Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (4 page)

Cluck,
cluck
, cluck,
cluck!

“That old hen must be laying again.”

“Maybe she’s caught a June bug.”

“The figs aren’t ripe yet.”

A mother called her children from a house across the way. Pigeons cooed in the oak next door. The rhythmic flap of a pounding beefsteak began in a neighbor’s kitchen.

“Mamma, I don’t see why Dixie had to go all the way to New York to marry a man from so near home.”

“He’s a very nice man.”

“But I wouldn’t have married him if I was Dixie. I would have married a New Yorker.”

“Why?” said Millie curiously.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“More conquering,” Millie mocked.

“Yes’m, that’s it.”

A distant trolley ground to a stop on the rusty rails.

“Isn’t that the streetcar stopping? I’ll bet it’s your father.”

II

“And I tell you I will
not
wear it if you fix it that way,” Alabama screeched, pounding her fist on the sewing machine.

“But, dear, it’s the very thing.”

“If it has to be blue serge, it
doesn’t
have to be long as well.”

“When you’re going out with boys, you can’t go back to short dresses.”

“I’m not going out with boys in the daytime—ever,” she said. “I am going to play in the day and go out at night.”

Alabama tilted the mirror and inspected the long gored skirt. She began to cry with impotent rage.

“I won’t have it! I really won’t—how can I run or anything?”

“It’s lovely, isn’t it, Joan?”

“If she were my child, I’d slap her jaw,” said Joan succinctly.

“You would, would you! Well, I’d slap your own jaw.”

“When I was your age I was glad to get anything. My dresses were all made out of Dixie’s old ones. You’re a vixen to be so spoiled,” pursued her sister.

“Joan! Alabama just wants her dress fixed differently.”

“Mamma’s little angel! It’s exactly like she said she wanted it.”

“How could I tell it would look like that?”

“I know what I would do if you were mine,” Joan threatened.

Alabama stood in the special Saturday sun and straightened the sailor collar. She ran her fingers tentatively inside the breast pocket, staring pessimistically at her reflection.

“The feet look as if they were somebody else’s,” she said. “But maybe it’ll be all right.”

“I’ve never heard so much fuss made about a dress,” said Joan. “If I were Mamma I’d make you buy them ready-made.”

“There’s none in the stores that I like. Besides, you have lace on all your things.”

“I pay for it myself.”

Austin’s door slammed.

“Alabama, will you stop that dispute? I am trying to take a nap.”

“Children, your father!” said Millie in dismay.

“Yes, sir, it’s Joan,” shrieked Alabama.

“My Lord! She always has to blame somebody else. If it isn’t me, it’s Mamma or whoever’s near—never herself.”

Alabama thought resentfully of the injustice of a life which had created Joan before herself. Not only that, but had given her sister an unattainable hue of beauty, dark as a black opal. Nothing Alabama ever did could turn her eyes gold and brown or hollow out those dark mysterious sockets from her cheekbones. When you saw Joan directly under a light, she seemed like a ghost of her finest points awaiting inhabitation. Transparent blue halos shone around the edge of her teeth; her hair was smooth to a colorless reflection.

People said Joey was a sweet girl—compared to the others. Being over twenty, Joan had attained her right to the family spotlight. When she heard them planning vaguely for Joan, Alabama hung on her parents’ rare delvings into what she felt was the substance of herself. Hearing little bits of things about the family characteristics that she too must have in her, was like finding she had all five toes when up to the present she had been able to count only four. It was nice to have indications about yourself to go on.

“Millie,” Austin asked anxiously one night, “is Joey going to marry that Acton boy?”

“I don’t know, dear.”

“Well, I don’t think she ought to have gone galavanting about the country visiting his parents if she doesn’t mean business, and she is seeing too much of the Harlan man if she does.”

“I visited Acton’s people from my father’s house. Why did you let her go?”

“I didn’t know about Harlan. There are obligations——”

“Mamma, do you remember your father well?” interrupted Alabama.

“Certainly. He was thrown from a race cart when he was eighty-three years old, in Kentucky.” That her mother’s father had a graphic life of his own to dramatize was promising to Alabama. There was a show to join. Time would take care of that, and she would have a place, inevitably—somewhere to enact the story of her life.

“What about this Harlan?” pursued Austin.

“O, pshaw!” Millie said noncommittally.

“I don’t know. Joey seems very fond of him. He can’t make a living. Acton is well established. I will not have my daughter become a public charge.”

Harlan called every night and sang with Joan the songs she brought with her from Kentucky: “The Time, The Place and The Girl,” “The Girl from the Saskatchewan,” “The Chocolate Soldier,” songs with two-tone lithograph covers of men smoking pipes and princes on a balustrade and worlds of clouds about the moon. He had a serious voice like an organ. He stayed too much to supper. His legs were so long that the rest of him seemed merely a decorative appendage.

Alabama invented dances to show off for Harlan, tapping about the outside edges of the carpet.

“Doesn’t he ever go home?” Austin fretted to Millie on each succeeding visit. “I don’t know what Acton would think. Joan must not be irresponsible.”

Harlan knew how to ingratiate himself personally; it was his status that was unsatisfactory. Marrying him would have meant, for Joan, starting over where the Judge and Millie had started, and Austin didn’t have racehorses to pull her background for her like Millie’s father had had.

