Lie Down in Darkness (39 page)

He stopped, because when he looked down he found that she had turned toward him a little. Her face lost its hardness, and he figured that in her mind he must have stirred up, finally, memory or recognition, for something crumbled in her eyes. Her lips moved again but she said nothing.

He bent down once more, hopefully. “You haven’t lost everything, honey. You still got me, if you want me. You’ve got Peyton. Who loves you. We’ll write her together, tell her everything is O.K. now. She can go back and finish school next year, like she should. Honey, if you’d just realize that people do love you, you’d know that you’ve got years more of—Christ—grandchildren——” Caught up in his own hopefulness, a rich philoprogenitive vision came to him for an instant, of babies, dozens of them, frisky and pink against the green timeless grass. “Don’t you see, Helen? Peyton doesn’t hate you. She’s the most understanding kid in the world. All we have to do is let her know how things are and then everyone’ll be happy. Helen, you’re all I’ve got, I’m all you’ve got. If you’ll believe me, why, by God, the best years of our lives are ahead. I tell you Helen that we can defeat fear and grief and everything else if you’ll only believe me and love me again. Honey, we can never die. … “

Somehow it had worked, his persuasions had touched her, and he marveled now, on the eve of Peyton’s wedding, as much as he had then, nearly a year before. The bay was filled like a bowl with silence, and upon its surface, as if scraped off from the moon, lay a litter of careless silver. It was almost ghostly, this quiet, and if Loftis had heaved the beer bottle out over the seawall to break the water with a noisy splash, it could have fractured its silence no more abruptly than he finally had penetrated Helen’s. He could only still wonder what he had said, which charmed word it had been to cause her to rise and throw off her blankets, to approach him with her eyes closed and her sickness still white and dusty on her cheeks like some fabled, lovely, medieval lady raised by potent magic from the tomb, and to put her arms almost weightlessly about his neck and murmur, “Oh my darling, you do understand me, after all.”

No, he hadn’t understood her, ever, but at that moment there had been no need of understanding: she was his once more, they were together and she believed in him. It was as if he had lifted by his self-abasement all the troubles from her shoulders, and afterward it was only when the desire for whisky became almost impossible to bear that he began to think glumly that he had let himself in for a hell of a situation. “Darling,” she had said that afternoon, “darling, darling, you have learned, haven’t you? You have learned what I need, haven’t you? You have learned. I believe you. Oh, yes, together we can never die!” But later it was hard for him to keep his equanimity every day, knowing that he had, voluntarily and submissively, let her get the upper hand. His pride rebelled fiercely at times, but he beat it down, thinking of the good things yet to come—of a life lived soberly and honestly, yet partaking of the decent and rewarding pleasures, golf still and talk with good friends; Peyton coming home to visit them—with tragic thoughts and tragic events but safely behind, as in the minds of all real Virginia gentlemen. He had made wild headlong promises to Helen, and it was a struggle, but he didn’t hold it against her that she expected them to be kept. He felt lucky when she said one day, “Don’t be silly, darling, I don’t care if you drink if you just use a little caution,” and with a faint laugh, “Heavens, Milton, has it taken you all these years to find out I’m really no puritan?” So he drank a little, with caution.

Dolly, of course, might as well have been in Tibet. He saw her on two occasions after Maudie’s death. The first time was when, with misgivings and fear, he ventured out of the house one night, a week or so after his reconciliation with Helen, and went to Dolly’s apartment. He intended to put the situation up to her with as much honor as he could, but he failed wretchedly. No matter how little a man may finally come to feel for a woman, if over a long period of time they have been together and intimate, he will acquire a certain tenderness for her small deficiencies, and remember the dirty dishes in her sink—her third-rate books and queer tastes in music, the broken mirror she never fixed—with as much charity as her lips or thighs. Remembering these about Dolly, his mind had become enfeebled by the time he reached her door and, after coffee and cake, he got up to go with vague promises to see her soon. And when she asked, with a look of foreboding, “When, when?” he could only reply, “Soon, soon,” and then go, haunted by the light in her eyes, which said, “Oh, you are leaving me.”

But he was committed. Let him for one moment think of
this
particular betrayal, and he knew he would be lost. He tried to forget her, succeeded: she sank from his consciousness like one of those poor people encased in concrete who are heaved over the side and plummet to the bottom of the sea. She didn’t forget him, though. Just when he had put her out of mind she began to call him, and, because he invariably hung up, to send him wistful, pleading notes in lavender ink, scented, and stuffed with humiliating souvenirs: roses they had picked during Garden Week at Westover, a postcard he had bought her on the Skyline Drive, two sticks from Popsicles they had eaten, with elaborate frivolity, at a Richmond fair. They shamed him, enraged him; it was these very things he had once told Dolly about Helen—the nagging, bittersweet memories—which made him frantic with remorse; how, having committed so much wrong, would he ever get out of life alive?

