The Handsome Road (39 page)

She was still smiling, as though he were trying to deny that the world was round. “Stop calling me Nellie. I’m not going to listen.” She sat down again and was about to take up her pen.

“Yes you are,” said Fred. He spoke with a tender vehemence. “Eleanor, I reckon this is about the hardest thing I ever tried to say. I guess you really are in love with him, and you’re mighty happy about it right now, but if you marry Kester Larne you’re not going to be happy long.”

“Why not?” she asked as if hardly hearing him.

“He’s just no good,” said Fred.

Eleanor picked up a match and began breaking it into small pieces. “He told me he hadn’t been an angel, if that’s what you mean.”

“Honey child,” said Fred earnestly, “I’m not talking about anything he’s done. I’m talking about the kind of person he is.”

Eleanor was beginning to be angry. “So you think I’ll have to wander around wearing a brave smile above a broken heart! But I won’t.”

“I want you to get more out of life,” said Fred, “than just not having your heart broken.” He repeated, “That fellow is just no good.”

Eleanor’s eyes had narrowed dangerously as he spoke. They looked like lines of blue fire. “You’d better be careful, dad,” she said in a low voice.

“Why should I be careful? I’m saying what I know is true. And you’re going to sit there and hear me.” Fred caught his voice and went on as gently as he could. “Eleanor, honey, Kester don’t know what it means to be a man grown up. He’s a child in a man’s body, and you deserve better than that.”

As he paused, Eleanor stood up. Her hands were in the pockets of her skirt. Fred saw them swell the cloth as they doubled into fists. It was his own movement of determination.

“All right, dad,” she said evenly. “I’ve listened. Now I’ll tell you. I love Kester. That’s all.”

Fred thought he should have known that if Eleanor ever loved a man it would be like this. She was so intense. Feeling that he would have given anything he owned to pierce the armor of infatuation around her, he tried again.

“I know you think that’s enough, Eleanor. But believe me, it’s not.”

Eleanor looked past him as though he were not there. “Maybe you’ve forgotten,” she said slowly. “Maybe it never happened to you like this. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about love. But nobody seems to mean what I mean.”

“No, Eleanor,” he said wearily. “Everybody means what you mean.”

But it was no use. Fred told her everything he believed was true, that Kester had never accepted the responsibility for his own life and was unfit to accept the responsibility for hers. As he persisted Eleanor grew furious. She flashed at him as she had never done, then she became penitent and pled for his comprehension, and at last she cried out despairingly, “It’s no use, dad. I love him. Why can’t you understand me? You always have before!”

She crumpled up by the desk and began to sob. It was the first time he had seen her shed tears since she was a little girl. He understood, with a pain that went very deep, that she was crying because all her life he had been her best friend. Eleanor was his first child and nearer to him than any of the others. She had run to him for comfort about her broken dolls and had accepted his rebukes for her childish sins, she had gone to him for counsel and he had talked over his own problems with her, and there had never been any anger between them. Fred stroked her shoulder clumsily. He was sure she was facing fierce disillusion, and the more he tried to tell her so the more he would succeed in making her hate him. But because he loved her he had not the faintest intention of being lenient. He wished they were back in the days when a man could lock up his daughter till she was willing to obey him.

5

Eleanor said nothing to Kester about her father’s opposition. She went through her work as usual and continued to see Kester every afternoon. They generally went out in his car, for his parents still lingered at Ardeith and he seemed to think they would be in the way when he and Eleanor had so much to say to each other. Eleanor supposed he had told them about their engagement, but she did not ask. It was enough to get away from her father’s hurt indignation into the wonder and peace that came to her when she and Kester were together.

But in less than two weeks the levee was finished and she was back in New Orleans, and now that she could not see Kester every day she found her battle with her father becoming a strain that increased as she grew tired of it.

