William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (9 page)

“Come on, Maudie,” Peyton said gently. “Let’s go upstairs. Come on, Maudie.” They disappeared into the living room, Maudie’s leg thumping—the sound receding dimly, ceasing, thumping again on the stairs above, ceasing once more. Helen turned.

“What’s the big idea?” she said. He watched her face, taut with controlled anger. “What on earth’s got into you?”

“Oh, listen, Helen——” He made a vague motion with his hand. Just like her, he thought. Get the children away—then get bitter, raise hell. Everything was going so nicely. … He took a swallow of whisky, a thin gesture of defiance. “Have a drink?” he said, and immediately regretted it. But now——Oh, God, he thought. Her face softened; a shy look, quizzical, playful, almost tender, came to her eyes. She plucked at his sleeves, towing him to a couch. “Sit down, dear,” she said.

“Look here,” she began softly—sitting beside him in the shadows, she looked very pretty, pretty as she once had been ten years before, the cheeks pale, unblemished by age: a girl’s face without sag or line or hollow, even beautiful once more, although maybe it was the whisky—“look here,” she was saying, “you know you mustn’t do this all the time. You know you’ll ruin your health. Nothing moral or immoral about it, dear … just that you can’t take the girls to Sunday school like that … you know we’ve got to go to church … we promised … you know that, dear. …”
You know, you know.
Now he wasn’t listening. The same old thing. Jesus Christ, it was awful. Why did she put on the mother act? Why didn’t she admit she despised him for his drinking, for everything? Instead of this cool, constant, silent bitterness and the desperate mother act, so obviously a fraud. Why didn’t she for once make a scene, raise hell? Then he could explode heroically, get everything out of his system in one big blow. Oh, it was awful. Awful. Jesus H. Christ, it was awful.

But he wasn’t listening. Just for a moment the elation returned, and as quickly collapsed within him. Past the edge of her cheek he gazed at the bay, resting in steamy doldrums. A few gulls circled lazily. Somewhere out of sight a motorboat coughed fitfully, died. In the winter, he thought, the bay would be gray and frozen, rimmed round its shore with snow, acres of frigid salt; warm inside the house, Peyton near him, they might gaze out and watch driftwood, gulls wheeling, a sky full of melancholy clouds the color of soot. He and Peyton … they would be together in the warm house—but that would be winter and he would be older, and not even on his way, most likely, to Senator … no, Judge.

He belched heavily. Helen swam toward him on a cloud of alcohol, filling him with sudden, intolerable discontent. “Look here, dear, you know you shouldn’t … we promised so long ago …” Long ago.

He arose, looking down at her. “Now you look here yourself, my dear,” he said, trying to keep anger back from his voice, “you might as well know I’m going to lead my life any good goddam way I please.” She started for an instant, protest swelling in her throat. “Now wait a minute,” he continued, “I don’t mean to be nasty. I just want you to know a few things—among which is the fact that I enjoy taking Sundays at my leisure and the other is the fact that I enjoy drinking leisurely, too.”

She sprang from the couch. “Selfish——”

“Hold on,” he said, looking downward, unaccountably afraid of looking at her. “Wait a goddam minute. It’s not a matter of selfishness at all. I don’t want to corrupt anyone’s morals. I’ll go often enough so that the voting populace knows I’m not an atheist. I told you a long time ago about what religion or lack of it I’ve got. I’m tired of having my Sundays interfered with by a string of platitudes by Carey Carr—that …”

She said nothing, walking to the door, turning then with a murmur: “Voting populace. That’s a laugh.” She was quiet for a moment—a silence on the edge of tears. “Oh, Milton, Milton,” she said in a despairing voice, and was gone.

He looked up warmly at the sky. He had told her.

Yet something interfered with this pleasure. A sense of ugly guilt crept over him. Now he shouldn’t have said … Oh, Milton, Milton, she had said. There seemed a necessity for reparations, amends. But with a feeling of no more than weariness, he knew it was too late. The hell with it. He drank, hearing a voice. He peered around a corner of the awning; above, at a window, Peyton stood in her underwear, smiling down. “Hello, stupid.”

“How’s my beautiful baby?” he said, raising his glass.

Helen called, Peyton fled, the window fell with a crash.

That Sunday long ago had brought Loftis precariously close to an understanding of something: himself, perhaps. Ghosts of things done, things undone lingered on the lawn in that complacent afternoon sunlight. Had he just turned soon enough he might have seen them and been properly frightened. But when he did turn it was too late, evening had come, and the moment for recognition was lost forever.

