Pay the Piper (15 page)

“Tell me why I know I should know that name.”

“A Mississippi writer.”

“I'm an unlettered cotton farmer, Laurel. I don't know much about literature. But I'm willing to learn. I'm looking forward to the books you're sending.”

“Unlettered.” She laughed. “You may have read everything at Choate and Chapel Hill. What was your major in college?”

“Spanish history.”

“Why that?”

“I had to major in something. The class wasn't filled. I know now I'd have been better off going to Ole Miss and studying agriculture. People like me didn't go there back then. I've been a snob all my life. If I had mentioned it, Mama would have had a fit.”

“All of us were snobs,” she said. “Would your father have let you go?”

“He wouldn't do anything Mama didn't want. Being in this place has helped me overcome a lot of old attitudes.”

“Living in the East helped me. Nobody knew who your parents or grandparents were, and nobody cared. You made it on your own merits as a person.”

“That would be a strange way to live, not knowing each other's families. My oldest daughter, Connie, lives in Canada. She's thinking about colleges and I tried to interest her in Ole Miss. She wants to be closer to her mother.”

She heard a sadness in his voice. “If she still lived in Mississippi, would you have wanted her to go to Ole Miss?”

“I'd never have considered it.”

There was such a distance in the room between them. To sit down at the table opposite him seemed too formal, but to go around it and sit next to him seemed too forward. She stayed by the bookcases. “Have you ever used your major?”

“Never even remembered a damn thing about it. What was the use? No matter what I did in life, I was always coming home to farm Matagorda. That had long been laid out.”

“I wonder if my father was ever there?” In explaining how he dynamited ditches and trees on farmland, she wondered if her father would only have been a workman at Matagorda.

“I don't remember that name. I'll ask Daddy. I used to blow stumps on the place myself, with Negro help.”

“You used dynamite. Hal!” She heard herself squeal in a ridiculous way, like a cheerleader, and was embarrassed.

He flicked open his cigarette lighter with a thumb, in a masculine manner she admired. Then he sat as he periodically had, in a subdued, silent slump as if waiting for directions. She thought prison would have wrecked his sense of being a man: achiever, doer, director of things around him.

She stood there watching him smoke and could not rid herself of a desire to steal the Welty edition. In this place, she felt she had a right to take it. She wanted to get back at an authority that had put her in a room with bars on the windows. Suppose Hal saw her and was moved to ask, Just who is it you are? Who are your people?

She could not pass off lightly the information that her paternal grandparents had come from a place no one ever heard of in Tennessee, and that her maternal relatives were right up the road in the clay hills. Remember? Once, she had cheated on an algebra exam in high school and passed for the whole year because she made a hundred on that test, sparing herself summer school and a re-exam. How, she had always wondered since then, did you evaluate right and wrong when she had bettered her life by cheating?

“Hal, this room is suffocating. There's no air-conditioning. I can't open any of these windows. Hal?”

He leaped up alertly as if used to being commanded by some female figure of authority—wife, mother, teacher? Hadn't he spoken of his mother as Mama? Laurel thought about playing with dolls, Betsey-Wetsey, in hers and Hal's common childhood days. He would have played with trains, soldiers, guns. Guns! she thought sharply. She remembered some public figure speaking about Lyndon Johnson, saying it was hard to get used to a President who referred to his father as Daddy. She had trained herself in the East not to refer to her daddy; she had been laughed at. My father, she had learned to say, with the elegance of aristocracy. Mrs. Perry, while being honored at a White House reception, ran into Johnson in an elevator. “Laurel,” she had said. “He took out a comb and ran it through his hair. ‘Got to spruce up for the ladies,' he said.” Mrs. Perry had laughed loudly. She could always see the humor of a situation. But there had been something uncouth to Mrs. Perry in the incident, that a man carried a pocket comb at all. Laurel had laughed, saying, “Well, shades of Andrew Jackson.”

