The Wintering (49 page)

All along his intention was to save me, too: from the middle class to which I had been born. I would fight it for every inch of art I ever gained, he said; and I have. He contended that art is a little stronger than any human passion for thwarting it. And art took care of its own, took care of those capable of fidelity to it above everything else. He wished to be the father I had had in name only; to be more; to make me a writer: to get the good stuff out of Joan Williams; Pygmalion, not creating a cold and beautiful statue in order to fall in love with it, but taking his love and creating a poet out of her. He refused to believe he could take a young woman into his life, and spirit, and not have her make something new under the sun whether she willed it or not. It might even have been partly that belief that drew him to begin with. Or maybe it was vanity, Lucifer's own pride.

At twenty, I read
The Sound and the Fury
lying on a wicker swing on an ivy-covered screened porch off my parents' dining room. It was in the days before the South became capsulated by air-conditioning, and overhead was an indolently revolving ceiling fan, which in Memphis's humid summer weather eventually sent to sleep anyone lying there. It was not a time when southern girls like me got summer jobs. In that pre–Sun Belt South there seemed always to be so much time.

I had never heard of William Faulkner until I took that book into my hands. Going to Bard as a junior I first heard of
Time
magazine, did not yet know of
The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's
, much less about quarterlies. In my household my father read only
True Detective
, often lying in bed and reading it while recovering from nightmarish binges of his own. My mother read women's magazines, and sometimes best sellers such as
Gone with the Wind
. One of my peers, a young man, who introduced me to
The Sound and the Fury
, and I decided that summer of 1949 to try to see Faulkner; it was considered a rather silly idea by our friends, perhaps a lark: the way once, on a double date, four of us decided at night to visit a Negro funeral home. We entered, walked about, were met by a gracious older black man who could do nothing but show these white teenagers, cordially, the establishment. I shudder to think of it now, but that was the South then.

Catching wind of my proposed visit, older Mississippi relatives told my mother not to let me go near Faulkner's place. He was liable to be up a tree in the yard, naked, and reciting poetry. I found the image intriguing.

We set off for the house of my first cousin Regina, who was married to a native of Oxford. John Reed was a contemporary of Faulkner's stepson, and went in his childhood to the Faulkner residence, Rowan Oak, to hear tales on Halloween. He phoned and asked if he might bring over a cousin who wanted to be a writer, and Faulkner said no; now that the rain had slacked, he was going sailing. My friend and I were crushed, and John Reed suggested at least driving by to look at the house. I wanted to renege at once when we drove in past the “No Trespassing” sign. I had thought he meant to view it from the road, in passing. But it was obscured by large cedars. We stopped just after turning in, to back out again, and John Reed said, There he is. He went over to ask Mister Bill if he'd just come and speak to us.

Typical of our summers, it was as hot and dry in the aftermath of rain as if the morning's rain had never been. Faulkner emerged with John Reed from a copse of trees where he had been pulling down vines. I had the sense that in that shelter raindrops remained. A grown man in shorts and wearing no shirt was a surprise to me, and I did not even note his smallness. I had looked away instantly, mortified by our intrusion. And though he bent to the car window to shake hands with my friend, who asked if he might shake Faulkner's hand—the audacity of it infuriating me—I did not look at him then. Whatever he saw of me in that instant was his only glimpse. Standing beside the car he spoke a few words to John Reed and to his toddler with us; then he went away again.

We drove out and my friend shouted, “I'll never wash my hand again.” John Reed was laughing. “You know what Mister Bill said? He was tired of people coming down here to see if he had two heads.”

Dear Mr. Faulkner
, I began a letter the minute I walked into my house in Memphis, knowing if I didn't do it then, I never would.
Probably you have a secretary and will never see this letter
. I told him I had come not to see if he had two heads but because I had read
The Sound and the Fury
and knew he had thought, felt, and suffered everything I ever had. And I wanted him to tell me the reason for suffering: why some people had to, and others never did. What were the rewards? I told him not to be embarrassed about his drinking, that I knew all about it. And it was all right; my father drank too. And could I see him again?

