A Southern Exposure (12 page)

Turning, Dolly asks—actually, she states—“I’ll just bet you’ve got every single color in your mind somewhere.”

“Don’t know about that, Miz Dolly,” Odessa grins. “How ’bout some curtains in here too? Make a world of difference.”

“Oh, draperies?” Dolly looks at Cynthia, eyebrows raised.

“Well, sure. Why not? The room is kind of stark.” Cynthia
turns and asks Odessa, “What color were you thinking of, Odessa?”

“Well, ma’am, maybe this real pale spring green? You know, like the first little shoots that come up, in April?”

“It was really the most bizarre conversation,” Cynthia reports to Harry that night, as the three of them sit at dinner, in the grand (very grand for only three people) Hightower dining room. “The connection between Dolly and Odessa is really something, something from another world. They seem to have their own somewhat subterranean language. But I really think it’s Odessa who does the work with the fabrics and all, and she’s really the one with the ideas too.”

“Smart of Dolly to give her her head, or whatever. To recognize the talent.”

“Dolly’s extremely smart. Though she tries to hide it. God, Southern women!”

“No one down here knows any Negro people at all,” Abby puts in. “It’s all so crazy. Deirdre told me it has a lot to do with sex.”

Automatically, Harry and Cynthia glance at each other, quickly fearful: how much does Abby know, and what does she know? So far they have told her almost nothing, beyond the most basic biology—about which they are a little vague themselves.

Seeing their puzzlement, Abby tries to enlighten them. “You know, they’re afraid that getting to know each other will lead to sex and babies. Sounds like a good idea to me,” says Abby. And then she says, “Can I go to the pep rally tonight? It’s Friday and Deirdre says there’s a torchlight parade that’s really neat. She wants to take Graham.”

•  •  •

“For all our plans to sweep the town off its feet, it looks like that’s more what’s been done to us.”

It is Cynthia who says this, but Harry agrees, quite as though he had thought of it too. “Yes, our daughter’s been taken over by a very strange and beautiful young woman, and our housing all taken care of, one way or another.”

Harry sighs. “If I take this job in Washington—I don’t know. All our new best friends would miss me.”

“Not nearly as much as I would, my darling.”

“But wouldn’t you come with me?”

“No, I don’t think so. I like it here, remember? You’d have to commute.”

“To Washington? You’re nuts. But you’re probably right, we should stay here. I don’t need to work for the Navy. And think of the money we’re not spending, living here. I think of it every day. Besides, living down here makes you think there’s not even going to be a war.”

The pep rally begins with the torchlight parade; in the heavy November dark, a straggly crowd marches along, some singing, many carrying flaming torches that to Abby look dangerous; in fact, she finds the whole scene frightening, uncontrolled. The dark, and the wavering bright torches, the strong hoarse songs, and the shouts: “Beat Duke! Beat Duke! Who are we going to beat tomorrow?
DUKE
!”

Dragging along in the crowded dark, holding one of Graham’s small hands while Deirdre holds the other, Abby thinks that they are in the wrong order; she and Graham, the two children, should be one on each side of Deirdre, the grownup. She’s afraid. The shouting sounds like news-reels, wars, and the torches could set everything on fire,
people’s hair and their clothes, like burning cities in the Sunday papers, all over the world.

And it’s dark, so dark, a dark black dark. She can’t see anyone, can barely see Graham, just huge black shapes of people, and everything so loud. “
BEAT DUKE
—
WHO
?—
BEAT DUKE, BEAT DUKE, BEAT BEAT BEAT BEAT DUKE
!”

Then a large shape, black like all the others, is coming toward them from the opposite direction, and, like a policeman, or a Nazi, he has stopped Deirdre, standing in front of her, close, so that they all stop and now Abby can see his face from the torchlight. Brown curly hair, deep blue eyes, about the age of her father. But he looks like Graham, a huge blowup Graham, like a Disney cartoon, and at first Abby thinks he must be Deirdre and Graham’s father, Mr. Yates, but then Deirdre is saying names: “…  Russell Byrd, Abby Baird, you’ve met her parents, probably.”

The man looks at Abby, but blindly, she could as well not be there; she hears him mutter, “…  pleased …”

To Deirdre he is saying, “…  somehow I’d find you here, what a chance—must see you.”

