William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (93 page)

“I don’t hate—” I began, turning, but another blast from the whistle nearly lifted us from the deck. Far off in the lower depths sounded a carillon of jangling bells. “Well, Mason,” I said instead, “it looks like it’s time to break up our party.” I stuck out my hand, feeling like hell. “Many thanks for all the nice presents. Thanks really, Mason.”

He moved toward me with a somber little smile, reaching for my hand. “Bon voyage, old dollbaby,” he said, “don’t get clutched up. Down one for me, will you, every now and then?”

It was the last I heard him say. His shoulder still heaving as if with palsy, he took my hand, turning that simple gesture of farewell into the sorriest act of loneliness, of naked longing, I think I have ever known.

For like that forsaken boy—his face unremembered now, even his name—who lingers dimly in my memory of childhood, the rich little neighbor boy who—so it was long after told to me—warped or crippled or ugly, perhaps all three, when asked one day by his elders why and how and whither all his nickels and his quarters and his dimes had so swiftly vanished, burst out the confession that they had gone, each one, not for candy or toys or Eskimo pies, but to pay for the companionship of other children —five cents for an hour, twenty for an afternoon, a small fistful of nickels for a whole summer day: like this lost child’s, Mason’s gesture was one of recompense and hire, and laden with the anguish of friendlessness. Before I could say another word, or recover my wits long enough to really understand what he had given me, he was gone, swallowed up in the shorebound throng, leaving my hand clutched around a wad of French money he had got from somewhere, all notes of ten thousand francs—enough to buy a solid-gold Swiss watch if I had wanted one, or a suit of Harris tweeds, or bottles of brandy without number. Mortified, I tried to call out after him, but already he was lost from sight—except for one last brief glimpse I had of him at the top of a distant stairway: with his head bent down there seeking the steps he looked curiously clumsy and inept; not the old breezy magician but vulnerable, bumbling and for an instant wildly confused—future’s darling, a man with one foot poised in the thinnest of air.

Then within minutes I felt a throbbing beneath my feet and the boat began to move. Propped against the rail with the money still in my hand—feeling even at this terminal moment that my virtue had been pre-empted, that somehow, irretrievably, I had been bought and procured—I slipped seaward toward Europe with all Manhattan aglitter in my eyes, its cenotaphs and spires exorbitant and heaven-yearning.

With my cabinmates I got along very well: they were really gentle, accommodating fellows—somewhat hard to get next to, maybe, but far less depraved than Mason, it seemed to me, and a lot better adjusted. In Paris I got a letter from Mason, telling me that Celia had gone to Reno. I remember one characteristic phrase, which seemed—as with so much of Mason—to emerge from some insubstantial shadowland unacquainted either with sorrow or joy: “Weep, weep for Mason and Celia, Peter, we’ve gone to Splitsville.” And it was not long after this that Mason faded from my mind. Yet I wish now I could recall the details of that shipboard dream I had, far out in mid-ocean, when I shot erect in my bunk and listened in a sweat to my fellow voyagers snoring in the dark, and smelled the sweet scent of those blossoms, slowly dying, that he had given me, and was touched all over with the somehow-knowledge of Mason’s certain doom.

4

When Mason, clattering down the hallway in his shower clogs, left me vibrating on that marble bench in Sambuco, I found it hard to get a decent grip on all my emotions. I was furious, God knows. Yet my anger, mixed as it was with a bewildering and indefinable fear of Mason, had the quality of anxiety; flight—from the palace, from Sambuco—seemed essential, and I sat there nursing the insult I felt, and pondered the ways in which I could make a decorous, unseen escape from the whole neighborhood. Two or three minutes must have passed. I was about to get up then, when I heard Mason’s wooden clogs click-clocking slowly back down the hallway. He entered, still walking with his strange bentover hobbled gait, but he stood a bit more erect now and he was looking at me with such grinning, callous good humor that my fear of him instantly vanished. No longer my Polaroid monster, he was himself, desperately plausible from top to toe. “Bet I gave you quite a start,” he said. “How about a drink, Petesy? I haven’t had time to—”

“Go to hell!” I retorted. “Who do you think you are, talking to me like that! We aren’t back at St. Andrew’s, and by God if you think—I’m not just another one of your crummy freeloaders!”

