Luke

On Thursday Miss Nancy told Luke they were going to spend the weekend in the country.

“You didn’t leave me much time,” he said. “What you want to take?” The weekend before, she had insisted on taking fishing tackle; since there was none in the house, she had made a special trip to town to buy two rods and reels. “You want to take the fishing things?” Luke asked.

Miss Nancy looked at him as she pulled on her white gloves. She was going to a meeting; Luke knew that when she came back, there would be black marks on the tips of the glove fingers, but now they were as they should be, perfectly clean. He had never known Miss Nancy to go out with dirty gloves.

“You know they didn’t fish last time,” she said, sounding short and efficient as she did when she called up from the Red Cross or the Volunteer Bureau to tell him she would be late for dinner. “Tell Mr. Ben”; the words had the same not-to-
be contradicted ring.

“No, we won’t take them,” she said, probing in her purse for the list of work she made for him every day although he had been with them for fourteen years and knew what should be done. Luke enjoyed the list; she wrote is as carefully as an invitation, and then she read the whole list to him, her finger following the words. Luke knew she was still not sure he could read. There was no mention of the list. “What about packing?” he asked, his voice more startled than he felt. “When you want me to get things ready? You leaving Saturday?”

“Yes, around noon,” she said, and closed her purse. The brass snap flicked a piece of sunlight. “But there isn’t any use going to all that trouble to plan things,” she said. “I have too much to do to go to all that trouble again.” As she walked out of the kitchen, she said to him over her shoulder, “You know, just the silver and china. But not the good set and not so much.” He heard her thin heels in the hall.

Luke leaned on the kitchen table and planned his morning. There would still be time to start on the windows after he had collected the china and silver and the linens she had forgotten to mention. He went to the cabinet and took out the big straw picnic basket that had come the Christmas before from New York. Before the last weekend, Miss Nancy had made him take out all the fittings in the basket and wash them although they had never been used. She had bought a new kind of polish, a spray, and she had spent half a day cleaning and shining the picnic knives, forks and spoons although they were only metal. The smell of that spray, clean and corrosive, still hung in the kitchen. Then she had spent two days mending the lace napkins. “You going to take them?” Luke had asked, but she had only laughed at the disapproval in his voice, laughed and re-crossed her legs in her tight peach velvet pants. “This is going to be done right for once, “she had said. “I’m not going to have my guests saying they spent the weekend beyond the pale of civilization.” And she had made Luke pack the Dresden.

Luke was sorry about the Dresden; over fourteen years he’d grown fond of the paling blue pattern and in all that time he had only broken one teacup—it had crumbled in his hand like a blown eggshell while he was washing it. Now as he opened the cupboard to take out the plain white service he planned to take this time, he noticed again as he’d noticed every day for a week the small colony of Dresden, seeing the chipped rims of the three soup bowls that were left and the teacups misshapen without their handles. He shook his head and lifted the white plates out carefully.

The weekend before, Luke remembered, he thought things had begun to go badly after Mr. Ben took the liquor out of the back of his car. Of course Miss Nancy had arranged to have sherry and some wine for the table, and a little bourbon for afterwards. But Mr. Ben had brought a ten-gallon jug of gin, raw gin and cheap—Luke could tell from the smell of it. He had poured it into a pitcher while Miss Nancy argued with her husband, standing carefully out of Luke’s sight in the hall as though he wouldn’t hear.

“What possessed you to bring that stuff?”

“Honey, if you expect this weekend to go over without hard liquor…”

But now Luke was not sure that Mr. Ben’s liquor was what had started it. He remembered that Mr. Ben had not come until six o’clock and things had started to go badly long before that.

Luke had been sent up a day early to open the cottage and so he was watching from the kitchen window when the guests came. Mrs. Mason kept saying she had forgotten to bring a nightgown; wasn’t that silly, coming for the weekend without a nightgown?

Luke had watched them hesitate beside their cars and stare at the cottage, its windows blinking in the late sun. “Say, this is right cute,” Mr. Mason had said as he bent heartily to pick up a suitcase. But Luke had noticed that they all glanced around at the iron circle of the woods and the still lake. Evening was closing in on them like a door.

