The Handsome Road (37 page)

“What a beautiful set this is,” she observed, watching the firelight stroke the pot. “It looks like a wedding present.”

“I believe it was.”

“Your mother’s?”

“No, earlier than that. My great-grandmother’s, I think—there’s a monogram on it.”

Eleanor turned the pot to find the initials. “F. D. L.,” she read. “Is that Frances Durham?—I saw a line in the big Bible about her wedding. But Kester!” she broke off sharply.

“What is it?”

“It’s none of my business,” said Eleanor, “but one of your servants has been frightfully careless. Did you know there was a big dent in the side, just over the monogram?”

Kester gave a low chuckle. “We’ve been meaning to do something about that dent for forty years. That’s where a spade struck it when they were digging up the silver after the Civil War.”

“Oh yes,” Eleanor said softly. She smiled as she watched the firelight flashing into the old depression. There was something touching and authentic about such a flaw, like the little irregularities that distinguish handmade lace from machinery imitations. “I can’t tell you how I’m enjoying this!” she exclaimed. “It’s so different from anything I’ve ever seen before. I live in a house in New Orleans that was built nine years ago, and we’re always complaining that it isn’t modern enough.”

“I’ve often thought it would be mighty convenient to live in a new house,” said Kester. “One where the plumbing always works and the attic stairs aren’t in danger of dropping on your head. May I have some coffee, please ma’am?”

She refilled his cup. “If you knew my father,” she continued, “you’d understand what I’m trying to tell you. He’s so entirely of today. It’s the typical American story—a self-made man, so proud of being able to give his children the chances he never had.”

“I think I’d have known even if you hadn’t told me,” Kester said thoughtfully, “that you had a streak of power. You’re like your father, aren’t you?”

“People say I am. I’ve been working for him a long time—during the summers while I was at college, and regularly since I finished.”

“Where’d you go to college?”

“Barnard. Where did you?”

“Tulane. Did you like college?”

“Not particularly,” said Eleanor. “I’m not very bookish, and the other girls seemed—well, so
young.
When you’ve lived on the river and seen real struggles, men fighting days and nights to keep a flood back, you get used to fundamentals—you can’t believe the most important thing on earth is the band of ribbon around your hair. I hope I don’t sound like somebody trying to be superior, but do you understand?”

“Yes,” he returned seriously, and added, “I’ve never known a girl like you before. What else about the girls at school?”

Eleanor brought her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms around them. “Well, the way they whispered with such curiosity about things I had taken for granted all my life. Birth and death are always going on in a levee camp, and of course I had known about them, and about the honky-tonk tent and why I mustn’t go down there. I don’t suppose I was ever very girlish.”

“You’re not girlish,” Kester said, smiling. He was sitting crosslegged on the floor, listening with interest. “Go on. Tell me about a levee camp.”

Though she did not often talk so much about herself, she continued. She told him about her cook, whose name was Randa and who had diamonds in her teeth, because Randa’s husband was killed in an accident on a levee job and the government paid her compensation; and Randa, afraid some fortune-hunter would try to marry her, devised that means of keeping her wealth to herself. She told him about Jelly Roll, who was the aristocrat of the camp, partly because he earned two dollars and a quarter a day and could afford shirts of flowered percale and partly because he was a genius at his work. Jelly Roll’s job was to keep the slope of the levee graded, and as the drivers came up with the scoops he told them where to dump the dirt; though he had only a grade-stake in the middle and a tow-stake on either side to guide him he gave directions so fast that he could direct the dumping of three wheelers at once, and with such accuracy that when the contractor measured the slope it was always right, three-to-one on the inside and four-to-one on the outside. “I like anybody who has a passion for doing his job well, like that,” said Eleanor. “That’s one reason I admire my father so much. Dad builds the best levees on the river. He’s incredibly careful, studying the soil formation and patterning the levee like a fine dress before he moves a spoonful of earth.”

“Do you know,” said Kester, “I’ve lived on the river all my life, but you make me feel as if I’m just beginning to learn about it. I’ve always thought of this country in terms of cotton.”

