William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (50 page)

“Carey, don’t you come near me with that stick!”

“Helen, poor Helen,” he said, “you are mad.”

A wave of agony swept over her. The air, the perishing twilight, thick with October leaves blown up from the lawn, was thicker with enemies. Something caved in on her mind: she saw Peyton, her gestures, her sinful hips, as round as moons. She saw Milton and Peyton together, and the tender, corrupt solemnity of their caresses: a multitude of red, soft lips, Milton’s hair, Peyton’s breasts, the torture of twenty years. “Damn you, Carey,” she said, “damn you for not understanding me!” And as she spoke she knew that it was not Dolly’s legs, but Peyton’s, which had shone with the rainbow of decay, sprawled out so indecently in the dreaming, pestilential dust.

“Damn you!” she cried. “I’ll fix her alone!”

“Do you mind an old man asking where you’re going on your honeymoon? Or are you supposed to tell?”

Dr. Lawrence Holcomb was speaking. He was having a hard time getting attention because, tight as he was, with so little co-ordination, he found himself being squeezed aside by four or five young people who crowded around Peyton and Harry, laughing and shouting and spilling champagne. A bachelor at sixty-eight and an uneasy drinker, Holcomb was seized with an itchy, reminiscent lust whenever he drank too much, whenever young girls were around—the younger the better—and this fact saddened him. He was a scholar and a stoic; what temperate virtues he owned had been hard won, but still his eyes filled up with tears and he felt the old, burning lust at the sight of these girls—the slick, peach-skin little necks, the stuck-out, yearning breasts, the dozens of naughty perfumes which teased the air. There was one girl now, in particular; she looked up at him casually, impishly, a little blonde with a mouth like crushed fruit, and in his drunken, lonely desire he felt he could have borne her away on his shoulders, without one thought whatsoever. But no. Really, he thought. Really. And sadly, with the sadness of a man who has known all the crucifixions of the flesh, he repeated to himself the old Socratic prayer: “Beloved Pan and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul.”

“What did you say, sir?” Harry had heard him, was shaking his outstretched hand.

“Peyton,” he said, “I brought her into this world, I, the
fidus Achates
of this family for a quarter of a century, remain totally ignored on her wedding day, alone, unnoticed, unsung. I asked,” he said, shaking his white, flowing hair in a parody of gloom, “a simple question, perhaps pardonable as the whim of a drunken old man, but my words are lost in the miasmal croakings of a horde of depraved children. I asked——” He put his hand on the blonde’s waist.

“What did you ask?” said Harry, smiling, exposing a row of even white teeth.

“I asked where you might be going on your honeymoon. I asked——”

“Florida.”

“Ah, Florida. Land of the mangrove and the simple-minded! Land of the orange juice and the palmtree and the brainless smirk! California’s little sister, land of the waterskis and the muscles—congratulations, my boy.” The blonde wriggled away with a chirp, and he succeeded in pushing toward Peyton.

“Hello, my love.” He kissed her on the mouth, moistly.

“Doctor Holcomb, I haven’t seen you for ages! You darling, you used to stick that cold piece of machinery in my ear! Here, let the bride kiss
you
.” She smacked him on the cheek.

“Steady, my love. Steady.” He cozied up to her, letting his arm steal about her waist. “I’ll do the drinking around here.
And
the kissing. Where in hell’s the champagne?” As if he had flourished a wand, a waiter appeared, tray extended. He and Peyton took glasses, but Harry, with a sudden frown, refused, and tapped Peyton on the shoulder. “Honey, you’d better go easy——”

“Young man,” the doctor interrupted, “I am a physician. Disregard my last remark.” His wrinkled face, with its beaked, talcumed nose and rheumy eyes and sagging dewlaps, became red with inspiration. “ ‘This day forever to me holy is,’ ” he warbled, “ ‘pour out the wine without restraint or stay, pour not by cups but by the bellyful, pour out to all that wull, and sprinkle all the posts and walls with wine, that they may sweat, and drunken be withal.’ ” Forever unmarried, he was touched to the heart always by marriage, and he thought of the unbearable tenderness of wedding nights and lovely, palpitating throats, nipples in the moonlight pink as unripe plums, and he ended the recitation with a dry catch in his voice: “ ‘The whiles … the maidens do their carol sing … to which the woods shall answer … and their echo … ring.’ ”

Peyton put her glass down and applauded. The doctor made a courteous bow and noisily blew his nose. Harry, in the meantime, had gone off for a minute, for a waiter had come up to tell him that Mr. Loftis wanted to see him on the back porch. “He drunk and ravin’, man. You bettah hustle on out dere!” and the whites of his eyes had been wild crescents of doom, but neither Peyton nor the doctor had noticed all this. More of the guests were leaving now. They had said their final good-bys to Peyton and so, with coats and hats in their arms, they stood around in the hallway, ready to thank Milton and Helen for a grand time, but Milton and Helen were not in sight. At the punchbowl, though, there was still heavy business; in one shadowy corner, their champagne glasses recklessly upraised, slopping over, a young couple embraced. In another corner Monk Yourtee, abandoned by his wife, sang, “Friendship … friendship” with a very drunk girl named Polly Pearson; her string of rhinestones broke suddenly and Stonewall burst from the kitchen and scrambled to retrieve them, like a squirrel among popcorn.

