William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (14 page)

“Aw, Peyton. What’s wrong? Aw, beautiful!”

All the boys called her beautiful. She was beautiful. Her eyes were brown, always hugely attentive; like her mouth, they lent her face at once an air of thoughtfulness and of inquisitiveness. Her lips, which were just full enough, seemed always slightly parted in a questioning way, as if asking a softly tolerant “Why?” of all those young men who from the time she could remember had hovered about her, their vague, anonymous voices always busy like dozens of bees. Her hair was dark brown and generally cut short so that it closely framed her face, and by the time she had reached twelve she had lost track of the number of small boys who had asked her to marry them.

Now she took a short cut through the golf museum, the pride of the club—a spacious sunny room that opened on the terrace—where, neatly arranged in sparkling rows, were the mashies and niblicks and putters used by Bobby Jones and Tommy Armour in this or that tournament; and golf balls, too, like endless rows of pigeon eggs scarred and cut, with which people like Johnny Revolta won the Western Open way back in 1929. Peyton paid no attention to these; she brushed through the door and onto the terrace: a ribbon of green confetti snaked through space and fell quietly over her hair. Drops of rain like silver dollars began to spatter the flooring and Charlie La Farge, pursuing her, took her hand and said, “Come on, beautiful, let’s dance one before it really rains.”

She shook her head and withdrew her hand, looking around the terrace.

“Come on, sugar.” Wistful, imploring.

She didn’t answer. She walked up to her father who, glowing and smiling, was looking down into Dolly’s face. “That would make a man rich,” he was saying.

Peyton tugged at his arm. “Bunny,” she said. “Come here a minute. I’ve
got
to talk to you.”

Loftis and Dolly stopped dancing. “Why, what’s the matter, baby?”

“Come on, Bunny, I’ve just
got
to talk to you. Excuse me, Mrs. Bonner.”

Dolly’s eyebrows arched dubiously. “Why, honey——”

“Come
on
, Bunny!”

“Excuse me, Dolly,” Loftis said.

Peyton shrugged off a boy yearning to dance with her, and drew Loftis into the golf museum. It was dark here. There was a sporting smell in the place, of oiled leather, of tarnished trophies. She and Loftis sat down together on a sofa. Outside in the ballroom the musicians were setting up their stands, in order to proceed with the dance, and the boys and girls rushed in out of the rain.

“What’s the matter, baby?”

Peyton began to cry. She let her head fall in his lap. “Mother says I have to go home!”

Well, goddammit, he thought. He had brought his drink with him from the punch table, a drink which he had kept spiked all afternoon, and he took a large gulp and stroked her hair before saying uneasily, “Why, baby? Why’d she say she wanted to do that?”

“Because,” she said. “Because—because she said you’d given me a drink of whisky and I told her it was my birthday and you’d given me just one, and just a little … oh, Bunny!” She sat erect, clutching his arm, and the tears had disappeared as quickly as they had come. “It was a joke, wasn’t it, Bunny? Wasn’t it? Tell her so, Daddy!” she said angrily. “I can’t go home. That’s the worst thing I ever heard of!” She looked as if she might cry again, so he drew her toward him, feeling her arm against his leg.

“Well,” he said reflectively, “I shouldn’t have given you the drink. That was most likely my stupidest act of the week.” It
had
been stupid, he thought. Whisky, of all things, was the perfect bait for trouble. For twenty years it had been a sufficiently extreme dereliction in Helen’s eyes for even him to drink; now to allow her to think that he might be corrupting the morals of the young … oh, God.

Peyton drew away from him and put an arm on his shoulder. “Bunny,” she said, “tell her something. Tell her we didn’t mean anything. Tell her, will you?”

He took her hand. “O.K., baby. You won’t have to go home. We’ll see about that. Now smile.”

Peyton didn’t smile; she bent her head thoughtfully to one side so that her hair, in short brown waves, partly obscured her face. Then she said in a grave voice which, falling word by word upon his consciousness, made him stir inside with a grotesque and awful fear: “Bunny, I don’t know what’s wrong. It’s absolutely a terrible thing to say and I don’t know how to say it it’s so terrible. But she’s always done these things and I guess she means all right by it and all, but I can’t help it, Bunny, I just don’t love her.” She looked up at him, paused and shook her head. “Bunny,” she said again, “I just don’t think I love her.”

She arose and stood by the couch, her back to him. He got up unsteadily and turned her around and pulled her head down on his chest. “Honey,” he whispered, “you mustn’t say that kind of thing. Your mother … well, she’s always been—well, nervous and high-strung and—well, she doesn’t mean these things. She——”

“She doesn’t have to take me home.”

