Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (32 page)

She went to her mother.

“Judge Beggs said yesterday,” said Millie to the shadows, “that he would like to go for a ride in the little car to see the people on their front porches. He tried all summer to learn to drive, but he was too old. ‘Millie,’ he said, ‘tell that hoary-headed angel to dress me. I want to go out.’ He called the nurse his hoary-headed angel. He always had a dry sense of humor. He loved his little car.”

Like the good mother she was, she went on and on—as if she could teach Austin to live again by rehearsing all those things. Like a mother speaking of a very young child, she told Alabama about the sick Judge, her father.

“He said he wanted to order some new shirts from Philadelphia. He said he would like some breakfast bacon.”

“He gave Mamma a check for the undertaker for a thousand dollars,” added Joan.

“Yes,” Miss Millie laughed as if at a child’s capricious prank. “Then he said, ‘But I want it back if I don’t die.’ ”

“Oh, my poor mother,” thought Alabama, “and all the time he’s going to die. Mamma knows, but she can’t say to herself, ‘He’s going to die.’ Neither can I.”

Millie had nursed him so long, sick and well. When he was a young man in the law office and the other clerks no older than himself addressed him already as “Mr. Beggs,” when he was middle-aged and consumed with poverty and care, when he was old and had more time to be kindly.

“My poor mother,” said Alabama. “You have given your life for my father.”

“My father said we could be married,” answered her mother, “when he found that your father’s uncle was thirty-two years in the United States Senate and his father’s brother was a Confederate general. He came to my father’s law office to ask him for my hand.
My
father was eighteen years in the Senate and the Confederate Congress.”

She saw her mother as she was, part of a masculine tradition. Millie did not seem to notice about her own life, that there would be nothing left when her husband died. He was the father of her children, who were girls, and who had left her for the families of other men.

“My father was a proud man,” Millie said, proudly. “When I was a little girl I loved him dearly. There were twenty of us and only two girls.”

“Where are your brothers?” said David curiously.

“Dead and gone long ago.”

“They were half-brothers,” said Joan.

“It was my own brother who came here in the spring. He went away and said he’d write, but he never did.”

“Mamma’s brother was a darling,” Joan said. “He owned a drugstore in Chicago.”

“Your father was very kind to him and took him driving in the car.”

“Why didn’t you write to him, Mamma?”

“I did not think to get his address. When I came to live with your father’s family I had so much to do I couldn’t keep track of my own.”

Bonnie was asleep on the hard porch bench. When Alabama had slept that way as a little girl, her father had carried her upstairs to bed in his arms. David lifted the sleeping child.

“We ought to go,” he said.

“Daddy,” Bonnie whispered, snuggling under his coat lapels. “My Daddy.”

“You will come again tomorrow?”

“Early in the morning,” Alabama answered. Her mother’s white hair was done in a crown around her head like a Florentine saint. She held her mother in her arms. Oh, she remembered how it felt to be close to her mother!

Every day Alabama went to the old house, so clean inside and bright. She brought her father little special things to eat, and flowers. He loved yellow flowers.

“We used to gather yellow violets in the woods when we were young,” her mother said.

The doctors came and shook their heads, and so many friends came that nobody ever had more friends to bring them cakes and flowers, and old servants came to ask about the Judge, and the milkman left an extra pint of milk out of his own pocket to show that he was sorry, and the Judge’s fellow judges came with sad and noble faces like the heads on postage stamps and cameos. The Judge lay in his bed, fretting about money.

“We can’t afford this sickness,” he said over and over. “I’ve got to get up. It’s costing money.”

His children talked it over. They would share the expenses. The Judge would not have allowed them to accept his salary from the State if he had known he was not going to get well. All of them were able to help.

Alabama and David rented a house to be near her parents. It was bigger than her father’s house, in a garden with roses and a privet hedge, and iris planted to devour the spring, and many bushes and shrubs under the windows.

Alabama tried to persuade her mother to take a ride. It was months since she had left the house.