“This really is the other end of nowhere,” Mrs. Kirkpatrick had said; she had a high frail voice that Luke recognized even over the telephone because it did not match her square figure. “How far is it to anywhere?” Then she started toward the cottage as Miss Nancy began the long, laughing description of car tracks and stream fords to an eventual faraway drugstore. And that had been before the liquor; by the time Mr. Ben came their voices were stiff and high with the bright, interrupting laughter Luke associated with Mr. Ben’s stag dinners.

“Did they like the flowers?” Miss Nancy always asked him afterwards, having spent a morning arranging gladiolas.

“Darling, they were perfect,” her husband told her although Luke knew he had moved the centerpiece by the time they had eaten the shrimp. “My wife’s fuss,” had called it, and the other men laughed.

On Friday, Luke went down into the basement with Miss Nancy to collect the magazines that had been accumulating for several years by the furnace. She had found out that they could be sold for a few cents a pound, and she was planning to use the money for charity.

She picked up an old Life magazine with a picture of a movie star on the cover, and then she asked him one of her rare embarrassing questions; Luke remembered all of them, scattered across the last five or six years as he remembered the loud, cheap ties and socks they gave him for Christmas. “Luke, am I still pretty?”

He did not answer, bending to pick up a pile of magazines.

Later on Friday Miss Nancy told him there would be six people for the weekend, and Luke expected they would be the same six people who had come the weekend before. He was sent up early Saturday to avoid the awkwardness of having him drive up with one of the party.

When he heard the cars scratching on the gravel road, he went to the door of the cottage. He had put on a clean white jacket and the starched edge of the collar cut his neck; he watched the puffs of dust around the cars as they approached.

He still had to set up the liquor tray. As he went back into the kitchen to break out the ice cubes, he heard their voices around the cars. He filled the ice bucket and went out to get the suitcases. Mrs. Mason was wearing a red dress cut out in a triangle at the throat and the skin under the triangle was bright red from the sun. “Good evening, Luke,” she said, and he knew she was proud of remembering his name.

He bent to pick up her husband’s suitcase and as he straightened up, he saw the other couple climbing out of their car. He was surprised; they were very young. Luke fumbled with the suitcase handle and looked at them. The girl was wearing a suit with a white collar like the suits girls wore to the dentist and her neat dark hair was scooped back behind her ears. The boy, her husband, was carrying a fishing rod.

Puzzled, Luke carried the suitcases into the cottage. Out front, he heard Mrs. Mason say, “Well, if you didn’t bring a fishing rod!” and as she laughed Luke knew she was throwing her head back, stretching the red skin smooth under the triangle.

As Luke lined up the suitcases in the front hall, he watched the young couple look carefully around them, hesitating in the door of the big room. The big room had a fieldstone fireplace with a gun over it; there were maps and deer head on the wall, and the rug was worn in front of the hearth. Miss Nancy had left everything the way it was when Mr. Ben bought the cottage; even the gun belonged to the former owner.

“What a delightful room!” the girl exclaimed.

“It’s a shambles; come on out to the porch,” Miss Nancy said. Mr. and Mrs. Mason had already taken up their positions in the lounge chairs. Through the dining room windows, Luke heard their chairs scrape as the moved and their voices while he set the table.

“Seclusion!” Mrs. Mason was saying. “There’s nothing like it in the world, or out of it, I should say.”

“Oh God, Helen,” Mr. Mason said and Luke heard his chair creak impatiently.

“I know you think I’m an incurable romantic,” Mrs. Mason said. “I never will forget how you laughed at me when you found my box.” She waited for someone to ask her to go on.

“What box?” the girl asked dutifully.

“It was silly, you’ll laugh at me too, but I kept this box with invitations and dance programs and dried corsages and all that kind of thing. I don’t like to forget happiness!”

“Was it a big box?” Mr. Ben asked.

