William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (15 page)

He arose and pulled her toward him. “Dolly,” he said, “sweet kitten, I think I love you.”

His arms surrounded her. He pressed upon her lips a long and despairing kiss.

Japanese lanterns bloomed over the terrace like swollen, pastel moons, painting the flagstones with an exotic light—orchid, lilac, phantom wings of midnight blue. On the tables crepe banners and paper hats lay strewn amid souvenirs, discarded favors and bricks of vanilla ice cream oozing messily away. The boys and girls had gone swimming. Loftis and Dolly and Mr. and Mrs. La Farge lingered over whisky and soda—at least Dolly and Loftis did, for Mr. and Mrs. La Farge, both of whom had originated in Durham, North Carolina, were teetotalers. The party had been a success; there had been the appropriate noise and disorder, and now three Negro girls went about, past the tables where other mothers and fathers sat drinking, and poked desultorily at the wreckage.

Mr. La Farge was saying, “You’re Sclater Bonner’s wife, aren’t you? How’s old Pookie? I haven’t seen him in a coon’s age.” He was a runty, repetitious man with thinning hair and large, stained teeth. He owned a local wholesale grocery, played golf in the high eighties, and was completely overshadowed by his wife, who outweighed him by forty pounds and who was forever chiding him for his grammatical lapses.

Dolly nodded. “Pookie’s in Richmond this week on a ‘deal,’ he calls it. Everybody’s all worked up in real estate.”

“The war——” Mr. La Farge began.

“Yes, the war, it’s so awful,” Mrs. La Farge broke in. “Everybody says it’s bound to come almost any minute. Poor little Poland!”

“Poor us, you mean,” Mr. La Farge said. He leaned back and swallowed part of his ginger ale, revealing in the process a row of stained and horselike incisors. “Poor us,” he repeated.

There was a noncommittal silence, modulated by the distant sound of frogs and katydids, and faint shouts and screams from the swimming pool.

“Poor us,” Mr. La Farge went on. He spoke in the flat, inflectionless tones of a Piedmont Carolinian, and Loftis, eying him sleepily—he had eaten and drunk too much and yearned to stretch out somewhere—felt that if he and Dolly didn’t escape these people at once, he would perish of nervousness. Why was it his lot to be eternally hemmed around by inferior minds, by dentists and real-estate operators and expensive undertakers? To get off more often to New York and take in a musical, meet some interesting people, go to the Alumni Club—that would be nice. Dolly nudged him with her knee. Take Dolly? But Chester La Farge was saying, “We should keep out of foreign entanglements. It’s Zionist Wall Street leading us into war. International raspcallions.”

Mrs. La Farge giggled. “Rapscallions, honey,” she said.

La Farge made a vast, declaiming motion with his hand. “Rapscallions, raspcallions, it’s all the same. The international Jewish bankers are conspiring to send my son Charlie into war, that’s all I know.”

Dolly and Mrs. La Farge responded in unison with a small interested hum of approval, while Loftis, bored, distracted, looked away. The swimming pool, infinitely far off, it seemed, trembled across his eyes with a filmy distortion, violently green, a cold and uncanny light into which young half-naked bodies seemed to be diving and tumbling with frightening abandon. “Yaaa-y,
Peyton,”
a boy’s voice called, rising up over the dark slope along with a muffled splash, and without apparent reason touching him for a moment with a mild and uncertain sadness. He glanced at Dolly out of the corner of his eye: now this was an uneasy position, he thought; here he was sitting here with her, like this. Here he was, in full view of God and God knew who else: Millie Armstrong over there, for instance, who was one of Helen’s dearest friends. Involuntarily, he thrust his neck down into his shoulders, as if to feel that they might imagine he was Pookie maybe, or Dolly’s old uncle from Emporia—but just then Mrs. La Farge said with maddening directness, “What in heaven’s name happened to Helen, Milton?”

“She had to take Maudie home,” he replied easily, a bit startled at the simplicity of his lie. “You know——” He made a wan smile, turned the palms of his hands outward, and looked down solemnly at the table—all as if to say, “You know how these things are. This affliction, this burden. At least I know.”

“Poor thing,” Mrs. La Farge said, “poor child. She tires easily, doesn’t she? Maudie, I mean.”

