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  Proud Flesh

  A Novel

  William Humphrey

  ONE

  After forty years as their family physician, Dr. Metcalf—“Doc” to all the world—knows the Renshaws better than anybody else. Which means only that Doc knows even less than anybody what ever to expect of them. Expect the worst: everybody who knows the Renshaws knows that. Having brought them all into the world, having cured their illnesses and healed their hurts, having come when summoned to their every call, in all seasons, at any hour, Doc has a larger claim than anybody else upon the Renshaws’ gratitude, but Doc is not relying on this now to save him from blame, from threats, from who knows what Renshaw unreasonableness, when he breaks his news to them.

  For even in a place where every man’s first loyalty is to his own clan, with the state of Texas coming a distant second and the South a still more distant third (and there it ends; even as a schoolboy, at morning assembly, the Texan mentally invokes the doctrine of interposition upon his pledge of allegiance to the United States of America one nation indivisible), the Renshaws are known, are notorious, for their clannishness. Being Renshaw is a state of mind. They are not a family, they are a nationality and a cult—pharisaical, fanatical. The Renshaws are like a colony of bees, just as exclusive, just as singlemindedly self-intent, and just as ready, each and every one of them, to sting its sting and die should the hive be attacked. And it is Doc’s duty now to tell them that the queen bee, their mother, Edwina, is dying.

  The Renshaws are unprepared for this. “Ma’s heart condition” is something they have known about for a long time, but they have been led to believe, by none other than Doc himself, that it is a mild one. Now Doc is in a dilemma. Shall he reveal that, like the court physician to an aging monarch tenacious of her power and mistrustful of her waiting heirs and successors, he has watched her condition worsen for years but has kept it from them on orders from her, not being allowed to tell even her daughter Amy, the nurse, and the most devoted of her children, its seriousness? Or shall he let them think it is as sudden a shock to him as it is to them, and risk having the Renshaws suspect him of incompetence, or negligence, or both? The sigh with which Doc prepares to break his news is as detached as he can make it, professional, philosophical, fellow-human. There comes a time, he says, when all the advancements of science are to no avail. Which to anybody else would convey the message that he, Ben Metcalf, MD, is up on all the latest advancements of science; but with these Renshaws you never know.

  They stand in the shade of the pear tree where generations of Renshaw men have stood to receive such news, have squatted and kept vigil whenever there was sickness in the house. In their sweat-soaked clothes, panting for breath, they look like survivors from a capsized boat just washed ashore, especially as one of them is dressed in a sailor’s white suit. The sailor’s eyes brim with tears. The three older men only swallow hard, their Adam’s apples working audibly. Three of the fruit from the tree they stand beneath are not more alike than they, so strong is the family resemblance among them. They do not look griefstricken at Doc’s news; their resentful expression is habitual, it is the Renshaw look, with which they confront all of life; it is a family feature, like the Renshaw brow, the Renshaw jaw. They say nothing. They level at Doc three identical sets of eyes, or rather of shadowed eye-sockets, which are like the muzzles of three double-barreled shotguns. If there is a difference of temper among the three brothers it is this: that like the three stops made by the hammer of a gun as it is cocked to be fired, Clyde’s is at the first stop, Clifford’s at the second, and Ballard’s at the third, ready to go off at any moment. The silence is filled with the drone of wasps among the fallen and liquefying pears—for the old tree can no longer hold its fruit until ripe—and the stridulation of a locust like a telephone ringing insistently in an empty house. Up from the fields comes the mournful chant of Negroes picking cotton.

  Their mother—grandmother—is a strong-willed woman, as they well know, Doc says, and one with a tight hold on life. But she is also a sick woman and one no longer young, and knowing them as he does, how close a family theirs is, he feels they will want to be told his worst fears now so they can call the others home to her side. Hope for the best still, he tells them, but—and he draws another sigh—be prepared now for the worst. He has done all he can do for her.

