William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (21 page)

“No.”

“You say no because you’re being kind.”

“No, now, Helen, look here. I’ll give you all the help I can. I’m not here to judge or condemn. I only said that because—well, suppose I take it back. I wasn’t suggesting any lack of kindness on your part. I guess—— Well, maybe the way you told this thing to me has given me just the false idea that you’ve been maybe—selfish. At least this particular time. Or something.” What else could he say?

“You mean that——”

“I mean that … Helen. Oh, I don’t know——” he said hopelessly. “I mean that maybe it’s not as bad as it might seem.”

She closed her eyes and raised her fingers to her brow. “I thought that you maybe could help me,” she said in a small voice.

Poor woman. It was a funny circumstance. In a day when a minister felt perpetually deserted, when the one thing one wanted most was to be able to offer spiritual guidance, here was a person who seemed to be in great need of whatever help he could give, and what could he say? Nothing really. So in the little gap before he spoke he concentrated heavily upon something up and beyond him and prayed, himself, for guidance. Finally he said: “Helen, do you believe in God?”

She looked up slowly, and said in a surprisingly self-possessed voice: “Yes. Or at least I want to.”

“Then that’s part of the fight already, and the better part of the eventual triumph. God has a strong adversary in the devil—” and he thought
yes, she knows that. She knows that. Which is all to her credit
—“ ‘his craft and power are great and armed with cruel hate’ as the hymn goes—” of this Carey was sure—“God gives His greatest reward to those whose fight is desperate and whose struggle at the bleakest hour seems most hopeless. Because then one’s only weapon is faith, which indeed often seems a flimsy thing, but unless you have it the struggle can avail nothing.” And as an afterthought: “ ‘Say not the struggle naught availeth.’ ”

He leaned forward and suddenly felt unburdened, sensing so completely the truth of what he was saying, that he had to communicate this to her: “Does it sound funny I can talk to you like this in an age like ours?” She began a negative nod of her head, but he went on: “Excuse me for this, but you must—listen, Helen, remember that our age is only a moment in that time we can perceive as the timeless love of God. The devil, if you want to call him that, walks abroad today as he has before, but always he’s been defeated and cast down. He rises with greater strength each time to try our faith. If our moment is worse and the devil seems more strongly armed, then it is our joy and our exaltation to seek combat: ‘I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness.’ Oh, Helen, there’s nothing stupid or arrogant in such an affirmation, or nothing to compromise the reason; it’s a tribute to the faith and strength and love of one’s self, which becomes the love of others, and which is the timeless love of God.”

“Who is He?” she said after a silence.

Could anything be more simple, or trite, or so hard to understand? “God is love,” he said, with a small feeling of triumph, and of sadness, too.

She looked away. “Maybe you’ve found him,” she said, rather accusingly.

“I have,” he said, lying, but not with any premeditation. He only felt that he
had
struggled for twenty years with simple, tangible evils. These, added up, were Evil, and they depressed him and in his dreams at night they gave him phosphorescent visions of earthly horrors and spiritual damnation. He could rationalize, he could say “These things happen to every man”—his gluttony, which kept his weight up and gave him gas, his petty parsimony—but nonetheless he knew that it was the little temptations which held him forever apart from true Christian peace, caused him to hurry through dark rooms at night and down the stairs, fearing even then, as reassuring light beckoned from the hall below, the clutch of a cold invisible hand. But he had struggled incessantly—against both the temptations and the vaguely mystical, idiotic fears; the struggle was the important part, and he felt that he could lie to Helen a little bit, if just to make her believe that anything might be possible through the grace of Jesus Christ.

