Siesta, p.1
Siesta, page 1
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Siesta
Berry Fleming
New York
There will probably be a few very gentle readers who will need to be reminded that this book is not intended to be a likeness of any real place or of any real group of people or of any real series of incidents; that it is intended to be, in a word, fiction.
CHAPTER ONE
1. Isobaric
It was dry that summer. Mr. Estill, the weather man, up in the top of the Post Office Building, drew a daily red circle of high pressure over the South Atlantic States for two months almost without change. The pink roads round Georgetown were powdery from the lack of rain, and on nearly any day you could look about the low rim of hills and see one of those little white puffs of still smoke somewhere on the horizon from a fire in the pine trees. The river sank to three feet at the Sand Bar Ferry Bridge and some people began to be afraid that soon there wouldn’t be enough water to fill the power canal and run the cotton mills. Up above the railroad bridge The Georgetown Manufacturing Company played a famous baseball game on the red river bottom and Chris Troupe, the dentist, took his little nephew across to the narrow channel on the other side and waded through the shallow water to the Georgia bank with the boy in his arms: “Now you can tell your grandchildren,” he said, “you’ve walked across The Congaree River.… Wave your hand at the train!”
The golf course was burned almost khaki and you could drive three hundred yards if you were any good at all; boys like young “Dub” Meigs, who were very good, sometimes drove the eighteenth which was three hundred and forty-five yards long. After the drought had continued for four weeks the congregation of the Sanctified Church on the hill above the golf course opened a series of prayer meetings in the afternoon and as you passed along the third fairway you could hear them over beyond the chinaberry trees wailing for rain with a syncopated cadence and an ecstatic slapping of palm upon palm that gave you a peculiar feeling at the back of your neck; Austin, anyhow, felt that way, though of course, as people were fond of pointing out, that was Austin. Anyhow, you couldn’t fail to hear the thin tunes all over the parched golf course, drifting about on the warm wind.
Once in early August a storm blew up out of the gulf and passed inland, cooling it off for a few hours. But the next morning the dust was rising up again in whirling flesh-colored clouds behind the old motor cars rattling in from the country, and September came with hardly a hint of fall.
Some people don’t believe there is any connection between the weather and the socially dramatic, but the boys down at the Daily News believe it and in July when the drought had gone on for about a month they began to notice a little increase of tension in their world, like a rabbit hunter walking up closer and closer to his brier patch.
In the meantime, simple people drove out over the hills after the sun had set to cool off, talked of the heat and the fluctuating decline of the cotton market, and prayed nightly for the salvation of their immortal souls.
2. Country Doctor
Thursday, June 4
Dr. Abercorn was a little blue. He paid only a minimum amount of attention to it, it being nothing more than some temporary maladjustment of chemicals, probably an excess of one of those that made you contented. First you purred with well-being, then you ordered up another jigger from the laboratory and positively radiated, then you ordered up another and things began to go a little bad.
Yesterday life had been, in a quiet way, rather good; he couldn’t quite remember what had shaken his balance. The world was full of millions of very sensitive scales, moving round, butting into things, butting into each other, blindfolded they were, like the Justice on top of the courthouse. That was it: millions of Justices, blindfolded, moving about with their chemicals held out in front of them poised in a nice scale, a sword in the other hand with which they laid about them when something upset the equilibrium. He couldn’t quite remember at the moment. Austin Toombs, whom he hadn’t seen for ten years, had come in suffering with acute idleness, but nothing else had happened. He had read Tristram Shandy most of the afternoon—oh, yes, it was Lucian; of course. His son, Lucian, wasn’t coming home right yet.
He had left his six-year-old Packard coupé at the iron hitching-post on his curb and walked into the cool cement areaway under his front steps, his stethoscope in his coat pocket, his white suit beginning to lose some of its starch and get comfortable, and life had seemed in a quiet way rather good. He was expecting a telegram from Lucian saying when he would arrive, expecting to find it either in the bar across his screen door or on the stone-topped table in the hall. And it hadn’t been in the screen door. If Miss Cope had been there she would have put it on the wide arm of his leather chair and meticulously weighted it down with his prescription pad.
But Miss Cope was on the Atlantic. She had been wanting to go to Europe all her life; when Travel and The Geographic came she practically met them at the door. She had been saving toward the trip for years; he didn’t know how much she had accumulated, but when Lucian wrote him he would be home in May and Dr. Abercorn decided that Lucian could do her work and at the same time perhaps pick up an elementary knowledge of some of the local customs and that now was the best possible time for her to go to Europe and get it off her mind, she bought a first-class ticket on the Majestic and he thought she must have saved up a good deal.
Ten days later Lucian had written him from New York saying that his boat had just docked (he had been studying medicine in Paris) and that he would probably be down on the first of June, but would telegraph him definitely. So he told Miss Cope to go on the first. Yesterday had been the third, and he had heard nothing further from Lucian. He was a little sorry about that; not that it made a great deal of difference, two or three days one way or another, but he felt that such carelessness didn’t speak particularly well for the boy.