Dolly came to visit him one night. It was a rash thing to do, but she was lucky, because Helen had gone for a week’s visit to her sister-in-law’s in Pennsylvania. It was a terrible scene. Dolly flew in out of a rainstorm with her hair plastered around her face like serpents, clumsily threatened him with a candelabra, got sick on the rug, slipped up and fell in the mess and remained there, in a pale coma. It was the first time he had ever seen her drunk and so he hadn’t known how to cope with her. He cleaned her up a little and drove her to her apartment, where he put her gently to bed and held her hand for a while, listening to her mumble an anguished fantasia of remembrances and longings. “Safe in their alabaster chambers”—lines he had once idly read to her from one of Peyton’s poetry books, lines he had forgotten and could not tell how she remembered—“sleep the meek members of the resurrection.” And she sank back into the pillows, like Camille, finally and mercifully unconscious, while he, sweat on his forehead and his heart wrung with regret, offered up to God or someone the first completely honest prayer of his life.

She troubled him no more. Because of that incident he had to make even more effort to forget her. Late in April he and Helen went on the train for a three-week vacation to a resort near Asheville, and there among the smoky hills, in the cool, ferny air where the sky seemed to be spread like a bottomless lake above them, they both calmed down. He turned her mind gradually away from Maudie and tenderly made her do healthful things, like swimming and riding, walking along the bridle paths. Her face was lined and worn, but her new bathing suit still defined a body receptive and warm to love. He made love to her three times, not particularly liking the act itself but afterward—as she drowsed peacefully beside him—smugly happy, proud that he was here rather than in bed with the vacationing Atlanta divorcee who had made a violent pass at him and whose perfect skin, resting like lacquer upon the pretty young oval of her face, looked as if it would crumble to the touch. Wistfully he thought of Dolly. But, “I love you, my darling,” Helen said again and again; “how could we have wasted so much time? Forgive me,” she’d say, clutching his hand tightly, as if to let go would set them adrift again, “forgive me, forgive me, forgive me, I’ve been such a fool.” And when Helen talked like this, just as they do in the movies, with such conviction, he was unable to decide who really had been the fool, after all—he himself or Helen.

Evenings they drank weak, wartime beer with a Rotarian and his wife from London, Ontario. This man was named Malcolm MacDermott; he affected kilts and a crooked walking stick and to listen to him was like hearing water rumbling into an old washtub. There was no question, Loftis knew, as to who wore the kilts in the family, for he was the type of man upon whose conversation his wife waits in a sort of meek attendance, like a flustered maid, and when she spoke it was as if to rush in timidly and sweep up a crumb, and retire to the wall once more. She was in her early fifties, with a plump, bright-eyed, Canadian face. When Helen mentioned the recent death in the family, Kathy’s swollen little lips grew tragic and she told Helen that she, herself, had suffered the loss of a child, but that she had found a diversion, and she blurted something about goldfish.

“Kathy girl,” MacDermott boomed, “what’s a mon to do with goldfish ar-round the house? Nothing but a bother.”

“For her, Malcolm—” she peeped.

“Goldfish!”

The subject perished then and there, but it did introduce a fascinating note into the conversation, for soon, unbelievably, Loftis heard Helen speaking of Peyton. “My daughter,” she said; “she’s my youngest, studying art in New York. She’s such a dear although I guess I have a mother’s prejudice. She hasn’t been home in quite some time and you know the wallpaper I was telling you about last night, the pattern we’re getting? Well, you know, I wouldn’t have thought of getting it made without showing it to her first, she’s coming along so well in New York. …” Loftis felt a crazy shock and later, in their rooms, the first thing he asked her was to repeat, please, what she had said to the MacDermotts.

