William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (37 page)

Helen held her breath. Rain had begun to fall. She watched Maudie and saw her laugh and clap her hands, and saw her suddenly reach up and grope at the air, as if she were trying to recover those vanishing balls. He let his arms fall then and stood looking at Maudie with his sunken eyes sad and mysterious, his cheeks bulging like a rabbit’s. Maudie laughed and cheered. He turned his head and peered up at the sky; gray light had fallen over the shore and as he turned, with the wind tossing his hair and with his bulging eyes and cheeks and with this sudden bitter look of annoyance, so comical but at the same time somehow alarming and fearsome, he looked like the greatest magician on earth. Maudie cried out something. He turned. “Again!” she cried. Then, one by one, the balls popped from his mouth with a little click and tumbled away along the fence.

And it happened then, this thing Helen had been talking about; he did one more trick. He picked up the balls, scrabbling along beneath the fence; his red silk shirttail had come out, she remembered, and it flapped wildly behind him as he hopped around like a chipmunk picking up the balls. Then he turned and came toward Maudie. Up went the balls again; each vanished as he caught it: his hands were empty. They stood there looking at each other, and again there seemed to be something sad and mysterious in his gaze; he was like the old magician, old artificer from another country, and his eyes were black and tender: it was as if he had many secrets and somehow knew everything there was to know: not just those dancing balls but the earth and sky, leaves and wind and falling rain; he knew their sorcery, knew their mysteries, and he knew the secret heart of this girl he’d never even spoken to. Bennie. Could he talk? He never said a word. There was something in him that understood love and death, entwined forever, and the hollow space of mindlessness: he gazed at Maudie and didn’t smile, only reached out his hand and made a ball come out of her ear, another from her hair.

Maudie knew maybe, Helen said; no, she
must
have known. There was that silent, sad, mysterious communion; God alone knew how she foretold the coming end. Something in his eyes, perhaps: the defiant glance toward the heavens, a violent look, or—afterward—the rapt, mournful gaze he gave her, that told her that such divine magic must come to an end like everything. She cried and cried. He put the balls in his pocket and stood there quietly, looking at her. She kept on crying, loud and unreasoning and anguished, and said, “No! No!”

Wind swept through the trees, and rain, plastering down her hair; Helen couldn’t move. “No! No!” Maudie screamed. “No! No!” It was as if she had seen the end—not only of this afternoon but of all afternoons, of sunlight and the water she had brought, the dancing balls and of all and anything she had ever loved on earth. Of Bennie. She kept on shrieking. Helen thought she’d faint of horror.

“No! No!” Maudie screamed, and toppled weakly against the fence, stretching out her arms to him. But he didn’t move; he merely stood there with the rain drenching his shirt, deepening the red, and gazed at her steadily and unhappily, understanding. Helen started to move toward her, but he moved first, swiftly. He walked to the fence and propped Maudie back up. He said nothing at all. She became quiet and looked at him with tears streaming down her face. Then he put his arms around her and kissed her once on the cheek.

That, mostly, Helen said, she would always remember: the swaying mimosas and the two of them, she much taller than Bennie, standing with the fence between, holding on to each other. After all these years she’d found it: a lover, father, magic—something. Helen didn’t know. But Maudie had found it. He knew. Bennie knew. He stood erect finally and smoothed back his hair, looking at her. Maudie looked back, saying nothing either, only, with her eyes, imploring him to stay.

What could he do? Nothing, Helen knew. Just understanding was enough. He shoved his shirttail in and wheeled about and walked swiftly across the field through the rain and disappeared behind the barracks. Then she led Maudie back into the house.

“He never came back. Maudie never went back again. All October in the afternoons we’d sit on the porch again. Maudie never said a word about him or anything. I’d tell her stories but I don’t think she listened. She sat beside me and rocked and looked at the bay. I suppose she thought about it a lot but I don’t know. Maybe it was the thinking that made her so sick. I don’t know. She became silent and peaceful; maybe she dreamed. Most likely she didn’t even feel the strength flowing out of her like a dying flower. A dying flower. She was tired and her leg hurt her and she slept. I’d sleep too. We’d sit together and watch the ships for a while and see the gulls soar overhead and softly drowsing, close our eyes and let the picture books fall and hear the bumblebees. …”

It was as if Helen had suddenly awakened from a long, exhausting slumber. She crushed out her cigarette and stood up unsteadily. “So she’s going to die,” she said. “Now you know. About love. Why don’t you go home? It’s too late now to see her. Why don’t you go home? You’ve had your fun. I’ve waited all day for you and now I’m through waiting and now I’m going to Maudie. Do you want some more whisky, my dears? You can get some at all the parties. Do you want your loving? Just try to get that too! Just try! I’ll not wait any longer for anything at all!”

