Tammy out of Time Page 12

  “And he went?”

  “Yes.”

  “God!” Pete said. Then they went on in silence till they came to the garden gate. He looked down at her as his hands reached for the latch. “Thank the Lord you were not afraid, Tammy.” Then he said, as they went on together, “You...you bring me back to myself somehow, Tammy. You—I’m grateful to you.”

  Tammy glanced up at him and looked away. “You’re welcome, Pete,” she said with a sigh. She went up the steps with a sadness folding round her like a cloak. Pete liked to talk to her, he liked the things she said, but that was all. His heart was not awakened to her, his bowels did not yearn for her.

  11.

  THE ways of people puzzled Tammy, what they did and why. She set her mind to figure them out, questioning one or another of the household. But there were times when a strangeness came over her, holding her back, troubling her in a way that was new to her. Then she saw herself through their eyes—shabby, alien and unknowing, lowly. She saw that her manner of talking was not like theirs and she tried to improve her speech. Miss Renie, hearing her catch back an “ain’t,” began to help her with such things.

  But even with fine clothes and proper speech Tammy was afeard she would not ever blend with the world here. Her way of thinking was too different. It must be that her life on the river had marked her and set a great gulf between her and these people. Only with Pete, when she was alone with him, walking out to see how his tomatoes grew, then she took heart. Pete did not look down on her from a high place. He turned to her for help and encouragement.

  Pete answered all her questions with patience, though sometimes he just laughed and said, “Well, Tammy, that makes me wonder, too.”

  Mrs. Brent was quickly upset. “That’s just the way it is, Tammy,” she would say with sharpness. Or “Everyone does. It’s customary.” And if Tammy asked why, she only said, “Oh, dear—my head, and there’s so much to see to.”

  Then Tammy would say, “I’m sorry. What do you want me to do now?”

  For Brenton Hall was being put in order for the Pilgrimage, when people would be coming from everywhere to see such places as this. From the outside, where Pete worked with old Prater, raking the lawn and drive, clearing out the flower beds, the house had an open-eyed look of surprise, with all its shutters flung wide. Inside it was agitated by all manner of activity. Osia was mopping, Steve was carrying out rugs to sweep, Miss Renie was tacking her batiks on the passageway walls, getting out paintings to hang on the ell porch. Mrs. Brent, with her head tied in an old brown scarf, was all over the place, directing, inspecting.

  Tammy polished the long dining-room table where they never ate, the chairs and the sideboard. She labored over the intricacies of whatnots and small carved seats and mirror frames. It was a wonder to her, how many things had been contrived for ornament alone. It troubled her that there were so many more chairs and sofas than they could ever sit in, more dishes than could be eaten from. What was the good of having more than could be used? It would take a body all day every day, just to keep them properly clean. Miss Renie seemed to feel the same way about it, for she had said at breakfast, “It’s a waste of time, all this cleaning up. If you’d just leave the blinds shut, Ena, the way they stay the rest of the year, nobody could see the dust.”

  Mrs. Brent had bristled at that. “Aunt Renie, I don’t care how you keep house the rest of the year, but Pilgrimage time is my responsibility and I’m going to have the place clean if it kills me. I won’t have people going away from here talking the way they do after going through some of those old houses down in Natchez.”

  “To hear you, Ena, the pilgrims will be climbing the bookshelves to spy out cobwebs, crawling under the beds——”

  “They do just about that and you know it, Aunt Renie. Now I don’t ask you to do a thing——”

  “Just as well you don’t.” Miss Renie set down her coffee cup with a little bang.

  “I’ll see to it all. What you don’t realize is that there will be important people coming from all over the country, as well as our friends. The reputation of the South is at stake. We have a responsibility to our position, to tradition, to the past and——”

  “Needn’t tell me anything about responsibility to the past,” Miss Renie said, her black eyes snapping. “I’ve spent my whole life looking after the past. First Pa and Ma—not that I begrudged them—and then Aunt Tessie, though she didn’t live long, poor soul. Just wanted to come and die at the old place and naturally here was Renie with nothing to do but take care of her. Not that I wasn’t willing——”

  Professor Brent slipped away then, his book under his arm. Pete had already gone. Osia came to the door and said, “Want I should clear off now or start scrubbing?”

