This Side of Glory (10 page)

“Why Eleanor! When did you get to town?”

She glanced at his secretary. “I’d like to see you alone, dad.”

Fred made a movement of his thumb toward the door to the outer office. “Run along, Miss Loring.” As the secretary and Vance went out he looked back at Eleanor. “Sit down, honey.”

“I haven’t much time to sit down,” Eleanor said brusquely. “Dad, will you let me have my stock in the fruit lines?”

“Oh.” Fred sat down again and folded his hands on the diagram of the steam-grader. He gave her a long look up and down. Their eyes met. Fred said, “No, I will not.”

Eleanor felt a stab that was almost like physical pain. With no more words between them she knew he had given it to her because he did not trust Kester, and that was why he had tied it up so she could spend nothing but the income. She had between twelve and fifteen hundred dollars a year, which would be enough to keep her and her child from destitution.

“All right,” said Eleanor. “If you won’t you won’t, and I know there’s no use arguing. I’ll go now.”

“Not yet.” Fred reached across the desk and took her hand in his. He gave her another intent look. “Honey,” he said, “if you’re having money trouble, why don’t you tell me about it?”

“It’s no use,” Eleanor returned. “I can manage.”

“How?” asked Fred.

“It’s none of your business,” she said shortly.

“Sourtheastern Exchange Bank?” Fred asked cannily. “Charlie Robichaux?”

“How did you know?”

He gave her a smile. “I’m not exactly stupid. That bank runs half those wornout plantations up the river.” Fred got up and came around the desk. “Why don’t you tell me about it, Eleanor?”

“No,” she said.

“All right, honey,” said Fred. “I guess you’re grown up.” After a moment he asked, “Baby, do you want me to sign my name on something? Would that be a help?”

Eleanor shivered. Fred was not a rich man, but he had never owed a penny he had not paid. His integrity was beyond question. If he signed his name, that was enough for any bank in town. She had never thought before about how hard such a reputation was to win and how precious it was to keep.

She answered sharply to cover the fact that her voice might easily have trembled. “Dad, I wouldn’t let you do that for a million dollars. If you don’t understand there’s nothing I can tell you.”

“I understand, Eleanor,” said Fred simply.

“Yes, dad, I’m your daughter,” she said, and then she dropped into the chair he had drawn up for her and put her head down on the desk, resting it on her arm. She did not cry. But she had undertaken this interview first because she had known it was going to be the most difficult, and so it was; she felt naked and ashamed before her father’s eyes. He put his arm around her shoulders, and Eleanor thought how much easier this would be to stand if he had been angry and had told her she could go ahead and take her punishment for not having listened to him. She wished she had not come to Fred; she might have known he would not yield to her request, but it had been her only chance to get her hands on some negotiable property at once and she had reached for it with a sense of desperation. When at last she lifted her head, making herself look into his eyes again, Fred said only,

“The folks’ll feel mighty sad if they don’t get a chance to see you while you’re here. Let me ring Molly and say you’ll be up for dinner this evening?”

She wanted nothing less than to see any of them, but she did not know how to refuse. So she nodded. “And dad,” she added, “nothing to the folks about why I’m in town.”

“Oh, to be sure not,” he said genially. “You’re old enough to have business of your own. Like to come out now for a cup of coffee?”

“No, thanks, I have to get back to the baby, then I’m seeing Mr. Robichaux.”

“All right. See you tonight, then.”

Eleanor left him. She went back to the hotel and waited impatiently till it was time for her appointment at the bank.

In the afternoon she went to see Mr. Robichaux.

Mr. Robichaux had iron-gray hair and a pleasant face that became grim when she asked about the Ardeith mortgages. She told him she wanted the dates and the totals.

Mr. Robichaux cleared his throat. He said he had been compelled to write Kester a rather sharp letter. Kester’s father had often borrowed money on the cotton crop, but he had been more careful about keeping up with it, though of course—he cleared his throat again and came to the present. Yes, there had been of late, ah, some slight neglect about the interest. Kester was becoming absent-minded. Besides, the plantation had become—well, slightly rundown. It was not as valuable security as it had been. Unless something was done shortly, he was afraid—

“I understand,” said Eleanor. “Now, how much do we owe the bank and when do the notes fall due?”

Mr. Robichaux called in a clerk and got a pile of papers.

