William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (79 page)

And so the forlorn business continued; the self-absorption of her misery, so omnivorous, seemed to have swallowed up all thought of Mason’s birthday and it was way past ten when—still talking and clutching at the two of us for support—she accompanied us to dinner. “I mean, really,” she was saying bitterly, as Mason shoved a chair under her.
“Reeshard,
that wine! Really, after all, young as you are, can’t you boys see that it’s just a matter of simple
ordinary human decency?
Really, it’s not as if I were some Hollywood tart he had picked up somewhere. I mean, after all, Daddy Bob and Mummy and I were in the Social Register back then, you know, and the Van Camps were on Long Island two hundred years before the Flaggs even landed. McKeesport, P.A.! Phoo-ee!” She gave a scornful laugh, made an ambiguous gesture with her hand—I thought, just for an instant, that she was about to thumb her nose at Richard, who at the moment moved noiselessly in from the wings—and in so doing sent flying a water tumbler which fell in splintery ruin at Mason’s feet.

“Did you call, moddom?” Richard murmured.

“Of course I called,” she said. “Don’t bother about that glass. Bring that wine. The
rose.
Did I call?” she added loudly in a simpering voice to his back. “Did I call!”

In the space between drink and drink she had become, it seemed to me, almost dangerously agitated; her fingers drummed nervously on the table and her voice, customarily so silken and tender, had taken on a gravelly, slurred, barmaid’s tone. I was by then faint with discomfort. I looked to Mason for solace, found none: holding Wendy’s hand in his he peered intently into her eyes as she rambled off again, solicitously kept her supplied with wine, then with gentle admonishments carved her chicken when, stumped by the perplexities of knife and fork, she made motions to gobble it wholesale, and throughout the rest of the whole sad, stricken monologue remained grimly alert and as grave as an archbishop. “One miserable, single
horse.
That’s all. You’d think I’d asked him for a stable. And that’s it! Listen, angel, you aren’t listening to Wendy!”

“Wendy-dear, my heart at thy sweet voice—or something or other.” Tensely watching her, he jerked his shoulder convulsively. “Roll on, lover.”

“Sweetness. Angel. Where was I? Oh, that’s just it! I mean, after all, who was it that gave him a start in the first place? Who was it? Answer me that. I’ll answer it! None other than Robert Sargent Van Camp the Second! Do you think Daddy Bob balked
one instant
when your father came to him back then and asked him for enough means to get started out in life? Do you think Daddy Bob balked? No, he didn’t. Not Daddy Bob. Daddy Bob—that’s Mason’s grandfather, Peter, I mean my father—Daddy Bob had a heart as big as all outdoors.” She began to sniffle again, her brow propped on her palm in sudden meditation, a forkful of food in mid-air, gravy trickling slowly down her chin. I was on the verge of panic.

“Everybody came to see us then. I mean just everybody. Before Mummy died. Parties. Dancing. Moonlight sails. I mean it was a—a way of life that was—oh, free and wonderful. And just after I got out of Foxcroft, Daddy Bob had the most marvelous coming-out party for me. With just zillions and zillions of people and two bands and everything. And there was this boy that was just mad for me. This boy named Amory Phelps. Poor thing, he got drowned at Bar Harbor. I mean, he was such a wonderful boy, all full of spirit and everything, with this wonderful soft voice. Oh, why am I
talking this way?”
she blurted suddenly. “I’m such a
drip,
angel, I know. Please forgive me. And Peter—forgive me, please forgive me. It’s just that—oh, I don’t know—it’s just that I’m so proud of my handsome grown-up boy but knowing you’ll be going far away from me now—I mean, on your wonderful way up, up toward the stars, really all those wonderful proud things you’re going to do. It’s just so hard thinking you’ll be so far away, and yet—and yet—oh, it’s just all so
tragic!
I’ve asked for so little. So little.” Her head sank to the table upon her folded arms; in spasms she began to sob, her shoulders heaving. At this moment the swinging doors flapped open, propelling toward us on a hot gust of kitchen air the nightmarish Richard, his face flaming red from the glow of seventeen candles on a cake. I had no idea what to do, knowing that tradition demanded a song. I began to sing “Happy Birthday” in a peepish voice, only to feel the words congeal soundless in my throat. In silence I stared at Wendy. I could barely make out those words she was mumbling so inconsolably and with such raw, tormented grief into the crook of her arm. “—will take me,
chéri”
she seemed to say. “Take me with you … our background …
chéri.”
Then “famous” and “man” and “good.”

