Skirmishes with the Ladies of the Magnolias

In the end, one is reduced to the pop wisdom about her--she does finally derive from that ancient dream of doomed plantation chivalry before the tragic gray crusade: a lost Arthurian age of heroic hoof-hammering romance and sylphic women, their chaste pale faces haloed by the murmurous glow of candelabra on midsummer evenings reeling with jasmine. Never mind those occasional sweet and furious midnight skirmishings with cousins out in the muscadine arbors. It was all a cotton-field Camelot that never existed so palpably and luminously and definitely as in the long perpetuation of a swooning nostalgia for it after its vague rude semblance was immolated by the Civil War. But she is one part of the memory that has actively survived, simply translating herself intact and oblivious on into the new tin-foil-bright cities of the South's brisk neo-Babbittry with their Tupperware-facade shopping centers, their quiet expensive suburbs where VWs and station wagons twinkle drowsily through the mornings under myriad bursts of dogwood like soft and weightless puffs of (continued on page 214)ladies of the magnolias(continued from page 121) musketry, their golf courses now mowed and groomed over the sites of savage Civil War collisions that are only discreetly denoted by historical markers set off in the pines along the fairways.

The peculiar triumph of the Lady of the Magnolias is that she has uncannily persevered, across all the generations, as an utter social figurine, a creature of manners--manners that once may have adorned a certain scruffy and haggard grandeur but since have adorned not even that, merely a life of Junior League teas, tennis, Republican den meetings, football weekends and perhaps a few indecisive suburban infidelities. An Atlanta matron delivered something like the ultimate benedictory tribute to Southern ladyhood when she recently noted of a friend, "So help me, Martha has just worked wonders with those daughters of hers. They grew up thoroughly plain and unexceptional, they simply never made it into swans, but somehow she managed to make them feel they were charming, feel they were desirable. And, you know, because of that--they almost are." Indeed, they do possess a capacity for a kind of oddly poignant private gallantry and doughtiness. They have always managed to appear dauntlessly chipper even in the midst of the most vulgar travail, such as Reconstruction or the difficulties with maids and yardmen visited on them by the civil rights movement of the Sixties. As one Charleston dowager empress explains it, "They are just as steady and gracious and lovely in times of duress as they are at parties."

But there are forbidding aspects to such a fortitude. The maverick scion of a New York banking family recounts, "Once I was engaged to this Southern girl, for something like a year and a half, actually. Evelyn, I'll call her: an exquisite creature who carried herself with an unfaltering serenity and self-possession despite her rather spectacular lusciousness. I mean, her calm was almost Oriental. There was also this other girl in town I'd been seeing off and on, mostly at those times when I'd start feeling a strange little chill setting in at the edges of my spirit from Evelyn. This other girl was Evelyn's absolute antithesis: dark, earthy, carnal, hungry and sensuous as hell, with a touch of gypsy berserkness about her. Anyway, one night I'm sitting in this little uptown bar, playing cards in the back, with Evelyn watching serenely from a table beside me, when all of a sudden I look up and this other girl is standing right over me. She has simply materialized out of the snowing night, her hair wet and her eyes burning, feverish and high again on those pills she was always gulping. 'Are you going to take me home?' she says right away in a strange little shriek, and I say, 'No. I'm not.' Whereupon she commences to hit me, on the head and shoulders and back, while screaming about all the varieties of a son of a bitch I am. It was one hell of a clinical catalog. I cross my arms on the table and put my head down while she pummels away, until finally the manager drags her--literally drags her, for God's sake--back out into the street, back out there into the goddamn snow. Then, after a few moments, I look over at Evelyn: She's still sitting there absolutely composed, her hands folded formally in her lap, like she had just tuned herself out for the length of the scene. Finally, she gives me a gentle little smile. But she never had one thing to say about the incident, not even an angry stare. For about two weeks, I kept waiting for her to say something, but it was like, for her, it had never happened, she was just too much of a lady to have noticed. Hell, I don't know--a few weeks later, when I broke up with her, she maintained that same complete and imperturbable calm. She was poised to the end. It was heroic. But as for me, I had to start seeing that crazy gypsy again, just to get my soul thawed back out. It wasn't her who'd really been stranded out in a snowstorm, it was me."

