A Southern Exposure (14 page)

“Have you heard the terrible news about poor little old Brett?” It is Dolly Bigelow who asks this of Cynthia, one morning on the phone. “Well, it was just a few days after you-all’s party, I guess. One morning Russ just told her to pack up a little bag, and he put her into that big old Cadillac, and he drove her right straight down to Southern Pines. To that place. That sanatorium, whatever they call it. Some Dr. Drake that I guess Russ has been talking to a lot on the phone, long distance. And I guess that Dr. Drake just finally said, Well, I guess you better just bring her on down. Not anything I can do for her from here. So Russ took her on down there. Place just full of alcoholics, I understand. And some real depressed folks. They’ve got this new treatment, call it electric shock, sounds just plain terrible to me, but I understand it works real well. Come to think of it, poor Brett is depressed a lot of the time, along with the drinking, but I hope they don’t use any of that shock on her. If she could just quit the drinking, for good and all, it would do her a world of good. But anyhow that’s where she is. SallyJane, her old name, she wants us to call her now, Russ said. Your neighbor. I hear this Dr. Drake is real handsome, too.”

“Oh, that’s terrible. Poor Brett. SallyJane. I’ve heard of electric shock. Oh, poor SallyJane. It is a nicer name, don’t you think?” But even as she is saying all this, and meaning
it, another voice, small and evil and insistent, is silently saying, Well, there’s Russ Byrd all alone now, and just up the road.

“How’s Odessa doing?” Cynthia asks Dolly, to her own ears sounding somewhat pious.

“Oh, ’bout the same as ever, I reckon. Now don’t you be turning her head, though, with all that New York talk. A plain old colored woman like Odessa. ‘New York’ doesn’t mean anything to her. It’s like with a child.”

“But if they sent her money—”

“Money!” Dolly laughs unamusedly. “Real grownup money wouldn’t mean a thing to Odessa, anymore’n it would to a little child. Every week I give her these dollar bills and I can tell you, it’s a lot more than many folks around here give theirs. But she’s like a little girl with an allowance.”

“But, Dolly, come on, she’s got those children to buy food for, and you said no husband. She’s got to have some sense of money, what you can buy. Food prices.”

“I have to tell you, darlin’ Cynthia. I don’t think any people from Connecticut
or
New York understand our colored friends.” As she said this, Dolly pursed her lips and raised her chin: she had spoken.

And Cynthia felt herself too cowardly at that moment to pursue it. Also, what Dolly said was true: she did not understand the people whom they all called “Nigras.” The word itself was a puzzle: were they consciously not saying “nigger,” a word she had never heard used in these parts, or was “Nigra” simply what their accents made of “Negro”?

She has sent samples of Odessa’s woven work to the decorating department at Lord & Taylor, and she is waiting to hear.

And now Russ is living down the road, with just those children. And the maid. And she is living alone with Abby.

•  •  •

One morning late in January—it is a Sunday, and Abby has spent the night with Betsy, daughter of Irene and Clifton Lee—Cynthia awakens to a silence more profound, more serious than any winter silence she has known. As though she were still asleep and wrapped in dreams, dreams of her childhood in Connecticut, perhaps—Cynthia goes back to sleep, and she dreams of snow, of waking to such magic silences, long ago. Dreaming, she remembers the Fifth Avenue of her grandmother’s house, in New York, horses clopping through snow, the smell of violets, and horses, and snow.

Waking again to the same thick silence, through the parted curtains she sees—yes!—snow. Everywhere white. Pristine, with a diamond sparkle from the early sunlight. Boughs heavily laden. Telephone wires sagging down. A few dark tiny birds on what was the lawn, hopping about, directionless. And the sky, as though reflecting snow, is pale and bright, barely blue.

Even before she takes the receiver off the hook and listens for a moment, she knows that the phone will be dead, and indeed it is: no way for her to call anyone, nor for anyone to reach her. This notion of complete inaccessibility makes her smile; she lies back luxuriously in her warm sheets, against the silk-soft pillows, a princess who must be rescued. Someone will have to come for her, she is sure of that. She feels happy and vaguely excited.

At last, in a pretty pink robe, she goes downstairs to make coffee, only regretting that of course there will be no Sunday papers.

Abby will be fine at the Lees’, and eventually they will bring her home.