She raised her hands to her face and bent over sobbing tearlessly, without a sound. Tearlessly, that is, because from where they sat they could see, between her fingers, the harsh light shining on her cheeks, revealing no tears at all but only the tight-clenched eyes and closed, drawn-down mouth which held a prolonged and agonized inspiration of breath, like a baby’s. They watched her shoulders shake and they both got up, hurt and a little awed by her madness. They were moved by guilt and by sorrow, but mainly by a sort of heedless, wanton love. For Helen and for Maudie, but for other things, too—for the memory of whatever had passed among them that had been proper and good, in spite of all the rest; for the memory of all that was now irremediable and beyond recovery. Loftis said, “Helen,” and Peyton said, “Oh, Mother.”

It was as if her vision still lingered and they were there, a part of it: of endless afternoons and soaring clouds, of mimosas that swayed and trembled, of a frieze of seagulls strung out immobile against the sky. There were bumblebees, too, and the magic, mind-haunted shapes of Indians. One juggled gay blue balls underneath the trees; the others, lunatic forms with knives, prowled around them in the canebrake. All of them, the shattered family, were home again, made briefly whole: they saw the swell and dip of galleon sails, at the prow a figure, breasting the mild summer storms of another century, who thought of conquest, thought of gold.

“Mother——” Peyton said again.

Helen looked up. “You,” she said, “don’t whimper at me. You’re half the cause. Remember when you let her fall? I’ll refresh——”

“But——”

“Remember?”

“Mother——”

“You don’t care. About anything. And is that why you kept your father away from here all day? Guilty? You with your whoring around and your drinking.”

“Helen!” Loftis shouted.

She turned and left the room.

“Dickie boy, let me have that bottle again,” she said.

“Here, baby.” Her head was on his shoulder, and with an arm around her he was driving with one hand. It was fairly awkward but the convertible was big and heavy, an Oldsmobile, and it clung safely to the curves which wound through the frosty night. Above, the sky was clearing. It was deserted, sleeping country, full of pines and swamps, puffs of fog which arose from the bottoms to envelop the road in dangerous gray swirls. The car, however, was an excellent one, built like a good ship to ride out any storm; indeed, the car did suggest some kind of boat: it was as spacious and padded and comfortable as any Doge’s gondola and it took the bumps with the aggressive dignity of a ferry. They rode through a sea of mist and chill darkness; farms and fences, dark filling stations, a Negro church in a spooky grove—all these, lit up briefly by the headlights, were on a remote fantastic shore. Night was all around them, but they hardly noticed, encapsuled by steel and glass, warmed by a heater. The dashboard’s green glow illumined them and they drank, safe for a while, listening mindlessly to music from a starlit roof over Broadway. Charlottesville was miles behind.

“And the thing that gets me,” Peyton said bitterly, “is how still—after all that—she couldn’t say a decent word at all.”

“What a female. I wish I could meet her.”

“No, you wouldn’t want to.”

“I’d like——”

“And the things she said then,” Peyton interrupted. “It was awful. I went up to her but she turned away. Then she looked at me and said, ‘It’s your fault. Your fault. You let her fall, you let her fall.’ My God, I didn’t even know what she was talking about until she ‘refreshed’ my memory, as she put it. That time I was telling you about, heavens, a couple of years ago when one time I let Maudie slip——”

“And Maudie——”

“Yes! She wouldn’t even let me see her. I left. I couldn’t stand any more of it. I just left, not even knowing how Maudie really was, whether she was—dying or what, or how much of it had all been made up. For effect, you know.”

“Jesus.”

“She said, ‘You with your drinking and your whoring around, you don’t care.’ That’s the last thing she said.”

“Jesus, honey, she sounds——”

“Yes. Crazy.” She tilted the bottle and drank, and part of the whisky drained down her camel’s hair coat.

“Careful,” he said.

“Oh, Dick.”

He comforted her, bending down to kiss her hair. On high ground, a straight, unfoggy stretch, he opened up, going very fast, and Peyton murmured, “I like to speed.” He held her close to him. There were wide barren fields now, a patch of river to the south, the Rappahannock; this was territory that they knew, where one lane, one house or barn, gliding soundlessly past the car’s vaultlike silence, only announced another house or lane or barn a few yards farther on, each more familiar as they drew closer to home. This was the Northern Neck, a land of prim pastoral fences, virgin timber, grazing sheep and Anglo-Saxons: these, the last, spoke in slumbrous Elizabethan accents, rose at dawn, went to bed at dusk, and maintained, with Calvinist passion, their traditional intolerance of evil. Most were Presbyterians and Baptists, many were Episcopalians, and all prayed and hunted quail with equal fervor and died healthily of heart failure at an advanced age; destiny had given them a peaceful and unvanquished land to live in, free of railroads and big-city ways and the meretricious lures of the flesh, and when they died they died, for the most part, in contentment, shriven of their moderate, parochial sins. They were bounded by two rivers and the sky, and were as chary of the hinterland as of the deepest heart of Africa. A sturdy and honest curiosity filled their minds, provided the objects of such were not exotic or from the North, and the smell of sea filled their days; exacting in all matters, moral but never harsh, they lived in harmony with nature and called themselves the last Americans.