The truth is, contrary to all the conventional celebration, the Lady of the Magnolias is finally and profoundly antisensual. She cultivates an elaborate femininity abstracted altogether out of the glandular: evanescent, scintillating, but ultimately and indefatigably inconclusive. The pattern of her life consists of passing maybe her first 25 years after pubescence as an imperishable belle, a deathless debutante, and then converting herself at a certain point into an austere formidable Romanlike dowager, delivered safely beyond the gusting of the senses into a kind of camphor-scented quiescence. Of course, a few, like Blanche DuBois, never quite make the transition. But through both incarnations, she skips any middle mellow period of true easy intimacy with men.

One young Southern swain not long ago speculated, ruefully but gamely, "I reckon when Leila and I finally get married, she's gonna want separate bedrooms during our honeymoon." Such a resignation--such sweet and painful broodings from separate quarters, from genteel distances--tends to prompt both secret ravishment fantasies, like the fictional mayhem visited on Temple Drake in Faulkner's Sanctuary, and a kind of awed reverence on the part of Southern men, not only for their own ladies but for all femaleness. If familiarity breeds contempt, this formal and systematized unfamiliarity has worked to breed the kind of fevered exorbitant lyricism about womankind in general often found in Faulkner: "A quality completely female in the old eternal fashion, primitive assured and ruthless.... She moved at last, shifted, a movement one single complete inherent not practice and one time older than man ... composite of all woman-flesh since man that ever of its own will reclined on its back and opened ... and he thought, She already knows more than I with all the man-listening in camps where there was nothing to read ever even heard of. They are born already bored with what a boy approaches only at fourteen and fifteen with blundering and aghast trembling...."

Indeed, this may have been their original gambit: the adoption of a devious female choreography operating on the principle that heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard, merely intimated, are incomparably sweeter--and never-finishing. To be sure, the Southern woman has always somehow suggested the unravished bride of Keats's Grecian urn, forever poised a breath away from a kiss, from capture. And this glimmering unending elusiveness may be an ancient ruse whose contrivance has long since been forgotten and has become now merely a feminine habit.

But even more, the mystery always lurking at the center of the whole white Southern psyche is the abiding figure of the black man. For three centuries, the two of them were alone together in the South, locked in a common moral and social saga, a common private epic, and the true communion between them--the unspoken underground interplay of frequencies--is the submerged unmapped continent of Southern history, the immense elemental but unarticulated story of the whole Southern experience. There is no way finally to understand the white Southerner apart from this unacknowledged shadow brother of his, the black Southerner. They are, really, one people. Most of the history of white Southern society can be read as a long pattern of reflexes to the subtly but fundamentally intimidating presence of the black man in its midst--beginning with slavery, an atrocity and absurdity accommodated, if not justified, by devising the notion of two orders of humanity, the brute simplicity of one defined and confirmed by the civilized and celestial sensibilities of the other: In fact, slavery demanded the cultivation of an answering mystique of gentility on the part of the enslavers.

Southern ladyhood, then, would be only one conjuration of this deliberately crafted mystique. More specifically, it has been speculated that the Southern woman's special feminine aesthetic--accentuating dichotomies between the decorous and the sexual, between the heavenly and the lascivious--had the effect of comfortably exalting her above the supposedly rampant and matchless carnality of the black women around her. However fanciful this suggestion, it is true that the two of them dwelt, at least in the dim unchronicled privacy of the South's beginning, in a casual social intimacy glimpsed only now and then through such incidental references as William Alexander Percy's recollections about his great-aunt in Lanterns on the Levee: "She gave a housewarming, a large affair, with dancing and champagne and a nougat from New Orleans. In selecting her guests she flatly refused to invite a prominent planter because he openly and notoriously lived with a Negro woman.... The planter found it easier to move from the community than to live down the stigma or to acquire a paler bolster companion."