Hal tapped expertly at the windows and they shot upward. When she complimented him, he said he had learned to do almost everything living on a plantation, particularly carpentry. Then he told her that his first wife, Carla, would not live out in the country. They had had a little bungalow in town. “I can't imagine her not wanting to live on your plantation,” she said. Perhaps that was the beginning of differences between them, the reason he left her for Sallie. That, she momentarily thought, was not exactly in his favor. Still, there was appeal to a man who let sexuality overrule his good sense. A stage he would have gone past, since he had matured in prison, according to Buddy. “Oh,” she said at a window. “There's that garbage man again. Why does he have on those clothes?”

Beside her, Hal said, “That old man's been pulling time here most of his life. They changed the uniforms, but he wouldn't give up his old ringarounds. He could be paroled, but he won't go before the board. Says he wouldn't know how to live in the free world; So they told him he can just stay on here till he dies.”

She would not have expected a prison to be compassionate. But she was not surprised Hal knew the old man's story. Would any of the other prisoners take that time? Would William? “His hat's like the one the Philip Morris callboy used to wear. Remember him?”

“Of course.”

Simultaneously, they raised cupped hands to their mouths and said, “Call for Phi-lip Morr-is,” after the old radio program. Then, laughing, they rounded the table and sat down side by side. Only first, Hal angled his chair so that his back was to the wall. Something you learned in prison, he said, never to leave your back unprotected. Laurel looked at him again with a sense of admiration about the danger he lived in.

As he stuffed his lighter into a pocket of his tight, white jeans, his legs parted and his rounded maleness showed. Laurel looked away.

“I'll tell you a funny story about that old man.” When he began, she thought how her father would have liked having a cotton farmer as a son-in-law. She saw them laughing together over anecdotes, the way her father sat at a table full of whiskey bottles, talking to his friends. Men who worked in offices all day did not really work, had been her father's belief.

“One day I was practicing my bagpipes,” Hal said, “and heard a racket outside. When I had cut loose with my fine rendition of ‘Scotland the Brave,' my friend on the trash wagon was just rounding the building. His mule almost got away from him. The backyard of the camp looked like the city dump. I don't think that old man ever did figure out what the noise was or where it came from.”

“It's good you can still laugh, Hal.” Her father had not had time to know William; when he died, William said, “I thought at last I'd have a father. People are always leaving me.”

“Honey, if I couldn't laugh in here, I couldn't stand the tension.”

Honey
. She assured herself the word meant nothing; it was common usage down here. However, endearments undid her because she had not known many in her life.

“Funny, Laurel. I've never mentioned the tension to anyone else. But I'll tell you something else. I used to have blinding headaches at home. And I've never had one since leaving there.”

“From the tension at home?”

“That's all I can think of.”

“You didn't mention the headaches to the psychiatrists?”

“No. The headaches went as soon as I left home, even when I was in jail at first. Then my lawyers had me sent to a psychiatric hospital. It was a lot more comfortable place to wait for trial than jail. I was there for several months. My lawyers wanted to enter a plea of temporary insanity. The doctors gave me every test and said, We're sorry, but Hal is not crazy.”

Laurel thought if he'd been in a psychiatric hospital for several months, he must have received a lot of help. It seemed the kind of treatment she'd like to undergo, though just a long rest was what she really wanted.

“My little girl Tina was always talking about the sheriff dropping by the hospital to see her mother or coming out to Matagorda.” And Hal had to sit helplessly confined, imagining what could be going on, what his daughter could be seeing whether she knew it or not. If nothing was happening, he was tortured by his thought, and that was the point, Laurel thought, feeling sorry for him. She said, “What hospital?”

“The one in Swan where the boy Greg was. You didn't understand he didn't die that night?” Laurel didn't know why that should make a difference, but it did. “Laurel, that boy was up walking around and ready to go home. He lived for weeks. He died unexpectedly of an infection.”

“Died in the hospital? Why in the world did they keep him in a little country one? Delton's one of the finest medical centers in the South. Why didn't they take him up there?”

“Daddy offered to move him. His family was happy with the attention he was getting.”

