Lie Down in Darkness (15 page)

A year ago he had fallen in love with Peyton. She alone among the pretty girls he knew remained unscathed in his morning despoilments; because he loved her, she alone stayed undefiled, unattainable. In a fashion he had fostered her remoteness, made of her something far apart from lustful considerations, and adored. He had had dozens of dates with Peyton, but he had never kissed her: he was afraid. He would leave her at night at her doorstep and drive slowly around the house—unkissed, balked and frustrated, peering up desolately at her lighted window in hopes of catching sight of her, she who, minutes before, standing at the door, had shown no emotion whatever at his aloofness and his self-control, but had merely said, “Good night, Charlie,” touched his hand lightly and vanished into the house. At such times, toying with the idea of self-destruction, he would drive home and go to bed where, crucified, shaken, miserable with unfamiliar insomnia, he would listen to his sister’s baby squalling in another room, and attend this solitary vision: He and Peyton had been happily married for some years now, but a trivial argument had come up; her back was to him; she was weeping. She was gazing from their penthouse window at the Manhattan spires and towers which lay below, as if drowning, in the movielike glow of autumn dusk. This light seemed to send tiny golden thorns through her hair. The radio, from distant hidden recesses in the room, played “Maria Elena,” a recording his band had made before he went off to war with the submarine service. She wept, he couldn’t see her face, and the climax was all simplicity and wonder: approaching her, he laid his hands on her shoulders and turned her about: “Peyton darling, you mustn’t cry.”

“Go away, you brute.”

“Darling, I love you.”

“Oh, no, Charlie, I mustn’t cry,” she murmured while, crumpled and acquiescent—realizing, as if by some transcendental power of autumn, of his strength, music, the power of love—she yielded herself up with a little cry, forgiving and forgiven, into his enfolding arms.

This, his most exciting vision, he turned over and over in his mind and ornamented and examined until it melted away and he fell asleep. The other dreams, fairly routine, concerned endless dancing, separate bedrooms in a Miami chateau and a good deal of problematical kissing.

Peyton looked slick in a bathing suit. It was made of tight red Lastex which glistened like a lobster shell under the arc lamps of the swimming pool. Dripping water, suntanned, she stood.at the side of the pool, removed her bathing cap, and fluffed her hair out properly. A boy named Eddie Collins, standing with Charlie in the shallow end of the pool, was trying to persuade him to sneak off into the woods, where he had a pint of whisky hidden, but he shook his head absently, watching Peyton. There was a great splashing, a shout; some boy rose up like a seal at the side of the pool and heaved a rubber ball at Peyton’s head. It bounced off. She laughed, threw the ball back and slid into a woolly robe. “Peyton!” he shouted, but the amplifier—playing music—the shouts, the splashes, drowned out his words, and Peyton, shod in rope-soled clogs, shuffled along the side of the pool and vanished up the slope.

He got out of the pool, dried himself off and put on a terrycloth jacket. He followed her toward the club, hoping to surprise her with a clap on the back or perhaps a horrible and chilling Dracula laugh, for which he had won considerable fame. She walked up the dimly lit front steps and started to go into the lobby but, drawing back suddenly, she paused there for a moment, watching. He halted and hid behind the fender of a car. Then he saw her go into the lobby, softly closing the screen behind her.

He crept up to the door and peeked in. The lobby was deserted, except for Peyton and a fat colored woman who staggered past under a loaded tray. An electric fan whined softly. A bug spanked up against the screen, clung there twitching, beneath his nose. The colored woman disappeared. Very quietly Peyton walked to the door of the golf museum and slowly tried the handle. She pressed downward gently, once, and again without a noise, but the door, it seemed, was locked. For two or three minutes she stood at the door; her head, cocked thoughtfully to one side, made him wince, it was such a lovely thing: he thought of kisses, of love.

She turned away and walked slowly toward him across the lobby. He drew into the shadows, ready to pounce. “Gotcha!” he cried as the screen opened; with a little scream she collapsed deliciously into his arms, then pulled back from him just as quickly, trembling, with a look of horror.