Inside of an hour Eleanor discovered that she and Kester were living at Ardeith only by a lenient interpretation of banking rules. Kester had apparently been willing to sign anything that would relieve him of thinking about money as a fact of life. She asked Mr. Robichaux for a sheet of stationery and began to write down the figures. Mentally she began to add these to the bills she had found in Kester’s desk. Kester’s notes at the bank and his personal debts together totaled, as closely as she could figure now, nearly one hundred thousand dollars.

And the plain truth was, Mr. Robichaux reminded her, that Kester had let half the plantation go to sharecroppers. The land was being ruined with one-mule crops.

“Thank you,” said Eleanor, “for giving me so much of your time.”

She left him and went out into the street. A January sun, glittering without warmth, lit the pavements. Eleanor took her watch from under her belt, wondering as she did so how long it had taken Kester to pay for the watch and what it would bring if she tried to sell it. She still had some leisure, and was thankful.

She walked down through the wholesale district, and among the factories, where the air was rich with the familiar odors of coffee and molasses that she would always associate with downtown New Orleans. When she reached the riverfront she stood on the wharf watching the creeping golden river that had fathered Ardeith and the land on which the city stood. Boats from Central America were unloading coffee, and great refrigerator cars were lined up on railroads leading to the wharf, ready to receive their cargo of bananas in the morning. Far out in the river a dredge was working, keeping the channel open. She could hear its puffing above the voices of the men busy on the wharf around her. She saw a big sign, “Tonelli Fruit Lines.” Lena Tonelli’s grandfather had come from Italy in the steerage, and picked up the overripe bananas thrown away on the wharf of New Orleans and peddled them in a pushcart at two cents a dozen. But at least he had had no debts when he started.

Turning her back on the fruit-ships Eleanor walked down to Canal Street. She could see the west bank, a line of trees and house made dim by distance, and the ferryboats going back and forth. The wind here was fresh; Eleanor thought of crossing the river on a ferry, but recollected that she could not afford to drop a nickel unnecessarily into a turnstile. So she stood still and looked at the river, remembering how she and Vance used to tease visitors to the levee camps by asking them if they knew which way the river flowed past New Orleans. Sometimes the strangers guessed east or west, but they almost never said north, which was right, and you had to draw a map and show them the bend whereby the Mississippi appeared to want to go back where it came from, before it turned around again and poured through seven golden mouths into the purple Gulf.

Eleanor caught herself. She was not often given to the yearning nostalgia that reaches for anything except the present. She turned around and walked swiftly back to the hotel, where she changed her dress and told Dilcy to stay with Cornelia while she went uptown to visit her mother.

Dinner at home was gay, friendly and noisy. After dinner the young Tonellis came in, with Guy Rickert, Lena’s fiancé, and everybody talked at once. Lena asked Eleanor if she had learned to drive a car yet, and when Eleanor said Kester was teaching her Lena said she had already learned and it was easy, she had an Overland coupé with an electric starter that had never yet failed to work, and these new slit skirts might be immodest but they did make it easy to reach the clutch and brake. Fred told about an exciting movie he had seen, in which Ford Sterling strapped Mabel Normand to a plank and started to cut her in half with a buzz-saw; he had forgotten how she was rescued, but it kept him on the edge of his seat and quite took his mind off the trouble the Atchafalaya River was making this winter. Florence said New Orleans had more than thirty moving picture theaters now, did Eleanor know that? Molly Upjohn reminded Florence that with a baby three months old Eleanor probably didn’t have time to be up-to-date on things like moving picture theaters. Florence began to play the piano and Guy Rickert asked Eleanor to dance. It was as though she had never been away. Eleanor had a sense of warm familiarity. These were her people, solid, sincere, utterly trustworthy. They took it for granted that you should take care of yourself. Guy and Lena drove her back to the hotel. Eleanor stood a moment looking after them regretfully, feeling that they were taking away with them the sturdy self-reliance to which she had been bred and leaving her nothing to put in its place.

When she opened the door of her room she saw Kester. He was reading an afternoon paper, and as she came in he sprang to his feet, letting the paper slip to the floor.

“Remember me?” he asked affably.

Eleanor went to him, and Kester put his arms around her. Eleanor dropped her head against him, wondering why it was that Kester’s arms around her should give her such a sense of security even now. When she looked up she asked, “Are you angry with me for coming?”

“What good would it do if I were?” inquired Kester. “How does Cornelia like traveling?”

“She’s fine.”

“She seems to be; I played with her in the other room till she went to sleep.” He helped her off with her coat, and Eleanor rescued her hat in time to prevent his tossing it upside down on the bed, for it was a velvet hat with a tall aigrette and she did not expect to buy another hat of such quality for a long time. “Now,” said Kester as she put the hat into its box, “what have you been doing, Mrs. Manage-it-all?” He was regarding her with the reproachful amusement he might have given if she had interfered with his poker game by an excess of solicitude.

