Lie Down in Darkness (50 page)

“What’s the matter, honey?” He looked down at her, raised her chin. She was weeping helplessly and without a sound, her mouth drawn down in anguish.

“Oh, sweetheart——” he said.

She shook her head. He sat her down on a box full of life preservers. “Sweetheart,” he said again, moving his hand against her cheek.

“They just never learned,” she sobbed, “they just never learned.”

But soon once more he had soothed her. She sat pale and shivering on the box, a little sick at her stomach, as she said. Harry had to go to the men’s room. He patted her on the shoulder. When he came back she was gone.

He looked around for her, with a growing dread. He asked the middle-aged couple where she had gone; they didn’t know. Nor did the sleeping soldier, who gazed up at him with one eye and belched. The boy behind the counter said she had gone out on deck. Harry tried to hide his fear—which was just nervousness, he began to tell himself, over and over—but at the end of the passageway he threw open the doors furiously, to be met by a salty and glacial breeze.

“Peyton!” he cried desperately. “Peyton, Peyton!”

The deck was empty. He ran to the forward part of the boat, bruising himself once on the davit of a lifeboat. Then he ran aft down the other side—filled each instant with a larger horror—to the stern, and it was here that he found her, standing placidly against the rail. He put his arms around her waist, squeezing it.

“Your heart’s beating so,” she said quietly.

“Yes.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

Peyton was silent for a while. Then she leaned forward and propped her elbows on the rail, spitting over the side.

“Ladies shouldn’t spit,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“Look at it,” she said, “it
is
dark and lovely. I wonder if it’s cold.”

“Don’t you——”

“Don’t what?” She seemed calmer now.

“Nothing. It’s cold out here.”

“Look there,” she said, “there it goes.” He looked up. From the rail they could see it—or imagined they could—among a chain of encircling lights upon the farthest shore—the house, surrounded like all the others by oaks and mimosas and willows. The streetlights, obscured by intervening, tossing trees, twinkled like stars. Harry rubbed the bruise on his arm. Then he leaned down and kissed her—sick and solemn as she was—on the ear, with as much love, he imagined, as ever a man had summoned.

“Which house is it? I can’t tell.”

“Oh, nuts, I can,” she said. “They aren’t all alike.”

West of the cemetery great clouds rose up in the sky; they sent long shadows across the land and wind through the trees. A few miles away it was raining; thunder crashed over the cornfields and the highway, there was lightning, too, far off but menacing, a brief white streamer blown through the gathering wind: Dolly was aware of these things about the weather, these and the sudden chin she had, pulling her raincoat about her shoulders, plus the fact that there in the limousine, drawn up in front of a brick chapel the color of dried blood, she was quite alone. She was surrounded by tombstones. A hideous angel looked at her vacantly with oval, alabaster eyes, flourishing a wreath over the name of McCorkle. Against another tomb a bunch of brown, dead roses, propped up in a wire stand, gave a heave in the wind, and came down on the roadway with a clatter. Dolly jumped nervously in her seat, blew her nose into a wet piece of Kleenex and cried some more. No one now could assess her misery; how could he have been so rotten? And it had been so quick and cruel: “You just stay right here.” Just like that.

There was a new groan of thunder, ending in a gigantic crackle. The very air seemed ripped apart. She jumped again, looking fearfully out of the rear window. The storm came on across the distant cornfields, sweeping before it dust and debris; borne on the blast a squadron of crows scooted frantically, wings flapping like windmills, filling the air with their dismal cries. In the farmyard two cows galloped clumsily for shelter, the chapel door began to swing, another wreath fell down in the road. Dolly hid her face in her hands, between sobs sucking for air, and clawed blindly for the handle to roll up the window. It was stuck. She moved over in her seat away from the storm: how could he be such a monster? She looked up at the chapel into which, twenty minutes ago, though it seemed to Dolly centuries, the party had disappeared. She could see nothing, hear no music, no organ or anything: would they never come out? Peyton’s coffin, Milton, Helen looking like a ghost, the fat preacher, Mr. Casper, his stupid assistant, that old nigger—all of them had vanished into the place, leaving her behind and alone; it was, she thought, with an effort at fantasy, as if they had disappeared into the gates of hell. She felt rocked by dread, she was getting sick, although in some vaguely whimsical fashion one thought supported her in her suffering: she was the only one who was still sane. Helen was crazy, the preacher was crazy, and Milton—how else explain the way he’d been acting? “You just stay there!” Violently, furiously, as if by her presence in there she’d be defiling the temple.