Eventually he would tell me I told him even about my dog being recently run over. By then, he was Bill. Bill, I couldn't have.

I don't remember him ever really laughing aloud. His laugh was a chuckle and seemed always to reach beyond the moment and to be for all the foibles of mankind he understood so well, to bring back memories. His eyes were hooded and nearly black, but when he was amused they took on decided amber glints; his moustache wagged and his thin lips twitched. Oh, yes, he said. Yes, you did. Perhaps he had waited so long to recall it to make certain I would know he was not poking fun.

He had to tear up the first letter; his mail was never safe. But a letter from a stranger? There was presentiment in it; he thought that he might fall in love, and tried the best he knew how to prevent it by discouraging a meeting between us. In answering the letter he apologized. He had thought I was to be some grim beldame of forty or fifty summers (ironical today) and president of some limited literary society come out of curiosity, and he was wrong. Something charming came out of my letter, remembered from youth. A smell, a scent or flower, not in a garden but in the woods, stumbled on by chance and with no past or particular odor and already doomed for the first frost; until thirty years later a soiled and battered bloke of fifty smells or remembers it and is twenty-one again and brave and clean and durable. He thought I already knew enough, had enough, and lacked nothing a middle-aged writer could supply. I could not have disagreed more. But write him the questions, he urged, and sooner or later he would answer them.

I don't know what questions I wrote him from college. But he replied that they were the wrong ones; that a woman must ask these questions of a man when they are lying in bed together, at peace. I was a little shocked, and also apprehensive. And I might not find answers, as most people didn't, he said. But he had the idea I would at least find something workable; then tell him. It would be a good subject for the last letter I need ever write him. And I was not to grieve over having the problems and the questions. The kindest thing the gods could give people at twenty was the capacity to ask why, and a passion for something beyond vegetation, even if what was gained by it was grief and pain. Meanwhile, read Housman, a lot.

These were words of rare comfort for the young woman I was: without much guidance in my life, out of my environment; the first indication I was going through a more thoughtful growing up than many my age, and might be a better person for it, as I'd suspected myself. I was not to him the oddity my parents thought me. To pass through childhood I'd invented at an early age the belief I would go someday to a place where people would love me, and I would not be hurt anymore. I could not keep myself from believing I was not worthless, as I was told at home I was.

Obediently, I read “A Shropshire Lad,” and immediately wrote him:

“‘Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.'

See, I always listen to you.”

In October, Faulkner found, suddenly, that he wanted to see me, and almost came east. And during my Christmas vacation we wrote back and forth trying to figure out how to meet. Not here, he wrote from Oxford. There might be nothing, or repercussions that would put a bad taste in the mouth. He disliked drawing into intrigue someone who had never known it. So I would have to think about it, or maybe better, forget it.

At ten
A.M.
the Southern Trailways bus emptied, its passengers scattered. A small man was left, bundled, belted into a trench coat and wearing a brown Tyrolean hat. I moved forward. Mr. Faulkner?

Miss Williams.

As pressing as where to meet was then where to go? He knew nothing about the city and had no ideas; the only object was not to be recognized. He had something to take to a typist in the Peabody Hotel. Would I drive him there? I would drive him there.

Is it a book? I asked as we moved along, and he replied, I hope so. Ignorant of the capriciousness of creativity, editors, publishers, and the public, I wondered what he was talking about. Was it a book or not? The Peabody had been part of my upbringing, yet I was momentarily uncertain when he said to take him around to the carriage entrance. I assumed he meant to drive beneath a portico where cars came closest to a door. Courtly manners, a willfulness toward the old-fashioned, would strike me many times, and he was still calling me Miss Williams. I didn't think Faulkner so old as to have come to the Peabody in a carriage.