One suspects, then, that it was all a kind of elegant fortification and can only guess how consciously it was constructed. But there's no doubt that the assumption prevailed with white Southern women as well as with their men that there was simply no way to outstrip blacks when it came to a facility in the lustier fleshly arts. That, after all, was implicit in the whole basic rationale for the system. So ladyhood for the Southern woman may have initially been the task of existing in melodic Mozartian counterpoint to the irrepressible sensual drum noise of the surrounding black women--a style she has sedulously continued to nurture, even if she no longer really remembers why. But its effects, its triumphs have continued, like the memorial found in the rotunda of Mississippi's state capitol. There in alcoves illuminated by small light bulbs are delicately tinted photographs of Mississippi's two successive Miss Americas, enshrined like Magnolia Madonnas.

• • •

To be sure, she once enjoyed an immense fashionability--well before Gone with the Wind. During a more filigreed and ferny time in our nation's past, there prevailed a feminine style to which she was perfectly bred: that fine art of existing incandescently--with a light glittering gaiety on long afternoons, a demure abstract Debussy patter conducted with softly thrumming fans against a running secret counterplay of smoldering gazes and mute avid blushings--in an endlessly tentative suspension above any consummation, any ultimate physicality. This may be one reason the peculiar tragedy of the South has always been that its gentlemen of consequence have seemed to suffer, as Walker Percy has noted, from an abiding seductive vision of infinite unrelinquishable possibilities.

But at this moment in American society of strenuous sexual egalitarianism, she could hardly seem more of an archaic curio. She has traditionally proceeded on the intuition or calculation that her true strengths--her true inviolate equality and identity--lie finally in that primeval principle of woman as belonging to the more private dimensions of human affairs, always dwelling at a certain immutable detachment from men and their public bargings and blusters. Curiously enough, this worked to render Southern culture into a kind of covert matriarchy. It's no accident that the world's most titanic and persuasive soap opera happens to be about a Southern woman, Scarlett O'Hara. Because of its defeat in that total folk expenditure of will and hope and belief over a century ago, the South became the kind of society--languishing and static, preoccupied with the melancholy music of time, the sequence of generations and full play of destinies--over which women, particularly the older ones, naturally tend to preside and mediate. Even while posing as coquettes, Southern women became the Norns, the keepers of the shrines of memory and the ancient values, the ancient proprieties, with a certain fierce ecstatic sexless quality about them, beneath the crinolines and mincing delicacies. At the same time, however, they have also seemed to have a way of frequently transforming their sons into stale gentle lisping bachelors with an obsession for antiques.

• • •

Collectively, the Ladies of the Magnolias have never been conspicuously cerebral women. Their intellectual extensions tend to consist, at the best, of slight volumes about early Southern pastelists and affectionate biographies of their Revolutionary War ancestors--or, the worst, John Birch civic-missionary work or garden-club seminars on the meditations of Paul Harvey. Instead, their excellence has always lain in those more ornamental aspects of mortal existence having to do with how people comport themselves, negotiate themselves in the company of other people--that is, with appearances. But even those decorums have become a bit musty and eccentric, with the result that Southern women, on the whole, are a peculiar coy wine that does not travel well beyond its own indulgent clime. Northerners tend to find them faintly grotesque. "We had several Southern girls--belles from Atlanta, they were--who had been exported by their families up to Vassar when I was there," recalls a former women's-magazine editor, "and they all went around swatting riding crops against their breeches, and it seemed they all had a brother called Bubba."

Nevertheless, it remains a manner of ladyhood--a feminine gentility--to which all Southern women answer and ravenously aspire, whatever their sources. It is an improbably democratic order, encompassing not only afternoon teas in antebellum mansions but all the gatherings of the women's missionary circles of the Calvary Baptist Churches amid gladioli and antimacassars. Even George Wallace's late wife, Lurleen--a quiet, singularly uncomplicated but altogether pleasant woman whom he had found behind the counter of a dime store--confided once that of all the figures in the whole spectrum of history from the Pyramids to the Battle of Britain, she most admired "those brave and gracious ladies of the South who fought such hardships and tried to hold things together back during the War between the States, and that dreadful period afterward."