Now, “Would you be a saint,” Dolly Bonner was saying delightfully across what seemed an acre of sunlit lawn, “and get me another drink, Milton honey?” Remotely a churchbell struck three. Shadows had begun to lengthen on the grass.

The way she said honey …

“Yes, yes, indeedy. I’d be proud, Dolly honey.” He arose from the lawn chair uneasily—he was getting tight, too tight, and so would have to taper off with care; stepping over the legs of Dolly’s husband, Sclater (pronounced “Slaughter,” known as “Pookie”), for an instant using one of Pookie’s knees as a sort of crutch—“Excuse me, Pookie,” he said—he walked to Dolly’s chair, smilingly took her glass with the faintest suggestion of a bow, and continued up the slope, feeling the glass a bit sticky, pleasurably warm from her hand. A few steps and he turned, contrite, looking at Pookie’s and Helen’s glasses: in his haste he had forgotten. But they were half-full; Pookie and Helen, talking, hadn’t noticed him. He turned again, Dolly winked, smiled—gesture of some secret, puzzling, yet vaguely exciting
rapport.
The smile lingered on his vision even as he turned and the house above floated recklessly into focus.

A wild, random exhilaration had swept over him. Although perhaps now fogged by just one drink too many, his mind had been suspended for nearly five hours in a state of palmy beatitude. The scene of odious domesticity that morning had been changed, after Helen’s departure and one more drink, into one of elemental significance, solitary enchantment. Secure in his misty Eden, he had wandered through the house: lace curtains billowed out like pale balloons, and he heard a hailstorm of gravel on the drive as Helen wheeled away; a horn honked, Peyton laughed in the distance, then silence.

Alone then, he had switched on the radio, a new and splendid one, an Atwater Kent he had bought six months before for three hundred dollars. There was a sudden belch of static; he leaped for the knob. A Sunday school choir commenced a falsetto chirping. Jesus loves me. Methodists, probably. He could almost see it: a row of maple chairs, young women with bad breath and half-moons of sweat beneath their armpits, a basement somewhere smelling of stale leaking water and moldy religion. A sad, shadowy place, where the timeless rattle of Proverbs and Commandments outlasts age and decay and even the dusty, pious slant, itself, of Sunday sunlight upon worn hymnals and broken electrical fixtures and cobwebbed concrete walls. Methodists. They hated beauty.
Ah, God
… He yawned, took a drink, turned off the radio.

Bemused, looking at the floor, he saw on the rug a black scorched place where a cigarette had burned. Dolly Bonner. It could be re-woven perhaps. Dolly Bonner. Yes. Pale hands last night that went tap-tap-tap against a cigarette; ashes sprayed downward on the rug. He had brought her an ashtray, devilishly cajoling, obliging. “Dolly, shame on you for five minutes.” “Oh, Milton—” her pale hand on his arm—“Helen. The Tabriz. I’m so sorry.” Pale face, too, with a soft mouth downward drooping, lovingly, moist a bit from the last highball, daintily swallowed. Pale. “Why are you so pale?” he had asked. “Oh, Milton honey, I never go out in the sun. I’m so susceptible.” Her finger tips on his made a little throbbing current of delight there. Like those buzzers jokers use to shock your hand. Then her laughter, almost inaudible, set her bosom all a-trembling: a pale tiny arc of breast peeped out, slyly.

He leaned back on the couch. Sunlight slanted through the room. Far off a dog barked, a man’s voice—“Rover!”—and thin yelps fading off into a gentle Sunday silence.

“Mawnin, Mistah Loftis.”

La Ruth, Ella Swan’s daughter, shuffled through the room with a mop. She was a huge, slovenly Negro with steel-rimmed spectacles and an air of constant affliction. She came on Sundays to help out.

“Morning, La Ruth,” he said, raising his hand. “How’s your back?” She lumbered past, mumbling something about misery, toiling up the stairs with a sullen flat-footed sound, a great, aching hulk of a woman, moaning and groaning.

Well, Dolly, he thought. He settled back restfully. Well, Dolly … He got up abruptly and went to the telephone.

Now, balancing a bottle of whisky, ice and fresh glasses on a silver tray, he sauntered back across the lawn, intent that nothing should be spilled. Someone, the children, perhaps, had turned on the radio: a fragment of Brahms, a vast, unhappy whimper, swelled out behind him, then melted on the air. Beneath the cedars the children were playing. He lifted his chin at them, smiling broadly, and they waved back at him in unison. Peyton hollered, “Can we have some ginger ale?” He nodded, still smiling, and Peyton and Melvin, Dolly’s little boy, scampered off toward the kitchen, leaving Maudie sitting sadly beneath the trees.