“But you’d have to. After all, that’s your business, and building levees isn’t. Did you always want to be a planter?”

“Why yes, I always took it for granted that I would be. My brother Sebastian wanted to go into business, so when my father retired he made over the plantation to me, and Sebastion went to New Orleans.”

“What does he do?”

“He’s a cotton broker.” Kester stood up, grinning. “Doing very well at it, I believe. A most excellent young man, the only one of us who is strong-minded enough to make cotton work for him instead of making himself work for cotton.”

Kester stood with his elbow on the marble mantel. Her chin on her knees, Eleanor lifted her eyes to look up at him. “You needn’t try to be flippant,” she said. “I’m beginning to understand you love this place devotedly, and are a little bit ashamed to confess how much it means to you.”

He nodded, half proud and half embarrassed. “I do love it, Miss Eleanor. I feel so much a part of it, you see—though not many people can make me own up to it so frankly.”

There was a pause. The shadows were beginning to thicken in the corners, but Kester’s figure stood out in clear relief as though all the firelight had gathered to meet his glowing vitality. He was right, she thought: he belonged to Ardeith as essentially as the house or the oaks, and it would be impossible to think of him apart from his background. Though he was standing quietly by the fire she was acutely aware of his powerful presence. It was easy to imagine his entering a crowded room and making everybody else in it flatten into unimportance by the mere fact of his being there. Again remembering what her father had said about the Larnes, Eleanor reflected that Fred knew nothing about them and was relegating them to a category, perhaps unfairly; certainly Kester was an attractive young man, who had not only the gift of fascinating but the rarer gift of being fascinated. “I could like him very much,” Eleanor said to herself. “In fact, I do.”

They both started as they heard a sound of footsteps at the front door.

Eleanor sprang up, feeling suddenly self-conscious, as though she had been interrupted in a moment of intimacy. Kester had turned toward the door. “Is that company?” she asked.

“No, only my mother and father. I’ll bring them in.”

He crossed the room to meet them, and a moment later Eleanor was being presented to his parents.

The first word that occurred to Eleanor in regard to Mr. and Mrs. Larne was
exquisite.
They looked rather alike: they were both tall and slender and graceful, they both spoke in soft, beautifully modulated voices, they both gave her an impression of perfectly charming uselessness. Mr. Larne insisted that she must have a glass of sherry with them before supper, and when she hesitated, thinking they might prefer to be left alone, he told her with flattering urgency that it was not every day Kester brought in a delightful young lady and he wouldn’t think of parting with her yet. Both amused and puzzled, Eleanor sat down again; it was quite impossible to tell whether these people meant what they were saying, but she decided to remain long enough for one glass of sherry and then go. Mrs. Larne gave her big plumed hat to a maid and Cameo brought in a decanter and glasses. Denis Larne II, married to Lysiane St. Clair, she remembered; yes, he did look like a gentleman whose doings would be rightly recorded in the right places. He would know vintages, and fine cigars, and clever lines from the new novels, he would like Debussy and shiver at ragtime, both he and Lysiane had distinction and a quiet air of breeding, but how in the name of heaven had this porcelain pair created Kester?

“You are visiting in the neighborhood, Miss Upjohn?” Denis Larne was asking her as he poured the sherry.

Eleanor recalled her thoughts. “Yes. I live in New Orleans.”

“New Orleans, yes. I believe I must be acquainted with your family —the name Upjohn sounds familiar to me, though I’m ashamed to say I can’t place it.”

“You might have heard of my father. He’s the contractor in charge of the new levee just upriver from here.”

“Possibly that’s it. I hope you like this, Miss Upjohn,” he added, offering her a glass.

“How pretty it is!” Eleanor exclaimed. She held up the glass to let the firelight dance through it.

Lysiane smilingly agreed with her. “I’ve often said I shouldn’t care for sherry if I couldn’t see it.” She glanced at Kester, who had returned to his place by the mantel. “Did we get any letters this afternoon, Kester?”