“No. We’ll see about that. No. But, honey——” He held her close. A damp, morose fog, part darkness, part alcohol, part his own bewilderment, drifted across his vision. He felt that he loved Peyton more than anything in the world. He kissed her. As for Helen, well, to hell with this kind of business. He held his whisky, again, up to Peyton’s lips.

“Now, honey,” he said, “don’t worry. You go back and have a good time and dance. You won’t have to go home.” Peyton drank deeply.

“O.K.” She looked at him. “Oh, Bunny, you’re such a darling.”

She gave him a kiss, which lingered lightly as a raindrop on his cheek, and unsteadily left the room. He watched her leave; the door, braked by air, eased to with a hiss, and he was alone in the room, with the golf balls and the trophies and the mauve, descending light. He sank back down on the couch again.

For minutes he sat there, gazing out of the window. The dancing, after eighteen holes of golf earlier in the day, had wearied him; he was drunker than he should be, he knew, with the rest of the evening still to go, but his glass was empty save for two lumps of ice. He thought wistfully of replenishment. Through the doors he heard music, the sound of thumping feet. He imagined that would be jitter-bugging. The window, which was open, let in a cooling blast of air, but also a lot of rain, so he pulled it down, and the woolly athletic smell of the museum fell limply around him. The opposite shore of the river was completely covered by a wall of rain, drooping summer clouds as white as milk; the slope below he seemed to view as if through a piece of green quartz: a murky golf course, deserted, dusty with scudding wind and rain; submarine willows down by the river, so sedate and feminine in the daylight, now filled with tremblings and shakings, lifting their branches like frantic women’s arms to the embrace of a rainy sky. An oyster boat moved soundlessly down the river near shore, and Loftis, groggy with warmth and too much whisky, must have dozed; just for an instant, though, because when he opened his eyes—or did he close his eyes at all?—the boat had moved but a few yards along the shore. Vaguely puzzled, anxious, gazing with heavy-lidded eyes at the river, he thought: What was that I dreamed? But drowsing off harmlessly once more, he saw fire, a pillar of smoke that hovered trembling on some remote horizon and grasslike shapes of windy rain, dissolving instantly into light. His eyes snapped open, it was nearly dark; the oyster boat had vanished beyond a curtain of tossing willows.

I need a drink. …

Down in the locker room he fished up a pint of Hiram Walker from his golf bag, had a drink, and was returning to the ballroom when he met Dolly on the upstairs landing.

“Why, Milton honey, I’ve been looking all around for you.”

“How’s it going, baby?”

“Why, Milton, what’s wrong? You look like you just saw a ghost.”

“It’s Helen,” he said. “She said she was going to take Peyton home.”

“How silly!”

“Yes,” he said.

“But why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I gave her a sip of whisky for a joke——”

“Oh, really. How silly!”

“Yeah.” He sighed. “I shouldn’t have given her——”

“No,” Dolly said. “I mean how silly for her——” She halted, assuming an air of haughty indifference. “Well,” she said with a little icy laugh, “you know it’s really none of my business.”

“No,” he said. “I mean that’s all right. It was silly. Silly of me, silly of her. But,” he added after a thoughtful pause, “she’s not going to take Peyton home.”

“When did all this happen?”

“Just before it started to rain,” he replied, “just a few minutes ago, I reckon. I reckon she suspected something.”

“Yes,” Dolly said with faint sarcasm, “I imagine so.”

Loftis leaned wearily against the banister. “I made one over par for nine and par for eighteen this morning. It near about wore me out.” He paused, and she came near him; he smelled her perfume, a sweet pungent odor, intimately coquettish, as evocative and compelling as the scents in those suave perfume advertisements—a fine, secular odor, suggesting undulance and flesh. It was always the same; he had come to identify this scent as peculiarly hers, just as, standing in vague, uneasy and often—later to his foolish surprise—unaccountable anticipation at a party, he would identify the abruptly thrown-open front door, the gay greeting, sometimes too noisy, but always enthusiastic and jolly and warm, with her alone; he sometimes felt that he knew she was nearby even before she entered a room.

He looked at her. She turned and leaned up against the banister, too. The sound of the party was distant, muffled by the walls. “Goddam,” he said suddenly. “What kind of bluenosed moral …
crap
is that anyhow? Why do you suppose I’ve got to put up with that sort of thing? Why do you think——” He stopped in confusion. Never before, with Dolly, had he allowed himself to be so outspoken—outspoken, that is, in regard to Helen. Now he felt that for propriety’s sake, or for the sake of some obscure sense of decency which prescribes that one doesn’t reproach one’s wife in this manner, he must repair the damage. He said, “Well, hell—” he gave the banister a sharp smack with the flat of his hand—“maybe I
don’t
know how to bring up children!”

