Homeplace (20 page)

She met J.W. Cromie coming down the stairs from his apartment over the garage, dressed in green overalls. They were starched to glassiness, and he smelled powerfully of Old Spice. He nodded at her, not breaking his stride.

“Good morning, J.W.,” she said, implacably cheerful and noncommittal. “I thought I’d take the car out for a little while, if you don’t mind. I’m anxious to get a look at town. I promise I won’t run it into a tree or a parking meter, and I’ll have it back before lunchtime.”

“It your car, Miss Mike,” he said. “Yours and Mr. John’s. I don’t be drivin’ it except when Mr. John want to go for a ride, or need somethin’ from the sto’.”

“Well … thank you,” Mike said. She did not move, and he paused and looked at her, waiting for her to finish what she had to say. But it was obvious to her that he was not going to speak of his own accord, and so she said again, “Thank you,” and went into the garage.

“You welcome,” J.W. said, and disappeared into the sunlight.

Mike slid the big old car silently down Pomeroy Street and turned onto Main, which ran, fittingly enough, through the center of town. The powerful V-8 engine purred with cleanliness and care. The interior leather shone softly and even the worn floor mats were spotless. The car was bigger than anything she had driven in recent years; she had never owned a car in Manhattan but opted for subcompacts whenever she needed a rental on assignment, which was often. She
felt now as if she were sliding along in a great, silent, ornate Pharaoh’s barge on an equally silent river. It was a cloistered, invulnerable, and almost invisible feeling. Mike felt protected from the eyes of Lytton.

She was wrong about the people. The streets were full of them. People in cars and trucks, queuing up at the three new stoplights in the middle of town; people walking briskly in and out of stores whose facades and names she did not know; people going in and out of the two large shopping centers at either end of Lytton’s business district. Mike drifted the Cadillac up one street and down another, recognizing all of them but feeling no stirring of familiarity, no pull of particularity to crack the hemisphere of the bell jar. Sealed within it and borne along in the great bronze coffin of the automobile, she drove the streets of Lytton and saw no face that she knew. In the drugstores, the bank, the hardware and insurance and real estate offices, the tax service office, the barber and beauty shops, the florist and the laundromat and the service stations and the appliance store and the cafés and fast-food outlets and the post office and library, in the new medical mall and the Ford, Chevrolet, and GM lots, in the parking lots of the condominiums and apartment complexes that had not been there when she left, and the churches and funeral homes that had, there were people; men, women, and children, as prosperous and banal and anonymous as starlings, and Mike knew none of them. The only blacks she saw were in small knots at the bus stops; riding, as she was, in cars; or going in and out of the supermarkets.

Later that afternoon, she stopped in to see Priss Comfort.

“How did you find Lytton?” Priss asked, over coffee and strawberry Pop Tarts. “Changed much?”

“Not at all, except that I don’t know anybody anymore,” Mike said. “Oh, there are some new stores, and
a few more traffic lights, but it looks just as quaint and adorable and Brigadoony as it did in 1964. The Lyttons of the world don’t change. Especially for the blacks. I’ve been all over town, and I could swear integration hasn’t gotten here yet. Nobody’s gotten the word. The only black faces you see are in the supermarkets or somebody’s kitchen or backyard, like J.W. and Lavinia Lester. I didn’t see a single black face in a single restaurant, or at the library or the bank or city hall … not even the car wash. Not even the
laundromat
, that great leveler of men. They don’t even call them blacks; it’s still Negroes in Lytton. Or worse. Much worse, at my house. And J.W. God, he’s about to ‘yassum’ me to death. What’s the matter with J.W., Priss? Why didn’t he get out of here while he had the chance? He must hate it here. He’s in virtual bondage to my father. Why does he go along with this yard-boy shit?”

Priss Comfort regarded Mike in silence for a while and then sighed.

“This is his home, Mike,” she said. “This town is his; it’s all he knows. It’s him. How can he hate it? He goes along because he has to
get
along. You’re looking just at surfaces, just at the bad side of us; you haven’t had time to see the good yet, even if you’re able. And it’s here. There’s great good in Lytton; there always was, no matter what you thought … and think. Of course, there’s plenty of not so good, too. Lord, sometimes I think … we’ve known the best and worst of the South, you and I. One day maybe the worst will be just a … sliver, like a waning moon. Each generation that comes along moves us further from our darker side. Sometimes I’m afraid we’ll move too far and lose the sweetness and bite of the South, along with the rot. But move we must. Don’t hate Lytton, Mike. It’s you, just like it’s J.W. Cromie.”