“Petesy, Petesy, Petesy,” he murmured in his old plaintive cajoling voice. He sat down beside me and gave me a slap of palship on the shoulder. “Old Petesy with the tissue-paper skin. Look, I want to tell you—”

“You
look!” I exclaimed, getting briskly to my feet. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on around here, but I can tell you I’ve
had
it! Do you think I’m some lousy
contadino
—some peasant you can push around? You invited me down here as your guest and I’ve felt about as welcome as a case of typhoid! If it hadn’t been for Rosemarie, understand, I wouldn’t even have gotten fed! I think I’ll take a raincheck.
Mille grazie!
Wise guy! Jerk!” I shouted miserably as I began to shuffle off. “Invite me back sometime when I won’t be such a strain on your resources!”

He leaped to his feet and caught my wrist. He was still panting from his recent pursuit, still sweating, and he wore an expression about as close to being shamefaced as he could ever approach. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am. I didn’t know what I was saying. I was—well, I was
hacked,
upset. Please forgive me, Peter. Please do.”

“Well, I’m going, Mason,” I said faint-heartedly. “See you around the campus.”

“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” he replied. “You’re going to forgive me for being a bastard. And you’re going to stay here with your old pal.”

“What did you mean, saying you were going to
stomp
me?” I said. “What’s gotten into you, Mason? What have I done? I’m not a criminal, a bum you can talk to like—”

He ran one hand nervously over his brow. “I—I don’t know, Peter. I’m sorry. That girl. She’s been robbing me blind. Just lifted a pair of Rosemarie’s earrings. I was upset, that’s all. I dunno, I got so exasperated I thought everybody was trying to side with her. Crazy of me! Look,” he pleaded, “say you forgive me! I really didn’t mean it, I swear. Soon as I said it I felt like a worm.”

Incorrigible to the end, I allowed nostalgia and sentimentality to win out. I averted my eyes and gripped his hand, saying: “Well, O.K., Mason, O.K.” All my life I’ve been addicted, in such situations, to weird self-implication. I added: “I’m sorry, too. It was half my fault, I guess.”

This seemed vaguely to cheer him up. “Right,” he said vacantly, “let’s call it bygones and to hell with it. We all make mistakes. Look, wait here a minute while I go up and put some clothes on, and I’ll show you around the plant.” And as I stood waiting there while he vanished up the stairway I was left feeling—like one bamboozled in an old familiar con game—that it was he who had pocketed
my
apology.

He was gone for five or ten minutes. During that time I wandered aimlessly around the deserted room, puffing at a cigarette; I still felt nervous and rattled, especially troubled over the girl he had chased down the hallway, and whom he had obviously molested in one way or another. I think that for a while it must have drizzled outside, for as I lingered, peering again up at the melee on the ceiling (the Huntress this time, harpooned squarely through the navel by a latter-day electrical conduit) I heard voices buzzing below as the poolside crowd began to disband and made their way back up through the garden and into the palace.

