SHE was a spirited-looking young woman, with dark curly hair cropped and parted on the side, a short oval face with straight eyebrows, and a large curved mouth. A round white collar rose from the neck of her tightly buttoned black basque, and round white cuffs set off lazy hands with dimples in them, lying at ease in the folds of her flounced skirt which gathered around to a bustle. She sat thus, forever in the pose of being photographed, a motionless image in her dark walnut frame with silver oak leaves in the corners, her smiling gray eyes following one about the room. It was a reckless indifferent smile, rather disturbing to her nieces Maria and Miranda. Quite often they wondered why every older person who looked at the picture said, “How lovely”; and why everyone who had known her thought her so beautiful and charming.
There was a kind of faded merriment in the background, with its vase of flowers and draped velvet curtains, the kind of vase and the kind of curtains no one would have any more. The clothes were not even romantic looking, but merely most terribly out of fashion, and the whole affair was associated, in the minds of the little girls, with dead things: the smell of Grandmother’s medicated cigarettes and her furniture that smelled of beeswax, and her old-fashioned perfume, Orange Flower. The woman in the picture had been Aunt Amy, but she was only a ghost in a frame, and a sad, pretty story from old times. She had been beautiful, much loved, unhappy, and she had died young.
Maria and Miranda, aged twelve and eight years, knew they were young, though they felt they had lived a long time. They had lived not only their own years; but their memories, it seemed to them, began years before they were born, in the lives of the grownups around them, old people above forty, most of them, who had a way of insisting that they too had been young once. It was hard to believe.
Their father was Aunt Amy’s brother Harry. She had been his favorite sister. He sometimes glanced at the photograph and said, “It’s not very good. Her hair and her smile were her chief beauties, and they aren’t shown at all. She was much slimmer than that, too. There were never any fat women in the family, thank God.”
When they heard their father say things like that, Maria and Miranda simply wondered, without criticism, what he meant. Their grandmother was thin as a match; the pictures of their mother, long since dead, proved her to have been a candlewick, almost. Dashing young ladies, who turned out to be, to Miranda’s astonishment, merely more of Grandmother’s grandchildren, like herself, came visiting from school for the holidays, boasting of their eighteen-inch waists. But how did their father account for great-aunt Eliza, who quite squeezed herself through doors, and who, when seated, was one solid pyramidal monument from floor to neck? What about great-aunt Keziah, in Kentucky? Her husband, great-uncle John Jacob, had refused to allow her to ride his good horses after she had achieved two hundred and twenty pounds. “No,” said great-uncle John Jacob, “my sentiments of chivalry are not dead in my bosom; but neither is my common sense, to say nothing of charity to our faithful dumb friends. And the greatest of these is charity.” It was suggested to great-uncle John Jacob that charity should forbid him to wound great-aunt Keziah’s female vanity by such a comment on her figure. “Female vanity will recover,” said great-uncle John Jacob, callously, “but what about my horses’ backs? And if she had the proper female vanity in the first place, she would never have got into such shape.” Well, great-aunt Keziah was famous for her heft, and wasn’t she in the family? But something seemed to happen to their father’s memory when he thought of the girls he had known in the family of his youth, and he declared steadfastly they had all been, in every generation without exception, as slim as reeds and graceful as sylphs.
This loyalty of their father’s in the face of evidence contrary to his ideal had its springs in family feeling, and a love of legend that he shared with the others. They loved to tell stories, romantic and poetic, or comic with a romantic humor; they did not gild the outward circumstance, it was the feeling that mattered. Their hearts and imaginations were captivated by their past, a past in which worldly considerations had played a very minor role. Their stories were almost always love stories against a bright blank heavenly blue sky.
Photographs, portraits by inept painters who meant earnestly to flatter, and the festival garments folded away in dried herbs and camphor were disappointing when the little girls tried to fit them to the living beings created in their minds by the breathing words of their elders. Grandmother, twice a year compelled in her blood by the change of seasons, would sit nearly all of one day beside old trunks and boxes in the lumber room, unfolding layers of garments and small keepsakes; she spread them out on sheets on the floor around her, crying over certain things, nearly always the same things, looking again at pictures in velvet cases, unwrapping locks of hair and dried flowers, crying gently and easily as if tears were the only pleasure she had left.
If Maria and Miranda were very quiet, and touched nothing until it was offered, they might sit by her at these times, or come and go. There was a tacit understanding that her grief was strictly her own, and must not be noticed or mentioned. The little girls examined the objects, one by one, and did not find them, in themselves, impressive. Such dowdy little wreaths and necklaces, some of them made of pearly shells; such moth-eaten bunches of pink ostrich feathers for the hair; such clumsy big breast pins and bracelets of gold and colored enamel; such silly-looking combs, standing up on tall teeth capped with seed pearls and French paste. Miranda, without knowing why, felt melancholy. It seemed such a pity that these faded things, these yellowed long gloves and misshapen satin slippers, these broad ribbons cracking where they were folded, should have been all those vanished girls had to decorate themselves with. And where were they now, those girls, and the boys in the odd-looking collars? The young men seemed even more unreal than the girls, with their high-buttoned coats, their puffy neckties, their waxed mustaches, their waving thick hair combed carefully over their foreheads. Who could have taken them seriously, looking like that?
No, Maria and Miranda found it impossible to sympathize with those young persons, sitting rather stiffly before the camera, hopelessly out of fashion; but they were drawn and held by the mysterious love of the living, who remembered and cherished these dead. The visible remains were nothing; they were dust, perishable as the flesh; the features stamped on paper and metal were nothing, but their living memory enchanted the little girls. They listened, all ears and eager minds, picking here and there among the floating ends of narrative, patching together as well as they could fragments of tales that were like bits of poetry or music, indeed were associated with the poetry they had heard or read, with music, with the theater.
“Tell me again how Aunt Amy went away when she was married.” “She ran into the gray cold and stepped into the carriage and turned and smiled with her face as pale as death, and called out ‘Good-by, good-by,’ and refused her cloak, and said, ‘Give me a glass of wine.’ And none of us saw her alive again.” “Why wouldn’t she wear her cloak, Cousin Cora?” “Because she was not in love, my dear.” Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, that time will come and take my love away. “Was she really beautiful, Uncle Bill?” “As an angel, my child.” There were golden-haired angels with long blue pleated skirts dancing around the throne of the Blessed Virgin. None of them resembled Aunt Amy in the least, nor the kind of beauty they had been brought up to admire. There were points of beauty by which one was judged severely. First, a beauty must be tall; whatever color the eyes, the hair must be dark, the darker the better; the skin must be pale and smooth. Lightness and swiftness of movement were important points. A beauty must be a good dancer, superb on horseback, with a serene manner, an amiable gaiety tempered with dignity at all hours. Beautiful teeth and hands, of course, and over and above all this, some mysterious crown of enchantment that attracted and held the heart. It was all very exciting and discouraging.
Miranda persisted through her childhood in believing, in spite of her smallness, thinness, her little snubby nose saddled with freckles, her speckled gray eyes and habitual tantrums, that by some miracle she would grow into a tall, cream-colored brunette, like cousin Isabel; she decided always to wear a trailing white satin gown. Maria, born sensible, had no such illusions. “We are going to take after Mamma’s family,” she said. “It’s no use, we are. We’ll never be beautiful, we’ll always have freckles. And you,” she told Miranda, “haven’t even a good disposition.”
Miranda admitted both truth and justice in this unkindness, but still secretly believed that she would one day suddenly receive beauty, as by inheritance, riches laid suddenly in her hands through no deserts of her own. She believed for quite a while that she would one day be like Aunt Amy, not as she appeared in the photograph, but as she was remembered by those who had seen her.
When Cousin Isabel came out in her tight black riding habit, surrounded by young men, and mounted gracefully, drawing her horse up and around so that he pranced learnedly on one spot while the other riders sprang to their saddles in the same sedate flurry, Miranda’s heart would close with such a keen dart of admiration, envy, vicarious pride it was almost painful; but there would always be an elder present to lay a cooling hand upon her emotions. “She rides almost as well as Amy, doesn’t she? But Amy had the pure Spanish style, she could bring out paces in a horse no one else knew he had.” Young namesake Amy, on her way to a dance, would swish through the hall in ruffled white taffeta, glimmering like a moth in the lamplight, carrying her elbows pointed backward stiffly as wings, sliding along as if she were on rollers, in the fashionable walk of her day. She was considered the best dancer at any party, and Maria, sniffing the wave of perfume that followed Amy, would clasp her hands and say, “Oh, I can’t wait to be grown up.” But the elders would agree that the first Amy had been lighter, more smooth and delicate in her waltzing; young Amy would never equal her. Cousin Molly Parrington, far past her youth, indeed she belonged to the generation before Aunt Amy, was a noted charmer. Men who had known her all her life still gathered about her; now that she was happily widowed for the second time there was no doubt that she would yet marry again. But Amy, said the elders, had the same high spirits and wit without boldness, and you really could not say that Molly had ever been discreet. She dyed her hair, and made jokes about it. She had a way of collecting the men around her in a corner, where she told them stories. She was an unnatural mother to her ugly daughter Eva, an old maid past forty while her mother was still the belle of the ball. “Born when I was fifteen, you remember,” Molly would say shamelessly, looking an old beau straight in the eye, both of them remembering that he had been best man at her first wedding when she was past twenty-one. “Everyone said I was like a little girl with her doll.”
Eva, shy and chinless, straining her upper lip over two enormous teeth, would sit in corners watching her mother. She looked hungry, her eyes were strained and tired. She wore her mother’s old clothes, made over, and taught Latin in a Female Seminary. She believed in votes for women, and had traveled about, making speeches. When her mother was not present, Eva bloomed out a little, danced prettily, smiled, showing all her teeth, and was like a dry little plant set out in a gentle rain. Molly was merry about her ugly duckling. “It’s lucky for me my daughter is an old maid. She’s not so apt,” said Molly naughtily, “to make a grandmother of me.” Eva would blush as if she had been slapped.
Eva was a blot, no doubt about it, but the little girls felt she belonged to their everyday world of dull lessons to be learned, stiff shoes to be limbered up, scratchy flannels to be endured in cold weather, measles and disappointed expectations. Their Aunt Amy belonged to the world of poetry. The romance of Uncle Gabriel’s long, unrewarded love for her, her early death, was such a story as one found in old books: unworldly books, but true, such as the Vita Nuova, the Sonnets of Shakespeare and the Wedding Song of Spenser; and poems by Edgar Allan Poe. “Her tantalized spirit now blandly reposes, Forgetting or never regretting its roses. . . .” Their father read that to them, and said, “He was our greatest poet,” and they knew that “our” meant he was Southern. Aunt Amy was real as the pictures in the old Holbein and Dürer books were real. The little girls lay flat on their stomachs and peered into a world of wonder, turning the shabby leaves that fell apart easily, not surprised at the sight of the Mother of God sitting on a hollow log nursing her Child; not doubting either Death or the Devil riding at the stirrups of the grim knight; not questioning the propriety of the stiffly dressed ladies of Sir Thomas More’s household, seated in dignity on the floor, or seeming to be. They missed all the dog and pony shows, and lantern-slide entertainments, but their father took them to see “Hamlet,” and “The Taming of the Shrew,” and “Richard the Third,” and a long sad play with Mary, Queen of Scots, in it. Miranda thought the magnificent lady in black velvet was truly the Queen of Scots, and was pained to learn that the real Queen had died long ago, and not at all on the night she, Miranda, had been present.