Only a great deal of wealth had the power, conceivably, to corrupt such people, but the Cartwrights, although oriented spiritually more toward the Farmers’ Bank of Lancaster than toward the ancient parish church where each Sunday they offered their punctilious but rather sketchy devotions, were not corrupt. They were admired and respected and—because they were aware that they, too, were from common stock—the somewhat too-elaborate deference paid them by their neighbors embarrassed them and caused them to clothe their wealth in muted, simple gray. If they were parvenus, no one would ever accuse them of it; no one would snicker. Harrison Cartwright was an aggressive, quick-tempered man with a face like a bulldog, and he was blessed with the ability to acquire money as easily as a pigeon picks up popcorn. Each enterprise in that part of the state—banks, fisheries, automobile agencies, icehouses—everything, in short, that could produce a dime in cold profit was governed entirely or in part by Cartwright, and it was the natural result of this that he should act, too, in another, perhaps even more dizzily awesome sphere, as a sort of proconsul for Senator Byrd. Cartwright was a vigorous, domineering man, but like most real geniuses he had a grace and a sort of modulation of tone—a way of getting along with people—and he knew when to lower his voice. People who want a king nowadays want one with an aluminum scepter, preferably collapsible, homespun robes and a big, broad smile: Cartwright had all of these.

It is inevitable that men with such ambivalent natures should have strange effects on their sons. When Dick was six, Harrison Cartwright gave the boy a slap which tumbled him headfirst into thirty feet of water—all because his son was neither stout nor skillful enough to handle the sailboat’s mainsheet. Equally vivid in Dick’s memory were the sting of the blow and the dreadful strangling fear as he plunged downward and felt the rudder rake his scalp—and the effect all this had on his father: the remorse that tortured the blunt bulldog face as Cartwright hauled him dripping over the side, his mawkish, unmanly apologies and, finally, his tears. “Dickie, Dickie, Dickie,” he groaned. “What have I done?”

His father baffled him, and as a child Dick was torn between love and hatred. In moments of calm, when his father was chastened and subdued and amiably playing the part of the tame country squire, Dick made fitful overtures and was ever surprised at the fondness and affection with which he was received. But there came foul weather, too, clouds and heavy sea; there were monsoon winds, smelling faintly of dollars, perilous transactions, heady enterprises to be sought on some distant hazardous shore. Then, relegated to a forgotten state, a grease monkey along with his brother and two sisters, he sought refuge in loneliness and with his grandmother, who had taken over the house upon her daughter-in-law’s death and who suffered from arthritis and an excess of the Bible.

His mother had been an Episcopalian and although the family, out of deference to her memory and to habit, still attended the little church in the village, the old lady quickly modified this gentle, liberal influence, being a Reformed Presbyterian and a direct descendant of John Knox. At breakfast she took hot water, sweetened with sugar, for her bowels. In a downstairs bedroom of the fine old farmhouse where they lived, she performed each afternoon the stern offices of her faith, and it was here that Dick was summoned, a thin little boy with brown eyes, who leaned and drowsed against the slanting beams of light, spread his arms out to make the blood flow again, pinioned against the light by this gesture as if upon racks of stupefying boredom. Nodding, he would drowse, open his eyes again and watch the stern old eagle’s face, the beak clapping endlessly over words of iniquity and damnation, intoned from a Bible clutched in an eagle’s arthritic claws. There were pictures, too, conjured up, superimposed upon gentler, greener visions of the lane outside, the cedars, a grassy bank by the pond where crayfish crawled and scuttled down holes, and pollen from September trees made all the creeks run gold; these pictures were of heaven and hell, of the seven-headed beast, the vials of wrath, the woman, full of abominations and the filthiness of her fornications, who was called the mother of harlots; and the boy, like the divine author of the book itself, wondered with great admiration. Mainly, though, he thought of those combustible infants plunged to hell, who stretched out their tiny arms to a pitiless, fiend-faced Abraham and shrieked eternal baby cries of agony and burning. These haunted his heart. And later, stretched out belly-down beside the pond, he mused and dreamed, poked the mud with a stick, and saw them below beneath the streaming gold, children no bigger than his sister, drowned fathoms deep among clamshells and coquettish minnows—children who stirred and noiselessly screamed and were beyond touch of the pale redeeming waters. Because he loved his grandmother, because she treated him kindly and made him fudge, he suffered this treatment, not exactly willingly but with resignation, and so learned early in his life that candy was paid for by tears.