And then, as she is finishing her second cup of coffee,
when she had almost given him up, there he is: Russ Byrd, her hero, her rescuer, trudging his way up her drive.

But there are two of him. Another man is following Russ, a smaller, wider man. Cynthia watches as Russ turns to grin and wave at Jimmy Hightower, who has stopped to wipe his glasses, but then he too is trudging on, toward her front door. Since there are two of them, it is all right to be in her robe, Cynthia decides—all right to open the door to them, to laugh at the whole situation, everyone more or less stranded in the snow, and she not dressed. At almost eleven on a Sunday morning.

“Had to come and see how you’re doing, neighbor!” Folksy Russ, who does not quite look at her.

“Cynthia, is there anything you need?” Jimmy looks around. “Where’s Abby?”

Cynthia explains about Abby, and explains too that she stocked up at the A&P on Friday. “Almost as though I’d known.” She laughs, tosses her hair.

Russ looks amazingly young and—well, fit. The weather becomes him, the skin above what is now a glossy full brown beard is smooth and clear and flushed with cold; his mouth, somehow more noticeable above the beard, is softly, beautifully curved. Cynthia closes her fingers against a sudden strong desire to touch his face, his cheeks and his forehead and his lovely strong mouth.

“Well, how’re you doing, anyway?” asks Jimmy. “How’s the single life?”

“I don’t think I know quite yet, but it seems okay.” Saying this, Cynthia risks a sidelong look at Russ: should she mention Brett—SallyJane; should she say she’s sorry or something?

“Come to think of it, that makes three of us,” Jimmy continues, headlong. “Although Russ here has already got another lady moved in,” he says insensitively.

A wave of shock goes through Cynthia, so that she can hardly hear Russ’s hurried, not-quite-coherent explanation: “…  Ursula, you know, the pig woman from Kansas. You know, I killed her pig and then we stayed on in Kansas. Poor Brett, I mean SallyJane, was so sick, and then she seemed to like it there, and she and Ursula wrote, and then Ursula just suddenly arrived. To take care of me for SallyJane, she said.”

“How nice of her.”

“Two days on the train. On the day coach.”

She must be crazy about you, Cynthia does not say. But this seems a possible time to ask, “How is Brett, I mean SallyJane doing?”

“Her doctor’s not the most articulate man in the world, I have to say,” says Russ, with a small pained frown. “So it’s hard to get any real information. I don’t know, I guess—I hope it’s the right place for her. She seems to like it there fine, and she liked the doctor.”

“You’ll have to meet Ursula.” Jimmy grins at Cynthia guilelessly—or is he in some way teasing? Cynthia can’t tell.

“She’s a big help with the kids,” Russ tells Cynthia earnestly. But is that just an excuse for having this Ursula there? “And it lets me get out of the house more often. I really have to, sometimes,” he adds.

“You’ll have to bring her over for dinner sometime,” Cynthia tells Russ. “And, Jimmy, you come too.” But as she says this she is thinking: God, it’ll be like a double date. How ghastly! She asks, “Will you-all have some coffee?”

“You-all,” teases Jimmy. “Never thought I’d hear the local lingo from Mrs. Baird.”

In a good-sport way, Cynthia laughs as she reaches for coffee cups, spoons, sugar. “I guess it’s really happening to me,” she says. “I’m going native at last.” She is laughing to
conceal the desolating loss that she has felt at the announcement of Ursula’s presence in Russ’s house. She asks, “Do you think the snow will melt soon, you-all?”

By early afternoon the snow is melting fast, in the brilliant sunlight. Water drips steadily from eaves, and from the trees. From pine needles and from the bare branches of oaks and beeches, maples. Watching from her window, listening to the steady tap, tap, tap of melted snow, Cynthia feels as though she were weeping internally—and for what? For Russ, whom she barely knows?

Dr. Clyde Drake has the saddest dark blue eyes that SallyJane, formerly Brett Byrd, has ever seen. The deepest-sea eyes, such depths of sorrow there. Does he care so much for his patients, SallyJane wonders? Does he, can he take on all their human pain, like Christ? But what of his own life, the ordinary and killing private troubles of all private lives, once you know the least little bit about them. Which of course she does not know about Dr. Drake. Not the simplest thing, like is he married? Children? Where did he go to school? SallyJane feels it would help her to know all this, but maybe not, and she is sure that you’re not meant to ask.