“Wendy-dear,” Mason said. “I’ve got news for you.”

“Don’ speak.”

“It happened again.”

“Don’
speak,
angel.”

“I ain’t going to college, lover.”

“Angel, my heart is
breaking.”

“Wendy, listen, I said
I’m not going to college.”

“So lonesome.”

He seized her roughly by the shoulders, shaking her. “Wendy, I got kicked out of school! Listen, I got booted out. Can’t you understand?”

“Angel-pie, always poking fun at Wendy.”

I think I would have fled at that instant had I not felt rooted helplessly to my chair. In the minute’s dead silence coming after, gongs and chimes went off all over the vast house, crying
midnight, midnight
in a clashing, outlandish counterpoint of tortured clockwork and jangling bells. “Excuse me—” I tried to say, but only my mind departed from the scene, winging outward over moonlit water, pines, and sleeping fields, toward safety, toward home—in swift flight seeking refuge for one blessed instant from all this incomprehensible sorrow and wretchedness, before that awful moment when Wendy, like a swimmer struggling up through asphyxiating depths, drew her face slowly upward from the table and now in grasp of it all, let out a deafening yell.

“Oh no! Oh no!” she cried, staring at him. “Oh no! Oh no! No! No! No! No! No!”

“Wendy, don’t take on like that—” Mason began in a fainthearted tone.

“No! No! No!”

He grasped her trembling hand. “Look, Wendy-dear, it’s not the end of the
universe.
After all, it’s not as if I hadn’t emerged unscathed.”

She shoved her face into her hands and began rocking to and fro, like some pitiable mourner. “You promised,” she moaned. “You said you’d be good. You said you wouldn’t disillusion me again. Oh no, no! I can’t believe it! I can’t stand it any more! What did you do, darling? What did you
do?”

For a moment I thought Mason too was going to weep, seeing his mother in such extremity. But he recovered, saying smoothly, almost jauntily: “Nothing you’d be ashamed of, lover. At least this time it wasn’t my grades. I got caught playing leapfrog with some dame.”

“Sex!” she cried. “Intercourse? Oh, angel! Why couldn’t you have waited? No! No! No!”

“Wendy, lover,” he said plaintively, “goddammit, I’m sorry as hell. I really am—”

“But what’ll you
do?
What’ll you do? Oh, angel, how could you disappoint me so? What’s going to happen to you now? You can’t ever go to Princeton now. Without graduating. They won’t take you anywhere! How
could
you disillusion me like this?” Tears in rivulets streamed down her desolate face; she was shaking as if with a violent chill, for an instant I thought she was going to founder. “How could you, when you’re all I have? When all my hopes have been pinned on you? When I said, oh so many times, remember, ’Always be good, my adorable one. Always be bright. Manly. Proud and poised. Oh, you are the
bright
star in Wendy’s crown!’” She paused, shaking and racked by hoarse, relentless sobs. A knife clattered to the floor. In the darkness of the room the birthday candles flickered and glowed, playing a blowzy light over her quivering lips, her tear-streaked face, her grief-disordered hair. Then I saw a remarkable thing happen. Mason, with suavity born of a communion with his mother so intricate that each impulse, each vagrant gesture, was freighted with a meaning like that of poetry, stuck two cigarettes in his mouth, lit them, and casually but tenderly placed one of them between her lips. Instantly her grief seemed to dissolve; she became placid, soothed. Whether this gift alone turned the trick or whether, so full of gin and wine, she had lost all touch with what was going on, I couldn’t tell; whatever, it was like sticking a lollipop in the mouth of a child: her tears stopped, she gently burped, and she turned to Mason with a dreamlike look of concern. “But angel,” she said, “what about all your clothes?”

“The old bastard wouldn’t let me go back to the dormitory. He made me sleep on a cot in the gym. He said I’d contaminate the rest of the guys. Oh, Wendy, really, the whole goddam thing is so
puerile
that I don’t even want to think about it. Really, honey—I mean I got my ashes hauled, that’s all. Jesus sake, it wasn’t any mortal sin. I was just too stupid not to be more
discreet.
I mean—Jesus sake—that’s all.”

“But angel, still, what about all your
clothes?
That Burberry—”

“Oh, he told me he’d get one of the niggers to pack them up and send—”

“Who did? Who said that?” she asked sharply.

“Dr. Marston.”

“You mean you weren’t even allowed to take away your own personal
possessions?”

