Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (9 page)

“You see,” went on Alabama at her mother’s look of surprise, “the last time Joan came she borrowed my best suitcase to carry away wet diapers and since then we’ve—well, we haven’t seen her so much.”

“Why shouldn’t she?” the Judge demanded sternly.

“It was my best suitcase,” explained Alabama patiently.

“But the poor little baby,” sighed Miss Millie. “I suppose we can telephone them.”

“You will feel differently about things like that after you have children of your own,” said the Judge.

Alabama wondered suspiciously if her figure showed.

“But I can see how she felt about the suitcase,” continued Millie magnanimously. “Even as a baby, Alabama was particular like that about her own things—never wanted to share them, even then.”

The taxi steamed up the vaporous chute of the station runway.

Alabama didn’t know how to go about asking the Judge to pay the taxi—she hadn’t been absolutely sure of how to go about anything since her marriage had precluded the Judge’s resented direction. She didn’t know what to say when girls postured in front of David hoping to have him sketch them on his shirtfront, or what to do when David raved and ranted and swore that it ruined his talent to have his buttons torn off in the laundry.

“If you children will get these suitcases into the train, I’ll pay the taxi,” said the Judge.

The green hills of Connecticut preached a sedative sermon after the rocking of the gritty train. The gaunt, disciplined smells of New England lawn, the scent of invisible truck gardens bound the air in tight bouquets. Apologetic trees swept the porch, insects creaked in the baking meadows widowed of their crops. There didn’t seem room in the cultivated landscape for the unexpected. If you wanted to hang anybody, reflected Alabama, you’d have to do it in your own backyard. Butterflies opened and shut along the roads like the flash of white in a camera lens. “You couldn’t be a butterfly,” they said. They were silly butterflies, flying about that way and arguing with people about their potentialities.

“We meant to get the grass cut,” began Alabama—“but——”

“It’s much better this way,” finished David. “It’s more picturesque.”

“Well, I like the weeds,” the Judge said amiably.

“They make it smell so sweet in the country,” Miss Millie added. “But aren’t you lonely out here at night?”

“Oh, David’s friends from college come out occasionally and sometimes we go into town.”

Alabama didn’t add how often they went in to New York to waste the extra afternoons sloshing orange juice through bachelor sanctuaries, droning the words to summer behind insoluble locks. They went there ahead, awaiting the passage of that progressive celebration that a few years later followed the boom about New York like the Salvation Army follows Christmas, to absolve themselves in the waters of each other’s unrest.

“Mister,” Tanka greeted them from the steps, “and Missy.”

Tanka was the Japanese butler. They couldn’t have afforded him without borrowing from David’s dealer. He cost money; that was
because he constructed botanical gardens out of cucumbers and floral displays with the butter and made up the money for his flute lessons from the grocery bills. They had tried to do without him till Alabama cut her hand on a can of baked beans and David sprained his painting wrist on the lawn mower.

The Oriental swept the floor in an inclusive rotation of his body, indicating himself as the axis of the earth. Bursting suddenly into a roar of disquieting laughter, he turned to Alabama.

“Missy, kin see you jessy minute—jessy minute, this way, please.”

“He’s going to ask for change,” thought Alabama, uneasily following him to the side porch.

“Look!” said Tanka. With a gesture of negation, he indicated the hammock swung between the columns of the house where two young men lay uproariously asleep with a bottle of gin by their sides.

“Well,” she said hesitantly, “you’d better tell Mister—but not in front of the family, Tanka.”

“Velly careful,” nodded the Jap, making a shushing sound and barring his lips with his fingers.

“Listen, Mamma, I think you’d better come upstairs and rest before dinner,” suggested Alabama. “You must be tired after your trip.”

From the sense that she had nothing whatever to do with herself which radiated from the girl as she descended from her parents’ room, David knew that something was wrong.

“What’s the matter?”

“Matter! There are drunks in the hammock. If Daddy sees
that
there’ll be hell to pay!”

“Send them away.”

“They can’t move.”

“My God! Tanka’ll just have to see that they stay outside until after dinner.”

