Third in the "Pearl County" series, The Looking-Glass is March's story of a small Alabama town in the early days of the twentieth century. Connected by relationships that bind, support, and strangle, the citizens of Reedyville are drawn ineluctably toward a single climactic night. March's skillful blend of humor and pathos evinces his deep insights and empathy into the problems of the mind and heart that are both peculiar to Reedyville yet found in every town and family.
Third in the "Pearl County" series, The Looking-Glass is March's story of a small Alabama town in the early days of the twentieth century. Connected by relationships that bind, support, and strangle, the citizens of Reedyville are drawn ineluctably toward a single climactic night. March's skillful blend of humor and pathos evinces his deep insights and empathy into the problems of the mind and heart that are both peculiar to Reedyville yet found in every town and family.
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Overview
Third in the "Pearl County" series, The Looking-Glass is March's story of a small Alabama town in the early days of the twentieth century. Connected by relationships that bind, support, and strangle, the citizens of Reedyville are drawn ineluctably toward a single climactic night. March's skillful blend of humor and pathos evinces his deep insights and empathy into the problems of the mind and heart that are both peculiar to Reedyville yet found in every town and family.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817388362 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 02/28/2015 |
| Series: | Library of Alabama Classics |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 351 |
| File size: | 653 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Looking-Glass
By William March
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1970 W. E. Campbell, LLCAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8836-2
CHAPTER 1
Professor St. Joseph, Principal of the Reedyville High School, once said that the milky and yet musty odor which seemed to issue like invisible mist from the walls of the Boutwell house reminded him of nothing so much as the smell of a freshly cut coconut. His comparison was more fanciful than accurate perhaps, but that concerned him little, for he was the town's acknowledged wit, and wits are less interested in the average realities of others than in the deeper, symbolic realities of their own.
It was the kind of remark which, when said against the background of a smile or punctuated by a lifting of the brows, could be made to take on a spurious depth, to achieve a significance beyond the actual meaning of the words themselves, and its implications were so vague, so ambiguous, you could not be sure whether it was meant as a criticism or as a compliment.
Minnie McInnis McMinn, who admired Professor St. Joseph a great deal, accepted the remark at its more significant value, and she recorded it that same day in one of her ledgers, for possible inclusion in a novel about Reedyville which she planned someday to write. Thereafter, when her duties as Society Editress for the Courier took her in the direction of the Boutwell house, she would stand outside in the road for a time, her eyes closed so expectantly, her manner so concentrated and patient, that she resembled, at such moments, a rustic maiden awaiting fertilization by a woodland god. But almost at once the spell would be broken, and she would throw her head back even farther, and laugh convulsively, her mouth opened so widely that the slippery, involved geography of her vibrating throat was visible.
"What St. Joseph says is really true," she would murmur. "It's actually like crushed coconuts—shells and all!" Then, since she was the adapter of the ideas of others, the expander of the simple situation, she would have a picture of the Boutwell family sitting in a semicircle on the floor, smashing one coconut after the other and eating the meat with famished cries; and at such times she'd make a mental note to repeat her variation on St. Joseph's original theme to Robert Porterfield, who was her idea of a truly handsome man, or to Lucinda Palmiller, her closest friend.
But it is doubtful if Mrs. McMinn could have sustained her variant phantasy had she passed the Boutwell place on a certain hot afternoon of September 1916. On that day, the smells which came through the open front door, and floated across the red, clay road, were unmistakably those of pork chops, turnip greens and fried potatoes, with the added aroma of coffee which had boiled out of the pot and sizzled into brown stains on top of the stove; and as far as the activities of the Boutwells themselves were concerned, they were certainly not cracking nuts, for Ada, the mistress of the household, was standing on her front porch, staring with undivided attention down the red, dusty road that led to the heart of Reedyville, and her youngest child, Dover, the only one of her children who now lived at home, was just behind her in the doorway, his own attitude anxious and waiting.
The reason for Ada's anxiety was quite understandable, for it was already late afternoon, and her husband had not returned from his usual Saturday afternoon's visit to town, and she did not know what had happened to him. According to custom, he should have had his supper an hour ago, and he should, at this moment, if precedent were any guide at all, be stretched out on a pallet on the back porch, sleeping off the effects of his unimaginative pleasures.
After a while she sighed and walked to the front gate, spreading the fingers of her left hand against her cheek, and allowing her chin, as hard and as knobby as an unripe sandpear, to fit precisely into her receiving palm. Almost at once she drew her other arm tightly against her flank, and her hand hung down limply, as if broken at the wrist. It was a characteristic pose, and Dover knew then that his mother was really worried. He came onto the porch and sat on the top step, coughed to let her know that he was there behind her, and drew up his bony, immature legs so high that his chin rested precisely in the heart-shaped crevice of his knees, while his head, like a balanced oval, swayed mildly from left to right. Then, after a moment, his rocking head came to rest at the instant it was canted a little to the left, as if the mechanism had run down unexpectedly; and without straightening his neck again, he stared upward, seemingly at nothing at all, in an attitude of baffled and waiting patience.
