“Sam!” My aunt’s voice, low and rich in overtones of meaning, comes down to us.
Sam looks down past his arm to see that his heel is aligned properly. I start up nervously, uneasy that Sam might have missed the warning in my aunt’s voice.
“One more thing. Oscar and Edna are here. Now wouldn’t you know they’d be? But perhaps it is just as well. For it is an awkward moment for Kate. The trick is for her to show herself. Here’s what we hit upon: you show up, knowing nothing, come looking for her and fetch her down to dinner.”
My aunt catches my eye from the dining room and I go in to kiss her and speak to the Oscar Bollings. Things seem calm enough. Uncle Jules is laughing with Aunt Edna about something. Though Aunt Emily is abstracted, temple propped on three fingers, she speaks cheerfully, and I can’t help but wonder if Sam’s story is not exaggerated. Uncle Oscar and Aunt Edna have come down from Feliciana Parish for Carnival and the Spring Pilgrimage, an annual tour of old houses and patios. Aunt Edna is a handsome stoutish woman with snapping black eyes and a near-mustache. Though she is at least sixty five, her hair is still black and loops back over her ears in a way that makes me think of “raven tresses.” Uncle Oscar is all dressed up, but you can tell he is countrified. The fourth of the elder Bolling brothers, he elected to be neither soldier nor lawyer nor doctor but storekeeper — that is, until his recent success in exhibiting Lynwood to tourists at a dollar a head. In certain quirks of expression and waggings of head, he is startlingly like Judge Anse, but there is a flattening of the nosebridge and a softening of the forehead and a giddy light-blue amiability about the eyes. Upon the death of the brothers and the emigration of the girls, Uncle Oscar and Aunt Edna fell heir to the old place. It is not much of a showplace, to be honest (it never occurred to anyone to give it a name until Aunt Edna thought of Lynwood), being a big old rambling pile and having no special virtue save only its deep verandas and its avenue of oaks. But Uncle Oscar and Aunt Edna managed to fix it up wonderfully well and even win a permanent place on the Azalea Trail. Strangely enough, it was not Uncle Oscar, the old settler, who restored the house in the best Natchez style — adding a covered walk to the outkitchen, serving mint juleps where the Bollings had never drunk anything but toddies, and even dressing up poor old Shad in a Seagram’s butler suit and putting him out on the highway with a dinner bell — it was not Uncle Oscar but Aunt Edna, the druggist’s daughter from upstate New York whom Uncle Oscar met and married while she was training at Plattsburg in the first world war.
When I bend to kiss her, my aunt gives me no sign whatever, beyond her usual gray look and the usual two quick pats on the cheek — no sign, unless it is a certain depth of irony, a gray under gray.
There comes to me in the ascent a brief annunciatory syllable in the throat stopped in the scrape of a chair as if, having signaled me and repenting of it, it had then to pass itself off as but one of the small day noises of the house. Off the landing is a dark little mezzanine arranged as a room of furniture. It is a place one passes twenty times a day and no more thinks of entering than of entering a picture, nor even of looking at, but having entered, enters with all the oddness of entering a picture, a tableau in depth wherein space is untenanted and wherefrom the view of the house, the hall and dining room below, seems at once privileged and strange. Kate is there in the shadows. She sits beside the porcelain fireplace with its glassed-in cases of medals and tufted Bohemian slippers and gold-encrusted crystal and the ambrotype of Captain Alex Bolling of the 2nd Louisiana Infantry not merely locked in but sealed in forever by glass set into the wall, an immurement which used to provoke in me the liveliest speculation by virtue of its very permanence — to think of the little objects closeted away forever in the same sequestered air of 1938—Kate sits, herself exempt from the needs and necessaries of all passers-by, and holds her arms in her hands and cheerfully makes room for me in the love seat. Not until later do I think why it is she looks so welclass="underline" she is all dressed up, for the first time since Christmas. It is the scent of her perfume, her nylon-whispering legs, the white dress against her dark skin, a proper dress fluted and flounced and now gathered by her and folded away from me.
The angle is such that we can see the dining room and its company, except my aunt. There is only her right wrist and hand curving out and under the chair arm to rub the lion’s face with its cloven leprous nose.
“Tell Mother that I am fine and that I will be down later. I am not hungry.” Then I will indeed be fine, Kate as good as says. It is her sense of their waiting upon her and that alone that intrudes itself into her mezzanine.
When I return (my aunt received me with a single grave nod), Kate is smoking, inhaling deeply and blowing plumes of lung smoke into the air. Her knees are crossed and she swings her leg and holds her Zippo and pack in her lap.
“Have you seen Sam?” she asks me.
“Yes.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That you had a bad night and that Merle had been here.” I tell her the truth because I have not the wit to tell her anything else. Kate knows it: I am the not-quite-bright one whom grown-ups take aside to question.
“Hm. Do you want to know the truth? I had a very good night. Possibly the best night of my life.”
Sam touches knife to goblet. As is his custom, he speaks down the table to my aunt but with a consciousness of the others as listeners-in. At his right, Uncle Jules is content to listen in and look on with an expression of almost besotted amiability. This is one of Em’s “dinners,” Sam is speaking at the Forum, Em is president. Long ago he, Uncle Jules, and with the same shrewdness with which he recognizes signs of corporate illness and corporate health, made out a certain pattern in Emily’s lectures. Persons of the most advanced views on every subject and of the most exquisite sensitivity to minorities (except Catholics, but this did not bother Uncle Jules), they were nevertheless observed by him to observe the same taboos and celebrate the same rites. Not so Uncle Oscar. Sitting there rared back and gazing up at the chandelier, he too is aware that he has fallen in with pretty high-flown company, but he will discover no such thing; any moment now he will violate a taboo and blaspheme a rite by getting off on niggers, Mrs Roosevelt, dagos and Jews, and all in the same breath. But Uncle Jules will neither trespass nor be trespassed upon. His armor is his unseriousness. It would never occur to him to take their, Aunt Emily’s lecturers’, irreverent sallies as an assault upon his own deep dumb convictions. The worst they can do is live up to themselves, behave just as he has come to expect “Em’s people” to behave.
Sam tolls his goblet. “Last Thursday, Em, Eric got back from Geneva and I met him at the airport. His face was white as chalk—”
Kate, who has been sitting back and peering down her cheek at Sam like a theatergoer in the balcony, begins smoothing out the cellophane of her cigarette pack.
“We talked like that last night. I was very happy—”
Aunt Edna leans out to intercept Sam’s monologue. She has not yet caught on to Sam’s way of talking, so she is upset. “But what can a person do?”—and she actually wrings her hands. Aunt Edna is as nice as can be, but she is one of our kinfolks I avoid. Her soul is in her eyes and when we meet, she shoots me deep theosophical soul-glances, and though I shoot them back and am quite sympathetic on the whole, it is an uneasy business.
“Sam is a very gentle person and a very kind person,” says Kate.
“I know.”
“He is very fond of you. Are you going to hear his lecture?”