All over the South now, there can be found the wives of prospering political figures, somewhat metallic and heatless women whose origins were the slatternly grease-sizzling outskirts of little slumping towns and who, as their husbands' fortunes rose, instinctively and systematically began to acquire tastes for glass figurines and enormous billowy hats and rather depthless precise nature paintings, along with, an air of twinkling blitheness, and thereby successfully reconstituted themselves, for all practical purposes, as Southern ladies.

The particular melancholy lurking in all this is the fact that on those rare occasions when they are impelled by some awry happenstance to reconstitute themselves into anything else, the result is usually a vague deep dislocation. A photographer with the Southern bureau of a national magazine recalls, "We had a girl sign on with us as a secretary who was right off an Alabama campus. There was nothing even remotely radical or intellectual about her; she was just a decently bright girl, a quick student." But, he continues, somewhere--somehow--she had contracted some small virus of discontent, had been jostled by some stray random voltage of restlessness. In the beginning, it was probably just a light appetite for novelty. But after a month or so exposed to the new excitements of the office, she began to seem haunted by sudden aurora-borealis intimations of larger experiences, larger meanings. "Her compass needle began wobbling seriously. She went through a hasty hectic succession of the sort of fellows for whom she had been tailored, she had always supposed she was meant to match--football players, old fraternity consorts, heirs to their fathers' businesses, you know--but each time, it seemed to end in deeper distraction and bewilderment. None of 'em were taking. 'They just aren't enough,' she told me once. So she began to worry about what the hell she really wanted, what was going to happen to her. One afternoon, after she'd spent about an hour ruminating about all this for me, I suggested to her, 'Pam, look, all you might need is one good hard thoroughgoing many-splendored lay.' She just paused for a long moment, with only a faint flush of her cheeks, and then she said, solemnly, 'Yes. That might be possible. That could be true, I admit it. But you can't just go up to somebody and say--I mean, well, you know.' The last I heard of her, she had tried working in a Bahamian resort for a while and then had joined VISTA and was up in some village of Eskimos in Alaska. I've since wondered if all we managed to do was not just spoil her permanently and irreparably for the kind of life she'd been born and bred to."

Indeed, they generally pass through college rather like fresh dewy lambent dryads tripping lightly through honey-suckled groves of academe, through a pretty nursery world of sorority houses and football games during which the central event is their getting pinned to the football player whom they will marry upon graduation and who will become a stockbroker or realtor in Jackson or Birmingham or Columbia. It's seldom that any other destiny seriously occurs to them. When, each year, the fraternities pluck from among them the particular girls who will serve as their symbolic communal sweethearts, it is like an affirmation and celebration--with semireligious candlelight and romantic hymns--of the whole belle mystique. She stands poised with a bouquet of violets or gardenias, the daughter of some banker or state senator or small-town Pontiac dealer now being formally consecrated as a soft newly hatched avatar of the old immemorial sentimentality, radiant and palpitating with her plump pigeon breasts welling and ebbing desperately in a low cuddling bodice, filmed with dampness in the candle warmth, yet a figure somehow beyond any touching, surrounded by a roomful of youths in crested blazers with the waxen sober faces of acolytes who, their hands folded with a regimental unanimity before them, unanimously and reverently chorus her; she merely smiles rapturously at them all, her eyes brimming just a little.

In fact, for the next 20 years of their lives, that remains more or less their pose: indestructibly virginal sweethearts to all mankind. They generally regard men as, essentially, animated coloring-book figures: plumber, soldier, businessman, artist, governor--they all amount to little more than paper-doll cutouts for them, ranging in substance from nice to not very nice, with sometimes the extra embellishment of cuteness or, occasionally, dash. "I first came across the belle species at a party once down in Mississippi," remembers one journalist who is a native of the North. "This woman--a delicious affair, with a complexion like ice cream--came up to me like I was the discovery of her life, producing more exuberance and warmth in that short span of time than I'll probably experience altogether over the rest of my years, and, goddamn, it's flattering to have all that attention paid to you. But then she goes on to the next guy, and be damned if it isn't exactly the same thing with him. And then another one of these creatures comes over to me and it's the same little instant ecstasy from her. You realize quickly that it simply has no relation whatsoever to you personally, you matter to them individually about as much as one orange blossom to a hummingbird."

