William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (31 page)

“Here, darling?” she was saying.

“Oh, Jesus, I’ll show her.” Over and over.

“Here, darling?”

He said nothing.

Then, “Wait,” he said. He put his hand inside on her breast, paused, drew his hand away. He took her arm and guided her through the darkness to another room—a woman’s, she could tell: perfume hung in the air, and a sharp smell of medicine. “I’ll show her,” he was saying. From the sea, wind brought the odor of salt and rain, but here all was emptiness, repose and promise, the silence of an abandoned room. Her heart beat faster and faster; she felt like a famished wanderer come back from a land where there wasn’t any love: here, like all those other places, like the Hotel Patrick Henry in Richmond, or that funny little tourist camp—was it Chevy Chase or Silver Springs?—she could find, in the mystery of a strange and untried room, new passion, new annealment, as hot as desire, for their love, still so futile and lame. Two and three and her apartment, four places, and this made five. Poor Milton, such a lost little boy. He fumbled toward her and they undressed. In the darkness, taking his hand, with nothing troubling her secret glow of triumph, she lay down next to him on Helen’s bed. Soon, “Have you?” she said.

“Not yet.”

“Have you?”

“No. I can’t,” he groaned.

“Now.”

“Yes, yes,” he said.

It was a lie but she couldn’t tell. In a moment she fell asleep, sleeping heavily, and she didn’t wake when he stirred beside her: smothered by dreams of shame, he had been on a ship at sea, gazing toward a barren arctic headland. Beside him at the rail Peyton turned to face him, lips upturned for a kiss; but a breath of coldness, darkening the ship, sea and land, swept over them like a blast of hail. “I’m cold,” she said, “I’m cold,” turning her eyes sadly away and she was gone, and now it seemed to be the uttermost ends of the earth, this land of rocks and shadows, walls sheering off to the depths of a soundless, stormless ocean, while far off on the heights there was a blaze without meaning, twin pyres that warned of a fear blind as dying, twin columns of smoke, a smell, a dreaming blue vapor of defilement.

Who is burning now?

Dolly slept. He turned from the sea, awoke, his head throbbing, and sat on the edge of the bed. He looked away from the sheets, the white, sprawling arms, and stared at the bay. Rain came down in torrents. Foghorns gave groans of warning all the way to Cape Henry, and searchlights prodded the darkness; the night was full of dizzy eyes. In the barracks in the field the soldiers slept. He thrust his head into his hands and thought of war and time, of headland fires and of great men, and of the shame of being born to such dishonor.

He could have died when the phone beside the bed rang, and the Western Union girl read, in weary hired tones: MAUDIE IS BADLY OFF. YOU MUST COME AT ONCE.

Even in autumn, season of death, time brings forgetfulness to thoughts of death, lost loves and lost hopes. Men (for instance, Loftis) whose fathers have lain for twenty years in darkness are often grateful that time has given them a dispassionate eye with which to view the hidden bones, the fleshless smirk, the hairless skull smothered among the roots and vines. Loftis could take refuge in time’s conscience-obliterating flow just as easily as he could in whisky; as a matter of fact, it was a combination of the two—several incautious swigs from his bottle before he had driven as far as Yorktown, and contemplation of the fact that, no matter how bad things seemed, they would be over soon—which steadied his nerves for the entire trip. Death was in the air: he thought briefly of his father, of Maudie; but wasn’t autumn the season of death, and all Virginia a land of dying? In the woods strange, somehow rather marvelous fires were burning: across the gray day, the road still shiny with last night’s rain, gray smoke drifted, bringing to his nostrils the odor of burned wood and leaves. Ghosts of Rochambeau and McClellan, old campfires of earlier falls, with smoke just as blue as this, just as fatal. He thought of other things: a two under par he’d made last August, the thread of a song: what party was it, what dance? He drank.

He had taken Dolly to her apartment at dawn, kissed her good-by, miserably. She had said, “Oh, do call me when you get there. When you find out how everything is.” He had hardly answered. “O.K., kitten. Good-by.” The dawn itself was bleak, extraordinary: overcast, it spread against the western sky a pale reflection, more like dusk than morning. His head ached, he thought of Maudie. God, he thought, and all my life I have given such little thought to her. Now this …

And quickly he forgot her, pushed her rather, mercifully, out of his mind: a new vision appeared, filling him with relief and a momentary contentment—Peyton. For a while he had almost overlooked the sweet, glorious fact of the matter; now it came back to him with all the tender pleasure of finding, at the dry tag end of a party, four surprise bottles of beer: she would be in Charlottesville, too. He’d hunt for her, she’d be with that Cartwright boy. See, God: it is the law of compensation; for my fright you have let me still have this loveliness. Peyton, my darling dear … Thank you also for the C card; perhaps there’ll be gas enough for both of us (even the Cartwright boy, if he wants to come along) to drive up to the mountains, to Afton.