The little girls loved the theater, that world of personages taller than human beings, who swept upon the scene and invested it with their presences, their more than human voices, their gestures of gods and goddesses ruling a universe. But there was always a voice recalling other and greater occasions. Grandmother in her youth had heard Jenny Lind, and thought that Nellie Melba was much overrated. Father had seen Bernhardt, and Madame Modjeska was no sort of rival. When Paderewski played for the first time in their city, cousins came from all over the state and went from the grandmother’s house to hear him. The little girls were left out of this great occasion. They shared the excitement of the going away, and shared the beautiful moment of return, when cousins stood about in groups, with coffee cups and glasses in their hands, talking in low voices, awed and happy. The little girls, struck with the sense of a great event, hung about in their nightgowns and listened, until someone noticed and hustled them away from the sweet nimbus of all that glory. One old gentleman, however, had heard Rubinstein frequently. He could not but feel that Rubinstein had reached the final height of musical interpretation, and, for him, Paderewski had been something of an anticlimax. The little girls heard him muttering on, holding up one hand, patting the air as if he were calling for silence. The others looked at him, and listened, without any disturbance of their grave tender mood. They had never heard Rubinstein; they had, one hour since, heard Paderewski, and why should anyone need to recall the past? Miranda, dragged away, half understanding the old gentleman, hated him. She felt that she too had heard Paderewski.
There was then a life beyond a life in this world, as well as in the next; such episodes confirmed for the little girls the nobility of human feeling, the divinity of man’s vision of the unseen, the importance of life and death, the depths of the human heart, the romantic value of tragedy. Cousin Eva, on a certain visit, trying to interest them in the study of Latin, told them the story of John Wilkes Booth, who, handsomely garbed in a long black cloak, had leaped to the stage after assassinating President Lincoln. “Sic semper tyrannis,” he had shouted superbly, in spite of his broken leg. The little girls never doubted that it had happened in just that way, and the moral seemed to be that one should always have Latin, or at least a good classical poetry quotation, to depend upon in great or desperate moments. Cousin Eva reminded them that no one, not even a good Southerner, could possibly approve of John Wilkes Booth’s deed. It was murder, after all. They were to remember that. But Miranda, used to tragedy in books and in family legends—two great-uncles had committed suicide and a remote ancestress had gone mad for love—decided that, without the murder, there would have been no point to dressing up and leaping to the stage shouting in Latin. So how could she disapprove of the deed? It was a fine story. She knew a distantly related old gentleman who had been devoted to the art of Booth, had seen him in a great many plays, but not, alas, at his greatest moment. Miranda regretted this; it would have been so pleasant to have the assassination of Lincoln in the family.
Uncle Gabriel, who had loved Aunt Amy so desperately, still lived somewhere, though Miranda and Maria had never seen him. He had gone away, far away, after her death. He still owned racehorses, and ran them at famous tracks all over the country, and Miranda believed there could not possibly be a more brilliant career. He had married again, quite soon, and had written to Grandmother, asking her to accept his new wife as a daughter in place of Amy. Grandmother had written coldly, accepting, inviting them for a visit, but Uncle Gabriel had somehow never brought his bride home. Harry had visited them in New Orleans, and reported that the second wife was a very good-looking well-bred blonde girl who would undoubtedly be a good wife for Gabriel. Still, Uncle Gabriel’s heart was broken. Faithfully once a year he wrote a letter to someone of the family, sending money for a wreath for Amy’s grave. He had written a poem for her gravestone, and had come home, leaving his second wife in Atlanta, to see that it was carved properly. He could never account for having written this poem; he had certainly never tried to write a single rhyme since leaving school. Yet one day when he had been thinking about Amy, the verse occurred to him, out of the air. Maria and Miranda had seen it, printed in gold on a mourning card. Uncle Gabriel had sent a great number of them to be handed around among the family.
“She lives again who suffered life,
Then suffered death, and now set free
A singing angel, she forgets
The griefs of old mortality.”
“Did she really sing?” Maria asked her father.
“Now what has that to do with it?” he asked. “It’s a poem.”
“I think it’s very pretty,” said Miranda, impressed. Uncle Gabriel was second cousin to her father and Aunt Amy. It brought poetry very near.
“Not so bad for tombstone poetry,” said their father, “but it should be better.”
Uncle Gabriel had waited five years to marry Aunt Amy. She had been ill, her chest was weak; she was engaged twice to other young men and broke her engagements for no reason; and she laughed at the advice of older and kinder-hearted persons who thought it very capricious of her not to return the devotion of such a handsome and romantic young man as Gabriel, her second cousin, too; it was not as if she would be marrying a stranger. Her coldness was said to have driven Gabriel to a wild life and even to drinking. His grandfather was rich and Gabriel was his favorite; they had quarreled over the race horses, and Gabriel had shouted, “By God, I must have something.” As if he had not everything already: youth, health, good looks, the prospect of riches, and a devoted family circle. His grandfather pointed out to him that he was little better than an ingrate, and showed signs of being a wastrel as well. Gabriel said, “You had racehorses, and made a good thing of them.” “I never depended upon them for a livelihood, sir,” said his grandfather.
Gabriel wrote letters about this and many other things to Amy from Saratoga and from Kentucky and from New Orleans, sending her presents, and flowers packed in ice, and telegrams. The presents were amusing, such as a huge cage full of small green lovebirds; or, as an ornament for her hair, a full-petaled enameled rose with paste dewdrops, with an enameled butterfly in brilliant colors suspended quivering on a gold wire above it; but the telegrams always frightened her mother, and the flowers, after a journey by train and then by stage into the country, were much the worse for wear. He would send roses when the rose garden at home was in full bloom. Amy could not help smiling over it, though her mother insisted it was touching and sweet of Gabriel. It must prove to Amy that she was always in his thoughts.
“That’s no place for me,” said Amy, but she had a way of speaking, a tone of voice, which made it impossible to discover what she meant by what she said. It was possible always that she might be serious. And she would not answer questions.
“Amy’s wedding dress,” said the grandmother, unfurling an immense cloak of dove-colored cut velvet, spreading beside it a silvery-gray watered-silk frock, and a small gray velvet toque with a dark red breast of feathers. Cousin Isabel, the beauty, sat with her. They talked to each other, and Miranda could listen if she chose.
“She would not wear white, nor a veil,” said Grandmother. “I couldn’t oppose her, for I had said my daughters should each have exactly the wedding dress they wanted. But Amy surprised me. ‘Now what would I look like in white satin?’ she asked. It’s true she was pale, but she would have been angelic in it, and all of us told her so. ‘I shall wear mourning if I like,’ she said, ‘it is my funeral, you know.’ I reminded her that Lou and your mother had worn white with veils and it would please me to have my daughters all alike in that. Amy said, ‘Lou and Isabel are not like me,’ but I could not persuade her to explain what she meant. One day when she was ill she said, ‘Mammy, I’m not long for this world,’ but not as if she meant it. I told her, ‘You might live as long as anyone, if only you will be sensible.’ ‘That’s the whole trouble,’ said Amy. ‘I feel sorry for Gabriel,’ she told me. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s asking for.’
“I tried to tell her once more,” said the grandmother, “that marriage and children would cure her of everything. ‘All women of our family are delicate when they are young,’ I said. ‘Why, when I was your age no one expected me to live a year. It was called greensickness, and everybody knew there was only one cure.’ ‘If I live for a hundred years and turn green as grass,’ said Amy, ‘I still shan’t want to marry Gabriel.’ So I told her very seriously that if she truly felt that way she must never do it, and Gabriel must be told once for all, and sent away. He would get over it. ‘I have told him, and I have sent him away,’ said Amy. ‘He just doesn’t listen.’ We both laughed at that, and I told her young girls found a hundred ways to deny they wished to be married, and a thousand more to test their power over men, but that she had more than enough of that, and now it was time for her to be entirely sincere and make her decision. As for me,” said the grandmother, “I wished with all my heart to marry your grandfather, and if he had not asked me, I should have asked him most certainly. Amy insisted that she could not imagine wanting to marry anybody. She would be, she said, a nice old maid like Eva Parrington. For even then it was pretty plain that Eva was an old maid, born. Harry said, ‘Oh, Eva—Eva has no chin, that’s her trouble. If you had no chin, Amy, you’d be in the same fix as Eva, no doubt.’ Your Uncle Bill would say, ‘When women haven’t anything else, they’ll take a vote for consolation. A pretty thin bed-fellow,’ said your Uncle Bill. ‘What I really need is a good dancing partner to guide me through life,’ said Amy, ‘that’s the match I’m looking for.’ It was no good trying to talk to her.”
Her brothers remembered her tenderly as a sensible girl. After listening to their comments on her character and ways, Maria decided that they considered her sensible because she asked their advice about her appearance when she was going out to dance. If they found fault in any way, she would change her dress or her hair until they were pleased, and say, “You are an angel not to let your poor sister go out looking like a freak.” But she would not listen to her father, nor to Gabriel. If Gabriel praised the frock she was wearing, she was apt to disappear and come back in another. He loved her long black hair, and once, lifting it up from her pillow when she was ill, said, “I love your hair, Amy, the most beautiful hair in the world.” When he returned on his next visit, he found her with her hair cropped and curled close to her head. He was horrified, as if she had willfully mutilated herself. She would not let it grow again, not even to please her brothers. The photograph hanging on the wall was one she had made at that time to send to Gabriel, who sent it back without a word. This pleased her, and she framed the photograph. There was a thin inky scrawl low in one corner, “To dear brother Harry, who likes my hair cut.”
This was a mischievous reference to a very grave scandal. The little girls used to look at their father, and wonder what would have happened if he had really hit the young man he shot at. The young man was believed to have kissed Aunt Amy, when she was not in the least engaged to him. Uncle Gabriel was supposed to have had a duel with the young man, but Father had got there first. He was a pleasant, everyday sort of father, who held his daughters on his knee if they were prettily dressed and well behaved, and pushed them away if they had not freshly combed hair and nicely scrubbed fingernails. “Go away, you’re disgusting,” he would say, in a matter-of-fact voice. He noticed if their stocking seams were crooked. He caused them to brush their teeth with a revolting mixture of prepared chalk, powdered charcoal and salt. When they behaved stupidly he could not endure the sight of them. They understood dimly that all this was for their own future good; and when they were snivelly with colds, he prescribed delicious hot toddy for them, and saw that it was given them. He was always hoping they might not grow up to be so silly as they seemed to him at any given moment, and he had a disconcerting way of inquiring, “How do you know?” when they forgot and made dogmatic statements in his presence. It always came out embarrassingly that they did not know at all, but were repeating something they had heard. This made conversation with him difficult, for he laid traps and they fell into them, but it became important to them that their father should not believe them to be fools. Well, this very father had gone to Mexico once and stayed there for nearly a year, because he had shot at a man with whom Aunt Amy had flirted at a dance. It had been very wrong of him, because he should have challenged the man to a duel, as Uncle Gabriel had done. Instead, he just took a shot at him, and this was the lowest sort of manners. It had caused great disturbance in the whole community and had almost broken up the affair between Aunt Amy and Uncle Gabriel for good. Uncle Gabriel insisted that the young man had kissed Aunt Amy, and Aunt Amy insisted that the young man had merely paid her a compliment on her hair.
During the Mardi Gras holidays there was to be a big gay fancy-dress ball. Harry was going as a bull-fighter because his sweetheart, Mariana, had a new black lace mantilla and high comb from Mexico. Maria and Miranda had seen a photograph of their mother in this dress, her lovely face without a trace of coquetry looking gravely out from under a tremendous fall of lace from the peak of the comb, a rose tucked firmly over her ear. Amy copied her costume from a small Dresden-china shepherdess which stood on the mantelpiece in the parlor; a careful copy with ribboned hat, gilded crook, very low-laced bodice, short basket skirts, green slippers and all. She wore it with a black half-mask, but it was no disguise. “You would have known it was Amy at any distance,” said Father. Gabriel, six feet three in height as he was, had got himself up to match, and a spectacle he provided in pale blue satin knee breeches and a blond curled wig with a hair ribbon. “He felt a fool, and he looked like one,” said Uncle Bill, “and he behaved like one before the evening was over.”
