William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (32 page)

She took her hand away and said in a toneless voice: “You see, like we always expected, something happened. You see, don’t you? I’ve told you how all my life I’ve been dreading this time. Remember what that doctor in Richmond told us years ago? How with her like she is you never knew what might come up to make her take a turn for the worse. Now this—” She paused. “But I know,” she went on in a monotone, “I know. I know what’s happened.” She hesitated again, continuing in a voice more agitated: “Yes, I know, Milton. And I’m the only one that knows. Only if anything happens I’ll tell you. Do you understand what I mean?”

“No,” he replied, “no, Helen, I just don’t see——” Listening to her, he could have sworn that for a moment she had gone mad, but now again she was clutching his finger tips, saying calmly, “Stay with me, Milton. Stay by me now. Stay with me, Milton.”

“Yes, Helen, but what was it that——”

The same dumpy nurse appeared at the door with a busybody rustle and a tray bristling with thermometers and it occurred to Loftis that she looked like Mayor LaGuardia of New York City. “Mrs. Loftis,” she said, “Maudie’s still asleep, but Dr. Brooks would like to see you for a minute.”

Helen got up quickly. “I’ll just be a minute, Milton.”

He rose from his chair. “All right,” he said. “Don’t you want me to——”

“No,” she said, “that’s all right. Dr. Brooks, he—he knows me and——”

Clumsily he took her by the arm. “Don’t worry, honey,” he said. “She’ll be O.K. We’ll all——” But she had left.

He walked to the window, thinking of the women in his life. He yearned for a drink, and wistfully his mind sought the glove compartment of the car. From below came the noise of moaning horns and a faint sad sound like distant tambourines, and people walked beneath the leafless trees. Against the hills a big blue kite rose and fell. Four young people passed in an open convertible, singing, waved an orange banner, and were gone, while behind him, borne through the odor of medicine, came a woman’s voice demanding Dr. Hall, Dr. Hall in surgery: heavy the scalpel of him who cuts, heavy the knife, heavy the guilt. Professional men like himself, they knew the power of specious knowledge. He licked his lips; they were dry. He was a little surprised to feel a nerve twitching beneath one eyelid. What was it that Helen meant about Maudie? Or had finally just something snapped inside her? Poor little Maudie, he thought, just don’t let her … The kite soared against the gray sky, swooped nervously and caught its tail in a tree. Two boys went up after it, groping among the branches, but finally gave up, and the kite hung disconsolately among the topmost limbs, a splash of blue, like a jaybird snared in honeysuckle. Below it there was a lane, a row of houses, and the cottage, a seedy place, he remembered, but somehow redeemed even then, and that was thirty years ago, by the wild roses which grew around the porch, as in a novel by Gene Stratton Porter. They called it Sleepy Time Home, in the way of lovers who are eighteen years old; and eluding her father, who was a brakeman on the C & O Railroad and who despised University boys, was an exciting and dangerous thing. Late spring and Papa was away to Waynesboro or Staunton or somewhere, and they lay down in the darkness holding each other while she cried, saying: “Oh, honey, I just can’t stand it. If Papa was to find out what happened he’d kill me, he’d kill me——” And bravely, resolute but frightened, and feeling even then desire like smoke rising between their bodies: “Don’t worry, Audrey. Don’t worry, honey, nobody’ll find out, I’ll get a doctor or something. … I know a fellow … somewhere …” How like that fear was this fear he had now, how long ago it was! He pressed his brow against the window, trying to remember. My God, Audrey—Audrey what? But he had been lucky; it had been so simple at that age to be cruel, since eighteen has no heart.

