Lie Down in Darkness (46 page)

Or her dreams. What did foolish men know of a woman’s dreams? Of a woman like herself—despised, rejected, but always patient, reveling in the violent surge of her blood—whose dreams were always crowded with enemies, dreams bizarre and frantic, villainous beyond men’s wildest imaginings? How simple-minded men were, after all! Carey there, puffing like a toadfish, round-faced and futile. What could he—with a switch now jerked from a bush, petulantly thrashing the seawall, saying “Now Helen, I insist that you leave that girl alone today!”—what could he know about the suffering that drenches a woman’s life, soaks into her dreams like blood, makes her awake each morning with her teeth hurting, from all the gnashing and grinding while she slept? What could he know about her dreams?

Three enemies had always dwelt there, in her dream country, three enemies and a friend. Maudie had been sweet, like something musical, always hobbling near (looking past Carey’s pink, petulant face she saw two gulls descend like scraps of rag across the dusk, and thought of Maudie with a sudden stab at her heart; thought, her lips trembling:
No, I mustn’t think of Maudie now),
and Maudie she had always hid
behind
her in her dreams, hiding her from sight of the planetary, fearsome half-light, the fingering shadows, the enemies who, somehow, would rape Maudie first, then her. Maudie had been her friend. Then there had been the big enemy, once the most fearsome of all, now dead, vanquished, done with: Dolly Bonner. That bitch, that whore. Many times Dolly had died in her dreams, often by the knife that Helen wielded, grinning, but more often by disease. In this landscape there were always the vaguest outlines of a city, with many ornate towers, from which pestilence rose like smoke through the air. It was a city of corpses and a faint moldering odor which troubled her sleep, yet the odor was not of death so much, or putrefaction, but of an indefinable, musky rancidness, like cheap perfume or rotten gardenias. Through this vapor Helen strolled, clad in her party best, and always with a man. Though now and then the man was Carey or her father, it was more likely Milton or someone in a mask. The corpses which lay strewn about were faceless, iridescent with decay, soft in parts or part leathery, invariably female. So, fanning themselves, sedate, she and Milton or whoever he was strolled for infinite miles, it seemed, through this land of the female dead, offended by, and commenting upon, the musky, floral odor, but mutually delighted by one corpse in particular, faceless like the rest, head down in the shadows, with its legs—suppurating, clotted by a swarm of sucking, avid flies—unmistakably Dolly’s.

If this was a vision more revolting than any she would tolerate when she was awake, it nonetheless possessed an adequateness, a rightness, which removed its nightmare quality and made her ghoulish stroll, in spite of the strange, sick smell, even pleasant. The more loathsome parts of the dream—the dried-up female organs, the yellowed, scabious flesh, which looked only too much like pictures she had once seen in a medical book—these faded away quickly upon awakening, leaving her with just the breath of the dream, the peculiar smell, and with a vague feeling of triumph. Yet she had remained fiercely discontented. That dream had come only in the past few years and, triumph or not, the ensuing days always seemed gray and bleak with a crushing guilt. She had never had such wicked, grim imaginings before and she asked herself: Am I going crazy? Besides, sometimes it was Maudie whose legs, outstretched and with the metal brace, were dead, and then she would wake up sweating and weeping.

It was so easy to defeat one’s enemies in a dream. Dolly, a soldier in armor, she sometimes slew on the field of battle, the horse, white and named Champ, just like her father’s, sinking its sharp hooves into Dolly’s skull—the final blow. Sometimes Dolly died with stilettos in her back or in the electric chair, but always the corpse returned to its destined place in the plague-ridden city—disgraced, ugly, with sprawling, indecent legs. Thereafter, face-downward, she would float past on a sluggish stream and this time, with Milton at Helen’s side murmuring sadly, “Too bad. I never loved the bitch,” as they watched her drift away, Helen awoke cleansed and healthy, knowing she would never have to dream of Dolly, or of the city, again.

Sometimes the dreams became all mixed-up, and these were the hardest times of all. Then it seemed that
she
was the enemy, she was the one who threatened people, frightened them. Everyone fled her—men and women, everyone she had ever known—a whole army of them, until she stood on the moonlit, moonlike plain, alone and lonesome, crying out, “Won’t someone please help me?” Then her second enemy, the Man, appeared: Milton, or Carey, sometimes her father, it made no difference—they all hated her, threatened her, asked her why she’d been so bad.

