William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (53 page)

She snatched the bottle from his hand, poured out some whisky, drank it down savagely. She turned to him, her eyes inflamed, not very pretty, and with the old despair again he prepared himself for a harangue, thinking bitterly: And how about me? Was this wedding a picnic for me? It had been months since she’d been like this, and he’d thought he’d straightened her out, but no: now, as at all those early parties in the Village, she was taking out on him—when he had done nothing at all—all her grief. “Can’t you keep your mind off these girls? Good
God,
Harry, on our wedding day! With all these other things happening, too. When I needed you. Do you think I’m just someone you can walk off and neglect and forget? You’ve done it before and you’ll do it again, I know, and we’re going to have a rotten, rotten time if you don’t watch out.”

“Peyton, don’t be absurd.”

“I’m
not
being absurd. It’s all the truth. It’s always when I
need
you like that that you——” But he was no longer listening; he shut off her words from his mind, neatly and completely, as if he had turned a switch. It was the only thing to do because, since there was, despite her claims, no truth to what she had been saying, he couldn’t hope to combat her frightful illogic with phrases like, “Peyton, don’t be absurd.” He thought he’d had it licked, too, this kind of perverse, crazy talk, and now he felt weary and sad and disappointed. He stopped up his mind with pleasanter thoughts, thinking of Florida, watched the parrot woman nod and drowse and wake with a start. The horn blew, hollow and mournful, above them, and now Peyton, somewhat pacified by his quietness, was saying more softly, “All I want you to do is watch out for me. I’m not a nagger really, or a shrew. I’m sorry for what I said, darling. I married you because I need you.”

He looked into her eyes. “Need?”

“I mean——” She struggled to say something.

“Need?” he repeated.

“I mean——”

“Need? Love?”

She said nothing.

“Love? Love?” he said bitterly, holding her arms.

She burst into tears. He let her cry quietly against his shoulder for a while, and held her hand. The middle-aged woman looked at Peyton doubtfully and, when Harry gave her a dark look, primly did something with her veil. The pimpled youth watched her, too, but became suddenly embarrassed and began to gnaw dreamily at a Hershey bar. Then Peyton stopped crying and dried her tears.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“That’s all right, honey,” he said gently. “You’ll be O.K. when we get on the train.”

“Yes.”

“Now let’s cheer up a little, for God’s sake.”

“Yes.” She smiled and squeezed his hand. They danced then, after considerable persuasion by Harry, in a place secluded from the other people’s eyes, a sort of passageway near the juke box, behind the lunch counter, where the souvenir pennants hung in gaudy rows and steam from the coffee urn got into Peyton’s hair. It was cramped and crowded; occasionally they ran into the fire hose but when they did so, tilted off-balance, he bent down and kissed her, running his hand shamelessly, lovingly, up and down her thigh. She giggled and kissed him back with parted lips, the light making shiny sparks on her perfect white teeth. Once she nibbled at his ear and when it began to hurt he pinched her on the tail. The music, a sort of boogie-woogie, was full of trembling piano notes and a groaning bass; they played the record twice. An old Negro, a beggar with a coonskin cap and a mouthful of blackened gums, hobbled over from the colored section to watch them, to clap his bleached palms feebly in rhythm and to beg for a dime. Harry felt happy, gave him all his change, which was nearly a dollar, and received the blessings of Jesus. Peyton had another drink. They danced some more, this time to “Frenesi,” and they were borne down the passageway like feathers on a gale of bawling trombones. The boat, hitting a swell, rocked beneath them, but of this Harry was not so much aware as of Peyton, sagging against him now, confused in her steps, her head heavy against his shoulder.

“What’s the matter, honey?” He looked down at her, raised her chin. She was weeping helplessly and without a sound, her mouth drawn down in anguish.

“Oh, sweetheart——” he said.

She shook her head. He sat her down on a box full of life preservers. “Sweetheart,” he said again, moving his hand against her cheek.

“They just never learned,” she sobbed, “they just never learned.”

But soon once more he had soothed her. She sat pale and shivering on the box, a little sick at her stomach, as she said. Harry had to go to the men’s room. He patted her on the shoulder. When he came back she was gone.