He had counted on Lucian quite a lot, too. When the boy was just a child, before his mother died, twenty years ago—God! nearer thirty—they used to wander sometimes about the basement office, he telling the boy about that future time when he should grow up and they would open a private office for him on the other side of the hall. They could share the examining room at the back. He would come home from Baltimore and they would talk medicine in the stone-floored office, and the town would say sotto voce, not wanting it to get back to the old man, that young Abercorn was a better doctor than his daddy. And now that future time had become the present and Lucian was returning; he had been a little careless in saying he was coming on the first and then neither coming nor telegraphing, but it was a small matter; he would probably get there tomorrow or the next day.
Then he had gone into the dim hall with the cool floor of blue and white octagonal stones, and seen the letter on the table; he knew as he touched it, even before he had tilted it to the light, that it was from Lucian. He had carried it in his fingers through the empty waiting room and laid it on his chair arm while he hung up his hat and washed his hands under the high spigot in the examining room; then he had turned on an oscillating fan and sat down.
DEAR GOVERNOR,
Sorry about the delay. Had expected to entrain Saturday but got tied up. Now have a bid to go up to Boston for a couple of weeks that is too good to pass by. We are going up tonight. I’m sure this will be O.K. with you. You can definitely count on me two weeks from today—
And his chemicals had begun to get a little out of whack. Now, twenty-four hours later, they seemed about as disorganized as ever.
A short hesitant ring from the doorbell interrupted him, though he heard it only half consciously, having become used to paying no attention to it; patients obeyed the sign on the door, “Ring and Walk In,” and Miss Cope notified him.
He turned his eyes with some weariness out of the window at his elbow, gazing across the dusty joint-grass almost at a level of his head beneath the low-drooping boughs of the magnolia tree. The points of some of the long leaves had begun to turn from the dry weather. He took a small pouch from his coat pocket, inserted a ruminative finger and thumb, and pulled out a pinch of finely-shredded tobacco. Sometimes it seemed to ease his teeth. He must go to a dentist. Chris Troupe would do. These God damned infirmities!
The bell rang again, and he remembered that Miss Cope had gone to Europe. He went out into the waiting room.
It was a mulatto girl and she was standing almost invisible in the shade of the hall. She seemed to be cheaply dressed but clean.
“Come in,” said the doctor in a resigned way. He sometimes ‘took a look’ at a friend’s servant, though the friend usually telephoned him in advance or came too.
“Dr. Abercorn, sir?”
“Come in the office,” said the doctor, leading the way; the girl didn’t seem exactly like a servant, like a ‘white-folks’ nigger.’
He sat down in the dry sweep of his fan.
“Well, what seems to be the matter?” He supposed it was the usual thing and he wondered how she would act when he put the needle into her arm vein; some of them were so scared they almost fainted.
“I heard you needed a nurse, sir.”
“A nurse?”
“Yes, sir.”
“No, I don’t need a nurse.”
She looked away at the revolving fan, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.
“My regular nurse has gone away on he
“Yes, sir.… And I don’t reckon you need anybody while she’s gone.”
“No. No, I don’t.”
“Yes, sir. I’ve been goin’ out here to the colored college and I wanted to get some kind of a place during the vacation time. I saw in The News where Miss Cope had gone to New York and I was thinking maybe you might could use somebody while she was gone.”
“Have you ever worked in a doctor’s office?”
“No, sir. But last summer I did some work in the colored wing at the hospital.”
“What’s your name?” He wondered if maybe it wouldn’t be just as well to have somebody until Lucian got home.
“Laney Shields, sir.”
“My son is coming back in a couple of weeks. I probably wouldn’t need anybody after that.”
“If I could just get something for two weeks.”
The doctor looked at her slowly from head to foot; “Are you married?” he said.
She hesitated a minute, flexing her fingers.
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll tell you, er—er, what did you say your name was?”
“Laney Shields.”
“I’ll tell you, Laney, I really don’t need anybody, but if you’d like to come and look after things round here until Mr. Lucian gets home I might be able to use you.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you very much, sir.”
“I could pay you seven dollars a week.”
“Yes, sir. That’d be all right, sir. I have some uniforms that I had at the hospital.”
The doctor nodded. “All right.… You’ll find a place to change back there in the examination room; there’s a closet over in the corner you can keep your things in. Come about quarter to nine and you can go home about six. The cook upstairs will fix you some dinner. You keep the place straight and answer the telephone and—and that kind of thing.” When he stopped to think just what it was Julia Cope did all day he couldn’t quite say. Of course, though, she took letters and handled the bills, which this girl couldn’t do. But perhaps it would be just as well to have her after all. She seemed clean. White blood,—as usual.