“Yes ma’am, several from New Orleans. They look like invitations to Carnival balls.”

“It’s about time we were going back to New Orleans,” Denis remarked at the mention of Carnival.

Eleanor glanced up in surprise. “Don’t you live here?”

“Father’s health isn’t of the best,” Kester explained to her, “and he and mother have lived in New Orleans since he gave up managing the plantation several years ago. They only came up to Ardeith for Christmas.”

“I see. But isn’t it lonely in this big house for you?”

“Why no,” said Kester, and his mother added,

“My dear, Kester is either out of the house or has it full of people, all the time. He has a passionate fondness for the human race.”

“Don’t you like people?” Kester asked Eleanor.

“Some of them, of course. But not everybody.”

“Oh, I do,” said Kester. “Clever people are entertaining and stupid ones give me such a pleasant sense of superiority.”

Lysiane laughed at him, and Kester asked,

“Where’ve you been all afternoon?”

Lysiane puckered her pretty little mouth as if her afternoon had not been entirely blissful. “We made several calls, winding up with Sylvia.”

Denis chuckled. Kester said to Eleanor, “Forgive us. But we have a great many cousins, and some of them are nuisances.”

“Aren’t everybody’s?” Denis asked with amusement. “Or what do you think, Miss Upjohn?”

“I’m afraid I can’t answer. I haven’t any.”

“No cousins?” Kester exclaimed.

“Neither of my parents had any brothers or sisters.”

“I’m tempted to call you lucky,” Kester said.

“I think it’s fun to have a lot of family,” said Eleanor. “I’ve never had to bother about it, because I have five brothers and sisters of my own, but my mother says it’s pretty lonesome to grow up without anybody who belongs to you.”

“I should think it would be,” Lysiane nodded. “Your mother is quite right. Where did she grow up?—with a remote uncle, or something like that?”

“No ma’am, in an orphan asylum in New Orleans.”

“Indeed!” Lysiane exclaimed with such sympathy that Eleanor hastened to add,

“Oh, it wasn’t as bad as that, Mrs. Larne! Mamma says they were very good to the children.”

“Those times were so difficult,” Denis said gently. “Everyone was in straits.”

“Everyone?”

“Why yes,” said Lysiane. “The carpetbagger days. When I was a little girl, a new dress was such an event!”

Eleanor thought of the buried coffee service. “It must have been a fantastic period. Kester was saying a little while ago he didn’t believe there was ever any such thing as the good old days.”

“No,” said Kester, “I’m glad I live now. Aren’t you, Miss Eleanor?”

“I’ve never thought much about it. But I’m glad I don’t have to wear their clothes. Imagine having to go about in hoops, or a bustle.”

“I can’t. But neither can I imagine wearing a hobble-skirt.”

“At least,” she retorted, “I can sit down in a hobble-skirt, and I’ve never understood how anybody ever sat down in a bustle.” Eleanor put her glass on the tray. “Mrs. Larne, it’s very pleasant being here, but I simply must go.”

Lysiane graciously asked her to stay for supper, but Eleanor shook her head. They made their farewells, and Eleanor and Kester went back to his car. As they drove toward the camp they did not talk much, but at length Kester said, “May I come back to see you tomorrow?”

“That’s very soon.”

“Not too soon,” said Kester. “I’ve been waiting years to meet a girl who could spend a whole afternoon without tucking her hand under her belt to see if her shirtwaist and skirt were coming apart. Tomorrow?”

She laughed. “All right. About three. I’ll be working until then.”

“I’ll be there at three.”

He stopped the car by the levee and walked with her to the main tent. “Gee, I like you!” he exclaimed, and strode back across the levee, whistling the
Horseshoe Rag
like a young man well pleased with the world.

Chapter Two

1

A
fter that Eleanor and Kester saw each other nearly every day. Conscientiously, Eleanor forbade him to call until afternoon, but for the first time since she had been her father’s secretary she found herself watching the clock. Until now she had liked her work and had gone out in the afternoon merely for rest and exercise, but suddenly the morning was only a dreary prelude to the golden hours when she would be with Kester, and even before he came her awareness of him was distracting.