“I wish you’d take to drink again,” Mike said. “This
metaphysical wisdom is more than I can stand. I will not be swayed.”

“Oh, you will be.” Priss grinned evilly at her. “I have only just begun to work on you.”

They sat in silence for a while, and the white cat came stretching his bulk out from Priss’s bedroom and jumped up into Mike’s lap. He butted his large head against her hand until, laughing, she petted him, and he settled down comfortably in her lap and began a rusty, rumbling purr. Priss beamed at them like a fond parent with a precocious child.

“Are things any better with you and John?” she said presently.

“I guess they’re as good as they’re going to be,” Mike said. “He’s doing his dead-level best to provoke me, and I’m not letting him do it. He’ll probably stop if I just don’t respond, which I don’t. You know, Priss, we’ve done a complete switch. He never paid half this much attention to me when I was little; I’d almost have welcomed this then. It would have been better than what he gave me. But now, it’s like he’s trying his best to drive me away. I could understand it after that last business, when I left home; he did say he never wanted to see me again, after all. And that suited me just fine. But now everybody’s saying that he’s the one who asked for me to come back. So here I am. And as far as I can tell, he doesn’t feel one shred of sentiment of any kind for me. Or anything else, for that matter. Except that old house, of course.”

Priss frowned. “People think old people are sentimental, but they’re not,” she said. “We’re ruthless, most of us. We’ve had to say good-bye to too many things to afford sentiment. At best we’re ruthlessly selective. No matter what your father might feel for you, he can’t show it, not even to himself. He’s lost you once.”

“And whose fault was that?”

“I know,” Priss said. “Old people aren’t rational, either. Mainly it bores us. Too many years of trying to make rationalization work like it’s supposed to. Finally we just stop trying to make sense. The point is, John stands to maybe lose that house now, and he knows he’s going to lose his life sooner rather than later. He’s not a fool. So I think he figures to see if he can run you off again before you go on your own. And you will, you know. You said so yourself.”

“Well, this was never meant to be permanent, Priss. I’ve made that plain to everybody. As soon as we see how Mrs. Lester is going to work out …”

“I know, I know,” Priss said impatiently. “You’re off after the brass ring again. Only it strikes me that maybe it’s not what or where you thought it was.”

“What do you mean?” Mike said. Uneasiness swam past the glass around her like a young barracuda, distant but potentially harmful.

“Oh, nothing really. I just had some idea that sooner or later, if you stayed long enough, you might come to write something about Lytton and the people here,” Priss said. “Just to pass the time, keep your hand in and all, since you’ve more or less got to be here anyway. It would be interesting to see what you had to say about your own folks.”

“A, they’re not my own folks, Priss, present company and a few others excepted, and B, I don’t have anything at all to say about them. What on earth would there be for me to write about in Lytton? There’s no pivotal crisis here, no contemporary drama going on. You know that’s what I do. It’s how I’ve made my name. What on earth has anybody around here
done
that I would want to write about them?”

“I’m not interested in what they’ve done … though it’s a damned sight more than you seem to think. I’m interested in what you
think
about them. How you feel about them. How it feels to come home
again at just this time and place in history; what resonances you feel now, what speaks to you out of your time here before. It could make a pretty interesting book, you know, and from what you said, you need a book.”

“Except that it’s already been written,” Mike said. “By Thomas Wolfe. And look where it got him.”

“Yes,” Priss said, and she was not smiling. “Look.”

“Oh, come on, Priss,” Mike said. “I don’t want to commit Literature with a capital L. I don’t even think I could. I’m simply too … detached, too journalistic, if you will … to handle that kind of point of view.”

“Too scared, you mean,” Priss said. “Because it would mean opening yourself up to everything … what’s past, what’s happening right now, what’s likely to happen. It would mean going through it, experiencing it, feeling it. I guess you’re right at that, Mike. I guess you really can’t do that.”