Briefly alone with Peyton, the doctor turned and took her hand. “You look sad, my dear—you need wine and poesy. What’s wrong?” A look of sorrow had come to her eyes; she put her hands over them, just for an instant, a curious, sweet gesture, thought the doctor, full of infinite distress, as if she were trying to wipe something away. “What’s wrong, my dear?” he said gently.

“Ah …” she said in disgust.

“Tell Doc?”

“Ah …” She looked straight ahead, then gazed about the room, slowly, precisely, and it seemed to the doctor that she was surveying all this—room and windows, fading sunlight, rowdy guests—for the first, perhaps last time (there seemed to be little difference), through eyes no more dim with champagne than with some pure agony. It came as a troubling shock to the doctor, for not ten seconds ago she had seemed the very spirit of gaiety, and it sobered him. “What’s the matter, my dear?” he asked again.

She turned on him her grave brown eyes. “Oh, Doc,” she said in a hopeless voice, “if you only knew. If I could only tell you.”

“You can tell me——”

She smiled. Her nose arched, her eyes sparkled, small pretty dimples came at the corners of her mouth; it was a classical smile, the doctor thought, and simply beautiful, but it was no good. It was a cover-up, and valiantly, through his whiskied brain, he tried to think: what could trouble the girl on this day? Epithalamion. But he couldn’t make it out. Besides, she was going on about something: “I distinctly believe, Doc, that the race is headed for destruction. You know—” and she put one hand on his shoulder with a sort of drunken intimacy, making him feel ticklish inside—“you know what the trouble is, Doc? You know, it’s not too much money at all. I have oodles of Communist friends in New York who’d make you believe that if they could. ’S not distribution of wealth or balance of population or any of those idiotic dusty things. You know what it is? It’s time and remembrance, that’s what it is. It’s people having a little humble—humility about not what happens now, at this moment, but all the things that went before. In themselves, I mean. I mean … I mean, Doc, just little things like coming home. If you could just know how I love this place. I mean, the bay and the beach and the mimosa trees. Even this house, as Thomson, Howell, and Woodburn-architected as it is. Even this house——”

“Yes,” he said, nodding his head. “Yes, I see, my dear.”

“It’s not old, this old house, is it? It’s big and commonplace and middle-class, but I love it. I was born here.” She raised her hand to her eyes again, in the same sweet, distressed gesture, and shuddered. “Oh, Doc,” she cried, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry to talk like this. Do you see what I mean? Do you? Tell me you do, now, because I haven’t got much time. I mean, not that someone should ever want to come home to stay, but that just to be understood for what you are, neither to be loved to death nor despised just because you’re young. Do you understand me, Doc?” Her eyes were bright with tears and he patted her on the shoulder, thinking that indeed he did understand her—a little, at least—for at this moment, past her head and framed in nearby doorways, he saw them: Milton and Helen.

Ah, he thought suddenly, so that’s what it is.

There they stood, so close together, yet unaware of each other because of the noise. In one doorway—the door to the kitchen—Loftis was struggling to steady himself, his face flushed and violent, talking to the bridegroom. The doctor couldn’t hear what they said, saw only one of Loftis’ hands propped tense and bloodless against the doorjamb, the other outstretched, describing desperate arcs in the air with his glass. But it was his face which was so startling, so troubling: limber-jawed, twitching all over with emotion, it seemed to be the face of a man making a last plea to some adamant, inquisitional power, and it seemed further, to the doctor’s mind, the face of someone on the verge of apoplexy. It was a wild and agonized face and the doctor, made suddenly cold sober, wondered what on earth Loftis could be talking about, for he was certainly not angry
at
the bridegroom, who listened intently, and with a worried look on his face.