She really tried to keep her thoughts away from Kester while she was at work. But as the days went by she found it increasingly hard to do so. In the midst of a statement to the Mississippi River Commission some gay remark of his would pop into her head and twenty minutes later she would discover her fingers still idle on the keys. She would jerk herself back, but her smooth typing turned into a chaos of wrong letters and dollar marks, and she could almost hear Kester laughing at her exasperation as she tore out the sheet and started over. Once she called Randa to bring her a cup of coffee, and Randa came in, her bediamonded teeth gleaming as she inquired, “You got a headache, Miss Elna?”

“No,” said Eleanor, “but I think I’m losing my mind.”

Randa gave her a flashing grin. “Yo’ mind done gone kitin’ over to dat plantation.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” said Eleanor shortly.

Arms akimbo, Randa surveyed her. “Ah, go on, Miss Elna. You’s just befo’ fallin’ in love wid dat gemman.”

Eleanor sipped her coffee and did not answer.

“He’s a mighty highclass gemman,” Randa went on. “Give me fifty cents mighty near every time he come over. But you take care of yo’sef, Miss Elna. He’s the sparkin’ kind.”

“Will you press my dotted shirtwaist?” Eleanor asked. “I want to wear it this afternoon.”

“Yassum.” Randa went off, shaking her head and mumbling like an oracle. Eleanor looked after her. The sparking kind. Randa doubtless knew what she was talking about. Eleanor had observed before now that Negroes knew a great deal more about white people than white people knew about Negroes. Setting down her cup so hard it rattled in the saucer, she turned resolutely back to her desk. Kester was none of Randa’s business.

Fred was good-natured when he and Kester met, but Fred’s contempt for what he called the mildewed aristocracy of the plantations was too profound for him to have much approval of any specimen of that class, and Kester’s blithe assumption that the world had been created only for pleasure would not in any case have won Fred’s esteem. But except for occasional comments on her incomprehensible taste, Fred said very little to Eleanor about him, for he was too busy to pay much attention to anything but his levee. Eleanor was not troubled by her father’s opinion of Kester—she was, in fact, hardly conscious of it. She was conscious of very little except her own sudden happiness.

She did not try to analyze it. She only knew that when she saw Kester the world turned radiant, and while she was with him she was aware of nothing but his charm and his genius for laughter. Kester laughed at everything. Bad weather, bumpy roads, the foibles of other people—Kester found them not irritating, but funny. Though she was by nature rather opinionated Eleanor found herself reflecting his tolerance. She thought she must have laughed more in the weeks she had known Kester than in all her lifetime before.

Except for some spontaneous gesture such as taking her hands and holding them while he told her how glad he was to see her again, Kester had never touched her, but his joy at being with her was evident. They took long drives through the plantation country, rattling over the roads in his little topless car or sometimes moving more sedately in a carriage. They crossed the river on a ferry and visited a sugar plantation where the cane-cutting season was not yet over, and the Negroes peeled cane for them while they sucked out the juice, which trickled down their chins and stickied their clothes and made them nearly sick with an excess of sweetness. They found an old Negro who ground his own cane to make molasses for his family, in an ancient shed thatched with palm branches such as the earliest planters used when cane sugar was new; subject as everybody was to Kester’s charm, he let them feed the stalks between the two big wooden wheels turned by mules, and they shouted with delight as the juice dripped into the kettle over the fire. Kester bought from him two big buckets of cuite, the thick dark molasses that is the last boiling of the syrup before it turns to sugar, and gave one of them to Eleanor to serve with hot biscuits for supper, warning her to serve it with a wooden spoon, for if you put a metal spoon into cuite it will granulate before morning.