“Charlie!” she said. “Charlie! Oh!”

And fled down the steps and into the darkness.

What had he done?

It worried him enormously; never since he could remember—for he had led a quiet middle-class life, free from emotional extremes—had he seen on a girl’s face, or, for that matter, on anyone’s face, such a look of desolation. Then he knew. Standing at that door, he figured, she must have seen, or known, something frightening and terrible.

Later, when the other boys and girls had gone home, he searched for her, longing to offer his apologies, and finally found her sitting alone by the pool in the dark.

“Peyton,” he said.

A flicker of moonlight crossed her face. She looked up. “Hello, Charlie,” she said.

“What’s wrong, sugar?” he said, sitting down beside her. “Look,” he said painfully, “I’m sorry I scared you. I’m——”

“That’s all right,” she said quietly. “It wasn’t that so much——”

“What’s wrong, honey? Tell Cholly boy. What happened up there?”

“Nothing.”

She lay back in the grass. He stretched out beside her, shivering a little, and put his arms around her, which was the usual thing to do.

“Nice party, honey,” he said.

She was silent for a moment. “No,” she said, “no, it wasn’t a very nice party. It wasn’t a very nice party at all.”

“Come off it, kid. You’re depressing. Get off this gloom kick, will you?” Kissing her, somehow, mainly occupied his mind, but lying there, feeling her hair brushing at his chin, he knew his head was too high, too far up. He edged down.

She was quiet.

“Honey——” he began.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t say anything, please. Just hold me.”

He shivered again. “O.K., honey,” he said, “I can always oblige.”

“Hold me,” she said.

This was it, he knew. Desperate, yearning, bending his face toward hers recklessly, he hazarded, out of a year-long desire, the first kiss, coronation.

She turned her head away.

“No,” she whispered, turning back to him.

With a shock he realized that she had been crying. He drew her close to him.

“Don’t cry,” he said, “I love you, Peyton.”

“Hold me close.”

That was all that happened. She put her arms around him, too, and they lay there like this for a long time silently by the abandoned playground, in the summer night.

The garbage heaps and junk piles have disappeared; the creek, down which the hearse and limousine traveled a parallel route, winds through a lovely meadow. Only the gas tanks, rising from the adjacent marsh, and the remnants of a deserted brewery, disturb the peacefulness of the scene. From here as far as the eye can see stretch the bay, the river and, obscured by a curtain of smoke, the distant sea. In the heat of midday, among the surrounding inlets and shallows, boys go hunting for shrimp; the marshgrass and cattails are motionless; the bleached ribs of a discarded rowboat lie half-buried in the sand, among driftwood, shells, seaweed like crumpled green banners. There is a tarry odor here, a strong smell of sea; above, the flaunting wings of seagulls tilt and recover, over the passing ships, the sound of bell-buoys and the sea itself, where dead men wash and turn and tremble and yield up to remote fathoms—perhaps on a summer noon like this—their inhabiting bones. The meadow is windless and peaceful, insects make a fitful drowsing sound; in August all the Negroes gather here with Daddy Faith, who drives down once a year from Baltimore, to find peace, redemption, the cleansing of the sea.

As the limousine rolled through the meadow Dolly watched the gas tanks approach; they frightened her, and again the monstrous thought rose up fearfully in her mind: He doesn’t love me anymore. An act only of desperation, she knew—the way he had come to get her this morning, out of habit alone, maybe, and just because Helen wouldn’t come. An awful dread seized her; the car dipped into a depression in the road and instinctively she reached for his arm, as if for support, but held her hand in mid-air, and let it fall on the seat. She closed her eyes: oh, please, God.

