Edgar guided her to the big front porch. Good, nobody else was around. It was a wonderful bluish-yellow and green here in mid-spring. They sat on the steps facing east. She wouldn’t say anything. He was afraid she would go off in a sick fog.
“What about those doctors’ wives that run this place?” he asked.
“Society cows looking for an audience anywhere. I’m so direct today.”
“I don’t mind. I like you. You look good.”
“How did you fail? Were you poor?”
“Fail?”
“You’re here, I mean. You don’t have any money. Nobody really means to be in sociology, do they? You’re older. You look delayed or off track — I can tell. I can spot true success a mile off.”
“Fail, really. .”
“See, if my mother and father hadn’t had to, if they hadn’t. . they got married when she was fourteen. My mother was beautiful and at forty she looks as old as your aunt. But they just had to. . couple, see, they’re blind as swamp rabbits. Two of my brothers are deaf, but they kept on keeping on. I was sick one day at school my senior year and walked home. We hardly ever had a working car. I walked in and tried to get on my pallet before I threw up again, and from their room I suddenly heard this ruckus. I couldn’t bear it. It was noon and he was home from the cleaners. They were in there mating, cursing each other, awful curses. I went out to the front yard and vomited, all dizzy, then looked up. Right on the road in front drove these rich boys in my class who were out for a restaurant lunch. They were hanging out the windows laughing at me. I never told that to anybody, Edgar.”
“Oh, no. Awful. You poor girl.”
Edgar took her hand. She had long fragile fingers with a class ring from Emory on one. It was still a teenager’s hand.
“Nine months from then I had a new baby sister. Mama all crumpled up and thin and lined. But I had a bright inner life and I went away on scholarship. Made A’s in almost everything, and Atlanta hardened me up.”
The party inside seemed a dim fraud, with Emma and her feather-light hands out here.
“I won’t tell you his name, but I had an affair with a married man — a wealthy important senator in Atlanta. The upshot was it ruined my life. He and his wife ‘reconciled’ and they named me a call girl he’d only seen a couple times during their marital stress. He’d promised me marriage, of course, but I never asked for it or wanted it. I took some money and shut up. My pop cursed me. My mother just died. They had principles, you know. But I gave him all the money for the four kids still at home.”
“Rough.”
“You might ask somebody in Atlanta who the senator was. Not me.”
“I believe you.”
“The man would put me naked in a silver Norwegian fox coat and work me over good, half a day at a time. He took poppers. We frolicked up where you could see all Atlanta. I liked him. We played backgammon. He cried when he lost me.”
“Were you ‘somebody’ then?”
“No. You know what I was — mainly dumb.”
“You don’t hear many people being truly ‘ruined’ anymore.”
Now there was another voice behind them and above. Edgar quailed.
“That was very nice, Edgar. Perfectly stranded, and I barely knew a soul.” His aunt stood peeved, he guessed, though her voice had some teasing in it, maybe in deference to Emma. He and Emma rose.
“Aunt Hadley, this is Emma Dean, one of my. . colleagues in the department.”
“Can anyone tell me, please, what sociology is? I’ve asked four or five times and got the silliest stares.”
Clearly she did not want an answer. Emma smiled, blinking her eyes dry.
“You’ve a lovely suit!” said Emma.
The old woman did not acknowledge the comment.
“I guess I’ve had enough ‘higher education’ for a day. Are you done?”
“Yes, ma’am. We’ll go then?”
Edgar was forlorn and felt infantile. The old woman demoted everyone, he knew. Suddenly he wished that he had vast wealth.
“I’ll ride home with you. My home, I mean,” said Emma. “I don’t even have a car, Edgar. Can you believe it?”
“Oh, the poverty-stricken bohemian student is rather a tradition, isn’t it?” Hadley said, bright with scorn.
“Then I’m very traditional, ma’am.”
“But you go to honky-tonks.”
“Ma’am?”
“Your dress. Those see-through shoes.”
“Would these be like what the ‘flappers’ wore in your day?” Emma remained kind, without strain.
“‘In my day’? I’m not dead, young lady. Surprisingly, I believe I’m still alive enough to pay all the bills.”
They were quiet going to the car, calmly elegant like the old lady. Edgar noticed with some horror that Emma promptly opened the front door and sat down. Auntie Hadley just stood there, flaming. Edgar froze, with gloom and awkwardness. She knocked his hand away when he tried to help her in. They rode a piece in hard silence until Emma instructed him as to where she lived, sounding drunk. It was way out south of town on a tarry country road, Edgar found out slowly. When he finally got there and drove into the “park” it became clear she lived in a long redwood mobile home in a group of pines. There was a man sitting barefoot on wooden steps at the front door.
“That’s Michael the Math Monster. He’s deaf,” laughed Emma.
“You have a husband?” asked Hadley.
“No, just a friend. Another grad goob. Shares the rent.”
“And all the fun, I’d imagine.”
Edgar was vilely impotent. Emma did not seem so attractive and remarkable anymore as she hit her leg (“Ow! Gee!”) getting out. She was common and messy. He winced when she stumbled in the pine straw. His aunt would not be missing a stroke. Emma had become the thing Hadley knew her to be. But it was not Emma. He wasn’t himself either around this poison. A gutless lackey at thirty-five, losing worth by the minute.
How many people become what they seem to be to harridans and wags? He was furious as he drove. Then he recalled his aunt was still in the back seat.
“Wouldn’t you like to ride up front?”
“Might as well continue on back here. They’ll think I’m domestic help or some retarded person not let near the wheel.”
“I’d be taken more for the chauffeur. Here I am with tie and suit.”
“Eyes on the road. You drive like an old man from Nester Switch. Slow, but dangerous.”
“Don’t want to ruffle you.”
“You and those mummies I saw at the party couldn’t ruffle me if you tried. You tell me what sociology is and why it is necessary they draw salary.”
“It is the study of people in groups — money, trends, codes, idols, taboos.” With his rage still hot, he wanted to focus on her case, but subtly, subtly. “Class distinction, or sometimes just ordinary meanness.”
She was quiet until they almost got to her big shaded Tudor redoubt. He wanted two quarts of Manhattans just for starters.
“In other words, nosy parasites without a life of their own,” she said.
“All kinds, great and low like anywhere. Could I ask you”—Edgar flipped by money, the room, the car, the stamps, clothes—“has there been anything. . unusually terrible in your life?”
“What? Why no!” He noticed in the rearview mirror that when she scowled she was twice as ugly. “You’re not using me to study. You stick with the bums.”
A man twelve years in prison wouldn’t take a rim job from you, he thought.