“Can I have a drink?” Mr. Mason asked before his wife could answer. Luke went to get the liquor tray as Mr. Ben came into the house. “Luke!” he called. “Bring the tray out,” and when Luke came with it, he looked as he did when the orange juice tasted sour because he had forgotten and brushed his teeth before breakfast. “Why didn’t you have the tray out on the porch when we came?” he asked. He was a big man and sweat lay like quicksilver in the creases of his neck.

Luke carried the tray out onto the porch. As he arranged the bottles with their silver labels hanging around their necks on chains, he noticed how everyone was sitting: the girl was perched on the edge of one of the lounge chairs, embarrassed to lie down, and her husband was standing over by the railing, looking at the lake. Mr. and Mrs. Mason had their feet up and Miss Nancy was wearing her new black slacks and sitting on the porch stairs. Luke could tell that she was bored from the way her hands were dropped between her knees.

“What kind of fish in that lake?” the young man asked generally.

“You’ll have to ask Mr. Ben,” Miss Nancy answered, yawning, but Mr. Ben was mixing drinks.

A little later, Luke heard the young man asked if he could fish before supper. His wife had gone into the cottage to take off her suit; Luke had sensed her silent surprise when Miss Nancy showed her into the bathroom rather than into a bedroom.

“I might be able to catch something for supper,” the young man said; he did not comment when Miss Nancy told him they already had steak.

“Well, if you want to go, go,” Mr. Ben said. “But don’t ask me anything about that lake. The man I bought the place from said it was stocked but I’ve never fished in it.”

“I’ll just get my things,” the young man said. Miss Nancy’s voice was light and sleepy as she asked if she could go too.

A few minutes later she hurried into the kitchen. “Luke, where are the fishing things?” she demanded; her face was bright with excitement and she had tied up her hair in an orange bandana. “That boy’s going to teach me how to fish, so don’t expect me to be near the house until suppertime.”

Luke rested his hands firmly on the counter and told her they had not brought the fishing tackle. “You said you wouldn’t be using it, like last time,” he told her.

“Oh God,” she exclaimed and stamped her foot. “Why can’t I ever do anything but die of boredom?” And she jerked out of the kitchen, tearing the bandana off her head. Luke heard her sullen voice explaining on the porch. “It looks like you can’t do anything with a college education but sit,” she said.

“That’s too bad,” the young man said. “Why don’t you come along anyway?”

“Well, I might,” she said. Her voice brightened but then she said, “That would be just stupid. Down in those rushes with the heat and the mosquitoes and nothing to do.” Luke heard a chair creak as she sat down.

He had almost finished setting the dinner table and he was folding the white napkins into triangles when the girl passed in the hall, wearing shorts and walking self-consciously because of her white legs.

“Can I come too?” she asked her husband privately, but the others heard.

“You didn’t bring your rod,” he said, but she followed him down the path.

“Who the hell are they?” Mr. Mason said before they were out of earshot.

“He’s just starting in the office.” Miss Nancy’s voice was worn flat. “Ben thought we ought to have them out because they’re new here.”

“Well, of all the dam killjoy wet blanket things to do…” Mr. Mason’s voice ran down as Mr. Ben came out on the porch.

He was carrying his drink. “God, it’s hot,” he said, and he set down the drink and began to take off his shirt.

“Oh Ben, really,” Miss Nancy said. “You’re disgusting.” Luke heard the others laugh.

Luke had dinner ready at seven and he announced it the way he did in town, with a white linen napkin draped over his arm. Mr. Ben said he didn’t want to eat yet. “Ben, it’s ready,” Miss Nancy said and she started to get up. But Mr. Ben settled his shoulders more deeply into his chair. “Listen, Honey Bee, you organize me just about to death in town.
This is where I come to get away from it all.”

Mrs. Mason laughed and rattled the ice cubes in her glass. Miss Nancy flushed and when she turned to Luke, he saw the hard glitter of tears in her eyes. “Hold everything,” she said. “We’ll be a while.” For no reason, Mrs. Mason laughed again.