Most people in the midst of disaster have yet one hope that lingers on some misty horizon—the possibility of love, money coming, the assurance that time cures all hurts, no matter how painful. But Loftis, gazing out at the meadow, had no such assurance; his deposit, it seemed, on all of life’s happiness had been withdrawn in full and his heart had shriveled within him like a collapsed balloon. He was not philosophical, he had never been trained that way, nor had he ever wanted to be. Emergencies had been things to get shut of quickly and to forget, and because in the past he had always been able to create some gratuitous hope, he had never had to believe in God. But hope. Yes: of course. Helen—she will come back to me. Faint, blurred as a mirage, he thought he saw columns of dust wreathing skyward from the farthest rim of the meadow; reflecting sunlight, huge, they ascended, spiraling: he saw weeds, sky, a ghost. I will cure her, make her well. Today I will tell her: Our love never went away at all. Sweating, he narrowed his eyes, half-shut: a wisp of a smile flew across his lips—My
love—
and the gas tanks rose abruptly out of the marsh beside them. The air was full of coal gas, the odor of fish. The hearse slowed down, steam billowing from the hood. Then the hearse stopped and Mr. Casper, throwing on the brakes with a jerk, halted the limousine behind it. There was a barricade, distant confusion: music, singing, jubilation. A crowd of Negroes in turbans and white robes were milling around a glistening Cadillac convertible.

“What is it?” Dolly said.

Ella Swan leaned forward on her seat. “It’s Daddy Faith,” she whispered. Perched on a seat of the Cadillac, Daddy Faith was bestowing grace upon the crowd. He was smiling; his face, black as night, was greasy with sweat. He made a wide arc with his hand, half a dozen diamond rings spun and glittered, and his shiny opera hat and diamond stickpin made beautiful flashes above the throng. A sigh, vast and reverential, went up from the crowd—Aaaaah!—and a shower of dollar bills, nickels, dimes and quarters cascaded over Daddy Faith, over the car and onto the ground. A band began to play, brassy, jubilant—and a big bass drum.

“Happy am I!” the crowd was singing.

Thump

“In my Redeemer!”

“Happy am I!”

“I am so happy!”

Thump

“Those Negroes,” Mr. Casper said, “are having some kind of revival or something. We’ll have to detour down that road.”

Hearse and limousine dipped toward the marsh, lurching over a cinder road. The Negroes rose up above them, unheeding, exalted, a mass of shifting robes, black arms lifted toward the sky, and Ella, peering out, said in a tone infinitely wistful as she turned, raising her hand to wave: “Hey there, Daddy.”

The limousine heeled alarmingly. “Oh dear,” Dolly said, “where are we going?”

Where indeed? Loftis thought: Does she always have to ask that?

The brewery towered over them, brick spires and battlements tumbling into decay. Trumpet vines and Virginia creeper and honeysuckle trailed over the parapets. Loftis looked upward. Now on fine Saturday afternoons amid the damp odor of hollyhock and dandelion, the glow of sunlight on crumbling stone, small boys would throw rocks, shatter what windows were left after all these years and shout fearfully through the echoing, deserted halls.

“Where are we going?”

Where indeed. We are going to bury my daughter, whom I loved.

The gas tanks rose up enormously; the Negroes, all singing, vanished behind those lordly, rustling forms. The Negroes would reappear. The gas tanks were old; God knew how ancient they were. Venomous weeds grew here, and tatterdemalion flowers, white, blue and rose; among crevices in the rust and tangled ancient iron a lizard would peep out drunkenly at the burning sun. Loftis looked upward. Gas tanks as old as time, here in the marsh and weeds, seaward-facing, ageless, from the lovely Virginia shores.

Salt air blew through the car; from the floor arose a thousand motes of dust. The gas tanks swept past. The Negroes reappeared, singing.

Happy am I
       In my Redeemer!

Oh, Helen, come back to me.

4

A
LL
the way over to Helen’s, indeed the entire morning, the Reverend Carey Carr had been thinking: Poor Helen, poor Helen. That and nothing more, for a predicament, overwhelming and hopeless, such as this one, couldn’t be helped by piety, or prayers, either; it was the human condition alone that he must minister to, and by flimsy human means, and so it was nothing but poor Helen, poor Helen that he thought, over and over. He drew up near the curb beneath a stoplight. Downsloping, the highway reflected sunlight, shimmering heat, and his automobile, a Chevrolet coupe, began to drift across the pedestrian walk. He pulled the emergency brake, looking around him. There was a clock above a corner barbecue stand, neon-blue in the midday sun. It was after eleven-thirty, and he would be late.