“I can’t go,” Millie said. “Your father might want me while I’m away.” She waited constantly for some last illuminating words from the Judge, feeling that he must have something to tell her before he left her alone at the last.

“We’ll just stay half an hour,” Millie finally agreed.

Alabama drove her mother past the Capitol, where her father had spent so many years of his life. The clerks sent them roses from the rosebed under his office window. Alabama wondered if his books were covered with dust. Perhaps he would have prepared some last communication there, in one of his drawers.

“How did you happen to marry Daddy?”

“He wanted to marry me. I had many beaux.”

The old lady looked at her daughter as if she expected a protest. She was more beautiful than her children. There was much integrity in her face. Surely she had had many beaux.

“There was one who wanted to give me a monkey. He told my mother monkeys all had tuberculosis. My grandmother looked at him and said, ‘But you look very healthy to me.’ She was French, and a very beautiful woman. A young man sent me a baby pig from his plantation, and another sent me a coyote from New Mexico, and one of them drank, and another married Cousin Lil.”

“Where are they all?”

“Dead and gone years ago. I wouldn’t know them if I saw them. Ain’t the trees pretty?”

They passed the house where her mother and father had met—“at a New Year’s ball,” her mother told her. “He was the handsomest man there, and I was visiting your Cousin Mary.”

Cousin Mary was old and her red eyes cried continually under her spectacles. There wasn’t much left of her, yet she had given a ball on New Year’s.

Alabama had never pictured her father dancing.

When she saw him in the casket at the end, his face was so young and fine and humorous, the first thing Alabama thought of was that New Year’s ball so many years ago.

“Death is the only real elegance,” she said to herself. She had been afraid to look, afraid of what discoveries she might make in the spent and lifeless face. There was nothing to be afraid of, only plastic beauty and immobility.

There was nothing amongst the papers in his bare skeleton office, and nothing in the box with his insurance premiums except a tiny moldy purse containing three nickels wrapped in an ancient newspaper.

“It must be the first money he ever earned.”

“His mother gave it to him for laying out the front yard,” they said.

There was nothing amongst his clothes or hid behind his books. “He must have forgot,” Alabama said, “to leave the message.”

The State sent a wreath to the funeral and the Court sent a wreath. Alabama was very proud of her father.

Poor Miss Millie! She had a mourning veil pinned over her black straw hat from last year. She had bought that hat to go to the mountains with the Judge.

Joan cried about the black. “I can’t afford it,” she said.

So they didn’t wear black.

They didn’t have music. The Judge had never liked songs save the tuneless “Old Grimes” that he sang to his children. They read “Lead Kindly Light” at the funeral.

The Judge lay sleeping on the hillside under the hickory-nut trees and the oak. From his grave the dome of the Capitol blotted out the setting sun. The flowers wilted, and the children planted jasmine vines and hyacinths. It was peaceful in the old cemetery. Wildflowers grew there, and rosebushes so old that the flowers had lost their color with the years. Crape myrtle and Lebanon cedars shed their barbs over the slabs; rusty Confederate crosses sank into the clematis vines and the burned grass. Tangles of narcissus and white flowers strayed the washed banks and ivy climbed in the crumbling walls. The Judge’s grave said:

AUSTIN BEGGS

APRIL
,
EIGHTEEN FIFTY
-
SEVEN

NOVEMBER
,
NINETEEN THIRTY
-
ONE

But what had her father said? Alabama, alone on the hillside, fixed her eyes on the horizon in an effort to hear again that abstract measured voice. She couldn’t remember that he had ever said anything. The last thing he said was:

“This thing is costing money,” and when his mind was wandering, “Well, son, I could never make money either.” And he had said Bonnie was as pretty as two little birds, but what had he said to her when she was a little girl? She couldn’t remember. There was nothing in the mackerel sky but cold spring rain.

Once he had said, “If you want to choose, you must be a goddess.” That was when she had wanted her own way about things. It wasn’t easy to be a goddess away from Olympus.

Alabama ran from the first drops of the bitter drizzle.