Everything went beautifully until the party gathered downstairs to leave for the ball. Amy’s father—he must have been born a grandfather, thought Miranda—gave one glance at his daughter, her white ankles shining, bosom deeply exposed, two round spots of paint on her cheeks, and fell into a frenzy of outraged propriety. “It’s disgraceful,” he pronounced, loudly. “No daughter of mine is going go show herself in such a rig-out. It’s bawdy,” he thundered. “Bawdy!”
Amy had taken off her mask to smile at him. “Why, Papa,” she said very sweetly, “what’s wrong with it? Look on the mantelpiece. She’s been there all along, and you were never shocked before.”
“There’s all the difference in the world,” said her father, “all the difference, young lady, and you know it. You go upstairs this minute and pin up that waist in front and let down those skirts to a decent length before you leave this house. And wash your face!”
“I see nothing wrong with it,” said Amy’s mother, firmly, “and you shouldn’t use such language before innocent young girls.” She and Amy sat down with several females of the household to help, and they made short work of the business. In ten minutes Amy returned, face clean, bodice filled in with lace, shepherdess skirt modestly sweeping the carpet behind her.
When Amy appeared from the dressing room for her first dance with Gabriel, the lace was gone from her bodice, her skirts were tucked up more daringly than before, and the spots on her cheeks were like pomegranates. “Now Gabriel, tell me truly, wouldn’t it have been a pity to spoil my costume?” Gabriel, delighted that she had asked his opinion, declared it was perfect. They agreed with kindly tolerance that old people were often tiresome, but one need not upset them by open disobedience: their youth was gone, what had they to live for?
Harry, dancing with Mariana who swung a heavy train around her expertly at every turn of the waltz, began to be uneasy about his sister Amy. She was entirely too popular. He saw young men make beelines across the floor, eyes fixed on those white silk ankles. Some of the young men he did not know at all, others he knew too well and could not approve of for his sister Amy. Gabriel, unhappy in his lyric satin and wig, stood about holding his ribboned crook as though it had sprouted thorns. He hardly danced at all with Amy, he did not enjoy dancing with anyone else, and he was having a thoroughly wretched time of it.
There appeared late, alone, got up as Jean Lafitte, a young Creole gentleman who had, two years before, been for a time engaged to Amy. He came straight to her, with the manner of a happy lover, and said, clearly enough for everyone near by to hear him, “I only came because I knew you were to be here. I only want to dance with you and I shall go again.” Amy, with a face of delight, cried out, “Raymond!” as if to a lover. She had danced with him four times, and had then disappeared from the floor on his arm.
Harry and Mariana, in conventional disguise of romance, irreproachably betrothed, safe in their happiness, were waltzing slowly to their favorite song, the melancholy farewell of the Moorish King on leaving Granada. They sang in whispers to each other, in their uncertain Spanish, a song of love and parting and that sword’s point of grief that makes the heart tender towards all other lost and disinherited creatures: Oh, mansion of love, my earthly paradise. . . that I shall see no more. . . whither flies the poor swallow, weary and homeless, seeking for shelter where no shelter is? I too am far from home without the power to fly. . . . Come to my heart, sweet bird, beloved pilgrim, build your nest near my bed, let me listen to your song, and weep for my lost land of joy. . . .
Into this bliss broke Gabriel. He had thrown away his shepherd’s crook and he was carrying his wig. He wanted to speak to Harry at once, and before Mariana knew what was happening she was sitting beside her mother and the two excited young men were gone. Waiting, disturbed and displeased, she smiled at Amy who waltzed past with a young man in Devil costume, including ill-fitting scarlet cloven hoofs. Almost at once, Harry and Gabriel came back, with serious faces, and Harry darted on the dance floor, returning with Amy. The girls and the chaperones were asked to come at once, they must be taken home. It was all mysterious and sudden, and Harry said to Mariana, “I will tell you what is happening, but not now—”
The grandmother remembered of this disgraceful affair only that Gabriel brought Amy home alone and that Harry came in somewhat later. The other members of the party straggled in at various hours, and the story came out piecemeal. Amy was silent and, her mother discovered later, burning with fever. “I saw at once that something was very wrong. ‘What has happened, Amy?’ ‘Oh, Harry goes about shooting at people at a party,’ she said, sitting down as if she were exhausted. ‘It was on your account, Amy,’ said Gabriel. ‘Oh, no, it was not,’ said Amy. ‘Don’t believe him, Mammy.’ So I said, ‘Now enough of this. Tell me what happened, Amy.’ And Amy said, ‘Mammy, this is it. Raymond came in, and you know I like Raymond, and he is a good dancer. So we danced together, too much, maybe. We went on the gallery for a breath of air, and stood there. He said, “How well your hair looks. I like this new shingled style.’” She glanced at Gabriel. ‘And then another young man came out and said, “I’ve been looking everywhere. This is our dance, isn’t it?” And I went in to dance. And now it seems that Gabriel went out at once and challenged Raymond to a duel about something or other, but Harry doesn’t wait for that. Raymond had already gone out to have his horse brought, I suppose one doesn’t duel in fancy dress,’ she said, looking at Gabriel, who fairly shriveled in his blue satin shepherd’s costume, ‘and Harry simply went out and shot at him. I don’t think that was fair,’ said Amy.”
Her mother agreed that indeed it was not fair; it was not even decent, and she could not imagine what her son Harry thought he was doing. “It isn’t much of a way to defend your sister’s honor,” she said to him afterward. “I didn’t want Gabriel to go fighting duels,” said Harry. “That wouldn’t have helped much, either.”
Gabriel had stood before Amy, leaning over, asking once more the question he had apparently been asking her all the way home. “Did he kiss you, Amy?”
Amy took off her shepherdess hat and pushed her hair back. “Maybe he did,” she answered, “and maybe I wished him to.”
“Amy, you must not say such things,” said her mother. “Answer Gabriel’s question.”
“He hasn’t the right to ask it,” said Amy, but without anger.
“Do you love him, Amy?” asked Gabriel, the sweat standing out on his forehead.
“It doesn’t matter,” answered Amy, leaning back in her chair.
“Oh, it does matter; it matters terribly,” said Gabriel. “You must answer me now.” He took both of her hands and tried to hold them. She drew her hands away firmly and steadily so that he had to let go.
“Let her alone, Gabriel,” said Amy’s mother. “You’d better go now. We are all tired. Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”
She helped Amy to undress, noticing the changed bodice and the shortened skirt. “You shouldn’t have done that, Amy. That was not wise of you. It was better the other way.”
Amy said, “Mammy, I’m sick of this world. I don’t like anything in it. It’s so dull,” she said, and for a moment she looked as if she might weep. She had never been tearful, even as a child, and her mother was alarmed. It was then she discovered that Amy had fever.
“Gabriel is dull, Mother—he sulks,” she said. “I could see him sulking every time I passed. It spoils things,” she said. “Oh, I want to go to sleep.”
Her mother sat looking at her and wondering how it had happened she had brought such a beautiful child into the world. “Her face,” said her mother, “was angelic in sleep.”
Some time during that fevered night, the projected duel between Gabriel and Raymond was halted by the offices of friends on both sides. There remained the open question of Harry’s impulsive shot, which was not so easily settled. Raymond seemed vindictive about that, it was possible he might choose to make trouble. Harry, taking the advice of Gabriel, his brothers and friends, decided that the best way to avoid further scandal was for him to disappear for a while. This being decided upon, the young men returned about daybreak, saddled Harry’s best horse and helped him pack a few things; accompanied by Gabriel and Bill, Harry set out for the border, feeling rather gay and adventurous.
Amy, being wakened by the stirring in the house, found out the plan. Five minutes after they were gone, she came down in her riding dress, had her own horse saddled, and struck out after them. She rode almost every morning; before her parents had time to be uneasy over her prolonged absence, they found her note.
What had threatened to be a tragedy became a rowdy lark. Amy rode to the border, kissed her brother Harry good-by, and rode back again with Bill and Gabriel. It was a three days’ journey, and when they arrived Amy had to be lifted from the saddle. She was really ill by now, but in the gayest of humors. Her mother and father had been prepared to be severe with her, but, at sight of her, their feelings changed. They turned on Bill and Gabriel. “Why did you let her do this?” they asked.
“You know we could not stop her,” said Gabriel helplessly, “and she did enjoy herself so much!”
Amy laughed. “Mammy, it was splendid, the most delightful trip I ever had. And if I am to be the heroine of this novel, why shouldn’t I make the most of it?”
The scandal, Maria and Miranda gathered, had been pretty terrible. Amy simply took to bed and stayed there, and Harry had skipped out blithely to wait until the little affair blew over. The rest of the family had to receive visitors, write letters, go to church, return calls, and bear the whole brunt, as they expressed it. They sat in the twilight of scandal in their little world, holding themselves very rigidly, in a shared tension as if all their nerves began at a common center. This center had received a blow, and family nerves shuddered, even into the farthest reaches of Kentucky. From whence in due time great-great-aunt Sally Rhea addressed a letter to Mifs Amy Rhea. In deep brown ink like dried blood, in a spidery hand adept at archaic symbols and abbreviations, great-great-aunt Sally informed Amy that she was fairly convinced that this calamity was only the forerunner of a series shortly to be visited by the Almighty God upon a race already condemned through its own wickedness, a warning that man’s time was short, and that they must all prepare for the end of the world. For herself, she had long expected it, she was entirely resigned to the prospect of meeting her Maker; and Amy, no less than her wicked brother Harry, must likewise place herself in God’s hands and prepare for the worst. “Oh, my dear unfortunate young relative,” twittered great-great-aunt Sally, “we must in our Extremty join hands and appr before ye Dread Throne of Jdgmnt a United Fmly, if One is Mssg from ye Flock, what will Jesus say?”
Great-great-aunt Sally’s religious career had become comic legend. She had forsaken her Catholic rearing for a young man whose family were Cumberland Presbyterians. Unable to accept their opinions, however, she was converted to the Hard-Shell Baptists, a sect as loathsome to her husband’s family as the Catholic could possibly be. She had spent a life of vicious self-indulgent martyrdom to her faith; as Harry commented: “Religion put claws on Aunt Sally and gave her a post to whet them on.” She had out-argued, out-fought, and out-lived her entire generation, but she did not miss them. She bedeviled the second generation without ceasing, and was beginning hungrily on the third.
Amy, reading this letter, broke into her gay full laugh that always caused everyone around her to laugh too, even before they knew why, and her small green lovebirds in their cage turned and eyed her solemnly. “Imagine drawing a pew in heaven beside Aunt Sally,” she said. “What a prospect.”
“Don’t laugh too soon,” said her father. “Heaven was made to order for Aunt Sally. She’ll be on her own territory there.”
“For my sins,” said Amy, “I must go to heaven with Aunt Sally.”
During the uncomfortable time of Harry’s absence, Amy went on refusing to marry Gabriel. Her mother could hear their voices going on in their endless colloquy, during many long days. One afternoon Gabriel came out, looking very sober and discouraged. He stood looking down at Amy’s mother as she sat sewing, and said, “I think it is all over, I believe now that Amy will never have me.” The grandmother always said afterward, “Never have I pitied anyone as I did poor Gabriel at that moment. But I told him, very firmly, ‘Let her alone, then, she is ill.’” So Gabriel left, and Amy had no word from him for more than a month.
The day after Gabriel was gone, Amy rose looking extremely well, went hunting with her brothers Bill and Stephen, bought a velvet wrap, had her hair shingled and curled again, and wrote long letters to Harry, who was having a most enjoyable exile in Mexico City.
After dancing all night three times in one week, she woke one morning in a hemorrhage. She seemed frightened and asked for the doctor, promising to do whatever he advised. She was quiet for a few days, reading. She asked for Gabriel. No one knew where he was. “You should write him a letter; his mother will send it on.” “Oh, no,” she said. “I miss him coming in with his sour face. Letters are no good.”
Gabriel did come in, only a few days later, with a very sour face and unpleasant news. His grandfather had died, after a day’s illness. On his death bed, in the name of God, being of a sound and disposing mind, he had cut off his favorite grandchild Gabriel with one dollar. “In the name of God, Amy,” said Gabriel, “the old devil has ruined me in one sentence.”