Her mother was more tolerant. Mrs. Upjohn was a woman who took life as it came. Born Molly Thompson, she had lost her parents during her babyhood, grown up in a Methodist orphan asylum and gone from there to stand behind a counter in a department store, where she had met Fred Upjohn, who was then a sub-foreman on a levee job. When they were married she went up to camp and cooked for Fred and five other men, not accepting the help of a Negro woman until a month before Eleanor was born and then only because Fred insisted on it, Molly’s opinion being that it was a shame to pay out wages when Fred needed the money to buy his engineering books. Molly had had six children in eleven years, and with prosperity she had grown fat, comfortable and more than ever easy to live with. Having observed that the world did not always adjust itself to meet her convenience, she assumed that the Lord knew more than she did and good-naturedly let Him have His way. When Fred and Eleanor first came home Molly said of Kester only that she had not met the gentleman and therefore had no opinion, and her husband and daughter spoke of him with such contradictory violence that she could not form one. After he had been down to see Eleanor several times Molly said he was a mighty pleasant young man, but she’d hesitate before she’d marry a planter who left his cotton so often right in the middle of planting time just to see a girl who wrote him every day anyway. Noticing that Eleanor had her mind made up, Molly was thereafter silent on the subject.

Eleanor blessed her mother’s calmness, but she was so eager to escape Fred’s troubled eyes that she would have been willing to be married in the courthouse at once. Kester, however, had assumed that their engagement would be properly announced in the New Orleans
Picayune
and that they would be married in her father’s house by a minister. Eleanor finally had to tell him, one day when they were lunching at Antoine’s, that Fred was so opposed to their marriage she did not believe he would consent to having it performed in his home. Kester was at first amazed, then he burst out laughing uncontrollably, and finally, when she insisted upon knowing what was so ridiculous about a situation that was racking her nerves beyond endurance, he told her his parents were also convinced the marriage would be disastrous, but for different reasons.

Eleanor was angry. “That pair of eggshells!” she blazed.

“That’s why I won’t run off to any justice of the peace,” Kester ended. “I want you worse than I ever wanted anything, but I’m going to marry you like a man who’s proud of what he’s doing.” He began to laugh again.

“I was never so mad in my life,” Eleanor exclaimed, “and it’s not funny.”

Kester was shaking with mirth. “But it is, my darling, it is funny. Your father thinking the Larnes were blessing heaven for the infusion of some fresh red blood into their weary veins, my father thinking the Upjohns were gloating over the prospect of getting my precious name into their chronicles—and you and I not thinking of anything but how much we love each other and how we wish they’d leave us alone.”

At that Eleanor laughed too. As Kester said it, the opposing viewpoints of their families did sound foolish. “What is it they say,” she asked after awhile, wonderingly, “‘two shall be born the whole wide world apart’—”

“I think everybody must have gone mad but us,” said Kester. Ignoring the uneaten half of his crêpes suzette, he asked the waiter for a check. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll attend to your father.”

He did attend to Fred, with a gay serenity that Eleanor began to think it must have taken six generations to produce. They went into Fred’s office, where Kester stood facing Fred across the desk and calmly stated that he was going to marry Eleanor.

“I’m sorry you don’t like me,” he went on, “but I’m going to marry her anyway. We’re both of age and don’t have to ask anybody’s permission. But I happen to be a man who likes the pleasant traditions. I want to be married in her father’s house and have him say ‘I do’ when the minister asks who gives her away.”

Fred crossed his hands on the desk and his eyes met Kester’s. “You’re mighty confident of yourself, young man, aren’t you?”

“Why, yes sir,” said Kester. “I am.”

“Mhm. I am too,” returned Fred. “I don’t like her marrying you, and I don’t like pretending in public that I do.”

Kester grinned coolly. “You’re a stubborn man, Mr. Upjohn,” he remarked, “used to bossing everybody around you. But this time you might as well acknowledge that you’ve lost, and it’s your own fault.”

“My fault?”

“Certainly,” said Kester. “I suppose it didn’t occur to you when Eleanor was born that she could be just as stubborn as you are, because when you begot her you gave her your own weapons to fight you with. You might as well give in, Mr. Upjohn. It’s the revenge of the chromosome.”

There was a silence. Kester and Eleanor waited. At last Fred nodded slowly. “I know when I’m licked.” He glanced at Eleanor. “You’re going to marry him, whether or no?”

“Yes, dad.”

