William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (3 page)

They talked bravely, brightly of the future. His father had a little money; he’d set Milton up in practice in Port Warwick, “a growing town,” as the saying goes. They could have a good time there. It wasn’t much money his father was giving them, but it would do for a while. They’d manage.

Then she told him. When her mother died she was due to inherit a hundred thousand dollars. “Oh, baby,” he said, mildly protesting but elated, and so they were married with the bright hollow panoply attending such military affairs, the ceremony that disturbed him because of the untroubled thrill it gave him. The sweet excitement that came from the flags and the music, of which he was faintly ashamed, was not mere patriotism. It was rather the pride he had in his rank, which he had attained only through his bride and he knew it, but which nonetheless sent through him a fierce adolescent upsurge of exciting arrogance—the twin silver bars and the starched dress uniform, impeccably white. Nor was the feeling of sham and fakery canceled by the news brought by his father, now a diffidently mild, still doting old man in whom patience was no longer a virtue but a habit, who stood shyly in one corner of the officers’ club at the reception, the ends of his once-proud mustache twitching sadly, and told him in an apologetic, mournful tone that Charley Quinn had been killed overseas, it was bad, too bad.

So the anger mounted silently in the younger man as he expressed a faint regret for the death of a boy he had lost track of long ago, barely concealing the resentment he felt at having been told such a thing on his wedding day—as if his father, in atonement for his ill-advised move in getting his son’s commission in the first place, had passed the remark as a reminder that war was not all champagne and flowers and the tinkly laughter of officers’ wives. And he had hardly restrained himself from saying something very bitter, archly insulting to his father as the old man stood there, the damp, feeble blinking of his eyes reflecting the weakness for which Loftis had felt all his life a quiet contempt. He wanted to get him out of there and on his way back to Richmond. He despised his father. The old man had given him too much.
My son
(he was living in a boardinghouse then; the old house had been torn down, a cigarette factory erected on the site, the steel and concrete walls impermeable to the lingering ghosts of a quiet and departed tradition or even to the memory of a dozen ancient cedars which had cast down a tender, trembling light upon that vanished ground)
my son, your mother was a joy and indeed a deliverance to me and I hope and pray if only out of honor to the blessed memory of her who brought you into life that you will as the Preacher said live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity which he hath given thee under the sun all the days of thy vanity for that is thy portion in this life and in thy labor which thou takest under the sun. My son
…

A sudden, quick ache of pity and sadness came over him, he fumbled stupidly for a word to say, but Helen’s face floated near, uptilted, offering him a kiss, and she led him away to meet someone. His father stood awkwardly in the corner then, groping in conversation with a bored young lieutenant while he, the new captain, listened to the rhythmic wedding small talk of a general’s wife, nodded, smiled, and thought of the pale boy with the blemish like a flower, the brother he had never had, and of his father whom he had never known. “Really, Helen,” the general’s wife was saying, “I think you have the pick of the Army. Such a peach!” And her laughter shattered the air like falling glass.

Think of now.
From a boat somewhere a whistle gave a loud blast. Loftis looked up through the dust, the slanting frames of light. “Helen,” he said absently, groping for her hand, but it was Dolly whose glove lay so consolingly on his arm and, turning to meet her eyes, he heard the train rumbling far down the tracks. “No!” he cried. “I can’t go through with it!”

The hearse was parked near the coal elevator. Each time Mr. Casper bent over to explain to Barclay what was wrong with the motor, a gondola car was upturned on the tracks above them, and his words were lost in the furious roar of coal plunging seaward, swallowed up in a ship’s hold with a hollow booming noise.

“Lyle,” he would begin, “maybe the
fan belt isn’t turning over. LYLE!
” Nervously he wiped dust from his cuffs, trying to keep calm. “Maybe the fan belt isn’t turning over.” Barclay climbed into the front of the hearse, let the motor run for a few seconds, but the fan was working. He turned the motor off.

“Did you check …”

Ree-ee-eep. CaaaaARWONG!

Bitter exasperation tightened like a knot in Mr. Casper’s mind. He had had hardly any sleep the night before and the scene around him had a giddy and abstract air. “Now, Barclay,” he said, “are you
sure
you checked the water?”

“Yes, sir,” he said bleakly.

“Because I warned you the last time. This hearse cost nearly six thousand dollars, son, and we don’t want anything to happen to it, do we?”

