The Night Travellers

8. Jeff

8 Jeff So she let him back into the night he'd come out of, a fish slipping into bayou-dark water, a night bird careening off into the shadows. Yet he did have his own history, like anyone else. Jefferson Blaise. He had been born north of New Orleans, south of Baton Rouge, a little to the west of both. His mother's father had inherited an old indigo plantation, but the market for the dye had dried up long ago, and nothing else he ever raised there had much luck. Jeff's grandfather then sold the land and put the money from it in a small investment firm in Baton Rouge during the thirties, depression times, but oil coming in, the feel of really getting ahead. Alignment on the wrong side of Huey Long was what he blamed for going broke in the late thirties. Oh, the good times, suddenly gone. Jeff's uncles had left for Texas. Jeff's mother, in desperation, found his father. He was an out-of-state-born executive of a Louisiana oil company, all too soon to be broken in turn by a suit brought to contest legitimate rights to property his company had developed. Twice now Jeff's mother had had to see it happen. It seemed to take the life out of her. His father became a seeker of small jobs in accountancy, had few friends, and found himself unable to converse with a son everyone was speaking of as brilliant, promising. When he had more to drink than usual, he would say to himself,I'm going tocall him in and explain everything. Sometimes he did just that. But nothing was really explained. From the early days they had lived in a large old house on the southern outskirts of town. It was white and just missed having that 51 j52 THE N I G H T T R A V E L L E R S aspect of splendor valued in those parts. The lot was heavy with live oaks. The summers grew numb with steady heat. When Jeff was ten he woke one night to find his room on fire. The fire started in the kitchen, they later assumed, and had spread toward Jeff's room on the ground floor. He raced out, yelling, "Fire!" His parents, upstairs, rushed down, the neighborhood sprang up to help them, and half the house was saved. A half house: They lived in that, two bedrooms above, a new, always makeshift-looking kitchen installed, one "gracious" room remaining to them, which his mother called "the library." Here, his father would draw the curtains, put out whiskey on a mahogany table left from better days, set out a crystal glass, pour a drink, and begin to "explain everything" to his son, who sat and listened quietly. In the dining room a cupboard with a glass door still held some good china and crystal and a few large pieces of silver, unused and tarnished. Upstairs, the rooms had high, shadowy ceilings. One was filled with boxes, crates of stuff salvaged from the burned half, a sewing machine, a dress model. In the years before she died, Jeff's mother all but lived in an armchair, covered by a quilt, wearing some fragile blouse or other. "Affluence," his father would say, drawing up his chair to a table of cracked dishes, but with his napkin still waiting in a heavy silver ring. "It's affluence she misses." And she, dressed as well as she could for the ritual of dinner, would come in from the kitchen, smiling weakly, with a smoking dish in either hand. She was not at all a bad cook. They managed to send Jeff to college, with some borrowing. During his first year there his mother died. Pneumonia with complications —she was not strong enough to start with to fight it out. "It's a hard life, boy," his father said, sitting in the library with the curtains drawn, taking the bourbon down. He lifted an earnest hand. "It's such a hard life." Untrimmed mustache streaked with gray. Bright wet eyes. He must have been handsome once. "You know that word affluence?" Jefferson Blaise asked Mary Harbison years later in North Carolina. "I know it's what Mother likes," she said, and they both laughed. "Being only children . . . it makes us alike," he noted. They were walking a campus path through fine fall air. The leaves showed a wild...