With a sense of femininity so preoccupied with distinctions like that between the polite and the profane, important divides are not crossed easily, and when they are, they are usually crossed tumultuously and totally. Probably the single most memorable casualty of the mystique was Zelda Fitzgerald, the daughter of a judge in Montgomery, Alabama. She quickly became the state's most conspicuous flapper, appearing at cotillion balls with a sprig of mistletoe fastened above her bustle, and later led a short manic shimmering life with Scott Fitzgerald, the two of them dancing across the tabletops of Europe, before finally winding up mad back in Montgomery, kept in her parents' old moldering gabled house, sheeted in white and given to religious prophecy. They still assure one another down there, over bridge tables and across the teacups at garden-club meetings, that, of course, it was Scott who ruined Zelda and really that man Hemingway who ruined Scott.

But all Southern ladies traditionally are possessed of a highly wrought sense of, if not exactly sin, at least unseemliness, in which unlicensed and unofficial toppling into sheets is centrally included. They tend either to abstain from that finality altogether or to enter into it with a kind of precipitous disarrayed abandon. This profound uneasiness with any casual diversions and exercises of the flesh contributes, at the minimum, to a pronounced gawkiness whenever they venture into what they imagine to be exotic indiscretions. One California writer recounts that, during a stay in a South Carolina city, he arrived at a discreet understanding with a somewhat eager and hectic matron there, slipped her his hotel-room key and later that evening opened his door to find her sitting brightly and prettily on the edge of his bed, smiling bravely, her hands folded tidily in her lap. After mustering a few faltering pleasantries, he picked up the phone to order drinks, turning to ask her what she would like. "Oh," she chirped a little thinly, "I might have me a Pepsi." He looked at her for a moment, then slowly lowered the phone and, with deep gentleness and solicitude and melancholy, led her to the door and sent her home.

At its more acute, though, this brittle delicacy produces a rather Armageddonal frame of mind after the fall. A Northern writer remembers, "I went for a while with this Southern girl who had been educated at some finishing school in Virginia, rode horses and all that--the classic belle, compulsively festive, with tawny-blonde hair and a voice like a late-summer-afternoon breeze passing through a crystal chandelier. But it seemed like there was also this undercurrent of static always going on between us: I kept feeling like she was trying to glycerin me into one of those passive and deferential Southern gentlemen who exist more or less as decorative accessories to the lives of such women. It wasn't really until the whole business was ending that we finally went to bed--it happened on the way out and it seemed she just relaxed, turned herself loose for that one time, which we both knew would be the last, to experience this other alien part of being a woman. After that, we amiably stopped seeing each other. Then, the following New Year's Eve, I'm in Miami Beach, doing a magazine piece on the hotel life down there, and I find this note in my box saying that she's checked into such and such a room and will I call her. I go up, and after a few minutes, the two of us standing there with her luggage and hatboxes still scattered unopened over the chairs and bed, she tells me she's pregnant and I'm going to marry her so I'll be punished for the rest of my life for this thing I've let happen, while in the meantime she's going to raise the child so it will hate me with purity. This sort of thing went on for three straight days, with me taking her down to dinner every evening--my God, she looked like a vision of paradise, floating into that dining room in a swim of simple blue chiffon, a stunning victory of taste and grace and serene beauty in the midst of all those damn sequins and spangles--but after a couple of hours, we'd go back upstairs and it'd be another one of those hotelroom Götterdämmerungs. By God, I'll marry her or else she'll tell her daddy, after which it's only a question of exactly when I'll get my head blown off. Christ, she wasn't after a father for her child, and she wasn't particularly interested in being a mother, for that matter. She would have had no problems in comfortably negotiating the birth, managing that item. It was simply this terrible, monstrous thing that had happened to her that would distend the exquisite symmetry of her life and appearance--meaning both the event itself and the baby, they were the same thing. Because as soon as she realized I wasn't about to marry her wrath over this thing, wasn't about to enter into that kind of half-mad arrangement for vindication, she promptly and methodically proceeded to have an abortion. It was in New York and I stayed with her for those few days: She was quite calm then, only a little impatient to get it done and over with. And when the business was gotten out of the way, she left. Just that clean and quick. I never saw her again."