It was past nine when they finally came in and Miss Nancy was still trying to get Mr. Ben to put on his shirt. “You’re disgusting,” she repeated over and over, and Luke noticed that she had taken off her earrings; she arranged them carefully on the edge of her plate. He began to watch her.

“Fat as a hog,” Miss Nancy said. “Sweaty. Put on your shirt before you make me sick.”

When he would not, she appealed to the others standing around the table. “Tell him you won’t eat with him like that. Fat. Disgusting.”

Mr. Ben sat down heavily and said, “It would be a hell of a lot more fun for me if you’d put a little fat on in the right places.”

Mrs. Mason screamed with laughter; above it, Luke heard Miss Nancy saying furiously, “You forget that I had several offers to be a professional model.”

Luke went to get the steak; it was dried out. In the kitchen, he allowed himself to stop for a minute, but when he heard Miss Nancy’s voice rising sharply in the dining room, he picked up the platter and went back in.

He passed the platter around the table. He noticed that the girl handled the serving fork awkwardly and carefully; her husband, too, was careful but his hands seemed under his control. Luke noticed the girl’s square, bitten-off fingernails; she was afraid of taking too much food.

Mr. Ben cursed at the dry steak, jabbing his knife into it, and Luke saw the girl’s husband put down his fork and stare, licking his lips as though he was about to speak. But he did not.

Mr. Mason got up and went back onto the porch where Luke had left the liquor tray. When Miss Nancy saw that he had gone, she jumped up from the table, jarring it with her knees, and ran to the door. ” You come back here. Come back here.” She beat on the doorframe with her hands.

Mr. Mason came back in, the ice in his drink tinkling, and Miss Nancy took her plate and glass and went to sit beside him. “You and me, we’re the only ones that’s educated,” she explained to him, “Got to stick together. You know, in the wilderness. Die of boredom together.” Then she tried to explain that she would not die of boredom because of him but only with him. When Luke passed the desert, Brown Betty with whipped cream, they were sitting close together and they looked up at him with enchanted birthday children faces and refused the dessert.

When he saw that, Mr. Ben said, “You bitch,” to his wife and then added reflectively, “You damn bitch.” Mrs. Mason leaned across the table and patted his arm.

Suddenly the boy spoke up. “I didn’t catch anything,” he said, as though someone had asked him. No one heard, and he turned to his wife. “Laurie, next time you bring your rod.” But the girl didn’t seem to hear him either.

Miss Nancy was explaining to Mr. Mason that everyone who went to college died of boredom afterward. “They teach you to do one thing: die of boredom,” she said. “Look at them,” and she pointed at her husband and Mrs. Mason who were eating Brown Betty out of the same bowl. “They’re never bored. Plenty to do doing nothing. Your wife, I bet she gets up, takes the curlers out, goes to the bathroom and it’s lunch time. Makes up the shopping list and calls the dry cleaners to say they tore one of your shirts and you come in the door while she’s on the phone. You kiss her when you get home?” she asked him suddenly and clearly.

Mr. Ben heard and said, “Don’t die of shock if he even sleeps with her now and then.” Then he explained to Mrs. Mason that Miss Nancy wouldn’t let him near her until he lost twenty pounds. “As if it would be worth it, with her,” he said.

Miss Nancy had not heard because Luke was asking her if they wanted coffee. Reminded, she stood up, knocking her chair over backwards and said, “Yes, on the porch,” and Like heard the clear command in her voice. She turned away as though he no longer existed and he felt relieved. Maybe everything would still be all right.

While Luke was clearing the table the young man came in from the porch. “My wife would like to be shown to her room,” he said as though he was used to giving orders.

To humor him, Luke stood at attention; he judged the young man lived with his wife in a three-room apartment in one of the new, inexpensive buildings on the edge of town, waiting for his job with Mr. Ben to raise him up. “She wants to unpack,” he explained when Luke didn’t say anything. “I wish you’d tell me which is her room.”