Carey Carr wore spectacles and he had a cleft chin. At forty-two he still looked very young, with round plump cheeks and a prissy mouth, yet to people who knew him this air of cherubic vacancy and bloodlessness, at first so apparent, quickly faded; one knew that this face could reflect decision and an abiding passion. As a very young man, he had tried to embrace all of the beauty of the world, and had failed. At sixteen he was a poet, convinced that the fact that he wasn’t very masculine was still somehow tragic, noble even, and born of a fatal necessity. He was an only child. His mother, a widow, had fine liquid eyes, lovely skin which curved tautly over the fragile arch of her cheekbones and drew her lips outward and down, so that it always looked as if she were sorrowing a little over something. But it was really not sorrow. She was actually a sweet, thoughtful woman, with a certain old-fashioned gaiety about her, and she loved Carey more than anything. She encouraged his sensitive nature. When he was seventeen she packed him off to Washington and Lee where an old, famous poet was in residence. But it was a mistake. Beguiled to a certainty of his own genius, Carey wrote a sonnet a day for nearly a year and finally, hopeful but exhausted, took them to the poet—three hundred sonnets in a purple binder—not so much for appraisal as for admiration. What a mistake it was! The poet was a petulant and whalelike man who had resolved most of his problems in eating and in waspish, continual chatter about boys on the campus whom he suspected of perversion. He wrote poetry no longer, and had in fact developed a contempt for poetry in general, except his own, which he recited on Saturday nights to the half-dozen young men who sat languidly on the floor around him drinking sherry. He tried to be gentle with Carey, but only succeeded in brutally telling the truth: the sonnets, the boy knew finally, were miserably bad. He had staked too much upon them, and his failure shattered his health and his wits. He had what was then known as a “nervous breakdown” and was hurried off by his mother, who lived in Richmond, to a Blue Ridge mountain sanitarium.

Eventually his beleaguered soul took strength. He began to read the Bible, at his mother’s prompting. The mountains soothed him; his mind soared again, but in a different way: he knew, with the same gathering ardor which had produced the sonnets, that God dwelt in the high slopes. He had had a vision which, it seemed to him in retrospect, had lasted many months. Feverish, his imagination took flight, lifted up into unearthly realms, high valleys, smoky with the spirit of the eternal; a blaze of light enveloped him and he knew later it was a glorious thing, for this radiance, surely, had been the light of heaven itself. But then to earth, gently, he was borne on the billow of light—shaken, immolated and vaguely unsatisfied. He resolved to become a minister, to retrieve his vision through a life of hard work and prayer. His mother encouraged him. “Carey, darling,” she would say, and her deep liquid eyes would grow soft and her mouth draw down, lovely and sad, “your grandfather was a man of the cloth and his father before him. Oh, it would make me so happy.” Perhaps she thought that through the mysteries of theology she could get an even stronger hold on him, keep him for her very own. But here, too, she was mistaken. For when Carey got out of the seminary in Alexandria a few years later he was a changed man. He had put on thirty pounds and through a violent struggle had learned how to swim and play softball, and had in general cast out his womanish failings, even realizing, in this new pleasing maturity, a passionate affair with a girl who worked as secretary in one of the seminary offices. He married her quickly. A year later his mother died, crying in her last delirium that somehow she had been all her life tricked and cheated—of what, no one could presume to say—and imploring Adrienne, who was Carey’s bride, to take care of him and love him, as she herself had done.