By-by, Papadaddy.
Oh, Jesus. From another pint, he drank. Past him a jalopy fled, carrying young people with pennants, bottles, celebrant smiles. Of course, he thought. The football game. Behind the receding window a girl turned, smiled and winked at him, and held up a pint bottle. He smiled back, and held up his own above the dashboard, but a curve took her out of sight, rocking wildly, enveloped by a boy’s overcoated arm. In the drab county beyond Richmond—so poor, he remembered, that a crow flying over had to carry his own provisions—cornstalks prodded upward stripped and brown. Goochland? Fluvanna? All those funny names. He drank again, desperately. Among the pine woods beyond the nigger cabins smoke curled in the trees, drifted to earth: buzzards circled over, like homing angels swung higher and higher and vanished above him. Once he heard a shotgun, far off, and saw the rump of a panicky deer.
Just don’t let her die, please,
he prayed to nothing, while he capped his bottle again;
for all of our sakes, just keep her alive, even
… Outside of Charlottesville a motorcycle roared past, a man and a woman in cowboy suits and airplane caps, and the woman turned blue, infant eyes in his direction and thumbed her nose. Choking with fury, Loftis gave chase, hitting seventy, but lost them, and at eleven o’clock when he drew up in front of the hospital he was soaked in sweat, hard-pressed to find a parking space, and on the verge of getting sick.

In an upstairs corridor he walked aimlessly beneath the lofty gaze of nurses, and it was with an increasing feebleness of soul that he inhaled the familiar hospital smell. Then, startled, he ran into Helen at a corner. He blinked at her stupidly, smelling her perfume, the medical vapor stifled beneath an odor of synthetic gardenias. He took her arms beneath the elbows. She looked awful, and she led him to a sun porch where they sat while she told him about Maudie. The sun porch was clean and uncomfortably warm and rather shoddy. The chair on which he sat was rump-sprung, and somewhere a radiator bore tuneless spanking notes through the corridors. He was very tight, and as she talked, filling his ears with a chant of medical terms too rapidly, too confusingly delivered for him quite to understand, he knew that it would somehow have been the decent thing to remain sober, at least for just this morning. November light, gray and depressing, covered the sun porch. His eyes wandered from Helen’s face—what was it she was saying: an osteo-something, a tuberculous what?—resting briefly upon a pile of magazines, and now, fuzzily, he was gazing out over the college grounds, the leafless trees above walks where boys in overcoats hustled along, and the blue soaring hills. Absently he took her hand. “Yes, yes,” he was saying, “I see,” and looked back again at the sun porch: nearly deserted, it had a mausoleum air; hunched beside a window, an old man in a bathrobe hacked croupily and plucked at the antique blue veins of his hand.

“The doctors say she has a fair chance,” she said finally, in a hoarse and wretched voice.

“That’s fine,” he said, “that’s fine,” and his words must have sounded as strange to Helen as to him—even while he was saying them—for she looked at him curiously, without a blink, her mouth open a little. It was odd, too, he thought, that his mind was on Dolly: nothing in particular—something she had said (to telephone her, wasn’t it? Yes, but it wouldn’t be really for Maudie, but only to talk to him), lingering in his consciousness—and instantly he thought how amazing, how amazing, the way she had seemed to take possession of his life, so subtly, perhaps, but totally. “Fine,” he said again in a soft voice, without thinking, and feeling, at precisely the same instant, with a shock much as if he had been hit on the side of the head by a brick, that truly both of them had lost their minds. Through the gray light his mind floated into a semblance of focus, and he turned quickly to face Helen’s startled eyes, and felt sweat beneath his armpits. “I mean,” he said, too loudly, “I mean, Helen, what on earth happened? There wasn’t anything wrong, much wrong with her when you left. Did something happen up here? What happened, Helen?”