Fresh from the gay safety of home, Eleanor was in no mood for banter. Her reply was clear and terse.

“I’ve been adding up your bills. Altogether you owe nearly a hundred thousand dollars.”

“A hundred th— Eleanor, don’t be fantastic!”

“I’m not being fantastic. You told me you didn’t know how much it was, so I’ve been finding out.”

Kester gave a long whistle. Leaning back in his chair, he regarded the chandelier thoughtfully. Eleanor told him about her talk with Mr. Robichaux.

“You wait for me,” Kester said abruptly. “I’m going downstairs and call him.”

“This time of night?”

“It’s not twelve o’clock yet. I’ll ring him at home.”

Soothed by his superb confidence that nothing could ever happen to
him,
Kester scampered out, and Eleanor went into the adjoining room to look at Cornelia. She bent over the crib. Cornelia had gone to sleep holding a rattle, which Eleanor slipped out of her fingers, lest she hurt herself with it in the night. Back in the light of her own room she noticed that the rattle was a new one, evidently brought by Kester when he came in this evening, and she flung it down with vehemence. With debts pointing accusing fingers at him from every corner, what right had he to waste even a quarter on a rattle for a child already amply supplied with unpaid-for luxuries? Kester came in, exuberant. He was going to see Mr. Robichaux at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon, he said, and he kissed her, assuring her that he’d take care of it and everything was going to be all right. Eleanor laid his hand against her cheek, with a wondering smile.

“Doesn’t it distress you,” she asked, “to know you’re in debt?”

“Darling,” said Kester, “I suppose it ought to, but I’m so used to it.” He sat down and drew her to sit on his knee.

“Have you always been in debt?” Eleanor inquired.

“Always,” he assured her solemnly. “I’ll tell you about myself. When I was eight years old my father gave me a quarter and told me he was going to give me a quarter every week. I was to keep a cash book, recording what I spent for candy and such, and this was to teach me how to be a big business man.”

“Yes, that’s the way I was taught,” she agreed.

Kester went on talking confidentially. “But I didn’t have any cash book, you see. So I went to the store and bought one. It was a funny little store kept by an old man named Mr. Parfax. The cash book cost thirty cents, and I only had a quarter. So the first entry I made in the book was, ‘I owe Mr. Parfax five cents.’” He sighed. “And it seems I’ve never caught up.”

Eleanor could not help laughing at him. Kester looked as ingenuous as his baby daughter. “Do you support your father?” she asked after a moment.

“No, darling, he has the rent from that sugar land across the river.”

“What are you going to tell Mr. Robichaux tomorrow? He can foreclose if he wants to.”

“Oh Lord, I don’t know. I’ll tell him something. Eleanor, I bothered about this for a long time the other night before I could go to sleep and all it did was give me a headache. I’m not going to tear my head to pieces again about it. It’s late, and I’m sleepy, and if you don’t get that serious look off your face you’re going to have lines before you’re thirty.”

3

The next afternoon they went to the Southeastern Exchange Bank to see Mr. Robichaux.

Mr. Robichaux greeted Kester cordially. Suspecting that this pleasantness was merely intended to soften what he would be compelled to tell Kester in about ten minutes, Eleanor was apprehensive as she sat down. Kester began to talk business.

That is, he began to talk what purported to be business, while Eleanor listened with increasing amazement. Her way of discussing anything was to slash through to its fundamentals. Kester’s was to exchange opinions about the races, to ask Mr. Robichaux about his grandchildren (he knew all their names), to congratulate Mr. Robichaux on having won the chess tournament at his club (and how under heaven, she wondered, did Kester know he had won any chess tournament? Kester knew everything about everybody). Apparently Mr. Robichaux’s chess was important to him. He grew more and more jovial. He told Kester about a tricky opening gambit he had used. Somehow the talk veered to politics. Mr. Robichaux thought the Americans who were having trouble with the Mexican bandits ought to come home and not expect the government to send soldiers to take care of them. That sort of thing would lead to war. And who wanted war with Mexico? Who indeed, Kester inquired agreeably. The United States got all of Mexico it could use during the old war with them, the one back in the eighteen-forties. But of course, said Mr. Robichaux, with that college professor in the White House you couldn’t tell what might happen. Kester nodded. Mr. Wilson was a sort of experiment with a philosopher-king, as they said, didn’t Mr. Robichaux think so?