William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (8 page)

“Chances are it’ll rain,” he said abstractedly.

“Yes,” said Peyton. “Chances are. Gimme the funnies.”

“Don’t say ‘gimme’.”

“Let me, then.”

“That’s better, baby,” he said. “I’ll give you the funnies on one condition. See that rosebush over there? Go and pick a rose and bring it to me. Careful, don’t get stuck on the thorns.”

Peyton ran off obediently and in a moment came back with a big red rose, trembling with dew. “Thank you, baby,” he said. There was something mildly debonair, he thought pleasantly, in presenting your wife with a rose on a sunny morning.

“Let me have the funnies,” Peyton said. She took the funnies without a word and sprawled out on the lawn beside him, reading Jiggs, plucking grass with her toes. In a lazy voice, as if in afterthought, she said, “Thank you very much.”

He looked down at her. “Children,” he murmured, “should respect their parents.”

Peyton said nothing, with infinite languor turning the pages, while Loftis, legs outspread, leaned back and read the news—mayor admits, woman denies, something about the NRA;
Roosevelt,
he thought—well, he’d voted for him, but Christ knows what he’d end up doing. The blue eagle fluttering everywhere. A good man, most likely, a Democrat, but watch him. Paradox: youngish, well-to-do barrister Milton Stuart Loftis plans maybe legislative career, could be maybe junior senator (D-Va.), President (Nation Hails First Southern Chief Since Wilson).
Question:
Senator, what is your attitude toward the Common Man?
Answer:
Ah, since I’m a Democrat——
Question:
Thank you. What is your attitude, Mr. President, toward the Common Negro?
Answer:
Ah, since I’m a Southerner——
Question:
Thank you. Social Security?
Answer:
Ah, well … Thank you, thank you. (
My son, paradoxically enough
…
being a Southerner and a Virginian and of course a Democrat you will find yourself in the unique position of choosing between (a) those ideals implanted as right and proper in every man since Jesus Christ and no doubt before and especially in Virginians and (b) ideals inherent in you through a socio-economic culture over which you have no power to prevail; consequently I strongly urge you my son always to be a good Democrat but to be a good man too if you possibly can.
…)

Paradox
… but that was a long time ago and besides—well, the hell with it. He felt a curious desire for whisky—pleasant, way down deep. Now that was funny, he really shouldn’t; he wasn’t a morning drinker. … Just then, turning a bit, he saw Helen coming down across the broad upslanting sweep of lawn, leading Maudie by the hand. He hid the rose underneath the newspaper. They approached slowly together, mother and daughter, Helen guiding Maudie patiently, cautiously across the undulating, decorous space of sunlit grass until, at the flagstone steps slanting down a small embankment, Helen descended first; turning then, she reached up and with great care and tenderness held Maudie’s arm as she limped down the steps, and so together again, twin red ribbons which they wore fluttering on a sudden ripple of breeze, they approached across the lawn, Maudie limping, looking from this distance very small and frail, and Helen gazing down with patient, tender eyes.

“Daddy,” asked Peyton idly, “what does ‘contraband’ mean?”

“That means——” he began, but Helen and Maudie were in the little circle of lawn chairs and Helen, who had helped seat Maudie gently on the grass, sank down heavily beside him, saying, “Milton, there’s a cigarette burn on the rug. Last night——”

“Which one?” he said.

“The Tabriz.”

“Oh, God. Larry Ellis.”

“No. Dolly Bonner. She’s an impossible person to ask anywhere.”

“Daddy,” Peyton interrupted, “what does——”

“Hush, Peyton,” Helen said, “we’re——”

“Just a minute, dear,” Loftis said. “Baby, you mustn’t interrupt. Contraband means—well, it means something illegal—something that a policeman is empowered to confiscate …”

“Confis——” Peyton said, looking up at him.

“Now one thing at a time,” he said softly. “Now contraband. What are you reading there anyway? All right, say that the U.S.A. has a law against foreigners bringing in perfume, or guns——”

“Or whisky,” Helen said, finishing his sentence with a chilly laugh. She groped in the pocket of her blouse for a cigarette. “Whisky might be contraband.”

He lighted her cigarette. “Whisky?”

“I see what you mean,” Peyton said in a knowing tone, turning back to the funnies.

Helen stirred in her chair. “It’s like when I ask your father,” she said, “not to drink when the Appletons come and he goes out and buys another bottle. You might call that contraband.”