Luke gauged how the boy would react to what he was going to say. He would not be angry, not in his employer’s house, not with his employer’s butler. But to be safe Luke dropped his wrists out of his white jacket like a field hand. “Ain’t no room,” he said.

“What do you mean? My wife wants to go to her room.”

“Ain’t no room,” Luke repeated and then, shrugging, he led the boy into the hall and up the stairs. The stairs emptied into the long loft room that was bare and brown except for Miss Nancy’s butterfly curtains and the flowery spreads on the six bunks. “This here’s the room,” Luke said.

A half an hour later, the young man came into the kitchen, followed by his wife. Luke was putting the dinner dishes away; he continued to make his slow trips from the sink to the cabinets while the young man spoke. “I wish you’d give Mr. Ben a message, out there on the porch,” he said. “I don’t like to disturb him; he seems to have dozed off. Tell him my wife doesn’t feel well and I think I’d better get her back to town.” The girl began to laugh, rocking on her heels. “Tell him we’re very sorry,” the young man said and he put his arm around his wife to hurry her out of the kitchen.

“Excuse me,” Luke said. “I can’t give him no such message.”

“What do you mean?” the young man asked, his voice rising sharply.

“I can’t give him no such message,” Luke repeated. “It’d lose me my job.” The young man pleaded with him, moving his hands helplessly. “I ain’t going to lose my job,” Luke said, and the young man turned, cursing under his breath, and hurried his wife out of the kitchen. Luke heard her voice in the hall, angry and thin as a child’s: “But I want to sleep in one of those funny bunks…” A minute later, he heard a car start cautiously.

Luke was surprised; he had not expected the young man to leave. He still looked like college and he never spoke to Mr. Ben directly and Luke had thought that he would be afraid. He was glad that he had not allowed himself to take the message to Mr. Ben, for after the amount he had been drinking, he would very likely have behaved as he had when Luke had told him that Miss Nancy had gone alone to a dinner party. Luke had been fired on the spot and it had taken Miss Nancy three days to get him rehired. Luke remembered it clearly because Mr. Ben had been so quiet. “You’re fired,” he’d said, almost gently, and then he had added, “Because you could have stopped her,” and Luke had remembered that when she had decided to go, he had polished her black alligator evening slippers in ten minutes.

When he had finished putting the dishes away, Luke went out on the back steps to smoke. It was heavy dark; first he heard a whippoorwill down in the thicket and then their voices rising higher and higher, starting off from each other like notes on a scale. A crazy scale: he stopped listening.

When Miss Nancy and her husband had begun to quarrel three years earlier, Luke had tiptoed around the house hearing every word. He had thought that a divorce or a murder must follow that kind of talk. But the arguments and the tone of their voices gradually became familiar, and then Luke could make himself stop hearing. In town it was easy because they locked themselves in their bedroom and Luke would only hear the door slam. But in the country they argued to a circle of people and the heavy warm air dragged their words all over the house.

Luke did not like the way the country made Miss Nancy change. He expected it of other people, and of course she never behaved exactly like them, but her voice became shrill and she said things to her husband that Luke knew she would never allow herself to think in town. Mr. Ben had no right to bring her out here to sleep in a bunk and share the bathroom; she was a city lady and she depended on her downtown suits and her engagement calendar and the notes she kept by the telephone. Luke thought that bringing her to the country was like taking the Dresden last weekend; they had not meant to break three plates but they had been rough with drinking and the Dresden had seemed to fall of its own accord. Of course nothing like that would happen to Miss Nancy—she knew how to behave—but she was uncomfortable here; Luke felt that she was always looking for something, carefully and yet desperately, like the times the gold telephone pencil disappeared when she needed it to take down messages; he would hear her slamming through the desk drawers. It was too hard on her to have things out of place; she was a city lady.

The house had gotten very quiet. Luke ground out his cigarette and stood up. It was not the right quietness; he cocked his head and listened to it. A door closed softly somewhere and he tried to judge if it was upstairs. And then he heard Miss Nancy’s voice close to him in the darkness: “Who’s there?”