  Mrs. Brent began, “Clear this——”

  Miss Renie went right on, “It just meant I had to give up my painting once more. My life has been one of sacrifice, start to finish and I’ve had about enough.”

  Tammy, stroking Picasso who sat in her lap, said, “What was it you were all the time wanting to do, Miss Renie?”

  Miss Renie gave her a black look. “Go to New Orleans and have a studio in the French Quarter and live an unfrustrated Bohemian life.”

  “You haven’t anybody to take care of now. Why don’t you go?”

  “Now? I’m too old.”

  “You’re still aliving, ain’t you?” Tammy said.

  “Not ain’t—are you not. Yes, I’m living but that’s about all. Though I might do it—if I had the money.”

  “Money—why, you could get a sight of money for this house and all these things——”

  Mrs. Brent groaned and lifted one hand to her head.

  “Now that’s an idea.” Miss Renie gave Mrs. Brent a wicked glance, caught up Picasso and swept away toward the back hall door.

  “Oh, Tammy—” Mrs. Brent sighed—“Tammy, please. Don’t go putting notions in her head. She has enough without——Oh, dear, I sometimes wonder why I go through with this every year. Nobody cooperates. Singlehanded——” She broke off abruptly.

  “Don’t you get any pleasure out of it?”

  “Well, it is a satisfaction just to be busy.”

  “No matter what you’re busy at?”

  “Yes, yes.” She sipped her coffee in quick little sips. “It keeps you from thinking.”

  Tammy’s lips parted in surprise. It would be awful not to think—unless you had nothing but bad things to think about. “What is it you don’t want to think about?”

  Mrs. Brent’s reddish-brown eyes fastened on the blue distance beyond the garden and the green field. “About getting sick and old and...and dying, and about my two little babies who died.” Her voice went off in a whisper with the last words.

  Tammy drew a long breath. Two little ones like Lena’s, not brown, but pink and white. Not getting better but worse. And Mrs. Brent all the time busy to keep from thinking about dying, being afeard of dying. “Looks like that would take the scare off it—looks like a body would be ashamed to be afeard of doing what two little ones by theirselves already gone and done.”

  “Yes, yes, that is true, isn’t it.” She spoke so softly it was hard to hear her. Then she came back to herself with a little jerk, gathered herself together again. “This isn’t getting anything done. Those rooms must be ready for the roomers.” She turned on Tammy sharply. “You ask why I do all this. It’s for Peter, of course.”

  “For Pete!”

  “Certainly.” Mrs. Brent sat up straight. “One must maintain a certain position in the world, or else the next generation has to start all over again, building it up. That wouldn’t be right.”

  “What is...position?”

  “It’s what you’ve acquired through generations, what you’re born to.”

  “But how can you lose what you’re born to? I should think you couldn’t lose that. It’s like the color of your eyes and——”

  “Oh, Tammy, you just don’t understand.”

  The eagernes
s went out of Tammy’s eyes and her shoulders drooped. Here it was again, the thing that haunted her, that made her see she could have no real place in Pete’s life. She was only here for a little while by chance, and Mrs. Brent was always reminding her that she was one apart and below. Yet, if one could lose position, it did look as if one might gain it. She looked up, wanting to ask whether if maybe one learned grammar and manners and the ways of people, if then maybe——

  But Mrs. Brent pushed aside her coffee cup and said with decision, “Position is what people think of you, the impression you make on them. Really, it’s money that counts most nowadays, more even than family. Peter must marry well and have money and nice things and...and security. He mustn’t have to skimp along on nothing the way I’ve had to do all my life.”

  “Oh.” Tammy was silent, her eyes fastened on Mrs. Brent. Then she asked, “Does Barbara...have money?”

  “No—” Mrs. Brent sighed—“but she knows the value of it, and of course her family is one of the oldest in the country. And she has wealthy kin—her cousin Alfred Bissle, for instance, with no heirs and...Oh——” She stood abruptly. “Nobody will get anything done if I sit here all day trying to——Come, Tammy I’ll get you some dustcloths.”

