William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (22 page)

The moon rose hot and orange, outlining the flower bed, serpentine and shadowy with nodding blooms, dark willows and, beneath the mimosa tree, two forms—Peyton and a boy. Helen leaned forward, watching. They approached each other and kissed, and the wind must have rustled in the branches once more, for there was a wild, long whisper and leaves fluttered down around them like the wings of birds.

“Good-by, Peyton.”

“Good-by.”

“Come back, Peyton. Come back soon.”

“Someday.”

“Good-by … good-by … good-by.”

She turned away, again filled with unfocused anger. She went to bed and, face downward in a pillow, tried to pray—not for guidance, which seemed too vague and elementary, but rather that God please simply give her the logic to direct blame in the proper direction, for her own fear and anger: Dear Lord, I can’t hate my own husband; dear Lord, I can’t hate Peyton, my own flesh and blood—but she felt that something was wrong: as usual, her prayers seemed to be on a one-way line to heaven, and so, her ardor spent, she took two nembutals and finally sank into sleep, dreaming
Good-by, good-by
to the shadow-silhouette, the woman who flickered and vanished—while white blooms floated earthward, and through these she seemed to be bearing a letter: but to whom? She bent down close to see, saw marigolds, nasturtiums, poppies, shameful-red, and three black hairs which spelled out across her garden: SIN. She turned, frightened, but Milton said: “Here, baby, I’ll mail it for you,” and was gone with Peyton who walked in shorts beside him and held before her hips, as round as moons, the hat, a flowered crucible. “Good-by, good-by,” she tried to say, but both of them were in the sailboat with Dolly Bonner, borne in a dark squall with sails awash, hurricane-swift far out to sea. A torrent of leaves filled the air, torn like feathers on a blast of wind past the house, garage, all reckoning, but there was a thump and the wind subsided: Milton with a smile reappeared in the garden soaked to the skin, pounding on a tree with her trowel: “Helen!” he shouted. “Helen, Helen!”

She awoke. Milton was knocking on the door. “All right,” she called weakly, “all right. Just a minute.” She climbed from bed and walked to the door, unlocking it.

“My God,” he said. “What happened? I thought you’d fallen or something and knocked yourself out. How’s Maudie?”

“All right,” she said.

“You’re all sweating, honey.”

Standing there in the doorway. The two of them. Carey could see it all: the one shirtsleeved and fleshy, suntanned from a summer of golf, even now breathing a faint, pulpy odor of whisky as he looked with puzzled apprehension at the other, who was no longer overwhelming, but merely drugged and sick. Distantly, breakers swept up over the beach with a prolonged
waaas-h,
fell back silently into the night. And she was holding his hand, in a rare, voluntary caress touching him, trying through waves of nembutal to shake off fragments of dreams, gusts of wind, remembered rain, saying: “Milton, you musn’t be unfaithful to me.”

In a tone, most likely, that would unsettle any man.

And before he could reply, she went on in a flat monotone: “Everything’s breaking up. If it takes all the strength I’ve got I’m going to see that we all stay together. Milton—” and she stroked his hand, which must have further surprised him—“I know what you’ve been up to and I’m not going to let it go on. ‘Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder’ ”—a phrase recollected from the fathomless past, most inopportune at this point, Carey judged: that old litany of innocence which men forget and which women remember with the clarity of a nursery rhyme.

Then Loftis said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“You know.”

“What do you mean?”

“That woman.”

He flushed, wheeled abruptly—“Oh, the hell with you anyway—” and walked down the hall. At the head of the stairs he turned. “The goddam hell with you anyway!” Then he was gone.

It occurred to her then that although he had been rude before, and had used foul words, he had never sworn
at
her. Never. Well, no matter. She sat by Maudie’s bed for a long time, thinking. Maudie slept soundly. At ten o’clock the churchbell rang and she went into her own room and got into bed. Still a little later, as she lay there alone—determined to feign sleep when Milton came to bed—she heard footsteps on the stairs. She rose up on her elbow. “Peyton,” she said aloud, “Peyton dear.” But her voice was not loud enough; she had made the gesture at least, which, in the light of Milton’s nastiness, was perhaps, she thought, of no matter either.