Whatever Deirdre has said, if she has said anything, makes the man, Mr. Byrd, turn to go; he is gone, and Deirdre is changing their hands, keeping Graham’s and taking one of Abby’s, as Abby wanted it to be in the first place, and close to her ear Deirdre whispers, “This is awful, what say we go?”

Abby’s frightened heart surges. She had not been able to imagine the relief of not being there; these present circumstances, the dark and torches and the shouting, had come to seem a permanent condition, she was caught in a newsreel that would go on forever.

“Besides, Graham’s really tired,” Deirdre continues unnecessarily. “We went for a very big walk this afternoon.”

“No bigger than we always do,” corrects Graham.

Deirdre does not say or explain what is clear to Abby, that she has to go and meet Mr. Byrd now—nor does she tell Abby not to mention Mr. Byrd to her parents, which Abby for whatever reasons of her own plans not to do.

In any case, having decided to leave, Deirdre seems nervous, very hurried. “We’re not far from where I left my car, actually. I can drop you off at your house and then swing up that little road to mine.” By now she is talking mostly to herself. Is she afraid of Mr. Russell Byrd? Afraid to be late to meet him?

BEAT DUKE, BEAT DUKE, BEAT DUKE
.

The rhythm seems slower and stronger, the shouts come louder, even as they are moving away from the crowd, not stumbling or unsure but very definite as they make their escape. Abby is thinking of her bed and of a really good book.
Jane Eyre
, she has just started it. She thinks too about Deirdre and Mr. Byrd, and whatever it is they plan to do, so urgently. She has a vague, excited, and on the whole unpleasant sense of this, this urgency. It is something she knows that she should not know.

“I guess he’s asleep,” she whispers, letting him in the front door.

“I had to see you—”

“That really scared him. And I think Abby too.”

“—so I knew you’d be there. You had to be—”

She laughs, very softly. “You sure do trust in your luck.”

“We’ve had good luck all along, haven’t we? In a way?”

“Graham?” She laughs again, softly. A little sadly.

“Yes, Graham too. Of course Graham too. He’s—he’s exquisite. Perfect. Our Pearl.”

“Pearl?”

“I just meant he’s perfect.”

“He looks more and more like you. Someone’s going to notice. If they already haven’t.”

“I suppose.” Not thinking about it, not then, he tangles his hand in her hair, all that strong dark silk. He asks her, “You don’t want to go back to California?”

“Well, sometimes I do. I feel scared here, I don’t know—”

Since she must stay, she must—at that moment Russ feels that his life would be unbearable without her, his mind races toward a possible fictional explanation; it is true both that Graham looks much like him, and that this will be noticed. He wonders: Some distant blood relationship? But even as he thinks this, imagines saying it, Russ recoils: himself, a Byrd, related to a Yates? And then the irony of such an incredibly snobbish recoil strikes him; he is in fact in love with a Yates, his most beautiful son is a Yates. And as for families, his branch of the Byrds wasn’t exactly such hot stuff either.

“Y’all do look a lot alike,” says Deirdre. “Why don’t you grow a beard, or something?”

“A beard? Like my grandfather had?” What an entirely crazy idea; no one wears beards but grandfathers these days. Maybe poets, though, it then occurs to Russ. Why not? He begins to laugh.

“Hush!” she whispers. “What’s so funny?”

“You. You’re so wonderful. You’re my funny girl.”

“I don’t think I’m so funny.”

“And beautiful. Lord have mercy. Every time I see you, the shock—”

Curiously, they are still standing there in the front hall, where they met to kiss, when Russ first tapped so gently at her door, when she said, “I guess he’s asleep.”

They are standing there still, half embracing, half talking, somehow unable to commit themselves to either.

Longing to make love to her, Russ in another part of his
mind or heart thinks of Brett. At home. The children. He reaches again to caress Deirdre’s long hair.

Something in his gesture, something tentative, resolves Deirdre, and she tells him, “I think you’d better go now, you know?”

“My darling, you’re right. Ah, how I love you—”

“I thought you didn’t. Anymore.” She has said this with a pure simplicity. No art, or design.

Russ is moved almost to tears, and later, recalling her tone and her words, he is moved again. (Is the phrase, he wonders, “crying into your beard”? But no, for God’s sake; it’s into your beer. Good old masculine beer.)

“I think I will grow a beard,” he tells Deirdre. “Ah, you’re so sweet—”

She says, very sweetly, and seriously, “I think it might work, for a while.”