In our part of the country, the Peabody Hotel was a fabled place. Ducks swam in a pool in the lobby and waddled across it nightly to an elevator to be borne to the Plantation Roof to sleep, near the bandstand and open-air dance floor where I'd been so many times. Part of my middle-aged dream is to be given gardenias again. Waiting, I thought about getting into something I had never expected. I had expected to see Faulkner as Faulkner, but his need for secrecy had turned the situation into my seeing a married man. I was three years away from Miss Hutchinson's School for Girls, where on Monday mornings gaunt old Miss Hutchinson bowed stiffly from the waist, on the platform of an assembly room, and said, Good morning, young ladies; and we bowed in return and said, Good morning, Miss Hutchinson; and the week began. I had spent my first year of college in Memphis too, and the second at a girls' junior college in Maryland outside Washington, D.C. I had gone north to school! On Saturdays, going into the city, we not only had to wear hats and gloves but had to appear at five
P.M.
at the Willard Hotel before an emissary from the college to prove our bodies still in the District of Columbia and our hats and gloves intact, at least. Bard College was a great leap. And now, rather unintentionally, I'd taken another one. By the day's end, driven almost beyond endurance by cold and aimlessness, I took him to see my mother: the house being both warm and stationary was the only reason. I told no friends about the meeting, for I felt they would either see no significance or make a joke.

Miss Hutchinson's was the first real academic training I'd had, having been in public schools up to the ninth grade. There I first began to show any aptitude for writing, and impressed everyone with a theme written from the viewpoint of a powder puff. I wrote a long poem as a mother with a son gone off to war and killed, which caused my English teacher to burst into tears. She had me read it before assembly; but since I was not a mother with a son gone off to war, some of the girls wouldn't believe I wrote it. While I considered myself serious, I was equally interested in obtaining White Shoulders cologne and Spalding saddle shoes, of which there were shortages during the war, and wearing the shoes as dirty as possible, and the darkest, bloodiest lipstick to be found, and I wore my cardigan sweaters backward like everyone else, the buttons imprinting themselves on my backbone while I sat at my school desks. As southern teenagers, our lives were consumed with social activities, centering on sororities and clubs we called inter-sororities: S K S, Chez Nous, La Jeunesse, Junior Cotillion, and on and on, followed upon graduation by Girl's Cotillion. The only cultural events I remember going to in Memphis in my younger days were Anita Louise playing her harp in the stage show after the movie at the Orpheum and Colleen Moore exhibiting her doll house at the auditorium. But all the organizations to which I belonged, and fraternities, gave informal parties year round, and at Christmas, and in early May, when schools let out because of the heat, large formal dances, preferably in the ballroom above my head while I waited for Faulkner at the typist's. The hotel held childhood memories too of eating with my parents in the enclosed rooftop dining room, looking down at the glitter of the city, and out at stars. A tall, gray-haired, tan-skinned headwaiter named Alonzo called me “the little princess.” I consider it lucky I never overheard him address another small girl similarly. Vanilla muffins were the Peabody's specialty and would become one in my household for my sons, someday.

But I could not predict that any more than the time coming, too soon, when Faulkner's wife, Estelle, asked me to meet her in the Black Cat restaurant of the Peabody, where she asked if I wanted to marry her husband. In astonishment, I said no, and, I am glad, did not have the presence of mind to add, I didn't think I knew him well enough, yet. Why then did I want to see him? Because I wanted to be a writer; didn't she understand? If she wanted to be a painter, wouldn't she want to know Picasso?

No, she said.

She thought Bill was going through the menopause; men had one as well as women. I had no idea of that. And all I knew about the menopause anyway was that women could no longer have babies, and might act peculiar. However, I did understand what she meant: change; and that he needed one. I said in couched, careful words that it was my understanding about life that when people had been married for a long time their feelings were not the same as they were at first; and I was thinking about my parents' separate bedrooms. But, misunderstanding me, she said abruptly that she did not consider herself too old, at fifty, to fall in love.