Original Sins (12 page)

Heads were craning throughout the minstrel show audience to catch a glimpse of old Mr. Prince. The older people in the well-fed, well-dressed crowd that night felt they owed their current prosperity to his prudent stewardship of the mill. Old Mr. Prince felt so too. Robert knew there was no question of this in the old man's mind: He'd taken a poor muddy little market town and put it on the industrial map, through his own personal foresight and hard work and optimism. At one time Robert had tried to discuss his problems running the mill with his father. The world economic climate was shifting. Just as contracts had been switched from Lawrence, Massachusetts, to Newland, Tennessee, due to cheaper labor, so were they now being switched to Taiwan and the Philippines, where workers were paid thirty-five cents an hour. Just as harness makers had been doomed by the arrival of the auto, so was cotton manufacture doomed by the arrival of synthetic fibers.

“Poppycock!” his father shouted, bushy white eyebrows twitching. “Don't hand me any of your Princeton bullshit, son! I want
action
, not excuses!” His father, who hadn't been to college, delighted in ridiculing Princeton, even though he'd pushed Robert to go there, in a seizure of keeping up with the other professional families in town. So Robert was a class hybrid as well as a regional one. And the result of all this hybridization was uncertainty. He had difficulty ever giving himself wholly to any course of action. He agonized, and delayed decisions, hoping someone else would make them for him, hoping the necessity for making them would evaporate if he ignored them. He felt loyalty to no one group. And whenever he tried to exercise blind allegiance, he was wracked with guilt over all the alternatives he was dismissing.

This unfortunate personality structure almost cost him his life during World War II. He was on a plane from England to Belgium when the instruments went screwy. They wandered around in a thick fog until the fuel was running out, and then had to crash land behind German lines. As captain he knew he was supposed to lead the crew back to no-man's-land. In the dark, with bursts of shell fire on the horizon, he studied the maps and compasses and terrain for a long time, then set out toward a woods. At the woods he turned around and led them back in the direction of the wreckage. This went on until his sergeant grasped the fact that Robert didn't have a clue what he was doing, and took over. It was all written off to shock from the crash, and battle fatigue. The crew joked with him about it for the rest of the war. He'd never let on to anyone that it hadn't been shock or fatigue, but indecision and terror. He'd been in full control of his faculties, but hadn't been able to make up his mind and had been overcome with anxiety. He'd smiled wryly as his father told about leading his platoon over the ridge in the Argonne Forest as showers of shells exploded all around them like a fireworks display.

All his life he'd been thrust into leadership positions because he was his father's son, or a Princeton graduate. But he didn't like leading, or have a gift for it. He hated it—with his soldiers during the war, and now with his workers—when they came up to him with those cringing grins to ask what to do about their personal lives, or work problems, or anything. How the hell should he know? Some mornings he couldn't even decide whether to wear green or brown socks. His father talked about “captaining his ship” and “commanding his troops,” and everybody loved it, most of all his father. But Robert, alas, knew that there were economic forces at work that nobody, not even his father, could control. He wondered if it was precisely because individual choices seemed to make so little difference that he had such a hard time making them.

A minstrel named Abraham Lincoln Jones, the town's leading pharmacist, jumped up. “Hey, boss,” he called to the interlocutor.

“Yes, Abraham? What can I do for you?” Raymond held his camera in readiness and studied the men. They looked like the coal miners he'd photographed in Clayton, after they'd emerged from the mine, when the only white on their faces was that of their eyes and teeth. The men who mined coal and these minstrels who in real life wore coats and ties and worked in clean offices—how were they different? Was it just a question of chance—whether you were born on Tsali Street or in a Kentucky hollow? He inspected this new thought.

“… you say your wife finally figured out how not to have babies, Abraham?”

“Yassuh. Now she keeps her legs crossed instead of her fingers!”

Shrieks of laughter. Tambourines shaking. Businessmen cakewalking across the stage. Raymond started snapping.