She gazed at him for a moment. Her eyes were huge and red-rimmed, and it was obvious that she didn’t quite believe what she heard. Then she closed her eyes and shook her head slowly back and forth, as if the idiocy of his question was just too much to bear. “Oh,” she groaned, “oh, God.” Behind them, framed against the chill sickly light, the old man was bent over the table as he picked through a pile of magazines, with one hand clawing at his crotch; Loftis shook his head, too, violently, striving for light and reason. He saw the old man’s neck go suddenly up like a turkey’s, Adam’s-apple bobbing, as he gazed out, for no apparent reason at all, toward the hills. I
will
become sober, he thought.

“I mean, Helen—oh, you see what I mean. You say the doctors say she’s got a chance and all——”

“Milton,” she broke in, “I don’t think I can stand this anymore. I can’t stand seeing you like this. I just can’t. I’ve just had enough. Don’t you see what’s happening?”

He looked at her for sympathy, in sodden distress, and he felt that he would have given all his wealth for the ability to pay one moment’s sober penance. “Helen, I see——”

“Don’t say anything. Just don’t say anything. Your own daughter, as sick as she is, and you aren’t even sane—yes, sane enough to know what’s happening. You——”

Below, Halloween horns blew amid a garland of cowbells, a football sound, and the old invalid suddenly strangled behind them, horribly and obscenely, with a noise like the last gurgle of water sliding down a drain. They both turned; the man looked up, perfectly composed. He had a huge scimitar of a nose from which the skin had begun to peel away in flakes, eyes pressed so deep in his head that they seemed, to Loftis, like billiard balls sunk in their pockets. With a shock Loftis realized that the man had no hair on his body at all. And with the disregard for convention which is the privilege of lonely old people, he made no introduction but stared at the two of them from the caves of his skull and stretched a skinny, hairless arm toward the hills.

“Might as well be frank,” he said. “I came up here to die. I came up to die near Mr. Jefferson. There he is”—he pointed toward Monticello—“there he is, up on the hill. On clear days you can see it from here. Yes sir, I sit here in the afternoon and look up at the hills and it takes a lot of the pain away to know you’re near Mr. Jefferson when it comes time to shuffle off this mortal coil.” His voice rose, thin, tremulous and old; Loftis saw a tiny flake of skin fall from his nose, but now there was a touch of color, too, on his cheeks, somehow rather dangerous. “I came all the way from the Eastern Shore to spend my last days here and Mr. Jefferson, if he was alive he’d appreciate it, I think. He was a gentleman. He was——”

A flicker of sunlight entered the room and at the same time a squat, officious nurse. “Mr. Dabney!” she said. “You know you aren’t allowed out of that chair. Bad boy! Now it’s back to bed with you.” Mr. Dabney had no opportunity even to say good-by. He merely said, “Yes, ma’am,” and humbly shambled out after the nurse, leaving behind the faint smell of rubbing alcohol.

“I’m sane enough, Helen,” Loftis said quietly, turning back to her, “I’m sane. I’m sorry, too. Can I see her now?”

“No,” she said, “she’s sleeping right now.”

“Oh.” He hesitated for a moment. “Well, what are we going to do?”

She buried her face in her hands. “We’ve just got to wait.”

It was painful, but they waited, saying nothing to each other. On the street below cars passed steadily, covered with streamers and Confederate flags, toward the stadium. Helen began to chain-smoke, glancing sightlessly through a
Reader’s Digest.
Loftis tried to think of Maudie, but somehow his thoughts didn’t seem to make sense: how, just how, was one supposed to feel now at a moment like this? Was this, after twenty years not of love but only a sort of sad, evasive fondness, all one felt—neither fear nor grief but just a wistfulness, a need to be left alone? It was cruel not to love or feel as one was supposed to. It was hell. And now it was even crueler, feeling as he did so anxiously the desire to say a sedative word, to know that he had already failed utterly in Helen’s eyes and that she would dismiss his comfort as graceless or phony, and perhaps both. Yet he held out his hand, saying, “Helen, don’t worry, everything’ll be all right, don’t worry,” and with a mild shock he felt her take it by the finger tips, looking up at him with eyes sorrowful, almost kindly—as if for once, just for this once, perhaps—she was suspending from him the eternal crushing weight of her judgment.

“Stay with me,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I will, Helen.”

“Stay with me,” she repeated.

“Yes,” he said.

“I’ve never felt anything like this in all my life.”

“That’s all right, honey, everything’ll be all right. Just try to take it easy.”