“Do you think the Judge would understand?”

“I’m afraid so——”

Alabama stared about disconsolately.

“Well—I suppose there comes a moment when people must choose between their contemporaries and their families.”

“Are they in very bad shape?”

“Pretty hopeless. If we send for the ambulance, it would just make a scene,” she said tentatively.

The moiré sheen of the afternoon polished the sterility of the rooms’ colonial picturesqueness and scratched itself on the yellow flowers that
trailed the mantel like featherstitching. It was a priestly light curving in the dips and hollows of a melancholic waltz.

“I don’t see what we can do about it,” they agreed.

Alabama and David stood there anxiously in the quiet till the clang of a spoon on a tin waiter summoned them to dinner.

“I’m glad to see,” said Austin over the beets like roses, “that you have succeeded in taming Alabama a little. She seems to have become a very good housekeeper since her marriage.” The Judge was impressed with the beets.

David thought of his buttons upstairs. They were all off.

“Yes,” he said vaguely.

“David has been working very well out here,” Alabama broke in nervously.

She was about to paint a picture of their domestic perfections when a loud groan from the hammock warned her. Staggering through the dining room door with a visionary air, the young man eyed the gathering. On the whole he was all there; just a little awry—his shirttail was out.

“Good evening,” he said formally.

“I think your friend had better have some dinner,” suggested the baffled Austin.

The friend exploded in foolish laughter.

Miss Millie confusedly inspected Tanka’s flowery architecture. Of course, she
wanted
Alabama to have friends. She had always brought up her children with that in mind, but circumstances were, at times, dubious.

A second disheveled phantom groped through the door; the silence was broken only by squeaky grunts of suppressed hysteria.

“He does that way because he’s been operated on,” said David hastily. The Judge bristled.

“They took out his larynx,” David added in alarm. His eyes wildly sought the protoplasmic face. Luckily, the fellows seemed to be listening to what he was saying.

“One’s mute,” Alabama explained with inspiration.

“Well, I’m glad of that,” answered the Judge enigmatically. His tone was not without hostility. He seemed chiefly relieved that any further conversation was precluded.

“I can’t speak a word,” burst from the ghost unexpectedly. “I’m mute.”

“Well,” thought Alabama, “this is the end.
Now
what can we say?”

Miss Millie was saying that salt air spoiled the table silver. The Judge faced his daughter implacable and reproving. The necessity for saying anything was dispelled by a weird and self-explanatory carmagnole about the table. It was not exactly a dance; it was an interpretive protest against the vertebrate state punctuated by glorious ecstatic paeans of rhythmic backslappings and loud invitations to the Knights to join the party. The Judge and Miss Millie were generously included in the invitation.

“It’s like a frieze, a Greek frieze,” commented Miss Millie distractedly.

“It’s not very edifying,” supplemented the Judge.

Exhausted, the two men wobbled unsteadily to the floor.

“If David could lend us twenty dollars,” gasped the mass, “we were just going on to the roadhouse. Of course, if he can’t we’ll stay a little longer, maybe.”

“Oh,” said David, spellbound.

“Mamma,” said Alabama, “can’t you let us have twenty dollars till we can get to the bank tomorrow?”

“Certainly, my dear—upstairs in my bureau drawer. It’s a pity your friends have to leave; they seem to be having such a good time,” she continued vaguely.

The house settled. The cool chirp of the crickets like the crunching of fresh lettuce purged the living room of dissonance. Frogs wheezed in the meadow where the goldenrod would bloom. The family group yielded itself to the straining of the night lullaby through the boughs of the oak.

“Escaped,” sighed Alabama as they snuggled together in the exotic bed.

“Yes,” said David, “it’s all right.”

There were people in automobiles all along the Boston Post Road thinking everything was going to be all right while they got drunk and ran into fireplugs and trucks and old stone walls. Policemen were too busy thinking everything was going to be all right to arrest them.

It was three o’clock in the morning when the Knights were awakened by a stentorian whispering on the lawn.

An hour passed after David dressed and went down. The noise rose in increasingly uproarious muffles.

