Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (7 page)

Alabama and the lieutenant lingered beside the door.

“I’m going to lay a tablet to the scene of our first meeting,” he said.

Taking out his knife he carved in the doorpost:

“David,” the legend read, “David, David, Knight, Knight, Knight, and Miss Alabama Nobody.”

“Egotist,” she protested.

“I love this place,” he said. “Let’s sit outside awhile.”

“Why? The dance only lasts until twelve.”

“Can’t you trust me for three minutes or so?”

“I do trust you. That’s why I want to go inside.” She was a little angry about the names. David had told her about how famous he was going to be many times before.

Dancing with David, he smelled like new goods. Being close to him with her face in the space between his ear and his stiff army collar was like being initiated into the subterranean reserves of a fine fabric store exuding the delicacy of cambrics and linen and luxury bound in bales. She was jealous of his pale aloofness. When she saw him leave the dance floor with other girls, the resentment she felt was not against any blending of his personality with theirs, but against his leading others than herself into those cooler detached regions which he inhabited alone.

He took her home and they sat together before the grate fire in a still suspension of externals. The flames glittered in his teeth and lit his face with transcendental qualities. His features danced before her eyes with the steady elusiveness of a celluloid target on a shooting-gallery spray. She searched her relations with her father for advice about being clever; there, she found nothing relative to human charm. Being in love, none of her personal aphorisms were of the slightest help.

Alabama had grown tall and thin in the last few years; her head was blonder for its extra distance from the earth. Her legs stretched long and thin as prehistoric drawings before her; her hands felt poignant and heavy as if David’s eyes lay a weight over her wrists. She knew her face glowed in the firelight like a confectioner’s brewing, an advertisement of a pretty girl drinking a strawberry sundae in June. She wondered if David knew how conceited she was.

“And so you love blond men?”

“Yes.” Alabama had a way of talking under pressure as if the words she said were some unexpected encumbrance she found in her mouth and must rid herself of before she could communicate.

He verified himself in the mirror—pale hair like eighteenth-century moonlight and eyes like grottoes, the blue grotto, the green grotto,
stalactites and malachites hanging about the dark pupil—as if he had taken an inventory of himself before leaving and was pleased to find himself complete.

The back of his head was firm and mossy and the curve of his cheek a sunny spreading meadow. His hands across her shoulders fit like the warm hollows in a pillow.

“Say ‘dear,’ ” he said.

“No.”

“You love me. Why won’t you?”

“I never say anything to anybody. Don’t talk.”

“Why won’t you talk to me?”

“It spoils things. Tell me you love me.”

“Oh—I love you. Do you love me?”

So much she loved the man, so close and closer she felt herself that he became distorted in her vision, like pressing her nose upon a mirror and gazing into her own eyes. She felt the lines of his neck and his chipped profile like segments of the wind blowing about her consciousness. She felt the essence of herself pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion. Neither falling nor breaking, the stream spins finer. She felt herself very small and ecstatic. Alabama was in love.

She crawled into the friendly cave of his ear. The area inside was gray and ghostly classic as she stared about the deep trenches of the cerebellum. There was not a growth nor a flowery substance to break those smooth convolutions, just the puffy rise of sleek gray matter. “I’ve got to see the front lines,” Alabama said to herself. The lumpy mounds rose wet above her head and she set out following the creases. Before long she was lost. Like a mystic maze, the folds and ridges rose in desolation; there was nothing to indicate one way from another. She stumbled on and finally reached the medulla oblongata. Vast tortuous indentations led her round and round. Hysterically, she began to run. David, distracted by a tickling sensation at the head of his spine, lifted his lips from hers.

“I’ll see your father,” he said, “about when we can be married.”

Judge Beggs rocked himself back and forth from his toes to his heels, sifting values.

“Um—m—m—well, I suppose so, if you think you can take care of her.”

“I’m sure of it, sir. There’s a little money in the family—and my earning capacity. It will be enough.”

David thought doubtfully to himself that there wasn’t much money
—perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand between his mother and his grandmother, and he wanted to live in New York and be an artist. Perhaps his family wouldn’t help. Well, anyway, they were engaged. He had to have Alabama, anyway, and money—well once he had dreamed of a troop of Confederate soldiers who wrapped their bleeding feet in Rebel banknotes to keep them off the snow. David, in his dream, had been there when they found that they did not feel sorry about using up the worthless money after they had lost the war.

Spring came and shattered its opalescent orioles in wreaths of daffodils. Kiss-me-at-the-gate clung to its angular branches and the old yards were covered with a child’s version of flowers: snowdrops and
Primula veris,
pussywillow and calendula. David and Alabama kicked over the oak leaves from the stumpy roots in the woods and picked white violets. They went on Sundays to the vaudeville and sat in the back of the theater so they could hold hands unobserved. They learned to sing “My Sweetie” and “Baby” and sat in a box at
Hitchy-Koo
and gazed at each other soberly through the chorus of “How Can You Tell?” The spring rains soaked the heavens till the clouds slid open and summer flooded the South with sweat and heat waves. Alabama dressed in pink and pale linen and she and David sat together under the paddles of ceiling fans whipping the summer to consequence. Outside the wide doors of the country club they pressed their bodies against the cosmos, the gibberish of jazz, the black heat from the greens in the hollow like people making an imprint for a cast of humanity. They swam in the moonlight that varnished the land like a honey-coating and David swore and cursed the collars of his uniforms and rode all night to the rifle range rather than give up his hours after supper with Alabama. They broke the beat of the universe to measures of their own conception and mesmerized themselves with its precious thumping.