From the corner of his eye, Jed could see Sally's cleavage. He wanted his face buried there, a hand molding either breast, while Sally stroked his hair and murmured how much she loved him. That would happen as soon as this infernal show got over with. He glanced at his watch. Oh God, another half hour. He was getting an erection. He crossed his legs, trying to weight the damn thing down. Talk about wearing your heart on your sleeve. Coach Clancy sometimes made jokes about the trouble older men had getting it up. Well, he had trouble keeping it down. It was embarrassing having the damn thing spring up like an eager puppy at the least excuse, or even without one. In junior high the boys had worn jockstraps to the dances to keep them down—diving board dicks, they used to call them. It made it tough to play it cool with girls. They always knew exactly where you were at. But them, with their secret little holes—you never had a clue what they were up to. So you were always barging ahead and horrifying them.

“… so de Doc says to her, says, ‘Maybelle, has you ever been through de menopause?' And Maybelle, she say, ‘Law, no, Doc, I ain't even been through de Smokies yet!'” Laughter. Tambourines.

Mrs. Prince tried to smile, but she disliked this show. Did jokes really have to be so crude to be funny? Everywhere she looked these days—crudity. She hung etched prisms in the living room windows so that when the sun poured in just right, the room filled with all the colors of the rainbow, and the mellow wood of the antiques gleamed. She played Bach fugues on her piano. Sometimes Emily played along on her flute, when Mrs. Prince could tear her away from her Sousa marches. In the summer she raised gardens full of flowers, and in the winter she filled the house with arrangements of dried weeds. The girls were scarcely aware of this. But she hoped that surrounding them with nice things could develop in them an instinctive feel for harmony and balance and proportion, though in doing so she knew she was preparing them for a world that was ceasing to exist. The radios and record players in the girls' rooms were always blaring with the maudlin self-pity of country music, or the throbbing sexuality of rock and roll. How could Bach and dried weeds compete? It was like trying to wave back a hurricane with a feather duster. She sometimes felt, as she walked her Oriental carpets, like a refugee from a Chekhov play. She preferred to think of herself that way, as opposed to Robert's description of themselves as flying reptiles nearing extinction. He always said that the real problem was that historical time differed so drastically from one's own lifetime. That people wanted the two to coincide so as to feel that what they were doing had significance. But that historical time was so vast that you might very well be a member of a transitional generation without being able to see what had preceded you, or what would take your place.

She often thought about this as she stood at her living room window with rainbows from the prisms dancing across her arms, looking down into the valley where the mill sat. She'd been a history major at Randolph-Macon and knew that the valley had been inhabited by wave after wave of prehistoric peoples—the Adenans, the Hopewells, the Copena, the Mississippians. They came out of the west from “The Place Where the Sun Falls into the Water,” they came from Mexico and Central America, they came from the eastern end of Lake Ontario. Then the Cherokees were driven into this valley from the Ohio River Valley by the Iroquois and the Delaware. They had to fight constantly to stay here—the Creeks to the south, the Tuscarora and Yamasee to the east, the Chickasaw and Shawnees to the west. Bands continuously dissolved, or split off from their tribes with ambitious leaders to form new tribes, like a crowded beehive throwing off a swarm. Then De Soto's men marched through the valley and dug gold mining shafts into the hills. Then came the Europeans—the Scotch-Irish and German and Dutch down from Pennsylvania. Scotsmen from the Clearances crossed the mountains from the North Carolina coast. Englishmen arrived from the Virginia settlements, signing treaties guaranteeing the Cherokees their land for “as long as the green grass grows and the water flows.” Then they massacred them, using their skin for boots and reins.

Some town father with a morbid sense of humor named the street outside the house Tsali Street. Tsali was a chief who refused to be marched to Oklahoma during the Removal. A soldier prodded Tsali's wife with a bayonet, and Tsali killed him, fleeing to the North Carolina mountains. The troops promised to leave the other cave dwellers alone if Tsali would turn himself in. He did, and was shot.

