Had I a Hundred Mouths (29 page)

Princis Lester's Houston behavior was an uncalculated change, among other changes, which at first surprised Mr. Simpson and then pained him literally to death. Princis kept herself from Mr. Simpson, and this took him by such surprise that he could not understand. She had shown him such a yielding eye at the commissary and in the hall under the hat tree. Still, for a while it was an excitement and a challenge to such a man as he, and he pacified himself by thinking about all Princis could give him, all the newly broken wilderness of future awaiting them both, when she was through her waiting. She turned, within the very first year, back toward her ancestry, and this in a world turning toward the other direction, so that such a new world could not support the change—it gave no ground to build upon, she might as well have made a house of mosquito netting; and against what weather could such a flimsy dwelling protect her? Princis became, in the Neighborhood, a curio left behind by a diminishing race, the last of the little country women, as if that race were finishing in her in a little house on a street in a city.

She seemed the last carrier of the bred-up aspects of a played-out species of large ears, small neat heads, faces no bigger than a coffee cup, dainty claws of hands with which to shell pea and bean, to cup a chick, to gather eggs one at a time and not to break any, to hang out small washings, dip one dipper of well water but not to draw a bucketful. When old Mrs. Graves first spied Princis Lester from her two-story boarding house across the street that once, when she and Mr. Graves first came to it from Benburnett County, was their home full of their seven children, she said to old Mr. Graves, sitting in his cane-back rocker in the one room they now lived in, “That new little woman in the Neighborhood will come to change and we will see her do it. Where are all the fine country women that once came to the Neighborhood, where have they all gone in the world? Something has changed them all away.” The Graves house had been the grand house of the whole street which ran fifteen blocks between grammar school at one end and junior high at the other. On a corner, it claimed two lots, one a wide space of trees and with a small greenhouse, a chicken yard in the back. It had even had awnings. Now the cars of the boarders were parked under the trees and there was no grass there, only a sort of soiled dirt from drippings of cars; some blown-out tires were lying around, and on Sundays some boarders washed their cars there. The greenhouse was a wreck of glass, roof caved in and the stalks of perished flowers still in it. In summer, though, trumpet vines covered the ruin. But in winter it was ugly to see. The servants' quarters were now rented to a woman from California who, at her age, was studying piano. Some nights it seemed she was trying to show off by playing the “March Slav” so loud for all the Neighborhood to hear.

Though Princis Lester stayed Red River County, Mr. Simpson took to ways of the Neighborhood and drew away from the house and from Princis. He was not a waiting man and he had waited beyond his capacity. Now it seemed to him that he had made a bad bargain at the commissary in Red River County, and he used these words one night to tell Princis Lester so. He started bowling two nights a week with the Hines Street Team while the wives sat in the boxes at the bowling alley and had their beer and cigarettes, yelling when the team made good strikes; or he went to baseball games and wresding matches, or played dominoes in town somewhere; and he wanted Venetian blinds. More and more Princis was alone, except for one other thing she brought from Red River County and that was her friend Zamour.

In the evenings Princis Lester, in her straight-down country dress falling like a sack down her body, would stand on the front porch or walk up and down the sidewalk on Hines Street in the
twilight
and call to Zamour to come in. “Zamour! Zamour!” she would call, in a sweet song, until Zamour, plain country cat, would come dallying in on his delicate high hind legs and too-short front ones, so that he seemed to be coming down a ladder to his destination. Sometimes Mr. Framer, one of the neighbors and a policeman, when he was off duty sitting on his front porch cooling off with his bare feet cocked up on the banister, would mimic her and whistle back an insinuating whistle, until his wife, Mercel, came out of the house smoking her cigarette to tell him he ought to be ashamed. They were Rockport County people who drank their homebrew and fished on the jetties at Galveston on Sundays. They painted all the flowerpots red on their front porch and made a garden in their back yard with painted Roman-art bullfrogs standing on the rim of a fish pool, a goose, and a little elf sitting on a toadstool. Their garden was of city mode, azaleas and camellias; but there was always one row of onions and one of bell peppers and a little greens.

