Lucinderella

I

We are readers of postcards in our family, anybody’s. Listeners-in. We can put a phone conversation back together from a few one-ended fragments like a paleontologist rebuilding a dinosaur with a handful of broken bones. Not that privacy is impossible at our house but you have to put your mind on it, have to pay the full postage. So that when Uncle Brownell got the long-distance call that gray April Wednesday most of us knew what it was all about way before he said good-by (shouted it, out of respect for the miles involved), and we moved in toward his worn oak threshold from upstairs and down. It may interest some of you to know, he said, I have just had word Lucinda is coming home, making a play at offhandedness though he was never one for the offhand. He was impressed and he couldn’t help showing it, impressed at the weight of the news, which of course was considerable, and also, I suspect, at being the one to have it first (or thinking he was) though, head of the house, he was the logical person to have it.

Was that Lucy you were talking to? I said, because that wasn’t the way I had put it together.

He said it was Lucinda’s lawyer in New York, or agent or something-or-other. Lucinda had asked the man to call him and say she was taking a bus today; the man thought she was somewhere in North Carolina, Nashville or Richmond or some such place (a little vague on the backwoods settlements).

Bus! the Judge said.

And I imagine most of us there on the old doorsill felt the same way. It was hard enough to believe she was coming back but, granting she was, it shouldn’t have been by anything much short of a Lagonda Three-Liter or a DC-9. Lucinda had got to be somebody since we had seen her. In fact all any of us needed to do to see her name in print that very minute was to open yesterday’s New York Times there on Uncle Brownell’s rolltop to the theater page; they had run an ad of her play there every day since last November, the play she had made from her novel about us, The Fugitives (we were fugitives from something, I gathered, maybe everything, those of us not too decayed to flee). And before the play we could read about her any old time on the book page or in the news columns, autographing, lecturing, personally appearing here and there, mostly in New England and the Midwest—not very far south, for obvious reasons. And it seemed only yesterday since her first poem, signed Lucinderella but we recognized her. She was on top of the world, glass slippers and all. And since she had scrambled up there largely by way of our bruised and lacerated shoulders—the Judge, I figured by Uncle Brownell’s mahogany clock, was waiting in the wings for his cue at almost this very moment to bumble out and make a fool of himself at the Wednesday matinee—I felt it would have taken a good deal of nerve to face us even with the backing of a DC-9.

Well, now, really! I said into everybody’s equivocal mumbling which I took to be righteous indignation searching about for expression. Really, now! My scalp was still tender from the crease she had put in it with a story called Of My Redemption Thence, though the thing had won some sort of award (Northern jury) and had been reprinted so often I shy to this day at the sight of an anthology.

How do you mean, Clamp? Uncle Brownell said. She had been gentler with him, incest, as I recall, but unintentional.

Mean? I said. I mean coming back like this as if she hadn’t creamed us, hadn’t done anything. We are human. After all. Or part human. I glanced at the others for support. Most of them had been given the full treatment, as I had, from the widow (who would be Jessica—possibly Mamie but I think Jessica) dreamily watering-watering with her garden hose, to the Judge, in a period piece, hankering so much to see a certain one of the Jewell Street girls ride a bicycle (she looked like our Savannah Sisterbaby Lane to me, allowing for the puffed sleeves, boater, and stockings with clocks) that he bought her one, which the bicycle man, misunderstanding, delivered to the Judge’s wife, who couldn’t ride.

They said nothing and I said, Coming back like this to round up a few more freaks for the sideshow. It seemed up to me to speak out for everybody, voice their sentiments, as the Judge would say (I am a sort of sergeant at our house, caught between the troops and the high command). I said, I mean how many books does she expect us to spawn anyway? After all.

Now, Clamp.

Father, then, I conceded, spawn perhaps too rough a word for Uncle Brownell.

He smiled at me round the rimless glasses and said, Oh, Clamp, my boy, and Lester said, Old Clamp, he’s scared, and Jessica said, But, Cousin Clamp! and though I could hardly believe it, I had a feeling they weren’t all behind me. I said, Jessie, maybe you don’t appreciate that garden hose.