“Yes,” he said simply. He finished his drink, poured more from a bottle underneath the table, out of deference to a state law which prohibited public display of liquor. Dolly’s shoulder brushed his as he bent over and just as this happened it seemed to him, with a vague sense of shame, that the long kiss still burned wickedly upon his lips. His mind drifted backward through the hours and he remembered: How quickly they had parted! It had excited him, that kiss, but it had startled and frightened him, too. Parted not because he had wanted to; feverishly, with all sorts of fumbling and satiny caresses, there as night fell completely, they had clung together: breaking apart for a moment, he felt his heart thumping, her hands on his, all over him—his cheeks, his hair—and gluey lipstick on his mouth. They had agreed in a concerted whisper: We’ve got to watch out.

“I’ll see you later, my darling,” she had murmured, and rushed upstairs.

Then the awful business with Helen. Perfectly awful. He had composed himself, thrown a stained red handkerchief down the stairwell and walked out, still unnerved, into the lobby where just at that instant, as he had imagined, she came flouncing out of the ballroom with Maudie and Peyton in tow.

“Hello, my dear,” he said quietly.

All nerves, all agony, she was dressed in a black cape, arms full of paraphernalia meant for rain (as he had pictured it uneasily before)—umbrellas, two of them, Maudie’s raincoat and overshoes and—the final sad touch—a bottle of aspirin clutched in her hand.

“Somebody sick?”

She pressed Maudie down onto a couch and leaned over, buckling the overshoes on.

“Maudie’s catching cold,” she muttered.

Peyton came toward him solemnly and wound an arm in his.

“Hello, Papadaddy,” said Maudie, looking up with a smile.

“Hello, honey. Listen,” he said, bending down and tapping Helen’s shoulder; “Listen,” he repeated softly, while the blood began to pound and pound at his temples, “let’s get this straight, my dear. Peyton’s staying right here.”

She arose and turned with a wry and forbidding smile, while in a flash he saw her breasts heaving—this and, out of the corner of his eye, the assistant manager of the club behind the desk, a pale overfed man counting stacks of coins, eying the scene slyly through his bifocals, vacant discs of reflected fluorescent light.

She smiled, saying, “Right here with you so you can feed her whisky. Well,” she went on smiling as she bent down above the overshoes, lifting, with accustomed tenderness, Maudie’s braced leg and adjusting a leather thong, “you’ve got the wrong idea.” A moment’s silence. “The wrong idea.”

Ah, that’s it, he repeated to himself: the wrong idea …

He stood there silently, hands in his pockets, watching her. No one said a word. Peyton clung to him, watching her, too, and Maudie, from her perch on the sofa, gazed down calmly at those hands flying over the buckles, straps and thongs. It was a fumbling performance; she was in too wild a state to do with skill an operation which by all rights, having been for so long a matter of habit, should have required no skill at all. Futilely she tried to press one of the overshoes against the metal brace; it wouldn’t go. Loftis, hesitant and afraid, made no move to help her. Or rather merely hesitant, no longer afraid, for he felt somehow, just for this instant, that he was taking part in a casual and unpleasant tableau which, like the tedious Sunday-school dramas he had performed in long ago, was unrehearsed and therefore a dismal nuisance because of the aimlessness, the uncertainty of the movements and the lines. There are these moments: when action is clearly indicated but impossible, and angry words, though desirable and urgent, just won’t come; a baffling thing—one can’t say these spiteful things and for unnamed reasons: maybe because on such occasions, in an atmosphere of hate and sorrow, there is still a guardian breath of love that hovers in the air.

Perhaps Loftis was too tight; maybe Dolly’s kiss, after all these years, had destroyed and erased something. Sober, he feared Helen; for what seemed ages he had lived with her not so much in a state of matrimony as in a state of gentle irritation, together like the negative poles of a magnet, gradually but firmly repelling each other. But now, quite drunk, consciously, arrogantly superior to the situation, he watched Helen fuss madly with the overshoes and the straps of the brace, muttering beneath her breath with fierce, obsessed whispers, and calmly awaited his lines.

The moment came. Peyton’s arm fell away from his. Helen arose and turned toward him with a smile while he, smiling too, drifted toward her and took her by the hand. “Now, dear,” he said, “come in here with me.” He led her into the golf museum with great dignity. As he closed the door he saw that the tableau had dissolved—all the waiting had been an illusion, past forever: there sat Maudie gazing out dumbly into space, Peyton beside her, sad and beautiful; even the assistant manager with his sly inquisitive eyes had turned back to ponder his stacks of nickels and dimes, and the music, which for a moment he hadn’t heard at all, filled the night with harmless echoes, as it had before.

“You wait there with Maudie, baby,” he called to Peyton, and closed the door behind Helen and himself.

He snapped the lights on. Beneath the self-satisfied photograph of a famous open champion she stood, her back to him, already lighting a cigarette. He sat down in a leather chair.