Once they took a picnic lunch and drove toward the woods, stopping on a road built along the edge of a cypress swamp. They had hardly left the carriage when a mighty rain tumbled upon them, so they scrambled back inside and sat huddled under the rug. Around them the swamp had a strange loveliness. The great cypresses were hung with moss in such thick draperies that there seemed hardly room for leaves to push through, though occasionally one of the trees was bare, holding up crooked white limbs to the rain. The leaves on the live oaks were dull, ready to drop when the new leaves would push them off in March. The only bright color in the swamp was the green of the tree-ferns growing along the branches. Under the oaks the sedges were brown, with a purplish tinge like a veil over them, and the lichens were gray on the cypress trunks growing out of the water, and over everything was the gray moss and the rain.

It was Kester who showed her the sullen magnificence of the swamp, while Eleanor looked, discovering the joy of becoming sensitive to the beauty of familiar scenes. When at last they drove back through the rain she felt as if she had been on a journey to a place of strange enchantment.

Often they went to Ardeith, and when she curled up on the rug by the fire and talked to him—on any subject, for sometimes she could hardly remember what they had talked about—Eleanor had a sense of rapture.

When she went to Ardeith, Kester’s parents were sometimes, though not always, at home. While they were invariably gracious Eleanor could not help regarding them with a secret amusement. Denis and Lysiane, and their numberless cousins who drifted through the house, seemed to her so delicate, like relics that should be kept behind glass. It was the first time she had had a glimpse of the gentle, defeated civilization that in secluded spots like this went on still stunned from the blow of the Civil War. These people were strange to her, yet she could not deny that they had a curious emotional security because it had never occurred to them to doubt their own values. She was continually being surprised at their cool, devastating scorn of people who fell short of their standards; they dismissed everything such a person said and did as of no consequence, so that one felt strangely ill at ease and could not explain why it was so. And they could do this, she concluded with some astonishment, because they were so much more attractive than people could be after fighting the battles necessary for adjustment to a changing world.

Eleanor thought them pretty but absurd. She could not have made articulate how utterly she felt herself superior to their canons. She sounded Kester as to what he thought of all this, and discovered, not greatly to her surprise, that Kester had never thought about it at all. Kester liked his country; he liked seeing the cotton come up and put forth its white flowers, the flowers turning pink and dropping off to reveal hard little green bolls on the stalks, the bolls opening and the fields turning white with the ripe cotton hanging ready to be picked. He liked these blue February days, the fragrance of the earth turning under the plows, and the prospect of the summer ahead when the earth would go mad with blooming and men would work not to make the plants grow but to check their increase. He liked hunting and riding and dancing and swimming and gathering around the piano with his friends to sing songs.

“But you don’t know whether or not you like to think,” Eleanor said to him, “because you’ve never tried it.”

They were driving back to the levee camp after a visit to Ardeith, and Eleanor’s lap was piled with the last poinsettias of the season. It was still early, but two army engineers were coming in for supper and she had to be at home to supervise Randa’s setting of the table. As she spoke Kester gave her a roguish look out of the corner of his eye. “What am I supposed to think about?” he inquired.

“Don’t you like to find out how people happen to be the way they are?” she asked.

“No, I can’t say that I do.” He adroitly drove around a wagon lumbering along the middle of the road. “They are the way they are, so what can I do about it?”

“But don’t you like to understand them?”

Again he glanced at her, with an eloquent flick of his eyebrow. “Eleanor, I understand more about people than you ever will.”

“No you don’t!”

“Yes I do,” he returned serenely. “You see, I look at them as persons. To you they’re like these mathematical equations you’re always figuring out for the engineers.”

Eleanor twisted a poinsettia leaf, considering. “You and I are very different, aren’t we, Kester?”

He nodded. “Very. You’re always surprising me.”

“Which of us do you suppose is right?”

“Oh Eleanor, people aren’t right or wrong. They’re different. Like blue eyes and brown eyes.” Kester turned off the highway into the cotton-road leading to the levee.

“Is that why you and I have so much fun together?—because we’re so different?”

“That’s probably one reason.”

“Strange, isn’t it? You and I—born in the same state, of the same race, the same generation, yet in so many ways we’re unlike.” She paused a moment, and added, “I believe I know what it is.”

