Set This House on Fire (21 page)

“That boy is killing himself,” said Cripps. “What can you do? He could stop Mason in his tracks, and all his breed. But look at him. He’s killing himself.” Then he said good night to me, and then he was gone.

It was not long after Cripps left that a really rather distressing thing occurred. What happened was this: after watching Cripps walk away, I lingered on the balcony for a while, brooding over the people around the pool. I listened—I should say I was belabored by the music: once again it became raucous and loud, and the voices of Elvira and Masetto and Ottavio, screeching like alleycats while the detestable grandee went about his seduction, boomed up and around me, and washed away the sounds from the pool below. I watched the lights floating out upon the sea, ravished by their beauty, but at the same time sunk in the profoundest gloom—primarily because of Cripps, who in an odd and oblique way had so mutilated my happy expectation of America that, if memory serves me right, I concocted all sorts of alternatives: another job in Rome, marriage to a princess somewhere, headlong flight to Greece. I was mired in despondency, my throat was itchy and sore. But after a short time my sadness diminished: to hell with Cripps, I thought, and I turned to make my lonesome way back down among the movie stars. It was several moments later, after I had passed through the long room, that a door burst open a few feet away from me, exposing a glimpse of an ascending stairway, and a girl of eighteen or twenty, who came skidding out into the room as if upon glass, slipped to the floor in a heap, and then leaped up and rubbed her elbow, sobbing as if her heart would break. She was almost faultlessly lovely; even the brief glimpse I had of her, as she stood there indecisively with her brown eyes round with hurt and terror, wrung my heart with yearning. I put out my hand to steady her, for she seemed to be on the verge of toppling once more, but she drew back instantly and threw a hunted, despairing look toward the staircase. Her dress was black and of poor quality, such as that which servants wear; through a rip in the bodice practically all of one of her full, heavy, and handsome breasts was laid bare, and for the entire ten seconds that she stood there, paralyzed, it seemed, by panic and indecision, I too felt rooted there and speechless, torn both by a futile, gallant desire to help and by the beast inside which drew my eyes down to that delectable, troubled bosom. Then, suddenly covering herself, still furiously sobbing, she struck herself in the face.
“Dio mio!”
she cried in a frenzy.
“Questa è la fine! Non c’è rimedio!”

“Can I help—” I began.

“Ah my God, please,” she exclaimed in English. “No, please, don’t—”

And then, recovering control, breathless, she pushed past me with a little groan of anguish, her brown hair in a scattered, lovely tangle about her face as she took to her heels again, bare feet pattering in diminishing terrified flight down the hallway. She had spun me around like a top, and I came to rest on a marble bench, still vibrating. Before I could rise, I heard a thunderous noise once more on the stairs, as of trunks and boxes tumbling down. It was a hell of a racket; the whole palace seemed to be in eruption. Then Mason burst forth, skidding too on the glassy floor, throwing out his arms wildly and righting himself as he slid to a stop before me. Three Band-Aids plastered his face. His hair flew out in all directions. He was clad in a silk dressing gown both too short for him and put on in obvious haste, for his chest was bare, exposing a thicket of reddish sweating hair, and I could see, below, his knobby knees. Rather incongruously, his feet were shod in wooden shower clogs, which is what accounted for all the noise.

“Where is she!” he snarled at me, his face red and ugly.

“Who?” I said. I had drawn back nervously on the bench. I had never seen him quite like this before: he wore a brutish, wild expression, and with his red-rimmed eyes and arm cocked threateningly I thought he was going to paste me one where I sat.

“Where did she go!” he yelled. “Tell me, you bastard! I’ll kill her!”

“I’ll swear to God, Mason,” I said, “I just do not
know.”

“You’re lying!” And then with a strange, painful, bowlegged gait, infinitely stiff and slow, he moved toward the hallway down which the girl had disappeared. “You wait right there, Petesy boy, because when I come back I expect to stomp out of you a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit.” There was a kind of a smile on my host’s face but pure malice and venom were in his voice, and hatred… .

Maybe you recollect that dream of betrayal which I described early in this story—of the murderous friend who came tapping at my window. Somehow when again I recall that dream and then remember Mason at this moment, I am made conscious of another vision—half-dream, half-fantasy—which has haunted me ever since I left Sambuco.