“Well, I told you that two days ago, didn’t I?” Mike said, irritated and oddly hurt by Priss’s words. “I’m just not interested in spill-your-guts prose. It’s … unseemly, somehow. It offends me.”

“Just a thought,” Priss said. “Hand me that sorry cat and get on out of here, now. Your Mrs. Lester is going to want to go home; it’s past three. Mrs. Lester. Hmmm. I can remember when she was Lavinia Parrott, a skinny little thing without enough to eat, helping her mother take in wash and carry it back to folks. Smart as a whip even then. I always wished I could have gotten hold of her in my class.”

Mike handed the limp, purring Walker Pussy to Priss and left. Priss’s talk of a book about Lytton left her feeling inadequate, chastened, slightly foolish and recalcitrant, exactly as if she had negligently done far less than her best at some assignment in class to which Priss had set her. She remembered the feeling well. Priss would never settle for mere competence from Mike.
When she had protested, rightly, that not nearly so much was demanded of the other students in Priss’s classes, Priss had said only, “It’s relative, Mike.”

“What the hell does she expect from me?” Mike said aloud, getting out of the Cadillac into the whitened heat of the Winship backyard. “I do what I do better than anybody in New York. What does Priss know, anyhow?”

“Knows an awful lot for a maiden lady from little ol’ Lytton, Georgia, seems to me,” Sam Canaday said, materializing at her elbow and taking it showily to help her from the car. “But she sure doesn’t let on that she does. A virtuous woman. She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness. Her price is far above rubies.”

“Do you always sneak up behind people?” Mike snapped, the hot, treacherous color flooding up her neck from her chest. “Every time I look up, there you are, lurking. Don’t you ever work?”

“Not if I can help it,” he said, grinning. “Sorry if I startled you. I was looking for J.W. No, I think there’s altogether too much toil and labor in the world. Look at you Yankees; skin and bones and stress headaches and all such; like to jump right out of your skins. You should consider the lilies of the field. They toil not, neither do they spin …”

“And what is it with you and the Bible?” Mike asked. “Priss tells me nobody in town is speaking to you because you shot your mouth off about the Old Testament in church. Do you really think it impresses us Yankees, as you’re fond of calling us when you’re in your Jeeter Lester mode … which is most of the time?”

“Why, Miz Singer-Winship.” He beamed, hand still under Mike’s elbow. “I didn’t mean
you
were a Yankee. Cross my heart. Southern girl like you ought to know that all us southern boys know our Good Book, even if
we don’t learn anything else. It makes us good lawyers.”

“It sounds more like you’re on the back of a flatbed truck speaking in tongues,” Mike said.

“Oh, I’ve done that, too,” Sam Canaday said comfortably.

“And handled snakes, I presume.”

“Something like that.”

He laughed, gave her elbow a squeeze, and ran up the outside garage stairs towards J.W.’s aerie, taking the creaking wooden steps two at a time. Mike looked after him in open dislike. In the merciless sunlight, she could see that the dark blue polo shirt that he wore today strained across his back, and that it was not fat that tautened it, but packed, sliding muscle. His biceps seemed to burst with muscle, too, as did his forearms, and the open hand that gripped the weathered railing was webbed with playing muscle. It was callused and scarred too; Mike saw the glisten of tight-pulled scar tissue, as if he had been scalded or burnt, on the back of his hand and on two of his fingers. Primitive hands, powerful and broken. Not a lawyer’s hands.

Her eyes traveled up his arm to his chest and neck, and then further, and she saw that he had stopped on the small porch outside J.W.’s door and was looking down at her. Her face flamed anew, and she turned and hurried through the heat haze over the driveway into the house. At every step she could feel his eyes on her back.

Later that evening, after she had warmed up the excellent chicken pot pie that Lavinia Lester had left for her and her father and they had eaten it in silence, staring at the kitchen television set, DeeDee came by for a quick visit. She and Mike sat in the still-hot lavender seclusion of the wisteria bower while
Let’s Make a Deal
brayed from the kitchen, DeeDee fanning herself mightily and greedily attacking the peach cobbler that neither
Mike nor her father had wanted. She had come to invite Mike to dinner at her house the following evening and would not take Mike’s halfhearted no for an answer.