William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (42 page)

One gray, windy afternoon in January—on purpose, she later told him—she took a small overdose of pills and Dr. Holcomb had to hurry around and lay a stethoscope over her feebly pulsing heart and stick her with a syringe. When Helen revived, the doctor left, telling Loftis, in a guarded, confidential voice, that he should take her somewhere for care. Because he was an old man, suspicious of progress, he used the word “alienist,” and this archaism, coming from one whom Loftis felt should know what he was talking about, made him weak with a weird and peculiar fright. He went back upstairs to the place where Helen sat by the window, bundled in blankets. He took a lighted cigarette from her fingers. “He said you shouldn’t smoke.”

“Yes, I know.”

He sat down beside her on a stool, startled by a hot water bottle, which he removed from beneath him. She let him take her hands.

“Helen,” he said, “it takes a long time for a man to learn to believe in life. Some men, that is.”

“Yes, and——” she began.

“What, honey?”

“Nothing.”

“I guess it’s taken me a long time. When I was a kid, even beyond that—when I got older—I thought I was living. I’ve just learned things—recently. I think it probably takes something terrible to happen to you before you learn how precious life is.” It was the first time he had used words like these; he was aware of their inadequacy, and it was the first time that he—a man who all his life had been spendthrift with words—had become so intensely aware of the inadequacy of words in general. So he pressed down hard on her hand, stroked her fingers, to make up for his lack.

“Look how sober I am,” he said.

It was as if she had been struck dumb forever. There was a statue of a woman, he remembered, left alone among the woods of his childhood somewhere—he could not remember—overgrown by ferns and laurel in a damp place where toadstools grew in a fairy ring. Time had not effaced its loveliness so much as rain, for it was made of a poor kind of stone, and it was a pity it couldn’t talk, because with all its frowzy defects of ravaged eyes and storm-stained hair, it yearned, out of some monumental voicelessness, to sing a song or speak a word; its parted lips struggled for speech, it had a throat that lived. Loftis remembered, gazing at Helen. Was she trying to say something? He couldn’t tell, because the light was fading from the room. She cleared her throat, something trembled on her lips, but she remained silent.

“Do you understand, honey, what I mean? Tell me you do. About what I’m trying to say.”

Outside, there was no division between sea and sky; where the bay met the ocean, a foam-capped reef, breakers mounted into the gray, as white and as soundless as snow. He told her again, with love in his throat, how much she meant to him, how, after all his errors, he had come to realize that his existence was a fairly useless thing if she was not a part of it; Dolly was gone now, and for her, Helen, he had trampled upon his weaknesses; wasn’t all this enough? He told her these things in a subdued, passionate, desperate voice. As he talked it seemed her lovely face took on more and more each second the lines of a sick and determined refusal, and by the way her jaw grew tight he knew at least that she heard him. Her hair, he noticed, had gray in it like streaks of milk. “Don’t you see what I mean?” he said again, squeezing her hand, but she appeared, with eyes that still glassed in like watch crystals the hollow reflection of shattered nembutal dreams, an incarnate No—reasonless and mute. He got up; patience fled him.

“You’re sick and I’m sorry,” he said bitterly. “Well, God help me, what else can I do? I offer you myself and that’s all I can offer. I say there are these things that can make us find a way, these things and nothing else, and it’s like I was talking to the goddam bloody wind. You’re sick. Certainly you grieve, but you’re not the only one who’s grieved, I’ve done my share of that. What makes you think you can afford the luxury of this particular kind of self-pity and self-hate? Why, by God? Helen, I’ve done my utmost damndest to make you see how much I care. How much I care to the extent of doing everything I know to make you see that I’m not the broken-down, unredeemable wreck you thought I was. I wasn’t noble, either, about it, or self-conscious about it. I figured that along with all the crap I’ve put up with you I’ve done my share of the wrongdoing and I was willing to keep my mouth shut about some of the things I thought if only I could change your way of thinking. If only you could see that I who I admit am nothing great, I guess, was still willing to do anything to start things right again. God almighty, Helen, forgive me for saying this if you’re as sick as I think you are, but what have you wanted from me, my manhood guts and balls and soul? What in Christ’s name have you wanted? I’ve offered you everything I’ve got——”

He stopped, because when he looked down he found that she had turned toward him a little. Her face lost its hardness, and he figured that in her mind he must have stirred up, finally, memory or recognition, for something crumbled in her eyes. Her lips moved again but she said nothing.