The nurse, Miss Effington, tells her, “Now, Miz Byrd, the doctors’ lives aren’t any concern of the patients, I can
tell you that. But since you ask, and you don’t look to me to be anywhere near as sick as most, I’ll just tell you that Dr. Clyde Drake is married to one of the most lovely women you would ever want to see, Norris Drake, and they have these absolutely beautiful children.” But Miss Effington’s voice, as she said all these nice, praising things, was a furious voice, high and shrill.

Why does Miss Effington hate this Norris Drake so violently? Might she kill her? Come up on her at the golf course, or the country club, or the Dunes Club, with some poison or a knife? The hatred in her voice was dangerous, palpable, and chilling. SallyJane shivers. She knows that she could not bear to hear about a murder, at close hand. Nor could she bear such a loss for Dr. Drake, such further infinite sorrow for his face.

“Dr. Drake, he sure looks sad,” says SallyJane to Carrie, one of the maids.

“He do,” agrees Carrie. “Everything a man could want, and sometimes more.” She laughs and rolls her eyes, the way colored people are supposed to do but usually don’t, in SallyJane’s experience.

“More?” queries SallyJane, in her white-lady way.

“Doctors be mens as much as they be doctors,” says Carrie mysteriously, in her not-mysterious voice.

“Oh.”

“You notice he a mighty handsome man?”

“Uh, yes. I guess I noticed.”

But all these messages about his family and then about his life, though fairly specific, came through only vaguely to SallyJane, who could no longer deal with specifics, so overwhelming were her own feelings of helplessness and grief, of intractable guilt and loss.

She thought sometimes of a strong and competent woman, herself, who took good care of five children and a moody, hard-to-please, and often-unloving husband. Herself,
as Brett. She found it impossible to believe that she could ever have done all that—and knew that she never could again. Never not cry when anyone said anything to hurt her, never kiss anyone when they were hurt and murmur to them, “Don’t cry, I’m here, I love you.”

She needed all that now herself, but she knew that she was too old for comfort, that none would ever be forthcoming. Drinking had been at least a temporary comfort, though she had never really liked it very much. But it seemed to work for other people, lots of their friends: why not for her? Other people drank and got cheerful and silly and fun (especially men, like Jimmy Hightower, Clifton Lee), but not SallyJane; it made her cry. Almost everything made her cry, she could never stop.

She has not told Dr. Drake about what happened to her in San Francisco, not any of it. She will never tell anyone about all that.

And now Ursula is up there with Russ, out from Kansas, and taking care of everything, the way she took care of SallyJane after San Francisco. How wonderful of Ursula. Too bad they have no pigs for her to take care of too. Maybe Ursula and Russ will take to raising pigs? Along with all those children; her children, raised like pigs?

Such thoughts as these, which do not stop, make SallyJane think that she is really crazy. That she really needs the shock that Dr. Drake has mentioned.

Sometimes Dr. Drake thinks so too.

She sees him for about an hour, every other day. Not enough.

She never quite knows what to wear, not to mention what to say. He never says much at all. And there is so much that she cannot say. Cannot allow him to know. She says as little as possible to Dr. Drake.

San Francisco.

She just says, “It seems so unfair to Russ, being married.
To me. He should just be having a love affair with someone very young and beautiful. Like Deirdre Yates. Once I saw her in the post office with this little boy, I guess her brother, and he looked more like Russ than our boys do, and so I thought, Oh-ho (no one would think those silly syllables but I did think, Ah-ha). I thought, So that’s what you’ve been up to, Russell Byrd. But it doesn’t make much sense, does it, if that little boy is her brother?”

“No.”

“Of course that was around the time when I started getting sick, so I guess probably you might say that thinking that little boy looked like Russ was a delusion.” She is somehow proud of this admission, but she wishes she was wearing a prettier, cleaner dress, maybe something flowing, with flowers.

“Yes, probably.” His sea eyes are deeper and sadder than ever, his voice very soft, and sad.

Meeting his eyes seems to SallyJane an intrusion, and yet if she does not meet them with her own, will he think her really sick? Will he not like her? Give her shock treatment?

“I guess wives just sometimes have these ideas about their husbands, don’t you think?” She needs to cry as she says this, but she manages not to.

He only says “Yes,” but she feels the smallest frown.

And then she won’t see him again for another two days.