It was the conduct of his immediate family in the matter that had embittered him, he said. They could hardly conceal their satisfaction. They had known and envied Gabriel’s quite just, well-founded expectations. Not one of them offered to make any private settlement. No one even thought of repairing this last-minute act of senile vengeance. Privately they blessed their luck. “I have been cut off with a dollar,” said Gabriel, “and they are all glad of it. I think they feel somehow that this justifies every criticism they ever made against me. They were right about me all along. I am a worthless poor relation,” said Gabriel. “My God, I wish you could see them.”
Amy said, “I wonder how you will ever support a wife, now.”
Gabriel said, “Oh, it isn’t so bad as that. If you would, Amy—”
Amy said, “Gabriel, if we get married now there’ll be just time to be in New Orleans for Mardi Gras. If we wait until after Lent, it may be too late.”
“Why, Amy,” said Gabriel, “how could it ever be too late?”
“You might change your mind,” said Amy. “You know how fickle you are.”
There were two letters in the grandmother’s many packets of letters that Maria and Miranda read after they were grown. One of them was from Amy. It was dated ten days after her marriage.
“Dear Mammy, New Orleans hasn’t changed as much as I have since we saw each other last. I am now a staid old married woman, and Gabriel is very devoted and kind. Footlights won a race for us yesterday, she was the favorite, and it was wonderful. I go to the races every day, and our horses are doing splendidly; I had my choice of Erin Go Bragh or Miss Lucy, and I chose Miss Lucy. She is mine now, she runs like a streak. Gabriel says I made a mistake, Erin Go Bragh will stay better. I think Miss Lucy will stay my time.
“We are having a lovely visit. I’m going to put on a domino and take to the streets with Gabriel sometime during Mardi Gras. I’m tired of watching the show from a balcony. Gabriel says it isn’t safe. He says he’ll take me if I insist, but I doubt it. Mammy, he’s very nice. Don’t worry about me. I have a beautiful black-and-rose-colored velvet gown for the Proteus Ball. Madame, my new mother-in-law, wanted to know if it wasn’t a little dashing. I told her I hoped so or I had been cheated. It is fitted perfectly smooth in the bodice, very low in the shoulders—Papa would not approve—and the skirt is looped with wide silver ribbons between the waist and knees in front, and then it surges around and is looped enormously in the back, with a train just one yard long. I now have an eighteen-inch waist, thanks to Madame Duré. I expect to be so dashing that my mother-in-law will have an attack. She has them quite often. Gabriel sends love. Please take good care of Graylie and Fiddler. I want to ride them again when I come home. We’re going to Saratoga, I don’t know just when. Give everybody my dear dear love. It rains all the time here, of course. . . .
“P.S. Mammy, as soon as I get a minute to myself, I’m going to be terribly homesick. Good-by, my darling Mammy.”
The other was from Amy’s nurse, dated six weeks after Amy’s marriage.
“I cut off the lock of hair because I was sure you would like to have it. And I do not want you to think I was careless, leaving her medicine where she could get it, the doctor has written and explained. It would not have done her any harm except that her heart was weak. She did not know how much she was taking, often she said to me, one more of those little capsules wouldn’t do any harm, and so I told her to be careful and not take anything except what I gave her. She begged me for them sometimes but I would not give her more than the doctor said. I slept during the night because she did not seem to be so sick as all that and the doctor did not order me to sit up with her. Please accept my regrets for your great loss and please do not think that anybody was careless with your dear daughter. She suffered a great deal and now she is at rest. She could not get well but she might have lived longer. Yours respectfully. . . .”
The letters and all the strange keepsakes were packed away and forgotten for a great many years. They seemed to have no place in the world.
During vacation on their grandmother’s farm, Maria and Miranda, who read as naturally and constantly as ponies crop grass, and with much the same kind of pleasure, had by some happy chance laid hold of some forbidden reading matter, brought in and left there with missionary intent, no doubt, by some Protestant cousin. It fell into the right hands if enjoyment had been its end. The reading matter was printed in poor type on spongy paper, and was ornamented with smudgy illustrations all the more exciting to the little girls because they could not make head or tail of them. The stories were about beautiful but unlucky maidens, who for mysterious reasons had been trapped by nuns and priests in dire collusion; they were then “immured” in convents, where they were forced to take the veil—an appalling rite during which the victims shrieked dreadfully—and condemned forever after to most uncomfortable and disorderly existences. They seemed to divide their time between lying chained in dark cells and assisting other nuns to bury throttled infants under stones in moldering rat-infested dungeons.
Immured! It was the word Maria and Miranda had been needing all along to describe their condition at the Convent of the Child Jesus, in New Orleans, where they spent the long winters trying to avoid an education. There were no dungeons at the Child Jesus, and this was only one of numerous marked differences between convent life as Maria and Miranda knew it and the thrilling paperbacked version. It was no good at all trying to fit the stories to life, and they did not even try. They had long since learned to draw the lines between life, which was real and earnest, and the grave was not its goal; poetry, which was true but not real; and stories, or forbidden reading matter, in which things happened as nowhere else, with the most sublime irrelevance and unlikelihood, and one need not turn a hair, because there was not a word of truth in them.
It was true the little girls were hedged and confined, but in a large garden with trees and a grotto; they were locked at night into a long cold dormitory, with all the windows open, and a sister sleeping at either end. Their beds were curtained with muslin, and small night-lamps were so arranged that the sisters could see through the curtains, but the children could not see the sisters. Miranda wondered if they ever slept, or did they sit there all night quietly watching the sleepers through the muslin? She tried to work up a little sinister thrill about this, but she found it impossible to care much what either of the sisters did. They were very dull good-natured women who managed to make the whole dormitory seem dull. All days and all things in the Convent of the Child Jesus were dull, in fact, and Maria and Miranda lived for Saturdays.
No one had even hinted that they should become nuns. On the contrary Miranda felt that the discouraging attitude of Sister Claude and Sister Austin and Sister Ursula towards her expressed ambition to be a nun barely veiled a deeply critical knowledge of her spiritual deficiencies. Still Maria and Miranda had got a fine new word out of their summer reading, and they referred to themselves as “immured.” It gave a romantic glint to what was otherwise a very dull life for them, except for blessed Saturday afternoons during the racing season.
If the nuns were able to assure the family that the deportment and scholastic achievements of Maria and Miranda were at least passable, some cousin or other always showed up smiling, in holiday mood, to take them to the races, where they were given a dollar each to bet on any horse they chose. There were black Saturdays now and then, when Maria and Miranda sat ready, hats in hand, curly hair plastered down and slicked behind their ears, their stiffly pleated navy-blue skirts spread out around them, waiting with their hearts going down slowly into their high-topped laced-up black shoes. They never put on their hats until the last minute, for somehow it would have been too horrible to have their hats on, when, after all, Cousin Henry and Cousin Isabel, or Uncle George and Aunt Polly, were not coming to take them to the races. When no one appeared, and Saturday came and went a sickening waste, they were then given to understand that it was a punishment for bad marks during the week. They never knew until it was too late to avoid the disappointment. It was very wearing.
One Saturday they were sent down to wait in the visitors’ parlor, and there was their father. He had come all the way from Texas to see them. They leaped at sight of him, and then stopped short, suspiciously. Was he going to take them to the races? If so, they were happy to see him.
“Hello,” said father, kissing their cheeks. “Have you been good girls? Your Uncle Gabriel is running a mare at the Crescent City today, so we’ll all go and bet on her. Would you like that?”
Maria put on her hat without a word, but Miranda stood and addressed her father sternly. She had suffered many doubts about this day. “Why didn’t you send word yesterday? I could have been looking forward all this time.”
“We didn’t know,” said father, in his easiest paternal manner, “that you were going to deserve it. Remember Saturday before last?”
Miranda hung her head and put on her hat, with the round elastic under the chin. She remembered too well. She had, in midweek, given way to despair over her arithmetic and had fallen flat on her face on the classroom floor, refusing to rise until she was carried out. The rest of the week had been a series of novel deprivations, and Saturday a day of mourning; secret mourning, for if one mourned too noisily, it simply meant another bad mark against deportment.
“Never mind,” said father, as if it were the smallest possible matter, “today you’re going. Come along now. We’ve barely time.”
These expeditions were all joy, every time, from the moment they stepped into a closed one-horse cab, a treat in itself with its dark, thick upholstery, soaked with strange perfumes and tobacco smoke, until the thrilling moment when they walked into a restaurant under big lights and were given dinner with things to eat they never had at home, much less at the convent. They felt worldly and grown up, each with her glass of water colored pink with claret.
The great crowd was always exciting as if they had never seen it before, with the beautiful, incredibly dressed ladies, all plumes and flowers and paint, and the elegant gentlemen with yellow gloves. The bands played in turn with thundering drums and brasses, and now and then a wild beautiful horse would career around the track with a tiny, monkey-shaped boy on his back, limbering up for his race.
Miranda had a secret personal interest in all this which she knew better than to confide to anyone, even Maria. Least of all to Maria. In ten minutes the whole family would have known. She had lately decided to be a jockey when she grew up. Her father had said one day that she was going to be a little thing all her life, she would never be tall; and this meant, of course, that she would never be a beauty like Aunt Amy, or Cousin Isabel. Her hope of being a beauty died hard, until the notion of being a jockey came suddenly and filled all her thoughts. Quietly, blissfully, at night before she slept, and too often in the daytime when she should have been studying, she planned her career as a jockey. It was dim in detail, but brilliant at the right distance. It seemed too silly to be worried about arithmetic at all, when what she needed for her future was to ride better—much better. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said father, after watching her gallop full tilt down the lane at the farm, on Trixie, the mustang mare. “I can see the sun, moon and stars between you and the saddle every jump.” Spanish style meant that one sat close to the saddle, and did all kinds of things with the knees and reins. Jockeys bounced lightly, their knees almost level with the horse’s back, rising and falling like a rubber ball. Miranda felt she could do that easily. Yes, she would be a jockey, like Tod Sloan, winning every other race at least. Meantime, while she was training, she would keep it a secret, and one day she would ride out, bouncing lightly, with the other jockeys, and win a great race, and surprise everybody, her family most of all.
On that particular Saturday, her idol, the great Tod Sloan, was riding, and he won two races. Miranda longed to bet her dollar on Tod Sloan, but father said, “Not now, honey. Today you must bet on Uncle Gabriel’s horse. Save your dollar for the fourth race, and put it on Miss Lucy. You’ve got a hundred to one shot. Think if she wins.”
Miranda knew well enough that a hundred to one shot was no bet at all. She sulked, the crumpled dollar in her hand grew damp and warm. She could have won three dollars already on Tod Sloan. Maria said virtuously, “It wouldn’t be nice not to bet on Uncle Gabriel. That way, we keep the money in the family.” Miranda put out her under lip at her sister. Maria was too prissy for words. She wrinkled her nose back at Miranda.
They had just turned their dollar over to the bookmaker for the fourth race when a vast bulging man with a red face and immense tan ragged mustaches fading into gray hailed them from a lower level of the grandstand, over the heads of the crowd, “Hey, there, Harry?” Father said, “Bless my soul, there’s Gabriel.” He motioned to the man, who came pushing his way heavily up the shallow steps. Maria and Miranda stared, first at him, then at each other. “Can that be our Uncle Gabriel?” their eyes asked. “Is that Aunt Amy’s handsome romantic beau? Is that the man who wrote the poem about our Aunt Amy?” Oh, what did grown-up people mean when they talked, anyway?
He was a shabby fat man with bloodshot blue eyes, sad beaten eyes, and a big melancholy laugh, like a groan. He towered over them shouting to their father, “Well, for God’s sake, Harry, it’s been a coon’s age. You ought to come out and look ’em over. You look just like yourself, Harry, how are you?”