But even this, he remembered now, had not given her a momentary contentment. She hadn’t seemed to notice. She had gone on dredging the shallows of her despair, embarrassing him and, occasionally, touching him with her confusion. They had sat there until long past midnight—until Adrienne had called from upstairs in a muffled, cross voice: “Carey, Carey, aren’t you coming to bed?”—but that had gone unnoticed. And Helen, never letting her voice rise now—she seemed to be getting tired—and pausing only to light innumerable cigarettes (even then continuing to talk so that the smoke came out in small voice-thickening gusts) had told him how she had gone to see Dolly Bonner the next day. It was all of a year afterward—when the gossip around town was unavoidable, even for a minister—that Carey learned who the woman was, because Helen persisted in calling her, with a certain charity, “Mrs. X.” But later he was able to reconstruct the scene in his mind. Even though he didn’t know Dolly, her ubiquitous smiling photograph had been in the newspapers every time the Red Cross or the Community Chest or the North Port Warwick P.T.A. had had the slightest excuse for a conclave: Dolly (“Mrs. Sclater Bonner”) could apparently be imposed upon by her sister members to serve as hostess, or take the more arduous responsibilities. He remembered that picture. And later, when he learned “Mrs. X’s” identity, he saw clearly all that Helen told him: the two handsome women facing each other at noon in a hot tearoom, each, through some propriety inbred or learned, controlling herself in a painful undercurrent beneath the gentle, ironic, hateful words, but ready at the first improper bat of an eyelash to do violence, even in public, to assert her claim upon Loftis, who by that time was fully halfway to Sweet Briar.

And Helen told him how she had gone upstairs with Maudie that night. She had turned brusquely and left the room holding Maudie’s arm and feeling Peyton’s and Milton’s silence and their bewilderment, like a sheet of fabric laid upended in the partitioning doorway, almost palpable, motionless at her back. Upstairs she had examined Maudie’s leg: there was a small greenish-blue welt below the knee where she had slipped against the newel post. Maudie giggled, as if she had no bruise at all.

It was then, bending over Maudie as she lay on her bed, that the shameful phrase occurred to Helen:
not inadvertent, not inadvertent.
The bruise was very small, and she had got out a poultice and iodine from the medicine cabinet, along with some aspirin, and perhaps it was this that further upset her—the dismal accretion of bottles and bandages around Maudie on the bedspread. Self-imposed, through some compulsion she had acquired over the years—this way she had of magnifying all out of proportion Maudie’s tiniest hurts and ills—now her enormous solicitude sought not only a cure but, in a sort of panic, someone to blame for this bruise. Of course. Again Peyton, whom she had momentarily forgotten. And she had said to herself
not inadvertent, not inadvertent,
and elaborating upon it as she salved the bruise with boric acid ointment:
She by heaven was just going to show her independence, the little devil. Perhaps it wasn’t intentional, but it was not inadvertent,
and here she drew a fine distinction between the two by assuming something that, even as it darted across her consciousness, she knew was vicious and false: that Peyton might not have planned to let Maudie fall, but by some subconscious process let her fall anyway, for revenge, or to show her independence, or something. But instantly she thought
No, no, oh, no,
and in order to distract herself from this thought (which by definition, she told Carey, implied she had been a rotten and cruel mother to Peyton) she hurried to the bathroom and with a great deal of trembling soaked cotton in hot water for Maudie’s bruise. Then she remembered that there was no need for hot water, the salve had already been put on, and so with a swift motion she threw the wad of cotton into the toilet, watched it spread and expand, and stood beneath the cruel, revealing bathroom lights gazing at herself in the mirror, the fading prettiness, and thought
Somehow I cannot concentrate.

Oh, yes.

So then her mind was mostly blank. She walked back to the bed and undressed Maudie and put the brace in the corner and, after kissing her, slipped out and shut the door. She went to her own room and locked herself in. There was a strong chemical smell in here, and a heavy stuffiness, she remembered: she had sprayed Flit in the room just before supper, for now toward the end of summer the mosquitoes were active and venomous. She had watched them approach and had been prepared, patching up screens herself, arming the house with spray guns. The mosquitoes were big and brown, as big as mulberries, and they came in clouds at sundown, swarming out of the inlets and pools along the shore as if in one last onslaught before the advent of that deathly season already hinted at in chill, tentative winds, a subtle browning in the marshes. She snapped on a light and, holding her breath for a moment, threw up all the windows and then took off her clothes and slipped into a nightgown. Then she rubbed cold cream on her face, put up her hair, and got into bed. She lighted a cigarette and set the ashtray beside her on the coverlet.

