William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (43 page)

Helen looked tired, but in her eyes was a look of solemn satisfaction, almost relief, as she came up to him and let her head fall on his shoulder, saying, “Wasn’t it a fierce old lie, darling?” She sighed. “Peyton. We’ve hardly said a word about her, and now I’ve said it. Oh, darling, I do want her to come back home, for a while anyway. I do want to see her so. You do believe me, don’t you, darling? Tell me how to write a letter to her … tell me …” She giggled. “Those funny MacDermotts. Tell me, darling. Let’s go back home….” He had let his head droop, too, softly, while around them the blue evening seemed to dwindle and die and in its smoky waning brought a dozen sounds he had not heard before: crickets and the nimble noise of children, footsteps in the hallway, soft good nights, and her heart and his, thumping like drums. It had been, by almost any standard, the most gratifying moment he could remember, and the night before Peyton’s wedding he had retrieved it, the hearts’ reunion, with a triumphant and savage ecstasy. A man so unaccomplished, he reflected, might achieve as much as great men, give him patience and a speck of luck; though his road slopes off to a bitter sort of doom—and the wind, blustering down the night through chill acres of stars, suddenly made Loftis feel cold, and his life a chancy thing indeed—he has had his moment, a clock-tick of glory before the last descent. You know this man’s fall: do you know his wrassling?

Bring home the bride again, bring home the triumph of our victory.

Bathed, shaved and combed, attired in herringbone tweed and a checked waistcoat, he made his way across the living room, after shaking half a dozen outstretched, congratulatory hands. It was four o’clock, the ceremony was to take place in half an hour, and the house was filled with guests. They had come, the middle-aged men and their wives, the younger men getting bald at the temples and their wives, who were trying at thirty-five to retard a faint dowdiness of flesh, and the youngest of all, the boys and girls in their teens and early twenties who, grinning at everyone and holding hands, were trying to retard nothing at all save thoughts of gloom, maybe, for there was a war on and some of them must go away—all these had come to make Peyton’s wedding a success. Many of them were friends of Milton and Helen, the younger ones were Peyton’s friends from Sweet Briar and the University and Port Warwick. All the guests had settled into the variety of moods which a wedding brings forth. The younger married women were possessed by flightiness and rapture, with occasional brief depressions of the spirit, while their husbands puffed on pipes and cigarettes and eyed the girls in their teens. These youngest girls, the ones with the soft, virginal drawls and the moist, painted lips and little freckled bosoms that rose and fell elastically as they breathed, stood around twittering, trying to appear prim, but only succeeded in looking more and more excited as the ceremony approached. Among the gray-haired men there was an air of boredom, but though they were patronizing to the younger people they were always kindly, and their wives, who tramped off periodically to marvel at the wedding gifts, became speechless and sentimental and had trouble keeping back the tears.

Almost everyone had come; they spilled out into the dining room, both hallways, both side porches and—because it had become fairly warm—onto the lawn. There was Admiral Ernest Lovelace, who was the naval inspector at the shipyard; he had lost his wife in an automobile accident two years ago. There were the Muncys and the Cuthberts and the Hegertys. All three men were executives at the shipyard. Old Carter Houston himself was there, along with his wife, who remained a Virginia belle at the age of seventy and pronounced Carter “Cyatah”; these two sat in one corner and everyone paid court to them, for he was head of the shipyard. There were the Appletons and the La Farges and the Fauntleroy Mayos, who were F.F.V.’s; and the Martin Braunsteins, who were Jews, but who had been around long enough to be accepted as Virginians. Then there was a contingent of doctors and their wives—Doctors Holcomb and Schmidt and J. E. B. Stuart and Lonergan and Bulwinkle (they all smelled faintly of ether)—and there was Dr. Pruitt Delaplane, making his first hesitant public appearance after his trial and acquittal for criminal abortion. There were poor Medwick Ames, and his wife—who threw fits—and the Overman Stubbses and Commander and Mrs. Phillips Kinderman.