Helen looked tired, but in her eyes was a look of solemn satisfaction, almost relief, as she came up to him and let her head fall on his shoulder, saying, “Wasn’t it a fierce old lie, darling?” She sighed. “Peyton. We’ve hardly said a word about her, and now I’ve said it. Oh, darling, I do want her to come back home, for a while anyway. I do want to see her so. You do believe me, don’t you, darling? Tell me how to write a letter to her … tell me …” She giggled. “Those funny MacDermotts. Tell me, darling. Let’s go back home….” He had let his head droop, too, softly, while around them the blue evening seemed to dwindle and die and in its smoky waning brought a dozen sounds he had not heard before: crickets and the nimble noise of children, footsteps in the hallway, soft good nights, and her heart and his, thumping like drums. It had been, by almost any standard, the most gratifying moment he could remember, and the night before Peyton’s wedding he had retrieved it, the hearts’ reunion, with a triumphant and savage ecstasy. A man so unaccomplished, he reflected, might achieve as much as great men, give him patience and a speck of luck; though his road slopes off to a bitter sort of doom—and the wind, blustering down the night through chill acres of stars, suddenly made Loftis feel cold, and his life a chancy thing indeed—he has had his moment, a clock-tick of glory before the last descent. You know this man’s fall: do you know his wrassling?

Bring home the bride again, bring home the triumph of our victory.

Bathed, shaved and combed, attired in herringbone tweed and a checked waistcoat, he made his way across the living room, after shaking half a dozen outstretched, congratulatory hands. It was four o’clock, the ceremony was to take place in half an hour, and the house was filled with guests. They had come, the middle-aged men and their wives, the younger men getting bald at the temples and their wives, who were trying at thirty-five to retard a faint dowdiness of flesh, and the youngest of all, the boys and girls in their teens and early twenties who, grinning at everyone and holding hands, were trying to retard nothing at all save thoughts of gloom, maybe, for there was a war on and some of them must go away—all these had come to make Peyton’s wedding a success. Many of them were friends of Milton and Helen, the younger ones were Peyton’s friends from Sweet Briar and the University and Port Warwick. All the guests had settled into the variety of moods which a wedding brings forth. The younger married women were possessed by flightiness and rapture, with occasional brief depressions of the spirit, while their husbands puffed on pipes and cigarettes and eyed the girls in their teens. These youngest girls, the ones with the soft, virginal drawls and the moist, painted lips and little freckled bosoms that rose and fell elastically as they breathed, stood around twittering, trying to appear prim, but only succeeded in looking more and more excited as the ceremony approached. Among the gray-haired men there was an air of boredom, but though they were patronizing to the younger people they were always kindly, and their wives, who tramped off periodically to marvel at the wedding gifts, became speechless and sentimental and had trouble keeping back the tears.

Almost everyone had come; they spilled out into the dining room, both hallways, both side porches and—because it had become fairly warm—onto the lawn. There was Admiral Ernest Lovelace, who was the naval inspector at the shipyard; he had lost his wife in an automobile accident two years ago. There were the Muncys and the Cuthberts and the Hegertys. All three men were executives at the shipyard. Old Carter Houston himself was there, along with his wife, who remained a Virginia belle at the age of seventy and pronounced Carter “Cyatah”; these two sat in one corner and everyone paid court to them, for he was head of the shipyard. There were the Appletons and the La Farges and the Fauntleroy Mayos, who were F.F.V.’s; and the Martin Braunsteins, who were Jews, but who had been around long enough to be accepted as Virginians. Then there was a contingent of doctors and their wives—Doctors Holcomb and Schmidt and J. E. B. Stuart and Lonergan and Bulwinkle (they all smelled faintly of ether)—and there was Dr. Pruitt Delaplane, making his first hesitant public appearance after his trial and acquittal for criminal abortion. There were poor Medwick Ames, and his wife—who threw fits—and the Overman Stubbses and Commander and Mrs. Phillips Kinderman.

Among the younger people were the Walker Stuarts and the P. Moncure Yourtees and George and Gerda Rhoads, who were, everyone knew, on the verge of divorce, and a men’s clothing dealer named “Cherry” Pye. The Blevinses had come, and the Cappses and the John J. Maloneys. Also the Davises and the Younghusbands and the Hill Massies, who had once won ten thousand dollars in a slogan contest; and a dentist named Monroe Hobbie, who limped. Those among the youngest group—most of the boys in uniform—were Polly Pearson and Muriel West and a willowy boy named Campbell Fleet who, it was generally rumored, had been expelled from Hampden-Sydney College for homosexuality; and the wealthy Abbott sisters—they were beautiful and blonde, and their father had made a fortune in Coca-Cola—and Jill Fothergill, who had arrived with Dave Taylor, and Gerald Fitzhugh. Ashton Bryce was in this group, and a fat boy named Chalmers Winsted, who had flunked out of Princeton, and Bruce Horner. These three were all in naval uniforms, as was Packy Chewning, who was a lieutenant (j.g.) and had won the Navy Cross in the Solomons.