Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (5 page)

She couldn’t tell whether Joan was crying or not. Alabama sat polishing white slippers in the upstairs hall. She could see her sister lying on the bed, as if she had laid herself down there and gone off and forgotten to come back, but she didn’t seem to be making a noise.

“Why don’t you want to marry Acton?” she heard the Judge say kindly.

“Oh—I haven’t got any trunk, and it means leaving home, and my clothes are all worn out,” answered Joan evasively.

“I’ll get you a trunk, Joey, and he is well able to give you clothes and a good home and all you will be needing in life.”

The Judge was gentle with Joan. She was less like him than the others; her shyness had made her appear more composed, more disposed to bear with her lot than Alabama or Dixie.

The heat pressed down about the earth inflating the shadows, expanding the door and window ledges till the summer split in a terrific clap of thunder. You could see the trees by the lightning flashes gyrating maniacally and waving their arms about like furies. Alabama knew Joan was afraid of a storm. She crept into her sister’s bed and slipped her brown arm over Joan like a strong bolt over a sagging door. Alabama supposed that Joan had to do the right thing and have the right things; she could see how that might be necessary if a person was like Joan. Everything about Joan had a definite order. Alabama was like that herself sometimes on a Sunday afternoon when there was nobody in the house besides herself and the classic stillness.

She wanted to reassure her sister. She wanted to say, “And, Joey, if you ever want to know about the japonicas and the daisy fields it will be all right that you have forgotten because I will be able to tell you about how it felt to be feeling that way that you cannot quite
remember—that will be for the time when something happens years from now that reminds you of now.”

“Get out of my bed,” said Joan abruptly.

Alabama wandered sadly about, in and out through the pale acetylene flashes.

“Mamma, Joey’s scared.”

“Well, do you want to lie here by me, dear?”

“I’m
not scared; I just can’t sleep. But I’ll lie there, please, if I may.”

The Judge often sat reading Fielding. He closed his book over his thumb to mark the end of the evening.

“What are they doing at the Catholic Church?” the Judge said. “Is Harlan a Catholic?”

“No, I believe not.”

“I’m glad she’s going to marry Acton,” he said inscrutably.

Alabama’s father was a wise man. Alone his preference in women had created Millie and the girls. He knew everything, she said to herself. Well, maybe he did—if knowing is paring your perceptions to fit into the visible portion of life’s mosaic, he did. If knowledge is having an attitude toward the things we have never experienced and preserving an agnosticism toward those we have, he did.

“I’m not glad,” Alabama said decisively. “Harlan’s hair goes up like a Spanish king. I’d rather Joey married
him.”

“People can’t live off the hair of Spanish kings,” her father answered.

Acton telegraphed that he would arrive at the end of the week and how happy he was.

Harlan and Joan rocked in the swing, jerking and creaking the chain and scraping their feet over the worn gray paint and snipping the trailers off the morning glories.

“This porch is always the coolest, sweetest place,” said Harlan.

“That’s the honeysuckle and star jasmine you smell,” said Joan.

“No,” said Millie, “it’s the cut hay across the way, and my aromatic geraniums.”

“Oh, Miss Millie, I hate to leave.”

“You’ll be back.”

“No, not any more.”

“I’m very sorry, Harlan——” Millie kissed him on the cheek. “You’re just a baby,” she said, “to care. There’ll be others.”

“Mamma, that smell is the pear trees,” Joan said softly.

“It’s my perfume,” said Alabama impatiently, “and it cost six dollars an ounce.”

*   *   *

From Mobile, Harlan sent Joan a bucket of crabs for Acton’s supper. They crawled about the kitchen and scurried under the stove and Millie dropped their live green backs into a pot of boiling water one by one.

Everybody ate them except Joan.

“They’re too clumsy,” she said.

“They must have arrived in the animal kingdom just about where we have in mechanical development. They don’t work any better than tanks,” said the Judge.

“They eat dead men,” said Joan.

“Joey, is that necessary at table?”

“They do, though,” Millie corroborated distastefully.

“I believe I could make one,” said Alabama, “if I had the material.”

“Well, Mr. Acton, did you have a nice trip?”

Joan’s trousseau filled the house—blue taffeta dresses and a black and white check, and a shell-pink satin, a waist of turquoise blue and black suede shoes.

Brown and yellow silk and lace and black and white and a self-important suit and sachet pads of rose filled the new trunk.

“I don’t want it that way,” she sobbed. “My bust is too big.”

“It’s very becoming and will be so useful in a city.”

“You must come to visit me,” Joan said to her friends. “I want you all to come to see me when you come to Kentucky. Someday we’ll move to New York.”

Joan held excitedly to some intangible protestation against her life’s purpose like a puppy worrying a shoestring. She was irritable and exacting of Acton, as if she had expected him to furnish her store of gladness with the wedding ring.

They put them on the train at midnight. Joan didn’t cry, but she seemed ashamed that she might. Walking back across the railroad tracks, Alabama felt the strength and finality in Austin more than ever. Joan was produced and nourished and disposed of; her father, in parting with his daughter, seemed to have grown the span of Joan’s life older; there was only Alabama’s future now standing between him and his complete possession of his past. She was the only unresolved element that remained of his youth.

