Бетти Смит: Maggie-Now

Claude stood there in his cap and gown, holding his diploma and he waited until all the people had gone.

He got a job that fall,IS English teacher in a small-town high [473 1

school in South Carolina. He loved the town, and he fell in love with a girl there. She v; as nineteen and he was twenty-four.

"I would like to live here all my life. If you will marry me," he said.

"I will, Claude," she said. "But first you'll have to speak to Daddy."

"Why? "

"Because that's the VV.Iy we do here."

He sat on the porch with the girl's father. It was a spring night. There was the smell of mimosa and the smell of woodsmoke. Claude noticed a broken board of the porch floor. Tomorrow, he thought, is Saturday. And I will come and fix that board for them. And in spring va. ation' 1 will come and say, Let me paint the porch for you.

He told the girl's father all he knew about himself. The father was much moved by Cl.lude's story. But he spoke of heritage; he spoke of lineage, proud and poor, but pure. He spoke in firm words of uncontaminated, white lineage.

"But, sir," said Claude, "I am a man in my own right. I

have my own kind of honor. ."

"But this is the South, ' said the father. "And we have to know."

"What was her name?" asked Ma~g~gie-Now.

"Who? "

"The girl."

"Oh, Willie May."

"I guess I don't like her," said Maggie-Now in a miserable voice.

"Because she wouldn't marry me?"

"Because you once loved her."

"Oh, Margaret," he said patiently, "that was so long ago.

It shouldn't matter now."

He left his town, his job and his girl and started on his wandering search. He went to Detroit first because there he had started as an infant. He got a job as hotel clerk and in his free time he wandered over the city and its raw suburbs and looked in phone looks, directories, libraries

(to read old newspapers, looking for the name), and examined the boards in office buildings and looked up names of professional people and firms. He found a Bassett or

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two but they were not the right ones. He tried to approximate the year of his birth and sent for a birth certificate. There was no record.

He went to Chicago and stayed there a fall and a winter and again it vitas the same. Each state he went to, he wrote and asked for a birth certificate. Some states had no records prior to 190O, in others, the records had burned up, and in other states there w as no record.

He got out to the West and he loved it there. lle loved the mountains and the sky and the great loneliness of it.

Here, he thought, a man could liqe. No one would ask who he was or where he cane from. A r,'an could start his own dynasty here, he thought grandly.

It was out there in Idaho that he first felt the chinook blowing. And he fell in love with it. After that, no matter where he was, he left the place and set out westward when he judged the chinook wind was blowing over the Rockies.

And as the years went by, it was so that the wandering got to be more important than the searching.

He made his way to Manhattan….

"Then I got over to Brooklyn and found you," he said.

"And I knew you were the one. You were the one. And you took me without question."

"You could have told me," she said. "And it would have been all right. I wouldn't have cared. And perhaps you w ouldn't have needed to go away any more."

In the summer just past, he had gone back to Detroit again. There he got the idea that perhaps Canada was the place. He walked over the bridge into Canada and worked his way north. One night, he registered at a small, inexpensive hotel in one of the smaller cities. The old desk clerk read off Claude's name slowly. He adjusted his spectacles to look at Claude. Claude had a sudden sense of awareness. "You have people here, I\lr. Bassett?"

"No. I'm from the States."

"I inquired because a gentleman of the same name used to live here."

Very quietly, Claude asked: "Where does he live now?"

~4-'71 "Oh, he passed on. B ifty years ago. I was a lad of twenty, then."

"What," asked Claude carefully, "became of his children?"

"He had but the one. A son. I

"And this Kenmore Where is he now?"

"That, I do not know." The old man suddenly became loquacious. "Kenmore never did have children. He was married, though. He was a professor in one of those big colleges up in one of the northern provinces. I don't remember which one, now. Used to know, though. Some things come back to me. I remember he had a year's holiday. You call it. .? "

"Sabbatical year."

"Thank you, sir. He went to the States for that year."

The aged clerk started counting the coins in the cash drawer as though the coversation was ended.

"And when he returned. .?" asked Claude nudgingly "Pardon me, sir? "

"When Kenmore Bassett returned. ."

"Oh, he never did come back from the States. Here's your key, sir, and we like our guests to pay in advance."

"I would appreciate any information you can give me about Kenmore Bassett," said Claude earnestly.

"Let me see: His wife didn't go to the States with him, you know. He wrote her. Yes, I remember now. He wrote and asked her to divorce him."

"Did she?"

"No, SiI'. You see he wrote that there was a young lady in the States whom he wished to marry. And that did not go down well with Mrs. Bassett. Oh, my wife could tell you everything. You see, sir, she was in service. She worked for Mrs. Bassett until that lady passed on."

"May I speak to your wife, sir?" asked Claude, feeling he had come to the end of the trail at last.

The old clerk shook Lois head sadly. "My wife passed on ten years ago."

"You believe then," said Maggie-Now, "that this Kenmore vitas your father?"

"I can make myself believe it if I wish."

[426 1 She thought: Oh, all the wasted years of life! But she said: "And now, you'll never need to go away again."

"Never more will I go," he said lightly.

But he had a stab of anguish. Never again to lit e a while in a sun-baked adobe house of the dreamy Southwest. . never again the thrill of seeing for the first time one of the magnificent big cities of America. Never again the eternal mountains against the wide and infinite sky. . the miles of golden wheat rippling in the sun. .

the blinding Lila of the great Pacific Ocean. Never again

. . never.

"And you're happy now that you know?"

"I don't know, Margarer. If we were younger I'd want children now. I feel right about becoming a father, now that I know. But for twenty-five years that has been my way of life the wandering and the searching. N(,NV that that's over, I don't know anv other way of life."

No, she thought, he doesn't know any other way of life.

But how, all of a sudden, can he tell himself that he's through with it? I know! Oh, dear God, his strength is failing and he knows he can't make it any more.

He said that now that he knows, /'e wants children; would feel right about having children. Did he mean. . IVhy wasn't it right before? Could it be that he, like all men who never settle dowel. didn't want to be tied down by children?

Or was it that he had to know who his father was first?

She felt oddly ill at ease with him now as though he were a stranger with whom she had nothing in common.

She felt vaguely inferior as though she were an illiterate peasant. Then she remembered that, this last time he had come home, he had asked her nothing about what she had done in the summer.