And this finally (the events thereafter, foreshortened, lacking detail, seemed confused, and Carey filled in the rest): sleeping in the morning, long after Milton and Peyton had gone, she heard children’s voices breaking in upon her dreams like the chatter of remote, unknown birds, but loud, somehow appalling, and she awoke in fright. But it was just the sound of children after all: far off, laughter and the noise that bicycles make fading down a gravel road—and she sank back again with a sort of relief and gazed blinking through the clear oriole light at Milton’s bed, gritty sand on the sheets: he hadn’t washed his feet. After taking a Bromo-Seltzer to clear her head, she dressed Maudie, fixed breakfast, and then Ella came. Finally—it was ten o’clock by now—she made the telephone call, reflecting briefly in the process upon how calm and sure she was.

“Hello.” (Helen knew the voice, which was lucky. To have to say, “Is this Dolly Bonner?” would be a forced betrayal of intimacy which, no matter how slight, she didn’t want.)

“This is Helen Loftis. How are you?” And without waiting—“I wonder if you could meet me at the Bide-A-Wee at noon. I want to discuss something with you.”

“Well, no, I really don’t think—” The voice was more than hesitant: instantly shocked, defensive and afraid.

Helen broke in. “It’s very urgent. I have to insist——” How formal!

“But no——”

“Then it’ll have to be sometime else.” Very decisively—the gauntlet thrown down. “Today would suit me best if you’ve got no other plans.”

“I have to go to a——” Squirming.

“Then what day then?”

“All right, then. All right. The Bide-A-Wee?”

“Yes. I think—I think it’ll be in both our interests.”

“All right. Good-by.”

“All right. Good-by.”

So already she had frightened her. If nothing else, she had done that, gained an initial advantage, and she felt equipped to do battle. At eleven-thirty she instructed Ella about Maudie’s lunch and then took a bus into town, to the Bide-A-Wee Tea Room.

By noontime a broiling heat had fallen over the town, and at the tearoom she took a seat in a secluded corner, beneath an electric fan which like a monstrous black flower turned its face from the wall in drowsy half-circles, dispensing puny hot puffs of air. From a distance the shipyard whistle broke the midday quiet, heralding the arrival of the office men who soon came singly or in pairs, wiping their necks with white handkerchiefs—“Jesus, don’t this beat them all?” But Dolly hadn’t come and so she merely sat there, a little fearful that some man might recognize her, and draw certain conclusions when Dolly arrived. They knew about Milton and Dolly. They knew. Or did they? Men … An enormous Negro woman brought her water in a glass, with which she printed wet circles on a tissue doily. At last she arose, prepared to leave, but from the hallway, in the mirror of a walnut hatrack, she saw Dolly open the screen door and stand looking around, warm and unhappy. Helen smiled a little and beckoned, and Dolly came over and sat down, averting her eyes, with an apology and a guarded remark about the heat. The waitress appeared with typed menus, mopping her brow.

“What’ll you have, my dear?” said Helen.

“Well, really. I’m not hungry,” Dolly said, smiling uneasily. “Just some iced tea, I guess.”

“Well, heavens, you have to eat,” Helen said lightly, “especially in the summer. I’ve heard that a person loses so much that—waitress, I’ll have the salmon croquettes and tea—that—what I mean is—” looking up—“you perspire so much, you see, that you have to eat to counteract that—the loss. Of course, that’s only one theory.”

“Yes,” Dolly replied, gazing around in misery, “this sure is some day.”

The waitress bent over. “You don’t want nothin’ else, ma’am?”

“No,” Dolly said, “no.”

“And how’s your committee?” Helen went on. “I haven’t been to the garden club in ages. I’m afraid——”

“Oh, fine. Oh, just fine.”

By one o’clock they had neared the end of their road of mutual interest, and the byways had been fully explored; Helen, doing most of the talking, thought pleasantly of her particular hatred for this woman. Furthermore, she felt already victorious, deliciously regal: she could administer the
coup de grâce
at any time, and without the degrading preliminaries. She was hot now, but vaguely excited. She reflected that in the years she had known Dolly, no matter how casually and with what hidden suspicion, it had always been this way, more or less. There are people for whom, when you see them after a long time, you begin to hoard up mentally all of the stray scraps of information which you know might be of common concern, for after these are used up there is nothing left to talk about, and then inevitably the person will drive you to distraction. Such was Dolly, although now she didn’t seem to be prepared to say anything at all—being fearfully ill-at-ease—and Helen, in mid-sentence, looked around her, watching the men drift out one by one, satiated, drowsy, scratching themselves, leaving behind in the room the fragile blue scent of cigars. She and Dolly were alone. The traffic, quieted during the lunch hour, began to flow again sluggishly up the street. She lit a cigarette.