Alabama thought of Joan. Being in love, she concluded, is simply a presentation of our pasts to another individual, mostly packages so unwieldy that we can no longer manage the loosened strings alone. Looking for love is like asking for a new point of departure, she thought,
another chance in life. Precociously for her age, she made an addendum: that one person never seeks to share the future with another, so greedy are secret human expectations. Alabama thought a few fine and many skeptical thoughts, but they did not essentially affect her conduct. She was at seventeen a philosophical gourmand of possibilities, having sucked on the bones of frustration thrown off from her family’s repasts without repletion. But there was much of her father in her that spoke for itself and judged.

From him, she wondered why that brisk important sense of being a contributory factor in static moments could not last. Everything else seemed to. With him, she enjoyed the concision and completion of her sister’s transference from one family to another.

It was lonesome at home without Joan. She could almost have been reconstructed by the scraps she’d left behind.

“I always work when I’m sad,” her mother said.

“I don’t see how you learned to sew so well.”

“By sewing for you children.”

“Anyway, won’t you please let me have this dress without sleeves at all, and the roses up here on my shoulder?”

“All right, if you want. My hands are so rough nowadays, they stick in the silk and I don’t sew so well as I did.”

“It’s perfectly beautiful, though. It’s better on me than it ever was on Joan.”

Alabama pulled out the full, flowing silk to see how it would blow in a breeze, how it would have looked in a museum on the “Venus de Milo.”

“If I could just stay this way till I got to the dance,” she thought, “it would be pretty enough. But I will all come to pieces long before then.”

“Alabama, what
are
you thinking about?”

“About fun.”

“That’s a good subject matter.”

“And about how wonderful she is,” teased Austin. Privy to the small vanities of his family, these things so absent in himself amused him in his children. “She’s always looking in the glass at herself.”

“Daddy! I am not!” She knew, though, that she looked more frequently than her satisfaction in her appearance justified in the hope of finding something more than she expected.

Her eyes trailed in embarrassment over the vacant lot next door that lay like a primrose dump through the windows. The vermilion hibiscus curved five brazen shields against the sun; the altheas drooped in faded
purple canopies against the barn, the South phrased itself in engraved invitation—to a party without an address.

“Millie, you oughtn’t to let her get so sunburned if she’s going to wear that kind of clothes.”

“She’s only a child yet, Austin.”

Joan’s old pink was finished for the dance. Miss Millie hooked up the back. It was too hot to stay inside. One side of her hair was flattened by the sweat on her neck before she had finished the other. Millie brought her a cold lemonade. The powder dried in rings around her nose. They went down to the porch. Alabama seated herself in the swing. It had become almost a musical instrument to her; by jiggling the chains she could make it play a lively tune or somnolently protest the passage of a boring date. She’d been ready so long that she wouldn’t be any more by the time they got here. Why didn’t they come for her, or telephone? Why didn’t something happen? Ten o’clock sounded on a neighbor’s clock.

“If they don’t come on, it’ll be too late to go,” she said carelessly, pretending she didn’t care whether she missed the dance or not.

Spasmodic unobtrusive cries broke the stillness of the summer night. From far off down the street the cry of a paperboy floated nearer on the heat.

“Wuxtry! Wuxtry! Yad—y—add—vo—tize.”

The cries swelled from one direction to another, rose and fell like answering chants in a cathedral.

“What’s happened, boy?”

“I don’t know, Ma’am.”

“Here, boy! Gimme a paper!”

“Isn’t it awful, Daddy! What does it mean?”

“It may mean a war for us.”

“But they were warned not to sail on the
Lusitania
,” Millie said.

Austin threw back his head impatiently.

“They can’t do that,” he said, “they can’t warn neutral nations.”

The automobile loaded with boys drew up at the curb. A long, shrill whistle sounded from the dark; none of the boys got out of the car.

“You will not leave this house until they come inside for you,” the Judge said severely.

He seemed very fine and serious under the hall light—as serious as the war they might have. Alabama was ashamed for her friends as she compared them with her father. One of the boys got out and opened the door; she and her father could call it a compromise.

“War! There’s going to be a war!” she thought.

Excitement stretched her heart and lifted her feet so high that she floated over the steps to the waiting automobile.

“There’s gonna be a war,” she said.

“Then the dance ought to be good tonight,” her escort answered.

All night long Alabama thought about the war. Things would disintegrate to new excitements. With adolescent Nietzscheanism, she already planned to escape on the world’s reversals from the sense of suffocation that seemed to her to be eclipsing her family, her sisters, and mother. She, she told herself, would move brightly along high places and stop to trespass and admire, and if the fine was a heavy one—well, there was no good in saving up beforehand to pay it. Full of these presumptuous resolves, she promised herself that if, in the future, her soul should come starving and crying for bread it should eat the stone she might have to offer without complaint or remorse. Relentlessly she convinced herself that the only thing of any significance was to take what she wanted when she could. She did her best.

III

“She’s the wildest one of the Beggs, but she’s a thoroughbred,” people said.

Alabama knew everything they said about her—there were so many boys who wanted to “protect” her that she couldn’t escape knowing. She leaned back in the swing visualizing herself in her present position.

“Thoroughbred!” she thought, “meaning that I never let them down on the dramatic possibilities of a scene—I give a damned good show.”