Lie Down in Darkness (16 page)

He seated Helen and opened a window, to let out the stuffy air. He turned. “Will you have a drink, Helen?”

“No,” she said, “no, thanks.” Then brightly, “Yes, yes, I will. I’ll have just a little whisky in a glass. Neat.”

He smiled. “All right. I’ll just be a minute. Let me get my coat, too.”

“Don’t bother, Carey,” she said quickly. “All this formality!”

Something about her—her aimlessness, the way she stirred in her chair—made him uneasy, but he laughed elaborately and patted her on the shoulder, leaving her to thumb through a copy of
Life
as he went out to fix the drinks. In the kitchen he opened a drawer, poking about amid a heap of egg beaters, ice picks, spoons, for a bottle opener, and it was then, startled (for until that moment—perhaps because he was sleepy—his mind had been almost totally blank), that it occurred to him what Helen had come for. Not precisely. Because, even so, what would she want with him, to arrive so nervously at this hour of the night, and in the rain? But he thought he knew: there had been all that talk—scraps and hints and winks which he had taken note of at gatherings and which, as he had told Adrienne, set his teeth on edge.

They had begun just lately—rumors about the Loftises, rumors about “another woman,” whisperings which disturbed him not so much because they concerned the Loftises—whom he didn’t know too well, in any case—but because they upset his notions about the prevalence of human decency.

“Well, after all, dear,” Adrienne had said—in the occasional brittle way she had, combing her blond, lovely hair at night with that brisk, self-assured, woman-of-the-world gesture which he had never dared tell her
really
set his teeth on edge, tossing the words over her shoulder—“well, after all, dear, you know extracurricular sports like that are not entirely new to the human race. If Alice La Farge let that fall it was because she talks too much anyway and she really should have had better sense in front of the clergy, but, after all, most everyone knows or at least should be able to tell that Helen Loftis is a
nest
of little hatreds. I can’t say that I blame Milton much anyway. In France——”

But, “Adrienne!” he had said sternly, “I won’t have that sort of talk,” and then, mollified, sitting down beside her on the dressing stool,
patiently
telling her that he knew of course she was joking, that it was true this was not France, that, as he had pointed out before, the glory of this latter-day Protestantism was its liberality; however, she very well knew that the home was sacred, et cetera—of course she had been joking, they both laughed then—and so on and so on. That had been months ago, he had forgotten it; even so, for a while vague conflicting visions had possessed his mind: of Loftis, handsome, good-natured, talkative, for whom (since despite Carey’s biennial urgings he had humorously refused to become a vestryman, or even to attend church) Carey had conceived a mild dislike; and of Helen—how could they be a match for each other? She had come prompt and obviously alone to Sunday school each week, herding the two girls, those amazing, dissimilar children—who
did
look feverish and unhappy and cold.
Cold
was the word; he thought of Loftis and of Helen, and then of Adrienne, who was really quite gentle, steadfast and full of the warmest and sweetest passion. And then he had put it all out of his mind.

He drew on a sweater and turned out the kitchen lights. When he brought in the drinks to the study—rye for her, a little brandy for himself—he was thinking wearily: If I had been a Baptist everything would be black and white, I’d pick and choose, either sinfulness or sinlessness. But Helen, standing at the window, turned to face him. She looked gently composed, casual, but he thought she had been crying. He tried not to notice.

“Sit down, won’t you, Helen?” he said quietly, and took his seat behind the desk. “Now, what can I do for you?” Was he being too officious? “Business or pleasure?”

She took a handkerchief from her pocketbook and noisily blew her nose. Then she began to sip her whisky cautiously and with distaste. The chair squeaked and wailed beneath him as he leaned back to close the window; outside a gust of wind caught a pile of leaves, sent them whirling upward across the lawn. Finally she said in a shy voice which, if it weren’t for the solemn way she was looking at him, he would have thought almost flirtatious—
cold though,
he was thinking—”Carey, don’t you hate
hurt
women?”

“Why, Helen,” he said, with a smile, “I don’t think I know what you mean. What——”

“I mean,” she broke in, “don’t you despise women who are so insecure or stupid or something—maybe both—that they’re always running around crazily trying to find something to hold on to. You know what I mean.”

“No,” he said, “I don’t despise them. I think I know what you mean, though.”