“Oh, Wendy,” he said wearily, “don’t capsize yourself. It’s all so tedious. It was a rotten little dump anyway. They couldn’t teach you to spell cat.”

“I will be heard! Oh, I will!” she cried angrily. “Do you mean to tell me that that old man! I mean that dirty old sanctimonious parson! That Morrison—”

“Marston,” he corrected.

“That he can just dismiss a boy like
that!
Without one word of why or wherefore or anything to
me!
A parent!”

“Oh, sit down, Wendy-dear.”

“I will not sit down. Does he think that he can just dismiss you without any kind of a trial at all? I mean reason? Or wherefore? To the parent, I mean. Or
justice!
And then talk about contaminating and all? And then not let you have the simple obligation of your
clothes!
That sanctimonious old man? Oh no!” She staggered from the table, a bedraggled scarecrow of a woman now, muttering vengeance and yelling for her car.
“Reeshard!
Where is that dummy?”

“Wendy,” Mason cried. “For Christ sake, sit down!”

She floundered across the room. “Oh no! Not on this night! Where’s the Pontiac? If that old man doesn’t think he’s going to answer—”

“Wendy,” he shouted, rising now. “You can’t drive up there!”

But she might have done so—at least she might have tried—had it not been for the commotion that arose at that moment from the hallway, and the five minutes’ chaotic events that followed. For as I watched her retreating back, watched Mason now too in hot pursuit behind her, I heard a tremendous hubbub outside, a banging sound, a man’s voice yelling, and the noise of barking dogs—all muffled at first and in fuzzy confusion, until Wendy, on her way out, threw open the door and let in the whole baleful, troubled racket. I heard the Great Danes at the door, roaring. Then the male howls again, not one voice now, but two or three, and the noise of scuffling feet and the lumpish sound of flesh bouncing off timber—all of these projected upon the balmy evening like the sound track alone in some tumultuous scene in a movie. I followed Mason out of the dining room and into the lofty foyer. Here at the entrance to the house I saw Richard, in full livery embattled at the door jamb, bawling in French and in English. and tugging passionately at the Great Danes, who, leashed and foaming, their toenails skidding and chattering against the tiles, made great ferocious lunges toward whoever it was standing on the portico below.

“Go away! You hear!” cried Richard.
“Allez donc!
Quick!”

“Richard!” Wendy shrieked.

“Je vais appeler la police, madame!”

“What do they
want?”
she cried.

“I reckon you know what we want!” said the voice from below, It was a countrified voice, guttural, faintly Negroid—almost Elizabethan—the lazy archaic voice of the southern Chesapeake, one now accented heavily with menace; I felt my scalp prickle as, drawing near the door with suspicion, then certainty, I saw whose voice it was: a rawboned oysterman in overalls, his face like a blade, eyes implanted deep beneath his brows like shiny buckshot and reflecting intolerable outrage and injury. Next to him stood a younger, shorter oysterman, with a square, very red, disconsolate face and a huge club in his hand. “I reckon you know all right,” the first man said. “We just want that boy of your’n, to learn him a lesson or two.” He shot a warning glance at the smaller man, “Don’t aidge up on them dogs, Buddy.”

“What are they talking about?” she wailed. “Richard, get Fritzi and Bingo inside! I can’t hear!”

“I’ll tell you what we’re talking about,” he said. “Let me lay hands on that boy of your’n and you’ll
know
what I’m talking about! Seems like they don’t teach nothin’ to ’em at that school, nor nothin’ home wise neither! Holt still, Buddy, them dogs’ll chaw yo’ laigs off. Missus, we druv all the way from Tappahannock tonight and don’t aim to go back without bruisin’ that boy’s dirty hide.”

Mouth agape, hair astray and tangled around her face, Wendy stood clinging to the door gazing at them in groggy alarm. Mason, along with Richard and the dogs, still bucking and snarling, moved back hastily into the shadows of the hallway. “Wendy,” I heard him say in a panicky voice, “shut the goddam door!”

“But I don’t
understand
—
”

“Missus, I’m right sorry for you,” he said. “If I had a boy like that I reckon I’d go drown myself. Anyways, if you want to know what he done, here’s what he done: he tuk my girl Doris—she ain’t but thirteen, by God, and not real bright in the head, nohow —he tuk her and—missus, I sure hate to say this to you—he tuk her and he got her drunk there, and then by God he
had
her. Right up in that church at St. Andrew’s school! He tuk that poor little girl of mine, that little thirteen-years-old tyke, and he
knowed
her. By the
flesh
I mean he knowed her!”