Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (3 page)

Judge Beggs lay on his stern iron bed sorting the sheafs of the yellowing afternoons. Calfskin volumes of the
Annals of British Law
and
Annotated Cases
lay over his body like leaves. The telephone jarred his concentration.

The Judge knew when it was Randolph. After half an hour, he’d stormed into the hall, his voice quaking with restraint.

“Well, if you can’t talk, why do you carry on this conversation?”

Judge Beggs brusquely grabbed the receiver. His voice proceeded with the cruel concision of a taxidermist’s hands at work.

“I will thank you never to attempt to see or to telephone to my daughter again.”

Dixie shut herself in her room and wouldn’t come out or eat for two days. Alabama reveled in her part of the commotion.

“I want Alabama to dance at the Beauty Ball with me,” Randolph had said over the wire.

Her children’s tears infallibly evoked their mother.

“Why do you bother your father? You could make your arrangements outside,” she said placatingly. The wide and lawless generosity of their mother was nourished from many years of living faced with the irrefutable logic of the Judge’s fine mind. An existence where feminine tolerance plays no role being insupportable to her motherly temperament, Millie Beggs, by the time she was forty-five, had become an emotional anarchist. It was her way of proving to herself her individual necessity of survival. Her inconsistencies seemed to assert her dominance over the scheme had she so desired. Austin couldn’t have died or got sick with three children and no money and an election next fall and his insurance and his living according to law; but Millie, by being a less closely knit thread in the pattern, felt that she could have.

Alabama mailed the letter that Dixie wrote on her mother’s suggestion and they met Randolph at the “Tip-Top” Café.

Alabama, swimming through her teens in a whirlpool of vigorous decision, innately distrusted the “meaning” communicated between her sister and Randolph.

Randolph was a reporter for Dixie’s paper. His mother kept his little girl in a paintless house downstate near the canebrakes. The curves of his face and the shape of his eyes had never been mastered by Randolph’s expression, as if his corporeal existence was the most amazing experience he had ever achieved. He conducted night dancing classes for which Dixie got most of his pupils—his neckties, too, for that matter, and whatever about him that needed to be rightly chosen.

“Honey, you must put your knife on your plate when you’re not
using it,” Dixie said, pouring his personality into the mold of her society.

You’d never have known he had heard her, though he seemed to be always listening for something—perhaps some elfin serenade he expected, or some fantastic supernatural hint about his social position in the solar system.

“And I want a stuffed tomato and potatoes au gratin and corn on the cob and muffins and chocolate ice cream,” Alabama interrupted impatiently.

“My God!—So we’re going to do the
Ballet of the Hours,
Alabama, and I will wear harlequin tights and you will have a tarlatan skirt and a three-cornered hat. Can you make up a dance in three weeks?”

“Sure. I know some steps from last year’s carnival. It will go like this, see?” Alabama walked her fingers one over the other inextricably. Keeping one finger firmly pressed on the table to mark the place she unwound her hands and began again. “——And the next part is this way——And it ends with a br—rr—rr—oop!” she explained.

Dubiously Randolph and Dixie watched the child.

“It’s very nice,” commented Dixie hesitantly, swayed by her sister’s enthusiasm.

“You can make the costumes,” Alabama finished, glowing with the glamour of proprietorship. Marauder of vagrant enthusiasm, she piled the loot on whatever was at hand, her sisters and their sweethearts, performances and panoplies. Everything assumed the qualities of improvisation with the constant change in the girl.

Every afternoon Alabama and Randolph rehearsed in the old auditorium till the place grew dim with dusk and the trees outside seemed bright and wet and Véronèse as if it had been raining. It was from there that the first Alabama regiment had left for the Civil War. The narrow balcony sagged on spindle iron pillars and there were holes in the floor. The sloping stairs led down through the city markets: Plymouth Rocks in cages, fish, and icy sawdust from the butcher shop, garlands of Negro shoes and a doorway full of army overcoats. Flushed with excitement, the child lived for the moment in a world of fictitious professional reserves.

“Alabama has inherited her mother’s wonderful coloring,” commented the authorities, watching the gyrating figure.