“Those kind of women,” she went on, “are always
hurt
women.” She paused. “That’s what I call them.” She looked away from him, out of the window. For a moment she seemed very grave and studious, calmly analytical. But there was nothing grim about all this. Indeed, she looked very handsome: he wondered how old she was. About forty—like some advertising man’s idea of a woman professor, with impossible, lovely skin and placid, unprofessional eyes. It was a remarkable thing, for she never had seemed interesting to him before, and he suddenly had the impulse to make a joke—but she turned and said in a wistful voice: “Oh, Carey, I don’t want to be a
hurt
woman.” And then, brightening a little, “Can I tell you these things?”

He was not tolerant of her self-pity; his mother had had the same disease. Yet he said, “Go on, Helen, tell me what’s the matter.”

“I’ve wanted to come and see you for a long time, Carey.”

And “Helen, you should have come,” he replied.

“I would have come but I’ve been scared of everything. Scared of myself in a way, because I’ve been carrying these things around for so long, keeping quiet, keeping secret, you know, feeling that if I let them out, why I’d somehow be betraying myself. That understanding I’ve got, you see, which is so horrible in a way. I mean, knowing that the fault’s mine partly. Not all, mind you—” her eyes were level upon him, and once more he had the impression that she knew exactly what her trouble was, but that the difficulty was in the telling of it—“not all,” she repeated, accenting the word
all,
”but enough to know that if I stayed burdened with all this too long I’d go crazy. Dr. Holcomb——”

She paused, raised her hand with a sort of swift, harassed motion to her throat. “I won’t tell names!” she said. “I won’t tell names!”

“Shh-h, Helen,” he cautioned, and Adrienne, in a bathrobe and hair curlers, peered in the door for a moment: “Excuse me—” with a cool nod to Helen—“Carol’s all right now. I’m going to bed.”

“Good night,” Carey said.

“Good night, dear.”

“Good night,” Helen said. The door closed. “I won’t betray anyone. No one at all,” she said excitedly. He held out a match for her cigarette, the third she had smoked, in chain fashion, and which she held to her lips with quivering fingers as she bent toward him.

“Take it easy now, Helen,” he said softly. “Finish your whisky.”

She did as she was told. He watched her, and then, when she had put the glass down, he listened. She was calmer now. He turned his eyes away and looked out the window. A misty driving rain filled the night. From isolated branches the last leaves were falling in endless spirals of loneliness. He sensed a strange kinship with this woman: what was it? But, eyebrows cocked a little, attentive, he heard her say: “I couldn’t put it out of my mind, the idea of them—Milton and this woman, Mrs. X—which I’ll call her since I have no intention of betraying her, even in her guilt. I couldn’t put it out of my mind. It was enough to drive you crazy. You see, I’ve known about the two of them for a long long time—six or seven years, at the very least. I’m afraid that all my life I’ve been very sensitive about right and wrong. My parents were Army people, and it was funny in a way: They were strict and severe with me, not a bit like some people might imagine Army people to be. My father was on Pershing’s staff during the war. His own father had been a chaplain and Daddy was very religious. ‘Helen,’ he’d say, ‘Helen, sweetheart. We must stand fast with the good. The Army of the Lord is on the march. We’ll lick the Huns and the devil comes next. Your daddy knows what’s right’—and go swaggering off in his jodhpurs and riding crop, and I thought he was just like God. The men loved him. He put the fear of the Lord in them, sitting on his horse (he was in cavalry then, and you’ve never seen anyone mounted so handsomely, so commanding. Really commanding). Fort Myer, with the beautiful woods and the river so full of the softest pastels—you could see them at evening parade. And Daddy on his mount—a silver gelding it was, named Champ, I remember. Daddy saying: ‘I’ll tolerate no misconduct in my outfit. We’re marching like men to war, not like rummies and sinners.’ They called him Blood and Jesus Peyton. And I standing by the parade ground, sixteen or so, watching him. The men just loved him.”

Carey stirred uneasily and lighted his pipe.

“And severe and strict he was. But it was good for me. I learned what’s right and what’s wrong. We’d go to chapel every Sunday, no matter where we were. And when we sang hymns I’d watch him out of the corner of my eye—the way he sang so loudly in a lovely proud baritone and his mustache flicking in a stern and impressive way.

