Set This House on Fire (8 page)

His face broke apart in a funny wide smile, not quite lewd but in the same general area. “That’s Mason’s bimbo,” he said. “You’ll meet her.”

“Rosemarie de Laframboise?”

Then all of a sudden I realized why the “we” left so unexplained in Mason’s letter had never really puzzled me, since I had known all along that Mason, wherever he was and at whatever time, might be expected to be living with
some
woman, even one with a name like Rosemarie de Laframboise.

“Rose-marie de La-fram-boise,” Cass said in careful, fruity syllables. “The works.”

In the depths of exhaustion—at least in the depths of
my
exhaustion, I have found—there comes a moment when the spirit makes one last flight outward toward consciousness and reason, before breaking up into crazy splinters, or being extinguished by sleep. At this point all of the senses, worn raw by tiredness, are for an instant uncommonly tender and as receptive to the mildest stimulation as new skin over a recent wound. I suppose this explains why, as Cass spoke, a confusion of emotions swept through me—a sense of wild, glamorous beauty but of something ominous, too, way off in the distance, as if against my tingling eardrums there already beat a sound of catastrophe inaudible to normal ears. For at that moment the sun had sunk far down behind the hills, so that everything in the grove around us—vines, stone walls, and trees—had become shadowy and blue, touched by this early, peculiar dusk. The little boy played in the gutter beside us, thrashing at the stones with a branch and uttering tiny solemn squeaks. Far up the slope Poppy still warbled sweetly away in high tones, not only half-unheard but now half-unseen in the twilight, poised in ghostly suspension among the leaves of her lemon tree. Music drifted up from below, a splash came from across the water. And all about us swam a wanton late-summer odor of earth and lemons and flowers, which sent a sharp blade of nostalgia through me, and phantoms of loveliness to galloping in my mind, and filled me with a rich, sudden craving for something I could not name.

Then at some moment during this seizure I realized for the first time that Cass, though outwardly composed, was quite drunk, and that again he was talking, not so much to me as to this lowering, tranquil dusk, and was filling it with sunbursts of weird eloquence as he swung his wine bottle through the air. “Their faces,” he was saying. “Their faces! My God, haven’t you seen them? They’re like something out of Goya in his most bilious, baneful, toxic mood. Goya! He would’ve ransomed his legs for a crack at them. One of them—that oldest one—is positively antediluvian. He’s got the primal curse on him, if ever I’ve seen it. And the other one, the lush-head, what’s his name—Burns. There’s a prince for you! I’d have sacks full of gold if he were a Medici. He’s got a slit-eyed Tuscan look, like one of Lorenzo’s seedy, black-sheep cousins dragged into town for a whorehouse romp. He’s the only man alive, I swear, with solid-green eyeballs. Check ’em, Leverett,” he said with a tickled laugh, turning to me, “and see if that’s not a twenty-four-carat fact. And the dame, too. Check her. My God, she’s dazzling. But a spook. Yesterday in the sunlight I saw her turn—it was bright noon with this harsh, enormous brilliance all around—and I swear the death’s-head was laid beneath her skin as plain as if it had been chiseled marble. Then I saw her eyes, and upon my word they evaporated away before me as if they had become dissolved like jelly by that selfsame midday sun—”

I heard Poppy’s voice, close by us down the slope now, cross and annoyed: “Goodness, Cass Kinsolving, if you can’t find anything to hate better than those movie stars, running on like that. Mr. Leverett is tired and upset and wants to go up the hill. I
told
you about drinking all that wine on a hot day like this—”

“Look, Leverett,” Cass went on, “am I boring you? Do you want to see faces, real
faces?
Are you going to be here for a while? Let me take you back to Tramonti sometime. There are faces there right out of the twelfth century. I’ll show you a face so proud and tragic and full of mortal splendor that you’ll think you had stumbled on Isaiah himself. More! Back there—”

“Hush!” I heard Poppy say, stamping her foot. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately, Cass Kinsolving. Why are you
acting
like this—”

“You know,” he said, “there’s an old witch back there makes ninety lire
a day,
hauling stakes for the vineyard on her back. Ninety lire! Fifteen cents! On her back! I want you to see her face. She’s got a face like something out of Grünewald, with this agony, you see, twisted perpetually on her lips so mean and gray that it’s like some living lamentation—”

“Stop
it now!” Poppy shrilled. “You’re such a
bore,
Cass, when you drink all that wine! And you’re going to ruin your
ulcer!
Mr. Leverett, just ignore him. What I was asking you is this: will you please ask Rosemarie de Laframboise to lend us Francesca for the evening? Felicia has a cold and I want to put her
right
to bed and I want Francesca to help out.”