“I scrubbed my cheeks with a nailbrush,” she yelled back from the stage. That was Alabama’s answer about her complexion; it was not always accurate or adequate, but that was what she said about her skin.

“The child has talent,” they said, “it should be cultivated.”

“I made it up myself,” she answered, not in complete honesty.

When the curtains fell at last on the tableau at the end of the ballet she heard the applause from the stage as a mighty roar of traffic. Two bands played for the ball; the Governor led the grand march. After the dance she stood in the dark passage that led to the dressing room.

“I forgot once,” she whispered expectantly. The still fever of the show went on outside.

“You were perfect,” Randolph laughed.

The girl hung there on his words like a vestment waiting to be put on. Indulgently, Randolph caught the long arms and swept her lips with his as a sailor might search the horizons of the sea for other masts. She wore this outward sign that she was growing up like a decoration for valor—it stayed on her face for days, and recurred whenever she was excited.

“You’re almost grown, aren’t you?” he asked.

Alabama did not concede herself the right to examine those arbitrary points of view, meeting places of the facets of herself envisaged as a woman, conjured up behind his shoulders by the kiss. To project herself therein would have been to violate her confessional of herself. She was afraid; she thought her heart was a person walking. It was. It was everybody walking at once. The show was over.

“Alabama, why won’t you go out on the floor?”

“I’ve never danced. I’m scared.”

“I’ll give you a dollar if you’ll dance with a young man who’s waiting.”

“All right, but s’pose I fall down or trip him up?”

Randolph introduced her. They got along quite nicely, except when the man went sideways.

“You are so cute,” her partner said. “I thought you must be from some other place.”

She told him he could come to see her sometime, and a dozen others, and promised to go to the country club with a redhead man who slid over the dance floor as if he were skimming milk. Alabama had never imagined what it would be like to have a date before.

She was sorry when the makeup came off of her face with washing next day. There was only Dixie’s rouge pot to help her masquerading through the engagements she had made.

Sloshing his coffee with the folded
Journal,
the Judge read the account of the Beauty Ball in the morning’s paper. “The gifted Miss Dixie Beggs, oldest daughter of Judge and Mrs. Austin Beggs of this city,” the paper said, “contributed much to the success of the occasion, acting
as impresario to her talented sister, Miss Alabama Beggs, assisted by Mr. Randolph McIntosh. The dance was one of startling beauty and the execution was excellent.”

“If Dixie thinks that she can introduce the manners of a prostitute into my family, she is no daughter of mine. Identified in print with a moral scapegoat! My children have got to respect my name. It is all they will have in the world,” the Judge exploded.

It was the most Alabama had ever heard her father say about what he exacted of them. Isolated by his unique mind from the hope of any communication with his peers, the Judge lived apart, seeking only a vague and gentle amusement from his associates, asking only a fair respect for his reserve.

So Randolph came in the afternoon to say good-bye.

The swing creaked, the Dorothy Perkins browned in the dust and sun. Alabama sat on the steps watering the lawn with a hot rubber hose. The nozzle leaked lugubriously over her dress. She was sad about Randolph; she had hoped some occasion would present itself for kissing him again. Anyway, she told herself, she would try to remember that other time for years.

Her sister’s eyes followed the man’s hands as if she expected the path of his fingers to lead her to the ends of the earth.

“Maybe you’ll come back when you’ve got your divorce,” Alabama heard Dixie say in a truncated voice. The shape of Randolph’s eyes was heavy with finality against the roses. His distinct voice carried clear and detached to Alabama.

“Dixie,” he said, “you taught me how to use my knife and fork and how to dance and choose my suits, and I wouldn’t come back to your father’s house if I’d left my Jesus. Nothing is good enough for him.”

Sure enough, he never did. Alabama had learned from the past that something unpleasant was bound to happen whenever the Saviour made his appearance in the dialogue. The savor of her first kiss was gone with the hope of its repetition.

The bright polish on Dixie’s nails turned yellow and deposits of neglect shone through the red. She gave up her job on the paper and went to work at the bank. Alabama inherited the pink hat and somebody stepped on the bar pin. When Joan got home the room was so untidy that she moved her clothes in with Alabama. Dixie hoarded her money; the only things she bought in a year were the central figures from the “Primavera” and a German lithograph of “September Morn.”