Why, that wasn’t anything, she said. Everybody has to water the camellias to keep them going through the summer. (Jessica doesn’t understand about sex. Her attitude was that it might be all right for dumb animals but for human beings it was The End.)

I opened my mouth and then closed it. I couldn’t stand up there in front of all of them diagraming what the reviewers had read into that hose the Widow Jacks was always playing with, whether Lucinda had meant it that way or not. I heard the Judge’s pants-pocket jingling, which meant he was taking an exception to one or the other of us and I said, And you, Judge, are you ready to be dragged over the coals again? (I wanted to say bare-assed, but Uncle Brownell doesn’t hold with such talk.) He grinned with his missing lower left canine and said, Didn’t hurt so bad, Clamp.

You’ve forgotten, I persisted, though it was clear enough I was out there by myself. You’ve all forgotten. Forgotten how burned up they had all been the first time (What Images Return), forgotten the blisters and singes, the boom! and the sparks flying, with Lucinda far away by then, squatting down low, I pictured her, the way she used to do at Christmastime when we set off the big firecrackers under the lard bucket. The town agog and askance, all of us using side streets, side doors, looking right and left, the Judge with his shoulders up for disguise, Jessica hardly daring to slink into the supermarket. Burned up for a month or so, that is; when the book started up the best-seller list at the Library you could feel a change in the air like a drop in humidity. And the farther up it climbed the faster the burns healed, until by summer when it was Number Two the Judge was taking his speech away from the Bargerons down the street because Mrs. Bargeron was telling everybody Mr. Bargeron was Leroy when the Judge was claiming he was Leroy himself. But it hadn’t occurred to me there would be no scar tissue; no wince.

Because it had been nearly eight years since Images and we hadn’t seen or heard from Lucinda in all that time, a picture now and then in the paper or on a book jacket, the same black-eyebrowed Lucinda—never much of a smiler—though less tense, I thought, from the beautiful warming action of Success (that wonder drug) and from the fact too that the fashion in eyebrows had caught up with her; but no personal contact, no letters or cards to any of us. She was through with us, as we should have guessed; there was a bridge-burning smell about Images. And I had never blamed her for washing her hands of us. We hadn’t given her much time while she was there, most of us; considered her (most of us) pretty largely a liability, with her ragged black hair and the ink on her chewed fingers and her flat shoes that let her appear and disappear like a cat. She hadn’t told anybody she was going until the morning she left, materializing about noon in Uncle Brownell’s door with a suitcase that had been her mother’s and a square unladylike package wrapped in newspaper that I see now was the dynamite with which we were all soon to be hoisted.

Though in reality it hadn’t been so soon, a couple of years. During which she worked here and there in the New York world of paste and type, made her way into the hangers-on of lunching wits and critics, got some Lucinderella poetry printed here and there, while the book manuscript with all of us aboard bounced patiently down the scale of editorial offices. Then it landed one day on the desk of a New England editor who had recently married an ample Southern family of his own and had probably already begun to raise an eyebrow at his shaving mirror; he called Lucinda on the phone from Boston. About the first thing she said was, I’m not changing a line, you know, and he said, Sugarchile, I don’t want you to change a letter, and six months later up went the lard bucket. For a while it looked, as I said, as if we were going to have to close up shop. She picked us off singly and in pairs, sent us spinning, like one of the people on Big Ma’s TV shooting his way out of an Indian ambush. And the few she missed in Images she drilled in Fugitives, book and play, and in the stories, until nowadays the only uncreased scalps thereabout I could think of were those of the twins, Letitia and Melba Stroud, who had been only six or seven when she left and must not have made much impression on her; I am sure no sense of sportsmanship deterred her. And that tougher one of Bivins, who hadn’t come until later (anyway, his skin was as thick as the paint on an old mailbox).