“He might not have died in a Delton hospital,” she said.

“Don't think I haven't gone over that in my mind a million times. When I found out that boy had died, my whole world ended. I was no longer arrested for manslaughter, but murder.”

“And you must have cared so terribly, the boy was dead.”

“When I put down that phone, everything turned black. A little nurse had to help me to bed. And do you know, Laurel, despite giving me a sleeping pill, she said she sat by me all night.”

“Really.”

“She's even knitted me socks and sent them since I've been here.”

“Isn't that sweet,” Laurel said. “I gathered from one of your letters, you don't want a divorce from Sallie?”

“I've tried to accept the inevitable. I don't want to go home to nothing, like most of these guys here. I don't want to lose another child. I come from the most conservative people possible. I can't go around being the poor man's Tommy Manville.”

“Two divorces does sound awful,” she said. “I hardly know anyone who's been divorced even once.”

“When I was young, I had to be Pete's partner in a tennis tournament at the Delton Country Club. I was embarrassed because his parents had been divorced. It was a stigma that rubbed off on you, I felt. I'd talked about a divorce. But I guess neither Sallie nor I wanted to admit we'd made a mistake. Also, I think she was hanging on to live in my parents' big home on Matagorda. The night we came out of the J.P.'s, Sallie was already hoping we'd have a girl so she could make her debut from my parents' big house.”

“I don't understand how someone like you married Sallie.”

“You want it put in its simplest terms? I was hot for her box. I was just so—” He looked away into the distance as if unable to explain exactly how intense his feeling had been. Then he looked at her hesitantly. “When you said you were going through a bad period in your life, I thought you might be getting a divorce.”

“I want to, but I'm afraid. And I don't know what to do about my son.”

They sat there in what seemed a world of their own, with nothing to do but talk on intimately. Hal said the hardest thing he'd ever done was tell his first wife, Carla, he wanted a divorce. Now he would have enormous guilt about his older child except she'd turned out so beautifully. “Children forget, Laurel. But you and your husband will suffer over your divorce the rest of your lives.”

But not if I want a divorce, Laurel thought, her dander up. She said, “I'm sure Sallie must be quite lonely now.”

“Sallie's not lonely. She's the type person that when we went on trips, she'd know everybody around the motel pool in five minutes. I could have stayed a year and never known anyone.”

“I'm like that too,” Laurel said. She could see Sallie prancing around the pool wearing high heels with her bathing suit, but there was something in the image she could envy.

“She's got those breasts, if you remember.”

“No. I never paid attention to the breasts of other girls.” She remembered only being embarrassed by her own.

“Sallie went to a finishing school. She used to come down to Chapel Hill to see guys from Delton. I'd seen her as a child, but that was when I first knew her. She'd pose around the frat house in a sweater, and the guys would be betting on whether all that was really Sallie.”

She remembered back to those days when girls wore foolish pointed things called falsies. “That's when you started dating her?”

“Hell, no. She was too much woman for me. I was a virgin G.I., just back from overseas. I started dating Carla in college. She went to a junior college and majored in horseback riding. She'd come down to see her brother. She was an army brat and had lived all over. She was a little more sophisticated than you Southern girls, in some respects. I got sucked into that marriage in more ways than one. She blew me on the first date. I couldn't have been more surprised—or pleased.”

“First date?” Laurel recalled her mother once insinuating there was such a practice, and saying that was why men went to prostitutes. She had been glad to be of a more enlightened generation than her mother's. But first date!

“Carla cried when I was graduating and didn't want us to separate. She wanted to get married. So I said, All right.”

Just like that? Laurel thought of the five years she had wandered around after college in terror of being an old maid; it would never have occurred to her to propose. Why hadn't she gone to a finishing school and learned to flaunt her breasts, or to a horseback-riding college and learned fellatio? She had learned nothing at all practical at Bard College, but a great deal about the development of the modern short story. Hal's world had been so safe and secure. “I didn't get married for five years after college,” she said.