William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (110 page)

The next day he counted up their money, cashed some traveler’s checks with the talkative Jew near the Hotel de Ville, and began to pack up their baggage. Such junk a family piles together in a year! Then, working awkwardly and somewhat haphazardly, he mapped out an itinerary. First he’d treat Poppy to a taste of the Riviera—it was not his dream at all, but it was south —then on to Italy, almost anywhere would do… .

Somewhere along the left breast of the Rhone valley, on the railroad route leading south to the Cote d’Azur, there is a lonely, humble grave. A solitary oak sapling, transplanted from its native soil nearby, marks the isolated spot; perhaps now even the sapling has perished, or has been blown away by the winds, so that the searcher for some mortuary relic will find nothing there at all save the tangled anomalous weeds, and the wind and sunshine, and the far, bleak, sun-swept cliffs standing sentinel over the immemorial flood. There was a gnarled apple tree too, though, Cass remembered, and a time-roughened fence, so that, triangulating upon a line of poplars which stood erect like a file of green soldiers upon the horizon, he might still, if he ever wanted to, find the sad and forsaken place. It was south of Lyon and north of Valence and it was the place where, when the train halted for a long inexplicable hour, they all debarked from the stifling and noisome third-class compartment to bury Ursula, the Flemish-speaking parrot. It had been an astonishingly speedy ending. From the moment in the draughty halls of the Gare de Lyon when Ursula had ceased her healthy, piercing harangue and had shuddered, greenly wilting, and had begun to fuss and grumble in a feeble, senile plaint and then withdrew nodding to a far corner of her cage, where her feathers became tacky and plucked-out and lusterless right before their eyes, to the moment when with rheumy eyeballs and a final croupy hack, she expired, toppling from her perch with a feather-duster plop and without—as Peggy, who was of all of them the least sentimental, put it—"even saying good-by,” the time elapsed could not have been more than two or three hours. It was an evil omen, Cass knew. The two middle children, Timothy and Felicia, filled the train with wild heartbroken cries of lamentation; even Peggy was affected, even he was. The baby wailed sympathetically from his basket, and Poppy—Poppy was the worst of all, leaking ceaseless tears, trying to control herself for the children’s sake, and with trembling lips, as if by words alone she might ward off grief, telling the baffled, perspiring countrywoman who shared their compartment that the
“pauv petit perroquet”
had had at least “a very happy life.”

The confusion, the grief, the noise became almost intolerable. Yearning for a drink—a stiff one, hating his hard-won self-discipline, and oppressed by a life in which certain insupportable moments, such as now, could only be made bearable by an elixir which he himself could not support, he drew a funereal cloth across the parrot’s cage (actually it was a species of parakeet), loudly told the mourning assembly to shut up, and with a pillow wrapped around his head went to sleep. But the sense of it all being an evil omen persisted in his dreams. When the train stopped, and when, waking, he learned from the conductor that there would be a long delay, he followed Poppy and the family into the lovely field. It was a sparkling, meridional day, dry and hot and cloudless, blindingly blue, and humming with the jittery noise of insects in the underbrush. Poppy carried the still-warm Ursula in a shroud of green cloth which had served to cover her cage. Each for the occasion had his solemn role: Poppy was the parrot’s mother, Timothy her beloved husband, Felicia her little sister; Peggy, somewhat removed from it all as usual (she had never forgiven Ursula for biting her, two months before), chose only to be “a friend, kind of a bird friend,” while he himself, through no choosing of his own, became both grave digger and priest. How could he be a priest, for Christ sake, Poppy? he asked. But she said he could, for a bird. It was, he thought, as with a stone he sweatily hacked a hole in the parched ground, a soft and sickening thing, the limits to which Poppy would carry the poetry of her faith—and perhaps even blasphemous—but priest he was chosen, and priest he was, reading the Mass for the Dead from her prayer book in orotund phonetic Latin, while Poppy and the children stood about with bowed heads and the listless passengers on the train, fanning themselves, gaped at the scene in quiet dismay. At last it was over. Into the hole they all cast handfuls of dust. Cass planted the sapling, and as floral tribute Poppy picked a bluebonnet for Felicia, who in sisterly fashion—at the time she was two—stuck it in her mouth. Good-by, Ursula, adieu, sweet oiseau, good-by, good-by… . Cass felt gladly shut of the blabber-mouthed bird. But in spite of all the stickiness, he thought as the cortege filed back toward the train, he had been oddly and obscurely moved: his children, good Catholics all, who would be saved, patient with heads bowed and as fresh and as fragile as the wildflowers they stood among. It was then, he recollected long afterwards, that he felt Peggy falter and stagger against him and, looking down, saw how wild-eyed the child was and saw fever glowing on her cheeks like flamboyant rouge. The omen, he knew, was fulfilled. Psittacosis! he thought. Monstrous bird! Parrot fever, fatal to man! Triple bleeding God!