  —All anybody can do, he hastily amends. All anybody can do. For you never know what is going on behind those slits of eyes. Only that they think as one, if they stop to think, then they act as one. She may be sick and old, but when Edwina Renshaw dies her sons and grandsons, not to mention those daughters of hers, are going to want somebody to blame. Then Doc’s white hairs and the fact that he brought them all into the world will count for nothing. These four here: they would not seriously suspect him of leaving anything untried; but they are perfectly capable of believing it a duty to the old lady, to the absent members of the clan, and to themselves, to accuse him of it just the same.

  At last one of them speaks. It is Clyde. He says it is just like Ma never to let them know how really sick she was so as to spare them worry, even to mislead her doctor, suffer in silence and all alone. Doc heaves another sigh, this one of relief, and saying that he must not be away from his patient any longer, makes his escape. He turns and steps out of the shade into the blaze of day. At the touch of the sun his head appears to flare into incandescent white ash like the mantle of a lamp. Head down, he wades through the shimmering heat waves on the far shore of which stands the house. The porch runs the width of the house, casting a shadow as straight as a ruled line which divides it into layers of black and yellow. In the upper story the windowpanes glint darkly, all but the one in the corner room, with its day-drawn shade.

  Ballard volunteers to go to the telegraph office.

  Derwent, wiping his tears on his sleeve, offers to drive him. It was Derwent who drove the doctor out from town, fifteen miles in just over ten minutes.

  Clifford reminds them that somebody will have to go after Uncle Howard and Aunt Estelle and them; they cannot be reached by wire.

  There is a silence during which each man stares off in a different direction. Finally Clyde says what all are thinking:

  “They’re not the only ones.”

  There follows another silence.

  “Well,” says Clifford, “you can’t go after him.”

  There follows another, deeper, longer silence. The wasps drone, the locust repeats its ring, up from the fields floats the Negroes’ melodious moan.

  Then in a tone of dreamy defiance, “Can’t?” says Ballard.

  I

  Of Edwina Renshaw’s ten children only Clifford, her eldest son, was left at home; the rest were scattered and gone. But with one exception they had not gone far, and their fixed orbits within their mother’s strong gravitational field brought them home regularly and often. In recent years they had rallied still closer around their mother to close that one gap in their ranks. It was always open house at Edwina’s. None of the children ever wrote or phoned ahead to announce a homecoming. None of the boys would have dreamed of giving his mother warning that he was on his way out bringing five or six hunting companions with him to spend the weekend. Bring as many as they pleased and arrive just at mealtime, they would find places set and the table heaped high.

  Her table was set in the old-fashioned farmhouse style, with the plates turned bottom side up waiting for grace to be said over them, the spoons in a pewter stand in the center, cone-rolled yellowed linen napkins as supple as chamois in cracked and yellowed ivory rings, t
oothpicks in a holder of Bohemian ruby glass. She served the old country-style recipes: chess pie, chowchow, fruit and berry cobblers; at hog-killing time in the fall, backbone and baked sweet potatoes, cracklin’ bread. A great deal of game birds in, as well as out of, season: quail, woodcock, doves, tangy black-meated wild duck.