A sudden flicker of resentment seized him at that—a moment’s rush of blood to his face, ebbing even while out of the corner of his eye he watched her as she said, “You might call that contraband,” smoke floating away from her mouth in little gusts, blue against the sunlight and the lawn, coiling away invisibly.

“Now——” he began angrily, but thought
Let it pass, let it pass
as Helen, sensing this irritation, gave his hand a light, nearly impalpable tap, murmuring, “All right, dear. Temper, temper.” Now she was not even looking at him, he could tell, gazing instead with a smile at Maudie sitting on her pillow in the grass—frail, expressionless, staring up at the sky with sweet, insensible eyes.

The anger had gone. He watched Maudie, too, and a gentle feeling of compassion came over him, mingled vaguely with bitter distress. Right now—said the doctor, a kindly old man in Richmond, lisping hesitantly—she no doubt knew all she would ever know; too bad, one could never tell—the mystery of birth.

Great God in heaven, was it his fault! Well, whose? What?

There, there now, take it easy. No, no, certainly. The mystery of birth——

Tragic—it happened to any man, in the best of families. Be calm—that’s what he had told himself to do. They had loved her, taken care or her, been good to her—that’s what people said. “Oh,” the older friends would say to him—sad, guileless women with gray faces and a sweet, elegiac air—“oh, Helen is a saint, she’s so good to her. You’re so lucky.” As if, he would think bitterly, Maudie were a burden, even in her affliction, instead of a joy. Yet the child troubled him. He loved her, he longed for an affection that could never really blossom, but those eyes—those sometimes he could hardly bear. Until Peyton was born, bleak doubt assailed him. He looked at his wife’s body with suspicion and his own with infuriate guilt. The mystery of birth … Poor dear gentle child. Now his heart went out to her yearningly. But there was no doubt that at times she caused him dreadful unhappiness.

Helen arose, knelt down and began to comb Maudie’s hair; tenderly she cupped her hand beneath the child’s chin, turning her face with great delicacy, like that of some fragile little china doll, all the while making soft sounds, laughing gently, saying, “There, see!” or “Pretty!” Loftis got up and squatted beside them, extending the rose to Helen with a grin: “My love,” he said, “is like a red, red rose,” but Helen, preoccupied, turned her head and blinked at him, with a pale smile replying: “Oh.” She put the rose on the ground. “Thanks.” She turned back to Maudie. She had hardly noticed. His sunny, contented bubble burst and scattered. What the hell, he thought. He got up; passing Maudie, he bent down and stroked her hair.

She raised her eyes, grave, impassive, as brown and big as those balls that fall from sycamore trees. “Good morning, Papadaddy.”

“Just Daddy, sweet.”

“Papadaddy.”

“O.K.,” he said. He walked up the slope, panting a little, feeling a stitch in his side. The party last night: as usual he had drunk too much: Dolly Bonner … he banished it all from his mind. Sunlight lay brilliant around him. The grass, green and odorous, had been mowed just yesterday; it yielded springily beneath his feet. Small insects darted about, grasshoppers wildly fled his advance, and the house, toward which he turned his eyes, loomed above him freshly painted, substantial, invitingly open to the day. It was a big house, Virginia Colonial in style, an elegant house, although much too large for four people. They had had it built—thanks to Helen’s mother, who had auspiciously died two years ago—at a cost of twenty thousand dollars. An immense surge of pride welled up in his breast as he drew near the house. Shingles on the roof glittered handsomely; a sprig of ivy had begun to climb one rainspout, coiling up from boxwood planted around the basement. Nodding there in the sunlight, this ivy seemed to lend a touch of permanence, possibly even of tradition, to the house. Loftis was filled with sudden elation: the novelty of ownership had not yet worn off.

He stood in the shadows of the awninged terrace, a bit dizzy from the climb: was that Helen calling behind him? He turned; the landscape, clockwise, swept before his eyes—trees, lawn, a gray streak of water, and Helen standing far below, calling upward.

“Church!”

Church? Oh, yes. Hell.

“No church,” he shouted back. “Just take the girls to Sunday school! Take the car!”

“What——”

“No church——” he began again.

“What——” she seemed to say, but the words were blown back on a gust of wind. He flung his arm toward her, hopelessly, turning. In the living room he poured whisky from the decanter on the sideboard, half a tumbler full. Then he hurried to the kitchen where, bent silently over a table, Ella Swan was peeling potatoes. He struggled with an ice tray in the refrigerator, scraped his thumb, but finally extracted two cubes and dropped them into the whisky, tunefully clinking.