“Oh,” she was saying. “I remember Ellen Davison, she was the one whose husband left her, the Navy person, and it caused her all sorts of trouble. No one would speak to her. Well, she was truly a horrible person and you just might guess what it did to his career.”

“Yes,” Dolly said, and raised her head timidly, and Helen could see on her lip a faint beady mustache of sweat.

They were both silent then. Finally Helen said, “Don’t you want some coffee?”

“No, thanks; no, really, I’ve got to be going. Melvin’s going back to school on Monday and I’ve just got to do some shopping.” She ventured the first part of a smile, as if Helen’s suggestion about coffee had really indicated, marvelously, despite the telephone conversation, that this was a social visit after all. It was the smile of a reprieved prisoner, and it broadened upon her pretty face, and became suddenly a laugh of deliverance: “Honey,” she giggled, “we sure do have a time with our children, don’t we? Melvin’s just like his daddy, the fat old thing. Sixteen, imagine that, and I got to get him size-thirty-six pants.” She paused, smiled and looked at her watch. “Well——”

Now.

“Listen here,” Helen said, bending forward. Again she couldn’t bring herself to repeat Dolly’s name. “I want to talk to you about something serious.”

Dolly turned, alert and intent. “Why, sure, what’s the matter?”

“I’ll get down to cases,” Helen went on, not smiling, but not betraying anger, either—controlling herself. “It’s my husband. Now listen—now I think you know why I wanted to see you. Listen—” she arched her eyebrows and, without raising her hand from the table, waved an admonitory finger—“I think really I’ve had just about enough, don’t you? You see, I have a family, which is very important to me, a
very
important thing. Also, there’s something else, the decency or indecency of the thing, if you know what I mean, and frankly—listen: Frankly, I’m tired of having these hints and rumors reaching me about the way Milton has been carrying on. Now, I know Milton isn’t beyond reproach, he’s got many faults like I suspect all husbands do, but I want to make it plain right now that I’m not going to let you carry on like this anymore.” While she talked she knew somehow that things were not going well at all; she seemed to have lost the advantage of surprise, her face felt suddenly feverish and, besides, Dolly had not become immediately crushed, as she had intended, but was only returning her gaze with receptive, placid eyes, and with her lower lip tucked thoughtfully between her teeth. “You see what I mean,” Helen went on in a level voice, “I’m not being vindictive. I’m right now offering you an opportunity to mend your ways and then we’ll say, all’s forgotten, live and let live, and so on. Do you understand?” What on earth had happened?

Dolly stretched languidly, all fear gone, as if now—having met the adversary—the apprehension, the pre-contest anxiety had vanished. Slowly she stretched, raising clasped hands to the ceiling, and made a small rude noise—like a belch—of apathy, of indifference. “Honey,” she sighed, letting her arms fall, “I just wouldn’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What do you mean—” Helen hadn’t foreseen this: the fury—“what on earth do you mean? What do you mean—don’t know what I’m talking about? I’ll tell you what I’m talking about very well. You know exactly. For six years I’ve known about you and Milton. Six years. That’s what. Watching you make a fool of him! Breaking up my family, that’s what! And you don’t know what I’m talking about! As God is my witness——” How disordered she had become, and how quickly her sure determination had gone astray! That subtle, secret weapon of Dolly’s—of indifference, of smug, easy denial—had thrown her attack into wild confusion. Swiftly she said, in a loud clear voice: “You see what I mean, don’t you? You’re breaking up my family because you’re a selfish, immoral, vicious woman. For six years you’ve worked your way with Milton and now that my daughter has gone off to school I need him even more and I won’t have it! Understand, I just won’t!” She wagged her forefinger, then stretched out her whole hand, trembling, casting anathema through the Bide-A-Wee. Old Mrs. Prosser, who ran the place, appeared at the door with a bevy of wild-eyed Negroes. “I’ll not suffer for six years,” Helen shouted, “and then plan—look forward to spent … spending the rest of my life in human bondage to your dirt-smut.”

Dolly had got up, collected her purse and umbrella. She looked down at Helen with a brief hard gaze. “You wait a while,” she said softly, “just you wait a while. I’ll put things right out in the open, which you’d never do. O.K. Listen,” she whispered, bending toward her, “if I’ve done wrong with Milton—wrong, as you put it—it hasn’t been any six years. It was two weeks ago, honey, at the country club at your dance. There, see, that’s a confession. And we’re going to keep on as long as Milton wants to. And I don’t care how much or where, honey, or how much people talk. Because I love him and that’s more than you do and you know it.”