“Now listen——” he began.

She whirled to face him, outraged. “Now you listen, yourself——”

“Now, not so loud,” he said, “least we can do is be ladies and gentlemen.”

“All right,” she said finally. Almost miraculously, making him uneasy, the tiniest suggestion of a smile appeared at the corners of her mouth, and she came over and sat down on the arm of his chair. There was, he thought, something still imposingly youthful about her in spite of everything—the complaints, the headaches, the moments of eerie and popeyed hysteria—and unaccountably he thought of her, just for an instant, riding a horse in Central Park years before. Where did all the rest of this come from? When?

“Well, now,” he said, “what’s the matter? What seems to be the trouble now?”

“Oh, Milton,” she said, looking down at him, again with the disarming echo of a smile, “what did you give that stuff to Peyton for? Honestly, Milton, sometimes I think you’ve lost your mind. Tell me,” she asked intently, “just why do you let her carry on like that?”

“For heaven’s sake—” he groaned—“for heaven’s sake, Helen, it wasn’t anything. Christamighty, I just let her have a little bit. It’s her birthday, for Christ’s sake. It was a joke, a joke. What’re you trying to make out of the girl, a nun or what?”

“Now don’t be silly——” she began again. Her tone, soft and illogically persuasive, made him restless: he knew it well, and although he could somehow adapt himself to her tempers, it was this sudden change of mood that he felt he could never cope with. Here was Woman, with a capital W, tricky and awful, inconstant as the weather. But, “It’s the principle of the thing,” she was saying. “Don’t you understand that? Don’t you understand these fundamental things about decency and propriety? Don’t you know that something like that, a little thing like that, as you say, can lead to worse things? You know——”

“My dear,” he interrupted gently, conscious—though unable to do anything about it—that what he was about to say was cruel and unjust, “if you had ever got beyond Miss Whozis’ finishing school you might have got another slant on morals and principles. Morals aren’t picayunish little——”

“Milton—” she made an agonized little cry—“why do you talk like that? How can you say a thing like that?” She got up quickly from the arm of the chair—brow, cheeks, even her neck all creased and lined and indignant. She might begin to weep, now, he guessed. “What kind of talk is that? Insults! Insults!” She turned away from him and let her shoulders droop in a posture of humiliation and outraged pride. “I love
my
God,” he heard her say in a small voice, irrelevantly.

“O.K.,” he said, rising. “I’m sorry for that. Forgive me.” He sighed. “Forgive me.”

She turned and said in chilling, ominous tones which from the very beginning, indicating an endless harangue, made him want to get out of there: “There are things that I can never forgive you for. There are a whole lot of things that no matter how long I lived with you I could never forgive you for. We’ve been building up to this. I love my God and you don’t, that’s one thing. You betrayed us when you stopped going to church; you betrayed not only me but the whole family. You betrayed Maudie and you betrayed Peyton who loves you so. I love
my
God,” she repeated, drawing herself up proudly, “and you,” she whispered, with a toss of her head, “you don’t have any God at all.”

“Listen, Helen——”

“Just a minute, Milton. I’m not finished. Let me tell you, too. Let me tell you. I know this. I know what sin is. I know what
sin
is,” she repeated, and the word
sin
was like the cold edge of a blade sunk deep somewhere in his body. “I do. I do. In knowing that I’ll always be superior to you.
Hah—”
a little blister of a laugh, frightening him—“indeed I do!”

“Now, Helen!” he began to shout.

“Shut up. Wait. Let me tell you. Don’t shout. Listen to me for a minute. Don’t you think I know? Don’t you think I know about you and Dolly? Don’t you think I’ve been able to smell the dirt you’ve been up to with her? Do you think I’m blind?” She stared at him and shook her head slowly from side to side, accusing, condemning. “Listen, Milton,” she said. In her anger she had backed into a display case, and now with a movement of her hips she happened to bump and dislodge two golf balls, precious mementoes, which tumbled to the carpet and rolled away. “Listen, Milton. I don’t care what you do at all. You’ve spoiled Peyton rotten. You’ve forgotten Maudie. You’ve forgotten her! You’ve destroyed love, you’ve destroyed everything. Listen—”she paused again, lifting her hand—“listen, if you do one thing to harm Maudie, one thing, listen, that will bring shame on that child I’ll——” She halted, peered for one terrible moment straight into his eyes as if, perhaps, to find there the ghost of a meaning for all this heartache and wretchedness, and then thrust her head into her hands, moaning, “Oh, my God, Maudie’s going to die.”