His diagnosis was not correct, but the child was horribly sick, and it gave him as rough a time as any he could remember. The port city of Toulon, where they arrived after several racking hours, is almost identical in size and aspect to Norfolk, Virginia, presenting to the eye a similar unsightly waterfront of jagged cranes and shipyards and an oily harbor and a general atmosphere of transient and maritime busyness. It is no place to take a vacation or to sightsee around or to bring a sick child, and Peggy, they knew long before they got there, was about as sick as a child could possibly get. She had puked all over the train and she throbbed with fever and her pretty blond hair was plastered wetly against her neck and brow and, in less time than it took to traverse the two hundred miles or so across the suffocating landscape of Provence, she had gone quite out of her head with delirium. In foolish headlong panic, and instead of going straight to a hospital, they went to a hotel—a barnlike place with potted palms, reminiscent of quick liaisons and commerical travelers. At an outlandish price
(“La saison, vous savez,”
said the manager, as if Toulon had a season) they took two connecting rooms and put the younger children in one and themselves and Peggy in the other. Then right before their eyes, at dusk, lying moist and disheveled on a pillow, the child’s face turned a blazing crimson, except for a circumferential pallor around the mouth, chalky white, which gave her the horrible aspect of a painted clown.
“C’est la scarla-tine”
said the pleasant young doctor, finally summoned, who needed only one glance to tell. Then, explaining that this case of scarlet fever seemed exceptionally severe, he ordered her taken to the hospital. Somehow, in all the confusion, the manager managed to find an old woman, who looked responsible, to take care of the children, and then, haggard and wretched and numb, not speaking, they wrapped Peggy in a blanket and took her to the hospital down palm-lined streets in a careering taxi driven by an eager and conscientious maniac. Sometimes life, Cass thought during the drive, holding the hot child in his arms, sometimes life is even worse than war. In a cavernous hallway of the hospital, smelling of carbolic, lowering and mysterious with cream-colored, flapping, soft-footed nuns, they waited until morning. Neither he nor Poppy said a word. At dawn the doctor’s face was drawn and grave. She was not responding well to the penicillin. It might, though, be still too early to tell. Go home and get some rest. Come back at ten o’clock. At their hotel room the old baby sitter met them with trouble and worry on her face like a mask.
“Les autres aussi,”
she whispered.
“Ils ont la fièvre!”
More bleeding scarlet fever!

Then at ten in the morning, leaving Poppy with the babies (after another doctor had come with more penicillin, then departed), he went back to the hospital. There he discovered that Peggy had gone into convulsions; a spinal tap had been made, revealing a terrible complication: something with the sound of infamy in it, and doom—streptococcal meningitis. Not uncommon, the doctor said, in extreme cases. Cass stole into her room and took a look at her: she seemed barely to be breathing and beneath the lobster-red of her face there was a subtle quality of flesh—a consistency—like that of wax. “Oh, baby,
don’t,”
he whispered. The outlook, the doctor was grieved to tell him (they actually did shrug, the maddening Frogs!), the outlook,
le prognostique,
was definitely not hopeful.