Barclay looked up from the engine. Mr. Casper smiled gently downward. About Barclay he felt warm and paternal, he had no children of his own. Lyle was slow, but a nice boy; nice but … well, slow. This was no day——

“Here,” he said, removing his gloves, “let me look in there.” On the backs of his hands there were freckles, large red ones lightly spired with carroty tufts of hair. As he bent over a sour gust of smoke went up his nostrils. He groped forward blindly, smearing grease on his cuffs. Then he lost his balance and as he grabbed wildly for support his hand struck the radiator. Scalding pain ran the length of his arm.

“Damnation,
Barclay!” He whirled, leaped away from the engine and clutched his hand. He looked fearfully downward where a blister was already forming: a small place, but it hurt, and the pain filled him with irrational anger. “Fix it, boy,” he said softly, as softly as he could. “Fix that radiator. If you can’t, I will.”

Two Negro dockhands walked past, a length of clanking chain between them. Mr. Casper heard a chuckle. “Dead wagon. Man!” Mr. Casper was ashamed of his anger.

While he stood and sucked at the blister, Barclay found the trouble: the rubber pipe leading from the radiator had broken loose from its connection and most of the water had drained away. He stuck the pipe back in place. As Barclay went off to fetch a bucket of water from the Esso station, Mr. Casper fastened the hood and stood erect, wiping grease from his hands. He put on his gloves, heard a faint whistle up the tracks. He looked at his watch: eleven-twenty. The train. Above, a coal car slid down the incline of the elevator: a wild, descending lisp of steel on steel. The noise ground unbearably at his nerves. Damnation. Hurriedly he walked toward the group on the dock. A porter, emerging from the baggage room, laden with suitcases, bumped against him: “ ’Scuse me, suh.” He climbed the steps onto the dock, and a clean, cool gust of salt air struck his face. Then, breathing in deeply, he heard Loftis’ distant, husky voice, high-pitched now and agitated, rocking tremulously on the edge of that sad hysteria he knew so well.

“I can’t go through with it!” Loftis said, loud enough for a fat man passing Mr. Casper to stop and look back with questioning eyes. “I tell you … than I can’t bear … WON’T!”

Mr. Casper was a kindly man. Anguish communicated itself to him with the swiftness of light; learned, practiced in sorrow, he could easily distinguish between real and counterfeit grief. This was the real thing. He strode up and patted Loftis on the shoulder.

“There, there, Mr. Loftis,” he said. “Buck up.”

“No, I won’t go up there. No, I don’t want to see it. No, I won’t. I can’t. I’ll just go …”

“All right, old trouper,” Mr. Casper interposed gently, “you don’t have to go if you don’t want to. You just go and sit in the limousine.”

The train rumbled ponderously onto the dock, sending down a vaporous white plume of smoke which swarmed and swirled about them. The engine shuddered to a stop, panting like a sudden and enormous beast beside them as the sunlight glinted brightly on a dozen greased wheels.

“Yes,” Loftis said quietly, subdued now. “I’ll just go sit in the car. I don’t want to see it.”

“That’s right, old trouper,” Mr. Casper replied, “just go sit in the limousine.”

“Dat’s right, po’ ol’ thing,” Ella whimpered, “jes go set in de lemmosine.”

“Yes, dear,” Dolly added, “the car.”

Loftis turned toward Mr. Casper with a look of deliverance, a wild-eyed and grateful expression that stirred Mr. Casper warmly and he repeated, “Yes, sir, you go sit down in the limousine if you want to. Everything’s in my hands.” And Loftis hurried off toward the car, murmuring, “Yes, yes,” as if Mr. Casper’s words had settled the issue.

When he had gone, Dolly burst into tears. “Poor Peyton,” she wept, “poor poor girl.” Her grief had a faintly dishonest ring, Mr. Casper thought. Of course, it was hard to tell about women: they were likely to be that way. He expected them to weep after all … but what was her connection with Loftis anyway? Something—a remark or a word he had heard—clamored for attention in his mind, but it was quickly lost. He had things to do. He walked up the tracks, peering through the dust for the baggage car, and a troublesome uncertainty plagued him. He had felt it somehow all morning and for a restless time last night in bed, but it was only the moment before—a funny look in Dolly Bonner’s eyes?—that he really had begun to get uneasy.
Something,
he thought,
is rotten in Denmark.
Mr. Casper took pride in his work. The fact that Mr. and Mrs. Loftis seemed to be taking such a secretive—even un-Christian—attitude toward the remains of their own daughter shocked him profoundly and, in some obscure fashion, seemed an insult not only to him but to his profession.

