The Plot (12 page)

Alex gaped; her lids fluttered. “I don't understand.”

“Can you understand any reason besides snobbery why Jamey should not want you to be interested in Louis Daignot? Can you understand why Jamey keeps Louis here? Ask him. He'll tell you, maybe. He loves to hear Louis read aloud. Why not? Louis has a beautiful voice, hasn't he? His voice makes shivers go up my spine, and Jamey's spine, too.”

“Don't talk like that, Ethel!”

“I'm talking like that for your own good. I'm telling you what I wish someone had told me before I fell for him. Oh, I've fallen for him, I admit that. Who wouldn't? Why wouldn't Jamey? I'm telling you to stop hanging around here for your own good.” She reached forward and grabbed Alex' wrist. “Don't listen to me, let me show you. Get dressed, go on, get dressed. I'll wait here. Come to the new house with me. Louis is locked inside Jamey's room. Louis is reading to Jamey in his room. Come on, while they're busy—reading. I want to show you something.”

When Ethel released Alex' wrist, it burned; where Ethel's fingers had clasped it, it burned. Walking into the big house to get dressed, Alex waved her wrist through the air to cool it.

The mahogany door to Jamey's room was closed. As Ethel and Alex walked by, they heard what sounded like a giggle from Jamey. The two women stopped and looked at one another, then Alex dropped her eyes. Ethel smiled and they walked on to Louis' room. When Alex hesitated by the open door, Ethel said, “Come on, come on.” Inside the room, she went to the wall and pressed the button that opened the sliding doors of the closet. Because Alex still hesitated, was still unable to overcome her reluctance to invade anyone's room, Ethel had to come back and half drag Alex to the closet. She was a very powerful woman. “We're not going to read Louis' diary. I don't like spying any more than you do, your ladyship! I was properly brought up, too, in case you didn't know. We're just going to have a showing of Louis' newly acquired wardrobe; that's all.”

She jerked out the hanger with Louis' suit on it. “You must know fine cloth when you see it, you must recognize fancy tailoring much more easily than I do. And you haven't seen this, have you? He wouldn't wear it around you, would he? I don't think he wanted you to see this, Miss Alex Wilcoxen, yet it's most becoming. You really should see him in that color! A dream suit, and it didn't come off a rack, either. Or this.” She put the suit back into the closet and, reaching in, pulled out a beautiful raw-silk robe. “You must have an idea of how much this cost the penniless young man from the slums. Now feel these.” She held up some pajamas. “What the young man will wear when dead-broke, aren't they?” She put the robe and pajamas back and closed the door, pushing her thumb so hard against the button that it turned white. “I don't have clothes like that, Alex, but of course I only work for Jamey. I'm only his secretary and his slave. I'm only his secretary, his slave, and, unfortunately for me, a woman!”

Jamey, talking much more than he usually did during dinner, seemed not to notice that the three others at the table were silent and sullen. Louis looked at Alex, but she kept her blue look veiled; Ethel watched Louis looking at Alex. Jamey seemed to see nothing but his food.

“Didn't you hear what I just said, dear boy?”

“Sorry.”

“Didn't anyone hear? Oh, dear, Johnson had his Boswell, but I am barren stock like the poor old Queen of Scots! Here I am ruining my dinner to drop these pearls and nobody listens to me. Pearls before swine? No, not swine, not piggy-wiggies; Louis and Alex have eaten but nothing today, and we have peach leather for dessert. Louis, you have never tasted peach leather, I'm sure.”

“No, thanks. I'm not hungry.”

“For Jamey, dear boy?” He crooned it. Alex looked miserable.

“No, thanks.”

Jamey watched William Reas set a plate of the dessert in front of Alex. She shook her head, and William Reas shook his. Jamey said, “Oh, come now, Alex, eat your dessert.”

“No, thank you, Jamey.”

“I'm going to earn your thanks, dear girl. Didn't you notice William Reas just then?”

Her head came up. “No, I didn't. What is it, William Reas?”

“Maum Cloe made the peach leather special for you, Miss Alex.”

“If you don't eat it, dear child, William Reas is going to report to his mother, and if she hears that you passed up your favorite dessert, you are in for a good dosing of her herb tonic and you know it!” He explained to Louis: “Maum Cloe is famous for her tyranny, her homemade medicines, and her oracular ability. That's a good girl, Alex, no, not just two spoonfuls!”

