After the War (17 page)

“Well, that makes sense, doesn’t it?” Cynthia’s voice was almost under control.

“Yes, it does.” Derek stared at her, thinking, but of what? He said, “I’ve got to get the plane for D.C. at five. Come along, Miz Byrd, I’ll drop you off.”

And then they were gone, and Cynthia sat there, alone in the too warm, too bright room, unable to eat her small tomato salad. No matter how anyone pronounced it.

She was literally choked with anger, primarily at Derek, but then too at herself. How could she have wasted so much emotion on a man who almost denied the existence of emotion? Who prided himself on his own lack of feeling?

And then Cynthia was visited by an odd out-of-character thought, which was: I hope Deirdre gets him, finally. That would be just right for both of them, I think—I hope.

14

I
N the large sprawling deep-country house that Russ had bought years back, when he and SallyJane Caldwell were recently wed (bought and added wings to, and an upstairs, and populated with children; then another wife, and a baby also named SallyJane), in that house Melanctha was rarely alone, but on a day in late April, home from Radcliffe for Easter vacation, she was truly all alone. Earlier, in a tentative way, she had walked through those rooms, as though reassuring herself that she was alone; she would not run into some stray brother, half-brother, half-sister, along a hall, or lurking in an upstairs bedroom. (Nor the ghost of a parent.) In a literal, practical way, she knew where everyone was, and that they would not be home, but still—she had an odd sense of another presence, and she wondered if maybe Graham was hiding somewhere in the house, for no reason except that he seemed to like to hide. He liked small mysteries—or large ones, probably.

Poor child, poor almost-young man. Melanctha felt a vague, uncomprehending pity for Graham. She had no idea what he was really like, nor, she suspected, did anyone else, least of all Graham himself.

The day outside threatened heat, intensity—so unlike the
clear cold chaste New England spring that Melanctha had left behind in Cambridge. Already on the pine boughs just outside her bedroom window (she had settled for the moment in that room), the pine needles in the sunlight were brilliantly green, too bright and sharp, strangely threatening, against a too bright blue sky. Fat white clouds lay heavily on the horizon. Nothing moved.

Melanctha’s room, like the weather, was as unlike her Radcliffe college room as possible. Her Radcliffe room, in Whitman Hall, was a book-strewn mess, usually. Whereas this was a girlish fantasy—but it was Deirdre’s fantasy, not Melanctha’s: a four-poster bed with a starched and flounced white lace canopy, and the same lace on the curtains, and on the kidney-shaped dressing table. It was a room that in her waking hours Melanctha could not tolerate for long. (It was “done” by Deirdre and a local decorator, a “surprise” for Melanctha one summer while she was away at camp. Russ had told her she was “very spoiled” and ungrateful when she failed to respond as they thought she should.)

Melanctha had already left that room, then, and was halfway downstairs when a light knock sounded on the front door. Expecting no one—no one in her family would be home until about five, or later, and besides, none of them would knock—Melanctha hesitated, unaccountably afraid. Although it would only be some passing friend; strangers never came down that backwoods road in Pinehill in those days.

But opening the door she saw that it was indeed a stranger, and a Negro: a very tall, light-skinned (yellowish-brown) old-looking (tired, perhaps, or maybe sick) young man. His great brown eyes red-rimmed. In cheap-looking, newish clothes. Who looked scared.

Scared, but very determined. He asked, “You Miss Melanctha Byrd?”

“Yes—”

“Could I talk to you a minute?” His voice was a whisper.

“Sure, come on in.” Melanctha’s voice too, as she heard herself, was unfamiliar, strained. She sensed both his panic and his determination, and she wished somehow to reassure him. And to give him some food; he looked starved. But for the moment she saw no way to do either, to comfort or to feed, without making him feel like a beggar, which he so clearly was not. He was an intelligent proud man, scared out of his wits but continuing anyway on his own chosen course.

He followed her into the living room, but before she could tell him to sit down, as she was about to do, he began.

“I’m Ed Faulkner,” he said, staring fixedly at her face.

For an instant the name meant nothing, and then, with a wrench, Melanctha thought,
Oh
.

He said, “I had to see you. To tell you—you know, your dad just fell down. Like a faint. Pass out. Maybe a stroke.”