It goes like this: I have taken a picture of a friend with one of those Polaroid cameras. While waiting for the required minute to elapse I have wandered into another room, and there I pull out the print all fresh and glossy. “Ha!” or “Well!” or “Look!” I call out expectantly to the other room. Yet as I bend down to examine the picture, I find there, not my friend at all but the face of some baleful and unearthly monster. And there is only silence from the other room.

III

“Holy
God,”
said Cass one day, as I recalled that evening for him, “was I as bad as all that?”

“I wouldn’t say bad,” I replied. “Not
bad.
As I recall it you were even quite eloquent, in a soggy way. But—well yes, you were blind, all right.”

He reflected silently for a long time on what I had told him. “That piano,” he said finally. “Falling all over that piano. I don’t remember a thing about it. I swear.”

“If you’d done that sober, you’d have been in the hospital for a week.”

“And that string music. Jesus, I’ve still got it somewhere, down underneath the Buxtehude. ‘What’s the Matter with This World?’ Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper. I got that record up in Petersburg, Virginia, right after the war when I was visiting my cousin up there. Carted it all around Europe with me, too. But I’ll swear I can’t remember ever playing it over there. And that night—”

“You played it all right. Boy, you played it.”

“Holy God.” He fell silent for a while, then he said: “What time do you suppose that was? What time of the evening?”

“Morning, I’d say. Somewhere around one o’clock.”

He wrinkled his brow and then looked at me intently. “All right then, that was the last time you saw Mason before—before he was dead. When you saw him chasing off after Francesca. Is that right?”

“That was Francesca, then?” I countered. “The girl he killed?”

His face for a moment seemed unutterably weary and somber. It was his first reaction of this kind since I had come to Charleston; partly through me, I suppose, he had begun to live it all again, and at this moment I could only vaguely sense how much he had cared for the girl. “It was her,” he said rather despondently, “it couldn’t have been anyone else. Did you see her again?”

“I don’t think it was too long afterwards. With you.”

“Where,
for God sake?”

“Down in that courtyard. You—” I paused. It was an awkward thing to say, and I didn’t know if he wanted to hear it. “You kissed her. Or she kissed you. Believe me, I wasn’t spying,” I added, “I happened to be—”

“No, of course not. But—” With puzzlement all over his face, he ran his fingers through his hair. Then after a moment he said:
“Wow,
you know it is all coming back now. In bits and pieces and little flickers, you see.” He fell silent again, then his eyes slowly lit up, and he arose from his chair and began to pace around the cluttered fishing shack. It was raining, and the roof leaked, and water dripped down the back of my neck. “Like what you just said, for instance. I’d forgotten that, too. A total and complete blank. Of course! I did see her. I
did
see her. And—” His voice trailed off.

“And what?”

He scratched his chin. “And she—Look,” he said, “this is important. Try to be as accurate as you can. How long do you think you were at that party? That is, before you saw Mason and he hollered at you.”

I brooded, straining to be exact. “It must have been eleven-thirty or so when I came in with Rosemarie.” I paused. “And about—oh, sometime after one when Mason came downstairs after Francesca. A little less than two hours, I’d say. But why—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he said, gesturing for silence. Then after a bit he turned to me with a wan sad grin, and said: “Now tell me this, will you. When
was
the last time you saw Mason?”

I started to tell him, again with some embarrassment. “Well, at least that’s an easy one. It was when he made you go into your trained-seal act. When he made you—” I faltered, horribly.

“Oh Jesus, yes,” he blurted, “Poppy once told me a little about that. It got so awful I didn’t ever let her finish.” He paused, somewhat agitated now, stroking his bare arms. “That was when—when you rescued me, I guess. I don’t remember that, but I do remember it afterwards, when you were sobering me up. And after this exhibition I put on you never saw Mason again?”

“Only when he was stiff and cold.”