He looked around for her, with a growing dread. He asked the middle-aged couple where she had gone; they didn’t know. Nor did the sleeping soldier, who gazed up at him with one eye and belched. The boy behind the counter said she had gone out on deck. Harry tried to hide his fear—which was just nervousness, he began to tell himself, over and over—but at the end of the passageway he threw open the doors furiously, to be met by a salty and glacial breeze.

“Peyton!” he cried desperately. “Peyton, Peyton!”

The deck was empty. He ran to the forward part of the boat, bruising himself once on the davit of a lifeboat. Then he ran aft down the other side—filled each instant with a larger horror—to the stern, and it was here that he found her, standing placidly against the rail. He put his arms around her waist, squeezing it.

“Your heart’s beating so,” she said quietly.

“Yes.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

Peyton was silent for a while. Then she leaned forward and propped her elbows on the rail, spitting over the side.

“Ladies shouldn’t spit,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“Look at it,” she said, “it
is
dark and lovely. I wonder if it’s cold.”

“Don’t you——”

“Don’t what?” She seemed calmer now.

“Nothing. It’s cold out here.”

“Look there,” she said, “there it goes.” He looked up. From the rail they could see it—or imagined they could—among a chain of encircling lights upon the farthest shore—the house, surrounded like all the others by oaks and mimosas and willows. The streetlights, obscured by intervening, tossing trees, twinkled like stars. Harry rubbed the bruise on his arm. Then he leaned down and kissed her—sick and solemn as she was—on the ear, with as much love, he imagined, as ever a man had summoned.

“Which house is it? I can’t tell.”

“Oh, nuts, I can,” she said. “They aren’t all alike.”

West of the cemetery great clouds rose up in the sky; they sent long shadows across the land and wind through the trees. A few miles away it was raining; thunder crashed over the cornfields and the highway, there was lightning, too, far off but menacing, a brief white streamer blown through the gathering wind: Dolly was aware of these things about the weather, these and the sudden chin she had, pulling her raincoat about her shoulders, plus the fact that there in the limousine, drawn up in front of a brick chapel the color of dried blood, she was quite alone. She was surrounded by tombstones. A hideous angel looked at her vacantly with oval, alabaster eyes, flourishing a wreath over the name of McCorkle. Against another tomb a bunch of brown, dead roses, propped up in a wire stand, gave a heave in the wind, and came down on the roadway with a clatter. Dolly jumped nervously in her seat, blew her nose into a wet piece of Kleenex and cried some more. No one now could assess her misery; how could he have been so rotten? And it had been so quick and cruel: “You just stay right here.” Just like that.

There was a new groan of thunder, ending in a gigantic crackle. The very air seemed ripped apart. She jumped again, looking fearfully out of the rear window. The storm came on across the distant cornfields, sweeping before it dust and debris; borne on the blast a squadron of crows scooted frantically, wings flapping like windmills, filling the air with their dismal cries. In the farmyard two cows galloped clumsily for shelter, the chapel door began to swing, another wreath fell down in the road. Dolly hid her face in her hands, between sobs sucking for air, and clawed blindly for the handle to roll up the window. It was stuck. She moved over in her seat away from the storm: how could he be such a monster? She looked up at the chapel into which, twenty minutes ago, though it seemed to Dolly centuries, the party had disappeared. She could see nothing, hear no music, no organ or anything: would they never come out? Peyton’s coffin, Milton, Helen looking like a ghost, the fat preacher, Mr. Casper, his stupid assistant, that old nigger—all of them had vanished into the place, leaving her behind and alone; it was, she thought, with an effort at fantasy, as if they had disappeared into the gates of hell. She felt rocked by dread, she was getting sick, although in some vaguely whimsical fashion one thought supported her in her suffering: she was the only one who was still sane. Helen was crazy, the preacher was crazy, and Milton—how else explain the way he’d been acting? “You just stay there!” Violently, furiously, as if by her presence in there she’d be defiling the temple.