The band struck up “Over the River” and Uncle Gabriel shouted louder. “Come on, let’s get out of this. What are you doing up here with the pikers?”
“Can’t,” shouted Father. “Brought my little girls. Here they are.”
Uncle Gabriel’s bleared eyes beamed blindly upon them. “Fine looking set, Harry,” he bellowed, “pretty as pictures, how old are they?”
“Ten and fourteen now,” said Father; “awkward ages. Nest of vipers,” he boasted, “perfect batch of serpent’s teeth. Can’t do a thing with ’em.” He fluffed up Miranda’s hair, pretending to tousle it.
“Pretty as pictures,” bawled Uncle Gabriel, “but rolled into one they don’t come up to Amy, do they?”
“No, they don’t,” admitted their father at the top of his voice, “but they’re only half-baked.” Over the river, over the river, moaned the band, my sweetheart’s waiting for me.
“I’ve got to get back now,” yelled Uncle Gabriel. The little girls felt quite deaf and confused. “Got the God-damnedest jockey in the world, Harry, just my luck. Ought to tie him on. Fell off Fiddler yesterday, just plain fell off on his tail—Remember Amy’s mare, Miss Lucy? Well, this is her namesake, Miss Lucy IV. None of ’em ever came up to the first one, though. Stay right where you are, I’ll be back.”
Maria spoke up boldly. “Uncle Gabriel, tell Miss Lucy we’re betting on her.” Uncle Gabriel bent down and it looked as if there were tears in his swollen eyes. “God bless your sweet heart,” he bellowed, “I’ll tell her.” He plunged down through the crowd again, his fat back bowed slightly in his loose clothes, his thick neck rolling over his collar.
Miranda and Maria, disheartened by the odds, by their first sight of their romantic Uncle Gabriel, whose language was so coarse, sat listlessly without watching, their chances missed, their dollars gone, their hearts sore. They didn’t even move until their father leaned over and hauled them up. “Watch your horse,” he said, in a quick warning voice, “watch Miss Lucy come home.”
They stood up, scrambled to their feet on the bench, every vein in them suddenly beating so violently they could hardly focus their eyes, and saw a thin little mahogany-colored streak flash by the judges’ stand, only a neck ahead, but their Miss Lucy, oh, their darling, their lovely—oh, Miss Lucy, their Uncle Gabriel’s Miss Lucy, had won, had won. They leaped up and down screaming and clapping their hands, their hats falling back on their shoulders, their hair flying wild. Whoa, you heifer, squalled the band with snorting brasses, and the crowd broke into a long roar like the falling of the walls of Jericho.
The little girls sat down, feeling quite dizzy, while their father tried to pull their hats straight, and taking out his handkerchief held it to Miranda’s face, saying very gently, “Here, blow your nose,” and he dried her eyes while he was about it. He stood up then and shook them out of their daze. He was smiling with deep laughing wrinkles around his eyes, and spoke to them as if they were grown young ladies he was squiring around.
“Let’s go out and pay our respects to Miss Lucy,” he said. “She’s the star of the day.”
The horses were coming in, looking as if their hides had been drenched and rubbed with soap, their ribs heaving, their nostrils flaring and closing. The jockeys sat bowed and relaxed, their faces calm, moving a little at the waist with the movement of their horses. Miranda noted this for future use; that was the way you came in from a race, easy and quiet, whether you had won or lost. Miss Lucy came last, and a little handful of winners applauded her and cheered the jockey. He smiled and lifted his whip, his eyes and shriveled brown face perfectly serene. Miss Lucy was bleeding at the nose, two thick red rivulets were stiffening her tender mouth and chin, the round velvet chin that Miranda thought the nicest kind of chin in the world. Her eyes were wild and her knees were trembling, and she snored when she drew her breath.
Miranda stood staring. That was winning, too. Her heart clinched tight; that was winning, for Miss Lucy. So instantly and completely did her heart reject that victory, she did not know when it happened, but she hated it, and was ashamed that she had screamed and shed tears for joy when Miss Lucy, with her bloodied nose and bursting heart had gone past the judges’ stand a neck ahead. She felt empty and sick and held to her father’s hand so hard that he shook her off a little impatiently and said, “What is the matter with you? Don’t be so fidgety.”
Uncle Gabriel was standing there waiting, and he was completely drunk. He watched the mare go in, then leaned against the fence with its white-washed posts and sobbed openly. “She’s got the nosebleed, Harry,” he said. “Had it since yesterday. We thought we had her all fixed up. But she did it, all right. She’s got a heart like a lion. I’m going to breed her, Harry. Her heart’s worth a million dollars, by itself, God bless her.” Tears ran over his brick-colored face and into his straggling mustaches. “If anything happens to her now I’ll blow my brains out. She’s my last hope. She saved my life. I’ve had a run,” he said, groaning into a large handkerchief and mopping his face all over, “I’ve had a run of luck that would break a brass billy goat. God, Harry, let’s go somewhere and have a drink.”
“I must get the children back to school first, Gabriel,” said their father, taking each by a hand.
“No, no, don’t go yet,” said Uncle Gabriel desperately. “Wait here a minute, I want to see the vet and take a look at Miss Lucy, and I’ll be right back. Don’t go, Harry, for God’s sake. I want to talk to you a few minutes.”
Maria and Miranda, watching Uncle Gabriel’s lumbering, unsteady back, were thinking that this was the first time they had ever seen a man that they knew to be drunk. They had seen pictures and read descriptions, and had heard descriptions, so they recognized the symptoms at once. Miranda felt it was an important moment in a great many ways.
“Uncle Gabriel’s a drunkard, isn’t he?” she asked her father, rather proudly.
“Hush, don’t say such things,” said father, with a heavy frown, “or I’ll never bring you here again.” He looked worried and unhappy, and, above all, undecided. The little girls stood stiff with resentment against such obvious injustice. They loosed their hands from his and moved away coldly, standing together in silence. Their father did not notice, watching the place where Uncle Gabriel had disappeared. In a few minutes he came back, still wiping his face, as if there were cobwebs on it, carrying his big black hat. He waved at them from a short distance, calling out in a cheerful way, “She’s going to be all right, Harry. It’s stopped now. Lord, this will be good news for Miss Honey. Come on, Harry, let’s all go home and tell Miss Honey. She deserves some good news.”
Father said, “I’d better take the children back to school first, then we’ll go.”
“No, no,” said Uncle Gabriel, fondly. “I want her to see the girls. She’ll be tickled pink to see them, Harry. Bring ’em along.”
“Is it another race horse we’re going to see?” whispered Miranda in her sister’s ear.
“Don’t be silly,” said Maria. “It’s Uncle Gabriel’s second wife.”
“Let’s find a cab, Harry,” said Uncle Gabriel, “and take your little girls out to cheer up Miss Honey. Both of ’em rolled into one look a lot like Amy, I swear they do. I want Miss Honey to see them. She’s always liked our family, Harry, though of course she’s not what you’d call an expansive kind of woman.”
Maria and Miranda sat facing the driver, and Uncle Gabriel squeezed himself in facing them beside their father. The air became at once bitter and sour with his breathing. He looked sad and poor. His necktie was on crooked and his shirt was rumpled. Father said, “You’re going to see Uncle Gabriel’s second wife, children,” exactly as if they had not heard everything; and to Gabriel, “How is your wife nowadays? It must be twenty years since I saw her last.”
“She’s pretty gloomy, and that’s a fact,” said Uncle Gabriel. “She’s been pretty gloomy for years now, and nothing seems to shake her out of it. She never did care for horses, Harry, if you remember; she hasn’t been near the track three times since we were married. When I think how Amy wouldn’t have missed a race for anything. . . She’s very different from Amy, Harry, a very different kind of woman. As fine a woman as ever lived in her own way, but she hates change and moving around, and she just lives in the boy.”
“Where is Gabe now?” asked father.
“Finishing college,” said Uncle Gabriel; “a smart boy, but awfully like his mother. Awfully like,” he said, in a melancholy way. “She hates being away from him. Just wants to sit down in the same town and wait for him to get through with his education. Well, I’m sorry it can’t be done if that’s what she wants, but God Almighty— And this last run of luck has about got her down. I hope you’ll be able to cheer her up a little, Harry, she needs it.”
The little girls sat watching the streets grow duller and dingier and narrower, and at last the shabbier and shabbier white people gave way to dressed-up Negroes, and then to shabby Negroes, and after a long way the cab stopped before a desolate-looking little hotel in Elysian Fields. Their father helped Maria and Miranda out, told the cabman to wait, and they followed Uncle Gabriel through a dirty damp-smelling patio, down a long gas-lighted hall full of a terrible smell, Miranda couldn’t decide what it was made of but it had a bitter taste even, and up a long staircase with a ragged carpet. Uncle Gabriel pushed open a door without warning, saying, “Come in, here we are.”
A tall pale-faced woman with faded straw-colored hair and pink-rimmed eyelids rose suddenly from a squeaking rocking chair. She wore a stiff blue-and-white-striped shirtwaist and a stiff black skirt of some hard shiny material. Her large knuckled hands rose to her round, neat pompadour at sight of her visitors.
“Honey,” said Uncle Gabriel, with large false heartiness, “you’ll never guess who’s come to see you.” He gave her a clumsy hug. Her face did not change and her eyes rested steadily on the three strangers. “Amy’s brother Harry, Honey, you remember, don’t you?”
“Of course,” said Miss Honey, putting out her hand straight as a paddle, “of course I remember you, Harry.” She did not smile.
“And Amy’s two little nieces,” went on Uncle Gabriel, bringing them forward. They put out their hands limply, and Miss Honey gave each one a slight flip and dropped it. “And we’ve got good news for you,” went on Uncle Gabriel, trying to bolster up the painful situation. “Miss Lucy stepped out and showed ’em today, Honey. We’re rich again, old girl, cheer up.”
Miss Honey turned her long, despairing face towards her visitors. “Sit down,” she said with a heavy sigh, seating herself and motioning towards various rickety chairs. There was a big lumpy bed, with a grayish-white counterpane on it, a marble-topped washstand, grayish coarse lace curtains on strings at the two small windows, a small closed fireplace with a hole in it for a stovepipe, and two trunks, standing at odds as if somebody were just moving in, or just moving out. Everything was dingy and soiled and neat and bare; not a pin out of place.
“We’ll move to the St. Charles tomorrow,” said Uncle Gabriel, as much to Harry as to his wife. “Get your best dresses together, Honey, the long dry spell is over.”
Miss Honey’s nostrils pinched together and she rocked slightly, with her arms folded. “I’ve lived in the St. Charles before, and I’ve lived here before,” she said, in a tight deliberate voice, “and this time I’ll just stay where I am, thank you. I prefer it to moving back here in three months. I’m settled now, I feel at home here,” she told him, glancing at Harry, her pale eyes kindling with blue fire, a stiff white line around her mouth.
The little girls sat trying not to stare, miserably ill at ease. Their grandmother had pronounced Harry’s children to be the most unteachable she had ever seen in her long experience with the young; but they had learned by indirection one thing well—nice people did not carry on quarrels before outsiders. Family quarrels were sacred, to be waged privately in fierce hissing whispers, low choked mutters and growls. If they did yell and stamp, it must be behind closed doors and windows. Uncle Gabriel’s second wife was hopping mad and she looked ready to fly out at Uncle Gabriel any second, with him sitting there like a hound when someone shakes a whip at him.
“She loathes and despises everybody in this room,” thought Miranda, coolly, “and she’s afraid we won’t know it. She needn’t worry, we knew it when we came in.” With all her heart she wanted to go, but her father, though his face was a study, made no move. He seemed to be trying to think of something pleasant to say. Maria, feeling guilty, though she couldn’t think why, was calculating rapidly, “Why, she’s only Uncle Gabriel’s second wife, and Uncle Gabriel was only married before to Aunt Amy, why, she’s no kin at all, and I’m glad of it.” Sitting back easily, she let her hands fall open in her lap; they would be going in a few minutes, undoubtedly, and they need never come back.