“Oh, Milton,” Dolly put in sharply, “don’t be silly now. Really, it’s none of my business but I think it’s the craziest thing I ever heard of, her wanting to do such a thing. If I were you—of course as I say it’s none of my affair—
I’d
just tell her what I thought. The idea!”

The moment seemed suddenly to Loftis to have assumed gigantic troubled proportions, of dilemma, of schism and heresy, and of moral strictures so subtle that it was beyond him, a poor lawyer, to plan a safe course of action. The music, from a distance, sent reedy and sentimental vibrations through the walls. The rain had ceased, a faint, tepid light seeped through the windows here, and far off he could hear the last remnants of the storm rumbling eastward, like a multitude of barrels tumbling off over the brink of night. Soon it would be dark.

“Dolly,” he began (much too drunk for logic, he felt a curious exhilaration in succumbing to easy sentiment), “you’re the only person who understands me, I think.”

Her eyes swam up to the edge of her lowered lids, gazed at him tenderly and with what he knew to be understanding.

“I’ve been in Port Warwick for twenty years. I had great hopes when I arrived. I was going to be one hell of a politician. I was going to burn up the town, the state, everything. At the very least I thought by now I’d be Commonwealth’s attorney. Look at me now—a goddam rotten failure, a bloodsucker using my wife’s money to get just a little bit ahead, by which I mean to keep as well stocked with bourbon as the next hot shot in town, and by which I mean——” He paused. Confession was not his specialty, and although he enjoyed the mildly tragic sensation it gave him, it also left him a bit breathless.

“You’re not,” Dolly said passionately. She clutched his arm. “You’re not! You’re not! You’ll become something great. You’re fine and wonderful. You’ve got a terrific quality about you that makes everybody want to be your friend. They want to talk to you. You’re positively—why you’re …
radiant!
”

“Let me finish that for you,” he said with a wink, reaching for her glass. Starry-eyed still, she yielded it up like a chalice, and he polished it off in one big gulp. In the little hallway it was getting warm, and he walked over and opened the window. He sat delicately on the edge of the sill, careful that he should get no rain on his pants. Dolly trailed him, skirts rustling. She stood beside him and let her hand rest lightly on his shoulder.

“You know—” he looked upward—“you know, I believe this is the first time I’ve ever talked to you alone. Beyond nosey ears and eyes, I mean. We’ve always been so circumspect.”

“What does circumspect mean?”

“Careful, cautious, coy.”

“Why, Milton,” she laughed, “don’t you remember one time a long time ago at your place? We were alone then.” She squeezed his shoulder, sending a pleasant nervous tremor down through his arm. “The first time you called me sweet kitten. I remember. Don’t you remember, Milton honey?”

“Yes.” He remembered. That was all a long time ago. A drunken and disastrous afternoon that lay chilled in his memory. He put it out of his mind and thought of Helen. Right now she would be gathering up her things, umbrellas, rubbers, and he would have to go out and face her—with an apprehension that approached terror.

I’m afraid of Helen
, he thought.

He put his arm around Dolly’s waist and drew her next to him. Her waist was most agreeably soft and through a little hole or gusset in her dress he intruded, before he knew what he was doing, his forefinger, and felt there, beneath the silk, a band of flesh, quite yielding and very warm. Dolly didn’t seem to mind so he left his finger there and stroked at the silk while Dolly, silent, softly and a bit timidly at first, began to caress the back of his head.

“But by God,” he said suddenly, embarrassed by the silence and feeling the need for some kind of assertion, “it’s not that I haven’t wanted to be with you.”

“Or me either,” Dolly said gravely.

It was dark outside, full of mist. A blaze of light illumined the swimming pool; in the woods beyond, a thousand frogs and katydids set up a shrill chaotic chirping. The stars appeared, and the edge of a summer moon, while the lawn tables, the shining Buicks and Oldsmobiles on the drive, all seemed engulfed by a ghostly, placid light through which the music, echoing from a distance, floated innocently out over the terrace and up to the stars. He groped idly, yet with a cunning sort of deliberation, toward the elastic of Dolly’s pants; he thought
young, youth,
and “Milton,” Dolly was saying, “I’ve wanted——” She stroked his cheek.