  Eulalie, the cook, had an antique boy’s coaster wagon with removable sideboards, the envy of every little boy in the neighborhood, which sat outside the kitchen door, and every morning at seven, as soon as the cream had been separated, the breakfast dishes washed and the milk utensils scoured, the two women would jam on their sunbonnets and Eulalie would take up her old sliver of a knife and they would trundle off together to the garden or to the root cellar, silent, synchronized, like one woman and her shadow. When they came back, wagon creaking beneath pecks of tomatoes, three or four dozen roasting ears, heads and heads of lettuce and bunches upon bunches of carrots and onions, it would be an hour later; for each ear of corn had to be tested, the shucks peeled back below the tassel, a kernel punctured by thumbnail, the ear selected only if it spurted milk. Down the rows of watermelons they would go, Eulalie thumping each one with her yellow nail, the two of them huddled down, heads cocked, listening: the one over which they nodded together would, when cut, split with a loud crack running ahead of the blade and part with a smack like two red lips. Then out to the smokehouse, where hams hung from the blackened beams for three years were adjudged ripe when they had attained the color and the texture of a mossy stone. Or out to the chickenyard where soon they might be seen surrounded by half a dozen headless pullets flopping on the ground in successive stages of death while Edwina pointed out and Eulalie enticed yet another with a handful of grain, then swooped and grabbed and wrung its head off in mid-squawk, execrating it and its whole race so as to work herself up against it and excuse her cruelty. By late morning the air of the back yard was spiced and sugared by the aroma of pies set out rim to rim to cool on the kitchen window ledges, and outside the door stood a queue of neighbor children waiting for pots and pans to lick. Hulls and shells and pods and peels and feathers and shucks and bones went out of that kitchen by the cartload—and with them went about half of the food. For the Renshaws admired nothing so much as bounty, lavishness, waste, despised nothing so much as “chinchiness”—their word for thrift. Everything Renshaw was overfed. The turkeys, chickens and geese rendered buckets when cooked. The pigs were so larded they scarcely opened their eyes when their evening trough was filled. The only lean creature on the place was Edwina. Tall and spare, she ate like a hummingbird: a shirred egg, the pullybone of a cold fried chicken, a dish of clabber. Ten cups of blistering black coffee per day, despite doctor’s orders. And at night before bed a hot toddy, the ingredients for which stood on her night table, for she trusted no one to make it to her taste—that is, to put in such a dollop of bootleg Old Overholt as, for the sake of her heart, she spiked it with.

  Until that day in September when she was brought back from the garden in Eulalie’s wagon, unconscious, blue in the face, her feet dangling over the sides and her heels scratching furrows in the dirt, the flaw in her heart had been Edwina Renshaw’s close-kept, open secret. Whenever Doc Metcalf was called in to treat her for an attack he was made to swear to tell none of the children about it. Edwina’s heart had been like a broken vase, so placed that the crack did not show, on a high shelf, out of her children’s reach. To them only its good side was ever turned. The break, had they seen it, they would have blamed on their baby brother. They would have been right, and Edwina herself did blame him; but to allow the others to do so would have been to acknowledge the wrong she had done them, as well as the mistake she had made, in favoring that one child over all his brothers and sisters.

  In September with the first touch of the sun the fields of cotton threw back heat into the air like a bed of white-hot coals. The breath came short and even sound hearts labored. And so Edwina had not waited for Eulalie that day but had gone down to the garden alone in the cool of the morning while there was still some shade. Derwent, her favorite grandson, was coming home on leave. Now in his second hitch (how those blackland prairie boys, born beyond all memory of the sea, all made for the Navy whenever there was any enlisting to be done! And how often the motive for enlisting was not patriotism but paternity!), Derwent remained an apprentice seaman in rank, and he always would. He had been promoted more than once; but always after a few weeks he was busted for insubordination or for a lead part in some shoreside brawl. Derwent never minded these demotions; on the contrary, they kept him young, a perennial boot, and they satisfied that rank-and-file pride in low, manly station of which Derwent had a large share. They kept him popular with the kind of girl he liked. The kind who preferred a tar, feeling too much on her good behavior with petty officers. He would come bringing his grandmother some doodad from some outlandish port which would have to be hidden from sight, and a shipload of dirty stories which she would squeal in protest against and laugh at until she cried. He would squire her downtown in his middy blouse and bell-bottomed trousers, his little white hat cocked on his brow, his rolling gait converting the square with its hunkering farmers into the deck of a gunboat in a running sea. It was to pick Derwent a mess of the butterbeans which were his favorite dish, and which he never got fresh on shipboard, that Edwina had gone down to the garden that morning. She was clutching a fistful of them when Eulalie found her an hour later lying pitched face down in the dirt.

  II

  Her reign had been Victorian in length, her sovereignty absolute, claiming allegiance at birth from all in whose veins a drop of her blood flowed. Whenever any of her sons foregathered away from home their first words were of her, like British colonial officers with their toast, “Gentlemen, the Queen. God bless her!” Spoiled, capricious, contrary, she had but to snap her fingers and those great unruly boys of hers, the terror of six counties, sprang to serve her like acolytes. To all her progeny in every generation she was “Ma”; that was a name which none of the grandchildren was permitted to call his own mother, just as none of her sons, no matter how long he might have lived in his own house or how many children had been born to him there, ever came to call the place “home.” Ma was Ma, and home was Ma’s house.