Then father said, “We mustn’t be keeping you, we just dropped in for a few minutes. We wanted to see how you are.”
Miss Honey said nothing, but she made a little gesture with her hands, from the wrist, as if to say, “Well, you see how I am, and now what next?”
“I must take these young ones back to school,” said father, and Uncle Gabriel said stupidly, “Look, Honey, don’t you think they resemble Amy a little? Especially around the eyes, especially Maria, don’t you think, Harry?”
Their father glanced at them in turn. “I really couldn’t say,” he decided, and the little girls saw he was more monstrously embarrassed than ever. He turned to Miss Honey, “I hadn’t seen Gabriel for so many years,” he said, “we thought of getting out for a talk about old times together. You know how it is.”
“Yes, I know,” said Miss Honey, rocking a little, and all that she knew gleamed forth in a pallid, unquenchable hatred and bitterness that seemed enough to bring her long body straight up out of the chair in a fury, “I know,” and she sat staring at the floor. Her mouth shook and straightened. There was a terrible silence, which was broken when the little girls saw their father rise. They got up, too, and it was all they could do to keep from making a dash for the door.
“I must get the young ones back,” said their father. “They’ve had enough excitement for one day. They each won a hundred dollars on Miss Lucy. It was a good race,” he said, in complete wretchedness, as if he simply could not extricate himself from the situation. “Wasn’t it, Gabriel?”
“It was a grand race,” said Gabriel, brokenly, “a grand race.”
Miss Honey stood up and moved a step towards the door. “Do you take them to the races, actually?” she asked, and her lids flickered towards them as if they were loathsome insects, Maria felt.
“If I feel they deserve a little treat, yes,” said their father, in an easy tone but with wrinkled brow.
“I had rather, much rather,” said Miss Honey clearly, “see my son dead at my feet than hanging around a race track.”
The next few moments were rather a blank, but at last they were out of it, going down the stairs, across the patio, with Uncle Gabriel seeing them back into the cab. His face was sagging, the features had fallen as if the flesh had slipped from the bones, and his eyelids were puffed and blue. “Good-by, Harry,” he said soberly. “How long you expect to be here?”
“Starting back tomorrow,” said Harry. “Just dropped in on a little business and to see how the girls were getting along.”
“Well,” said Uncle Gabriel, “I may be dropping into your part of the country one of these days. Good-by, children,” he said, taking their hands one after the other in his big warm paws. “They’re nice children, Harry. I’m glad you won on Miss Lucy,” he said to the little girls, tenderly. “Don’t spend your money foolishly, now. Well, so long, Harry.” As the cab jolted away he stood there fat and sagging, holding up his arm and wagging his hand at them.
“Goodness,” said Maria, in her most grown-up manner, taking her hat off and hanging it over her knee, “I’m glad that’s over.”
“What I want to know is,” said Miranda, “is Uncle Gabriel a real drunkard?”
“Oh, hush,” said their father, sharply, “I’ve got the heartburn.”
There was a respectful pause, as before a public monument. When their father had the heartburn it was time to lay low. The cab rumbled on, back to clean gay streets, with the lights coming on in the early February darkness, past shimmering shop windows, smooth pavements on and on, past beautiful old houses set in deep gardens, on, on back to the dark walls with the heavy-topped trees hanging over them. Miranda sat thinking so hard she forgot and spoke out in her thoughtless way: “I’ve decided I’m not going to be a jockey, after all.” She could as usual have bitten her tongue, but as usual it was too late.
Father cheered up and twinkled at her knowingly, as if that didn’t surprise him in the least. “Well, well,” said he, “so you aren’t going to be a jockey! That’s very sensible of you. I think she ought to be a lion-tamer, don’t you, Maria? That’s a nice, womanly profession.”
Miranda, seeing Maria from the height of her fourteen years suddenly joining with their father to laugh at her, made an instant decision and laughed with them at herself. That was better. Everybody laughed and it was such a relief.
“Where’s my hundred dollars?” asked Maria, anxiously.
“It’s going in the bank,” said their father, “and yours too,” he told Miranda. “That is your nest-egg.”
“Just so they don’t buy my stockings with it,” said Miranda, who had long resented the use of her Christmas money by their grandmother. “I’ve got enough stockings to last me a year.”
“I’d like to buy a racehorse,” said Maria, “but I know it’s not enough.” The limitations of wealth oppressed her. “What could you buy with a hundred dollars?” she asked fretfully.
“Nothing, nothing at all,” said their father, “a hundred dollars is just something you put in the bank.”
Maria and Miranda lost interest. They had won a hundred dollars on a horse race once. It was already in the far past. They began to chatter about something else.
The lay sister opened the door on a long cord, from behind the grille; Maria and Miranda walked in silently to their familiar world of shining bare floors and insipid wholesome food and cold-water washing and regular prayers; their world of poverty, chastity and obedience, of early to bed and early to rise, of sharp little rules and tittle-tattle. Resignation was in their childish faces as they held them up to be kissed.
“Be good girls,” said their father, in the strange serious, rather helpless way he always had when he told them good-by. “Write to your daddy, now, nice long letters,” he said, holding their arms firmly for a moment before letting go for good. Then he disappeared, and the sister swung the door closed after him.
Maria and Miranda went upstairs to the dormitory to wash their faces and hands and slick down their hair again before supper.
Miranda was hungry. “We didn’t have a thing to eat, after all,” she grumbled. “Not even a chocolate nut bar. I think that’s mean. We didn’t even get a quarter to spend,” she said.
“Not a living bite,” said Maria. “Not a nickel.” She poured out cold water into the bowl and rolled up her sleeves.
Another girl about her own age came in and went to a washbowl near another bed. “Where have you been?” she asked. “Did you have a good time?”
“We went to the races, with our father,” said Maria, soaping her hands.
“Our uncle’s horse won,” said Miranda.
“My goodness,” said the other girl, vaguely, “that must have been grand.”
Maria looked at Miranda, who was rolling up her own sleeves. She tried to feel martyred, but it wouldn’t go. “Immured for another week,” she said, her eyes sparkling over the edge of her towel.
Miranda followed the porter down the stuffy aisle of the sleeping-car, where the berths were nearly all made down and the dusty green curtains buttoned, to a seat at the further end. “Now yo’ berth’s ready any time, Miss,” said the porter.
“But I want to sit up a while,” said Miranda. A very thin old lady raised choleric black eyes and fixed upon her a regard of unmixed disapproval. She had two immense front teeth and a receding chin, but she did not lack character. She had piled her luggage around her like a barricade, and she glared at the porter when he picked some of it up to make room for his new passenger. Miranda sat, saying mechanically, “May I?”
“You may, indeed,” said the old lady, for she seemed old in spite of a certain brisk, rustling energy. Her taffeta petticoats creaked like hinges every time she stirred. With ferocious sarcasm, after a half second’s pause, she added, “You may be so good as to get off my hat!”
Miranda rose instantly in horror, and handed to the old lady a wilted contrivance of black horsehair braid and shattered white poppies. “I’m dreadfully sorry,” she stammered, for she had been brought up to treat ferocious old ladies respectfully, and this one seemed capable of spanking her, then and there. “I didn’t dream it was your hat.”
“And whose hat did you dream it might be?” inquired the old lady, baring her teeth and twirling the hat on a forefinger to restore it.
“I didn’t think it was a hat at all,” said Miranda with a touch of hysteria.
“Oh, you didn’t think it was a hat? Where on earth are your eyes, child?” and she proved the nature and function of the object by placing it on her head at a somewhat tipsy angle, though still it did not much resemble a hat. “Now can you see what it is?”
“Yes, oh, yes,” said Miranda, with a meekness she hoped was disarming. She ventured to sit again after a careful inspection of the narrow space she was to occupy.
“Well, well,” said the old lady, “let’s have the porter remove some of these encumbrances,” and she stabbed the bell with a lean sharp forefinger. There followed a flurry of rearrangements, during which they both stood in the aisle, the old lady giving a series of impossible directions to the Negro which he bore philosophically while he disposed of the luggage exactly as he had meant to do. Seated again, the old lady asked in a kindly, authoritative tone, “And what might your name be, child?”
At Miranda’s answer, she blinked somewhat, unfolded her spectacles, straddled them across her high nose competently, and took a good long look at the face beside her.
“If I’d had my spectacles on,” she said, in an astonishingly changed voice, “I might have known. I’m Cousin Eva Parrington,” she said, “Cousin Molly Parrington’s daughter, remember? I knew you when you were a little girl. You were a lively little girl,” she added as if to console her, “and very opinionated. The last thing I heard about you, you were planning to be a tight-rope walker. You were going to play the violin and walk the tight rope at the same time.”
“I must have seen it at the vaudeville show,” said Miranda. “I couldn’t have invented it. Now I’d like to be an air pilot!”
“I used to go to dances with your father,” said Cousin Eva, busy with her own thoughts, “and to big holiday parties at your grandmother’s house, long before you were born. Oh, indeed, yes, a long time before.”
Miranda remembered several things at once. Aunt Amy had threatened to be an old maid like Eva. Oh, Eva, the trouble with her is she has no chin. Eva has given up, and is teaching Latin in a Female Seminary. Eva’s gone out for votes for women, God help her. The nice thing about an ugly daughter is, she’s not apt to make me a grandmother. . . . “They didn’t do you much good, those parties, dear Cousin Eva,” thought Miranda.
“They didn’t do me much good, those parties,” said Cousin Eva aloud as if she were a mind-reader, and Miranda’s head swam for a moment with fear that she had herself spoken aloud. “Or at least, they didn’t serve their purpose, for I never got married; but I enjoyed them, just the same. I had a good time at those parties, even if I wasn’t a belle. And so you are Harry’s child, and here I was quarreling with you. You do remember me, don’t you?”
“Yes,” said Miranda, and thinking that even if Cousin Eva had been really an old maid ten years before, still she couldn’t be much past fifty now, and she looked so withered and tired, so famished and sunken in the cheeks, so old, somehow. Across the abyss separating Cousin Eva from her own youth, Miranda looked with painful premonition. “Oh, must I ever be like that?” She said aloud, “Yes, you used to read Latin to me, and tell me not to bother about the sense, to get the sound in my mind, and it would come easier later.”
“Ah, so I did,” said Cousin Eva, delighted. “So I did. You don’t happen to remember that I once had a beautiful sapphire velvet dress with a train on it?”
“No, I don’t remember that dress,” said Miranda.
“It was an old dress of my mother’s made over and cut down to fit,” said Eva, “and it wasn’t in the least becoming to me, but it was the only really good dress I ever had, and I remember it as if it were yesterday. Blue was never my color.” She sighed with a humorous bitterness. The humor seemed momentary, but the bitterness was a constant state of mind.
Miranda, trying to offer the sympathy of fellow suffering, said, “I know. I’ve had Maria’s dresses made over for me, and they were never right. It was dreadful.”
“Well,” said Cousin Eva, in the tone of one who did not wish to share her unique disappointments. “How is your father? I always liked him. He was one of the finest-looking young men I ever saw. Vain, too, like all his family. He wouldn’t ride any but the best horses he could buy, and I used to say be made them prance and then watched his own shadow. I used to tell this on him at dinner parties, and he hated me for it. I feel pretty certain he hated me.” An overtone of complacency in Cousin Eva’s voice explained better than words that she had her own method of commanding attention and arousing emotion. “How is your father, I asked you, my dear?”
“I haven’t seen him for nearly a year,” answered Miranda, quickly, before Cousin Eva could get ahead again. “I’m going home now to Uncle Gabriel’s funeral; you know, Uncle Gabriel died in Lexington and they have brought him back to be buried beside Aunt Amy.”
“So that’s how we meet,” said Cousin Eva. “Yes, Gabriel drank himself to death at last. I’m going to the funeral, too. I haven’t been home since I went to Mother’s funeral, it must be, let’s see, yes, it will be nine years next July. I’m going to Gabriel’s funeral, though. I wouldn’t miss that. Poor fellow, what a life he had. Pretty soon, they’ll all be gone.”