He had his own, individual problem to deal with, and it seemed, at that moment, insoluble to him. Compared with it, his father's tardiness was trivial and rather academic. High school had opened the week before and Dover, through a misunderstanding, had applied for admission to Professor St. Joseph's class in English Construction—having got the strange idea in his head that the course had something to do with cabinet making—and what was even more depressing, from his viewpoint, he had been accepted. It was a special class, intended for talented pupils interested in the arts, a class which St. Joseph had personally organized, and which he taught himself, not because it was one of the requirements of his contract, but because he liked doing it.
The day before, St. Joseph had announced the subject for the first theme of the new class, requesting that it be handed in promptly the following Monday morning. This, of itself, had not seemed too difficult of accomplishment, even for Dover; but St. Joseph, who rarely said what he meant in simple language, had complicated the issue by delivering a lecture just prior to announcing the subject, a lecture which discussed not only writing as an accomplishment in its own right, but one which endeavored to show its affinities with painting, a related form of expression, as well.
And so it happened, as Dover sat in bafflement on the front steps of his home, that he could not be sure whether St. Joseph wanted a literary composition, a drawing, or a combination of some of the elements of both. He lowered his eyes from his lost contemplation of the horizon and examined the pattern in the flat-sawn, pine board below him, shook his head, and picked absently at his callused feet with that rapt, other-worldly concentration of adolescent boys.
Ada, without turning her eyes from the road, spoke over her shoulder, her manner suddenly brisk and demanding: "Haven't you got any idea at all where your father went to after he left the boys at Moore's Livery Stable? Didn't he say where he was going to from there?"
Dover bent over and outlined with his index finger the irregular knothole in the step below where he sat. When he had circled it twice with complete concentration, he looked up and said: "No, ma'am. I haven't got any idea where he went to." It was a lie, and he knew quite well that it was, but he saw no point in adding to his mother's burdens; but while he was looking so innocently into her worried face, he was thinking: "Papa's over at Mattress May's house, that's where he's at; but you won't get no information out of me, one way or the other."
Her husband's fidelity was one of the illusions which sustained Ada's faith. When discussing his shortcomings with Mrs. Paul Kenworthy, Professor St. Joseph or the other people of Reedyville for whom she did sewing, or occasional cleaning, she would emphasize this point with insinuating vigor when rebutting their sympathy at the harshness of her lot. Once, while talking with Robert Porterfield, she had said: "Oh, yes, Mr. Robert. I admit it: Wesley Boutwell has got his faults, just like all other men, and I'd be the last person in the world to maintain different." She turned back to her polishing and added pointedly: "But at least there's one bad habit Wesley never fell into, and it's this: He don't pinch the backside of every pretty woman that comes along, least of all, other men's wives!"
It happened that Robert Porterfield saw his mistress, Mrs. Palmiller, that same evening, and for her amusement he repeated the conversation. "But, my dear!" said Cindy in a mocking voice. "You've never pinched my backside. Not once. Not once in all the time I've known you."
Robert turned slowly and outlined her face with his finger tips, gazing at her with grave, adoring eyes. "Mrs. Boutwell had reference to attractive women—remember?" he said gently.
Cindy turned on her back and stretched her arms high above her head. She pursed out her lips thoughtfully, and when she spoke, her voice was startlingly like the shaky, mincing voice of old Miss Eulalie Newbride, Robert's great-aunt, a woman noted equally for the dullness of her figures of speech and for her dislike of all her kin. "Oh, I see," she said primly. "But that's a horse of a different color!" and added: "Then why didn't you come out aboveboard and say so, instead of beating around the bush, like some damned Porterfield!"
She turned again to her lover, just in time to see his arm sliding innocently under the sheet which covered them. She made an excited, intaken sound and rolled quickly to the far side of the bed, raising her knees and pressing the target of his attack firmly against the flowered wallpaper. "Don't you dare!" she said. "Don't you dare pinch me, Robert Porterfield!"
Robert gazed at her lazily and then, bending over her, he sought some vulnerable spot between her body and the wall. "We Porterfields always try to please, Madam," he said gravely. "We do our best in every social situation." But Cindy shifted her position from side to side with such skill, such vigor, that she managed to keep always just beyond the nip of his menacing thumb and forefinger. "Behave yourself!" she said laughingly. "I'm serious! I really am, this time! And if you dare to pinch me, I'll, I'll—"
"You'll do what, madam?"
"I'll call my husband, that's what!" said Cindy. "I'll scream for my husband just as loud as I can, and when he comes I'll say, 'Robert Porterfield is no gentleman. He always tries to pinch me when we are in bed together, and I want you to tell him to stop this instant!'"
There was a moment's silence in which they both had a clear picture of Mr. Palmiller's entry into the room at that precise moment; then, locked in each other's arms, they laughed until they were exhausted.
