Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

of fact, a great deal to be said for Harlan in this area? For instance…Well, even if nothing springs immediately to mind…But, no, she’s thought of something now. Surely, it would be a shame, a great shame—as Harlan said—for Wando Passo to lapse into decline. When God favors us, the people of our class and race, she thinks, with wealth and property, He entrusts us with a duty—a sacred duty, one might even say—to keep it up. Harlan made that point, and it is true. Very, very true. And, clearly, too, the DeLays have bestowed significant advantages on Jarry. How well he spoke! And his recitation—he seems to have a more than rudimentary grasp of iambic tetrameter, and in fact, if called upon to judge, Addie would have to say she preferred his delivery to Paul’s—Paul Hayne, who admired her once and has now achieved a minor fame (she heard him read some patriotic verses at the Agricultural Hall not long ago). And Jarry’s tone, the dignified and undemonstrative way heframed his argument—so sympathetic, so much easier to navigate than Harlan’s rambling, explosive rant! And his clarity of countenance, Jarry’s limpid eyes (somehow it was their expression of fatigue that she found most affecting)…

“What this family made me is a slave….”

And what was it, the hush that descended on the room, like church? What was the opening she felt in her spine when Jarry spoke those words, the stinging in her eyes? Were those her own ancestral spirits, the voices of fifty or a hundred Anglo-Saxon generations crying up from the abyss of time? And what message were they trying to impart? Addie has stopped brushing now. She’s staring into her reflection in the glass….

“It was the truth, the truth!” She cries the words aloud. She cries them in despair. Her hands are at her mouth. And will she do that violence to herself, to call the truth a lie, and lies, the truth? They made this man a promise—what matter if he’s black! “A promise kept, and Hell hath wept”—from Mme Togno’s school, the rhyme comes back. “A promise broken, and Hell hath opened.” Whom have I married? Addie thinks. I will never love this man. Love will never come. Not if I live a thousand years.

Yet what of it? She’s known she didn’t love him from the start, hasn’t she? And now she starts in brushing again quite vigorously, furiously, in fact. Didn’t Blanche know, too, and never bat a lash? And don’t people marry all the time for reasons other than true love—for family, children, class alliance, out of simple loneliness? A hundred times, Addie gave herself these reasons and forgave herself on ninety-nine. So what’s different now, the hundredth time? Why does she feel on the verge of panic at the thought that, at any moment, the jovial and undistinguished man she’s married to will enter through that door, expecting intimacies she will henceforth and forevermore be obligated to provide? (For she’s made a promise, too, as grave as Percival DeLay’s, to love and honor Harlan till they are parted by death.) What has turned that flitting, inoffensive sparrow into the large, obstreperous black crow that’s cawing in the corner of the room and clearly in no mood to leave? However it is, Addie, who’s leapt with gratitude into this marriage, is staring gravely in the mirror, thinking, What in God’s name have I done?

And now the knock. Now Harlan enters from the bath in his shirt and stockings. He’s blushing like a bridegroom—which, in fact, he is—grinning in a way that seems wicked, boyish, and good-naturedly naive. The subject of his curious humor, which Addie can’t fail to perceive, is the erection protruding through his parted shirtfront, jouncing, as he walks, like a joggling board on a Pawleys Island porch.

“This came upon me by surprise,” he says. “There I stood behind the door, cringing, waiting for it to subside, and then I thought, What are we about here? Freedom? Frankness? Where’s your courage, man! What is there to hide?” He laughs. “Ho ho.”

Seeing her expression, though, he comes to a dead stop. His northward-pointing member takes a turn toward east.

“But I hope I haven’t miscalculated, dear. Have I embarrassed you? You look rather pale. I don’t wish this to seem fearful or unclean….”

“No, Harlan, no, it isn’t that…. I’m only…”

“Yes?”

“Well, dear, it’s something of a shock.”

Deciding how to take this, he blinks his hazy ginger eyes, in which there is that eager, childlike, reckless something that seeks confirmation of its effect in her and appears, upon consideration, to find insufficient grounds for disappointment. He laughs again. “Ho ho ho,” says he. “Yes, well, I can tell you, dear, though you have no standard of comparison, I’m considered rather well endowed. Hung like a bull as some…But never mind. Come, let me introduce you to my small, strong friend. It’s best to be forthright with him, Addie, to shake his hand or shake him whole.” He holds his tumid member for her close perusal, twisting it between three fingers and a thumb, the way he holds his Lonsdale to his ear before he lights, listening to the telltale crepitation of the leaf. “Go on now, touch him. He won’t bite. Is he not a handsome fellow? But I warn you, his character is suspect! He’s a rakish type, a bounder! Now, let us have a look at you.” He takes her hands, small and cool and lifeless, now, as a china doll’s, in his great, hot, meaty ones. He lifts her to her feet and spreads her robe. “My, my…Yes, as I suspected, your bust is small. Shapely, though.” He appraises like a connoisseur.

In his grasp, her thin shoulders feel as insubstantial as the wafer of the Eucharist. He runs his hands down her slender arms and up the undersides. He touches her breasts, gently, then not gently, hungrily. He lifts them to look at them; his face changes as he looks; he excites himself in