly’s here? Honestly, Southerners and what they call their help—it’s too much for me.”

It is late at night, and they are lying in their extra-wide, custom-made bed. The Hightower bed.

“Sweetheart, why don’t you just leave that to Dolly? Bringing Odessa was her idea, let her cope. They’ve got all this stuff worked out, they have for years.” He adds, “The only trouble with this bed is that I can’t find you. Oh, here, here’s something that feels familiar.”

Odessa is very tall, she must be six feet or over, a powerfully built woman with broad hips, broad shoulders, and long swinging arms. But her eyes are frightened. Coming
into the Hightower house (will anyone ever think of it as the Baird house?) walking behind and to one side of Dolly Bigelow, Odessa looks everywhere except at Cynthia, darting glances into corners, up at the ceiling. (“It was so hard to tell if she was just scared and shy—of me!—or just measuring things,” Cynthia later tells Harry. “Maybe both” is his rather sensible answer. “In any case,” Cynthia tells him, “she has the most ravishing skin.”)

Odessa’s skin is dark brown—to most people, Southern people, just that, a dark brown Negro skin. A darkie. Cynthia, though, less accustomed to such skin, is instantly aware of the shades and the rich subtleties within that brown, the complexity of its spectrum, and the velvet smooth look of the skin itself.

“I just wanted Odessa to have a look at you-all’s living room,” explains Dolly, as though Odessa needed explaining. “She just has the best ideas, and you know she’s the one did most of my weaving for me. She and her sister have got this loom they set up. Odessa honey, you just look around everywhere you want to. Me and Miz Baird’ll just be setting in here and talking, so you just take all the time you want to, and then you go on in the kitchen and heat yourself up some coffee.”

As Dolly and Cynthia settle in the living room, Odessa, as she was bidden, looks carefully about, moving with a curious combination of directness and unease, moving jerkily. Dolly seems completely to ignore her, but Cynthia is unable to. After all, she is another person in the room. Hearing them talk. Presumably, reacting.

“…  the most wonderful house for parties ever in this town,” Dolly is saying. “And, speaking of social occasions, what is there so much worse about a woman getting drunk than a man who does the exact same thing, will you tell me that? It doesn’t make sense, if you look at it just in a logical way, and maybe there’s no logic to it, but I just have to say
I can’t stand the sight of a lady who’s had a touch too much. Willard says the same. Of course you know who I’m talking about.”

Actually, Cynthia does not know, she does not remember any conspicuously drunken lady at any recent party. On the other hand, there must be local parties to which she and Harry are not invited—yet. (Although they have done extremely well in that direction, as they frequently say to each other, laughing as they refer to their “Southern social climb.”) But Cynthia makes a face, a sound to indicate, Of course I know who you mean. As she watches Odessa’s broad shoulders move into the dining room. Does Odessa know who Dolly is talking about? Does she care, or are all white ladies just the same to her, mean and silly and incomprehensible?

“Of course I can’t blame her for sometimes drinking more than a little too much,” continues Dolly, in what is now an almost saccharine voice. “I was married to Russ Byrd, I think I’d have a few nips now and then myself.”

Brett Byrd? Drunk? Cynthia finds this hard if not impossible to imagine. Shy, rather placid Brett, with her perfectly knotted golden hair, her calm blue eyes, and her soft dull voice, getting drunk? Behaving “conspicuously”? This was surely not a scene at which she, Cynthia, has been present.

Dolly seems also, then, to recall the absence of Cynthia at whatever party she was so vividly remembering. “Oh, I am just so forgetful! This was over to the Lees’, and you-all don’t even hardly know them. I’m so tacky, just a tacky forgetful old gossip I’m turning into. Just like my momma.”

Cynthia laughs at her, as she is sure that she is supposed to do; Dolly enjoys this version of herself as a comic character. “In that case, you might as well tell me all about it,” says Cynthia.

“
Well.
” And Dolly settles in. “Some of us were over to the Lees’ a few nights ago, you know, Clifton and Irene? She’s the pretty one. I think Jimmy Hightower used to be a little sweet on her.”

Of course Cynthia does remember the Lees, from that first Hightower party. She remembers an extremely pretty smallish woman, who drank a lot. With a big fleshy husband with whom, as Cynthia remembered the scene, Dolly was furiously flirting. Hardly thinking, she says, “I do remember Irene Lee. Very pretty, isn’t she? It seems to me she was drinking quite a bit herself.”

Dolly giggles in an agreeing way. “Well, she does have that tendency sometimes. I declare, poor old Clifton, I think it’s downright embarrassing for him.”

Out of some odd mixture of motives then, only half understood by herself, Cynthia chooses that moment to lash out (though mildly) at Dolly. “I just don’t agree with you about women drinking,” she declaims. “I think any messy drunk is unattractive, and God knows I’ve seen more messy men than women. Falling-down slobs. Actually I think I feel more sorry when women get drunk. I always think, Poor things, they must be really tired, or having their period, or some bad trouble with some man. I guess that isn’t quite fair either, making allowances for women when I don’t for men, but that’s how I feel.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Dolly agrees. “Oh, I’m glad to hear you say that! Really deep down I’ve always thought that too, but it’s just like something you’re not supposed to say, or even think. But you know whole lots of times at parties when some lady’s had a little too much and everyone’s muttering just exactly what I just now said, I’m secretly thinking the opposite, which is what you said. I’m thinking, Poor thing, I’ll bet you’ve got the curse, or your husband is mean, or just plain cooling off, his mind gone to somewhere else. Or you’re tired from your kids and all.
And like you say, it’s the slobby men are the worst drunks, no doubt about that.”

There is a pause during which Cynthia considers this about-face—so interesting, as though Dolly had been waiting for some permission to have or to voice those subversive views. Nevertheless she asks her, “But what on earth do you think is wrong with Brett Byrd?”

“Just about everything, I’d imagine.” Dolly stops to think, her plump legs pressed against the edge of the sofa, one foot lightly tapping. “Beginning and ending with James Russell Lowell Byrd himself.”

Wanting badly to ask some very direct questions, Cynthia still does not. She has been down here long enough to realize that people just do not do that. She cannot ask Dolly, Did Brett Byrd know about Emily Yates? Is she upset, seeing that child around town?

Instead she only very mildly says, “He mustn’t be too easy to be married to. Not that anyone is, I mean—” She laughs. “But a famous handsome poet, that would be really hard, I’d think.”

“Brett lot of times just closes her eyes to things,” says Dolly somewhat portentously. “And maybe sometimes it all gets too much and she has to take a couple of drinks to get those eyes back closed.”

At that moment Odessa appears in a doorway, as though poised to swim back into the room—or, rather, to dive: head lowered, she seems to contemplate depths.