Now, as though shades were being drawn down in her heart, she was tormented by one single dread, and it became larger and blacker than the storm. Not that Helen would take him back—something told her that this could never happen—but that Milton wouldn’t return to the car, today, to her. This, in its temporariness, was her greatest fear: she knew, or thought she knew, that Milton was going through a great, tragic crisis—hence his wild actions, his mean words, his hostility. Of course the poor darling was deranged, what with Peyton and all. She knew that when all this blew over he’d come back to her, would apologize for his brutishness today, and his neglect, and for making her stay out in the car. She knew his moods as well as her own. But that, still demented and crazy, or whatever he was, he wouldn’t return to the car today, that he’d make her drive back to town alone—humiliated in front of everyone—with the stupid undertaker and the crazy nigger: this paralyzed her with fright. No, he just couldn’t do it to her.

She wept softly, listening to the moaning wind. A few drops of rain fell on the roof of the limousine; one of them, huge and soft and cold, struck her on the cheek: she moved to the center of the seat. They’d had such fine times, too; she was getting in at the club, meeting better people, and his divorce was to come through on October 21. It was so sad—but no, he wouldn’t leave her: then he’d have no one, no Helen, no Peyton, no little Maudie, no Dolly-pooh. Which was what he’d called her when, nights at the club, they lay awake all tired out and watched the ivy shake against the moonlight and she’d stick her finger, playfully, in his navel. Almost two years of bliss, free of that ghostly bitch. Now this. What would she do if he left her again? It was too much to think about. Now no more could she stay alone in her apartment listening to the radio, as she’d done those long months when he and Helen had been reconciled—an endless stream of Aldrich Families and Gangbusters and Contented Cows, mooing serenely only half-heard through the evenings filled with wistful tears, thrice-read newspapers, chocolate boxes empty and forlorn. The heartaches were too much, as were the times when she ventured out, to go to the bank or to her lawyer’s for Pookie’s criminally dwindling alimony checks, her face averted from the stares of those who might see, who might say: “Poor woman. Milton left her stranded high and dry.” She’d have to leave town, go to Norfolk or Richmond, or back to Emporia and sit by her mother’s bedside, watch the withered, wasting flesh of multiple sclerosis, look at her twitch and moan, change her clothes when her sphincter gave way; it was sad country, unsophisticated and dull and awful; she’d sit in the parlor and stare at the peanut vines stacked up in the fields like big brown thumbs, the peanuts and the red earth and in December the sad, rain-drenched cotton, looking as if it had already been used.

There was a crackle of thunder. She gazed up from her Kleenex. It was an odd sight. Emerging from the chapel, her hair blown by the wind, Helen stood cool and erect on the steps, one hand lightly resting on Carey’s arm. Beside her—though Dolly couldn’t hear his words—Loftis was saying something. His eyes had the horror-filled, yearning look they had had all day. Then—and a pang of grief such as she had never known before stuck her heart—she saw Helen turn abruptly and smile, with a word to Loftis. She couldn’t
see
the rest. Carey got in the way; for no reason at all he made the sign of the cross, and far off to the east the thunder rumbled and rolled, came nearer. It began to rain.

7

P
OTTER
’s F
IELD
for New York City is on an island in the Sound, half a mile east of the Bronx and just inside the city limits. The island is named Hart’s, after a deer which, in the later days of the English settlement, was seen to swim out to the place from the mainland and apparently to establish residence there, among the scrub-oak and willow groves. The hart was later shot, so the legend goes, by a man named Thwaite who rowed out to the island in a skiff, with a big gun and a hankering for venison. It was this person, a gentleman of preternatural modesty, who named the island Hart’s, rather than Thwaite’s, and it was also he who made a tidy living for years by rowing picnickers out to the place; at that time there were sandy beaches there, woods, gentle groves—a perfect place, in short, to rest yourself, if you lived in the eighteenth century.