“Hello, Alabama, what a pretty bib you’ve got on.” Alabama blushed. She strove to sustain the pleasurable emotion. It was the first time she could remember blushing; another proof of something or other, or that all the old responses were her proper heritage—embarrassment and pride and responsibility for them.

“It’s an apron. I’ve got on a new dress and I was helping fix supper.” She exposed the new blue serge for Harlan’s admiration.

He drew the lanky child across his knee.

Alabama, unwilling to relinquish the discussion of herself, went on hurriedly, “But I have a beautiful dress to wear to the dance, more beautiful than Joan’s even.”

“You are too young to go to a dance. You look such a baby, I’d be
ashamed to kiss you.” Alabama was disappointed at sensing Harlan’s paternal air.

Harlan pulled the pale hair away from her face. There were many geometrical formations and shining knolls and an element of odalisque retrocession about its stillness. Her bones were stern like her father’s, an integrity of muscle structure bound her still to extreme youth.

Austin came in for his paper.

“Alabama, you are too big to sprawl on young men’s laps.”

“But he’s not
my
beau, Daddy!”

“Good evening, Judge.”

The Judge spat contemplatively into the hearth, disciplining his disapproval.

“It makes no difference, you are too old.”

“Will I always be too old?”

Harlan rose to his feet spilling her to the floor. Joan stood in the door.

“Miss Joey Beggs,” he said, “the prettiest girl in town!”

Joan giggled the way people do when, entrenched in an enviable position, they are forced to deprecate their superiority to spare others—as if she had always known she was the prettiest.

Alabama watched them enviously as Harlan held Joey’s coat and took her off possessively. Speculatively she watched her sister change into a more fluctuating, more ingratiating person, as she confided herself to the man. She wished it were herself. There would be her father at the supper table. It was nearly the same; the necessity of being something that you really weren’t was the same. Her father didn’t know what she really was like, she thought.

Supper was fun; there was toast with a taste of charcoal and sometimes chicken, warm, like a breath of the air from beneath a quilt, and Millie and the Judge talking ceremoniously of their household and their children. Family life became a ritual passed through the sieve of Austin’s strong conviction.

“I want some more strawberry jam.”

“It’ll make you sick.”

“Millie, in my opinion, a respectable girl does not engage herself to one man and permit herself to be interested in another.”

“There’s no harm in it. Joan’s a good girl. She is not engaged to Acton.”

Her mother knew that Joan was engaged to Acton because one summer night when it poured with rain and the vines swished and dripped like ladies folding silken skirts about them, and the drains growled and
choked like mournful doves and the gutters ran with foamy mud, Millie had sent Alabama with an umbrella and Alabama had found the two of them clinging together like moist stamps in a pocketbook. Acton said to Millie afterwards that they were going to be married. But Harlan sent roses on Sundays. Lord knows where he got the money to buy so many flowers. He couldn’t ask Joan to marry him, he was so poor.

When the town gardens began to bloom so prettily, Harlan and Joan took Alabama with them on their walks. Alabama, and the big japonicas with leaves like rusting tin, viburnum and verbena and Japanese magnolia petals lying about the lawns like scraps from party dresses, absorbed the quiet communion between them. The presence of the child held them to trivialities. By her person, they held at bay the issue.

“I want one of those bushes when I have a house,” Joan pointed out.

“Joey! I can’t afford it! I’ll grow a beard instead,” expostulated Harlan.

“I love little trees, arborvitae and juniper, and I’m going to have a long walk winding between like featherstitching and a terrace of Clotilde Soupert at the end.” Alabama decided that it didn’t much matter whether her sister was thinking of Acton or Harlan—certainly the garden was to be very nice, for either or neither or both, she amended confusedly.

“O, Lord! Why can’t I make money?” protested Harlan.

Yellow flags like anatomical sketches and pools of lotus flowers, the brown and white batik of snowball bushes, the sudden emotional gush of burning brush and the dead cream of Joey’s eggshell face under her leghorn hat made up that spring. Alabama understood vaguely why Harlan rattled the keys in his pockets where there was no money and walked the streets like a dizzy man traversing a log. Other people had money; he had only enough for roses. If he did without the roses he would have nothing for ages and ages while he saved until Joan was gone or different or lost forever.

When the weather was hot they hired a buggy and drove through the dust to daisy fields like nursery rhymes where dreamy cows saddled with shade nibbled the summer off the white slopes. Alabama stood up behind and brought back the flowers. What she said in this foreign world of restraint and emotion seemed to her especially significant, as a person will imagine himself wittier than usual in an unfamiliar tongue. Joan complained to Millie that Alabama talked too much for her age.

Creaking and swaying like a sail in a swelling gale, the love story breasted July. At last the letter from Acton came. Alabama saw it on the Judge’s mantelpiece.

“And being able to support your daughter in comfort and, I believe, in happiness, I ask your sanction to our marriage.”

Alabama asked to keep it. “To make a family document,” she said.

“No,” said the Judge. He and Millie never kept things.

Alabama’s expectations for her sister envisaged everything except that love might roll on using the bodies of its dead to fill up the craters in the path to its line of action. It took her a long time to learn to think of life unromantically as a long, continuous exposition of isolated events, to think of one emotional experience as preparation to another.

When Joey said “Yes” Alabama felt cheated out of a drama to which she had bought her ticket with her interest. “No show today; the leading lady has cold feet,” she thought.