Now, as though shades were being drawn down in her heart, she was tormented by one single dread, and it became larger and blacker than the storm. Not that Helen would take him back—something told her that this could never happen—but that Milton wouldn’t return to the car, today, to her. This, in its temporariness, was her greatest fear: she knew, or thought she knew, that Milton was going through a great, tragic crisis—hence his wild actions, his mean words, his hostility. Of course the poor darling was deranged, what with Peyton and all. She knew that when all this blew over he’d come back to her, would apologize for his brutishness today, and his neglect, and for making her stay out in the car. She knew his moods as well as her own. But that, still demented and crazy, or whatever he was, he wouldn’t return to the car today, that he’d make her drive back to town alone—humiliated in front of everyone—with the stupid undertaker and the crazy nigger: this paralyzed her with fright. No, he just couldn’t do it to her.

She wept softly, listening to the moaning wind. A few drops of rain fell on the roof of the limousine; one of them, huge and soft and cold, struck her on the cheek: she moved to the center of the seat. They’d had such fine times, too; she was getting in at the club, meeting better people, and his divorce was to come through on October 21. It was so sad—but no, he wouldn’t leave her: then he’d have no one, no Helen, no Peyton, no little Maudie, no Dolly-pooh. Which was what he’d called her when, nights at the club, they lay awake all tired out and watched the ivy shake against the moonlight and she’d stick her finger, playfully, in his navel. Almost two years of bliss, free of that ghostly bitch. Now this. What would she do if he left her again? It was too much to think about. Now no more could she stay alone in her apartment listening to the radio, as she’d done those long months when he and Helen had been reconciled—an endless stream of Aldrich Families and Gangbusters and Contented Cows, mooing serenely only half-heard through the evenings filled with wistful tears, thrice-read newspapers, chocolate boxes empty and forlorn. The heartaches were too much, as were the times when she ventured out, to go to the bank or to her lawyer’s for Pookie’s criminally dwindling alimony checks, her face averted from the stares of those who might see, who might say: “Poor woman. Milton left her stranded high and dry.” She’d have to leave town, go to Norfolk or Richmond, or back to Emporia and sit by her mother’s bedside, watch the withered, wasting flesh of multiple sclerosis, look at her twitch and moan, change her clothes when her sphincter gave way; it was sad country, unsophisticated and dull and awful; she’d sit in the parlor and stare at the peanut vines stacked up in the fields like big brown thumbs, the peanuts and the red earth and in December the sad, rain-drenched cotton, looking as if it had already been used.

There was a crackle of thunder. She gazed up from her Kleenex. It was an odd sight. Emerging from the chapel, her hair blown by the wind, Helen stood cool and erect on the steps, one hand lightly resting on Carey’s arm. Beside her—though Dolly couldn’t hear his words—Loftis was saying something. His eyes had the horror-filled, yearning look they had had all day. Then—and a pang of grief such as she had never known before stuck her heart—she saw Helen turn abruptly and smile, with a word to Loftis. She couldn’t see the rest. Carey got in the way; for no reason at all he made the sign of the cross, and far off to the east the thunder rumbled and rolled, came nearer. It began to rain.

P
OTTER’S FIELD
for New York City is on an island in the Sound, half a mile east of the Bronx and just inside the city limits. The island is named Hart’s, after a deer which, in the later days of the English settlement, was seen to swim out to the place from the mainland and apparently to establish residence there, among the scrub-oak and willow groves. The hart was later shot, so the legend goes, by a man named Thwaite who rowed out to the island in a skiff, with a big gun and a hankering for venison. It was this person, a gentleman of preternatural modesty, who named the island Hart’s, rather than Thwaite’s, and it was also he who made a tidy living for years by rowing picnickers out to the place; at that time there were sandy beaches there, woods, gentle groves—a perfect place, in short, to rest yourself, if you lived in the eighteenth century.

As the city expanded, however, it became necessary to find a newer and larger place to dispose of the friendless, nameless dead. Up until the middle of the last century, when Forty-Second Street was suburban and sheep still nibbled placidly around Columbus Circle, this purpose had been served by the old Pauper’s Burial Ground, which occupied what is now part of Washington Square. The dead do not remain long dead in big cities, or perhaps they become deader; at any rate the markers were torn down, the square filled in with new earth and sidewalks laid across. They have become twice unremembered, those sleepers; once, though many bore no names, they had at least a sunny plot of ground. Now no one can mark them, and the nursemaids strolling along McDougal Street, aware only of the birds and the boys and the dusty April light, cannot know even the fact of those who rest beneath the asphalt—their bones shaken by the subways—and await the resurrection.