As the city expanded, however, it became necessary to find a newer and larger place to dispose of the friendless, nameless dead. Up until the middle of the last century, when Forty-Second Street was suburban and sheep still nibbled placidly around Columbus Circle, this purpose had been served by the old Pauper’s Burial Ground, which occupied what is now part of Washington Square. The dead do not remain long dead in big cities, or perhaps they become deader; at any rate the markers were torn down, the square filled in with new earth and sidewalks laid across. They have become twice unremembered, those sleepers; once, though many bore no names, they had at least a sunny plot of ground. Now no one can mark them, and the nursemaids strolling along McDougal Street, aware only of the birds and the boys and the dusty April light, cannot know even the fact of those who rest beneath the asphalt—their bones shaken by the subways—and await the resurrection.

The first person to be buried in the new Potter’s Field on the island was an orphan named Louisa Van Slyke, who died in Charity Hospital in 1869. Many followed her; there close to half a million souls have been laid to rest, a lot of them nameless, all of them forgotten.

The island itself is bleak and unprepossessing. There are islands like this, serving all sorts of cheerless but necessary municipal functions, near every great city in the world—islands in the Thames and Danube and the Seine, and in the yellow waters of the Tiber. This one, perhaps because it is American, seems more than necessarily dreary. No blade of grass grows here, only weeds. On the south end of the island stands a sewage disposal plant. North of this is a city detention home, a great mass of soot-stained brick and iron bars, where derelicts and drunks and the less-involved dope addicts are “rehabilitated.” Moss and flakes of pale green lichen creep along the walls. In the treeless shade of the courtyards, flowering in crannies below shuttered windows, are chickweed and ghostly dandelions. Still farther north of this jail, separated from it by a quarter mile of dusty, weed-choked rising ground, is Potter’s Field. The glens and willow-groves are gone, the picnickers and the slain deer; if you stand here on the hill beneath a dead, wind-twisted cedar, the island’s only tree, you can get a good view of the land—the sewage plant and the prison and the burial ground, each recipient, in its fashion, of waste and decay.

The towers of Manhattan are faint and blue in the distance, rising like minarets or monoliths; near by on summer days yachtsmen sail their boats out of City Island, and the patterns their white sails make on the water are as pretty as kites blown about against a blue March sky. Here in the field weeds and brown, unsightly vegetation grow in thick clusters, tangled together over the numbered concrete markers. There are no proper gravestones in the meadow. Rusted strands of barbed wire traverse the field, serving no purpose, preventing no intrusion, for few people ever visit there. It’s an ugly place, full of rats and spiders, and crisscrossed, because of its prominence above the water, by raw, shifting winds.

To transport bodies from the morgue they once had a tugboat; painted black, a flag at half-mast on its stern, it chugged up the East River on Thursdays. When it passed, barge captains and sailors would uncover their heads, cross themselves or murmur a prayer. Now a truck is used, and the dead no longer receive this final benediction: who would salute a truck, so green and so commonplace? The coffins are made of plain pine and these—twenty-five or thirty each week—are laid four deep in the big mass graves. There are no prayers said; city prisoners are used for the burying, and they receive a day off from their sentence for each day’s work in Potter’s Field. The other dead must be crowded out—those who have lain there for twenty years. Now they are bones and dust and, taking up valuable space, must be removed. Not just twice dead like the relics beneath Washington Square, they become triply annihilated: the prisoners won’t let them rest, remove them—bones, rotted cerement and rattling skull—and throw them in a smaller hole, where they take up one tenth the space they did twenty years before. The new coffins are laid in precisely, tagged and numbered; in this way many souls occupy, undisturbed, their own six feet of earth for two decades.