But if Cindy Palmiller and her lover got so much innocent enjoyment from her remark, Ada Boutwell had her own peculiar satisfaction in the incident. "Who do you think had the nerve to criticize Wesley the other day?" she asked St. Joseph. Then, not waiting for his answer, she went on: "Why, it wasn't anybody but handsome little Mr. Robert Porterfield! I felt like saying, 'Well, look who's talking! Look who has the nerve to throw stones now!'"
"What did you say in reply, Mrs. Boutwell?"
"First, I looked him right straight in the eye, and so hard that he blushed and turned his head away. Then I said, 'I beg your pardon, Mr. Robert, but Wesley, while having his faults like other men, and not taking care of his family as good as he ought to at times, ain't so bad when you stop and compare him with others I could name. My husband ain't an adulterer,' I said, and I said it so pointed that he couldn't help knowing it was him I was referring to. 'Wesley has his mind on something else than women,' I said, 'least of all other men's wives, and the mothers of children!' Oh, I shamed him plenty, Professor! I really did, for a fact!"
St. Joseph raised his eyebrows so high above his nose glasses, and furrowed his brow so deeply, that a thin white line, like a long scar, ran across his forehead at the hair line. He turned away so that she could not see his amusement, thinking: "Perhaps she's right, after all. At least I've never heard that Mattress May, or her young lady visitors, were either wives or mothers so far."
But if the whole of Reedyville knew of her husband's attachment to Miss Violet May Wynn and the girls of her establishment, Ada apparently did not. Certainly no such possibility for his lateness occurred to her as she stood looking down the road on the hot September afternoon with which we are presently concerned. Finally she left her position by the gate and came to the steps where Dover was sitting.
She was a tall, strongly built woman with prominent cheekbones, and narrow gray eyes which curved downward at their outer edges. She was approaching her fiftieth year, and her neck and shoulders had already taken on the emaciated, and yet bloated, appearance of old farm animals. Her chest was flat, her arms and legs strong and wiry; but her inappropriate and rounded belly pushed forward in a caricature of desirable plumpness. During the thirty-odd years of her marriage, she had given birth to twelve children, and it almost seemed as if her womb, obeying some natural law of economics, had, in the end, taken on the shape of perpetual pregnancy.
Dover moved a little, making a place for his mother beside him; and he watched, with interest, as she eased herself onto the steps, steadying her protruding belly with her cupped hands, as if it were something fragile and precious which could easily roll off her lap and be broken.
"I'll tell you one thing," said Ada, "and no two ways about it: If your papa's not home in a half hour, I'm going down the road myself and look for him." Dover started to speak, but changed his mind. Instead, he drew up his knees once more and stared stolidly at the western sky. The sun hung balanced now above the horizon, fierce and bloated and seemingly without movement against a sky in which there was neither a cloud to hide it, nor a mist to veil its burning magnificence.
The Boutwells had first appeared on the streets of Reedyville riding in a warped farm wagon drawn by a white mule with thin, flattened ears and a mouth which was at once resigned and sardonic. Significantly enough, it was Ada Boutwell who discovered the old abandoned house at the edge of town and took it for her own purposes. Later on when they were established in their new home, and Ada had come to an arrangement with Mrs. Kenworthy regarding the rent, the family pitched in and built a walk with pieces of broken bricks from the front gate to the doorstep; and they laid out elaborate flower beds, bordered with empty beer bottles driven into the earth, in the patterns of stars, triangles and lancet arches.
While Wesley Boutwell had not welcomed work in those days, at least he had not denied it with the sweeping repudiation of his later years. Even then however he had felt that there was but one career worthy of a man's serious attention, and that career, as he himself phrased it, was "soldiering for the Government." But it would be a mistake to think of him as either a cruel or a bloodthirsty man. On the contrary, he was gentle and kindly, and, paradoxically enough, more quickly moved to compassion by the suffering of others than the average, or non-warlike, person. It was his great regret that his life was to be lived out not in a period of excitement and clanging military glory, but in one of the dull intervals of peace between.
As if to compensate him for the absence of the dramatic from his life, he had many exciting daydreams in which he played an outstanding role; dreams in which he rescued the flag—the flag of the Confederacy, strangely enough—from the hands of a dying comrade, and planted it atop a breastwork so green, so unscarred, that it resembled the Wentworth lawn; or those in which he rallied his men for a desperate charge, and led them to a victory so final that the whole world resounded with his praise.
His emotions, to put the matter in its simplest terms, were those of the twelve-year-old boy. His mind, too, was the eager mind of the adolescent, and this gave his character a boyish and wistful appeal. It was perhaps fortunate that the quality of his mind and the quality of his emotions were so consonant, since it is from among those whose emotions are juvenile and whose minds are excellent that the dangerous and outstanding people of a generation are recruited.
"Sometimes I wish I'd never married at all," he would say to his wife in a protesting voice. "Sometimes I wish I'd gone to South America, like I said I was going to do before I met up with you."
"Well," said Ada patiently, "you did marry me. And what's more, you've got a houseful of children to prove it. Now you go on to town, and you ask for a job at every place you pass."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Looking-Glass by William March. Copyright © 1970 W. E. Campbell, LLC. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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