Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (6 page)

“He’s just like a very majestic dog,” she thought of the tall officer beside her, “a hound, a noble hound! I wonder if his ears would meet over his nose.” The man vanished in metaphor.

His face was long, culminating in a point of lugubrious sentimentality at the self-conscious end of his nose. He pulled himself intermittently to pieces, showered himself in fragments above her head. He was obviously at an emotional tension.

“Little lady, do you think you could live on five thousand a year?” he asked benevolently. “To start with,” he added, on second thought.

“I could, but I don’t want to.”

“Then why did you kiss me?”

“I had never kissed a man with a mustache before.”

“That’s hardly a reason——”

“No. But it’s as good a reason as many people have to offer for going into convents.”

“There’s no use in my staying any longer, then,” he said sadly.

“I s’pose not. It’s half past eleven.”

“Alabama, you’re positively indecent. You know what an awful reputation you’ve got and I offer to marry you anyway and——”

“And you’re angry because I won’t make you an honest man.”

The man hid dubiously beneath the impersonality of his uniform.

“You’ll be sorry,” he said unpleasantly.

“I hope so,” Alabama answered. “I like paying for things I do—it makes me feel square with the world.”

“You’re a wild Comanche. Why do you try to pretend you’re so bad and hard?”

“Maybe so—anyway, the day that I’m sorry I’ll write it in the corner of the wedding invitations.”

“I’ll send you a picture, so you won’t forget me.”

“All right—if you want to.”

Alabama slipped on the night latch and turned off the light. She waited in the absolute darkness until her eyes could distinguish the mass of the staircase. “Maybe I ought to have married him, I’ll soon be eighteen,” she tabulated, “and he could have taken good care of me. You’ve got to have some sort of background.” She reached the head of the stairs.

“Alabama,” her mother’s voice called softly, almost indistinguishable from the currents of the darkness, “your father wants to see you in the morning. You’ll have to get up to breakfast.”

Judge Austin Beggs sat over the silver things about the table, finely controlled, coordinated, poised in his cerebral life like a wonderful athlete in the motionless moments between the launchings of his resources.

Addressing Alabama, he overpowered his child.

“I tell you that I will not have my daughter’s name bandied about the street corners.”

“Austin! She’s hardly out of school,” Millie protested.

“All the more reason. What do you know of these officers?”

“P—l—e—a—s—e——”

“Joe Ingham told me his daughter was brought home scandalously intoxicated and she admitted that you had given her the liquor.”

“She didn’t have to drink it—it was a freshman leadout and I filled my nursing bottle with gin.”

“And you forced it on the Ingham girl?”

“I did not! When she saw people laughing, she tried to edge in on
the joke, having none of her own to amuse them with,” Alabama retorted arrogantly.

“You will have to find a way of conducting yourself more circumspectly.”

“Yes, sir. Oh, Daddy! I’m so tired of just sitting on the porch and having dates and watching things rot.”

“It seems to me you have plenty to do without corrupting others.”

“Nothing to do but drink and make love,” she commented privately.

She had a strong sense of her own insignificance; of her life’s slipping by while June bugs covered the moist fruit in the fig trees with the motionless activity of clustering flies upon an open sore. The bareness of the dry Bermuda grass about the pecan trees crawled imperceptibly with tawny caterpillars. The matlike vines dried in the autumn heat and hung like empty locust shells from the burned thickets about the pillars of the house. The sun sagged yellow over the grass plots and bruised itself on the clotted cotton fields. The fertile countryside that grew things in other seasons spread flat from the roads and lay prone in ribbed fans of broken discouragement. Birds sang dissonantly. Not a mule in the fields nor a human being on the sandy roads could have borne the heat between the concave clay banks and the mediant cypress swamps that divided the camp from the town—privates died of sunstroke.

The evening sun buttoned the pink folds of the sky and followed a busload of officers into town, young lieutenants, old lieutenants, free from camp for the evening to seek what explanation of the world war this little Alabama town had to offer. Alabama knew them all with varying degrees of sentimentality.

“Is your wife in town, Captain Farreleigh?” asked a voice in the joggling vehicle. “You seem very high tonight.”

“She’s here—but I’m on my way to see my girl. That’s why I’m happy,” the captain said shortly, whistling to himself.