All this time—it was odd, she told Carey—all this time she had been pressing back in her mind the confusion of the last hour, and it wasn’t until she had pulled the coverlet over her and had arranged herself against the pillows, settling a copy of
Good Housekeeping
in her lap, that she realized what strain the effort to
not
think had caused her, and how tense she was: she could hardly read the magazine, it was shaking so. She put the magazine down: for minutes she had been gazing vacantly at a colored advertisement of hamburgers soaking in a repulsive red sauce, and it occurred to her that it was making her ill. And then—again it was so odd, she said—her next thought was this: that she had been behaving remarkably well, with dignity; recalling the events of the past few minutes, she believed she had been properly curt and distant with Milton when, at the bottom of the stairs, she had told him she would have to stay here tomorrow. All this, while she lay there in bed trembling, passed through her mind in a warm, satisfying wave, with the pleasant tingle that the remembrance of small triumphs lends to reflection. It was so odd, and indeed, hadn’t this devil, or whoever he was, perhaps disguised himself in order to make her think such a vain mean thought? Although invisible, cleverly off-stage, wasn’t he prodding her just the same? Nonetheless, she felt most satisfied.

And then (this, she said, she had pondered ever since and still had no explanation: maybe Carey would) then it was as if everything that had happened during the evening had come into focus, as if in the seesawing of her crazy moods she had slowly teetered and risen and fallen and had finally stopped, so that for one instant—did she have a fever?—all her thoughts rested at precise, unhurried equilibrium. She raised her hand to her brow, withdrew fingers watery with sweat; a pervasive scent like naphtha hovered in the air, and she sat stiffly upright in bed, scattering cigarettes, matches, ashes.

And thought: They don’t think I was properly distant, dignified or anything. They just think I’m queer. And thought, thrusting her face into her hands: God help me please, I’m going crazy.

There it was: the suspicion tangible and outrageous and, for the moment, hardly to be denied. What could she do? She looked around her: at the familiar yellow-capsuled nembutal in a bottle on her dresser; she gave the bottle short, casual consideration: ten, maybe fifteen of those would fix things up forever—but the thought passed quickly from her mind. She wanted to scream but … how silly. And just as these notions fled through her consciousness, so, she remembered, the whole idea of insanity was forgotten as too difficult and too gross a thing to contemplate for more than an instant, and with a sigh she stretched out her hot legs so that sheet and coverlet enveloped her body in a soundless rush of air, like a tent collapsing. She lay silent for a while with her eyes closed and then, for no apparent reason at all, arose and walked barefoot to the window. Now for a moment she felt, as she put it, “normal.” Most likely it was the fresh air, clearing her mind, but as she sat in a chair by the window the sweating and the trembling vanished. Below she heard music from the radio and laughter from Milton, vacant and loud and carefree, as if nothing had happened at all. Leaning forward with her elbows on the windowsill, she cupped her chin in her hands and looked down at the garden and the bay. Perhaps now, upon reflection, it was only the season that had made her unhappy: this tail end of summer, the September midpassage when the year seems sallow and emaciated like a worn-out, middle-aged countrywoman pausing for breath, and all the leaves are mildly, unsatisfactorily green. Everything then is waiting, expecting, and there is something in the air that promises smoke and burning and dissolution. One’s flowers bloom gaily for a while, but September is a quick, hectic month, bearing on the air seeds for burial, and making people feel tired and a little frantic, as in a station just before the train pulls out. But it was lovely, too; it had its loveliness. Night had come, but over the sky was spread a pale-gray afterglow in which the evening star, rising over the bay, rested like a solitary gem on a sea of smoke; the earth below exhaled an odor of grass and flowers, the mimosas were shaking in the wind. Beyond these and the willows at the edge of the water, dark ships were passing slowly out to sea. War. And again a wind, faintly chill, pressed against her cheek, bringing an odor of salt and the cool imminence of fall, and huge mosquitoes, tapping futilely at the window. She blew softly against the screen. The mosquitoes darted up and outward against the sky and returned, settling heavily in the dying wind. A branch fell to the ground, leaves scuttled across the driveway and became silent all at once, an army felled in its tracks. Noise from the radio ceased, the sleazy female voice strangled in mid-note as if it, too, had perished on the wind’s last dissolving sigh, and in the silence she thought of her imprisonment, her banishment.