Feeling faint herself, Melanctha told him truthfully, “That’s what I thought. You know, I never thought—”

He still stared, now silent, as Melanctha observed a very small but clear diminution of panic in him, and she wondered, Now could I offer him something to eat? Would that be all right? It was a social, or rather, a human situation for which she had absolutely no training, no experience. And instead of offering food she asked him, “But how did you—how did you get here?”

“I got family there. Family in Texas.” As though that explained not being in jail.

He added, “Ne’r mind how,” with the tiniest suggestion of a smile. And then he said, again very earnestly, “He just fell
right down.” He paused, and then said, “He was a real nice man. I could tell right off. We got along good.” He added, “It was almost like he wanted to—”

“Well, he was mostly nice, I guess.” Melanctha’s own feelings about her father had never pulled themselves into a steady focus, and perhaps never would. She was affected, though, by this man’s tone, which included piety, a proper mourning, and her own voice quavered (properly) as she added, “We all miss him.”

“I have to go now.” Ed Faulkner spoke softly, but most decisively, and he began to move toward the door in a curious sideways walk, as though he thought it rude to leave her there.

“Can’t you have some lunch or something? Iced tea?” Melanctha was suddenly desperate. She even crazily wondered, was this man really Ed Faulkner?—the one who had been with her father when he died?

“Oh, no’m, I’ve got to get along—”

“Where’re you heading?” She realized that she had spoken in an unfamiliar accent, and rhythm. Who was she—was she Russ, really?

“Well, up North. Up to Massachusetts, soon as I can. My folks are in Roxbury, outside of Boston.”

“Oh, that’s where I’m going too. In a couple of days, I’m going back up to Cambridge, that’s where I go to school. What a coincidence, the both of us—”

“I reckon.” He gave her a puzzled, unsmiling look. And then, almost out the door, he said, “Well, I do thank you—talking to me—listening—”

“Oh, I wish you could stay!”

For suddenly that was what she wished, more than anything. If he would stay, she felt that he could explain
everything to her. If he would just stay and have something to eat. Or drink. Should she have offered him a beer? Or whiskey?

But he had opened the front door and was halfway out when he spoke, not just a mutter, not looking at her. “Well, ma’am, I thank you, I do. I wish you good luck—and your family—”

Melanctha watched him walk down the worn brick path, now lined with the bright yellow jonquils. He had a very slight limp: how come she hadn’t noticed that before? And had she really observed exactly what he looked like? Could she describe him? The crazy idea came to her then that maybe “Ed Faulkner” was really Benny Davis, come down to check her out and disguised as another man. But that was crazy, she knew that instantly, and she thought, I’m not well, I am sort of crazy. Anybody mentions Russ and I lose track. Will I always be like this? I can’t stand it!

And she wondered:
Did
Russ fall on purpose?

“Who was that colored man?” asked Graham, perhaps an hour later, as he came into the kitchen where Melanctha was making tea (tea, she drank gallons of tea, every day).

“What colored man?” She knew though, of course it would have been Ed Faulkner. But why would he have been still around here, after an hour?

“Just up the road a way. He was just sitting there, like he’d been taking a nap. In this funny brown suit.”

Melanctha stared at Graham’s dark blue eyes, so like their father’s, Russ’s deep blue eyes. So like hers too—except that on Graham everything was beautiful; he was lovely, as everyone had always said. And she was not, which of course no one
said, although Melanctha could imagine, behind her back: “It’s just the funniest thing, how that little old boy got all the good looks, and that Melanctha, who’s the dead spit of her daddy too, well, I guess she just kind of missed out in the looks department. Maybe it’s that Russ’s kind of face was more cut out for a boy? Maybe, she’d’ve been a boy, Melanctha would’ve been a real good-looker too? Though all those others are not a lot to write home about—”

But now she wondered, Had that Ed Faulkner hoped or wanted to see
her
again? Had he fainted from hunger, since he wouldn’t take any food? She asked Graham, “Did he look all right? I mean not sick or anything?”

“He looked sleepy.” But Graham had lost whatever interest he may momentarily have had in this stray colored man. Which was typical of Graham, who had the attention span of a flea. Even Deirdre, his mother, said this of him.

“The clouds have changed color a lot,” Graham now observed. “I think it might be a thunderstorm.”