When Mason returned he had on a white jacket and freshly creased Bermuda shorts, and he wore a preoccupied look. “Come on, Petesy, let’s look over the plant.” His voice and manner were terse; nonetheless, he was trying hard to please and impress me. In the next half-hour or so he showed me his den, a leathery relaxed place done up like a whiskey ad, with elephant guns, books, bullfight posters, an ottoman made from the foreleg of a rhinoceros, and the head of an African buffalo he claimed to have slain —a rather pathetic beast that gazed down from the wall with the sweet, dumb, glassy expression of a Brown Swiss cow. This was a new phase of Mason’s, I reflected—the sporting life—and here in the den we lingered for a while, drinking brandy, while he told me of his friendship with various flashy matadors, showed me his great bullhide-bound volumes on tauromachy, which is the word he used, and, lastly, with an effrontery and shamelessness advanced even for him, described in detail the safari he had made through Kenya with a sensitive Canadian blonde. She had taken her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, on Baudelaire’s imagery … but I won’t go into it: such a rich amalgam of jackals howling in the night, and nerve-racking trails of blood spoors down draws and gullies, and bwanas and memsahibs, and petrifying waits for a wounded beast to come plunging from the brush, or bush—all of this laced with
Fleurs du mal
and strong draughts of fornication on the veldt—a romance the likes of which you never heard. I think I must have feigned interest but my mind was far away; all I wanted to do was to make an escape from this palace and go to sleep somewhere. Next he took me through the rest of the “plant,” showed the basement with its General Electric oil furnace—trucked over from Naples, he said, at great expense and effort—the frozen food locker, and then the stainless-steel kitchen complete with Frigidaire, an expanse of cabinets, ovens, and ranges whose buttons, controls, and indicators glittered in multicolored ranks. I looked around. At a gleaming sink two local scullery maids toiled in a cloud of steam, scraping plates for the nearby dishwasher, which grumbled and hummed like an idling Diesel engine; beyond them in one corner old Giorgio, stripped to his galluses, was moodily amusing himself with an electric knife sharpener that sent a spine-chilling wail through the air.

“I got everything wholesale at the PX,” Mason said. “Well, what do you think of it?”

“Mason,” I said, “I think it’s just grand. But tell me something —how did you get PX privileges?”

“There are ways,” he said inscrutably. And then he led me into a nearby alcove and showed me a newly developed American fire extinguisher, the extinguishing element of which—a type of gluey foam—he claimed you could actually eat.

“Fantastic, Mason,” I said. Culturally he had shifted his poles, that was plain to see; he seemed no more self-conscious over this sudden display of pelf than he had been before over his forays into the demimonde. “Tell me,” I went on, “how come you’ve got a Cadillac now? Isn’t that rather square?”

“Oh, sports cars,” he said. “They’ve become such a cliche.” I should have known.

Then we returned to the kitchen and were confronted by Giorgio, looking this time sour and mournful as he gave Mason what appeared to be some kind of note.
’Da Francesca,”
said Giorgio.

“Francesca?” Mason exclaimed, his eyes growing wide. “Where is she?”

“Dov’è, signore? Non lo so. Ma credo che sia giù, nella strada”

“Speak up!” he said excitedly, then to me: “What’s he saying, for Christ sake?”

“He said he believes she was downstairs, on the street.”

“What does he mean, ’believes’?” he said, tearing open the note. “Doesn’t the old fool
know?”

“Se n’èandata”
Giorgio said with a shrug, spreading his hands wide. “Finish.”

“She’s gone, Mason,” I said.

“Well, tell him to go find her.”

I told him. More knowledgeable, apparently, than Mason knew, he shuffled away, mumbling resentfully that he was nobody’s fool. I began to fidget. Mason in the meantime, digesting the message in a glance, had turned scarlet; puckering his lips up as if to spit, or to blurt out some blasphemy, his face became redder and redder, and he let the note fall to the floor, his eyes bugging out and looking wild as, finally, he found words to speak. “The little slut,” he said in a low, mean voice, “the unspeakable, filthy dago slut.”

“Mason,” I said hastily. “I think I’ll go on up to the Bella Vista. I’m really quite beat and—”

“They’ve got the minds of criminals, I’ll swear to God,” he said. “Every goddam one of them are filthy, sneaking thieves. It’s born in them, I’ll swear, Peter, with the same predestination that makes the Germans born with blood-lust. They’ve got robbery and embezzlement in their
bones.
No wonder they’re so goddam poor. They must rob each other blind!” As of yore, he had begun to gyrate his miserable shoulder.