Then all is done. The grave is covered. The prisoners load up their spades and picks, climb back into the police van, and are driven away. On a promontory near the sea the old coffins are burning, for these too must be destroyed. They make a beautiful and lonely pyre; stacked high, they burn briskly, because the wood has become well decayed. Decay flowers in the air too, ripe and fleshy, yet it is a clean decay, as natural as dying leaves; decay is being destroyed. On the broken splinters flames lick toward the remnant of a shroud, and a garland of baby’s hair, preserved as in a locket all these years, is touched by the fire, shrivels away in a puff of dust. Small bones, overlooked by the buriers, become charred and fall among the weeds. A rat peeps out from a burrow, sniffs the wind, then withdraws. The afternoon lengthens and evening comes, but the burning blue odor ascends, is caught by a breeze and sweeps down among the graves, curls about the monument. It is almost as if this monument were forgotten. Who put it there is a mystery; it bears the meadow’s only epitaph. It is small and cracked and mostly covered by weeds; on it the graven eyes of Christ, weathered by many storms, still burn like the brightest fires. Below these the legend, obscured by brambles and the swirling blue odor of decay, can be read:
He calleth His own by Name
.

So the darkness comes on, covering the graves and the withered cedar and the nameless dead. Lights wink on around the Sound. Rats stir in the weeds, among the graves. The smoke still ascends in the night, clean and without guilt, borne like passion with the last dust of the nameless and the unremembered, upward and upward, toward the stars.

The police were not to blame. When they came for Peyton she had no clothes on. Then they went up to the twelfth floor and looked around, found her clothes but not a scrap of identification. What else, said the spinsterish-looking man at the Department of Hospitals, where Harry went later, could they have done? It had been a routine procedure. Wait for the prescribed length of time, to allow for identification, and then ship the “individual,” as he put it—in a way that made him seem to smell of formaldehyde—on out to the island. Nobody had come to identify this individual. That was that. There was no doubt, then, that this photograph they had taken was of his wife? All right, then, there were papers to fill out and he could get an undertaker (of course, at his own expense) and retrieve—“exhume,” he said—the body. Through all this Harry sensed the man’s weary disapproval, as if Harry were just another negligent relative, but sick with sorrow, he didn’t care.

He went out with his friend Lennie and the undertaker in a hearse. Harry had hauled Lennie, half-drowning, out of the Ebro on a spring day in 1937. It had been in the middle of the fighting; he had laid Lennie beneath a pear tree and had worked over him for half an hour before Lennie, groaning and with blood on his lips, had revived. They hadn’t known each other. Later they discovered they had both been born on Caton Avenue in Brooklyn, had indeed both gone to Erasmus Hall. There had been nothing heroic about the rescue; concussion from a mortar had knocked Lennie into the water, and it was just lucky that Harry had been nearby. They were in different battalions, but after that they saw each other as often as they could. Not because of the rescue so much as because they simply liked each other. Most people, on being mustered out of an army, forget the names of their associates as quickly as they do the fact that the M-l rifle is .30 cal., gas-operated, semiautomatic, and so forth, but when Harry and Lennie left the brigade they left together, and finally were graduated in the same class at N.Y.U. Harry was quiet, almost self-effacing; Lennie had a mass of carrot-red hair and was given to outbursts of temper and moods. In between these times, though, he was humorous and quick-witted and generous; somehow he and Harry made an amiable pair. Harry appreciated Lennie’s sharp mind, his tart humor and his ability as an illustrator, which was considerable. Lennie had been crippled in the left arm by shrapnel, a bad wound, making that limb almost helpless. This had caused him to become bitter often, and cynical, and much of the time he relied upon Harry’s cautious, quiet wisdom to straighten him out. They lived together for a while in an apartment on Cornelia Street in the Village. They managed very well. Harry taught classes at the University and Lennie had by this time begun to receive fairly profitable commissions from some of the magazines. When the Second World War came they were both 4-F, Harry with a spot on his lung, and neither of them cared much, or felt ashamed; they had had it, forget it, as Lennie said. Then Lennie got married to a bright-eyed, loving girl named Laura Abrams, and Harry—because he needed more room anyway; his canvases, according to Lennie, were becoming dismally heroic—moved uptown to a flat on York Avenue, in the east eighties. He and Laura and Lennie had big times during the first years of the war.

