Читать книгу Creep Around the Corner - Douglas Atwill - Страница 9

Such romantic illusions, and they’re all about you.

–Marlene Dietrich

“WE’LL ONLY STAY FOUR OR FIVE days. Sarah called and said she needed to see me. Asked for you to come, too. We can swim, drink some beers, go frog-gigging.”

A road trip always excited Henry Zilbert, away from Middleton for a week or so. He asked me to take off work, join him on the trek over to Parthenon. In the years before he had invited me several times but I turned him down because of my summer work.

I said, “Yesterday I was fired from the highway department. Dad got the job for me. Your father is a good man, they said, but there’s no place here for you, Bradford. I’ll cash this last check on the way out of town.”

“Don’t bring much. Shirts, pants, swimming suit.”

A stop by the house to pack, on to the bank and we were on the road by late morning. The drive from Middleton in West Texas to Parthenon in far East Texas took seven hours on the farm-to-market roads, no stopping. We talked little as we drove through San Angelo, Robert Lee, Goldthwaite, Brownwood, across the middle of Texas to Nacogdoches, Chireno and finally the last half hour into Parthenon, where Sarah, Henry’s grandmother, lived.

This was a year before I was drafted, Henry Zilbert and I home for the summer. Before Schloss Issel. We shared a room at college for the last three years. Summers brought us back to Middleton, he to help his grandfather on the ranch and I for temporary work in the oil fields or the pipeline. It would be best to let Dad cool down about my being sacked at the highway department. When we got back I would need to avoid family dinners for a while.

Just outside of Parthenon we turned off into the Blanchett Farm, a gravel road crowded by magnolia trees in a long crescent, dark leaves brushing against the car. I rolled down the window on the passenger side and the moist smell of evening pastures flowed in like water. Honeysuckle, magnolia, new-mown hay and turned earth. It was barely light, the sky a dark violet blue. Around the curve, we saw Sarah’s house, a clapboard two-story with yellowish light filling the double-hung windows.

Sarah had not set foot in Middleton since her son, Henry’s father, was killed in the war, counseling the family with detailed letters and, more recently, telephone calls. Henry’s grandfather refused to go to Parthenon, she would not come back to Middleton, and so the Zilberts had lived apart for twenty years. Sarah was there to meet us at the door.

“I love you, Henry John. Do you know that?” She was tall enough to kiss him on the forehead, like a favored son. With a sense of personal style that we saw little of in Middleton, she wore pleated ivory slacks, a black-and-white striped blouse, and a black silk scarf tucked around her neckline. Her hair was pure white, abundant, cut sharply short and straight. She and Henry had the same burnt-umber eyes. Sarah bought her clothes in New York, Henry had told me, not trusting Dallas to have what she wanted.

“Yes, ma’am. You remember Harold.”

“I do. Come in, both of you. Francie’s gone for the night, but she left some cold chicken and potato salad in the kitchen.” It was cooler in the house, a lingering mix of aromas: cooking, cut-flowers and damp fabric.

Henry said, “We ate in Nacogdoches. No need.”

“You talk like Henry Sr. Not a spare word. Harold, are you hungry?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Henry John can ‘ma’am’ me, but you call me Sarah, please. If Francie’s chicken doesn’t suit, at least get yourselves a cold beer.” She pronounced her name Say-rah.

After twenty minutes of conversation between Henry and Sarah about Middleton—who was still there, what the Zilbert neighbors were up to, how the Angus herd was doing—we went up to bed. Henry and I were staying in Sarah’s father’s room, which she said had the best view of the pastures. Twin beds now stood where Earl Blanchett’s four-poster bed almost touched the ceiling. Francie would serve breakfast on the lawn about eight.

A cool breeze came through the windows, laboring to break up the moist heat inside. I slept under a half a sheet, fitfully in the warmth. At first light, I got up and took a shower, dressed in clean Levis and a button-down shirt. Henry did not stir. On the back lawn, Sarah was already having coffee at a narrow table, reading a newspaper.

“Join me, Harold. I have a hot carafe here.” She poured me a cup and folded her newspaper. The morning air was cooler, but sultry.

I said, “This is beautiful. So different from Middleton, so green.” We looked across the rolling Blanchett fields to the native hardwoods of East Texas: oaks, maples, dogwoods, wild cherries and tulip trees, making a dark verge. Compared to the dry openness of West Texas, it was a close green paradise, ponds brimming, streams rushing into all of the low places, sounds of tree frogs and water birds.