“All right. Kester, I guess that’s so, what you said. I’d never thought of it that way.”

“Neither had I,” said Kester demurely, “till I walked in and saw Eleanor’s face when she looked at you. Thanks, Mr. Upjohn.”

After that Fred made no more opposition, and gave Eleanor a check to spend for clothes. But he could not hide his disappointment, and Eleanor was eager to be gone. She did not have much time to think, however, and but for the help of her sister Florence, who came home from school for the Easter holidays, she did not know how she would have done her shopping. When the engagement was officially announced in the
Picayune
(with a photograph of herself pled for by the society editor with an eagerness that made Eleanor recognize the Larne hand in the background, for she knew nothing about the society section), then she found herself breathlessly busy. Lysiane called the next day, and one would have thought this marriage was the consummation of her dreams—“I cannot tell you, Mrs. Upjohn, how happy we are that your lovely daughter is to be one of us”—and Kester’s brother Sebastian called, and his married sister Alice gave her a luncheon, and Alice’s friends gave her luncheons, and wedding presents began to arrive with an abundance that made her understand that in marrying a man named Larne she was entering a tower of mighty significance. Her best friend, Lena Tonelli, whose family owned a tropical fruit company and had grown vastly rich from bananas, undertook the task of keeping the list of the letters Eleanor would have to write after she was married, and she sat competently among the gifts, collecting cards and scribbling on them with amazed exclamations. “Good heavens, Eleanor, these are all names out of the state history books! I thought they were dead. What
are
you getting into?”

Eleanor sighed and then laughed. “Once I told Kester he was a Southerner and I was an American. I’m beginning to grasp what I meant.”

“My dear,” said Lena Tonelli, “you’re marrying the Louisiana Purchase and the whole Confederate Army.” She waved her hand in dismissal.
“I
wouldn’t get mixed up with this outfit—”

“Neither would I, but for one reason.”

Lena nodded soberly. “I never met him but once, the day I happened to be here when he walked in, but I do think he’s enchanting. Eleanor, is he really worth all this?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose you’re right,” said Lena.

Eleanor smiled to herself. There was a great deal about Kester’s people Lena could not be expected to know, as she was only beginning to discover it herself. Their gallantry, for instance. The Larnes did not approve of this marriage. But once it had been decided on, they had accepted the fact with far more ease than Fred. No outsider could have guessed it was not all they had wished. They simply closed the door on their private lives. It was such a spirit, she thought, that had carried them through pestilence and war; for all their artificial graces they had their own invincibility.

But Fred too was gracious, in his own blunt fashion. The evening before Eleanor was married Fred sent for her. Eleanor went with some reluctance, for Fred’s disapproval of what she was doing was still so keen that she had been avoiding him as much as she could. But Fred started the interview in a matter-of-fact way. He merely wanted her signature. He had made over to her a little of his stock in the Tonelli Fruit Lines, to give her an income of about a hundred dollars a month. Eleanor was astonished, and protested as she thanked him. No, no, Fred said, looking embarrassed, he could afford it. The Tonelli Lines owned a vast slice of Central America and were growing. What with his fruit stock and his levee work his income last year had been about twenty thousand dollars, and he didn’t think she’d like to ask her husband’s permission every time she wanted a dress. This was just income. He had tied up the principal so she couldn’t do anything silly, because Tonelli stock was worth holding.

Eleanor kissed him impulsively. They were in the little study off his bedroom where Fred sometimes worked at night. She sat on his desk.

“Dad, you’re rather splendid,” she said sincerely. “I mean—I know you don’t like my marriage any more than you did when I first told you.” That was hard to say. They had not mentioned it since Kester’s visit to the office. “Yet you’re doing everything you can to give me a good start.”

Fred crossed his arms on the desk and smiled at her. “I’m mighty fond of you, Eleanor.”

“I know you are,” she answered. “I’m mighty fond of you too.”

Fred put his hand over hers. “Honey, you and me haven’t been getting along very well lately. But I hope you’re right about this and I’m wrong. And I’d like for us to be friends.”

“I’d like it too, dad. I—well, I’ve missed you,” she said with a little catch in her voice.