He bent down once more, hopefully. “You haven’t lost everything, honey. You still got me, if you want me. You’ve got Peyton. Who loves you. We’ll write her together, tell her everything is O.K. now. She can go back and finish school next year, like she should. Honey, if you’d just realize that people do love you, you’d know that you’ve got years more of—Christ—grandchildren——” Caught up in his own hopefulness, a rich philoprogenitive vision came to him for an instant, of babies, dozens of them, frisky and pink against the green timeless grass. “Don’t you see, Helen? Peyton doesn’t hate you. She’s the most understanding kid in the world. All we have to do is let her know how things are and then everyone’ll be happy. Helen, you’re all I’ve got, I’m all you’ve got. If you’ll believe me, why, by God, the best years of our lives are ahead. I tell you Helen that we can defeat fear and grief and everything else if you’ll only believe me and love me again. Honey, we can never die. … “

Somehow it had worked, his persuasions had touched her, and he marveled now, on the eve of Peyton’s wedding, as much as he had then, nearly a year before. The bay was filled like a bowl with silence, and upon its surface, as if scraped off from the moon, lay a litter of careless silver. It was almost ghostly, this quiet, and if Loftis had heaved the beer bottle out over the seawall to break the water with a noisy splash, it could have fractured its silence no more abruptly than he finally had penetrated Helen’s. He could only still wonder what he had said, which charmed word it had been to cause her to rise and throw off her blankets, to approach him with her eyes closed and her sickness still white and dusty on her cheeks like some fabled, lovely, medieval lady raised by potent magic from the tomb, and to put her arms almost weightlessly about his neck and murmur, “Oh my darling, you do understand me, after all.”

No, he hadn’t understood her, ever, but at that moment there had been no need of understanding: she was his once more, they were together and she believed in him. It was as if he had lifted by his self-abasement all the troubles from her shoulders, and afterward it was only when the desire for whisky became almost impossible to bear that he began to think glumly that he had let himself in for a hell of a situation. “Darling,” she had said that afternoon, “darling, darling, you have learned, haven’t you? You have learned what I need, haven’t you? You have learned. I believe you. Oh, yes, together we can never die!” But later it was hard for him to keep his equanimity every day, knowing that he had, voluntarily and submissively, let her get the upper hand. His pride rebelled fiercely at times, but he beat it down, thinking of the good things yet to come—of a life lived soberly and honestly, yet partaking of the decent and rewarding pleasures, golf still and talk with good friends; Peyton coming home to visit them—with tragic thoughts and tragic events but safely behind, as in the minds of all real Virginia gentlemen. He had made wild headlong promises to Helen, and it was a struggle, but he didn’t hold it against her that she expected them to be kept. He felt lucky when she said one day, “Don’t be silly, darling, I don’t care if you drink if you just use a little caution,” and with a faint laugh, “Heavens, Milton, has it taken you all these years to find out I’m really no puritan?” So he drank a little, with caution.

Dolly, of course, might as well have been in Tibet. He saw her on two occasions after Maudie’s death. The first time was when, with misgivings and fear, he ventured out of the house one night, a week or so after his reconciliation with Helen, and went to Dolly’s apartment. He intended to put the situation up to her with as much honor as he could, but he failed wretchedly. No matter how little a man may finally come to feel for a woman, if over a long period of time they have been together and intimate, he will acquire a certain tenderness for her small deficiencies, and remember the dirty dishes in her sink—her third-rate books and queer tastes in music, the broken mirror she never fixed—with as much charity as her lips or thighs. Remembering these about Dolly, his mind had become enfeebled by the time he reached her door and, after coffee and cake, he got up to go with vague promises to see her soon. And when she asked, with a look of foreboding, “When, when?” he could only reply, “Soon, soon,” and then go, haunted by the light in her eyes, which said, “Oh, you are leaving me.”