Then Harry met Peyton. It was at a party in the spring of 1943 at the house of Albert Berger. Albert was a young man of twenty-six or seven who subsisted on an annuity from his rich aunt’s estate, and had bad eyes. He lived in an apartment in Washington Mews with a Great Dane and some excellent jazz records. He was thin and very white. He wore rimless glasses and carefully bedraggled tweeds and something about him—perhaps his dress or the way his eyes had a tendency to cross or get out of focus or merely to close and water helplessly—gave him the look of a sick, sexless person of forty. He was uncompromisingly generous, and was free with his whisky, but arch, self-consciously intellectual and prone to hazy dogma; he was not really very interesting. He did no work except to give parties every Saturday night, when his rooms would be filled with Hindus and anthropologists and floor-lounging people who talked desperately of Chelichev and Lenin and Reichian psychoanalysis. Everybody eventually came to Albert’s. Harry didn’t remember how he met Albert, but he liked a few of the people who came there, and it was there that he fell in love with Peyton. She was quite drunk, aggressive and argumentative. He didn’t like her at all, but she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, and it was not hard to fall in love with her, in spite of not liking her. Presently, at about dawn, he found himself alone with her and Albert, who, his eyes closed, a nimbus of moisture soaking the edge of his lashes, told them that a certain new war novel was a finer one than
War and Peace.
“Aaah,” said Peyton. Then, unaccountably, she burst into tears and threw her head into Harry’s lap. Through the blue dawn he took her home, a one-room apartment near Sheridan Square. She clung to him, breathing whisky, and kissed him violently, disconsolately on the mouth. Although he wanted to, he didn’t allow himself to go in.

The next day, a Sunday, he asked her why she had wept so; he was inquisitive and frank, but gentle: what’s ailing you? he asked. She said she didn’t know. They took a walk along Eighth Street. The sun was out, and the strollers with baby carriages and poodles; the fairies were in, rolling famished, swooning eyes behind the barroom windows. It was a beautiful day, but Peyton had a hangover. She described her feelings; she told him she felt as if she were walking undersea, as if she were surrounded by water. For some reason he remembered that later.

They sat on a bench in Washington Square and fed nuts to the pigeons. Peyton became happy after a while and he found himself holding her hand. They talked about whether Cezanne was greater than Goya, and Van Gogh greater than Paul Klee, arguing a little but not peevishly, and when Peyton said finally that the discussion was useless, that it was silly to “live by comparisons,” he was surprised—remembering her attitude the night before—that she had become so subdued and sober. He agreed with her completely. Later she said she had left school, contemptuously remarking upon it as a “dancing class down in Virginia,” but she wouldn’t tell him why. There was something open and withdrawn about her at the same time; there seemed to be a part of her that he couldn’t reach. She complained of a headache, said again that the day seemed filled with water; perhaps she was drowning, she announced with a pretty yawn, and let her head fall against his shoulder. “Did you ever read
Winnie-the-Pooh
?” she said, and he was about to answer, but a man with a broom came by, sending the pigeons aloft like feathered rockets, and Harry leaned down and said, “You know, you’re beautiful.”

“Yes.”

“It’s true.”

“Yes.” She paused. “Maybe I need to be analyzed.”

He didn’t know why he said it. “You just need me.”

“Maybe so.”

At first, like Harry, Lennie didn’t care for Peyton either, and he told him so. Sober, she was pleasant enough, if quiet and vague, but get a few drinks in her and look what happened:
oy
, such perversity, such a sharp tongue. It was this, Harry knew, that Lennie responded to in the wrong way: two people, each with a wry, sarcastic turn, rarely get along. Besides—Harry had to admit it—Peyton had read more than Lennie, had a more acutely intuitive appreciation of Art, which she capitalized. And beyond this, too, was the fact that Peyton was from Virginia; Lennie, with all his virtues, was still the provincial New Yorker, often myopic, to whom everything south of Washington was ignorance and oppression: it was a prejudice left over from his early days, but hard to shake off. “You’re still a sucker for hot lips,” said Lennie, the second time he had met her, when Harry had come back to Cornelia Street after taking Peyton home. “Don’t tell me you aren’t staying the night with the lady?”