“Oh, but yes. You see, for a while we were happy, Milton and I. You’ll never know. Then there were the four of us; we lived in an apartment up by the shipyard. We had an old broken-down Ford and on Sundays there’d be the four of us driving out to the beach, lying in the sun, picking up shells. Once the car got bogged down in the sand just as we were ready to go home, so we left it there until seven or eight that night, not caring, and went back and sat in the sand and watched the sun go down and drank chocolate milk, with Maudie and Peyton who were five and four then, I guess, respectively. Wasn’t that a happy thing, to let your old broken-down car just stay stuck in the sand, while you went back to the beach and drank chocolate milk?

“But that was happiness, something else. I couldn’t put this thing out of my mind. Let me tell you. …”

Long ago he had begun drinking. She had no idea what it was; maybe his need for her died, if Carey knew what she meant, or maybe it was Maudie, his disappointment and all that. An awful, awful thing, but it was that that she suspected the most—the last—though, as she said, it might have been both. Well (as Carey should realize), she was no prude, but he began drinking all the time—and it was then that he stopped going to church. Oh, she could see it all coming so very plainly. One has no idea what it is to stand by quietly and watch those bricks you’ve so carefully put together—safe and sound, you thought—crumble away, begin to topple off. It starts so slowly, takes you by surprise and sneaks up on you a little more month by month until then, at one point, you look around and discover that this whole structure you’ve so carefully built—and not yet completed—has begun to dissolve like sand in water, melted off with all the cruel underneath edges showing, so that you want to throw a cloak over the whole mess—your pride wants that first—and then, later, wanting not so much to hide it all but frantically to pick up those fallen pieces and by some shrewd, decorous masonry to repair, repair, saying, “Oh, please stop, please stop,” all the while.

His drinking. And his way with Maudie—nothing obvious, Carey must understand, but insidious and unfeeling and utterly detestable. How could he do such a thing? And then the woman, Mrs. X. She was the thing, Helen said, which had torn off her skin of decency and reason, had stripped her naked with the meanness showing.

For six years (Helen went on)—long after she had reconciled herself to such a way of living, where her only hope was to recoup each loss as gracefully as she could, not fuss, but to supply her soul each day with new attitudes, new bulwarks, new hopes—for six years she had watched him turn to this woman, following his stupid progress as she might a fly in a spider’s web, down in some ugly cellar—indifferent all this while, aloof, and only a little sad: look! they’re apart, yet touching each other, antenna-wise—a lewd and diligent woman and her poor Milton who, fascinated, tries vainly to pry himself out of that awful mess. Flies and spiders, the underground chill. It was easy: though she couldn’t see them, she sensed a trembling, acquiescence, the sweet convulsive entanglement. Done. How many times she couldn’t tell. Victory for that other woman. And oh, her poor Milton.

Yet how could you really be sad about all this when sadness belonged to a long time ago, to memory?

So damn them both, she said. God please damn them.

It was a sinful thing, but she was righteous, wasn’t she, wanting to see them swallowed up in their own filth? Carey would never know how hurt she was.

“Why can’t a man stay with the wife who loves him so? You could see this injustice. It made me sicker and sicker; each night I prayed that this wouldn’t go without reproach. But sin. Haven’t I sinned, too? God, what is sin? Sometimes the logic of this life defeats me so completely that I think there isn’t any reward here on earth, or vindication. Sometimes I think life is just one huge misunderstanding and God must be really sorry for confusing the issues so.

“Listen—

“Two weeks ago, after supper one evening, we were sitting on the lawn beneath the willow tree. It was the day before Peyton was going off to school, and I had been helping her pack all afternoon. The next day all four of us were planning to drive up to Sweet Briar. I had been tired and hot—I’d driven downtown that afternoon to get Peyton a new handbag and a hat, and I’d had to contend with the crowds—you know how it is. Then after the iced tea and coffee I felt relaxed. You see, a week or so before, at a dance I’d given Peyton, I had had a fight with her which had worried me for a long time, but we had ‘come around,’ you know, and weren’t angry with each other anymore. We’d had so much fun, really, packing and all and getting excited together about going off to school, that I felt very happy—even along with that sort of sadness you get when you know your child’s leaving you for the first time—and so I just sat there and watched the ships going out to sea and the hummingbirds in the flowers—things like that, you know. Maudie said she had a headache, so I helped her upstairs and gave her some aspirin and told her to lie down for a while and call me when she was rested. And she said, ‘Yes, Mamadear,’ and then she lay back on the sheets and closed her eyes and in a moment she was asleep. She has so little trouble in finding sleep, poor girl. …”