“Oh.” The especially young lieutenant didn’t know what to say to the captain. It would be about like offering congratulations for a stillborn child he supposed to say to the man, “Isn’t that splendid” or “How nice!” He might say, “Well, Captain, that’ll be very scandalous indeed!”—if he wanted to be court-martialed.

“Well, good luck, I’m going to see mine tomorrow,” he said finally, and further to show that he bore no moral prejudice, he added “good luck.”

“Are you still panhandling in Beggs Street?” asked Farreleigh abruptly.

“Yes,” the lieutenant laughed uncertainly.

The car deposited them in the breathless square, the center of the town. In the vast space enclosed by the low buildings the vehicle seemed as minuscular as a coach in the palace yard of an old print. The arrival of the bus made no impression on the city’s primal sleep. The old rattletrap disgorged its cargo of clicking masculinity and vibrant official restraint into the lap of this invertebrate world.

Captain Farreleigh crossed to the taxi stand.

“Number five Beggs Street,” he said with loud insistence, making sure his words reached the lieutenant, “as fast as you can make it.”

As the car swung off, Farreleigh listened contentedly to the officer’s forced laugh stabbing the night behind him.

“Hello, Alabama!”

“Ho, there, Felix!”

“My name is not Felix.”

“It suits you, though. What is your name?”

“Captain Franklin McPherson Farreleigh.”

“The war’s on my mind, I couldn’t remember.”

“I’ve written a poem about you.”

Alabama took the paper he gave her and held it to the light falling through the slats of the shutters like a staff of music.

“It’s about West Point,” she said disappointed.

“That’s the same thing,” said Farreleigh. “I feel the same way about you.”

“Then the United States Military Academy appreciates the fact that you like its gray eyes. Did you leave the last verse in the taxi or were you keeping the car in case I should shoot?”

“It’s waiting because I thought we could ride. We ought not to go to the club,” he said seriously.

“Felix!” reproved Alabama, “you know I don’t mind people’s jabbering about us. Nobody will notice that we are together—it takes so many soldiers to make a good war.”

She felt sorry for Felix; she was touched that he did not want to compromise her. In a wave of friendship and tenderness. “You mustn’t mind,” she said.

“This time it’s my wife—she’s here,” Farreleigh said crisply, “and she might be there.”

He offered no apology.

Alabama hesitated.

“Well, come on, let’s ride,” she said, at last. “We can dance another Saturday.”

He was a tavern sort of man buckled into his uniform, strapped with the swagger of beef-eating England, buffeted by his incorruptible, insensitive, roistering gallantry. He sang “The Ladies” over and over again as they rode along the horizons of youth and a moonlit war. A southern moon is a sodden moon, and sultry. When it swamps the fields and the rustling sandy roads and the sticky honeysuckle hedges in its sweet stagnation, your fight to hold on to reality is like a protestation against a first waft of ether. He closed his arms about the dry slender body. She smelled of Cherokee roses and harbors at twilight.

“I’m going to get myself transferred,” said Felix impatiently.

“Why?”

“To avoid falling out of aeroplanes and cluttering up roadsides like your other beaux.”

“Who
fell out of an aeroplane?”

“Your friend with the Dachshund face and the mustache, on his way to Atlanta. The mechanic was killed and they’ve got the lieutenant up for court-martial.”

“Fear,” said Alabama as she felt her muscles tighten with a sense of disaster, “is nerves—maybe all emotions are. Anyway, we must hold on to ourselves and not care.

“Oh—how did it happen?” she inquired casually.

Felix shook his head.

“Well, Alabama, I
hope
it was an accident.”

“There isn’t any use worrying about the dog-one,” Alabama extricated herself. “Those people, Felix, who spread their sensibilities for the passage of events live like emotional prostitutes; they pay with a lack of responsibility on the part of others—no Walter Raleighing of the inevitable for me,” she justified.

“You didn’t have the right to lead him on, you know.”

“Well, it’s over now.”

“Over in a hospital ward,” commented Felix, “for the poor mechanic.”

Her high cheekbones carved the moonlight like a scythe in a ripe wheat field. It was hard for a man in the army to censure Alabama.

“And the blond lieutenant who rode with me to town?” Farreleigh went on.