Among the younger people were the Walker Stuarts and the P. Moncure Yourtees and George and Gerda Rhoads, who were, everyone knew, on the verge of divorce, and a men’s clothing dealer named “Cherry” Pye. The Blevinses had come, and the Cappses and the John J. Maloneys. Also the Davises and the Younghusbands and the Hill Massies, who had once won ten thousand dollars in a slogan contest; and a dentist named Monroe Hobbie, who limped. Those among the youngest group—most of the boys in uniform—were Polly Pearson and Muriel West and a willowy boy named Campbell Fleet who, it was generally rumored, had been expelled from Hampden-Sydney College for homosexuality; and the wealthy Abbott sisters—they were beautiful and blonde, and their father had made a fortune in Coca-Cola—and Jill Fothergill, who had arrived with Dave Taylor, and Gerald Fitzhugh. Ashton Bryce was in this group, and a fat boy named Chalmers Winsted, who had flunked out of Princeton, and Bruce Horner. These three were all in naval uniforms, as was Packy Chewning, who was a lieutenant (j.g.) and had won the Navy Cross in the Solomons.

Loftis found Peyton upstairs sitting alone reading a World Atlas, and looking beautiful and somewhat bored.

“Where’s your mother, honey?”

“She went to the kitchen to tend to the champagne. Bunny, did you know that in all of Delaware there are only three counties?”

“No.” He sat down beside her and kissed her on the cheek. “Baby, baby,” he said, “I’ve had hardly any time to talk to you. Aren’t you excited? You look wonderful. I’ve never seen such a beautiful, unexcited bride in all my life. What’s the——”

“Virginia has a hundred.”

“Hundred?”

“A hundred counties, it says so here. Texas has the most——”

He shoved the book away and swept her up toward him, laughing, kissing her helplessly. She lay tender and unresisting against his shoulder; he breathed the perfume in her hair, and was stricken by beauty at the sight of a gardenia pinned there, nestling just beneath his left eye. “Bunny,” she said finally, pushing away from him, “you are such a demonstrative old bum. Come on, quit it now. I’ve got lipstick on your neck.”

“I’ve hidden Harry,” he said.

“You have? Where?”

“I’ve got him locked in on the sun porch with your Uncle Eddie and Carey Carr. Carey’s briefing him on the service.”

“That’s nice,” she said. “Poor Harry, he was in such a stew over the ceremony. He told me just a while ago that he had never seen so many Aryans under one roof in all his life. He said that when he saw Mrs. Braunstein it was like finding his mother at a meeting of the D.A.R.” She chuckled beneath her breath, as if she were being tickled. “What a funny guy! All this business has given him a good case of the creeps. It’s a good thing we’re not High Church and he’d have to cross himself and all that rot. But I think maybe he’s putting a lot of this stuff on. The nervousness, I mean.” Peals of laughter came up from the lawn.

“He seems like an awfully nice boy, honey.”

“He is,” she said, and let her eyes stray musing upon the bay and the dappled blue sky and the windy lawn where all the girls stood chattering, in patches of red and blue. She looked down at her hands. “He is, I guess. I guess he’s about the nicest person I’ve ever met—” and raised her eyes and winked at him—“except you, of course. I mean,” she went on, “I guess he’s got about everything a girl could ever want, if that doesn’t sound banal. I mean there’s something honest and right about him, and I can’t quite describe those qualities without sounding a little silly. After Maudie died I wanted——”

He squeezed her hand and put his fingers to his lips.

“Yes, I know, I’m sorry,” she went on, “I’m sorry, Bunny. We promised not to talk about that, didn’t we? Well, by every letter in the alphabet I promise you that I’ll forget.” She paused and closed her eyes. There arose a tender blur of memories, phantoms, shadows, as he listened to her repeat the old hocus-pocus he hadn’t heard in years; with her eyes closed and her lips drawn sweetly down she looked six or eight, just for an instant, and he could have hugged her to his breast. “So anyway, when I went up there I was ready to go absolutely wild. I guess I did for a while. All last winter and last spring I lived like a tramp, though I didn’t let on when I wrote you. I lived like that, thinking I was worldly or something, and was miserable. Really, Bunny, you don’t know how miserable I was. I think it was only the letters you wrote me which kept me going. And then even so I’d go out and drink too much with some of these horrid, awful people I knew—they were in the fashion business or they were interior decorators or they drew pictures for the expensive magazines, and all of them were slick and talked chic and none of them had any heart or soul—and then I’d come home with a funny feeling that I’d been betrayed, but only because I’d allowed myself to be betrayed, and then your letters for some reason didn’t seem to help at all. They seemed stupid and silly and maudlin and rather futile—you were so far away and lost, too, and you didn’t seem to understand me at all. And I tore most of them up, and then cried afterward, when I woke up the next morning, because I’d destroyed them. Oh, Bunny, you don’t know how miserable I was then. I guess I hated everyone. I tried to pretend that I liked these new people, any people at all, but I didn’t. I don’t even guess I liked myself.”