Miranda said, “We’re left, Cousin Eva,” meaning those of her own generation, the young, and Cousin Eva said, “Pshaw, you’ll live forever, and you won’t bother to come to our funerals.” She didn’t seem to think this was a misfortune, but flung the remark from her like a woman accustomed to saying what she thought.
Miranda sat thinking, “Still, I suppose it would be pleasant if I could say something to make her believe that she and all of them would be lamented, but—but—” With a smile which she hoped would be her denial of Cousin Eva’s cynicism about the younger generation, she said, “You were right about the Latin, Cousin Eva, your reading did help when I began with it. I still study,” she said. “Latin, too.”
“And why shouldn’t you?” asked Cousin Eva, sharply, adding at once mildly, “I’m glad you are going to use your mind a little, child. Don’t let yourself rust away. Your mind outwears all sorts of things you may set your heart upon; you can enjoy it when all other things are taken away.” Miranda was chilled by her melancholy. Cousin Eva went on: “In our part of the country, in my time, we were so provincial—a woman didn’t dare to think or act for herself. The whole world was a little that way,” she said, “but we were the worst, I believe. I suppose you must know how I fought for votes for women when it almost made a pariah of me—I was turned out of my chair at the Seminary, but I’m glad I did it and I would do it again. You young things don’t realize. You’ll live in a better world because we worked for it.”
Miranda knew something of Cousin Eva’s career. She said sincerely, “I think it was brave of you, and I’m glad you did it, too. I loved your courage.”
“It wasn’t just showing off, mind you,” said Cousin Eva, rejecting praise, fretfully. “Any fool can be brave. We were working for something we knew was right, and it turned out that we needed a lot of courage for it. That was all. I didn’t expect to go to jail, but I went three times, and I’d go three times three more if it were necessary. We aren’t voting yet,” she said, “but we will be.”
Miranda did not venture any answer, but she felt convinced that indeed women would be voting soon if nothing fatal happened to Cousin Eva. There was something in her manner which said such things could be left safely to her. Miranda was dimly fired for the cause herself; it seemed heroic and worth suffering for, but discouraging, too, to those who came after: Cousin Eva so plainly had swept the field clear of opportunity.
They were silent for a few minutes, while Cousin Eva rummaged in her handbag, bringing up odds and ends: peppermint drops, eye drops, a packet of needles, three handkerchiefs, a little bottle of violet perfume, a book of addresses, two buttons, one black, one white, and, finally, a packet of headache powders.
“Bring me a glass of water, will you, my dear?” she asked Miranda. She poured the headache powder on her tongue, swallowed the water, and put two peppermints in her mouth.
“So now they’re going to bury Gabriel near Amy,” she said after a while, as if her eased headache had started her on a new train of thought. “Miss Honey would like that, poor dear, if she could know. After listening to stories about Amy for twenty-five years, she must lie alone in her grave in Lexington while Gabriel sneaks off to Texas to make his bed with Amy again. It was a kind of lifelong infidelity, Miranda, and now an eternal infidelity on top of that. He ought to be ashamed of himself.”
“It was Aunt Amy he loved,” said Miranda, wondering what Miss Honey could have been like before her long troubles with Uncle Gabriel. “First, anyway.”
“Oh, that Amy,” said Cousin Eva, her eyes glittering. “Your Aunt Amy was a devil and a mischief-maker, but I loved her dearly. I used to stand up for Amy when her reputation wasn’t worth that.” Her fingers snapped like castanets. “She used to say to me, in that gay soft way she had, ‘Now, Eva, don’t go talking votes for women when the lads ask you to dance. Don’t recite Latin poems to ’em,’ she would say, ‘they got sick of that in school. Dance and say nothing, Eva,’ she would say, her eyes perfectly devilish, ‘and hold your chin up, Eva.’ My chin was my weak point, you see. ‘You’ll never catch a husband if you don’t look out,’ she would say. Then she would laugh and fly away, and where did she fly to?” demanded Cousin Eva, her sharp eyes pinning Miranda down to the bitter facts of the case. “To scandal and to death, nowhere else.”
“She was joking, Cousin Eva,” said Miranda, innocently, “and everybody loved her.”
“Not everybody, by a long shot,” said Cousin Eva in triumph. “She had enemies. If she knew, she pretended she didn’t. If she cared, she never said. You couldn’t make her quarrel. She was sweet as a honeycomb to everybody. Everybody,” she added, “that was the trouble. She went through life like a spoiled darling, doing as she pleased and letting other people suffer for it, and pick up the pieces after her. I never believed for one moment,” said Cousin Eva, putting her mouth close to Miranda’s ear and breathing peppermint hotly into it, “that Amy was an impure woman. Never! But let me tell you, there were plenty who did believe it. There were plenty to pity poor Gabriel for being so completely blinded by her. A great many persons were not surprised when they heard that Gabriel was perfectly miserable all the time, on their honeymoon, in New Orleans. Jealousy. And why not? But I used to say to such persons that, no matter what the appearances were, I had faith in Amy’s virtue. Wild, I said, indiscreet, I said, heartless, I said, but virtuous, I feel certain. But you could hardly blame anyone for being mystified. The way she rose up suddenly from death’s door to marry Gabriel Breaux, after refusing him and treating him like a dog for years, looked odd, to say the least. To say the very least,” she added, after a moment, “odd is a mild word for it. And there was something very mysterious about her death, only six weeks after marriage.”
Miranda roused herself. She felt she knew this part of the story and could set Cousin Eva right about one thing. “She died of a hemorrhage from the lungs,” said Miranda. “She had been ill for five years, don’t you remember?”
Cousin Eva was ready for that. “Ha, that was the story, indeed. The official account, you might say. Oh, yes, I heard that often enough. But did you ever hear about that fellow Raymond somebody-or-other from Calcasieu Parish, almost a stranger, who persuaded Amy to elope with him from a dance one night, and she just ran out into the darkness without even stopping for her cloak, and your poor dear nice father Harry—you weren’t even thought of then—had to run him down to earth and shoot him?”
Miranda leaned back from the advancing flood of speech. “Cousin Eva, my father shot at him, don’t you remember? He didn’t hit him. . . .”
“Well, that’s a pity.”
“. . . and they had only gone out for a breath of air between dances. It was Uncle Gabriel’s jealousy. And my father shot at the man because he thought that was better than letting Uncle Gabriel fight a duel about Aunt Amy. There was nothing in the whole affair except Uncle Gabriel’s jealousy.”
“You poor baby,” said Cousin Eva, and pity gave a light like daggers to her eyes, “you dear innocent, you—do you believe that? How old are you, anyway?”
“Just past eighteen,” said Miranda.
“If you don’t understand what I tell you,” said Cousin Eva portentously, “you will later. Knowledge can’t hurt you. You mustn’t live in a romantic haze about life. You’ll understand when you’re married, at any rate.”
“I’m married now, Cousin Eva,” said Miranda, feeling for almost the first time that it might be an advantage, “nearly a year. I eloped from school.” It seemed very unreal even as she said it, and seemed to have nothing at all to do with the future; still, it was important, it must be declared, it was a situation in life which people seemed to be most exacting about, and the only feeling she could rouse in herself about it was an immense weariness as if it were an illness that she might one day hope to recover from.
“Shameful, shameful,” cried Cousin Eva, genuinely repelled. “If you had been my child I should have brought you home and spanked you.”
Miranda laughed out. Cousin Eva seemed to believe things could be arranged like that. She was so solemn and fierce, so comic and baffled.
“And you must know I should have just gone straight out again, through the nearest window,” she taunted her. “If I went the first time, why not the second?”
“Yes, I suppose so,” said Cousin Eva. “I hope you married rich.”
“Not so very,” said Miranda. “Enough.” As if anyone could have stopped to think of such a thing!
Cousin Eva adjusted her spectacles and sized up Miranda’s dress, her luggage, examined her engagement ring and wedding ring, with her nostrils fairly quivering as if she might smell out wealth on her.
“Well, that’s better than nothing,” said Cousin Eva. “I thank God every day of my life that I have a small income. It’s a Rock of Ages. What would have become of me if I hadn’t a cent of my own? Well, you’ll be able now to do something for your family.”
Miranda remembered what she had always heard about the Parringtons. They were money-hungry, they loved money and nothing else, and when they had got some they kept it. Blood was thinner than water between the Parringtons where money was concerned.
“We’re pretty poor,” said Miranda, stubbornly allying herself with her father’s family instead of her husband’s, “but a rich marriage is no way out,” she said, with the snobbishness of poverty. She was thinking, “You don’t know my branch of the family, dear Cousin Eva, if you think it is.”
“Your branch of the family,” said Cousin Eva, with that terrifying habit she had of lifting phrases out of one’s mind, “has no more practical sense than so many children. Everything for love,” she said, with a face of positive nausea, “that was it. Gabriel would have been rich if his grandfather had not disinherited him, but would Amy be sensible and marry him and make him settle down so the old man would have been pleased with him? No. And what could Gabriel do without money? I wish you could have seen the life he led Miss Honey, one day buying her Paris gowns and the next day pawning her earrings. It just depended on how the horses ran, and they ran worse and worse, and Gabriel drank more and more.”
Miranda did not say, “I saw a little of it.” She was trying to imagine Miss Honey in a Paris gown. She said, “But Uncle Gabriel was so mad about Aunt Amy, there was no question of her not marrying him at last, money or no money.”
Cousin Eva strained her lips tightly over her teeth, let them fly again and leaned over, gripping Miranda’s arm. “What I ask myself, what I ask myself over and over again,” she whispered, “is, what connection did this man Raymond from Calcasieu have with Amy’s sudden marriage to Gabriel, and what did Amy do to make away with herself so soon afterward? For mark my words, child, Amy wasn’t so ill as all that. She’d been flying around for years after the doctors said her lungs were weak. Amy did away with herself to escape some disgrace, some exposure that she faced.”
The beady black eyes glinted; Cousin Eva’s face was quite frightening, so near and so intent. Miranda wanted to say, “Stop. Let her rest. What harm did she ever do you?” but she was timid and unnerved, and deep in her was a horrid fascination with the terrors and the darkness Cousin Eva had conjured up. What was the end of this story?
“She was a bad, wild girl, but I was fond of her to the last,” said Cousin Eva. “She got into trouble somehow, and she couldn’t get out again, and I have every reason to believe she killed herself with the drug they gave her to keep her quiet after a hemorrhage. If she didn’t, what happened, what happened?”
“I don’t know,” said Miranda. “How should I know? She was very beautiful,” she said, as if this explained everything. “Everybody said she was very beautiful.”
“Not everybody,” said Cousin Eva, firmly, shaking her head. “I for one never thought so. They made entirely too much fuss over her. She was good-looking enough, but why did they think she was beautiful? I cannot understand it. She was too thin when she was young, and later I always thought she was too fat, and again in her last year she was altogether too thin. She always got herself up to be looked at, and so people looked, of course. She rode too hard, and she danced too freely, and she talked too much, and you’d have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to notice her. I don’t mean she was loud or vulgar, she wasn’t, but she was too free,” said Cousin Eva. She stopped for breath and put a peppermint in her mouth. Miranda could see Cousin Eva on the platform, making her speeches, stopping to take a peppermint. But why did she hate Aunt Amy so, when Aunt Amy was dead and she alive? Wasn’t being alive enough?
“And her illness wasn’t romantic either,” said Cousin Eva, “though to hear them tell it she faded like a lily. Well, she coughed blood, if that’s romantic. If they had made her take proper care of herself, if she had been nursed sensibly, she might have been alive today. But no, nothing of the kind. She lay wrapped in beautiful shawls on a sofa with flowers around her, eating as she liked or not eating, getting up after a hemorrhage and going out to ride or dance, sleeping with the windows closed; with crowds coming in and out laughing and talking at all hours, and Amy sitting up so her hair wouldn’t get out of curl. And why wouldn’t that sort of thing kill a well person in time? I have almost died twice in my life,” said Cousin Eva, “and both times I was sent to a hospital where I belonged and left there until I came out. And I came out,” she said, her voice deepening to a bugle note, “and I went to work again.”
