William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (28 page)

Peyton knocked over her glass.

They all three arose at once, moving for napkins, a handkerchief, heading for the kitchen, but Helen was first: “Keep still, I’ll get it.” Peyton’s face was white and bewildered, and her eyes sought his as she moved her lips soundlessly, beseeching. A trickle of water drained down her skirt. They both sat down, and now Helen was on her knees beside Peyton, mopping up the water, humble, propitiating, but saying nothing—a charwoman immersed in a flood of atonement. And Loftis, hot anger and despair surging up in his chest, thought: God, like a nigger she wants to be, a black slave. She wrung the rag out into a pan, dabbed at the spots of water beneath the table, and squeezed out the rag again. Then she got up, with an air of infinite weariness, and went back to the kitchen. She cleared the dishes away. Neither of them rose to help her; they were cowed by her. Peyton looked at him, and her eyes were full of tears. He smiled a little, put his finger to his lips and gave her a subdued, numb wink. If we can get through this dinner, he thought, I can get Helen off by herself somewhere. He reached out and touched Peyton’s hand. Oh, to keep her home.

“The pudding!”

Maudie clapped her hands, shouted again; in it came, glorious and flaming. “It looks wonderful,” Loftis ventured hopefully. Helen began to carve slices from its flank. “Thank you,” she replied, and her voice was surprisingly decent and sociable. “Ella made it. I wish I could make a pudding.”

“It was a lovely turkey, too, Mother,” Peyton said. She smiled a little. There was no answer.

“Helen,” he said bluntly, “Peyton said she liked the turkey.”

“Oh.” She looked up and smiled, but her eyes fell only on the walls. “Thank you. I burnt it some across the bottom.”

“It was a lovely turkey, Mammadear,” said Maudie.

Helen smiled again, made a little humming sound, and there was an adoring look on her face as she paused to stroke Maudie’s cheek. “Thank you, darling,” she said.

In such small dramas of frustration there comes a moment when something must give. Loftis knew that Helen was spoiling for a breakdown. God help her, wasn’t she aware of what she had been doing? What crazy furied winds, bearing the debris of what wicked imaginings, sour suspicions, balked hopes, had swept her mind? Who on earth was it that she hated, loved? And had she indeed cried aloud in the nighttime for love to return on white, silent wings: Yes, Milton, feel that; haven’t I got love down there, too? For
that
he could feel guilt and pity. But now, for this show of immeasurable shabbiness, nothing but hatred. He wished he had the courage to slap her across her drawn, tortured face. He thought of Dolly.
Oh, Jesus
… The room, lit only by candles, was filled with wintry shadows. Two edges of a cloud parted, an open wound, revealing sunlight, the stark and frozen bay, icicles sparkling at the eaves like pendant blades of glass—and closed again: like sunflowers, Maudie’s eyes turned toward the window, turned back again as the shadow descended. Then casually she put on the purple paper hat.

There was one at each place. Why Helen had put them there no one but she could explain, and Loftis couldn’t ask her. Three were purple, his was green, left over from some long-ago birthday, and Maudie’s gesture was a signal: Helen gravely put hers on, slanting it down over her forehead, then Peyton, then he himself. Save for the diffident tinkle of the coffee cups, the table was plunged into silence. No one said a word. But from a great distance, glancing secretly from face to face as if through a pane of translucent glass, they watched each other over the rims of their cups, with unfocused pupils that managed to caress—rather than a person or other eyes—the walls and the far horizon. In an instant, each of them crowned with the gaudy innocence of birthday hats, each of them took a lasting fatal measurement: of whose guilt, of whose love or hatred, and why, of the length that all this could endure. Then they looked past each other, demurely and foolishly, into the windy wilderness of sky and frozen sea. Only Maudie escaped; oblivious, she turned to Loftis, saying, “Papadaddy, this is a Christmas hat.” Only Maudie and perhaps Peyton. No, Loftis knew, not Peyton after all—she who arose with a gasp from her chair, upsetting the water again. Loftis would remember the water: pure, pale and cold, still bearing on its miniature tide two cubes of ice as it swept across the table, it engulfed the legs of the salt cellar, swept on, drenching the prim lace doilies, and sank like a waterfall over the edge, soaking the carpet in a noisy clean spatter.