“We are certainly accountable,” she said, “for all the things manifest in others that we secretly share. My father has bequeathed me many doubts.”

Panting, she threw the car into gear and slid off down the already slippery red clay road. She was lonely at night for her father.

“Everybody gives you belief for the asking,” she said to David, “and so few people give you anything more to believe in than your own belief—just not letting you down, that’s all. It’s so hard to find a person who accepts responsibilities beyond what you ask.”

“So easy to be loved—so hard to love,” David answered.

Dixie came after a month had passed.

“I’ve plenty of room now for whoever wants to stay with me,” said Millie sadly.

The girls were much with their mother, trying to distract her.

“Alabama, please take the red geranium for your house,” insisted her mother. “It doesn’t matter here any more.”

Joan took the old writing desk and crated it and shipped it away.

“But you must be careful not to let them fix the corner where the Yankee shell fell through my father’s roof—that would spoil it.”

Dixie asked for the silver punch bowl, and expressed it to her home in New York.

“Be careful not to dent it,” said Millie. “It is made by hand from silver dollars that the slaves saved to give to your grandfather after they were freed—you children may choose what you like.”

Alabama wanted the portraits, Dixie took the old bed where she and her mother and Dixie’s son had been born.

Miss Millie sought her consolation in the past.

“My father’s house was square with crossing halls,” she’d say. “There were lilacs about the double parlor windows, and an apple orchard far down by the river. When my father died, I carried you children down to the orchard to keep you away from the sadness. My mother was always very gentle, but she was never the same, after.”

“I’d like that old daguerreotype, Mamma,” said Alabama. “Who is it?”

“My mother and my little sister. She died in a Federal prison during the war. My father was considered a traitor. Kentucky did not secede. They wanted to hang him for not upholding the Union.”

Millie at last agreed to move to a smaller house. Austin would never have stood for the little house. The girls persuaded her. They ranged their memories on the old mantel like a collection of bric-a-brac, and closed the shutters of Austin’s house on the light and all of himself left there. It was better so for Millie—that memories should be sharp when one has nothing else to live for.

They all had bigger houses than Austin’s and much bigger than the one he left to Millie, yet they came there to Millie feeding on what she remembered of their father and on her spirit, like converts imbibing a cult.

The Judge had said, “When you’re old and sick, you will wish you had saved your money.”

They had, someday, to accept the tightening up of the world—to begin someplace to draw in their horizons.

Alabama lay awake thinking at night: the inevitable happened to people,
and they found themselves prepared. The child forgives its parents when it perceives the accident of birth.

“We will have to begin all over again,” she said to David, “with a new chain of associations, with new expectations to be paid from the sum of our experience like coupons clipped from a bond.”

“Middle-aged moralizing!”

“Yes, but we
are
middle-aged, aren’t we?”

“My God! I hadn’t thought of it! Do you suppose my pictures are?”

“They’re just as good.”

“I’ve got to get to work, Alabama. Why have we practically wasted the best years of our lives?”

“So that there will be no time left on our hands at the end.”

“You are an incurable sophist.”

“Everybody is—only some people are in their private lives, and some people are in their philosophy.”

“Well?”

“Well, the object of the game is to fit things together so that when Bonnie is as old as we and investigates our lives, she will find a beautiful harmonious mosaic of two gods of the hearthstone. Looking on this vision, she will feel herself less cheated that at some period of her life she has been forced to sacrifice her lust for plunder to protect what she imagines to be the treasure that we have handed on to her. It will lead her to believe that her restlessness will pass.”

Bonnie’s voice drifted up from the drive on the evangelistic afternoon.

“And so good-bye, Mrs. Johnson. My mother and father will be very pleased and glad that you have been so kind and delightful about the nice time.”

She mounted the stairs contentedly. Alabama heard her purring in the hall.

“You must have had a wonderful time——”

“I hated her stupid old party!”

“Then what was the oration about?”

“You said,” Bonnie stared at her parent contemptuously, “that I was not polite the last time when I didn’t like the lady. So I hope you are glad now with how I was this time.”