William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (80 page)

Wendy began to sob and moan again, but whether over this recital I couldn’t tell.

Piety and retribution glittered from the oysterman’s eyes. “Missus, I ain’t never been no man to take the law in my own hands. I never had no cause to, anyways. Ask anybody around the river from Essex County all the way to Deltaville and they’ll tell you that Groover Floyd is a law-abidin’ man. But missus, I’ll tell you one thing.” Here for a second he paused, grimly clenching his knotted fists, and sent a russet jet of tobacco juice into the boxwood. “I’ll tell you one thing, missus. Ain’t no law nor statute in this state goin’ to stop me from undoin’ what that boy of your’n done. Warn’t no iniquity of Sodom any worse than he done, and right there in the plain sight of God, too, in His holy temple, to a pore little tyke but half out of her didy-drawers. Missus,” he said, stepping forward with Buddy now at his heels, the club cocked in mid-air, menacingly, “I don’t aim to cause you no hurt. Just step aside, now, because we means to
git that boy!”

It seemed then, as I too retreated in alarm, that a dozen things occurred to me at once: I saw Wendy first, thrown back against the door as if upon the full blast of his advancing wrath, her arms outstretched against the portal so that, spread-eagled now, her eyes tightly closed and mumbling unintelligible terror to the heavens, she looked like some swooning martyr awaiting upon the fagots her last agony and combustion; the two overalled men, hot-eyed and unrelenting, pressing forward up the steps toward us with stony resolution and slab-handed brawn, the older man now unlimbering from some rear pocket a length of cast-iron pipe which he brandished before him as he moved past Wendy and gained the doorstep; Mason, cowering pale behind Richard and the howling dogs, in abrupt crablike retreat scuttling across the hallway, slipping down, getting up, pleading for help in a shrill child’s voice as he raced for the stairs: Richard, himself too frightened to move or to release the dogs, paralyzed, brainlessly yelling, “Moddom, moddom!”—I heard and saw these things all in the briefest fraction of an instant. They passed across my mind in mesmeric slow parade as I stood there groping for a cigarette and until I realized with warm sinking panic in my entrails that the two men, their eyes now level upon me, thought that I was Mason. I tried to cry out, to move, but I was rooted there. And for all I know they might have grabbed me had there not at that moment issued from somewhere in the house behind me an outraged “Hold!”

The voice sounded again: “Hold!” It was Mr. Flagg. Barefooted and in pajamas he emerged from a corridor—it seemed miles away across the hall—and padded noiselessly toward us. Was it that baritone parade-ground voice which alone was so commanding? Or indeed some pure presence, some compelling quality of power and authority which transmitted itself almost instantly to everyone in the place and caused each to stop, transfixed petrified in separate attitudes of anguish and wrath and flight? Whatever the case, as he spoke and came across those infinite distances toward us it was as if by sudden legerdemain we had all been frozen like statues in our tracks: Wendy crucified against the door, her eyes bulging in disbelief—“Justin, I thought—” I heard her murmur; the two oystermen stock-still where they halted at the doorstep, weapons upheld in motionless, powerless frieze against the night; even the dogs became still, struck dumb in a silence that seemed almost more deafening than all their roars; and finally I saw Mason on the staircase looking wildly down, one leg still poised in panicky ascent. And as we watched, Flagg came on. “Hold!” he cried. Bald and short, bespectacled, wearing a foppish sprig of a mustache, he came gliding toward us like a wound-up toy soldier on a drumhead, his fly open, looking neither left nor right, negotiating corners and pillars with precise right-angle turns. I felt I could almost hear a
click
at the corners, and the whir of toy machinery, but as he brushed past me with his face set grimly forward toward the door, I smelled the odor of bath-lotion, still lingering about me as he boomed at the men:
“Get out of my house!”

It was a display of sheer annihilating authority, of will; it was almost regal; the two men seemed to shrivel and bend before his fury like willows in a gale. Flustered, sheepish, now alarmed, the older man began to croak out again his affliction. “Well look, mister,” he started, “ ’twas only that boy of your’n there tuk my little girl—”

“Drop that pipe!” Flagg snapped. “I heard everything already. I’ll pay you well for whatever you’ve suffered. Now get out of my house. Get out of my house before I shoot both of you!” He had no gun with him, but I would not have been astonished had he materialized one from the air.