The air turned opaque over the singed grass slopes, and the sand in the bunkers flew up dry as gunpowder under a niblick. Tangles of goldenrod shredded the sun; the splendid summer lay ground into powder over the hard clay roads. Moving day came and the first day of school spiced the mornings—and one summer ended with another fall.

When David left for the port of embarkation, he wrote Alabama letters about New York. Maybe, after all, she would go to New York and marry.

“City of glittering hypotheses,” wrote David ecstatically, “chaff from a fairy mill, suspended in penetrating blue! Humanity clings to the streets like flies upon a treacle stream. The tops of the buildings shine like crowns of gold-leaf kings in conference—and oh, my dear, you are my
princess and I’d like to keep you shut forever in an ivory tower for my private delectation.”

The third time he wrote that about the princess, Alabama asked him not to mention the tower again.

She thought of David Knight at night and went to the vaudeville with the dog-faced aviation officer till the war was over. It ended one night with the flash of a message across the vaudeville curtain. There had been a war, but now there were two more acts of the show.

David was sent back to Alabama for demobilization. He told Alabama about the girl in the Hotel Astor the night he had been so drunk.

“Oh, God!” she said to herself. “Well, I can’t help it.” She thought of the dead mechanic, of Felix, of the faithful dog-lieutenant. She hadn’t been too good herself.

She said to David that it didn’t matter: that she believed that one person should only be faithful to another when they felt it. She said it was probably her fault for not making him care more.

As soon as David could make the arrangements, he sent for her. The Judge gave her the trip north for a wedding present; she quarreled with her mother about her wedding clothes.

“I don’t want it that way. I want it to drop off the shoulders.”

“Alabama, it’s as near as I can get it. How can it stay up with nothing to hold it?”

“Aw, Mamma, you can fix it.”

Millie laughed, a pleased sad laugh, and indulgent.

“My children think I can accomplish the impossible,” she said, complacently.

Alabama left her mother a note in her bureau drawer the day she went away:

My dearest Mamma:

I have not been as you would have wanted me but I love you with all my heart and I will think of you every day. I hate leaving you alone with all your children gone. Don’t forget me.

Alabama

The Judge put her on the train.

“Good-bye, daughter.”

He seemed very handsome and abstract to Alabama. She was afraid to cry; her father was so proud. Joan had been afraid, too, to cry.

“Good-bye, Daddy.”

“Good-bye, Baby.”

The train pulled Alabama out of the shadow-drenched land of her youth.

The Judge and Millie sat on the familiar porch alone. Millie picked nervously at a palmetto fan; the Judge spat occasionally through the vines.

“Don’t you think we’d better get a smaller house?”

“Millie, I’ve lived here eighteen years and I’m not going to change my habits of life at my age.”

“There are no screens in this house and the pipes freeze every winter. It’s so far from your office, Austin.”

“It suits me, and I’m going to stay.”

The old empty swing creaked faintly in the breeze that springs up from the gulf every night. Children’s voices floated past from the street corner where they played some vindictive trick on time under the arc light. The Judge and Millie silently rocked the paintless porch chairs. Uncrossing his feet from the banisters, Austin rose to close the shutters for the night. It was his house at last.

“Well,” he said, “this night next year you’ll probably be a widow.”

“Pshaw!” said Millie. “You’ve been saying that for thirty years.”

The sweet pastels of Millie’s face faded in distress. The lines between her nose and mouth drooped like the cords of a flag at half-mast.

“Your mother was just the same,” she said, reproachfully, “always saying she was going to die and she lived to be ninety-two.”

“Well, she did die, didn’t she, at last?” the Judge chuckled.

He turned out the lights in his pleasant house and they went upstairs, two old people alone. The moon waddled about the tin roof and bounced awkwardly over Millie’s windowsill. The Judge lay reading Hegel for half an hour or so and fell asleep. His deeply balanced snoring through the long night reassured Millie that this was not the end of life although Alabama’s room was dark and Joan was gone and the board for Dixie’s transom was long thrown away with the trash and her only boy lay in the cemetery in a little grave beside the common grave of Ethelinda and Mason Cuthbert Beggs. Millie didn’t think anything much about personal things. She just lived from day to day; and Austin didn’t think anything at all about them because he lived from one century to another.

It was awful, though, for the family to lose Alabama, because she was the last to go and that meant their lives would be different with her away. . . .

Alabama lay thinking in room number twenty-one-o-nine of the Biltmore Hotel that her life would be different with her parents so far away.
David David Knight Knight Knight, for instance, couldn’t possibly make her put out her light till she got good and ready. No power on earth could make her do anything, she thought frightened, any more, except herself.

David was thinking that he didn’t mind the light, that Alabama was his bride and that he had just bought her that detective story with the last actual cash they had in the world, though she didn’t know it. It was a good detective story about money and Monte Carlo and love. Alabama looked very lovely herself as she lay there reading, he thought.