Time passed and Princis withdrew more and more from the city and from the Neighborhood. She would not answer the knock of visiting ladies from the houses in the block, and one in particular, a Christian woman from the Neighborhood church who said she brought greetings from the Married Couples' Class, and had a bob with a permanent wave in it. No one saw Princis Lester any more, walking in her sunbonnet to the grocery store in the late afternoons with Zamour following her and the two of them having their conversation. She and Zamour kept indoors. Neighbors watched her forlorn-looking house through their windows, ferns on the porch burnt up from lack of water, newspapers and circulars in yellow drifts on the porch. They wondered if she was sick or not. The men on the bowling team knew that Mr. Simpson had moved to the Railroadmen's boarding house in town and told their wives.

Then one afternoon there was suddenly the announcement of Zamour on the sidewalk, and sure enough at twilight the Neighborhood heard the call “Zamour! Zamour!”; and something was broken, like a long drought. They saw Princis walking up and down the sidewalk again. Her some sort of confinement was over, it was probably out of embarrassment or mourning at the flight of Mr. Simpson. Month after month, they followed this single daily appearance of Princis Lester at twilight, with only the calling of Zamour to let the Neighborhood know she was there, and her total silence and absence the rest of the time. “I think that's why she calls the cat so long and so sadly,” one of the neighbor women said, “to let us know she is still there. For how else would we ever know, if it were not for the sign of the cat?” “And when she does come out, to call the cat,” another said, “she looks white as a ghost. But that's because of the heavy powder she wears on her face, as if she'd fallen into the flour bin. Still, that's the old Red River County way: all caked powder, an inch thick, and no rouge.”

One day Mr. Simpson fell very ill and was taken to the Southern Pacific Hospital. He lay there month after month, still a young man and sinking ever so slowly toward his death because of drinking. Princis Lester talked once to the doctors who came and made her let them in by crying out that it was a death message—and she said at the door, “About who, my sisters?” The doctors told her that her husband must have been drinking all his life, for he had a cancer of the spleen from it. Did she know? they asked her. “No,” she said to them. “I never knew Mr. Simpson that well.”

Princis would not go to see Mr. Simpson at the hospital. She wrote a postcard to Red River County—but not to her sisters—and asked her cousin, a twenty-year-old boy named Wylie Prescott, to come and try to get him some kind of job in the city and stay in her house until Mr. Simpson could die. He came—he was from the Prescott branch of the family, kin some way to her, her mother's younger brother's son, she remembered; and he had very little to say, or Princis heard little of what he said. She did not even ask him about Red River County. He took the back bedroom to have for his, though he never seemed to be in it.

The young cousin began a secretive life, the city provided him this opportunity, and he got a job driving a large dusty truck which he parked on Hines Street in front of the house at night. He made his own secret life right away, or found it; and sometimes in the humid evenings, now, the Neighborhood would see Princis and Zamour sitting in the swing on the front porch and the cousin on the front steps playing his guitar. The Neighborhood, living their ways, would all be in their houses: the Catholics on the corner in theirs, the one who had the big tomboy named Sis, in theirs; those in the rotting two-story Graves house in theirs—all the roomers in their hot lighted rooms, their cars parked in front of the house and their radios on at different stations—while the decrepit owners, Mr. and Mrs. Graves, sat pushed back into one room they lived in, with pictures of their seven children and their wives and children on the walls. The yards had been watered and the mosquitos had come, suppers were over, the oleanders were fragrant, and there was the sound of accelerating night traffic on the close boulevards. Tree frogs were in the trees, for there usually had been no rain for three months, and their song was as if the dry leaves were sighing. Then Princis Lester would stroll up and down the sidewalk, ghostly in her thick face powder, arms folded as if it were chilly, her felt houseshoes on, with bonbons of fuzz on the toe, calling, “Zamour! Zamour!” and there was the faint strumming of her cousin's guitar accompanying her little cat call.