Dixie covered her transom with a block of pasteboard to prevent her father’s knowing that she was sitting up after midnight. Girls came and
went. When Laura spent the night the family was afraid of catching tuberculosis; Paula, gold and effulgent, had a father who had stood a murder trial; Marshall was beautiful and malicious with many enemies and a bad reputation; when Jessie came all the way from New York to visit she sent her stockings to the dry cleaner. There was something immoral about that to Austin Beggs.

“I don’t see why,” he said, “my daughter has to choose her companions from the scum of the earth.”

“Depending on which way you look at it,” protested Millie. “The scum might be a valuable deposit.”

Dixie’s friends read aloud to each other. Alabama sat in the little white rocker and listened, imitating their elegance and cataloguing the polite, bibelotic laughs which they collected from one another.

“She won’t understand,” they reiterated, staring at the girl with liquidated Anglo-Saxon eyes.

“Understand what?” said Alabama.

The winter choked itself in a ruching of girls. Dixie cried whenever a man talked her into giving him a date. In the spring, word came about Randolph’s death.

“I hate being alive,” she screamed in hysterics. “I hate it, I hate it, I hate it! I could have married him and this wouldn’t have happened.”

“Millie, will you call the doctor?”

“Nothing serious, just nervous strain, Judge Beggs. Nothing to worry about,” the doctor said.

“I cannot put up with this emotional nonsense any longer,” Austin said.

When Dixie was better she went to New York to work. She cried when she kissed them all good-bye and went off with a bunch of kiss-me-at-the-gate in her hand. She shared a room with Jessie on Madison Avenue, and looked up everybody from home who had drifted up there. Jessie got her a job with the same insurance company as herself.

“I want to go to New York, Mamma,” said Alabama as they read Dixie’s letters.

“What on earth for?”

“To be my own boss.”

Millie laughed. “Well, never mind,” she said. “Being boss isn’t a question of places. Why can’t you be boss at home?”

Within three months Dixie married up there—a man from Alabama, downstate. They came home on a trip and she cried a lot as if she was sorry for all the rest of the family who had to go on living at home. She changed the furniture about in the old house and bought a buffet
for the dining room. She bought Alabama a Kodak and they took pictures together on the steps of the State Capitol, and under the pecan trees and holding hands on the front steps. She said she wanted Millie to make her a patchwork quilt and to have a rose garden planted around the old house, and for Alabama not to paint her face so much, that she was too young, that in New York the girls didn’t.

“But I am not in New York,” said Alabama. “When I go there, I will, anyway.”

Then Dixie and her husband went away again, out of the Southern doldrums. The day her sister left, Alabama sat on the back porch watching her mother slice the tomatoes for lunch.

“I slice the onions an hour beforehand,” Millie said, “and then I take them out so just the right flavor stays in the salad.”

“Yes’m. Can I have those ends?”

“Don’t you want a whole one?”

“No’m. I love the greenish part.”

Her mother attended her work like a chatelaine ministering to a needy peasant. There was some fine, aristocratic, personal relationship between herself and the tomatoes, dependent on Miss Millie to turn them into a salad. The lids of her mother’s blue eyes rose in weary circumflex as her sweet hands moved in charity through the necessities of her circumstance. Her daughter was gone. Still there was something of Dixie in Alabama—the tempestuousness. She searched the child’s face for family resemblances. And Joan would be coming home.

“Mamma, did you love Dixie very much?”

“Of course. I still do.”

“But she was troublesome.”

“No. She was always in love.”

“Did you love her better than me, for instance?”

“I love you all the same.”

“I will be troublesome, too, if I can’t do as I please.”

“Well, Alabama, all people
are,
about one thing or another. We must not let it influence us.”

“Yes’m.”

Pomegranates in the leathery lacing of their foliage ripened outside the lattice to an exotic décor. The bronze balls of a mournful crape myrtle at the end of the lot split into lavender tarlatan gurgles. Japanese plums splashed heavy sacks of summer on the roof of the chicken yard.