A terrible guilt fell over her. She watched Carey thrash the switch about, wanting to take it away from him. “If you’d just be calm, Helen,” he was saying, gentler now, “you’d see that everything’s going to work out all right. Look——” He approached her, trying to smile, but the smile was so forced and artificial, and he seemed so confused because of the wine he’d been drinking, that Helen felt he was losing all control, that he was threatening her, too, play-acting, faking, and again she desperately wanted to take the stick away from him. “Look Helen, suppose you and I get another drink and go upstairs for a minute and calm down and talk this thing——” Ah, Carey, she thought, and she raised her hand a little, as if to ward him off. Did Carey know he was one of the Men? One of the enemy? Wouldn’t he be surprised! To know how much a part of her he’d become, to know (and now she thought,
He really is weak and silly and doesn’t understand, why have I had any faith in him and his silly, weak ways?)
how she’d dreamed of him, while he, no doubt, had been dreaming of silly, worldly things, furnaces and things, that silly wife of his, Adrienne, or of becoming a fat bishop with folds of fat covering up his tiny little worshipful you-know-what. How shocked and angry he’d be! And she recalled the dream again, with an inward, chilling fright.

Carey dislodged a stone from the seawall; it went tumbling onto the beach below, smacked sharply against the sewer drain, and the ducks flew up, the gulls, too, piping shrilly, leaving a floating waste of feathers. From the house came a renewed spasm of music, hoarse, Viennese, with the whine of an accordion, and she thought,
Silly ass, he doesn’t know.
How naked to the waist he’d been one night, fat and pink with his belly button showing, pulling her along angrily after him through woods of fern and laurel, through her garden, trampling down the azaleas. She had screamed, “But, Maudie, she’s gone!” and he had turned, threatening her with a big stick. Fat and pink, his titties bobbing with greasy yellow fat beneath, like butter on oatmeal. Threatening her with the stick, saying, “You must believe! You must believe! I am the way, the truth and the life!”

She retreated two steps backward along the seawall. Carey came toward her, brandishing the threatful switch. She had dropped her handkerchief, wondered if he’d be so much the gentleman enough to pick it up, but neither handkerchief nor switch seemed so important now as this matter of her enemies.

“You’ve been my enemy, too!” she said, only faintly aware of the choking in her voice, and of the big, salty tears which unaccountably had begun to flow down to the corners of her lips. “You haven’t wanted to help me. You and your church! Honestly, Carey, how could you be such a hypocrite? Pretending to understand my problems all these years. Mocking me behind my back!” She groped for something crushing, annihilating to say, to this her enemy. “Your God God is a silly old ass,” she said, “and my God … my God is the devil!”

“Hush, Helen, don’t talk like that,” he said gently. “You’re all wrought up and nervous. Come on inside. Look, it’s getting dark. We’ll have something to calm us ’down and then you’ll see Peyton. …”

Peyton! She wanted to shriek the name aloud. How could he be such an enemy! Wasn’t Peyton precisely the one she’d been talking about for the past fifteen minutes? Did he think she’d been talking to the air, for a joke, for fun? She held up her hand. “No, don’t come closer with that stick,” she said hoarsely, sobbing, “you stay right there! Right there!” Carey stopped in his tracks. “Did you conspire, too? With that tramp, that little whore? Is she on your side, with my poor, weak Milton in the middle? You should die of shame! Don’t you see what she’s done to this family? Don’t you see how she’s used him right up to the very end? The shameless bitch. Excuse these words. …”

And she paused for a minute, to dry her eyes.

“Excuse these words, Carey. What else can I say about a shameless little seducer who’s used her father’s love to get everything she wants in life, who half-killed her own sister through negligence—did kill her in fact, she let Maudie fall! Who used her father’s love, played on it like a sheer music box, rubbed herself up against him until he was half-crazy——” She lifted her hand again. “Don’t come near me with that stick! I’ve seen it all my life. He was putty in her hands, sheer putty! She’s drained him dry!
My
money, too, drained through him, my poor, weak Milton! You should die of shame for taking sides with a shameless bitch! After all my suffering, after all I’ve done for her. Now she comes home drunk, thinking so long as she’s married she can get away with torturing him. Torturing my poor, weak Milton, who I slaved and suffered over to get back again. Comes home with a little Jewish artist she’s been sleeping with for months! A little Jew. I thought I would overlook that, too, if just to make Milton happy. Anybody she was married to, all right, I said, even if he’s not from Virginia and is from a mongrel family. Anything! Anything, I said! So long as Milton was contented once more. Now she gets drunk and lures him on with her sinful little tail twitching and then turns on him like a dog. ‘Don’t smother me!’ she said, ‘Don’t smother me!’

