A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor

Author:Peter Taylor [Taylor, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Ballantine
Published: 1987-03-15T07:00:00+00:00

6

AS I HAVE INDICATED EARLIER IT WAS only a matter of a few weeks after Father left off dining with those old ladies that the picture changed entirely. There was to follow the period during which the old gentleman's nightlife would become something quite different. Along with everybody else concerned, I began hearing about it at once. And it was at once apparent that Betsy's and Josephine's anecdotes were no longer intended to be merely amusing. In fact it was at this point that one would almost certainly have expected that things would go sour for them. But of course go sour they did not. Instead, the new stories were meant by my two sisters to be not merely funny but, in their own words, "hilariously funny." These new stories of course were not about polite dinner parties with old widow-ladies but about Mr. George Carver's "stepping out," as Betsy and Jo so merrily termed it, "stepping out with youngish women of a very different sort."

(The women were always referred to as "youngish women," and it was as though they had no names.) And according to Alex the new kind of stories were generally prefaced by the sisters with demands, so Alex wrote me, for the attention of a whole roomful of people, not merely the attention of that customary circle of close friends. It was then, moreover, that the audience would be promised that the upcoming anecdotes would be not merely funny but hilariously funny.

Betsy and Josephine now seemed to become ever more voracious in their demand for listeners. They seemed to want to tell the whole world. And it seemed, night after night, that as their stories became more outrageous the manner of narration become softer and more genteel, and yet at the same time somehow higher-pitched and more shrill. This, too, may be only a part of the standard Southern lady's style—the obvious discrepancy, that is, between the content and the manner of narration. The manner was such, according to Alex Mercer, that on some occasions it could make him, standing as he generally was on the periphery of their circle, break out either in a cold sweat all over or at least in goose bumps about his neck.

I cannot help identifying myself with Alex in this as in so many instances. I think I would have responded just as he did, because in some ways we are remarkably alike. When we were boys and young men together we seemed to be of very much the same temperament and sensibility, with our interests in the arts and with our aspirations toward all things intellectual. We suffered equally from the sometimes crude behavior of people around us. But Alex of course chose finally to remain there at home and become the sedate university professor at Memphis State, whereas I had to go off to Manhattan to pursue my interests as a "dedicated bookman"—that's Alex's learned phrase for me.

The major difference between us now would seem to be that

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