If there was a storm, what would happen to that man, a strange Negro with maybe no money? “I think I’ll go out for a walk,” Melanctha told Graham. “I’ll try to make it back before the rain.”

He was right about the clouds. What had been small and plump and white had swollen and turned black, heavy, menacing. Melanctha hurried along the road, staring out into the thin woods on either side, where she saw no one.

Passing Jimmy and Esther Hightower’s big white “modern” house, she thought of how Russ had always disliked it; he had muttered, almost every day, “If’n that’s what ‘modern’ is, let me go backwards, please. At least a century or so.” She thought she saw Jimmy at the window, but didn’t bother really to look, or to wave.

She heard and then saw a car coming pretty fast from the direction in which she was headed, from the highway. A gray convertible, top down, and in it Deirdre and that newspaperman she liked so much, that Derek. They slowed and waved, and Melanctha heard Deirdre call out, “You have a nice walk, honey.”

What a dope:
honey
.

She continued to stare through the small trees and bushes that lined the road, though of course at the same time she thought that he wouldn’t be there, he was either really hiding somewhere where she couldn’t see him, where no one could, or else he was just gone. Got out to the highway and hitched a ride on some truck going north, or somewhere.

With a heavy reluctance she turned and headed home, very slowly now. It wouldn’t even be all her own private house anymore; there would be Deirdre and that Derek McFall. However, after not many minutes Derek’s car came toward her again, now that they had both changed directions. He slowed and gave her a wave and a big fake grin, then hurried on by, raising dust.

When she got home, Deirdre was nowhere around. Melanctha took some iced tea from the icebox and was sitting, sipping, in the kitchen when she heard Deirdre’s voice from the front stairs.

“Melanctha, honey, is that you?”

Who the hell else would it be? Not saying that, of course not, Melanctha went around to the front of the house, and there was Deirdre, her fat all shrouded in a pink silk kimono, hair loose, standing at the top of the stairs.

“I’ve got this real sick headache,” Deirdre called down, unnecessarily loud, in that quiet, emptily stretching house.

“Where’d Graham go?” Melanctha had suddenly remembered that Graham had been there before.

“Oh, he left this note, gone to the show with his scoutmaster, guess they went up the back road. But when you get hungry, you think you can get yourself something out of the icebox?”

“Oh sure.”

Deirdre disappeared.

The storm began.

But its center seemed to be somewhere else, maybe over as far as Hilton, to the west. In Pinehill there was only a darker sky, and a steady silver rain. The thunder was distant, and the lightning pale.

Later, hunched over her potato salad and cold chicken, her glass of iced tea, Melanctha still thought, and thought and thought, about Ed Faulkner. How brave of him to come to see her. He cannot have known anything about her; for all he knew, she was some real Southern hysteric, some crazy woman who would call the sheriff right off, a strange Negro man at her
front door
. Whereas, actually Melanctha had never thought, had never imagined, that he did anything bad to Russ. But did she tell him that? She cannot remember! In fact she can hardly remember anything of their conversation, only his face, his yellowish skin and red-rimmed tired eyes, and his dusty shiny brown suit. And she had not given him anything to eat. Had she even asked? Had she treated him like she should have, like a guest?

Her mind was all clouded with guilt and confusion, there alone in the fresh-cleared April night, of which she was almost unaware. Upstairs, Deirdre had some music on her radio, which she did almost all the time these days, now that Russ was not around to stop her (“Deirdre, for the Lord’s sake, turn that thing down!”), and some band, probably that jerk Glenn Miller, whom Deirdre
just loved
, was playing one of his Serenades, Sunset, Moonlight, some damn silly thing.

Melanctha sat there for a long time, feeling leaden, hopeless, without any real thoughts at all. Until she got up and rinsed her few dishes and went upstairs to bed.

A little later, she heard Graham come slowly upstairs—she knew his odd light hesitant walk—and go into his room, next door to hers. And later still she heard the awful, familiar sound of Graham crying. He sobbed loudly, though for a very short time, and sometimes Melanctha wondered, Did he want someone to go in to him? Was the crying a cry for help? But Deirdre never went to him; a long time ago Melanctha remembered Russ had told Deirdre not to. “You’re already turning that boy into a little sissy,” Russ had said, and even now, with Russ dead, Deirdre in that and in most things kept to what Russ had told her.