The pipe clattered to the floor. “She warn’t but thirteen years old,” the man began to blubber. “I swear ’fore God she come to me, mister, and she had a
babydoll
in her arms. A
babydoll
she had, the pore little tyke—”

“I’m sorry for what you’ve suffered,” Flagg cut in. “But it’s no cause to enter someone’s home with weapons as you have done in the middle of the night. Now you get out of here, do you understand? Leave your name with my man and I’ll contact you tomorrow. Now both of you get out of here!”

Standing barefooted at the door, he watched them turn and shuffle silently down the steps.

“Justin—” I heard Wendy say. She took a step toward him. “Justin, I didn’t know you were here! Where have you—”

“Shut up!” he said, whirling upon her. “Richard, call Denise in here, and have her put madame to bed.”

“Justin,” she cried, “oh, Justin darling, where have you
been?”

“Shut up,” he repeated. “That’s no longer any concern of yours, Gwendolyn. Where I go and what I do is my concern and it will be that way, do you understand? It will be that way.
It
will be that way!
And it will stay that way forever, while I have a common drunk for a wife—a common drunk, a common drunk and a
moron
—you are a
moron,
do you know that?—and a contemptible
swine
for a son!”

Then, padding swiftly again across the gleaming floor—a short little man, stiffly erect—he was gone, leaving behind him, amid the shambles of the room and upon the hectic evening, the strange girlish scent of gardenias.

Much later, still shaken, unable to sleep, I sat in the library with the radio turned down low and leafed half-blindly through a copy of
Town & Country,
Through the windows blew the faint smell of bloom and fern and flowers, the sound of frogs in the meadow and katydids, and in the woods a whippoorwill, broadcasting sweet, piercing word of impending summer. Mason came in after a while wearing an ornately figured bathrobe and a broad, derisive grin.

“Well, it was quite a show, wasn’t it, Pierre?” he said.

I would like to have answered but the words, whatever they were to be, refused to leave my lips. I kept looking at the magazine. It was the first of its kind I had ever seen, and it seemed to be full of pale, scrawny people propped on shooting sticks or studying horses. I was close to tears.

“Mason,” I said finally, with a strained effort at levity, “why doesn’t Wendy get something somebody can read?”

But then I saw that he was face-down on a couch sobbing desperately into the pillows, and so, not knowing what else to say, I let him go on weeping.

After a while I dozed off. There was a sound in my ears, it seemed, of ten thousand alpine horns—slumberous, dim, muted from afar—while in a distant airy room of the mansion populated by whispers, by the footsteps of people I could not name, there came an incessant shuffling and rustling, as of someone packing for immediate flight. “Always love your mother,” I thought I heard Wendy murmur, but then, “Peter Leverett! Oh, Peter! Peter Leverett!” a voice called far above me. “Wake up! It’s
way
past time!” And I forced my eyelids apart, dreaming for a while that it was Wendy’s face hovering over me, until, pushing off the shroud of slumber, I blinked, still half-dozing, and felt the hands of Rosemarie de Laframboise urging me awake, in the dead of night, in Sambuco.

“Don’t feel too bad about it, Peter,” Rosemarie was saying, “perhaps the poor man will get all right. You know, I’ve read about people who lie in a coma for just years and years …” She faltered, as if with the sudden knowledge that this was no consolation to me at all. “… and still live.” We were standing at the front entrance of the Bella Vista, where she had waited for me while I hurriedly bathed and shaved and put on my best suit. She had waited patiently, too, while I telephoned the hospital at Naples and learned from whom I took to be some nursing sister, a frosty tight-lipped woman, that di Lieto, still sunk in his dark unflagging slumber, his broken skull packed in ice, was in that condition whose outcome only the Heavenly Father Himself could fathom or influence. As a parting shot—something steely in her voice told me she knew I was an Episcopalian—she enjoined me to prayer, and it was the look on my face, I suppose, prayerful and disconsolate, that caused Rosemarie with all the good will in the world to implant in my mind the vision of di Lieto lying supine, his hair slowly graying, oblivious of all, fed through some miserable tube until doomsday. “I mean,” she added hastily then, “what I mean is that this doesn’t mean he’s necessarily going to
die,
you know.”

“I know,” I said forlornly.