“Yes—” I began, but as I spoke, my warm languid sense of beauty swept away from me, replaced by a sickening feeling like terror.
Oh God not again,
I thought,
not again.
Because I realized that that hurrying, ominous noise I had heard buzzing in my ears was not a trick; it was real and full of peril, and was now almost on top of us. Ear-racking explosions rent the dusk. “Watch out!” I yelled. “Out of the road!” But it was too late. A gray-green blur surmounted by two crouched figures—a black-haired man hugged close behind by a girl in fluttering red pants—the motorscooter was already among us with a roar, sending Cass and Poppy in startled leaps to the fenders of the car, and children flying like wind-blown scraps of paper in all directions. “You fool!” Cass cried, but again too late. The motorscooter shot on headlong past us, in full-throttled acceleration discharging flatulent backfires of smoke, the girl’s shiny red hips cantering with equestrian, rhythmical bounces to the rocking machine as it vanished at the curve. As we turned then in alarm to the side of the road, Nicky was still pinwheeling around as if sideswiped or clipped, and then he sprawled out on his face in the gutter.

Poppy fled to his side. “Nicky! Nicky!” she screamed. “Look up at Mother!”

I knew I had seen this before; abruptly—and I am certain for the first time in my life—I believed in the existence of hell.

“Speak to me!” she wailed.

At once we heard a cheerful voice. “I’m all right, Mummy. I just fa’ down.”

Then over Poppy’s hoarse little sobs of relief, I heard myself telling Cass: “See what I mean about these Italians? They’re sick! They—”

Cass stopped me with an imperious signal, and a gesture with his wine bottle.

“Don’t get yourself in a spasm, my friend,” he said quietly. “That wasn’t no Italian. That was one of the flicker creeps. I think he comes from Ioway.”

II

“It was one bitch of a day,” said Cass. “A bleeding monstrosity.”

I agreed that it was. I had told him—in detail, for the first time —about my collision with di Lieto and all the rest. And from time to time he would mop his brow, sweating in the Carolina sun. Then recalling the way I looked, he had laughed in high uproarious knee-slapping laughter, so loud and long that I began to laugh too, possibly aware for the first time of the humor even in that straggling debut; and finally, when we had laughed ourselves out and our mirth chuckled itself down into a kind of ruminative quiet, he said: “I know it wasn’t funny then. It wasn’t funny at all. But Lord, boy, you should have seen yourself. You looked like a big scared bird.”

“But did you—” I began, then halted, not knowing what else to say. Here we sat, as we had off and on for two days, in a skiff in the middle of the Ashley River, fishing for channel bass. And though he, who had most of the answers, had told me next to nothing, I had told him a lot—I who had nothing to tell. It was hot, and sand gnats skittered about our heads; in place of his beret, which somehow in my memory had seemed a stock cartoon headpiece of the American expatriate, he wore a floppy straw against the blazing noon. This and a pair of old Marine Corps dungarees bleached to the shade of dried grass comprised his angling costume. The heat had misted up his glasses, and he was barefooted. He chewed on a fat cigar, molasses-brown, half-smoked, and unlit.

“Toadfish,” he said with a snort, yanking aboard a pop-eyed struggling fish, flapping and burping. “Nothing more miserable God ever made. Swallow a couple yards of line in two seconds. Swallow your hand if you’d let him.” He threw the fish back, alive. “Don’t come mooching around here again, toad,” he said to the fish. “Rather hook a water moccasin,” he went on, “almost anything. Look out there. See where the tide rips there? Spot. You got spot up your way, don’t you? Drop a line in there and you’d be dragging fish in for six hours. Don’t need no bait at all. Mighty poor sport indeed, though. One time last July I went out with Poppy and we could have gotten a bushel basket of spot in half an hour. They’re all bones, though, just nothing but bones and only a mouthful.” He rebaited his hook and cast out the line again, squinting against the light. The river shores were immensities of shade —water oak and cypress and cedar; the heat and the stillness were like a narcotic. “September’s a good month for this kind of fishing,” he said after a long spell of silence. “Look over there, over those trees there. Look at that sky. Did you ever see anything so
clean
and beautiful?” I had never heard the word “clean” spoken with such passion; it had the quality of an offertory or a prayer. He seemed to sense this and, as if to cover up, said: “Un-unh, it wasn’t really funny, was it? The guy. Di Lieto, that his name? You say that he’s still—what?—
out?”

