William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (11 page)

They sat down on the edge of the bed across from her. A great blossom of fire suddenly illuminated the darkness; Helen lighted a cigarette, propped herself on one elbow. For a moment they saw her face, drawn and twisted with anger, sorrow—they really couldn’t tell. She sank back again, blew out the match. The bloom of fire collapsed as darkness rushed in about them all: a tiny crumb of light flickered at the match end; then this also went out. Night enclosed them—night, fragrant with gardenia and rose, yet with a smell of medicine rising through the darkness, an unpleasant vapor faintly threatful, suggesting weariness and infirmity and disorder.

“Helen,” he said slowly. “Peyton wants to tell you—that she’s sorry … about Maudie.”

“Mama, I’m sorry that I hurt Maudie. I’m sorry, Mama. I didn’t mean to, Mama.”

“Yes,” Helen said.

They sat in silence, smelling the perfume, the medicine, the cigarette smoke, unable to see. High above, an airplane droned past; each of them stirred a little, listening: how far was it going, where? On the wingtips lights would flash green and red, demon eyes winking in the night.

“She’s sorry, Helen,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” Peyton said again, a little breathlessly, as if she might begin to cry.

“Yes,” said Helen.

“I’m sorry, Mama.”

There was a whisper and rustle of bedclothes in the darkness. A hand reached out; she pulled Peyton toward her. “Oh, yes, dear. I know you’re sorry. I know. I know. I’m sorry, too.” And together, both of them weeping a bit, they made the soft, soothing sounds two women make when they try to forgive each other. Loftis sat idly by for a while, until finally Helen whispered to Peyton, “Now, dear, you go downstairs. Go and wash your face now. You must be awfully dirty. It’s time to go to bed.” Peyton stumbled past him—he couldn’t see her—but he felt her fingers on his leg, trembling there like moths, plucking at his trousers. “Daddy?” she said.

“Just a minute, baby,” he said. “I’ll be right along.”

Peyton left the room, bumping against footstools and dressers, and again Loftis sat in silence.

Finally he said, “She was really sorry, I think. It wasn’t I … who prompted her. I just told her how to say it. I think she was really sorry.”

“Yes. She was.”

“Is Maudie all right now?”

“Yes,” she said in a weary voice.

“I think she was just frightened,” he ventured slowly.

“Yes.”

Then he said something which he didn’t want to say, it hurt his pride so, yet he knew he had to: “Helen, I’m really very sorry about today. Really I am. It was a very foolish business, the whole thing. I hope you really didn’t get the wrong idea. I just shouldn’t have done it.”

“No.”

“Invited them over, I mean.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Helen, I love you. Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She turned over on her side with a labored sigh. He couldn’t see her, although he knew from her voice that she was still facing him. The words came without hesitation, in a tired sort of monotone, and as he listened he began to break out in a chilly sweat: “I don’t know. I just don’t think you do. I’ve tried to do the right thing. I’ve tried to humor you even knowing that when I humored you I wasn’t doing the right thing. I just think you’re a child. I just don’t think we’ve ever understood each other. That’s all. I just think we’ve got a whole lot of different values.”

“Do you love me?” he asked quietly. It occurred to him that he hadn’t asked her that in a long time, and the thought of what she might reply caused him a vague tremor of fear.

“I don’t know——”

“How do you mean that, Helen?”

“If it weren’t for Maudie. If it weren’t for Maudie——”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think I’d be able to live with you anymore. I just think you’re going to destroy us all.”

He stood up. A surge of anger and futility rose up in his chest—and sudden shame, too, shame at the fact that their life together, which had begun, as most marriages do, with such jaunty good humor and confidence, had come to this footlessness, this confusion.

“Well,” he said in a level voice, thinking
well, it’s your money, that’s the awful part.
“Well, I’m sorry.”

“Yes,” she said.

“We started everything and now we’ll have to finish it.”

“Yes.” Her voice was cool, tired, full of indifference. She rose once more on her elbow, turned the alarm clock’s luminous dial away from the wall so that a weird green halo of light was cast about her. Then she reached for a glass of water and swallowed a pill. He wanted to shout something at her. “Keep your hands off my daughter!” was what, with desperate urgency, he wanted to say, but for a moment he also wished to sit down by her and take her hand because there was something wrong with her—but he loved her, and she had to understand all these things. However, he really didn’t know what to say, and so he merely turned and groped his way out of the room.