“Beauty goes, character stays,” said the small voice of axiomatic morality in Miranda’s ear. It was a dreary prospect; why was a strong character so deforming? Miranda felt she truly wanted to be strong, but how could she face it, seeing what it did to one?
“She had a lovely complexion,” said Cousin Eva, “perfectly transparent with a flush on each cheekbone. But it was tuberculosis, and is disease beautiful? And she brought it on herself by drinking lemon and salt to stop her periods when she wanted to go to dances. There was a superstition among young girls about that. They fancied that young men could tell what ailed them by touching their hands, or even by looking at them. As if it mattered? But they were terribly self-conscious and they had immense respect for man’s worldly wisdom in those days. My own notion is that a man couldn’t—but anyway, the whole thing was stupid.”
“I should have thought they’d have stayed at home if they couldn’t manage better than that,” said Miranda, feeling very knowledgeable and modern.
“They didn’t dare. Those parties and dances were their market, a girl couldn’t afford to miss out, there were always rivals waiting to cut the ground from under her. The rivalry—” said Cousin Eva, and her head lifted, she arched like a cavalry horse getting a whiff of the battlefield—“you can’t imagine what the rivalry was like. The way those girls treated each other—nothing was too mean, nothing too false—”
Cousin Eva wrung her hands. “It was just sex,” she said in despair; “their minds dwelt on nothing else. They didn’t call it that, it was all smothered under pretty names, but that’s all it was, sex.” She looked out of the window into the darkness, her sunken cheek near Miranda flushed deeply. She turned back. “I took to the soap box and the platform when I was called upon,” she said proudly, “and I went to jail when it was necessary, and my condition didn’t make any difference. I was booed and jeered and shoved around just as if I had been in perfect health. But it was part of our philosophy not to let our physical handicaps make any difference to our work. You know what I mean,” she said, as if until now it was all mystery. “Well, Amy carried herself with more spirit than the others, and she didn’t seem to be making any sort of fight, but she was simply sex-ridden, like the rest. She behaved as if she hadn’t a rival on earth, and she pretended not to know what marriage was about, but I know better. None of them had, and they didn’t want to have, anything else to think about, and they didn’t really know anything about that, so they simply festered inside—they festered—”
Miranda found herself deliberately watching a long procession of living corpses, festering women stepping gaily towards the charnel house, their corruption concealed under laces and flowers, their dead faces lifted smiling, and thought quite coldly, “Of course it was not like that. This is no more true than what I was told before, it’s every bit as romantic,” and she realized that she was tired of her intense Cousin Eva, she wanted to go to sleep, she wanted to be at home, she wished it were tomorrow and she could see her father and her sister, who were so alive and solid; who would mention her freckles and ask her if she wanted something to eat.
“My mother was not like that,” she said, childishly. “My mother was a perfectly natural woman who liked to cook. I have seen some of her sewing,” she said. “I have read her diary.”
“Your mother was a saint,” said Cousin Eva, automatically.
Miranda sat silent, outraged. “My mother was nothing of the sort,” she wanted to fling in Cousin Eva’s big front teeth. But Cousin Eva had been gathering bitterness until more speech came of it.
“‘Hold your chin up, Eva,’ Amy used to tell me,” she began, doubling up both her fists and shaking them a little. “All my life the whole family bedeviled me about my chin. My entire girlhood was spoiled by it. Can you imagine,” she asked, with a ferocity that seemed much too deep for this one cause, “people who call themselves civilized spoiling life for a young girl because she had one unlucky feature? Of course, you understand perfectly it was all in the very best humor, everybody was very amusing about it, no harm meant—oh, no, no harm at all. That is the hellish thing about it. It is that I can’t forgive,” she cried out, and she twisted her hands together as if they were rags. “Ah, the family,” she said, releasing her breath and sitting back quietly, “the whole hideous institution should be wiped from the face of the earth. It is the root of all human wrongs,” she ended, and relaxed, and her face became calm. She was trembling. Miranda reached out and took Cousin Eva’s hand and held it. The hand fluttered and lay still, and Cousin Eva said, “You’ve not the faintest idea what some of us went through, but I wanted you to hear the other side of the story. And I’m keeping you up when you need your beauty sleep,” she said grimly, stirring herself with an immense rustle of petticoats.
Miranda pulled herself together, feeling limp, and stood up. Cousin Eva put out her hand again, and drew Miranda down to her. “Good night, you dear child,” she said, “to think you’re grown up.” Miranda hesitated, then quite suddenly kissed her Cousin Eva on the cheek. The black eyes shone brightly through water for an instant, and Cousin Eva said with a warm note in her sharp clear orator’s voice, “Tomorrow we’ll be at home again. I’m looking forward to it, aren’t you? Good night.”
Miranda fell asleep while she was getting off her clothes. Instantly it was morning again. She was still trying to close her suitcase when the train pulled into the small station, and there on the platform she saw her father, looking tired and anxious, his hat pulled over his eyes. She rapped on the window to catch his attention, then ran out and threw herself upon him. He said, “Well, here’s my big girl,” as if she were still seven, but his hands on her arms held her off, the tone was forced. There was no welcome for her, and there had not been since she had run away. She could not persuade herself to remember how it would be; between one home-coming and the next her mind refused to accept its own knowledge. Her father looked over her head and said, without surprise, “Why, hello, Eva, I’m glad somebody sent you a telegram.” Miranda, rebuffed again, let her arms fall away again, with the same painful dull jerk of the heart.
“No one in my family,” said Eva, her face framed in the thin black veil she reserved, evidently, for family funerals, “ever sent me a telegram in my life. I had the news from young Keziah who had it from young Gabriel. I suppose Gabe is here?”
“Everybody seems to be here,” said Father. “The house is getting full.”
“I’ll go to the hotel if you like,” said Cousin Eva.
“Damnation, no,” said Father. “I didn’t mean that. You’ll come with us where you belong.”
Skid, the handy man, grabbed the suitcases and started down the rocky village street. “We’ve got the car,” said Father. He took Miranda by the hand, then dropped it again, and reached for Cousin Eva’s elbow.
“I’m perfectly able, thank you,” said Cousin Eva, shying away.
“If you’re so independent now,” said Father, “God help us when you get that vote.”
Cousin Eva pushed back her veil. She was smiling merrily. She liked Harry, she always had liked him, he could tease as much as he liked. She slipped her arm through his. “So it’s all over with poor Gabriel, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes,” said Father, “it’s all over, all right. They’re pegging out pretty regularly now. It will be our turn next, Eva?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” said Eva, recklessly. “It’s good to be back now and then, Harry, even if it is only for funerals. I feel sinfully cheerful.”
“Oh, Gabriel wouldn’t mind, he’d like seeing you cheerful. Gabriel was the cheerfullest cuss I ever saw, when we were young. Life for Gabriel,” said Father, “was just one perpetual picnic.”
“Poor fellow,” said Cousin Eva.
“Poor old Gabriel,” said Father, heavily.
Miranda walked along beside her father, feeling homeless, but not sorry for it. He had not forgiven her, she knew that. When would he? She could not guess, but she felt it would come of itself, without words and without acknowledgment on either side, for by the time it arrived neither of them would need to remember what had caused their division, nor why it had seemed so important. Surely old people cannot hold their grudges forever because the young want to live, too, she thought, in her arrogance, her pride. I will make my own mistakes, not yours; I cannot depend upon you beyond a certain point, why depend at all? There was something more beyond, but this was a first step to take, and she took it, walking in silence beside her elders who were no longer Cousin Eva and Father, since they had forgotten her presence, but had become Eva and Harry, who knew each other well, who were comfortable with each other, being contemporaries on equal terms, who occupied by right their place in this world, at the time of life to which they had arrived by paths familiar to them both. They need not play their roles of daughter, of son, to aged persons who did not understand them; nor of father and elderly female cousin to young persons whom they did not understand. They were precisely themselves; their eyes cleared, their voices relaxed into perfect naturalness, they need not weigh their words or calculate the effect of their manner. “It is I who have no place,” thought Miranda. “Where are my own people and my own time?” She resented, slowly and deeply and in profound silence, the presence of these aliens who lectured and admonished her, who loved her with bitterness and denied her the right to look at the world with her own eyes, who demanded that she accept their version of life and yet could not tell her the truth, not in the smallest thing. “I hate them both,” her most inner and secret mind said plainly, “I will be free of them, I shall not even remember them.”
She sat in the front seat with Skid, the Negro boy. “Come back with us, Miranda,” said Cousin Eva, with the sharp little note of elderly command, “there is plenty of room.”
“No, thank you,” said Miranda, in a firm cold voice. “I’m quite comfortable. Don’t disturb yourself.”
Neither of them noticed her voice or her manner. They sat back and went on talking steadily in their friendly family voices, talking about their dead, their living, their affairs, their prospects, their common memories, interrupting each other, catching each other up on small points of dispute, with a gaiety and freshness which Miranda had not known they were capable of, going over old memories and finding new points of interest in them.
Miranda could not hear the stories above the noisy motor, but she felt she knew them well, or stories like them. She knew too many stories like them, she wanted something new of her own. The language was familiar to them, but not to her, not any more. The house, her father had said, was full. It would be full of cousins, many of them strangers. Would there be any young cousins there, to whom she could talk about things they both knew? She felt a vague distaste for seeing cousins. There were too many of them and her blood rebelled against the ties of blood. She was sick to death of cousins. She did not want any more ties with this house, she was going to leave it, and she was not going back to her husband’s family either. She would have no more bonds that smothered her in love and hatred. She knew now why she had run away to marriage, and she knew that she was going to run away from marriage, and she was not going to stay in any place, with anyone, that threatened to forbid her making her own discoveries, that said “No” to her. She hoped no one had taken her old room, she would like to sleep there once more, she would say good-by there where she had loved sleeping once, sleeping and waking and waiting to be grown, to begin to live. Oh, what is life, she asked herself in desperate seriousness, in those childish unanswerable words, and what shall I do with it? It is something of my own, she thought in a fury of jealous possessiveness, what shall I make of it? She did not know that she asked herself this because all her earliest training had argued that life was a substance, a material to be used, it took shape and direction and meaning only as the possessor guided and worked it; living was a progress of continuous and varied acts of the will directed towards a definite end. She had been assured that there were good and evil ends, one must make a choice. But what was good, and what was evil? I hate love, she thought, as if this were the answer, I hate loving and being loved, I hate it. And her disturbed and seething mind received a shock of comfort from this sudden collapse of an old painful structure of distorted images and misconceptions. “You don’t know anything about it,” said Miranda to herself, with extraordinary clearness as if she were an elder admonishing some younger misguided creature. “You have to find out about it.” But nothing in her prompted her to decide, “I will now do this, I will be that, I will go yonder, I will take a certain road to a certain end.” There are questions to be asked first, she thought, but who will answer them? No one, or there will be too many answers, none of them right. What is the truth, she asked herself as intently as if the question had never been asked, the truth, even about the smallest, the least important of all the things I must find out? and where shall I begin to look for it? Her mind closed stubbornly against remembering, not the past but the legend of the past, other people’s memory of the past, at which she had spent her life peering in wonder like a child at a magic-lantern show. Ah, but there is my own life to come yet, she thought, my own life now and beyond. I don’t want any promises, I won’t have false hopes, I won’t be romantic about myself. I can’t live in their world any longer, she told herself, listening to the voices back of her. Let them tell their stories to each other. Let them go on explaining how things happened. I don’t care. At least I can know the truth about what happens to me, she assured herself silently, making a promise to herself, in her hopefulness, her ignorance.