“Cold as stone,” I said. “In a coma. At least he was that way six months ago. I get a letter from this hospital in Naples every now and then. A nun there, she writes me.”

“Ah merciful Jesus,” he whispered. “So that would make it—how long?
Two years
for the poor bugger. You think he’ll ever pull out of it?”

“I don’t know. Some people have been known to be out five, ten years—even more. I’ve talked to doctors—friends, you know —and they say it’s entirely possible, but don’t bank on it. I send a little money every now and then.”

“So it’s not your fault.” He paused again, and now this swift and vagrant look of sorrow, which I was to notice so many times when I was with him, traveled across his face: it was just a flicker, no more, reflecting loss, regret, yet an infinity of remembered pain. Then it was gone as quickly as it had come, and his face was all repose again, and peace, and wrinkled forbearance and calm. “So it’s not your fault,” he said again. “But you suffer over it. You’re bound to. You suffer over things like that and you can shake—believe me—you can shake at the whole universe like a madman, hollering for an answer, and all you’ll get is this here little snicker. Which is God, or somebody, telling you to keep a stiff upper lip.
Dio buono!
There ain’t—
Hooboy,
watch it! You got a bite!”

But the fish already had wriggled itself off my hook. “Prob’ly a crab,” said Cass, “or an eel.” He looked at the sky. “Must be around twelve-thirty,” he murmured. “Poppy’s just about getting lunch ready, I reckon.”

“But what I could never understand,” I said, getting back to the main topic, “what seemed to me so incredible was not so much what he did at first. Rape. That was right down Mason’s alley, you know.” I halted. “No, maybe not that kind of rape. I couldn’t imagine him going that far. Sadism, you know. Killing and all the rest. But the rape itself was at least believable. What I just couldn’t figure out was this—well, what must have been this remorse of his. The remorse and then what must have been the final courage or guts or something to finish himself off like that in one last act of atonement. You know, it takes—”

“Suicide?” Cass put in. He removed the cigar from his teeth and squinted at me, making a thin smile. “It does not take anything whatsoever, my friend. Maybe desperation. Guts is the last thing it takes.” He gazed at me, not without humor, shrewd, tugging gently at his line. “It don’t take courage, guts, or anything else. You’re talking to a man that knows. Goddam gnats,” he said, slapping.

He had said something like that only the day before; it puzzled me then as it puzzled me now, but again, as at that moment, he allowed me no time to ponder it: almost as if he felt he had let slip something he should not have said, he went on with a question, shoving Mason aside and interrogating
me:
“What happened to your car, anyway? It was a crazy fantastic mess. Did you ever get it fixed?”

“No,” I said, “I didn’t have time. Remember how—well, you know it wasn’t more than a few hours after that when all hell broke loose. It was monstrous, you know. I arrive in that kind of state, shattered anyway. Then the next day Mason’s dead. After that I didn’t care. I sold it to Windgasser for junk. Just before I flew back to New York. I think he gave me a hundred dollars for it.”

“You mean our old sweet
padron di casa
Fausto?” He chuckled. “Now wouldn’t you just know. Swear to God, on doomsday that guy will be scalping tickets for the seats front and center, including his own. I’ll bet he fixed that wreck up and made six hundred percent on the deal.” He chuckled again and fell silent. Then after a bit he said: “Tell me this, boy. Just how drunk was I that day, down there on the road? I mean when we ran into each other.” His gaze upon me was so solemn that I began to fidget.

I started to say something but he broke in: “I mean the reason I ask, you see, is because somewhere along the line there everything just plain blacked out for me. Everything. Then it was the wee hours and I was in the shower and you were trying to sober me up. Everything between is a complete bare-assed blank. I’m trying to pin down the time when everything blanked.”

“I don’t know,” I said, straining once again for memory. “Hell, you didn’t seem so drunk. Well, as I say, you did get wound up finally and started haranguing me about some of those movie stars, but I’ll swear even then you didn’t seem—”