“Well, then, I’ll take a drink with you if you’ll try to make a little less noise,” Alabama heard David say as she meticulously put on her clothes. Something was sure to happen; it was better to be looking your best when the authorities arrived. They must be in the kitchen. She stuck her head truculently through the swinging door.

“Now, Alabama,” David greeted her, “I would advise you to keep your nose out of this.” In a husky melodramatic aside he continued confidentially, “This is the most expedient way I could think of——”

Alabama stared, infuriated over the carnage of the kitchen.

“Oh, shut up!” she yelled.

“Now listen, Alabama,” began David.

“It was you who said all the time that we should be so respectable and now look at you!” she accused.

“He’s all right. David’s perfectly all right,” the prostrate men muttered feebly.

“And what if my father comes down now? What’ll
he
have to say about this being all right?” Alabama indicated the wreckage. “What are all those old cans?” she demanded contemptuously.

“Tomato juice. It sobers you up. I’ve just been giving some to the guests,” explained David. “First I give them tomato juice and then I give them gin.”

Alabama snatched at the bottle in David’s hand. “Give me that bottle.” As he fended her off, she slid against the door. To save the noise of a crash in the hall, she precipitated her body heavily into the jamb. The swinging door caught her full in the face. Her nose bled jubilantly as a newly discovered oil well down the front of her dress.

“I’ll see if there’s a beefsteak in the icebox,” proffered David. “Stick it under the sink, Alabama. How long can you hold your breath?”

By the time the kitchen was in some kind of order, the Connecticut dawn drenched the countryside like a firehose. The two men staggered off to sleep at the inn. Alabama and David surveyed her black eyes disconsolately.

“They’ll think I did it,” he said.

“Of course—it won’t make any difference what I say.”

“When they see us together you’d think they’d believe.”

“People always believe the best story.”

The Judge and Miss Millie were down early to breakfast. They waited amidst the soggy mountains of damp bloated cigarette butts while Tanka burnt the bacon in his expectation of trouble. There was hardly a place to sit without sticking to dried rings of gin and orange juice.

Alabama’s head felt as if somebody had been making popcorn in her cranium. She tried to conceal her bruised eyes with heavy coatings of face powder. Her face felt peeled under the mask.

“Good morning,” she said brightly.

The Judge blinked ferociously.

“Alabama,” he said, “about that telephone call to Joan—your mother
and I felt that we’d better make it today. She will be needing help with the baby.”

“Yes, sir.”

Alabama had known this would be their attitude, but she couldn’t prevent a cataclysmic chute of her insides. She had known that no individual can force other people forever to sustain their own versions of that individual’s character—that sooner or later they will stumble across the person’s own conception of themselves.

“Well!” she said defiantly to herself, “families have no right to hold you accountable for what they inculcate before you attain the age of protestation!”

“And since,” the Judge continued, “you and your sister do not seem to be on the best of terms, we thought we would join her alone tomorrow morning.”

Alabama sat silently inspecting the debris of the night.

“I suppose Joan will stuff them with moralities and tales about how hard it is to get along,” she said to herself bitterly, “and neatly polish us off in contrast to herself. We’re sure to come out of this picture black demons, any way you look at it.”

“Understand,” the Judge was saying, “that I am not passing a moral judgment on your personal conduct. You are a grown woman and that is your own affair.”

“I understand,” she said. “You just disapprove, so you’re not going to stand it. If I don’t accept your way of thinking, you’ll leave me to myself. Well, I suppose I have no right to ask you to stay.”

“People who do not subscribe,” answered the Judge, “have no rights.”

The train that carried the Judge and Miss Millie to the city was lumbered with milk cans and the pleasant paraphernalia of summer in transit. Their attitude was one of reluctant disavowal as they said good-bye. They were going south in a few days. They couldn’t come back to the country again. David would be away seeing to his frescoes, and they thought Alabama would be better off at home during his absence. They were glad of David’s success and popularity.

“Don’t be so desolate,” said David. “We’ll see them again.”

“But it will never be the same,” wailed Alabama. “Our rôle will always be discounting the character they think we are from now on.”