  Dutifully, unquestioningly, like offering them up to a religious order or to a draft call, her sons and daughters turned over their children to her—woe to the daughter-in-law who demurred! Beginning when they reached six and lasting through sixteen, the grandchildren each spent three weeks every summer with Ma down home on the farm. Cousins came to seem like brothers and sisters in the Renshaw family. They went as to a summer camp, with uniforms tailored to Ma’s rigid taste and the unvarying season of outings she had planned, and her determination that none should feel any inequality in their parents’ financial positions. For the girls, pinafores and shirtwaists cut to the pattern of her own distant childhood: two pink, two blue; skirts with hemlines precisely fifteen inches off the ground. And such was her domination that boys in the first hot flush of long trousers meekly suffered themselves to be put back into kneepants: two pairs white flannel, two of blue serge. At the County Fair on Labor Day, the summer’s last excursion, they looked like a select, well-endowed orphanage, and she its directress, or, nunlike in her own habit-shaped black or gray dress, and nunlike in her severity—at least toward the girls—like its mother superior.

  And so the farm came to be home for the grandchildren as well. It did not lack a man. There was unmarried Uncle Cliff, the one the whole family looked up to—though in middle-age he was a child, backward and tonguetied and countryfied, childishly good-natured when not in the throes of some childish tantrum and off somewhere pouting, who spent all his time with a pack of hounds and who knew where to find wild honey and the biggest blackberries and the best baits for catfish and when the bream were biting, but nothing more—because he was the one who had stayed with Ma and never left home.

  But it was not in the summertime only that Edwina’s daug
hters and daughters-in-law relinquished their sons to her. In the independence, the impudence, the sassiness which she fostered in a boy (her favorite endearment was “rascal”), they felt her between their sons and them the year round. With their daughters they were free to do pretty much as they pleased. Girls had only to meet certain negative requirements: to be chaste, demure, silent, and when the time came, long-suffering and uncomplaining toward some vagrant man of their own, preferably one chosen, certainly one approved, by Ma. It was boys Edwina cared about, and that they should grow into men. She knew what made a man. He must be braggardly and bold, touchy, trifling, headstrong, wild—obedient to no one in the world but her. They were glad to obey her. Pretending to disapprove, she egged on her grandsons as she had their fathers before them by winking at their escapades with girls, their recklessness with cars and horses and guns. She wanted them vigorous but idle. Polite but bawdy. Chivalrous but predatory. In a word: men.

  Although widowhood now seemed her lifelong vocation, there had been a husband once … dust and a handful of anecdotes for twenty years: Lonzo (Alonzo), known behind his back as old Dot-and-Carry because of the hitch in his gait, not congenital but from a crippled big toe, broken, then disowned and neglected, grown gnarled as a brier root, in a kick he had given a calf that persisted in wishing to suck its mamma whom he was trying at the time to milk. Tame as a tabby cat with his wife, with all the rest of the world he had been quarrelsome, self-opinionated, abrasive. This tale was told of one fistfight he had gotten himself into. One day in a cafe in town he had hailed a man sitting on a stool at the far end of the counter as his long-lost friend Lew Pearsall, and stumped down to shake old Lew by the hand. The fat was in the fire when the stranger failed to lay down his knife and fork. Said he was afraid there was some mistake. His name was Selby, and he did not remember to have had the honor. Lonzo stood there with his empty hand stuck out. Perhaps one or more of the other diners snickered. Lonzo swore he never forgot a face, and reminded Lew of that night in Texarkana when together they—The stranger said he was afraid there was some mistake. Then Lonzo accused him of thinking he was too good for his old friends, said now that he came to think of it that was the sort he had always been, and called him by six or eight names which the stranger found even less acceptable than Pearsall, and which could only lead to the backalley behind the cafe, where finally the spectators had had to disarm Lonzo of the brass knuckles he happened to be carrying in his hip pocket at the time.