" During the past few decades, as the South has been grimly engaged in metamorphosing itself into a duplication of Los Angeles and Cleveland and Newark, there has begun to emerge a different population of women--mostly found in those instant outer suburbs of life-scale dollhouses of imitation Tudor and Georgian and Seville and Fontainebleau, a surrealistic frontier out in the jack pines and broom sage and red dirt where barbecue pits and lawn sprinklers are pushing out the possums and moonshine shanties. Whether by design or by happenstance, these mutated Southern matrons have apparently divested themselves of the old lacy mystique--aside from their accents and perhaps a whimsical Southern cookbook or two--and to a large degree are indistinguishable from housewives in Des Moines or Omaha or Cincinnati. But in this, they seem to have merely lost dimension: The airy buoyant graces and ceremonies and demure mysteries of magnolia ladyhood, however much an artifice, have been replaced with a kind of drab flat chumminess with their men, perhaps a more comfortable condition but also a more prosaic one. They have acquired a quality of pleasant and even unbrightness without acquiring any of that carbonation, those brisk hints of mischief and adventure, that implicit electricity that Southern men have always secretly found so fetching in Northern women. They are, in a way, like displaced persons--or, as one imposing grandmother belle recently pronounced, "It seems these new ones have lost a certain tone." At the same time, out of the meager and mildewing little towns of the South's outback, there has accumulated into the measureless apartment warrens of cities like Atlanta an enormous host of young single girls, secretaries and receptionists, who cluster in fours in the downtown pubs and steakhouses during lunchtime, uniformly glossy and sleek and well preened with a certain lacquered look about them, fastidiously sipping daiquiris and manhattans, and who, with an idle regularity, indulge in casual and somewhat tinny weekend liaisons at Panama City or ski resorts in the Blue Ridge Mountains. They give one the impression that all the modest wan Melanie Wilkeses of the South's small towns have transmuted themselves into a generation of airline stewardesses.

Nevertheless, the mystique will be a stubbornly long time dying. Back in those towns, still detached and remote from the violent chemistries taking place in the cities, the species implacably endures as it's always been. The dour prim grand duchesses of Southern ladyhood continue to perpetuate that oblique and meticulous and archaic femininity as they carefully raise their daughters to duplicate themselves. For anyone who tries to intervene in this process--who would intrude in more elemental terms, with any passion or heat or gustiness--the experience rapidly turns into something like a passage through all the cold fires of hell, a malarial and hopeless involvement with La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

One such unlucky chap, a writer who himself was reared in the Deep South, was sitting with a few of his colleagues in a Lower East Side Manhattan saloon one sleeting twilight not long ago and began recounting the distant episode: "It was back when I was a senior in high school and my family was living in a little South Carolina mill town I'll call Lintburg. There happened to be a girl there who was like some innocent and unknowing angel who'd been accidentally mislaid amongst us mortals, as fine and sweet and simple and fresh as an April morning, hair like honey and blue eyes that looked at you like the soft dreaming pang of mandolins, with this strange, almost classic Grecian air. She was Hellenic, by God, like some astonishing strayed murmur of those flutes and lyres on Aegean hillsides had filtered somehow through the centuries right there into Lintburg. Need I say she devastated everything in town old enough to use a razor? She was picked homecoming queen and most outstanding everything else we could find to pick her. At one time or another, she had personally and critically stricken about every boy in the county, from the mill villages to the mill mansions. Emily Sims, I'll call her. Her father was a minor civic official in Lintburg, a rather quiet and sober burgher, but her mother was something else again--a true fearsome Valkyrie of a Southern woman, staunch and correct and implacable, whose central ambition was to graft her daughter onto the upper branches of Lintburg's somewhat skimpy social tree, up there among the few haggard blossoms that passed for our aristocracy. Emily herself seemed compliant enough--I always suspected that she was probably a great deal like her mother had been at one time, she just hadn't been dried and cured and salted yet. But for the time being, she had all the soft elegancies of a really consummate and timeless femininity, which inspired me--when she notified one of her message bearers once that she thought I was 'fascinating,' as I think she put it--to begin immediately producing these long unbelievable epistles to her on Blue Horse notebook paper, comparing her to Helen of Troy and Josephine and Guinevere, by God. I don't think she had counted on touching off such epic De Millean theatrics, and her responses were along the line that she wasn't really anything at all like I seemed to think, but I was awfully nice and sweet, you know, to say all those things. Pretty soon, after so many retorts like these, I began to feel a little bit delirious. A friend of mine suggested I was something like Leonard Bernstein trying to conduct Beethoven's Third with a lunch-hour string quartet that can't play anything but Jeanie with the Light-Brown Hair. Of course, I figured the son of a bitch just coveted her, too, so I dismissed what he had to say.