They begin to kiss, again.

“Abby, darling, how nice and early you’re home.”

“Uh, yes’m.”

“Abby! For heaven’s sake. Are you saying ‘ma’am’ to me?”

“It just, it just came out that way.” Feeling weak, Abby laughs.

“If you’re going to talk like that, I’ll have to take you home to Connecticut.” Cynthia laughs too, a little.

“The point is,” Harry now puts in with a frown, “how was the famous pep rally?”

“Well, it was sort of noisy. But all those torches, it was sort of neat.”

Abby can find no acceptable (to herself) reasons for not having liked the rally, and so she feels that she must lie and say that she did like it, that it was neat. She cannot say, The whole thing scared me a lot, and then Mr. Byrd came along,
and he scared me too, but Deirdre had to do what he said, and go home to meet him there.

“Well, isn’t it nice you’re home so early. Actually your father and I were just going off to bed, so we’ll all have an early night.”

“I guess so.”

“Well, good night, my darling. Sweet dreams!”

For the second time that night, Abby feels herself thrust aside, thrust out of the way of grownups who are themselves impelled by violent and incomprehensible forces. She sighs as she gets into bed. Where she does not have sweet dreams, but rather newsreel nightmares, in which a man who seems to be a combination of Hitler and Russell Byrd is shouting “
BEAT DUKE
!”

“I just can’t believe a thing that’s happening these days. Harry Baird off to Washington, to the Navy—”

“And Cynthia all alone in this beautiful house. I just can’t believe—”

“Do you think old Jimmy’s planning to move back in with her?”

“Oh, you’re terrible, that’s a terrible idea. Jimmy wouldn’t—and with Esther—”

“Are Russ and Brett coming over, do you know?”

“Someone saw him downtown—in the post office, I think—and they told me he’s growing a beard.”

“Lord, Russ with a
beard
?”

“I just can’t believe the job that Dolly did on this house.”

“Of course she says it was all Odessa, that’s her little joke.”

“Well, maybe it was.”

“I just can’t believe that Odessa—”

“Where’s their little girl, that Abby?”

“Is that really Deirdre Yates across the room?”

“Isn’t she just the most beautiful thing? You ever see such skin?”

“Irene, you’re looking real, real pretty. How’s Clifton?”

“Well, of course there’s going to be a war. I don’t care what Mr. Roosevelt says. Or her either.”

“Isn’t it nice that Cynthia’s wearing that lovely dress again.”

“Just what is a ‘defense plant’? Does anyone know?”

“But Harry’s not going to Washington to fight. Just the Navy in Washington. A desk job, they call it.”

“Harry says Japan’s the country to worry about. Not so much Germany.”

“Japan! We were there on our honeymoon.”

“Deirdre Yates, if you aren’t the prettiest thing in the world? Now tell me, how’s your daddy doing out there in California?”

“I don’t think Russell and Brett are coming, after all. I’ll make you a little bet.”

“I just can’t believe Odessa made all these things.”

“But Dolly says—”

“Deirdre, how’s your little baby brother? We’re all just dying to get a look at him.”

“Cynthia says he’s here but he’s gone upstairs with Abby.”

“Maybe old Jimmy will move up to New York with Esther and the girls.”

“Oh no, Jimmy’d never live up there with Yankees. It’s different for Esther, she’s more Jew—”

“Can you imagine Russ Byrd with a beard?”

“Well, he is a poet.”

“That Harry’s going to be the handsomest thing in the Navy.”

“Deirdre, I tried to get them to come downstairs, but Abby just won’t. I don’t know—”

“It could be just as well, don’t you think?”

“There’s going to be these defense plants all over, everyone says.”

“Well, at least it’ll do a lot for unemployment.”

“But I’m dead sure that’s not the same dress.”

“It’s the colors that make all the difference. Poor Esther, I’m not sure she knows a whole lot about color.”

“But will she like it, if she ever comes back down here?”

“Has anyone heard what Russ is working on now?”

“Some goddam thing about those goddam pigs, I’ll bet.”

“Clifton Lee, is that any way to talk at a party?”

“Well, it’s all he talks about since they were to Kansas. Goddam dead pig.”

“Oh, sometimes I just wonder how Brett bears it!”

“Oh look, Jimmy’s trying to make up to Irene again.”

“But it looks like Harry Baird’s cutting him right out.”