Lilith (3 page)
The building itself was difficult to see. It was set far back, perhaps fifty yards, from the street, behind beautifully landscaped grounds. There were avenues of arbor vitae, several magnificent poplar trees, from which the Lodge took its name, and a group of tall, low-hanging willows, under which a pair of Grecian stone benches glowed in the shadow. The driveway was bordered with privet and wound in a graceful curve from the street between the boles of the poplars. At the back of these grounds, thickly planted at its base with rose-of-Sharon bushes, stood the main building. It was actually a converted mansion (although I did not learn this until many years later), three stories in height, with a wide screened porch surrounding it on three sides, from which a set of broad wooden steps descended to the drive. It was an old Gothic building, typical of the early part of the century, full of bays and towers and long dormers, surmounted by a slate mansard roof, through which five ivy-covered chimneys, their moist bricks showing between the leaves, projected comfortably. All of its many windows were barred with heavy diagonal wire netting. (To the side were several small auxiliary buildings which I never noticed in very great detail: a small cottage, a shed, and a kind of converted loft with a flight of outside stairs ascending to it.)
It was always very quiet. In the late afternoons the blend of sunlight and shadow lying on the soft lawns and the ivied walls was calm and lovely. There was nothing grim or terrible about it; never were there faces peering from the high barred windows, or the sound of screams or violence within. With its elaborate and spacious grounds and its air of age and dignity, it had, indeed, a peaceful, almost an idyllic, aspect. And yet, standing in the sunny street to look at it, as I so often did, I would feel my mind shadowed and solemnized for a moment with a sudden delicate pall of awe, for children are moved by the mystery of madness, as they are moved by the other mysteries of life.
There is one picture of the place which I must set down here: the most enduring which I have of it. When I think of the Lodge this is the way I always see it, in a sudden wan, bright image, apparently preserved forever, which is projected somewhere in my mind.
I shall have to regress a little in order to reconstruct it fully, for I feel that the picture for some reason would not be complete unless it were presented together with—framed by, as it were—the event which immediately preceded it. Nothing ever is seen clearly; always the pathos of the perceiver helps to create the thing perceived, as the image of water in sunlight is illumined by the thirst of the observer. In some such way, I believe, the event of which I speak helped to color and create this image of the Lodge which was to become so important for me, whose magic was to cast so deep a spell upon my life.
A short time earlier I had delivered a box of groceries to a Mrs. Hallworth. Her house was in the close neighborhood of the Lodge, a prosperous, well-kept place with a gardener usually busy in the front yard, mowing the lawn or kneeling at the walk to clip the edges. She was a regular customer of ours; and this was the fourth consecutive week that I had delivered her order, although I had never seen her. Ordinarily I was admitted to the kitchen by the maid, a sullen young Negress who opened the door silently with an expression of great suspicion and dislike. On this morning, however, she did not appear. No one answered my tapping against the light frame of the screen door which opened onto the back porch. I pressed my face against it and called, “Groceries!”
From a small high window in the side wall of the house a petulant female voice shouted, “What is it?”
“Groceries, ma’am,” I repeated.
“Well, the door is open. Bring them in and set them on the kitchen table.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I opened the door toward me and, holding it with my shoulders, carried the box up the steps and across the back porch into the kitchen. I put it on the large porcelain-topped table in the center of the floor, pushing aside several unwashed dinner plates on which a coating of orange-colored sauce had hardened and a slim-stemmed glass, still beaded with sweat and cool to my hand. From the hall which entered into the kitchen I heard the muted cascade of a water closet, a sound which suddenly increased in volume as a door was opened into the hallway and a middle-aged woman appeared, buttoning the front of a light summer dress. She held crumpled under her arm a garment of some type—another dress, apparently—of pale-blue silk, which she made a perfunctory attempt to conceal against her body.
“Here are your groceries, ma’am,” I said with some embarrassment.