Alex wiped her mouth. “It isn't as good as usual, Jamey.”

Jamey tasted his own portion. “Of course it is as good. It's you who aren't as good as usual. You are a naughty girl.” She had bent her head again and was rapidly spooning up the peach leather. “I am going to excuse myself, children, and try to have my nap now.”

Louis, who had risen when Jamey got out of his seat, started to seat himself again, glanced at his watch, and changed his mind. “I must speak to you, Jamey. It's important.” He had not been able to hint at his departure because he did not want Ethel to hear him. In front of her, he couldn't try to express his genuine gratitude to Jamey, since she would think him a liar and a hypocrite and he wasn't either. Because he was leaving, he could push his anger at Jamey into the background, and his affection for him, promptly, inevitably, came forward. He could remember the real kindness, the patience, and forget the denials. Besides, Louis thought, his eyes seeing Alex' hand, the narrow fingers, the pale nails, the white smooth skin, he had wanted to spend this last hour free to watch Alex. Damn, he thought, I don't need to look at her, I will never forget the shape of her head or her mouth or her shoulders in that kind of low-cut navy-blue thing she wore. He gave his dessert plate a furious push and it clinked against the heavy silver. “I've got to talk to you, Jamey.”

“To me? To old Jamey? One down for the ladies! You may speak to me in ten minutes, Louis. First I must change for my nap.”

Alex decided to have a cigarette. She leaned forward to take one from Jamey's box, set near his plate, took it, leaned forward again to take the lighter, and felt the first cramp in her belly. The pain was so dreadful that she didn't believe in it and, with her hand trembling from the pain, wet with the sweat the pain had induced, tried to work the lighter. Her fingers could not turn the emery wheel, and when she had dried them on her napkin and tried again, she had the second pain. Bending over, tottering, clasping her belly, she staggered from the table. Louis, who was standing outside of Jamey's door, forming his difficult farewell speech, heard her as she collapsed. He saw Alex on the floor; Ethel standing over her.

He gathered her up, and she moaned with the agony of this pressure on her body. Her eyes glazed. She licked her lips and whimpered, “Dah! I want my dah, my dah!” Then she screamed shrilly, like an animal.

Jamey opened his door. “Alex, Alex!” he said, as if he were scolding her for making such an untoward noise. “Get her to Maum Cloe, quickly! Oh, dear,” he said, “women!” His door was closed hastily, noisily, as if, had he watched Alex' agony any longer, he would have been infected by it.

Then Louis saw Ethel's face, the expression on it complex, baffling. He shouted, “Get a doctor!”

“No telephone. Get her to that old dah witch doctor, Louis, that's the best way, and send Joseph Reas to Charleston.”

Holding Alex as lightly as he could, Louis ran with her until his breath whistled and his heart pounded; then he ran further. Alex had stiffened; she was unconscious, but she moaned rhythmically in a terrible, almost musical pattern that Louis thought would fill his ears forever. He told her, as he ran, that he loved her, he loved her; but she didn't hear. He thought: Hear no evil; see no evil; speak no evil.

Before he was in sight of the big house, he started to call for Maum Cloe, and perhaps she heard him, or perhaps, as she had always insisted, she was psychic, for she was already waiting with William Reas and her grandson under the columns of the piazza. She put her withered gray hand on Alex' forehead and wiped the sweat off. “Give she here,” she nodded; the two men stepped forward. William Reas held his arms out for Alex, and when Louis hesitated, Maum Cloe repeated, “Give she here!”

There was such assurance in her that Louis promptly handed the girl over. William Reas marched into the house and Maum Cloe followed him, munching her gums, hobbling; then they were swallowed up in the dim interior. Louis wiped his face. “You drive me to Charleston,” he said to Joseph Reas. “We've got to get a doctor here quickly.”

Joseph Reas looked uneasy. “Maum Cloe doctor Miss Alex.”

“Get that car out! Get that car out right away!”

The speedometer read sixty on the bad road and eighty on the good. Joseph Reas, slowing down when they came into the city, said he would take them to Mr. Jamey's doctor.