He went reeling out into the violent sunlight with a dry, rusty taste of fear in his mouth, and a clammy touch of mortality on his flesh and in his bones. Sleepless, and with splintery pain in both eyes, he could not tell how at last he found himself where he was —by a clamorous pier on the waterfront where the air was filled with a fine powdery grit from some ship’s hold, and the wind was odorous with salt and gasoline, and an unseen riveting hammer stitched bullets of pure noise across his eardrums. Less distraught, less exhausted and unhelmed, he later reasoned, he might not at that moment have been quite so fatalistic, but all things had conspired to make him think one thought: all my children are going to die. All my sons and daughters. The thought was so desolating as to be beyond the realm of sorrow. Try as he might to down the image, he could not get it out of his mind: of Peggy, his first-born, and of all the dear ones the dearest and the best, who, with lovelocks atangle, flower-face uptilted to celebrate her devotion, always kissed him like this: grabbing him by the ears and turning him around to face her, as if her adoring father’s head had been a jug. Chasing the intolerable vision from his mind, he lifted his eyes to the sky: two jet planes swooped in low over the harbor, screaming, skimmed ships and rooftops, were gone. Adoring? Of course he had adored them, but in his surpassing self-absorption how little
real
love he’d shown them in return. Had it not been Poppy who had brought them presents, who had cared for them and watched over them, who in her aimless and scatterwitted fashion had nonetheless taught them everything they had ever known, while he, content indulgently to pat their rumps and dandle them on his knee and smile with condescension at their tricks, had only taken them all for granted? God knows, it served him right. It served him right for the presumption. For his foolish, childish presumption. Because it was true, he knew: by some limp and witless Sunday School reflex—throwback, he supposed, to all of Poppy’s subtle pious influence—he had thought that his regeneration of the past few months, his temperance and his more or less sober habits might somehow quite erase his recent years of footlessness and laziness and dissipation, could atone for all the time—irrevocably, miserably lost now—when he had been drunk, when he had refused to work, when he had left undone those things he should have done, and the other way around. Why, by God, he thought with real anguish, he had behaved like a bleeding Catholic! Expecting to be
shriven
like that! Expecting to evade retribution through the unworthy simple-minded premise that an act of evil could be erased, like so much chalk-dust from a slate, by the easy expedient of replacing it by an act of good. Why, he’d forgotten his own upbringing—overlooked the fact that God was really not a gentle benign Christian who, as Poppy would have it, let you get by through honest penance, but was a mean old Jew with a dirty beard and flashing eyes and nostrils snorting smoke and hellfire who had graven upon Cass’ mind The Law in the same way that those mad-eyed foot-washing prophets with paint cans flapping through the low country of his youth had inscribed the blazing, merciless slogan on every barn and pillar and post:
THOU SHALT NOT
—! He would get you if you done wrong, and if He got you, you were doomed. That was the simple sum total of the whole situation. It did not matter that you cried out “Father!” or “Forgive!” or beat your head bloody in contrition against the nearest wall—He got you in the end. And finally, with the same magisterial wrath that made a hundred million Hebrews tremble at His very name, He fashioned the punishment to fit the crime. How fitting it was, Cass thought, that he himself, whose life until now had been dedicated to such senseless self-flagellation, should both more than half-believe in and yearn for a God who was such a sadistic monster. How fitting, really, that that God (had He had His gloating eye upon him that fearful night such a short time past?) should take it all in His own vengeful hands now and, as if to indicate His displeasure with one who had so clumsily and gropingly and vainly striven for some specious immortality, should snatch away all of him that was, in truth, immortal. Sons and daughters! It did not matter that they were as fragile and as lovely as flowers or that, in their brevity, they were hardly more than small eyewinks into the glory of His own sun. He would get them, too. “Take them then!” Cass heard himself whispering aloud, in fury and hopeless remorse. “Take them!
Take them!”

Later, in a waterfront bar, he tried to get drunk on Pernod, but for some reason he couldn’t. Long, long afterwards he was willing to admit that something essentially honest in himself saved him from this sort of last failure. But at the time the feeling of being a worthless derelict was almost insupportable: sensing that in some vague, secret, hopeless, irremediable fashion he was the slayer of his own children, and that God, whoever He was—He who like some uneasy phantom kept changing shape and form within him —had abetted the crime, he walked back to the hotel to tell Poppy the news about Peggy, bitterly weeping the whole way. Bawling out loud, in fact.

But one of the exciting things about life is that some of our worst trials have miraculously kindly endings. There is no way out! This is the very end! I am dying, Egypt, dying! Then all of a sudden we are relaxing by the fire, talkative, immodest, faces all aglow as we tell of the horrible ordeal safely maneuvered, its details still bright but already dimming. The point being in this case that the children began to recover completely within thirty-six hours. Peggy, after huge injections of penicillin, rallied, shouting at the top of her voice for
de la glace au chocolat,
while Timothy and Felicia, similarly filled with the almighty drug, having had mild cases anyway, lost their rashes and their fever and by the end of the second day had crept from their beds to disturb the hotel corridors with rowdy cries. As for the littlest one, he was protected by the immunity of his age, and had not got sick at all. There was a week of convalescence for Peggy, during which time it was made fairly certain that she had suffered no permanent ill effects, and there were big bills to pay, but in less than ten days—all of them swatting mosquitoes on the rocky beach at Hyères, where they had rented a cottage—one might have scarcely known (save for the towels on a clothesline which each bore the legend
Clinique de Provence Toulon)
that the household had been ravaged by disease. Poppy, wet, brown, slippery-looking in a polka-dotted Bikini the size of an eye-patch, would call from the foaming shore: “There’s Daddy! Cass, come in and take a swim!” But Cass—sneaker-shod and in a baggy sweatshirt, sucking at the licorice candy which tasted like Pernod and took the place of booze, and aggravated by athlete’s foot he had picked up God knows where—would retreat into the shadows of the cottage. He alone still remained somber, detached, subdued… .