She came into the kitchen, her hands lingering upon, and then abandoning, the upper button of her dress, looking at me longer and more reflectively, I felt, than was required by the casualness of the circumstance. She was perhaps fifty, with graying hair and a round, soft, still pretty face, oddly combining a middle-aged, maternal benevolence with something avid, a look of candid, unquenched sensuality in her very pale-blue eyes. Her heavy-breasted, still vigorous-looking body was voluptuous in a plump, matronly way, and obviously uncorseted under her light cotton dress.
“Oh, thank you, young man,” she said. “I’m just all at odds and ends this morning because that damn maid didn’t show up.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“You just cannot depend on these nigras. She claimed to have a toothache, but you know how they are.”
She smiled at me and lifted one hand to brush back with a movement of artificial, somehow unpleasant delicacy a strand of loose pale hair that had fallen across her forehead.
I murmured, “Yes, ma’am,” again and stood for a moment looking into her eyes, held in some kind of a profound, spontaneous communication with her. It seems almost absurd in transcribing the event, but I felt that quick, impulsive, strangely zealous contact of my look flower suddenly, not beautifully or rarely, perhaps (but there are common flowers), into a relationship. My gaze was a moment too long. There was an instant when I knew I should have turned away toward the door, and, having done so, would have successfully dismissed another of those experiences from which the profound convention of modesty protects us; but I did not, and, having delayed that instant, I felt myself compromised, drawn with her into a covenant of confidence, both primitive and very subtle, from which I could not now, without dishonesty, renege. When I did break our gaze and make my belated movement toward the door I was not surprised, therefore, to hear her say, “I think perhaps you had better wait just a minute, young man. I just want to check this order and make sure everything has been sent.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, turning again toward her.
She dropped the crumpled dress she had been carrying onto a chair and began to rummage with assumed concern among the groceries.
“Isn’t there an order sheet in here? There ought to be.”
“Yes, ma’am, it’s there somewhere,” I said.
“I’m just entirely at a loss this morning. I was so upset about that maid that I had to have a cocktail to quiet my nerves. Can you imagine that! A cocktail for breakfast!”
She lifted her head toward me with an expression of spurious, gay vitality that made her pleasant maternal face almost ugly with imposture. “I wonder if you could help me find it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I murmured. “I know it’s there, because I put it in myself.”
I moved toward the table and bent above the carton to search with her. From her body there came a warm, strong smell of flesh, undisguised by perfume or cosmetics, moist and earthlike, which I could not escape. I knew that she leaned forward purposely to expose, beneath the fallen front of her dress, her heavy naked breasts, and I lowered my eyes quickly, shifting my hands among the groceries. I found the order slip and gave it to her, relinquishing it hastily to avoid the touch of her hands.
“Here it is, ma’am.”
“Oh, yes. Thank you. Now, let me see.”
She studied the slip of paper for a moment, frowning and shaking her head. “I just can’t make out a thing without my glasses. I wonder if you’d read it off to me. I know you won’t have any trouble reading it, with those lovely big brown eyes.”
I murmured with embarrassment. She turned her back against me, her body touching mine, and held the slip for me to read across her shoulder. I stood cringing from the contact of her body, staring at her hands in a kind of grief. They were still firm and strong enough to be womanly, but they were aging hands, the skin dry and freckled with pale-brown patches of pigment, the fingers slightly swollen, puffed about her rings, the veins corded and blue—my grandmother’s hands, as I had watched them sewing so many times. When she lifted one suddenly to clasp my chin in it I felt strengthless with shame, but out of some obscure, fierce sense of charity or dignity, I did not flinch. I smiled at her, my face flaming, while she squeezed my cheek and jaw lightly and said in a voice of dreadful, sweetened fondness, “My, they certainly do have handsome young grocery men these days. I can just see I’m going to have to let Dora off every Saturday morning.”