On the way to the car, where Louis had rushed him, Louis described Alex' symptoms; the doctor stopped, resisting Louis' efforts to push him forward. He sent Joseph Reas back into his office to fetch his stomach pump from his nurse. It sounded like food poisoning, he said. When Louis groaned at this waste of precious moments, the doctor said, “Now, young man, a stitch in time …”

Louis paced up and down, waiting for Joseph Reas and the stomach pump. In time—in time—in time——

The doctor said, coming out of the big house, blinking in the sunlight, snapping the catch on his leather bag, that some of these old dahs seemed to have an uncanny understanding of illness. Miss Wilcoxen's dah had certainly done just the right things without waiting for him to arrive. “Would you like a drink, young man? You look bad. Sit down, there, on the steps. It was almost certainly food poisoning. If I had the vomitus … Unfortunately, the old dah tidied up before we arrived.”

Louis said, “Food poisoning.”

The doctor said, whatever it was, the patient was all right. Since nobody else had been taken ill, he thought it possible she might have some food allergy, a sensitivity she ought to have checked. He needn't have come, he said, not with that old dah around. “Waste of time, medical school, eh? Degree, eh?”

“Yes,” Louis said. “Oh, excuse me, Doctor, of course not. I was thinking of something else.”

The doctor climbed into the car and leaned out, poking Louis in the ribs. “Thinking of some
one
else, eh? Well, I don't blame you, no, sir! Well, might as well get traveling; I'm not needed here this time.”

Louis thought: Next time? He thought: How can I go? How can I leave her? As the car moved off, he began to run back along the road to the little house.

William Reas, shaking his head, muttered something and went inside to report to Maum Cloe. She was washing out the dress Alex had been wearing. Maum Cloe scrubbed rhythmically as she listened to her son. She said nothing.

“Ethel, did you do it?”

“Do what? Do what, Louis? Louis, there is no need to yank my arm like that.”

“Did you do it?”

“Stop shaking me, Louis.”

“I am going to shake it out of you, one way or another. You heard her screaming. You saw her. Did you do it? The doctor said it was food poisoning; you were close enough to her food for that. Did you poison her?”

“Food poisoning? Did I? Now, did I?”

He said between his teeth, “I'll break your neck, Ethel. Stop being so funny.”

“Well, it is funny, at that. I gather that you're accusing me of poisoning her because I threatened her, is that it?”

“Bright of me, isn't it? Come on. Did you?”

“Did I?”

“Don't start that again; answer me!”

“Answer you yourself, Louis. You'll have to because I have no intention of confessing. Why should I? Do you think I'm crazy? Come on, Louis, you don't think I'm going to admit it, do you?” She smiled at him and began to move away.

“Where are you going?”

“Do you want to keep track of me? Oh, you don't trust me, Louis! You're afraid if I get out of your sight, dear Alex will have another tummy-ache! Well, right now, since you're interested, I'm going to my room to rest, then, tonight, I have a date in Charleston. I think I deserve a bit of fun tonight, don't you?”

“You deserve to get your neck wrung.”

“Why don't you wring it? If
you
were to wring it, Louis——And where are you off to? New York?” Ethel went back to her room. She flung herself on her bed and closed her eyes, visualizing the dinner, the three of them—Jamey sitting there, Alex, Louis, the nigger at the serving table. (She often used words like “nigger” and “yid” and “harp” when thinking. Her culture and surroundings had taught her that these were wrong, and she used them because she believed them to be wrong; it was a form of rebellion against the life that, she believed had wronged her.) The nigger had insisted Alex eat that dessert, certainly. It was his expression that had caused Jamey to remark that Alex would be punished if she didn't eat it. Jamey? Because Louis was in love with Alex? No, the old fool wouldn't see one inch in front of his colossal vanity; he didn't really believe that Louis could prefer anyone to him. But Maum Cloe—hadn't she begged Alex to leave? Hadn't Alex said that Maum Cloe would never have asked her to come if it hadn't been beyond her to conceive of her wonderful Wilcoxen as falling in love with poor white trash? Wasn't Maum Cloe a woman who would go to any length to make herself felt? “Thank
you
, Maum Cloe,” Ethel said, opening her eyes. “Many, many thanks!” She laughed. “And you don't have to worry your dirty old head that I'll tell on you, not Ethel! Ethel won't snitch! ‘Hear no evil; see no evil; speak no evil'!” That's rich, she thought, that's really rich! She was going to tell Budder about that tonight. That much she could tell Budder; he could understand that much, and that much was safe to tell him.