It was her cousin Wylie Prescott who came in late one night and saw something, after sitting in his truck in front of the house with Mercel Framer, with whom he had become good friends, playing poker and drinking beer with her to keep her company because Mr. Framer the policeman had night duty. What the cousin saw was Princis Lester sitting in her bedroom by the low light of a little lamp, gazing like a statue into a mirror she held in her hand. Zamour was sitting on her shoulder watching and poised as if to catch a bird in the mirror. They did not even hear him come in. He watched Princis and Zamour, then shut the door very quietly and went on peeping through the crack. There she and Zamour sat, frozen in a spell of gazing. He went on to bed, thinking, “As long as they don't mess with my playparties I won't bother theirs.”

When Mr. Simpson finally died, Wylie Prescott disappeared, so far as the Neighborhood could make out, for the truck was gone and no sign of him. Princis Lester took Zamour in out of the Neighborhood for good and they kept together in the little house very quietly, to wait for Mr. Simpson's pension. Every morning at five-thirty the faint click of the alarm clock, turned off now but still set at the hour when Mr. Simpson used to get up to go to the railroad yards, was like a little ghost living on in the clock. “Mr. Simpson is still living in that big ticking clock,” she told Zamour. “But when his pension comes, we're going back to Red River County.” She played a game with Zamour, to wait for the pension. “When we go back to Red River County, what shall we take with us?” Princis named things first—she would take this, and she would take that; what would Zamour take? Zamour did not seem to want to take anything, only looked up at her through his cotton-eyes, arched his back for her to put her fingers in his fur, and rubbed against her legs, shimmering up his tail. They had grown so close.

Most of the time Zamour had been so much like a person, a beautiful, loyal, and loving person, that Princis had forgotten that he was just a mortal cat, and she talked to him, did nice things for him, making plans for him in Red River County. “We'll plant a little garden and have some okra in it, have our cow, and there'll be a shade tree for us, when Mr. Simpson's pension comes and we go back to Red River County”; and she would run her fingers through his fur until Zamour would stretch himself long and electric under her caress. But when she would come upon him sprawled on the bed, involved in his frank bestial sleep, mouth gaping and wild teeth bared in his cat snore, she realized, passing to another room, that Zamour was just a dumb beast and could play no game with her, speak no conversation. “Why go back to Red River County at all?” she asked herself despondently. “He is no one to be with.” Then was when she was so very lonely that she wished to see her sisters. She wrote a little letter to them and said, “Do not be surprised but I am coming back to the house in Red River County when Mr. Simpson's pension comes.”

Her sisters were still there in the old house. There had been a few postcards exchanged during Mr. Simpson's illness and upon his death. What would they think when they saw her coming through the gate to the house, carrying Zamour and her suitcase? Or would she surprise them, come at night without their expecting her, walk up the road hearing their xylophone music which they had played together for years, hymns and sacred songs and some songs out of their girlhood, but most of all “Beautiful Ohio,” their best one. People passing the old house on the hill at night would hear the sounds of the xylophone and used to say, “Those are the sweet bearded Lester Sisters.” She would open the door, the music would stop, and Cheyney and Maroney would run to her in their delicate bracelets of beard that seemed to hang from the tips of their ears and loop round their chins, and take her back; and the three of them would live the rest of their lives together there in Red River County.

But no… she could not. They were of another tribe, it seemed to her, almost as if they were of another color and language; they had their own ways, their own world—she was an alien there. There would always be the question in her mind, did they love her or did they mock her. It would only mean another waiting with the face mirror, to see if it would come to her, and with them waiting and watching, too—she was sure they would wait and watch, for how could they help it? I am not like them, I am not like them, she told herself; they make me feel so lonely and unusual… and she could not go back to them. She and Zamour would find a little cottage of their own near her sisters and they would live happily there on the pension. She would go to see her sisters once in a while, as the other kinfolks did, be nice with them, listen to their music, accepting their difference, as she had when she was young. The pension was what to wait for.