She had been lucky, too, had later told him, “I’m all right now, honey. I was just scared for a couple days, I guess.” Asking him to kiss her again, like he used to. “No,” he had said. “No, I’m going now.” And her sorrow then, her horrible gasping enormous sorrow. “I’ll kill myself.” Frightened, he had replied, “Go on, I don’t care,” and had walked out into the swollen May evening, waiting for a shot, a shriek that never came, and disillusioned, for the first of many times, with love. At that age he was clear-headed enough to understand that he was not alone in a world of mismated passions: others betrayed and were betrayed, and got tired of loving. But his soul was romantic, and although he never saw her again he felt pity for her, and despised himself (just a little) for his misprision. Yet to have even
that
much conscience now, how noble it would be: he might have become a great man, a great lawyer, a poet. And pettishly, as he gazed at the kite in the tree, he tried to curse himself, but couldn’t, and found himself cursing instead the obstinate female flesh which had destroyed his conscience even more brutally than time, and had brought him to these convulsive days and untidy evenings. He thought of Maudie dying, and of Helen, and he felt sick with fear and sorrow. The kite trembled in the wind, fell to another branch and then lay still. The row of houses looked gray and cold and shabby. That was so many years ago, she’d be nearly fifty, a woman run long ago to fat, with bad teeth and a house smelling still, most likely, of kerosene. He would walk up the steps, knock at the frayed screen door, watching the cottonwood tree, filled with leaves in spring, now bare and rusty, shaking in the wind: it would be taller now, bigger, arching heavy branches over the house. She would come to the door, a slattern in rags (Why, he wondered, did he snobbishly picture her like this?), with the odor of the milk of her grandchildren, and she would ask him, maybe nicely, what it was he wanted and who he might be.

He would tell her, then right off say, “Why did you betray me, girl? Why didn’t you tell me what love was? You knew, you knew. You had the secret. The trouble we had, it should have bound us together: it only made me arrogant and cruel. You knew what love was, you could have told me. You betrayed me.” And she would say, “Ah, no, honey, it was I who was betrayed. I gave you the secret, and that for the last time. Your last love was with me, and you never knew it. I tried to tell you that love wasn’t in the mind or the heart or the flesh, either, but something that comes as easy as morning and never leaves. But you were afraid, even then——” And he would put in quickly, “But I was young then, and though I was cruel I guess I had more conscience than I do now. Have a little charity——” But she would say, “Charity, honey, don’t talk about charity. You can’t undo time. Go back to your life and stop thinking about what can’t be retrieved and remember how love comes as easy——”

“Don’t you see, though?” he would cry. “Don’t you see? I want to know the secret——” Then she would be gone, the door would close, and he would be alone on the porch. He’d try to call out her name, but his voice would fail him and he would go too. He’d leave behind him forever the cottonwood tree, the bare withered vines, thwarted by longing: that woman’s flesh should never become real, but reside only in memory, and that love should be just a sound which rose like a kite through long-ago darkness—a word, a laugh, a sigh, something like that, and the noise of sagging springs and the rustle of half-drawn blinds.

He turned from the window; his hands were sweaty and his face, save for a crescent of his brow which had been against the pane, prickly with fever. The sun porch seemed unbearably depressing, and he felt that he had to get out of there, go someplace, anywhere—anywhere to think things over. He went out into the corridor. There was no one in sight. A metal box, one of those vessels in which knives and such things are made sanitary, percolated briskly, sending up a cloud of steam. He was completely sober, but his eyes watered and his head ached and he was afraid. If only he could get to the car for a moment, if only he could go somewhere and concentrate and think things over …

“Milton!”

He turned. Smiling, Hubert MacPhail bore swiftly down upon him from the end of the corridor, or as swiftly as he could, considering his limp. Hubert was a Charlottesville lawyer and a KA, and he stood a good chance of being a federal judge if Harry Byrd would only die. Loftis liked him, in an unexcited way, but seeing him now for some reason was actual delight and he grabbed Hubert’s hand.

“Hubert,” he said, “what’s the matter with your foot?”

“I stepped on a goddam roller skate,” he said. “The thing was rusty and for a while they thought they’d have to take my goddam foot off. I’ve been on sulfa for a week now——” And so forth. They sat down on a hard bench for a moment, to rest Hubert’s foot. He was a large enthusiastic man with fawn-colored pouches beneath his eyes and an indecisive mustache which looked as if it had been sprinkled on; Loftis had always got on well with him, although he remembered that when he drank he became smug and aggressive. They were still holding hands, and Loftis was embarrassed. And sad. When Hubert asked him why he was there, Loftis told him and felt his eyes blurring up with tears.

“Is it—is it bad?” asked Hubert gently.

“No, no,” he answered, “it’s not very bad. I don’t think it is. The doctors——” His voice faltered. He hated the sympathy, but at the same time desperately would have liked Hubert to stay with him.

“That’s goddam tough, Milton,” Hubert said, shaking his head.

“Yes,” Loftis said.

“God
damn
tough.”

“Yes.”