But all was forgiven it seemed. More than forgiven; glancing about now at what must have looked like backstage at the Martin Beck Theater I could see no emotion but pride and anticipation and welcome. It was in the Judge’s chinkling keys as he paced the dried-out parquetry strips of the floor, in the executive lift of Jessica’s pink chin (Mrs. Fullcharge we called her), in the roll-over of Lester’s wet cigar, and of course in the deeper pitch of Uncle Brownell’s already deep voice (Bivins hadn’t lowered himself to come). They didn’t seem to care what the next book did to them; or, which I thought was more probable, didn’t have much foresight as to how it was going to feel. Everybody needs to visit back home from time to time, Uncle Brownell said.

I said, Yes sir, but she’s coming back the way you come back to the woodpile to get another armload of logs. She’s just run out of logs.

He doesn’t like that sort of talk, metaphor I mean, and I came right out and asked him, all of them, why else they thought she was coming back. That’s her business, Clamp, he said, with some of the asperity now of a Secret Service man blocking a nosy inquiry about the President. Her privilege.

I wanted to say it wasn’t her privilege to come back there and slap me into some new book she was thinking up, but I knew they would have taken it as selfishness. A more practical objection occurred to me anyway and I asked him where he was going to sleep her. There isn’t any place, I said. He had moved Big Ma into Lucinda’s old room and I knew he wouldn’t stand for any doubling up even for the short time Lucinda would be there, the this-is-no-rabbit-hutch rule.

But the Judge brushed it aside with We’ll find a place, which Uncle Brownell underscored with There’s always room at The Homestead for a celebrated kinsman.

And how do you know she even wants to stay here? I said. With all that money. All that Success. Somebody in the big time like that would rather take the Governor’s Suite at the hotel. Might want space to receive the press. Malice in the suggestion I don’t deny; she had not only left us all at the post but coming back among us like this was as if she had gained a whole lap on us. And before long she would pull out—with a new armload of logs—and leave us all at the post again. The same post.

But in our part of the world to suggest that visiting kinspeople might stay at a hotel is about on the level of suggesting they sleep in the bus station, not that you are so panting to have them under your roof but that staying anywhere else reflects on your equipment to accommodate them. And of course in this case we were panting, the majority. Hotel! several of them exclaimed, looking at each other as if they were saying jail or police barracks.

I pursued it with The Jonathan Copp is an excellent hotel— (Uncle Otis’ hotel, which I’ll take up later). But Uncle Brownell ignored the idea altogether. He said, Isn’t Savannah’s room vacant, Jessica? his tone the one you use for queries you know the answer to.

I was glad to say, No sir, it’s not.

But Savannah is in Miami on her honeymoon, Clamp.

She wants to hold the room, sir, until—well, until she has more information, everybody looking at me as if I had almost gone too far. He said Lucinda would only be wanting the room for a short time in any case, disposing of the whole thing by addressing the theory to Jessica, and I knew I had lost. I said, Savannah’ll be back, you watch what I tell you, but it was merely to go down struggling; Savannah knew what she was doing. (When Savannah looked at you you stayed looked at, sometimes for ten or fifteen hours.)

And maybe I am a worrier. You hear a lot about the troubles and trials of the artist in a hardhearted society; you naturally would, he’s the one doing all the talking. You don’t hear anything about what society has to put up with from a hardhearted artist, about how it feels to have one of these people poking into your simple normal everyday life, hanging round with his ears stuck out like the FBI.

But what worried me was more specific than that, as I realized once I had got back upstairs to my room and let the news settle a little bit. It was partly that I didn’t take to being put through Lucinderella’s typewriter again all right, but I felt there was something else too, something less personal though I make no apology for wanting to protect myself. As I thumbed through the various possibilities I noticed a cringing in my nostrils that signaled the penetrating dust-dry choking acid stink of the little pencil cigars that Bivins lighted one off another in his basement quarters by the boiler room and that seeped up through our old laths and plaster like a rancid tune, and I thought for a minute my worry was about what Lucinda might gladly make of the complicated tensions that had been growing for some time between Bivins and Uncle Brownell (Bivins wanted Uncle Brownell supplanted, by whom a child could guess—a definite drag he was on the Pax Brownellica). This led me on to the real worry, which had probably been in my head all along.

There were certain basic details in the operation of our house—The Homestead—that I happened to know and that of course Uncle Brownell knew and no doubt the Judge, whatever the rest of us knew—probably nothing, though it was