He had been in Port Warwick for eighteen years, as assistant rector and then rector of St. Mark’s Protestant Episcopal Church. He had three daughters, to the youngest of whom, Linda Byrd, age five, he gave a moment’s thought now as he paused at the stoplight, since yesterday had been his birthday and he could smell the odor of a shaving lotion which she had presented to him, rising faintly from his cheeks. And as he thought of the little girl—just for a moment intruding upon his thoughts, which all morning had been largely dark and full of melancholy—he smiled, and smelled the shaving lotion. Then he remembered Helen Loftis, and his face became solemn once more, filled with the same youthful, abiding passion—a passion which, though he hadn’t ventured to think it such, was partly the strange and tragic sorrow he felt at never having been able to attain a complete vision of God, and partly devotion—devotion to his duty, a small thing, but which he performed as well as he could.

The light remained red for what seemed minutes. A laundry truck swerved out from behind his car and the driver, a youth with bare skinny arms and an underslung jaw, halted the truck with insolent dexterity beside him. The two of them exchanged listless glances and although Carey made the faintest beginning of a smile, the boy turned to study a clipboard with surly concentration. Carey turned, too, sweating, watching the light, still red, and the intersection where a suburban bus labored sluggishly through the heat, borne westward and out of sight as if upon the poisonous violet waves of its exhaust.

The light blinked “Go”; the laundry truck lurched forward, and with a peevish squealing of tires hurtled in front of him, past him, disappearing around behind the barbecue stand. He started forward; the air, circulating around his face, cooled him off a little, and, because of the heat, because of the urgency of the situation, he thought: I’ve just got to. And he began to speed down the highway at fifty miles an hour.

Carey lived at the opposite side of town from the Loftises. He rarely took this route to the section where the Loftises lived: although a faster way, if one wanted to speed, it was an ugly road, and he was partly conscious of it now: an asphalt highway traversing low marshland, neither industrial nor residential, but occupied by decrepit garages and hot-dog stands and the waterlogged tents of itinerant Madam Olgas and Doreens—palmists mostly—unhappily pitched between the visits of poor, inflamed, neurotic women, astray from God, and the monthly raids of the county sheriff. He saw such a tent now—set off in a grove of trees, with an old foreign woman in apron and spangled bandanna, turning beneath the pines with dim uncertain eyes to watch him. Then she was gone.

But Helen. What would he say to Helen? He feared seeing her, yet at the same time he knew that of all people it was he himself from whom she must draw the greatest strength today. Carey was confused by sorrow. Although he was certain that he felt and saw as deeply as any man, he
was
conservative and diffident by nature, and even after all these years he felt tongue-tied in the presence of those stricken by grief. He was made uneasy by unbraked hilarity and by extremes of sorrow alike, especially the latter; he preferred life to sail along pleasantly and evenly, and this, he knew, was for him a minor sort of tragedy. For, being so guarded and reserved, how could one ever hope to become a bishop?

Across the pinewoods the shadow of a hawk fled, a wraith, as black as smoke; the pines seemed to shake and tremble but the hawk vanished, sailing up over the roof of a filling station, a dusky shadow, wings outspread like something crucified. Carey looked at his watch: he’d have to hurry. He blew his horn, wheeled past another car recklessly, in spite of a third car, oncoming, looming ahead. His heart gave a leap but the maneuver was finished; the driver of the third car, which was not a car at all but a pickup truck, shook his fist as they passed and shouted something obscene. Trembling, he slowed down a little, thinking: That was close, and again: Poor Helen, poor Helen.

The day seemed plunged in horror. She would never cry; what had he been thinking? It was hopeless. She had lost the capacity for love or grief, like a spring in some arid upland, drained dry by the sun. That was the worst of all. What had he been thinking? Lord, he thought, I must make her see the light. I must bring her and him together again. Lord, give me strength. Eager desire swept through him, his eyes became wet with tears. In Niggertown, past tumbledown shacks vined with summer honeysuckle, women in slow, aproned procession along the dusty roads, he slowed down, carefully, thinking of St. Bernard. “O love,” he said aloud, “everything which the soul-bride utters resounds of thee and nothing else; so hast thou possessed her, heart and tongue.” Wasn’t there a way to lift her up, he wondered, make her whole? All the way through Niggertown he thought about this. He drove on. The idea took hold of him; he mopped his brow, pondering, turning onto a road by the shore where far out, alone in his skiff, becalmed, a colored fisherman mournfully evoked the wind—
Lo-ong comin Lo-ong comin—
in a voice like dying.