Downstairs he found Peyton twisted up in a chair, calmly reading
Winnie-the-Pooh.
He called to her and they went outside. They got in the car and drove for what seemed miles, out of town and through the lonely pinewoods, across wild swamps full of frogs that piped shrilly and, dazed by the headlights, hopped giddily onto the road and got squashed beneath the wheels. This excited Peyton but Loftis had a headache. It began to rain—a half-hour’s steady drizzle which ceased as abruptly as it had begun. Finally, at about ten o’clock, Peyton announced that she was hungry and so, in a little fishing town up the bay, they stopped at a deserted restaurant and had deviled crabs and Seven Up. Peyton kept up an incessant chatter and told him to look at her: look at this new bracelet. Loftis had a beer. Then a red-faced woman, with a wen on her cheek, who seemed to be the owner of the restaurant, came up with sawdust and a broom and told them they would have to leave, it was closing time.

The car was parked on a dark wharf outside. They sat there for a long time, gazing at the bay. The tide rose, bright with phosphorescence, washing gently at the shore. It began to get cool and Peyton curled up beside him. “The more it
snows
-tiddely-pom, the more it
goes
-tiddely-pom …”

He looked down at her. “When you grow up, baby,” he said, “you’re going to be wonderful.”

She didn’t answer him. After a while, she said, “Daddy, I’m sorry Buster and me tied up Maudie.”

“No,” he replied, “that wasn’t a very good idea. Buster and
I
.”

“Buster and I. Why did Mama hit me like that? She never——”

“She was just feeling bad, baby.” He put his arm around her and pulled her close against him.

“Yes,” Peyton said thoughtfully. “I reckon she was feeling bad. I was really sorry to hurt Maudie like that.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Children should be kind to one another,” Peyton said.

“Yes.”

Soon Peyton fell asleep against him, and an offshore breeze sprang up, rustling her hair, bringing with it an odor of swamp and cedar, remembrance things, out of this season of love and rain.

H
ALFWAY
between the railroad station and Port Warwick proper—a distance altogether of two miles—the marshland, petering out in disconsolate, solitary clumps of cattails, yields gradually to higher ground. Here, bordering the road, an unsightly growth of weeds takes over, brambles and briars of an uncertain dirty hue which, as if with terrible exertion, have struggled through the clay to flourish now in stunted gray profusion, bending and shaking in the wind. The area adjacent to this stretch of weeds is bleakly municipal in appearance: it can be seen from the road, and in fact the road eventually curves and runs through it. Here there are great mounds of garbage; a sweet, vegetable odor rises perpetually on the air and one can see—from the distance faintly iridescent—whole swarms of carnivorous flies blackening the garbage and maybe a couple of proprietary rats, propped erect like squirrels, and blinking sluggishly, with mild, infected eyes, at some horror-stricken Northern tourist.

It was along about here, as the limousine, with its tires sizzling musically over the hot asphalt, proceeded into town, that Dolly began to have her premonition again. The day had grown hotter; greasy waves of heat swam up from the road. There was no wind at all now and the weeds on either side of the road, so hot and dry and motionless, seemed perilously close to flame. Trickles of sweat began to ooze down beneath her arms. The garbage piles swept past, emitting a nasty smell, and with a jolt the limousine had risen to the span of a small bridge. Below was a brackish creek, foul with sewage and hostile to all life save for great patches of algae the color of green pea soup, where dragonflies darted and hovered, suspended from the sunny air as if by invisible threads. She looked at the creek despondently: somewhere there had been a silly story about the creek—about a Negro convict who had fallen into the stream and been drowned and who, since the body, mysteriously, was never recovered, had reappeared from the creek at night on each anniversary of his death, covered with scum and slobbering horribly at the mouth as he prowled the town in search of beautiful white women to ravish and to drag back to the unspeakable depths of his grave. Pookie had told her the story each time they had ever gone past the creek, and although she didn’t believe the tale, it had always caused her a pleasurable shiver of fear.

All at once the limousine gave a startling heave, dipping downward, and her stomach leaped up inside her like a balloon: this sudden jolt, together with the sight of the weeds and the garbage, and the boiling heat, gave her a sense of almost unbearable anguish, and so with a despairing little cry she sank back into the seat, wet and wilted, and clutched at Loftis’ hand. She felt Loftis quickly draw his hand away: That’s another time he’s done it, she thought—and it was then, looking up at him, that she had her horrible premonition.