Now at the other door, not more than five yards away, stood Helen. The doctor saw her pull the coat tightly about her shoulders, although it was stuffy in the room, even hot. On the phonograph there was a sudden blare of music, violently incongruous—“The Stars and Stripes Forever”—and from some of the loitering guests came a chorus of whistles, trumpetings, shouts for attention. The music fell on the room like boiling water; Peyton started, the doctor, too: he felt her squeeze his arm and he wanted to turn and comfort her, even protect her, but, his gaze on Helen, he felt stupefied by apprehension. He watched her suspiciously. She stood in the doorway without moving a muscle in her body. With her arms at her side stiff as sticks, only her head moved and her blue, crazy eyes: it was like watching an adder, thought the doctor; surely she was ready to strike. None of the other guests seemed to have noticed her, and this fact, too, increased his feeling of impending peril: of a snake which lies tranquil, cold as ice, save for its head motionless at the rim of some thicket, prepared as if by divine intuition to bite not the wary but the unaware. Peyton hadn’t seen her. Nor did she see, as the doctor did, Helen’s gaze dart and move once more from the walls to the punchbowl to the windows, linger momentarily upon the last fading light, and then fasten like teeth upon Peyton’s back.

It can’t happen, the doctor thought, it can’t. And he knew Helen had gone off, knew it just as well as he had known for twenty years—having probed and prodded and palpated that tortured and self-torturing flesh until it was as familiar as his own—that there
would
come a time when all her fury and envy became unbottled—
poof
! like an avenging genie risen black as smoke from the confining, torturing lamp. Only,
not now,
he thought,
please, not now.
It was too late, he was too old, he had worked too goddam hard and long at becoming a man of good will to want to see a sweet, tender life such as this one smashed out like an insect.
No,
he thought,
no,
and he turned desperately to Peyton, to comfort her, to protect her, saying with a laugh: “Ah, my love, don’t be sad.” And he took her hand, feeling her new gold ring: “ ‘Her finger was so small the ring would not stay on, which they did bring; it was too wide a peck——’ ”

“Oh, that!” Peyton said. “How did you remember? I just love the seventeenth century! I——”

He saw Helen approach. “ ‘They are all gone into the world of light!’ “ he said. “ ‘And I alone sit ling’ring here …’ ”

“ ‘Their very memory is fair and bright,’ ” Peyton said. “ ‘And my sad thoughts doth clear …’ ”

“ ‘Either disperse these mists …’ ” the doctor said, tightening his grip on her arm. “Something, something, something, something …”

Peyton turned and saw Helen bearing down on them. “Yes. ‘Or else remove me hence unto that hill, Where I shall need no glass.’ ”

Months later, when he tried to put in some sort of ordered sequence the events of the day, Loftis found himself hopelessly baffled. It was as if he were trying to relive an experience in time, with the minutes all scrambled, an experience in which he was unable to tell whether one precise event followed, or antedated, another; whether he had talked to Harry
before
he developed the misery over Peyton, or afterward; when he had tipped the waiters, after Peyton left or before—had he tipped them at all? Whether, in fact, the reception had not preceded the ceremony; and for that matter had Peyton really come home? Had it not been all a drunken and terrible dream? When he came right down to it, he actually made little effort to remember the day; with its peculiar quality of dementia it seemed not a commonplace and civilized social event but a nightmare in vivid technicolor, with no director and clumsy actors, and wired—rather than for words and music—for one vast and febrile noise. Mainly, he recalled his anxiety: how, with his awareness of coming disaster, a fever had risen in his body, making him hot all over, and his underwear was drenched with sweat. This was the primary symptom—the fever—followed by a raw scraping in the back of his throat, which announced the arrival of a bad cold. It
was
a bad one, too, and it laid him low, prostrate and helpless, for a week afterward. Then there had been his crashing, outrageous drunkenness. Bad enough because of the frightful events—past, present and those he knew must come—his desire to drink, to drown himself utterly as in the sea or beneath sand, became even more powerful when, talking in the doorway to Harry, he found himself making a total, impossible ass of himself. At that point—by, most likely, an inaccurate count—he had drunk seven glasses of champagne, three shots of whisky straight, the Lord knew how much of the abominable pineapple punch. The whisky he had taken on the back porch alone, in a daze. And even then he knew that this course was perilous, not only in itself but because for eight months he had abstained, at least been moderate, and his poor, unsuspecting stomach just wouldn’t be able to take it. Which was true. Because, talking to Harry, he felt not only the gradually encroaching symptoms of his anxiety—the fever, the itching throat, the sweating and the trembling and the dreadful weakness in his limbs—he felt not only these, but a new terror: the pains of his headlong flight toward helpless drunkenness: his stomach which, because he hadn’t eaten (even a crumb of the cake), had already begun to protest, contracting in spasms that he imagined were worse than those of a womb in labor; his mouth, nervelessly, numbly drawn down; and this finally—the asinine, crazy things he heard himself saying to Harry. And although later he only faintly remembered what he had told Harry, he recalled himself standing there wildly flailing his arms, saying things that were inept, maudlin, unhinged, and knowing then that these very words must drive him on and on toward newer, blinder, more helpless depths of drunkenness.