As he approached the lawn chairs Pookie arose and started forward. “Let me help you there, old man,” he shouted with oppressive fervor. He was short and balding and wore a lavender silk sport shirt through which there was somehow exposed part of a melonlike paunch, glowing pinkly. As he trundled toward Loftis he seemed to move through the grass with short, obscure steps of his own devising, like an inexpert roller skater. He was already quite drunk; one or two drinks always did it. Loftis despised him.

He fended Pookie off politely—“That’s all right, Pookie”—and set the tray down beside Dolly. He saw Helen out of the corner of his eye. She was obviously still angry with him; her face was flushed, bent downward toward something she was knitting.

“Milton,” Dolly was saying, “I was telling Helen if I could get Pookie some flannel pants like you’ve got on I might have to worry about some gal taking him away.” She giggled.

Loftis leaned down beside Dolly, pouring whisky into the glasses. He could smell her perfume.

“It’s not pants, sweetheart,” Pookie said, sitting down. “It’s my pussonality.” Exploding on the air his laughter was wild and disheartening and the ensuing silence—since no one else had laughed—was rather horrible. Dolly filled the breach with a severe comment on the size of Pookie’s behind, Helen bent toward her knitting, saying nothing.

“Aw, sweetheart——” Pookie said.

Dolly stirred in her chair—a sudden swell of hips, tightly draped in black. Even in spring, that excellent black … He stirred the drinks and eyed Pookie. How had she ever lived so long with such a jackass? He was a real-estate agent. Luck had been good to him: during the land boom just before the market crash he had made enough in commissions to drive a Buick and to get around to the best parties and to have his house redecorated by a stylish young decorator from Richmond. He also felt secure enough in his wealth to make several brash, futile attempts at joining the country club, and Loftis had always felt that Pookie’s buoyant friendship for him was merely a badly disguised effort to have him speak a few good words to the membership committee. He and Dolly were Baptists. Dreariness and quackery. Loftis despised him. Despised him because he was loud-mouthed and had never been to college and furthermore … Because furthermore—God, it’s true, he thought with a sudden shock—Dolly was the first woman since his marriage whom he had really considered making love to.

He served the drinks. Helen, it developed, didn’t want any more; she only drank to be sociable anyway, she explained with a pallid smile in Dolly’s direction. It didn’t agree with her. “I know what you mean, honey,” Dolly said significantly. Helen returned to her knitting. For a while they talked aimlessly. Dolly spoke lazily of quilts and mattresses and bedspreads and the little town of Emporia, where she had lived as a child, and Loftis, sunk in his chair, thoughtlessly plucking at the canvas seat, would have been, he knew, bored to extinction except for the fact that Dolly
did
make him warm with desire each time, with a silken whisper, she crossed her legs. It was as simple as that and so Loftis kept his eyes on her legs; his mind, with unconscionable fascination, he kept upon bedspreads and quilts and the “funny little old peanut town” that Pookie had rescued her from. There was something common about her, Loftis thought as she paused once to drink, but she had a certain naive, little-girl wit which wouldn’t be too hard to take provided one weren’t around her for too long. He pondered certain possibilities: he could get her off to Richmond somehow; people wouldn’t have to know.…

But what was he thinking? Good God, he had never had a thought like that before. His eyes drifted guiltily to Helen, back to Dolly’s legs. He drank. Long, diagonal clouds formed above the bay. Over the cedars rested the sun, a faultless copper disk. The mockingbird, which had chattered all day, had fled now and no sound disturbed the quiet; nothing could be heard on the lawn save the easy rise and fall of careless talk hovering above the lawn chairs like bumblebees, a tatter of Brahms, unheard, that sighed down the slope, fading sorrowfully on the afternoon air.

He drank.

Pookie’s face rose up like a ruddy, insubstantial globe, smiling. “What about this New Deal—” he walked past toward the whisky, his pants fluttering; Dolly’s knees disappeared behind them, came back into view—“gonna give all the money to people who never worked for it, gonna give all the money to a buncha no-count niggers.”

“Nigras,” Dolly corrected.

“Nigras then.” The pants fluttered past again, the big behind. “What about that, Milt?”

“The hell with it, I say,” Loftis said over the rim of his glass, thinking: Now why did I say that? Far off, the churchbell struck four. Dolly’s skirt was drawn back a little, exposing six inches of thigh, all the way up to …