The Snare

5. JULIA THINKING

5. JULIA THINKING Her pen stopped, hovering above the diary page she was meaning to give to Martin to silence him about her past—what did it matter if he knew the truth or not? She was remembering the town—Towson , Tennessee, up near the Alabama-Mississippi border. It was the thirties and they had boarded, the three of them, her mother, her father, and herself, in a tall white Victorian house, one of those houses meant from the first, no doubt, to be boarding houses, else how explain all its divisions into unexpected cupboards, passageways, stairwells, and entrance rooms? She remembered the smell of medicine on the many stairs, also the dark closed doors of actual sicknesses. In the rooms windows were seldom raised in winter, as both coal and the cash that paid for it were scarce. On the street, going uptown to the drugstore, she took the hand which swung by her head's height, and it was her father's though she could not see him. She saw straight ahead and down, cracked sidewalks with prints of cows' and horses' hooves, or far ahead, up, treetops, telephone wires, and clouds. Her father had a side-to-side walk: she was always being shoved at by it. When this came back to her in later years, she wondered if he drank and she didn't know it, but decided it was a certain gait that went with run-down brown shoes, a single suit to wear, and discouragement. He couldn't get a job. That was the dead knowledge that lived with them, a fourth member of the family. It was like living with a corpse. Then there were the days when letters came to them, 194 Elizabeth Spencer 195 usually from New Orleans, sometimes from one of Papa's family down in Birmingham. Then a long discussion: "Why not go back there?" "We've been all over that." "It's a big town. Everybody has forgotten what happened . We can live in another part of it." "But who can I ask for help then?" "There's nobody to ask for it here." "But it's so much cheaper." "That's right." "Little goose." Mother would smile. Were they both stupid? Julia wondered , years later, with her detached citified curiosity, leaning back toward the sharp mouse-face of the dark little girl who had been herself but wasn't anybody any more. The letters from New Orleans were always on white stationery. The texture of the paper was interesting to run a finger over; it made a terrain, something like hills and valleys on a map. But all was fleecy white except for the gold initial in the corner: D. This was for a French name, unlike her own plain one. People in town knew it soon enough, the way they knew everything. It accounted for the special way they looked at her mother and spoke to her, and for the way her mother could look slightly interesting and modish still in her old frail dresses, one flowered green and black, one blue dotted swiss, one dark blue with a peach-colored collar. She leaned back slightly when she met anyone, and when she walked her heels swayed a little bit. Julia was aware of these habits as what people called your ways, your airs. She knew that people said, What'd she see in him?—meaning her mother was above her father. Yet he must have had some distinction . Years later, Aunt Isabel said that they had met during a Mardi Gras dance, somebody having given her father the chance to come down there and go to one. Maybe for that very reason, to find a well-off girl who'd marry him? "He was a good dancer," said Aunt Isabel, and that was about all that Alice wanted to know. "Of course, she was very young," she added hastily, lest Julia think she was being critical. Sometimes the letter with the golden D had money ig6 T H E S N A R E in it, a check. Those were really the good days. There would be more food, maybe dinner uptown at the hotel with smiles to all who saw them out together, and surely a bath beforehand, good cigars for Papa, and Mother smelling of cologne. And talk, with reminiscence and optimism. Julia's memories of those lost days, so abruptly...