She had come to him six years ago, he remembered, on a rainy Sunday night in October when the leaves of sycamores lay upon the rectory lawn in drenched disordered piles and a gathering wind, blowing in chill and premonitory gusts from the river, had made him think wistfully of a new furnace and despairingly of his God who, he had prayed, would reveal Himself finally this year and preferably before Advent. It was a season for him of self-searching and vague, amorphous sorrows. The war had arrived and it was a difficult thing for him to speak of faith to people whose faith, so tenuous anyway, had evaporated upon the threatening winds of “a cosmic cataclysm,” as he had put it that morning, in an amended sermon. There had been personal matters, too. Termites had eaten up most of the timbers in the basement, directly beneath the dining room; this he had only lately discovered, after a carefree, unwitting summer, and meals in the dining room had become fidgety and precarious, with the constant thought of repair bills giving him worry. Other bills were piling up: his two little girls were going through their year of childhood ailments, and had exchanged diseases in the careless way of children; he owed the pediatrician two hundred and forty dollars. In fact, it had been seeing the doctor on this particular night that had heightened his mood of quiet despair.

He had been standing at his front door; Adrienne had gone upstairs with the children, the younger of whom seemed to be coming down with something. “Nothing serious,” the doctor said; “Don’t worry.” And he went down the steps. Standing on his glassed-in porch with a prescription in his hand, watching the taillight of the doctor’s car recede into the night, it had occurred to him, as it had a thousand times before, that it was the most awful thing—you went through life expecting things to get better, hoping for the vacant, idle day when you would be free from worry, and although you were conscious of the folly of expecting a giddy bright time like that, you nevertheless went on hoping, sustaining your poor illusions: he groped for something meaningful—but his thoughts dwindled off into a prosy and confused prayer which he left half-completed. He gazed at his lawn, the seawall, the river beyond. The sycamores tossed nakedly; the faintest moonlight, yielded up through a rent in the clouds, outlined silver fish stakes, whitecaps, the masts and booms of sailboats upraised to the heavens like silver, suppliant arms. Cloud shadows fitfully crossed and darkened the moon which suddenly seemed too wild and ghostly for Port Warwick, and it was through this light, just as he was about to turn, that Helen Loftis approached him, alighting from her car, alone, and rushing up the walk in the rain.

He took her hand. “Helen Loftis,” he said, “what brings you out in the rain?”

There was a constrained and agitated motion in the way she removed a green silk scarf from her hair, shaking it once so that the fine drops of rain scattered away, but she laughed as she stepped onto the porch, saying vaguely, “Well, I just thought I’d come.”

He was surprised, mystified from the very beginning. But helping her off with her raincoat, he made casual talk, as if it were the commonest thing in the world to receive one of his flock—a lone married woman, at that—at ten-thirty in the evening, and he was worried about being in his shirtsleeves.

“Well,” he said cheerfully, “this is a very nice surprise. Adrienne’ll love to see you. I hope I can get her down here. She’s upstairs with Carol——”

She touched him lightly on the hand. “No,” she said intently, but with the same disarming smile, “you let her stay. I want to see
you.”

“Oh.” He laid her coat on a table and, embarrassed, a welter of silence surrounding both of them, he led her to his study: a converted side porch, paneled in ugly oak, upon which varnish lay dark and shiny like lampblack, a place he had always considered both austere and cozy, because of the artful mingling of the secular and the orthodox; a Velasquez reproduction, for instance, dominated one wall, yet upon the adjoining wall there was the presiding bishop, handsomely framed and autographed. He could work here, shut away from the family, or just meditate. On his severe boxlike desk there was a silver crucifix he had bought in Canterbury years before. Swiveling about in his chair, he might simply gaze at the pitilessly romantic stretch of waves and shore: deep blue and placid, but often given to wild moody squalls. Both crucifix and river, in their different ways, sometimes offered contentment and poignant, fugitive hints of another world.