"Well, this went on for two or three months, and then her mother decided she'd better step in--I guess she concluded I was getting dangerously exercised about her daughter. One afternoon, she dropped by the department store where my mother was working and managed, through a kind of polite code, to give my mother to understand that she was somewhat dubious about certain developments and about me in particular. Then I called over there once and Mrs. Sims told me that Emily had been taken to a track meet by some college football player, but she just knew Emily would be terribly sorry she had missed me, to which I abruptly muttered, 'Yeah, I bet she will,' and with that, Mrs. Sims snapped, 'Matty, I don't think that's a very nice thing to say about Emily. It sounded sarcastic. I don't think it was very nice of you to say that, now--do you?' I tried to sputter out of it, but, by God, she wasn't about to turn me loose now: 'Do you think that was really a nice thing to say about Emily, now, Matty?'--until finally I mumbled, no, I didn't reckon it was. Whereupon she quickly ended the conversation with a pleasant goodbye. In all this, it was like she was performing some unobtrusive and discreet piece of surgery, a deft quiet excision. She was that kind of authentic Dragon Lady.

"Actually, though, it wasn't totally her own engineering. The truth was, Emily was a creature of almost unalleviated simplicity and conventionality who just happened to be clothed in all the exquisite graces of an Aphrodite. This just naturally invited the most unimaginable variety of emotional accidents and mischarges--extravagant swooping hopeless expenditures of passion, lyricism, desperation, rage, jealousy, wiliness. Hell, it's a misery that is probably universal, ageless: these great lugubrious soulful booming gongs of the heart answered by only polite little tinklings. I remember one night toward the end, when I was alone in the house, literally beating on the walls and groaning, 'God, I got to have her, it has to be.' But it was really already over with. And I didn't perish --after a while, I came to suspect I had been drowning in a girl who, in fact, had been snugly and triumphantly raised to produce a home that would be more or less a replica of the one that had produced her, who would arrive at a more or less perfunctory marriage with some suitable local young man of good family and, in due time, bear a circumspect number of children, like two, and cook them all roast beef every Sunday in a brick home in some quietly fashionable neighborhood there in Lintburg, like the stars and her mother had decreed she would from the beginning.

"Only, it almost didn't happen. There occurred a short and unexpected season of dishevelment. I wasn't a part of it; I was just a spectator from a distance, you might say. The two of us happened to go to the same college, and during Emily's senior year, she came across this basketball player from a nearby school--Hank Campbell, I'll call him--a solitary and thoroughly inconspicuous and almost painfully awkward guy in any setting beyond a basketball court, where he happened to be transformed into a thing of magic. His father, so we heard, was a professional gambler up in Indiana or Missouri. Anyway, all of a sudden we began seeing Emily and Hank constantly together, usually off by themselves somewhere--it was probably the most unlikely pairing anybody who knew either of them could have imagined. But somehow, for that very reason, you also knew that it was a bit more than casual. You never saw him saying anything to her--he would just be sitting mutely and gawkily beside her while she talked to him in a steady whisper, as if she had deliberately withdrawn and closed herself eagerly around him. I mean, after years of performing perfectly and placidly for her mother, there came this sudden little aberration, like an abrupt small private assertion of herself beyond the scrupulous scrutinies and orderings of her mother, a kind of tiny fitful last-minute reaching out of whatever feeling and self-identity were still left in the intricate and peaceful workings of her mechanisms. In any event, Hank Campbell was an entirely unprogramed event as far as Mrs. Sims was concerned.