Hubert slapped Loftis’ knee. “Look,” he said, “let’s go over to the house and have a drink. The boys are warming up for the game. It’ll do us both good.”

“No, thanks, Hubert. I’ve got to wait for Helen. She’s with the doctor now.” He looked nervously up the hall. It was airless and deserted. In an adjoining room a man groaned, and a fat, middle-aged woman came out, poking damply at her eyes with a handkerchief and calling feebly for a nurse. Panic seized him and suddenly he thought of Peyton—finally, finally thought of Peyton. He turned. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, “let’s go over just for a minute. You got a car? I’ll follow you in mine.”

Hubert slapped him on the back and stood up. “Buck up, old fella,” he said. “We’ll beat this goddam thing yet.”

In the KA house at noon there was an air of intense gaiety. Young people milled about on the portico, in the hallway and in the chapter room, and everybody said, “Hey! How you?” very loudly to one another. Although it was too early to drink or dance, everybody casually did both, to the noise of horns and saxophones, and the girls’ faces became pink and lovely and excited, so certain was each girl that this day was meant for her alone. At the bar, in an atmosphere of calculated darkness, boys and girls stood drinking hot rum from Mason jars, and here a perspiring brother at the piano splashed happily through an improvised boogie-woogie. Couples drove up in polished automobiles, stayed for a moment, and left, but they would return in ten minutes, after a short drive to nowhere, like fledglings come home to nest. No one could remain away for long at an hour like this—not merely because gasoline was rationed, but because there was something in the air which demanded noise and companionship. Solitude, two lovers together—these were for another time, this evening, perhaps, and the football game itself was hardly mentioned: it was only a hurdle to be overcome before the real happiness began. So the piano competed thinly with the phonograph and there was a pleasant ripe smell of liquor everywhere and the girls’ flushed pink faces passed from door to door, from room to room, sprouting like frivolous blossoms amid waves of laughter and the muted notes of saxophones.

Into these preliminaries Loftis walked, feeling old and somewhat out of place, with Hubert MacPhail hobbling at his side. There was a sprinkling of gray-haired men about, and Loftis greeted each by name and shook their hands, although without much spirit, because most of these fellow alumni he had seen not more than a month ago, at a football game in Norfolk. Hubert limped off to hunt for Buzz, his son. Loftis looked for Peyton, but she was not around and he was told by a scholarly-looking boy, who regarded him with a patronizing gaze and called him “Brother Loftis,” that she and Dick Cartwright had driven downtown to fetch some ice. Loftis thanked the boy for the drink he gave him, and warily placed himself against the wall, between a velveteen drapery and a very drunk blond girl, waiting for her date, who eyed him coyly and was able, at his most casual word, to disgorge peals of high hysterical laughter. The mood of pleasing melancholy returning, he felt very fatherly toward her, and concerned, and he once tried to prevent her from slipping, in a spasm of mirth, down the side of the wall, but at that moment her young man came up to make a laborious rescue, and then their arms about each other’s waists, the two of them weaved out of sight.

It was not quite one o’clock yet, but the mood had already become one of celebration, as if the game, a formality at most, were already won: at least no contest could be lost, encouraged as this one was by such dizzy rejoicing. Outside it was getting grayer and colder, but here, warmed by the nearness of other faces and the fraternal glow of alcohol, it seemed that every cheek was lit by a beautiful flame. The phonograph played louder and louder, the piano kept rattling in a persistent off-beat, and the half-dozen boys now dancing led their partners in ever-widening, ever more precarious circles around the room. Through a haze of smoke, wide-eyed girls with pennants and cowbells wandered, to pet, and be petted by, the graying alumni, and they cornered people in doorways and chattered breezily of
party-party-party—
in Richmond last year, or last month, or they couldn’t remember. The boys in the meantime had begun to gather up their football trappings—blankets, raincoats, a flask to keep them warm—but the music went on, now a sad love ballad, dropping guitar notes on the air like silver dimes.

All of a sudden the door opened. A gust of cold wind entered, and Peyton and Dick Cartwright, flanked by two moon-faced boys who began to brandish whisky bottles.

We come from old Virgin-i-a, they sang, where all is bright and gay …

The crowd turned, a cheer went up, and the two boys, their arms around Peyton and Dick, led a brassy encore: “Are you ready? Get set!”