“Just try to forget about it, Peter,” she went on. “I know it must have been a horrible shock to you, but if you—if you can just for a moment conceive of it not as something so personal, but as only a—oh, I don’t know, a tiny little thing in the great working-out of the universe. Did you ever read
The Prophet,
by Kahlil Gibran?” Her voice was very sad.

“Oh Jesus, no,” I said. We paused to light cigarettes at the bottom of the steps that led into the front courtyard of the Bella Vista. Roses were in bloom here; the night was fragrant and warm and starless. Mild clouds drifted over the moon, leaving a hint in the air of reluctant and improbable rain. It would be sunny and hot again tomorrow. I felt wobbly, depleted still, as if in my recent half-hearted, muddled sleep I had not slept at all, but had walked endless distances, hefted huge burdens, battled giants. Yet as Rosemarie’s face, vast and beautiful, moved downward toward the flame in my cupped palm, obscuring the scent of roses with some strong sweet perfume of her own, it seemed that my mind was oddly keen and alert—that old beaten and buffaloed sensitivity again—and with a stab of recognition I knew I had seen her face before: it was of course Wendy’s, about which I was in no hurry to draw any Freudian parallels, but even more so it was an exact replica in composite of all of the faces of those at last fetched-up virgins gazing out at me impassive and gentle from a thousand Sunday society pages, their features all but indistinguishable one from another by the soft standardized look in their eyes, so completely American, of conventional morals and moneyed security.
The Prophet.
It was indeed a Finch College notion of poetry, and I could have laughed aloud, except for the fact that now, as she drew back her head, it occurred to me why Rosemarie seemed so sad. She was Mason’s “mistress” (I felt she would be the first to put quotation marks around the word), and something abstracted, insecure, and fumbling about her, despite all her smooth big beauty, made me sense that she had come to feel ashamed of the role, or perhaps afraid of it, and yearned for that lost, irretrievable image of herself, gazing out chastely from the engagement pages of the
New York Times.
Was I indulging in unfair prejudgment? I don’t think so. Besides, as she turned to take my arm and as we stepped out into the cobbled village road, light from a street lamp fell full upon her and I could see for the first time the shiny blue bruise beneath her eye, where Mason had socked her.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come and wake you sooner,” she said as we walked along, “but you looked like you needed sleep so badly, poor boy. Mason agreed with me. I hope you didn’t mind.”

“Not at all,” I said. “Thanks for coming for me.”

“I’ll bet you could stand a drink.”

“I could do more with some food,” I said. I was famished. I had had nothing to eat all day, except for the bun in Formia, and that seemed years ago. “I wonder if you all have anything, or if I should try to get something at—”

“Oh, Peter, how absurd!” she broke in. “Of course we have just oodles of things to eat. You must be famished! And Mason drove over to the PX in Naples today, and just brought back literally tons of provisions. Oh, steaks and chopped meat and packages and packages of frozen foods. And
milk,
Peter, real honest-to-God milk in bottles! Mason says it’s flown down from Germany. I drank a whole quart this evening in place of cocktails. Really.”

“The PX?” I began. “But how—”

“Oh, you know he was a pilot during the war. He established PX privileges in Naples as soon as we got here.”

“A pilot? But what—” Once again I halted, perplexed for an instant but quickly perplexed no longer as a horde of recollections about Mason came tumbling back. I think I must have suppressed a groan. “I mean I didn’t know being an ex—an expilot gave you PX privileges. Unless you were still in. He must have some kind of deal, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know, Peter,” she said in a faraway tone. “Those things are so complicated to me. Anyway,” she said, her voice brightening, “we have just everything to eat. Just God’s own quantity. How would a nice sirloin steak appeal to you?”

I was about to reply with enthusiasm when out from a dimly lit alleyway hopped a crouched and ragged figure that approached us with a husky snuffling noise—a series of rich, porcine grunts that caused Rosemarie to stop and grow rigid in her tracks, clutching my wrist in a sudden powerful grip as she uttered a gasp of alarm. But the subhuman noise, I could tell, came only from my dragoman of the afternoon, Saverio, as he grappled with speech: his flat red face bobbed toward us, fat tongue wagging in the lacuna between his snaggled teeth, and he managed to roar out a phrase in incomprehensible dialect, his features all smiles and glowing, like some inebriate Halloween pumpkin.