Here Peyton stood, sidestepping the flood, stiff with fury, her arms straight as broomsticks at her side. “Oh—” she began, looking not at Helen, but at Loftis. “Oh, God! Oh!” Helen had got up, too, and in sudden mimicry, Maudie, who had started to cry. He alone was left sitting, with a feeling of paralysis, watching them. Above Maudie’s frightened moans came Peyton’s “Oh!” again, and Helen, the purple hat still slanted violently across her brow, her eyes growing wide with awareness, contrition or regret, perhaps just fear, put both hands convulsively to her mouth and began to sob. “I’ve tried to make——” she began. But no one was listening. Peyton tore off her own hat, threw it to the floor, and rushed weeping past Loftis out of the house. He was transfixed. It was many seconds before he was able to rise and shout, with lamentable rhetoric, “Helen, by God, this is the end!” But in the meantime she had run to the vestibule, dragging Maudie with her, and he could hear her frantic voice at the telephone: “Carey! No. Yes. May I speak to Mr. Carr?”

He grabbed Peyton’s coat and his own, and followed her outside. It was frightfully cold; a path had been cleared along the flagstones to the seawall, and it was here, above the beach, that he found her. She was standing alone; he threw the coat around her shoulders.

“Baby, you’ll catch pneumonia.”

She didn’t answer him, only nodded a little and shivered.

“Come on back inside now.”

“No.”

“Baby——”

“No, I tell you!”

“Baby, listen——”

“No.”

“Baby, listen——”

“No.”

“Look, baby, we’ll get the car and drive down to Old Point to the hotel, have a drink, talk this thing over. It can’t be this bad. Already she’s sorry——” Frantically he contrived—anything to keep her with him—the weirdest blandishments. But it was no use. He turned her about and dried her tears, pulling her close to him.

“Look, baby——”

“She’s crazy. Absolutely, Bunny. Absolutely off her head.” She pressed her head down on his shoulder. “Oh, I can’t stand it!”

“Yes,” he said.

“I’m never coming back here again.”

“No,” he said hoarsely. “No, that’s not true.”

“Yes, that’s true,” she said, and her arms went tightly around his waist. It began to snow tentatively; past the frozen reach of ice the bay was as black as dusk, as despair, and a cruiser slid rakishly off into war and night: night would come soon on a day as bleak as this. He kissed her hair, her brow.

“Baby,” he whispered, “don’t leave me. I love you so.”

“Bunny?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve tried to do what’s right. Do you think everything will turn out O.K. someday? I’ve tried, Bunny, I’ve tried. Do you think so?”

“Oh, yes, baby. Lord, yes.”

“I’m a good girl, I think. All I’ve done is just what’s normal. Oh, Bunny. I’ve——” She shivered. “It’s cold.”

“Shh-h. We’ll get over all this.”

But it was true; she was going, and he felt that she would never come back again. He felt it all afternoon when they sat alone in the living room. Helen remained upstairs. Friends of theirs, the Albrights, a youngish couple with eyes avid for refreshment, dropped in later on, and Peyton served them the rest of the eggnog. They lingered too long, talked too much, and ruined any chance he might have had to speak to Peyton; for when they left, still talking, they collided at the doorway with Dick Cartwright, who had come to take her off in his brand-new convertible. She packed her bag, avoiding Helen. She simply said that they were going back to finish the holidays at the home of Dick’s parents on the Rappahannock. The snow had ceased. The air was damp and cold, and the houses up and down the street, with their dimly lit windows, had a subdued look, as if everyone finally were tired of Christmas. “Drive carefully, son,” he said. “Write me, baby,” and kissing her through the car window seemed neither sweet nor proper, but only the bitter farewell to a dubious season. “Come back soon,” he said, and desperately: “Everything will be all right.” But she merely gave him a sad grin, and winked. “Tell Maudie by-by for me,” she said, and the pane of glass floated up smoothly between them, and the car eased forth down an arch of icy sycamores.

Inside the house, immersed in the glow of the Christmas tree, the presents lay unopened, including Peyton’s. He poured a drink. If he could get off to war, he thought, get a commission, everything would be solved. … That lousy Edward with his cheap arrogance … Upstairs a light burned softly in Helen’s room. He had four drinks in a row and went to the bottom of the stairs.

“Helen,” he shouted upward, “you’re a real horror, do you know that? Why, God damn your soul, I——” But what was it he was trying to say, and of what use? In place of anger, he felt only a vast, detestable pity. And at any rate, Helen made no answer. He turned on the radio: spongy sounds came out, a crooner’s voice that sang of a white Christmas, and a choir of trombones shunting leaky, synthetic notes across the darkness.