“I’m afraid I can’t explain him away,” she said.

Captain Farreleigh went through the convulsive movements of a drowning man. He grabbed his nose and sank to the floor of the car.

“Heartless,” he said. “Well, I suppose I shall survive.”

“Honor, Duty, Country, and West Point,” Alabama answered dreamily. She laughed. They both laughed. It was very sad.

“Number five Beggs Street,” Captain Farreleigh directed the taximan, “immediately. The house is on fire.”

The war brought men to the town like swarms of benevolent locusts eating away the blight of unmarried women that had overrun the South since its economic decline. There was the little major who stormed about like a Japanese warrior flashing his gold teeth, and an Irish captain with eyes like the Blarney stone and hair like burning peat, and aviation officers, white around their eyes from where their goggles had been with swollen noses from the wind and sun; and men who were better dressed in their uniforms than ever before in their lives communicating their consequent sense of a special occasion; men who smelled of Fitch’s hair tonic from the camp barber and men from Princeton and Yale who smelled of Russian Leather and seemed very used to being alive, and trademark snobs naming things and men who waltzed in spurs and resented the cut-in system. Girls swung from one to another of the many men in the intimate flush of a modern Virginia reel.

Through the summer Alabama collected soldiers’ insignia. By autumn she had a glove box full. No other girl had more and even then she’d lost some. So many dances and rides and so many golden bars and silver bars and bombs and castles and flags and even a serpent to represent them all in her cushioned box. Every night she wore a new one.

Alabama quarreled with Judge Beggs about her collection of bric-a-brac and Millie laughed and told her daughter to keep all those pins; that they were pretty.

It turned as cold as it ever gets in that country. That is to say, the holiness of creation misted the lonesome green things outside; the moon glowed and sputtered nebulous as pearls in the making; the night picked itself a white rose. In spite of the haze and the clouds in the air, Alabama waited for her date outside, pendulously tilting the old swing from the past to the future, from dreams to surmises and back again.

A blond lieutenant with one missing insignia mounted the Beggs’ steps. He had not bought himself a substitute because he liked imagining the one he had lost in the battle of Alabama to be irreplaceable. There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention. Green gold under the moon, his hair lay in Cellinian frescoes and fashionable porticoes over his dented brow. Two hollows over his eyes
like the ends of mysterious bolts of fantasy held those expanses of electric blue to the inspiration of his face. The pressure of masculine beauty equilibrated for twenty-two years had made his movements conscious and economized as the steps of a savage transporting a heavy load of rocks on his head. He was thinking to himself that he would never be able to say to a taxi driver “Number five Beggs Street” again without making the ride with the ghost of Captain Farreleigh.

“You’re ready already! Why outdoors?” he called. It was chilly in the mist to be swinging outside.

“Daddy has the blight and I have retired from the field of action.”

“What particular iniquity have you committed?”

“Oh, he seems to feel for one thing, that the army has a right to its epaulettes.”

“Isn’t it nice that parental authority’s going to pieces with everything else?”

“Perfect—I love conventional situations.”

They stood on the frosted porch in the sea of mist quite far away from each other, yet Alabama could have sworn she was touching him, so magnetic were their two pairs of eyes.

“And——?”

“Songs about summer love. I hate this cold weather.”

“And——?”

“Blond men on their way to the country club.”

The clubhouse sprouted inquisitively under the oaks like a squat clump of bulbs piercing the leaves in spring. The car drew up the gravel drive, poking its nose in a round bed of cannas. The ground around the place was as worn and used as the plot before a children’s playhouse. The sagging wire about the tennis court, the peeling drab-green paint of the summerhouse on the first tee, the trickling hydrant, the veranda thick in dust all flavored of the pleasant atmosphere of a natural growth. It is too bad that a bottle of corn liquor exploded in one of the lockers just after the war and burned the place to the ground. So much of the theoretical youth—not just transitory early years, but of the projections and escapes of inadequate people in dramatic times—had wedged itself beneath the low-hung rafters, that the fire destroying this shrine of wartime nostalgias may have been a case of combustion from emotional saturation. No officer could have visited it three times without falling in love, engaging himself to marry and to populate the countryside with little country clubs exactly like it.