"At last, she began to take a hand in the situation. She looked around Lintburg for what was available and came up with a boy who wasn't exactly an Errol Flynn but who belonged to a family with a passable pedigree--Hugh Gates, we'll call this one: an utterly decent and likable fellow, if surpassingly inauspicious, who had proceeded through high school as a decidedly remote bystander to all the amorous lowing and churning around Emily, which, as I've said, included at one time or another anybody who could have been considered even faintly eligible for her. When Mrs. Sims commenced to go to work on the problem of Hank Campbell, this fellow Gates was off at some military academy, I believe, so what Mrs. Sims began to do was arrange, through Mrs. Gates, dates for Emily and Hugh that pre-empted her weekends with this odd ungainly, taciturn basketball player over at school whose daddy seemed to be some kind of gambler.

"What this maneuver startlingly occasioned, though, were--for the first time ever--taut and crackling little scenes between Mrs. Sims and Emily, repeated disarrays and frayings, bedroom arguments. While Emily submitted physically to her mother's arrangements, she seemed to become only more intense and intransigent and contrary about the boy back at school. After a while, Mrs. Sims began to panic just a little. Then one Sunday, Emily brought Hank home, and that night, before they left to drive back to school, Mrs. Sims abruptly stalked into the front room where they were sitting and blurted, 'Hank, I just want to know if you're planning to marry Emily!' With that, Hank arose and delivered what was probably the longest succession of syllables he had ever mustered in his life: 'Why don't you go straight to hell.' And just walked out, went through the door and got into his car and left.

"Not quite two months later, it was announced in the Lintburg Sentinel that Emily Sims, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. O. P. Sims, was engaged to be married to Mr. Hugh Gates, the son of Colonel and Mrs. Winston Brevard Gates of North Coventry Drive."

At this point, the writer lifted his vodka martini and, with a small elegiac smile, murmured, "So here's to Mrs. O. P. Sims. She not only endures, by God, she prevails." He took a short sip, and then began coughing--the ragged distracted hacking of a refugee from old familiar warmths and fevers too long stranded in the dim dank snows of the North. Finally he waved his hand and said, "But wait a minute, you ain't heard the real finish. Her real victory was yet to come. For several months after that newspaper announcement, see, nobody heard anything more about Emily. But the damn thing kept haunting me for some reason--maybe I just didn't believe that any actual struggle in a person's life, however token, could come to such a neat and trivial and banal conclusion.

"About a year later, though, I found out that not only had they gotten married but Emily had moved the wedding up four months--she didn't want to wait until Christmas, she told her friends. Not long after the business was transacted, Hugh left for his tour of duty with the Service, but Emily stayed behind in Lintburg. And while Mrs. Sims would occasionally drive Emily around looking for a place where she and Hugh might settle when Hugh returned, Emily lived there at home with her mother--in that same squat little brick house with those goddamn clean cold lacquered fireplaces, those icy mantelpiece mirrors, the piano still sitting in a corner of that front parlor where she'd practiced her music lessons as a little girl. She slept in her old bedroom, pink with dotted-swiss curtains, where once, like a moment now in some vague remote dream of delirium, she and her mother had engaged in those shrill arguments. She had some of her old girlfriends over now and then for tea and bridge and they'd report afterward that she talked about Hugh all the time, how she just adored him and couldn't wait for him to get back--though she never seemed to know exactly when that might be. Nevertheless, they said, it seemed she'd never been happier in her life. Everything had worked out beautifully. Then, one morning, she went with her mother to the doctor's office and found out she was pregnant."

The writer paused for another long taste of his martini, then a few more croaks of coughing. "Christ," he muttered, shaking his head with a bleary grin, "I'm gonna die if I stay up here much longer." He then added, almost like an incidental afterthought, "Only a few weeks ago, while Hugh was still off in Europe or Asia somewhere, she had the baby. She almost didn't come out of the anesthesia--she was under for more than a day, I understand. But the baby was fine and strapping. It was a girl and Emily named her after her mother."