He doesn’t love me any more. He’s going to leave me.

The same premonition she had had last night, and now she had it again. The moment pierced her with hopelessness and she shrank into one corner of the seat, looking at him. He was gazing out of the window with misty preoccupation. A lonely willow tree swept by, and beyond, following his gaze, she saw half a dozen gas storage tanks, rusty and enormous, rising up out of the wasteland like the truncated brown legs of some awful assembly of giants. They were still far off but the car was approaching them steadily, and for some reason the prospect of nearing them, going by them, filled her with anxiety and horror. She began to weep a little, silently in the corner, engulfed in a bleak gray fog of self-pity; small tears drained slowly down her cheeks. It’s true, she thought: the way he’s been acting. He doesn’t love me. He only came to get me this morning because Helen wouldn’t come. Through a blurred film of melancholy she saw a brown wart at the base of Ella Swan’s neck, unkempt strands of nigger hair turned gray.

Ugly. Oh, ugly.

She turned and stared miserably out of her window: He’s that way not just because he’s grieving for Peyton, but because he’s rejecting me. I can tell. Two buzzards flapped soundlessly up from a junk heap, swooped toward the weeds, were gone.

Well, for that matter, she thought bitterly, she had felt all this, just a bit, for the past few months, although it had only been last night that she had really become conscious of something wrong. After all, he had left her once before to go back to Helen. It was his divorce this time, she knew. Backing out at the last minute like that. That was what he wanted to do. And last night. Last night had been just horrid, and as the remembrance—the recognition of the pure shock it had caused her, and of what that shock meant now—fled through her mind, a new, yet more crushing wave of agony and remorse swept over her and she began to sob in little stifled gasps, clutching the velvet tassel above her and rocking mournfully with the rhythm of the limousine as she watched the gas tanks mercilessly approaching, truncated and incomplete, like totems on a plain.

Oh, Milton honey.

Now late yesterday afternoon it had been very warm, and toward sunset she and Loftis had been sitting on the terrace at the country club. The club was on a bluff overlooking the James, a costly establishment, vaguely gothic in style, complacent and splendid. There was a swimming pool with sapphire waters near the eighteenth hole; a diver in shiny blue trunks arched against the twilight—they could see him from the terrace—and soared downward cleanly, behind beach umbrellas slanting like crazy sombreros, to break the water without a splash. Dolly and Milton were drinking martinis—this was his third, her second—mixed from his private bottles in the kitchen. Children in sunsuits, tumbling on the slope below, made pink pinwheel patterns against the grass. An odor of mint and pollen filled the dusk, and golfers wandered in from the course; their caddies trailed indolently behind, golfbags merrily clinking. There were perhaps a dozen other people on the terrace: lazy evening conversation, faintly heard, eddied, flowed, swelled downward toward the pool where a fat woman, sunbathing, lay on the grass sunless and asleep, absorbing the evening shadows.

“To D-day,” said Dolly. It was their private joke. D-day was October twenty-first, when Loftis’ divorce, the result of two years’ separation, became final. Usually Loftis proposed the toast, but after Dolly had caught on she had managed to wear the joke a trifle thin, so now Loftis didn’t answer her but only forced a faint smile of acknowledgment and concentrated on the martini. A shiny red convertible slid to a stop on the driveway. White dresses issued from the doors like so much airy foam, and three young girls ran laughing up the walk, followed by three young men in tuxedoes, as solemn as crows.

“Dance tonight,” Dolly said. “Dinner dance, it looks like.”

“Mmm-hh.”

“What are you thinking about, darling?” she asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he replied. “Nothing.”

Oh dear, she thought. For all the years she had known him she had identified him with talk, speech; his talent in this direction was possibly the reason for their rather one-sided communion. She loved to hear him talk and was a conscientious listener, although often, in a dreamy sort of abstraction, she found herself listening not so much to the substance of what he said as to the tone of the words, the melodious, really endearing way he said them. The eccentric manner of twisting words into grotesque parodies of themselves, his supplications—“Oh, God” or “Oh, Jesus” when something went wrong—uttered with such profound and comical intensity to the heavens; and his own particular wit, the subtleties of which she often didn’t get: to listen to that steady flow of words, the fine enthusiasms and the wry, damning accusations of things in general, so true, so commanding and intelligent—she could listen to all that forever. And usually she agreed with him. He had taught her so much.