Like the layers of a compost pile, each culture that had inhabited this valley rested on the decaying remains of previous ones. The ashes from their fires, the graves of their forebears littered the valley. Humanity had existed for 20,000 generations, the most recent consisting of her friends and family. And what culture would replace the Newlanders? She could speculate, but it irritated her that she would never know. She recalled her outrage at Randolph-Macon when she first saw in a textbook a chart illustrating that most species failed to adapt to new conditions and went to extinction.

Having Robert around triggered bleak musings like this. He was like a live-in Hamlet. Getting to know him had been a shock. The men around her—her father and brothers and their friends—had been so flamboyant, forceful, and gallant that she'd just assumed that that was what men were like. Her father owned a large tobacco farm and raised horses, in addition to being vice president at the mill. He wore silk shirts and a diamond ring on his little finger. And when he rode, the horse's hooves scarcely touched the ground, seemed to dance deftly in the air. He merely flicked his wrist and the horse reversed directions or changed gaits.

Robert had been so unflamboyant that she was scarcely aware of his existence until he asked her out in high school. Even then, he had stooped badly. Their parents were great friends, his father being president at the mill. Her father admired his father's blustery optimism. He used to say, “We need us a few Yankees around this town who know there's still such a thing as progress. You take a Southerner: He's positively wedded to the status quo because, however pathetic, it's an advance on the War and Reconstruction.” Robert's and her mothers were heads of rival garden clubs that engaged in friendly but fierce competition when members opened their gardens to the public in early summer. All four parents were thrilled with the match, and it seemed a shame to disappoint them, so she kept dating him. And gradually she learned to appreciate his anguished seriousness. There was nothing he could take for granted and enjoy. But if these qualities made him interesting to talk with, they sometimes made him frightful to live with. Some mornings she'd go into their bedroom to see why he was late to breakfast and find him staring bleakly into his sock drawer. “Wear the green ones, dear,” she'd say. “They're nice with that tie.”

They'd both long acknowledged that he was in the wrong job. But there seemed nothing to be done about it now. She'd been in the wrong job too for a while, but had been able to quit, since no income and very little civic responsibility were involved. When she was a bride, all the various clubs had vied for her membership, and she'd joined half a dozen—her mother's garden club, a bridge club, a book club, the Junior League. After several years of marshaling maids to take care of her house and children so she could be at luncheons and on committees and at fund-raising events, she decided that where she really wanted to be was home. She dismissed the gardener and began doing her gardens herself. Her mother and mother-in-law were horrified. You planned your garden, you supervised your gardener, you cut and arranged the flowers. You did not do the actual spading and weeding yourself. But Melanie liked it. She'd grown up riding horses and building mud dams on the farm with her brothers, and was baffled by the life of a clubwoman, which involved such crises as who had refused to give which recipe to whom. Plants, on the other hand, stayed where you put them and did as they were told. But the gardens taught her more than that: When she and her friends and family were gone, whether or not others replaced them, the sun would still shine, birds would continue to sing, and weeds would grow. Oblivious to the absence of humans. Almost nothing was as important as people tried to make things.

She'd have done her own housework too, except that she didn't know how to get rid of Ruby. Whenever she tried, Ruby informed her that Melanie wouldn't be able to get along without her. Since Ruby had raised her, taught her how to tie her shoes, and made her stop sucking her thumb, Melanie was incapable of disputing anything she said. Which was why her own mother was always marching into her house and telling Melanie that she didn't know how to “handle her servants.” As though Ruby were a mule in a field. According to her mother, the way to “handle” Ruby was to tie a cloth around your head and start cleaning with her and gossiping about the other families Ruby worked for. Eventually Ruby would insist on taking over. The one time Melanie tried this, Ruby sat down with a Coke and gave Melanie pointers on her cleaning techniques. But this world in which one “handled one's servants” was passing, so this wasn't a skill she'd felt obliged to figure out so that she could pass it on to her daughters. Unfortunately, she hadn't been able to figure out any other skills to pass on to them either, since she didn't understand what kind of a world she was supposed to be preparing them for.