“Mmm-hh!” Ella said. A sigh of suspicion and reproach, of original sin apprehended and denounced, especially on Sundays. He had heard it before, he would hear it again. A score of them: old nigger cooks and nurses and laundrywomen from birth to death casting up eyes of blame and self-righteousness, in impotent reproach, across Saturday afternoon parlors, through the steam of Sunday stoves. He raised his glass happily, anticipating.

“Here’s looking at you, Ella,” he said. He took a large swallow, commencing to glow.

“Hmmph,” Ella said. Downward toward the potatoes she bent her face—black and gnomish, a web of lines and wrinkles. “Ain’t nobody lookin at me,” she snuffled, “leas’wise not today. Know who’s lookin at you, though. Good Lawd’s lookin down, He say, ‘I am de troof and de way and de life,’ good Lawd’s sayin …”

“All right, Ella,” he said. “That’s fine. That’s fine. No sermons. Leas’wise not today … for Christ’s sake,” he added deliberately, smiling.

“Dat’s Beezeldebub talkin. See de cloven hooves and de monstern eyes. Should be ashamed of yo’self, praise Jesus sweet name.”

Leaning against the refrigerator, he took another swallow; contentment enveloped him like a cloak. The kitchen, like all rooms, all scenes, began very slowly a sweet process of transfiguration: table, gleaming stove, Ella, white aseptic walls—all of these, as in some leisurely seraphic progression toward ultimate truth, began to take on the quality of perfection. Even the morning sunlight, flooding along the floor in bright pools and patches, seemed to be part of this wonderful house—his.

He walked to the little porch which adjoined the kitchen and stood there gazing out. On this side of the house there was a row of cedars which bordered his property, slanting downward toward the bay. Beneath them the earth was naked of grass, shadowed, cool-looking; as he had before, he felt a twinge of nostalgia. So much time had already passed: there were cedars like these at the school to which he had gone as a boy—St. Stephen’s, faded brick buildings which overlooked marshland. Beyond lay the river, flat and wide and blue, devoid of life on either shore for miles, except for the lonely school, so that sometimes standing there beneath the cedars, breathing the mingled odor of salt and evergreen, he would gaze out at the wintry river, at the endless miles of willow and cypress on the other shore, and imagine, as if in a trance, that this was not the Tidewater at all, but that these cedars and indeed all this wild and frigid sunlit space belonged to another country. Russia perhaps—the Arctic wastes he had read about in geography books, where the Lena and the Yenesei (he imagined) wound forever toward the dazzling sun of the Northern ocean, rimmed like this by cypress, willow and cedar, shores unpeopled, full of cold and silence. Once, too, it was to these cedars he went when in his last spring at school, in some fit of introspection rarely since repeated, he took biscuits from the kitchen and a book, poetry—Keats? Shelley?—and lay in the morning shade reading drowsily while countryside sounds rang out from every side, cows bawling, seabirds shrilling in the marsh, a boy’s shout—until the bell rang lazily for morning service and he strolled off with the other boys to chapel, casting a reluctant glance behind to the place where he had lain, and at the river and the cedars, too—disturbed about something: loveliness vanished, or perhaps merely the sense that one bright instant of his youth would always, mysteriously, be bound up in the invisible and fugitive scent of cedar trees.

He smelled the cedars now; the odor filled him with a sense of time, things gone—things he didn’t want to think about any more. So much time had passed.

Chapel. Church. Grimly he toyed with the idea of grace. If he didn’t go to church, she would raise hell. No, she never raised hell, merely became quietly, bitterly unpleasant. Well, he just wouldn’t go. Forget it. …

He turned. “Ella,” he said archly, “would you care to join me in a drink?”

“Who?” She made a scandalized sound. “Not me. Not fo’ a million dollahs. You gwan sin all you want. Ah don’t keer. …” Somber denunciations followed him as he went into the dining room, to the sideboard, and poured another drink. Then he walked to the terrace where, startled, he met Helen and the two children coming up from below. Almost mechanically he thought to hide the drink but, thinking better of it, merely stood there in the doorway, glass in hand. “First today in my left hand,” he said with awkward humor. Dammit, he thought, it was uncomfortable. …

Helen said nothing, returning his look with a quick accusing glance. Once on the terrace she shepherded the children to the door. “Peyton,” she said briskly, “you take Maudie up and help her get dressed for Sunday school.”