But he was committed. Let him for one moment think of
this
particular betrayal, and he knew he would be lost. He tried to forget her, succeeded: she sank from his consciousness like one of those poor people encased in concrete who are heaved over the side and plummet to the bottom of the sea. She didn’t forget him, though. Just when he had put her out of mind she began to call him, and, because he invariably hung up, to send him wistful, pleading notes in lavender ink, scented, and stuffed with humiliating souvenirs: roses they had picked during Garden Week at Westover, a postcard he had bought her on the Skyline Drive, two sticks from Popsicles they had eaten, with elaborate frivolity, at a Richmond fair. They shamed him, enraged him; it was these very things he had once told Dolly about Helen—the nagging, bittersweet memories—which made him frantic with remorse; how, having committed so much wrong, would he ever get out of life alive?

Dolly came to visit him one night. It was a rash thing to do, but she was lucky, because Helen had gone for a week’s visit to her sister-in-law’s in Pennsylvania. It was a terrible scene. Dolly flew in out of a rainstorm with her hair plastered around her face like serpents, clumsily threatened him with a candelabra, got sick on the rug, slipped up and fell in the mess and remained there, in a pale coma. It was the first time he had ever seen her drunk and so he hadn’t known how to cope with her. He cleaned her up a little and drove her to her apartment, where he put her gently to bed and held her hand for a while, listening to her mumble an anguished fantasia of remembrances and longings. “Safe in their alabaster chambers”—lines he had once idly read to her from one of Peyton’s poetry books, lines he had forgotten and could not tell how she remembered—“sleep the meek members of the resurrection.” And she sank back into the pillows, like Camille, finally and mercifully unconscious, while he, sweat on his forehead and his heart wrung with regret, offered up to God or someone the first completely honest prayer of his life.

She troubled him no more. Because of that incident he had to make even more effort to forget her. Late in April he and Helen went on the train for a three-week vacation to a resort near Asheville, and there among the smoky hills, in the cool, ferny air where the sky seemed to be spread like a bottomless lake above them, they both calmed down. He turned her mind gradually away from Maudie and tenderly made her do healthful things, like swimming and riding, walking along the bridle paths. Her face was lined and worn, but her new bathing suit still defined a body receptive and warm to love. He made love to her three times, not particularly liking the act itself but afterward—as she drowsed peacefully beside him—smugly happy, proud that he was here rather than in bed with the vacationing Atlanta divorcee who had made a violent pass at him and whose perfect skin, resting like lacquer upon the pretty young oval of her face, looked as if it would crumble to the touch. Wistfully he thought of Dolly. But, “I love you, my darling,” Helen said again and again; “how could we have wasted so much time? Forgive me,” she’d say, clutching his hand tightly, as if to let go would set them adrift again, “forgive me, forgive me, forgive me, I’ve been such a fool.” And when Helen talked like this, just as they do in the movies, with such conviction, he was unable to decide who really had been the fool, after all—he himself or Helen.

Evenings they drank weak, wartime beer with a Rotarian and his wife from London, Ontario. This man was named Malcolm MacDermott; he affected kilts and a crooked walking stick and to listen to him was like hearing water rumbling into an old washtub. There was no question, Loftis knew, as to who wore the kilts in the family, for he was the type of man upon whose conversation his wife waits in a sort of meek attendance, like a flustered maid, and when she spoke it was as if to rush in timidly and sweep up a crumb, and retire to the wall once more. She was in her early fifties, with a plump, bright-eyed, Canadian face. When Helen mentioned the recent death in the family, Kathy’s swollen little lips grew tragic and she told Helen that she, herself, had suffered the loss of a child, but that she had found a diversion, and she blurted something about goldfish.

“Kathy girl,” MacDermott boomed, “what’s a man to do with goldfish ar-round the house? Nothing but a bother.”

“For her, Malcolm—” she peeped.

“Goldfish!”

The subject perished then and there, but it did introduce a fascinating note into the conversation, for soon, unbelievably, Loftis heard Helen speaking of Peyton. “My daughter,” she said; “she’s my youngest, studying art in New York. She’s such a dear although I guess I have a mother’s prejudice. She hasn’t been home in quite some time and you know the wallpaper I was telling you about last night, the pattern we’re getting? Well, you know, I wouldn’t have thought of getting it made without showing it to her first, she’s coming along so well in New York. …” Loftis felt a crazy shock and later, in their rooms, the first thing he asked her was to repeat, please, what she had said to the MacDermotts.