  Tammy was perched now on the tall stepladder, taking out books, dusting them, putting them back. She had just run into a whole nest of medical books and she stopped to look at pictures and read a little here and there. It was a surprise, how much people’s insides looked like chickens’. She bent over a picture. “I declare, that’s funny, that is.”

  “What is funny?” Professor Brent looked up from his reading over by the window.

  “I was just seeing here how they study folks before they’re born. They can’t cut up humans to look at through a microscope, so what animals you reckon they use?”

  “Oh, you’ve found Uncle Ezra’s medical books, have you? Well, I am not an embryologist. What animal is it?”

  “But what you reckon?” Tammy persisted. It did her good knowing something that a professor did not know.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Pigs!” Tammy could hold back her laughter no longer. “I’ll have to tell Grandpa about that. I bet he could preach a sermon on that.”

  “No doubt. By the way, didn’t you have a letter from your grandfather yesterday?”

  “Oh, yes. I’ve got it right here.” She touched the front of her dress.

  “How is he?”

  “He says his health and his whereabouts are both comfortable and he hopes I’m the same and to write him in care of the Forestville jail. He preaches the Word but it’s stony ground, except for the jailor’s wife who is a godly woman and makes very good pies.” Tammy clapped two books together and the dust floated out on the air to reach the sunlight coming in by the western windows. “Sure is plenty of dust here,” she said. “If I was the Lord I reckon I could nigh on to make a man out of it. Made out of the dust off books, it would likely be a learned man, too.”

  Mrs. Brent spoke from the door. “If you’d give over thinking so much of men, you’d get through with that dusting sooner.”

  “It ain’t thinking of men that delays me,” Tammy said. “It’s their insides that slows me down. I was just reading a minute ago about guts—a human’s is around thirty feet long. You wouldn’t think——”

  “Tammy, please, must you use that word? Really, it isn’t nice.” Tammy looked down at her gravely. “People talk about their hearts all the time—and their insides too. So why——”

  “It’s not at all the same.” Mrs. Brent came in and sank down in the black leather chair by the west window. She leaned back her head and closed her eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Brent. I’ll try not to say it. It’s just got me kind of wild, being turned loose amongst so many books. If Grandpa stays in jail long enough I’ll read them for sure. How long did it take you?”

  “Take me?” Mrs. Brent opened one eye and looked up at Tammy. “Why, I haven’t read them. Oh, some, of course, but nobody reads all the books they have.”

  “You mean folks own books and don’t read them?”

  “Certainly. They are often bought purely for decorative purposes. And really I don’t know anything that gives a room more of an air.” She looked around the room now with satisfaction and sneezed in the midst of it. “Joel, you shouldn’t sit in here with all this dust.”

  Professor Brent went on reading. Tammy said, “He likely don’t notice it. A man’s got more hair in his nose than a woman. He don’t breathe it like we do.”

  Mrs. Brent sat up straight. “Tammy, I want to ask you to do something for me. You may think it is—well, fussy. But the Pilgrimage is coming and important people. You will be helping Osia keep the punch bowl filled, but some of the people may speak to you. Now you...you say things that upset people, Tammy, unexpected things. I’m not saying there’s any harm in it—sometimes you are very understanding. But I don’t want people upset. People have been living in a certain way, with certain ideas about what’s proper, for a long time, and when you question them it’s—well, it’s disconcerting.”

  “Doesn’t anybody else ever question them?”

  “Maybe so, Tammy, but nice people don’t.”

  “Oh.”

  “Will you just try your best not to talk too much? That’s all I ask of you.”

  Tammy stood motionless with the duster in her hand, her eyes on the floor. Mrs. Brent was ashamed to have her around with the Pilgrimage coming, ashamed of how she talked. Not just her grammar that Miss Renie was trying to correct, but the things she said. Mrs. Brent likely thought she wasn’t good enough even just to stay in the house. Tammy went to dusting fast and furiously. If it was Mrs. Brent’s house, she wouldn’t stay a minute.