He called Dolly, but she was out again. Finally, when Ella came at eight to wash the dishes, he helped her, getting soapy, getting drunk and filled with a sudden mawkish ecstasy:
Go tell it on de mountain,
they sang together, Ella disapproving. “Seems like you ain’t cheersome with Christmas,” she said, raising a withered arm to shove his glass out of the way, “seems like you just gittin’ drunk.”
Go tell it on de mountain,
he sang, loudly and bravely,
over de hill and everywhere.

Dat Jesus Christ is born …

And “Good night, Ella,” he said, “Happy New Year for you. Christmas Gif’!”—pressing five dollars into her hand, and finally groping his way upstairs past Helen’s darkened room, the stertorous breathing sleep—dreaming what dreams?—and into bed, thinking of Peyton, close to tears.

That was Christmas. Peyton came home neither in the spring nor in the summer, when she stayed at the home of a classmate in Washington. Four times during the summer he drove up alone to see her. But from Christmas on, the memory of the holiday remained in a corner of his mind, inflaming his emotions, his affairs, and caused him to retreat from contact with Helen in almost any form. They lived like shadows together, indeed like “boarders,” as Helen had said, but like boarders in some city rooming house who pass each other stiffly on the stairs, trailing behind them the warm air of suspicion and dislike and who, to show their real breeding, are each obsessively dedicated to keeping their radios turned down, the bathroom spotless, and their manners beyond reproach. They seldom spoke to each other, except on business. Loftis hated the business sessions—not merely because he was forced, with a sketchy show of politeness, to talk to Helen, but because, since money was involved, they made him conscious of his continued dependence upon her. From his law practice he received a marginal income, and the practice itself, involving as it did contracts and drafts and mortgages, was an increasing bore. Gradually though, and as if by a mutual unspoken agreement, his and Helen’s daily life became so scheduled that they were not often faced with the ordeal of gazing into each other’s eyes. Remorse for Peyton he knew she felt. He noticed that she kept Peyton’s picture on her dresser, in a silver frame, along with Maudie’s. That meant something, a little something, at least. And one hot, fearsome spring night he heard her call out her name aloud, while she slept: a lone startled cry—“Peyton!”—and lying in the muggy moonlit silence, alone in his room, he wondered about her dreams. When he left one week end in June for Washington, she astonished him with her shyness. “Tell Peyton I send my love,” she said. He put on his raincoat; she kissed him on the cheek: it was like a feather brushing against his skin—the first time she had kissed him in over a year.

As for Dolly—well, all this time they had kept up a nimble romance, and it was an affair which should have, ideally, worked out all right on both sides, for at this point Dolly had begun to shuck off Pookie like an old cocoon, and Helen no longer gave Loftis any trouble—being generally silent and resigned and preoccupied with Carey Carr, and with Maudie. The only unholy note which intruded in upon their pleasure was Loftis’ awareness that everyone in town knew about them. It wasn’t because of Helen that he wished to keep it secret. He only wished to wear his rectitude like a topcoat, concealing from others what embarrassed him and made him feel not quite a gentleman. The nasty words of gossip which reached him clung thick as bats from the roof of his mind, and cast, to the very end, a bleak, secretive unpleasantness over their affair. People knew, as people in even middle-sized towns will know, their various ruses—artfully prepared, and sadly transparent: how on week ends he might entrain for Richmond—“to see Senator So-and-So,” he would tell Helen, and perpetuating an unneeded deception; Dolly, in turn, would be in Richmond, too. Shopping. Everybody shopped in Richmond on Saturdays. Or Washington. Once in a while he and Dolly met in Washington, which was nearly two hundred miles away. Hell, they’d say in the country club locker room, you know how Milt’s getting his. Everybody knew, bearing testimony to the fact that suburban vice, like a peeling nose, is almost impossible to conceal. It went all over town, this talk, like a swarm of bees, settling down lazily on polite afternoon sun porches to rise once more and settle down again with a busy murmur among cautious ladylike foursomes on the golf course, buzzing pleasurably there amid ladylike whacks of the golf ball and cautious pullings-down of panties which bound too tightly. Everybody knew about their affair and everybody talked about it, and because of some haunting inborn squeamishness it would not have relieved Loftis to know that nobody particularly cared.