“Baby,” he said, “you don’t have to go over all those sad old things. Not today. All those things are buried and done with. …”

“I know, Bunny—it’s just that I’m all worked up today.” She laughed. “Here I am trying to be sober and sophisticated and modern and I feel like I was twelve again and back in Mr.—what was his name?—that pansy’s dancing class. What was I about to say? Oh, yes, Harry. I was talking about Harry. Don’t you think he’s nice? He’s so gentle, Bunny, and
real.
Does that sound like so much stuff to you, Bunny?”

“No.”

“And he’s going to be a great painter someday. Emily Genauer saw some of his work and she thinks he’s got terrific promise. But like he says, Bunny, it’s not so much all that business about becoming a great something or the finest this-or-that, it’s being true to yourself inside. That’s what he is, he’s
right
inside—oh, damn, I can’t talk without sounding like a fool.”

He patted her hand. “I get you, baby. You don’t have to explain to me. I know that any guy you liked would be——“

“No, Bunny, not any guy would be O.K. Just because I liked him. Remember that Lieutenant Timmy Washburn I wrote you about last spring? I liked him and——” She made a look of violent displeasure. “Oh, well.”

“Incidentally,” he put in, as he reached for her hand, “while we’re talking about the life and loves of Peyton Loftis, just what happened to Dick Cartwright?”

Her eyes sparkled, grew wide with what appeared to be sadness and she dropped the subject hastily, as if she were brushing a bee away, with a quick, “Oh he was such a child.”

“So—?”

“I don’t guess brides can drink
before
the wedding, can they?”

“No,” he said, “definitely not.”

“An eentsy one?”

“No, now, baby——”

“Just a wee dram?”

Her voice touched him with worry, vague and somber, but because she was so beautiful, so fetching in the way she cocked her head to one side and repeated, in the soft supplicant voice, her quaint request, he got up—“Baby,” he said, “we’ve only got twenty minutes”—and went to his bedroom. There, hidden amid a nest of mothballs in his dresser drawer, he found the cough-sirup bottle, a full half-pint. He uncapped it, stuck its mouth up to his nostrils and breathed deeply, thinking of Helen, satisfied that rye could be mistaken for terpin hydrate after all. He held the bottle up against the light, sniffed again, turned it about in his fingers. “No,” he said half-aloud. He recapped it quickly, hearing footsteps in the hall, and stuffed it back in the drawer beneath a pile of shirts. It was only La Ruth. She frolicked in, graceless as a whale, humming the “Jersey Bounce.” “ ’Scuse me,” she said, “Miss Helen, she say she wants dem napkins up dere.”

“Which ones?”

“Dem pretty ones dat come from de laundry, right dere on de bureau.”

“What for?”

“Deed I have no idea, but I suspects dey’s for de folks when dey start eatin’.”

“That I’d say would be a logical conclusion,” he admitted. If you were to peel back her skull, he thought, you’d find no convolutions at all on the brain, only a round, thoughtless, shiny sphere. She loaded her arms with napkins, transmitting shock waves of sound across the floor, shifting from foot to foot, her starched maid’s cap on sideways, constantly mumbling. “My, dem folks is sho’ gonna stuff dey guts today,” she said, lumbering from the room, and he opened the drawer, closed it quickly. Below, the guests stood on the lawn talking together, moved from group to group; a balmy wind flicked the skirts of the Abbott sisters, who were scowling at each other, and he saw Commander and Mrs. Kinderman, bloated and stiff in their matching Navy blue. They talked to no one, and were borne staidly about upon gusts of scuttling leaves. He heard Edward’s laughter somewhere, Edward who was already tight, with whom he had, for Helen’s sake, enacted the most strained and touchy friendship, and for some reason the desire for a drink became hot and powerful. There were other footsteps in the hall, and he started, but they faded away; how silly to have this nervous, quarrelsome conscience, that resentment—yes, he had had it, just for a moment, at Edward’s laughter which, in turn, had made him think of Helen and of the ridiculousness of her demands on him, demands he had paradoxically brought on himself—all in all, how silly to have to pussyfoot about like this on Peyton’s wedding day, dredging up such ugly conflicts. Or was it silly? Well, my God, just one. He found two glasses, got the bottle out of the dresser and went back to Peyton’s room, closing the door behind him.