“What?” he asked, casually, as though it were not very important.

“You’re a Southerner,” Eleanor said, “and I’m an American.”

Kester grinned. “You’re bewitching,” he told her, “and I’m appreciative. Well, you’ll probably amount to something, and when I die they’ll write on my tombstone ‘Here lies a man who had a grand time.’”

She laughed. They had reached the levee, and Kester walked to the tent with her. At the door he said, “I’ll be back tomorrow,” and smiled at her admiringly. “You’re very fetching above those red flowers. In fact, you’re a splendid person.”

“So are you,” said Eleanor.

She watched him climb the levee. He was lithe as a dancer. At the crest he turned and waved. Smiling to herself, as he went on out of sight Eleanor separated one poinsettia from the rest and began counting off the petals.

“He loves me, he’s the sparking kind, he loves me, he’s the sparking kind—”

It came out even, on “He’s the sparking kind.” Eleanor threw down the stem, called herself a goose for trusting a flower, and went indoors.

2

Kester sang to himself as he drove back toward home. He was not given to thinking ahead of the moment in time he happened to be occupying, but he knew he enjoyed being with Eleanor more than with any other girl he had ever known and he wished she were not so scrupulous about her work so they could have more time together. Leaving his car by the front steps he ran into the house. His mother and father were in the parlor, evidently engaged in earnest conversation. Denis stood by the fire and Lysiane sat near him, looking up with troubled attention. As Kester came in he heard Denis say, “It can’t go any further.”

Kester tossed his overcoat on the sofa and came to the fire. “Hello,” he greeted them.

“Where have you been?” his father asked.

“Seeing Nellie home.”

“I thought so,” Lysiane murmured half under her breath.

Kester started to poke the fire.

His father made a gesture of exasperation toward Lysiane. Kester turned around, leaning his shoulders against the mantel and surveying his parents nonchalantly.

“You don’t like Eleanor, do you?”

“We don’t
dislike
her, Kester,” Lysiane corrected him. “But—” she hesitated.

“But she shocks you, doesn’t she?” he persisted. “You were displeased the first time you saw her when she made that remark about sitting down in a bustle, weren’t you? You don’t understand her father’s letting her live in a levee camp, do you? You’re missing the Carnival balls so you can stay here and keep an eye on her, aren’t you?” He shook his head at them shrewdly. “I’m not impressed. She’s the nicest girl I know.”

“I have no doubt, Kester,” said Denis, “that Eleanor Upjohn is a very deserving girl. But after all,” he added tersely, “there is something called background, and your mother and I are not alone in believing it has value.”

“You are alone, though,” said Kester, “if you believe we’re the only people who have it.” He strolled over to the sofa and sat down, stretching his legs in front of him.

“Don’t be absurd,” said Lysiane. She turned her chair so that she was facing him, and spoke with a rare abruptness. “I’ve never been called a snob in my life, Kester, and I’m not risking any such description now when I say that Eleanor Upjohn is not one of us.”

It was not easy to make Kester talk seriously about anything. He took a cigarette out of his pocket and held it lengthwise between his thumb and forefinger. He did not light it, because his mother disliked tobacco smoke, but he looked at it as though he found it more interesting than this conversation. “Why not?” he asked ingenuously.

Denis answered. “Eleanor Upjohn’s mother came from heaven knows where and was brought up in an orphan asylum. Her father is the illegitimate son of a prostitute and a carpetbagger.”

“How do you know that?” Kester demanded shortly.

“About her father? I’ve just remembered it. Ever since I met that girl I’ve been trying to think where I had heard the name Upjohn. Then I recalled a story I had heard from my mother.”

“What was your mother doing,” Kester inquired, “associating with prostitutes and carpetbaggers?”

“I’d prefer you to speak of my mother in more respectful terms, Kester. Not long before the war she gave work to a girl who came here one day asking for charity. Some time later the girl left, and nothing was heard of her till she reappeared during the Reconstruction period as the mistress of a tax-gatherer of the most vicious type. A child was born of that association.”