She said, “These were cotton fields in the last century, but we turned them to permanent pasture years ago. A cattle farm instead of a ranch. We make three cuttings of hay for winter feed, have open pasture the rest of the summer. I can call the cows from here. We don’t brand them. Pets, almost. Not like the wild, tough cattle on the Zilbert spread.”

“Henry loves that ranch.”

“I know, just like his grandfather. He thought that good-for-nothing Middleton spread was the land of Goshen. It is all your Henry John’s now that Henry Sr. has passed.”

It was difficult for me to call her Sarah. “Sarah, Henry said that you were born here?”

She nodded, “When the tobacco failed in the eighteen forties, the brave part of the family came west, founded Parthenon. The worried ones stayed on in Virginia, getting fatter and more fretful. Lots of Blanchett cousins around here, first, second and twice-removed cousins. It’s always been home for me.”

“I can see why you like it.”

“I wish I could get Henry John to like it, too, to sell up and move here. We have two farms still in the family that he could have, the Grand Vert and the Yellowwood, either one. But I think he’s got too much Zilbert blood. Dry-land, Zilbert blood.”

“You never know.”

Henry walked out and joined us. Sarah poured him a cup of coffee and refilled mine. Francie, a thin, straight-boned black woman, brought eggs, biscuits, butter and bacon. Sarah touched her arm gently and looked up to thank her.

Sarah said to Henry, “We’ve been talking about your selling up and moving back to Parthenon. Francie’s chicken dinners every Friday night. What do you think, Henry John?”

“What did Harold say?”

“Very little. He’s a smart young man.”

Henry said, “We have our friends back in Middleton. Harold and I talk about sharing the house on Water Street, living together.”

She said, “So you should live together, but I never liked that house. Your great-grandfather Zilbert had a heavy hand with it, brown woodwork, dark plaster and those pier glasses.”

“It’s the oldest house on Water Street.”

“Henry John, if you won’t come back here to Parthenon, you should pull it right down and build a new house. A modern house for two bachelors with a swimming pool in the back garden. Get a good architect from Dallas.”

He tried to ignore his grandmother. He said, “As it is, Harold can use the attic for his studio, and I will run the ranch from there. In town. Convenient, central.”

“Harold, wouldn’t you like a proper studio with a big north window, no dusty old attic, where that garage is now, and a long pool to have your friends over?”

Henry replied before I could. “Sarah, leave off. The house is fine just the way it is. Harold and I can move right in when we graduate next May.”

She said, “I give up, then. What about the Army?”

“We went by the bank and John Bartram said the war will be over in a few months, no more draft.”

“John Bartram is quite often dead wrong.”

“He said to send his love. How’s that pretty thing, your Sarah?”

“Did he now?”

Later that morning, Henry and I drove Sarah into Parthenon, three miles east of the farm. With the convertible top down, we circled the court-house, which she said was a scaled copy of the Temple of Zeus in Greece. On adjoining streets, canopied with live oaks and Chinaberry trees full of blackbirds, there were other Classic Revival houses with Doric porches, windows with pediments and the invariable green shutters, some angling away from their hinges. The more imposing houses were the Blanchett cousins, she said, and the others were owned by newcomers who bought in after the War.

I thought that Parthenon had a caught-in-amber quality, curious green amber, a town waiting for the world to press in, to make changes. Changes that might not prosper under Chinaberry trees.

I asked, “Are there oilfields near Parthenon?”

She said, “No, north and east of here, near Tyler. A little shallow sweet near Chireno. We just have the farmland and the timber around here. No royalty checks.”

Henry said, “Humble Oil is drilling next to the ranch in Martin County right now. We might just get a lot of royalty on that good-for-nothing Zilbert land.”

“Don’t be smart to your grandmother, son. You’re as much a Blanchett as a Zilbert.”

“Just joking, Sarah.”

“I miss you, Henry John. Why can’t you be here all the time?”

“I’ll try to come more now that college is about over.”

She said, “I don’t have many more really good years.”

“I know.”

The next morning, Sarah and I drank our cups of coffee before Henry came down. There was a faint breeze against the hot press of morning. Looking away across the field to the forest, she put her hand over on mine. It was smooth and cool.

“Don’t get caught up in Henry John’s good looks, Harold, like I did with his grandfather. A fly stuck in honey.”

I said, “I think he is handsome, Sarah. I wish I had his dark hair, brown eyes.”

“Henry Sr. could turn heads on the streets of Middleton. Every woman had hungry eyes for him, but all he wanted was that old, dry land. And me, he said. He was always loyal to me.”

“You never liked the ranch?”