Luke did not answer. He remembered the time she had asked him if she was still pretty, expecting him like a mirror in a soft light to give a nice answer.

He heard her sleeves move as she stretched out her arms. “They’ve gone upstairs. We can have a little peace.”

Luke turned, barely out of reach of her hands, and went into the kitchen. He heard her horrified exclamation, but then she went on around the house.

He listened to her slow step, groping in the darkness. Probably she was wearing a pair of too-high heels; her shoes were so small Luke could barely fit them over his fingers when he polished them. He went to the window and looked out. She must have hesitated at the front door, and he thought that she was tucking her blouse down into her slacks with the efficient, arranging gesture he knew from watching her fix flowers. Even when she tried too hard to spend all her time on the house, she moved gracefully; he had watched her shell peas one morning when she had nothing to do and the broken shells had not made her hands look clumsy. Luke had noticed that she never took of her square diamond ring when she worked.

He could not forget the way she had spoken to him, and he realized if he had left the light on in the kitchen, it would not have happened. She would never have spoken to him like that except by accident. Before Mr. Ben made his money they had lived in a little house on Walnut Street that had no bell system, and when Miss Nancy wanted him, she had to come to the bannister and call down, “Luke! Luke!”

Her voice had always been grave and matter-of-fact, with no shade of the softness he heard when he passed the salad over her shoulder at dinner parties and she turned from laughing with her neighbor and helped herself without looking at Luke, as though she had never seen him before, much less struggled that hot morning to translate the French recipe for him. She had never used that soft party tone to him before, even by mistake, and he felt suddenly sick and afraid. She was changing too fast; it was going to be worse than last weekend.

He listened. The house was still too quiet. He had heard that quietness once before and had weighed it carefully so he would be able to recognize it again. It had happened in his first place, Mrs. Lester’s house with the hollow wooden columns off Arlington. He had come back from his day off and let himself in the back door, and for the moment before he turned on the light he had heard that silence. When he turned it on, he saw Mrs. Lester and a strange man wearing bathrobes and holding two slices of lemon pie. The pie had offended Luke the most; he had given his notice at the end of the month.

He judged that Miss Nancy had gone around to the porch. He started toward the hall, and then he hesitated as he had not done before turning on the light in that other house. For a moment, he stared at the white kitchen cabinets and then he walked quietly out of the room and through the dark hall that always smelled of cigars. Mr. Ben was not in the living room; upstairs Luke heard someone talking and then a laugh.

He walked halfway up the stairs. When his head was level with the door to the attic, he called, “Mr. Ben!”

“What in the name of God do you want?” the raw voice shot out of the darkness.

“Mr. Ben, it’s important. I wish you’d come down here, sir.”

“Down there, hell. I told you never—“

“Please, Mr. Ben,” Luke interrupted. He had heard Miss Nancy speak to someone on the porch. “Miss Nancy wants you, sir,” he said, and he heard with surprise the change in his own smooth voice.

A bed creaked sharply, and then he heard Mr. Ben’s bare feet cross the floor. He stood half-dressed in the shadows, leaning one arm against the attic doorframe. “What’d you say?”

“Miss Nancy wants you, sir. Downstairs.” Luke knew he could go down first, warning Mr. Ben loudly against the dark stairs.

“You think that’s a reason to disturb me?” Luke saw his big feet pinching up on the bare floor. “Listen here, nigger, you got to learn different. I don’t care what she’s doing, from now on you leave me out of it. There’s not a thing she does I want to hear about, you hear me, not a thing. You hear me? Don’t come telling me a thing.” And then he turned back into the attic and began to wrench at the warped door to close it.

Luke went back downstairs. In the hall, he stopped and listened to Miss Nancy’s voice on the porch. She was whispering, but now and then an angry word broke free and Luke heard it. He tried to gauge how much she had had to drink. As though to plan what he was going to do, he sat down on the bottom step. He remembered how he had often found things for her, like a white glove in a chair seam when she vowed it was lost. But then he heard her low silk laugh, reproofing and indulging, and he stopped planning and put his head in his hands.