  She moved the ladder along, having finished one section of the bookcase. Mounting to the top, she felt a sadness come in place of her anger. Pete’s mother, this was, ashamed of her. From the top of the ladder Tammy looked down on her as she leaned back in the chair resting with her eyes closed. She seemed little and defenseless there, just a small human, trying to forget, trying to have things the way she thought was right. Suddenly Tammy was sorry for her, sorry for all people everywhere trying to have something they couldn’t get. I’m that way, too, Tammy thought, trying to have something I can’t have.

  “I’ll try not to talk too much, Mrs. Brent,” she said.

  “All right, Tammy.” Mrs. Brent spoke with mildness, not opening her eyes.

  “Actually, my dear,” Professor Brent said, “Tammy has a most interesting and unusual mind. I have been thinking of consulting some of my colleagues as to the best method of education. It seems to me that we have here, in a way, a blank, a virgin page—John Locke’s idea——”

  “Please, Joel, I am just trying to get through the present emergency as best I can.”

  Tammy, dusting the top shelf and trying to figure out how her mind could be a blank, had come on the head and shoulders of a man, done in white plaster but thick with dust. She took it in her hands and turned it round and round with wonder. “I been itching to get my hands on this. Is it your pa, Mrs. Brent?”

  Mrs. Brent threw up her hands in a gesture of despair. “Of course not, Tammy, that’s Shakespeare. You’d better take it out to the kitchen and use a damp cloth. The dust is an inch thick.”

  Tammy, coming down with the bust cradled in her arms, laughed to herself. “Next time Ernie asks if I’m personally acquainted with W. Shakespeare, I’ll say, ‘Well, I gave him a bath one time.’ You couldn’t be much more acquainted with a man than that, could you?”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t know. Now who is that?” Mrs. Brent rose and went to the back hall where a bell was ringing.

  Tammy stopped in the hall doorway to see what made the bell ring. Mrs. Brent was holding something to her ear and she spoke toward a little black trumpet that came out from a small box on the wall. Mrs. Brent said, “Hello, hello, hello,” with impatience.

  “Goshamigh
ty,” Tammy breathed, “it’s a telephone!” It must be a new-fangled one because it was not like the one in the catalogue that you could buy a fancy-dressed doll to cover, nor yet like the one in the toy department that was all in one piece. There had been a time when she wanted that toy phone more than anything. She had thought that if she had it she could sit on the deck of the Ellen B. and talk to anybody in all the world. She still ached a little when she thought how she had wanted it.

  Mrs. Brent turned around in the middle of a sentence. “Tammy, will you please go on—it makes me nervous having you there listening to every word.”

  Tammy shook her head. “I wasn’t listening——”

  “Wasn’t listening—why! Wait a minute, Louise, I have to——” She turned back to Tammy. “What were you doing if you weren’t listening?”

  “I was just thinking how funny it looked seeing somebody standing there talking at the wall.”

  “Well, no matter, run along.” She turned back to the phone. “Sorry, Louise, I had to stop....Yes, it is very——Really, you have no idea. I’m so upset sometimes....Nonsense, there’s nothing romantic about it and there won’t be if I can help it. But do tell me now, who are you going to send me? No more women, I hope—not after the one we had last time.”

  Tammy went to the kitchen and got a damp cloth to wash Shakespeare with, thinking Mrs. Brent ought to talk lower if she didn’t want to be heard, for her high excited voice carried words all the way to the kitchen.

  “Yes, I could have the room ready tonight. Who is he? You mean Barbara’s New York cousin Alfred Bissle?...That is wonderful. I’ve always wanted him and Peter to meet....I know, but it might work out that he would have an opening in his office....He does? Oh, Louise, I do appreciate your sending him here. And who is the other one?...you mean the artist, the one who had those pictures in the magazine and the articles....Fernan?...Aunt Renie will be out of her head....”

  Tammy rinsed out the washcloth and hung it up. She was glad there were people coming to stay in some of the empty rooms in Pete’s house, because it did seem a shame to have so many empty and not being used.