Ghosts in the Closet

MISS LEONORA WHEN LAST SEEN by Peter Taylor. 398 pages. Obolensky. $4.95.

Most writers drop a pebble in some domestic pool and write about the splash. Peter Taylor waits, and from the vantage point of memory, recalls the ever-widening rings of ripples that slowly subside as if nothing had disturbed the surface.

Taylor's territory is the borderland of Kentucky and Tennessee before, during, and immediately after the Depression. In these 16 stories, his themes are love, marriage, childhood. As he peels away the layers of the past, he finds in an early-morning walk to a drugstore or a family dinner implications of lives changed, misdirected, or ruined. In What You Hear from 'Em?, Aunt Muncie, the Negro housekeeper, retains a measure of dignity only as long as she can believe that the two white boys she raised for a widowed doctor will come back home to live. But when she realizes that "they ain't never coming back," she feels somehow demeaned and resorts to "old nigger foolishness."

To Taylor, love has no winners. In Reservations, a young couple on their wedding night cruelly expose to each other all their past deceits, then try to heal the wounds in a disturbed embrace.

In Cookie, marriage has become an elegant pretense; over the dinner table, a philandering husband can only communicate with his wife about the quality of the meal. "Fine, fine, fine," he murmurs. And to outsiders, "fine" is how she would describe her life.

Author Taylor is not for every taste. Some of his stories fail to get off dead center. He does not point; he does not posture; he does not underscore. But as he pokes through the dusty closets of memory, Taylor conjures up ghosts that will continue to walk abroad in the reader's imagination long after the dust of indifference has settled on his flashier contemporaries.

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