I could not move or speak. She held my chin for a moment, smiling at me with heavy, suddenly undisguised concupiscence, while I stared beyond her, my eyes moving in idle, random desperation about the room. I do not know what I should have done—perhaps I should have yielded to her—if I had not chanced to see in that moment the dress which she had dropped into a chair. I realized suddenly that she had just exchanged it, as I was entering the house, for the one she was now wearing—and on the pale-blue silk, exposed as she had dropped it carelessly, I could see a dark-edged, scarlet stain of menstrual blood.
There was a convulsion of disgust in my throat, and I turned quickly, mumbling some absurd apology, and left the house, lurching against the door frame in my haste and barely controlling an hysterical desire to run as I went down the back steps and along the stone walk to the street. I do not know how I managed to conceal my feelings from Charlie—perhaps his cheerful simplicity made him oblivious to them—but he said nothing. I sat beside him, burning-faced and tremulous, in the truck while we drove through the suddenly oppressive sunlight and parked directly opposite the Lodge. I was, for once, far too distracted to glance in its direction, even to think of it. My hands were still trembling as I opened the rear door of the van to remove the box of groceries, and in my agitation I dropped the carton. A box of eggs fell open and smashed upon the pavement. I stood, staring down at them bleakly: bright-yellow, shining, naked yolks, some of them broken and oozing in livid rivulets, embedded in a pool of glittering colorless slime.
There came, from across the street, a sprinkle of cool, delightful laughter. I lifted my head and looked across the pavement and the low barberry hedge which bordered it, to the asylum lawn. A girl in a white dress stood watching me in the broken shadow of a willow. Her long yellow hair, very pale and radiant, like sunlight through honey, lay softly on her shoulders, stirring a little in a breath of air which swung the willow trailers gracefully in front of her. She held them apart with her hand, looking through at me. I shall say her face was slender and white, with great violet eyes and a bright, tender mouth, cleft with a hint of cruelty, but merry in that moment, lifted in laughter from her moist teeth; yet nothing I put down here can convey her inexpressible strangeness and beauty. She laughed again—a sound like the crystal prisms of a wind-chime blown together in a breeze of cool, perfumed air—and, while I watched her raptly, lifted one hand, as pale and fragile as a branch of coral, and hid her eyes with it in a shy, alluring gesture, both timid and wanton, letting the willows fall together like a veil. Was she alone? I can never quite remember. Sometimes it seems that there was an attendant, a dark-haired woman in a matron’s uniform, standing a little away from her, but the image fades into nebulosity at its edges, and I cannot quite recall. All that I see clearly is the girl in her white gown, the cruel and tender beauty of her face before she covers it with her hand, the slenderness and pallor of her throat and arms, all softly diffused and delicately shadowed by the sunlight falling through the willows, casting a radiance like golden frost upon her hair; and behind her, rising distantly and mistily with a look of enchantment through the summer haze, the Palace of Fantasy from which she had strayed.
I was often alone as a boy. My childhood was not entirely unhappy—it was often far from so—and yet I felt subtly distinguished from my companions, and from the life of our town, by the circumstances of my birth. What those circumstances were I never learned exactly in my youth, for they were never spoken of at home, although they seem to me now fairly certain, and simple enough to be assumed with confidence. But then they were only a haunting source of isolation that made my early life lonely and sometimes very painful. I remember that, on entering the grocery store or Wingate’s Pharmacy to make a purchase for my grandmother, there would be sometimes a moment of silent attentive interest from the townspeople gathered there, while, with burning self-consciousness, I would stand reading the labels of packaged merchandise behind the counter as I waited to be served. Often, coming home from school in the afternoon, kicking a stone ahead of me along the sidewalk in some solitary, smiling game—it might be a racing car whose driver, if he ran off the track onto the grass edges of the sidewalk, would be killed—I would pass a pair of ladies chatting on a front walk and become suddenly aware of their suspended conversation, perhaps hearing scraps of their hushed, quickly resumed talk as I passed:
“That’s the Robinson girl’s child, you know.”
“Yes, I thought it was. He looks like her, doesn’t he?”
“Oh, I think he looks more like
him
.”