Somber, absorbed, he gazed for a long while through the streaming windows. “Somewhere,” he said slowly, “at one point along in there somewhere she told me something.” He struck his head shortly with his hand, as if to dislodge the memory. “She told me something …”

I was utterly baffled about all this, and my silence must have betrayed my bafflement, for in a moment he turned and said in an even voice: “You’ve got to excuse this, you know. I’m not pulling your leg, really.” He ran some water in a pan and, sitting down beside me, began to eviscerate a large croaker. “I’m going to level with you about something,” he went on. “It’s not something I’ve ever wanted to think about, much less talk about. Maybe it’s better this way—get it out of the system. But—well, it’s like this, you see. That trained-seal act, as you call it. Mason had me coming and going down there that summer. It started out O.K., we were even sort of buddies at first. But then—something went wrong. What with the booze and the weird condition I was in he began to stomp me —I mean really stomped me, and I let him—and it got so bad I was paying him for the time of day. A regular peon I was, if you want to know the truth.” He paused. “I’ve never known anyone in my life I ever hated so much.” He became silent, sweating over the fish.

“So—” I said.

“I’ll tell you about that sometime. But now—Anyway, the point is this: a while back you said something about how it shocked you, Mason doing what he did and all. How though you could credit him with an ordinary red-white-and-blue Americanstyle rape you couldn’t see him doing it in the all-out monstrous way he did it. Well, when you said that, it rang a bell. Because there in Sambuco, when it was all over, that was the way I felt too. I hated his guts, he was the biggest son of a bitch I had ever run across; but later I couldn’t see him doing that. What he did took something Mason didn’t have. His cruelty and his meanness was a different kind. Only—” He fell silent again, the cords of his arms standing out as he strained away with the knife. “Bleeding croaker,” he said at last, as if wishing to banish the subject for good. “Hardly worth the trouble. Skin on a croaker’s like—”

I may have been mistaken, but I thought for a moment he was going to weep.

“Only
what?”
I persisted. “Look, Cass, like you say, you can level with me. I’m not trying to worm something out of you that you don’t want—”

“Only this,” he said, turning calmly to face me. “Only I think now that, by God, I was wrong about all that. Maybe he had it in him, after all. Everything you say—all of this stuff I was blind to —makes it plain that rape was on his mind from the word go. She wouldn’t give in to him, so he would take it. That afternoon, for instance; what he said there to Rosemarie that time, just before he belted her. And then this thing you told me about—chasing after her down the stairs. He said, I’ll kill her.’ Isn’t that what you said? And then—”

“Then what?”

“Nothing much,” he said in a bemused voice. He turned to me again. “Put it this way,” he said. “Maybe I’m just being a scoundrel. Maybe I’m just being un-Christian. Maybe I just want to make sure that he really was a monster.”

“Monster?” I said. Cass appeared to have lost his reticence about Mason, and I was eager to press this slight advantage. “Tell me,” I said, “he really gave you a rough time down there, didn’t he?”

He seemed to ponder the question for a long moment, turning over all the angles, absorbed. “Yes, I reckon he did. But how much of all that was due to my own corruption, this old corruption of mine—how much of the whole ruination was my blame I’d like to know. Maybe I’ll tell you about that too sometime, when I’m able to be sensible about it and recollect it.” He halted to wipe the wet scales off his knife, and dried his hands. “It’s really curious, you know,” he went on, now in a somber monotone, “this business about evil—what it is, where it is, whether it’s a reality, or just a figment of the mind. Whether it’s a sickness like cancer, something that can be cut out and destroyed, with maybe some head doctor acting as the surgeon, or whether it’s something you can’t cure at all, but have to stomp on like you would a flea carrying bubonic plague, getting rid of the disease and the carrier all at once. Not too long ago, as time goes—you’re a lawyer, you know all this—they’d hang a ten-year-old for stealing a nickel’s worth of candy. Right there in Merrie England, France too. This was the plague theory, I guess. Stomp on the evil, crush it out. Now a kid goes out on the streets—he’s not even ten, most likely he’s twenty and he goddam well knows better—and he commits some senseless and vicious crime, murder maybe, and they call him sick and send for the head doctor, on the theory that the evil is—well, nothing much more than a temporary resident in the brain. And both of these theories are as evil as the evil they are intended to destroy and cure. At least that’s what I’ve come to believe. Yet for the life of me I don’t know of any nice golden mean between the two.”