“No, not yet,” she said. “Not until I want you so much I can’t bear it.”
“I want you that much now.”
“We’ve got the whole week,” she said. “Let’s not rush it.”
When she took off her clothes later, he grinned at her and said, “You’re out of uniform.”
She giggled and said, “Mmmm, don’t I know it!” She threw her arms wide. “Am I all right?”
“You’re beautiful.”
“Oh, liar, lovely liar. But I do have very good legs. Don’t you think I have good legs?”
“Extraordinary legs.”
“Do you want me very much?”
“Yes.”
“I do, too. Now I do. Now, I really do.” She laughed suddenly and lustily and then said, “I’m glad you’re from Virginia.”
He lay in bed for a long while with his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling of the strange apartment. Kitty was asleep beside him, her small spiring breasts pressed against his arm. He felt suddenly lonely. It did not have anything to do with the girl, he knew, or with their practiced love-making. It simply seemed like a very long road all at once. He was twenty-seven years old and in a strange city at Christmastime, and he felt like weeping. “I’m glad you’re from Virginia,” she had said, and those words would remain in his mind long after all memory of her body had departed. He was not a sentimental Southerner. He had severed all ties with Glen City on the day he left for college. But he wondered now how someone whose childhood had been so full of people, so rich with the sounds of life, happened to be alone in a strange town in a strange apartment on Christmas Day, alone with a girl who had touched him deeply when she’d said, “I’m glad you’re from Virginia.”
He could never think of his home without a feeling of tenderness, even though he knew he would never return there. He could remember the big old house with its pale-blue shutters, and the sudden coolness when you stepped inside, and the voices, there were always voices, the Bridges’ home seemed constantly in a state of preparation for some festivity or another. His childhood was a round of family gatherings and celebrations, of holidays shared with laughing relatives, more relatives than he could count, of servants rushing about the house setting the table and preparing food. He could remember the smell of linseed oil, and the sweet smell of magnolias, a Southern cliché, but the house was banked with them and the aroma drifted through the open windows and the blossoms covered the ground like pink-and-white sea shells. He would play with his cousins under the magnolia trees, oh so many cousins, and they would scoop up the fallen petals and let them fall through their fingers while uncles and aunts stood about on the wide front porch in white summer suits and drank from frosted glasses with the pale-blue shutters behind them. Linseed oil, and magnolia blossoms, and the delicate scent of his mother’s lavender, or the crisply laundered smell of her starched linen.
There were aunts to kiss, they always hugged him, and afterward he was embarrassed because they had left lipstick marks on his cheek. Aunt Matilda, who would say, “Matthew, mah dove, you have the devil in your eyes. Sally, keep this boy locked up somewheah!” and his mother would smile delicately, and once she winked at him. Uncle Jeff, who came and went to Arizona, who was a gambler they said, miraculously appearing every Thanksgiving and leaving again after New Year’s Day, who taught Matthew how to keep an ace kicker. Fidgety cousin Birdie, who played the piano, and who always wore something yellow, her frock, her ribbon, her shoes. “I feel naked without a touch of yellow,” she stated. They said she’d married a Yankee in New Orleans, but it hadn’t worked out, she used to play all the popular songs. They would crowd about the piano and sing gustily. “Do you know this one, Birdie?” and her thin fingers would ripple over the keys.
They always seemed to be laughing in that house, and telling stories. The family was like an army he was always glad to see. Grandpa Bridges with his head of snow-white hair, who still wore string bow-ties and who still referred to Northerners as “Carpetbagging bastards,” and who, Matthew knew from his older cousins, kept a high-yeller girl in Hopewell. “You mustn’t smoke, Matthew,” Grandpa Bridges always said, a foul-smelling cigar in his hand. “It is bad for the liver and the lungs. Mind you now, son, I am tellin’ you this for your own good,” his accent so thick you could slice it with a butter knife. “You’re a professional Southerner, Pop,” his mother would say, and Grandpa would wiggle his white eyebrows and answer, “Than which there is nothin’ better, daughter. When will that roast be done, anyways?”
There was always so much to eat, not only the chickens brown and hot from the oven, or the roasts simmering in blood-red juices, or the yams and turnips and bright-green peas and hot muffins, but all the aunts seemed to have their culinary specialties as well. Aunt Christine with her corn bread that you bit into, crusty and golden on the outside and then crumbling in your mouth so soft, the heat escaping in a sudden puff of steam; Aunt Isabel, who made shortcake afloat with strawberries and giant gobs of white whipped cream; Aunt Lo, who brought jars of orange marmalade whenever she came up from Tallahassee; everyone brought something, everyone gave something as if it came direct from the heart to show their love, not as duty-gifts, not the phony presents of fake families. “I hope the meringue is all right, Sally,” Aunt Martha M. would say, and Uncle Rufus would kiss his mother on the cheek and say, “She spent four hours in the kitchen yesterday, Sally, made that house like a blast furnace,” and Aunt Martha M. would say, “Hush, Rufe, you know I love to bake.”
It was a kissing family, and a hugging family, and he loved them all, each and every one of them, even Simmie, who had bad skin and was always lying about his business deals out West. He loved the warmth of the family, and the lore of the family, and its idiosyncrasies, and its shared family intimacies, like having one aunt named Martha M. and another aunt named Martha L. or having two cousins named James and calling one Jimbo and the other Jamey, or calling Grandma Anson “M.D.,” which everybody in the family knew stood for “Mother dear,” but which outsiders did not know. He loved, too, the intrigue of the family, the vast family network stretching as far west as Sacramento and as far north as Allentown, Pennsylvania, and the stories everyone had to tell when the family met.
He could remember sitting under the dining-room table with his cousin Rita one day, a rainy day, the grownups talking and laughing in the living room, the tablecloth covering them like a cave; he could hear the rain lashing at the dining-room window, and the shade rattling. His cousin with her straight black hair and black bangs and blue eyes whispered to him in the darkness, “Well, the reason they took her back from that farm is because the boys were doing things to her, Matty.” His eyes wide, “What kind of things, Rita?” And Rita suddenly blushing, a year older than Matthew who was twelve, “Well, I don’t know if your mother wants you to know about such things yet.”
His mother died in August. He could remember the funeral, black umbrellas, rows and rows of black umbrellas, but no rain. It was not like in the movies. He remembered feeling a sense of disappointment. The sun was shining in Glen City that day, so hot, and they carried umbrellas because of the hot sun, with the dust climbing the black trouser legs of the men carrying the coffin, and his father weeping, the tears mingling with the dust on his face, streaking his face. Matthew did not cry. He thought only, They shouldn’t be carrying umbrellas when it isn’t raining.
The scent of her lavender clung to the silent house. He could hear his father weeping in the library. He went into the room, opening the door slick with linseed oil, the house was so still, he could not remember the house ever being so still. His father turned his head so that Matthew would not see the tears. “I want to be a lawyer,” he said to his father. “Like you.” His father nodded and said nothing, his face still streaked from the dusty sunny street of the town and the walk to the cemetery. He wondered if his mother had gone to heaven.