“Look, Mason,” I said, “all this is very well and good, but it’s not true and I don’t want to talk about it. I’m dead tired and I want to go to bed—”

“Jesus Christ!” he said, paying me no attention. “To think that filching little bitch would promenade right under my nose for two —no, three whole months, robbing me baldheaded—at the wages I pay her, too!—robbing me with no more compunction than if she thought I was a gibbering idiot. Wiggling her criminal little twat around the house as if she owned the place—” And as he stood before me there in the steaming, grandiloquent kitchen, he sailed away upon a harangue so absurd and so mad that I actually thought for a brief moment he was joking: had I not heard, for Jesus sake, of Willie Morelli and Tough Tony Anastasia and such thugs as The Dasher Abbandando and Bow-legs Sarto—not to speak, for Jesus sake, of Luciano and Costello and Capone? Was that not proof enough, if proof was needed, that the principal contribution of the Italian people to America if not to all humanity (and
please,
Peter, he knew all about the Renaissance) was a thievish and corrupt criminality so murderous, so immoral, that it was unrivaled in history? “Jesus sake, Peter!” he said angrily, as if he sensed my silent rebuke. “Use your head!” Didn’t I know that Murder, Incorporated—that vicious mob of professional assassins —was made up almost wholly of Italians and that moreover gangsterism in America was totally controlled by a wicked pack of dope-sellers and connivers in Italy? (Dear old Italy.) I had heard that, but I didn’t see that—
’Jesus!”
he cried. “Use your head!” And then he indulged himself in one final, flamboyant, pathetic lie (the last of his I was ever to hear): about a young friend of his, a Harvard-bred assistant district attorney so brilliant that his name had been bruited about New York as candidate for mayor, who, having declared a personal war on the mobsters, went out bravely incognito among them, only to be found slain one night in a vacant lot in Rego Park, Queens, mutilated so horribly that even he, Mason, was loath to tell about it (but he would: a hot poker rammed up his bowel; his genitalia … etc.). I made my mind a blank. “And the Mafia had branded their mark on his chest!” he concluded, shaking with fury. “A bunch of miserable Italian thugs with the mentality of beasts. Look, you know I’m not a—a
xenophobe,
of the lunatic fringe. But isn’t that proof enough that the Italians have become degraded to the point of
bestiality?
Do you see why I might be peeved,” he asked, with a heavy load of sarcasm, “when this dirty little twat of a housemaid has the temerity—the gall—to walk out beneath my nose with practically everything I own? Can’t you see how I might be
vexed,
to say the least? Well, can’t you?”

I said nothing. I couldn’t even bring myself to look at him, as he stood there panting and heaving. Then all of a sudden he smacked one fist into the palm of his hand, startling me, forcing me to look up at his face. And as I stared at him, he muttered beneath his breath something which made no sense to me at all: “So it’s a lot of lowbrow diddling, that’s what it is. A cheap smelly roll in the hay.” Then he paused again, the sweat pouring off his face, smacking his palm. “Well, we’ll see about
that!”
he exclaimed. He turned on his heels then and charged back through the door past the fire extinguisher, his shorts flapping around his knees as he hotfooted it down the hallway.

I picked up the note he had let fall to the floor. It was in English, but in a messy, lacerated scrawl so splintered that it was barely legible.
Youre in deep trouble,
it read,
Im going turn you in to bait for buzards. C.
I thought it some sort of joke.

I pocketed the note, then I trailed after Mason, despondent but curious. I followed his gaunt and hustling vision, multi-reflected, down the mirrored corridor; breezing into the foyer, past the marble bench upon which I had so lately tumbled, he made no sign or word of recognition to the scattering of guests returned from the pool, who had gathered there, but threw open the door to the stairway of the courtyard and raced out onto the balcony. I followed in his wake, passing through the foyer too, where I had a brief glimpse in the distance of several people dancing and the black indefatigable face of Billy Raymond as he pounded the piano. And when I reached the balcony I saw that Mason was leaning over the stone parapet, bawling down into the courtyard.

“Cass!” he shouted. “Hey, Cass! Come on up!”

But from the green door down in the shadows below there was no stir, no answer.

“Cass!” he yelled again. “Hey, Cass! Come on up here!” His voice, oddly, had none of the anger nor the agitation his recent movements would have led me to expect; it was instead only rather blunt, peremptory, as if it expected to be heard, and obeyed, and it echoed in hollow waves around the dark and lofty courtyard. “Cass!” he cried again, but there was still no answer from the door; he turned to me with an exasperated look, saying,
’Now
where the hell has he gone to?”