“Carey, don’t you come near me with that stick!”

“Helen, poor Helen,” he said, “you are mad.”

A wave of agony swept over her. The air, the perishing twilight, thick with October leaves blown up from the lawn, was thicker with enemies. Something caved in on her mind: she saw Peyton, her gestures, her sinful hips, as round as moons. She saw Milton and Peyton together, and the tender, corrupt solemnity of their caresses: a multitude of red, soft lips, Milton’s hair, Peyton’s breasts, the torture of twenty years. “Damn you, Carey,” she said, “damn you for not understanding me!” And as she spoke she knew that it was not Dolly’s legs, but Peyton’s, which had shone with the rainbow of decay, sprawled out so indecently in the dreaming, pestilential dust.

“Damn you!” she cried. “I’ll fix her alone!”

“Do you mind an old man asking where you’re going on your honeymoon? Or are you supposed to tell?”

Dr. Lawrence Holcomb was speaking. He was having a hard time getting attention because, tight as he was, with so little co-ordination, he found himself being squeezed aside by four or five young people who crowded around Peyton and Harry, laughing and shouting and spilling champagne. A bachelor at sixty-eight and an uneasy drinker, Holcomb was seized with an itchy, reminiscent lust whenever he drank too much, whenever young girls were around—the younger the better—and this fact saddened him. He was a scholar and a stoic; what temperate virtues he owned had been hard won, but still his eyes filled up with tears and he felt the old, burning lust at the sight of these girls—the slick, peach-skin little necks, the stuck-out, yearning breasts, the dozens of naughty perfumes which teased the air. There was one girl now, in particular; she looked up at him casually, impishly, a little blonde with a mouth like crushed fruit, and in his drunken, lonely desire he felt he could have borne her away on his shoulders, without one thought whatsoever. But no. Really, he thought. Really. And sadly, with the sadness of a man who has known all the crucifixions of the flesh, he repeated to himself the old Socratic prayer: “Beloved Pan and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul.”

“What did you say, sir?” Harry had heard him, was shaking his outstretched hand.

“Peyton,” he said, “I brought her into this world, I, the
fidus Achates
of this family for a quarter of a century, remain totally ignored on her wedding day, alone, unnoticed, unsung. I asked,” he said, shaking his white, flowing hair in a parody of gloom, “a simple question, perhaps pardonable as the whim of a drunken old man, but my words are lost in the miasmal croakings of a horde of depraved children. I asked——” He put his hand on the blonde’s waist.

“What did you ask?” said Harry, smiling, exposing a row of even white teeth.

“I asked where you might be going on your honeymoon. I asked——”

“Florida.”

“Ah, Florida. Land of the mangrove and the simple-minded! Land of the orange juice and the palmtree and the brainless smirk! California’s little sister, land of the waterskis and the muscles—congratulations, my boy.” The blonde wriggled away with a chirp, and he succeeded in pushing toward Peyton.

“Hello, my love.” He kissed her on the mouth, moistly.

“Doctor Holcomb, I haven’t seen you for ages! You darling, you used to stick that cold piece of machinery in my ear! Here, let the bride kiss
you
.” She smacked him on the cheek.

“Steady, my love. Steady.” He cozied up to her, letting his arm steal about her waist. “I’ll do the drinking around here.
And
the kissing. Where in hell’s the champagne?” As if he had flourished a wand, a waiter appeared, tray extended. He and Peyton took glasses, but Harry, with a sudden frown, refused, and tapped Peyton on the shoulder. “Honey, you’d better go easy——”

“Young man,” the doctor interrupted, “I am a physician. Disregard my last remark.” His wrinkled face, with its beaked, talcumed nose and rheumy eyes and sagging dewlaps, became red with inspiration. “ ‘This day forever to me holy is,’ ” he warbled, “ ‘pour out the wine without restraint or stay, pour not by cups but by the bellyful, pour out to all that wull, and sprinkle all the posts and walls with wine, that they may sweat, and drunken be withal.’ ” Forever unmarried, he was touched to the heart always by marriage, and he thought of the unbearable tenderness of wedding nights and lovely, palpitating throats, nipples in the moonlight pink as unripe plums, and he ended the recitation with a dry catch in his voice: “‘The whiles … the maidens do their carol sing … to which the woods shall answer … and their echo … ring.’ ”