“I did in the early years with summer rains. The grass grew up to the stirrups and went as far as the eye could see. I fancied that it was the steppes of Mother Russia when we rode out for roundups. Then the dust started to blow year after year. We talked about selling up and moving east. But Henry Sr. was afraid he would lose his soul here in Parthenon, be the worthless son-in-law of rich, old Earl Blanchett. It’s true that Papa never liked him much. If Henry Sr. stayed hundreds of miles away in Middleton, he could still be his own man.”

“I can see that.”

“Harold, you will also have to fight to be yourself, to be a painter. The Zilberts are beguiling, can trap you in what passes for love. Henry John is very fond of you, but he is a Zilbert, stubborn, manly, unbending.”

“I think that’s why I like him.”

“Big mistake, unless you want to be suffused by Henry John, nothing for yourself.”

“I don’t know what I want.” I knew that Sarah was right, but I hoped that the summer days would just go on. We could stay ever as young men, extending our college days into bachelorhood, drinking too much, avoiding plans of any sort. Being suffused by Henry did not sound like a bad thing at all.

He joined us at the breakfast table. Our heresy must have been written on our faces. He said, “What have you been talking about? Me?”

Sarah said, “Guilty.”

After breakfast, Henry and I went swimming in the lake just beyond Parthenon, bog water clear as brown glass. Rounding a bend, we swam way out, not talking above the splash of our arms. Climbing up the ladder to the raft moored in the middle of the lake, we lay down in the sun.

I said, “Sarah thinks I love you too much.”

“Do you?”

“She says I will become a part of you, get filled by you and that I won’t be myself. I’ll have to fight to be a separate person, an artist.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” he said.

“I thought so, too. To become saturated with you, permeated by you. It gets me excited to just think about it.”

“Sarah can complicate things.” Henry took off his swimming shorts and I saw as he turned toward me that he was as aroused as I was. I pulled him close and kissed him, my hand stroking him gently. I could that see his brown eyes were open, looking past me. Sarah knew there was an attraction between us, but she got it wrong by one hundred and eighty degrees. I was the one who would take Henry, make him give in to me. Henry John, the dark brooding manly one, was just about to get himself suffused by the artistic one. The buzzing sound of an outboard motor around the bend stopped us cold. We hustled back into our trunks and down into the water. The outboard went past us and turned down into another inlet as we swam back to shore. Henry came close to me and returned a long kiss while the cars went back and forth on the pond road.

He said, “Let’s not forget this back on Water Street.”

But we would forget. That night at dinner, Sarah saw that something had happened because she looked at me in a different way. It was as if I had become larger or taller, a change she would now have to deal with. She was charming to me, solicitous of Henry. Francie brought in a dessert soufflé, portioned it between us on rose-painted plates. Sarah raised her glass of iced water as if it were wine.

“I have a sort of toast to make. Henry John, the Grand Vert farm is yours now if you will come and live there with Harold. We can build him a north-facing studio, get you some farm machinery, maybe even a swimming pool. I will have the papers drawn up tomorrow in town.”

Henry said, “Why now, Sarah? Why give it to me now?”

“Because I fear for the two of you on Water Street, never growing up, never coming back here to Parthenon. Middleton’s dusty power will take hold of you, pull you in like it did Henry Sr. If you have an obligation here, a home for both of you, maybe that won’t happen.”

He said, “Won’t the farm come to me in your will?”

“That could be a long while down the line. Even if I feel poorly at times, Blanchetts tend to live into their nineties, testy and frail. And, who knows, I might give it all to the church. The new pastor at St. Bede’s has come calling, talking about a thirty-foot rose window for Big Earl and a permanent endowment for an English choirmaster.”

Henry said, “Thanks Sarah, but let me think about it. Back in Middleton, in the house with the brown woodwork. It’s hard for me to make sense here.”

From what I knew of Henry, he had already thought about it, made sense of it. As we drove on the two-lane roads back to Middleton, we talked about other things as the green amber faded into the drier air. The promise of sensual adventure that teased us at the pond never took root in the hardscrabble acres of Martin County, even on the nights when we drank too much and watched the dawn. I kept the hope that we would make our love in the near future, that it would happen by itself.

But the ranch had a thirty-year mortgage on Henry, a long-term obligation with no hope of an early payoff. On snowy nights in Bad Issel, I still wondered what might have happened if he did not spurn the rolling fields of Parthenon, eating Francie’s chicken dinners and lemon soufflés over at Sarah’s, spending warm nights with me in the upper bedroom at Grand Vert, Big Earl looking down upon us without amusement.