He had received the Loftises’ call the night before, not at his house but at the funeral home where—because of a stupid error he had made in his accounts the month before—he was going over the books with Mr. Huggins, the auditor for the Tidewater Morticians League. It was Mrs. Loftis’ voice. He recognized it instantly, having had casual business with her from time to time in the Community Chest fund: the cultured, precise tone, polite but faintly superior. She told him the facts—which he jotted down in a notebook—in a voice oddly calm and devoid of feeling, and it was only after he had hung up, concluding with the usual condolences, that he remarked to himself and then to Mr. Huggins: “That was funny, she sounded so …
cold.
”

Mr. Casper had no taste for the emotional congestion that usually afflicts women at times of great strain; often he had told Barclay that “a weeping woman is worse than a wildcat with wings,” yielding to the boy one of his facetious epigrams, so carefully hoarded, by which, like the rakehell quip of a soldier before battle, he hoped to soften a little the austerity of their mission. But at the same time there was something within him—a feeling for dignity harmonizing with the nature of his work—that demanded that the bereaved, especially a woman, give some small token of distress, if only pale, drawn lips trying bravely to smile; eyes which, though dry, expressed endless grief. It was with great curiosity, then—remembering the tone of Helen Loftis’ words, cool, heartlessly so—that he had approached their house that morning. She greeted him at the front door, her face as composed as if she were meeting the groceryman. True, he thought, her skin was worn. A fine tapestry of wrinkles had traced itself across the ghostly face. Sad, he thought, sad. But they—all those wrinkles and tiny little lines and convolutions—had been there before. They—along with the lovely hair, stark white, although she couldn’t yet be fifty—belonged to some other sorrow. Then he remembered in a flash: something else a few years before—another daughter, a cripple. Who had passed away. Wasn’t she feeble-minded? Barnes, his competitor, had handled … Lord almighty, he thought.

She made an attempt to smile.

“Come in,” she said. “Mr. Loftis is upstairs. He’ll be right down.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, “I want to say——” Gentle words of consolation began to rattle in his head like dominoes. “I want to say——”

“That’s all right, Mr. Casper, won’t you come in?”

He entered the screened-in porch hesitantly, unnerved and bewildered. The morning sun was hot against his back. Around the porch hovered the odor of honeysuckle and verbena, bees, a couple of tiny hummingbirds.

“I would like——” he began.

“Please, Mr. Casper,” she said with an impatience that startled him, “if you’ll just sit here.” She disappeared into the house silently, and her silk wrapper rustled weirdly behind her. He sank into the glider, warm with the smell of leather, and he began to sweat. Through French windows he could see the dining room, shadowy, empty. Crystal and silver laid out on the sideboard reflected pools of light against the walls. Her work, he thought. Very neat and ordered.

Milton Loftis came out in rumpled clothes, with bloodshot eyes. He spoke softly, in a voice that was husky and tired. It was to be strictly private. No announcement in the newspapers—no, none at all. Flowers? No, they wouldn’t be necessary. Yes, he knew it was all out of the ordinary but the rector had given his sanction. Yes (with a thin unhappy smile), yes, he was at the end of his tether.

“Don’t worry, old trouper——” Mr. Casper began, but Loftis had vanished and Mr. Casper sat down again and felt the warm green leather beneath his perspiring hands. It was all so strange, he thought. He could see the bay, blue and waveless, resting in a sultry calm. Far out on the other side a tiny purple battleship, silhouetted, floated like a toy boat on a bathtub lake. An insolent gull squawked over the beach, soared upward and out of sight.

Ella Swan darted out on the porch. When she saw him she burst into tears and fled back through the door in a tumultuous rustle of ribbon and lace. “Lawd, Mistah Loftis, he’s here!”

Mr. Casper heard voices floating from the hallway. Uneasily he leaned forward. Loftis was saying, “And so you aren’t coming with me?” and she: “Why should I? I told you I’d come with Carey Carr:” and,

“Helen, haven’t you even——”