“My hours are twelve to two. Write down all messages. You can write, can’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
When she had gone he read the letter again and put it in his pocket. It had been over a year and a half since he had seen Lucian; sometimes he felt that he had not really seen him since that day he took him up to Lawrenceville when he was thirteen. He wondered if it had ever been quite the same after that. The boy’s center of interest had shifted. But he felt that it was temporary; he felt that when the time came for Lucian to return for good, a year’s residence would change things. He had the right stuff in him. They spoke well of him at Saint Luke’s in New York, where he had done his interne job; Lucian had thought the experience would be broader than if he chose the Georgetown Hospital and the doctor had felt that he was probably right. Good for a young man to go to a big city, anyhow; he still sometimes saw in the blue flames of his coal fire a different Dr. Abercorn, different primarily from having served his interneship in a big city. He might not have come back to Georgetown at all. He was really, at heart, a little surprised that Lucian was coming back. In fact, he suspected that, at heart, he still felt a slight doubt that Lucian would get there. And if he got there, would he stay? Would he be satisfied with the old office? Except for an occasional coat of white paint, nothing had been done to it for twenty years.
He liked the room, himself, with the shallow coal grate and the black marble mantel and the wide glassed-in shelves of heavy books forming a base for ink drawings by Charles Dana Gibson and the famous picture of the dark-haired young woman sitting before a round mirror which upon second glance became a skull with her head and its reflection the eye sockets, the racks with pipes, the stiff sofa, the leather chair by the window. It was a human friendly room into which you felt that only simple ailments had ever ventured. It seemed to be a secure room, definitely in communication with some panacea, a room of remedies, hiding almost from the doctor himself the slightly-discomforting knowledge that with the exception of quinine for malaria and the heavy metals for syphilis (and, he usually added, water for inebriation) there were practically no medicines of real efficacy. The room also still contained those moments with a slightly-faded purple halo round them when he had, with all degrees of reception, cheerfully done what he could to smirch the fair name of Southern Womanhood.
He wondered, though, if the room might not seem to Lucian a little drab. If Lucian wanted it changed, it would be changed; he thought he would do almost anything in return for having Lucian’s warm vitality under the roof again.
3. Homeward Passage
Monday, June 15
The tropical disturbance is central tonight in the Gulf of Mexico about seventy-five miles southwest of Tampa, Fla., moving eastward about six miles an hour, attended by strong shifting winds and probably by gales over a very small area near its center. Pressure is high over the greater part of Alaska and western Canada, and remains high from the Carolinas eastward beyond Bermuda—
Mr. Estill leaned over his map table in the top of the Post Office Building, picked a blue pencil from behind his ear, and drew twenty-five hundred miles of isothermic line in a single winding sweep.
Four hundred miles of it circled through “The South”: down the red foothills of northern South Carolina, down the long weak slope of the sandhills, over the pine barrens, over the flats of southern Georgia, through the tropical tangles of the swamp lands along the nigger-black rivers,—four hundred miles of cotton and pine, of share-croppers and sun-blackened tenant houses, of red land, showing, where the white taut stretches of Highway No. 1 slashed through a hilltop, like a section of underdone roast beef,—four hundred miles of red land spotted and streaked bright green from the crops and the forests with the same banal discord of coloring as the interiors of the Pullman cars that glided in their sticky dust down from “The North.”
The little fan at the end of the Pullman droned away into the dusty air above Mr. Applewhite’s thin-haired head while the perspiration rolled in shining streamlets down his round cheeks and disappeared into his wilted collar. It tickled him as it passed in front of his ears and now and then he drew an already damp handkerchief down his pale newly-shaved stubble. He hadn’t dreamed it would be so hot, so deadly hot. He had never been South before in summer; one spring in his youth he had visited a friend in Augusta, across the state. It had been warm then, but nothing like this. And just the middle of June too.
It was an empty bloodless sort of heat, timeless, as if that part of the world had ceased to move and were lying out there motionless under the sun. The woods running indolently by his window were almost nauseatingly lush; the warm light fell on their drooping leaves with an almost palpable weight. He felt that that sunshine was something to be reckoned with; it was not to be lightly put aside. He wondered if it didn’t do for the South what snow did for his New England, if it wasn’t the music-teacher of his far-off childhood blowing on her pitchpipe, setting the key. He had finally, at Atlanta, brought himself to the point of imitating the young man with the clipped black mustache in Lower 7 and taking off his coat.
The other young man in the car, however, continued to defy this informality. He was a dark-skinned chap of twenty-five or so, with well-kept black hair in thick waves above his ears and at the back of his head. He looked a little like a foreigner; he was dressed with a good deal more care than most Americans and the pale mauve of his soft collar harmonized fastidiously with the echoing blue of his silk handkerchief. But at the time when Mr. Applewhite had met him in the narrow corridor by the smoking room and they had squeezed past each other, apologizing, his tone had seemed unquestionably American. Anyhow, he was certainly not a Southerner, Mr. Applewhite had thought.
He turned away to the disheveled little town slowing down beyond his window screen. The train halted with an imperceptible glide; he hardly knew it had stopped until it emitted a profoundly weary suspiration and the little fan over the door took up its hot drone. He shifted his head until he could see the sign on the end of the blistered station:
