William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (54 page)

The first person to be buried in the new Potter’s Field on the island was an orphan named Louisa Van Slyke, who died in Charity Hospital in 1869. Many followed her; there close to half a million souls have been laid to rest, a lot of them nameless, all of them forgotten.

The island itself is bleak and unprepossessing. There are islands like this, serving all sorts of cheerless but necessary municipal functions, near every great city in the world—islands in the Thames and Danube and the Seine, and in the yellow waters of the Tiber. This one, perhaps because it is American, seems more than necessarily dreary. No blade of grass grows here, only weeds. On the south end of the island stands a sewage disposal plant. North of this is a city detention home, a great mass of soot-stained brick and iron bars, where derelicts and drunks and the less-involved dope addicts are “rehabilitated.” Moss and flakes of pale green lichen creep along the walls. In the treeless shade of the courtyards, flowering in crannies below shuttered windows, are chickweed and ghostly dandelions. Still farther north of this jail, separated from it by a quarter mile of dusty, weed-choked rising ground, is Potter’s Field. The glens and willow-groves are gone, the picnickers and the slain deer; if you stand here on the hill beneath a dead, wind-twisted cedar, the island’s only tree, you can get a good view of the land—the sewage plant and the prison and the burial ground, each recipient, in its fashion, of waste and decay.

The towers of Manhattan are faint and blue in the distance, rising like minarets or monoliths; near by on summer days yachtsmen sail their boats out of City Island, and the patterns their white sails make on the water are as pretty as kites blown about against a blue March sky. Here in the field weeds and brown, unsightly vegetation grow in thick clusters, tangled together over the numbered concrete markers. There are no proper gravestones in the meadow. Rusted strands of barbed wire traverse the field, serving no purpose, preventing no intrusion, for few people ever visit there. It’s an ugly place, full of rats and spiders, and crisscrossed, because of its prominence above the water, by raw, shifting winds.

To transport bodies from the morgue they once had a tugboat; painted black, a flag at half-mast on its stern, it chugged up the East River on Thursdays. When it passed, barge captains and sailors would uncover their heads, cross themselves or murmur a prayer. Now a truck is used, and the dead no longer receive this final benediction: who would salute a truck, so green and so commonplace? The coffins are made of plain pine and these—twenty-five or thirty each week—are laid four deep in the big mass graves. There are no prayers said; city prisoners are used for the burying, and they receive a day off from their sentence for each day’s work in Potter’s Field. The other dead must be crowded out—those who have lain there for twenty years. Now they are bones and dust and, taking up valuable space, must be removed. Not just twice dead like the relics beneath Washington Square, they become triply annihilated: the prisoners won’t let them rest, remove them—bones, rotted cerement and rattling skull—and throw them in a smaller hole, where they take up one tenth the space they did twenty years before. The new coffins are laid in precisely, tagged and numbered; in this way many souls occupy, undisturbed, their own six feet of earth for two decades.

Then all is done. The grave is covered. The prisoners load up their spades and picks, climb back into the police van, and are driven away. On a promontory near the sea the old coffins are burning, for these too must be destroyed. They make a beautiful and lonely pyre; stacked high, they burn briskly, because the wood has become well decayed. Decay flowers in the air too, ripe and fleshy, yet it is a clean decay, as natural as dying leaves; decay is being destroyed. On the broken splinters flames lick toward the remnant of a shroud, and a garland of baby’s hair, preserved as in a locket all these years, is touched by the fire, shrivels away in a puff of dust. Small bones, overlooked by the buriers, become charred and fall among the weeds. A rat peeps out from a burrow, sniffs the wind, then withdraws. The afternoon lengthens and evening comes, but the burning blue odor ascends, is caught by a breeze and sweeps down among the graves, curls about the monument. It is almost as if this monument were forgotten. Who put it there is a mystery; it bears the meadow’s only epitaph. It is small and cracked and mostly covered by weeds; on it the graven eyes of Christ, weathered by many storms, still burn like the brightest fires. Below these the legend, obscured by brambles and the swirling blue odor of decay, can be read:
He calleth His own by Name
.

So the darkness comes on, covering the graves and the withered cedar and the nameless dead. Lights wink on around the Sound. Rats stir in the weeds, among the graves. The smoke still ascends in the night, clean and without guilt, borne like passion with the last dust of the nameless and the unremembered, upward and upward, toward the stars.

The police were not to blame. When they came for Peyton she had no clothes on. Then they went up to the twelfth floor and looked around, found her clothes but not a scrap of identification. What else, said the spinsterish-looking man at the Department of Hospitals, where Harry went later, could they have done? It had been a routine procedure. Wait for the prescribed length of time, to allow for identification, and then ship the “individual,” as he put it—in a way that made him seem to smell of formaldehyde—on out to the island. Nobody had come to identify this individual. That was that. There was no doubt, then, that this photograph they had taken was of his wife? All right, then, there were papers to fill out and he could get an undertaker (of course, at his own expense) and retrieve—“exhume,” he said—the body. Through all this Harry sensed the man’s weary disapproval, as if Harry were just another negligent relative, but sick with sorrow, he didn’t care.

He went out with his friend Lennie and the undertaker in a hearse. Harry had hauled Lennie, half-drowning, out of the Ebro on a spring day in 1937. It had been in the middle of the fighting; he had laid Lennie beneath a pear tree and had worked over him for half an hour before Lennie, groaning and with blood on his lips, had revived. They hadn’t known each other. Later they discovered they had both been born on Caton Avenue in Brooklyn, had indeed both gone to Erasmus Hall. There had been nothing heroic about the rescue; concussion from a mortar had knocked Lennie into the water, and it was just lucky that Harry had been nearby. They were in different battalions, but after that they saw each other as often as they could. Not because of the rescue so much as because they simply liked each other. Most people, on being mustered out of an army, forget the names of their associates as quickly as they do the fact that the M-1 rifle is .30 cal., gas-operated, semiautomatic, and so forth, but when Harry and Lennie left the brigade they left together, and finally were graduated in the same class at N.Y.U. Harry was quiet, almost self-effacing; Lennie had a mass of carrot-red hair and was given to outbursts of temper and moods. In between these times, though, he was humorous and quick-witted and generous; somehow he and Harry made an amiable pair. Harry appreciated Lennie’s sharp mind, his tart humor and his ability as an illustrator, which was considerable. Lennie had been crippled in the left arm by shrapnel, a bad wound, making that limb almost helpless. This had caused him to become bitter often, and cynical, and much of the time he relied upon Harry’s cautious, quiet wisdom to straighten him out. They lived together for a while in an apartment on Cornelia Street in the Village. They managed very well. Harry taught classes at the University and Lennie had by this time begun to receive fairly profitable commissions from some of the magazines. When the Second World War came they were both 4-F, Harry with a spot on his lung, and neither of them cared much, or felt ashamed; they had had it, forget it, as Lennie said. Then Lennie got married to a bright-eyed, loving girl named Laura Abrams, and Harry—because he needed more room anyway; his canvases, according to Lennie, were becoming dismally heroic—moved uptown to a flat on York Avenue, in the east eighties. He and Laura and Lennie had big times during the first years of the war.

Then Harry met Peyton. It was at a party in the spring of 1943 at the house of Albert Berger. Albert was a young man of twenty-six or seven who subsisted on an annuity from his rich aunt’s estate, and had bad eyes. He lived in an apartment in Washington Mews with a Great Dane and some excellent jazz records. He was thin and very white. He wore rimless glasses and carefully bedraggled tweeds and something about him—perhaps his dress or the way his eyes had a tendency to cross or get out of focus or merely to close and water helplessly—gave him the look of a sick, sexless person of forty. He was uncompromisingly generous, and was free with his whisky, but arch, self-consciously intellectual and prone to hazy dogma; he was not really very interesting. He did no work except to give parties every Saturday night, when his rooms would be filled with Hindus and anthropologists and floor-lounging people who talked desperately of Chelichev and Lenin and Reichian psychoanalysis. Everybody eventually came to Albert’s. Harry didn’t remember how he met Albert, but he liked a few of the people who came there, and it was there that he fell in love with Peyton. She was quite drunk, aggressive and argumentative. He didn’t like her at all, but she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, and it was not hard to fall in love with her, in spite of not liking her. Presently, at about dawn, he found himself alone with her and Albert, who, his eyes closed, a nimbus of moisture soaking the edge of his lashes, told them that a certain new war novel was a finer one than
War and Peace.
“Aaah,” said Peyton. Then, unaccountably, she burst into tears and threw her head into Harry’s lap. Through the blue dawn he took her home, a one-room apartment near Sheridan Square. She clung to him, breathing whisky, and kissed him violently, disconsolately on the mouth. Although he wanted to, he didn’t allow himself to go in.

The next day, a Sunday, he asked her why she had wept so; he was inquisitive and frank, but gentle: what’s ailing you? he asked. She said she didn’t know. They took a walk along Eighth Street. The sun was out, and the strollers with baby carriages and poodles; the fairies were in, rolling famished, swooning eyes behind the barroom windows. It was a beautiful day, but Peyton had a hangover. She described her feelings; she told him she felt as if she were walking undersea, as if she were surrounded by water. For some reason he remembered that later.

They sat on a bench in Washington Square and fed nuts to the pigeons. Peyton became happy after a while and he found himself holding her hand. They talked about whether Cezanne was greater than Goya, and Van Gogh greater than Paul Klee, arguing a little but not peevishly, and when Peyton said finally that the discussion was useless, that it was silly to “live by comparisons,” he was surprised—remembering her attitude the night before—that she had become so subdued and sober. He agreed with her completely. Later she said she had left school, contemptuously remarking upon it as a “dancing class down in Virginia,” but she wouldn’t tell him why. There was something open and withdrawn about her at the same time; there seemed to be a part of her that he couldn’t reach. She complained of a headache, said again that the day seemed filled with water; perhaps she was drowning, she announced with a pretty yawn, and let her head fall against his shoulder. “Did you ever read
Winnie-the-Pooh
?” she said, and he was about to answer, but a man with a broom came by, sending the pigeons aloft like feathered rockets, and Harry leaned down and said, “You know, you’re beautiful.”

“Yes.”

“It’s true.”

“Yes.” She paused. “Maybe I need to be analyzed.”

He didn’t know why he said it. “You just need me.”

“Maybe so.”

At first, like Harry, Lennie didn’t care for Peyton either, and he told him so. Sober, she was pleasant enough, if quiet and vague, but get a few drinks in her and look what happened:
oy
, such perversity, such a sharp tongue. It was this, Harry knew, that Lennie responded to in the wrong way: two people, each with a wry, sarcastic turn, rarely get along. Besides—Harry had to admit it—Peyton had read more than Lennie, had a more acutely intuitive appreciation of Art, which she capitalized. And beyond this, too, was the fact that Peyton was from Virginia; Lennie, with all his virtues, was still the provincial New Yorker, often myopic, to whom everything south of Washington was ignorance and oppression: it was a prejudice left over from his early days, but hard to shake off. “You’re still a sucker for hot lips,” said Lennie, the second time he had met her, when Harry had come back to Cornelia Street after taking Peyton home. “Don’t tell me you aren’t staying the night with the lady?”

“She’s tired tonight.”

“She should be. Can’t she ever turn it off?” The four of them had drunk sherry until late. An argument had begun. Laura had said something about an ignorant person she had met, from Tennessee. This had started Peyton off: why, she said, were there so many bigots in the North? Why couldn’t they realize certain obvious truths: that the South was benighted, maybe, and the people filled with guilt, but didn’t they see that this was the very tragic essence of the land, that it was still going through its upheaval, still shattered by conflicts, that it was improving, rising from the ruins, and that when it emerged it would be a greater place for its very ordeal? Couldn’t they see that? Lennie couldn’t see that: how romantic can you get? he wanted to know. They had argued some more, and the argument had ricocheted between Peyton and Lennie, while Harry and Laura quietly drank sherry. When Peyton spoke of Virginia, Harry saw passion glowing in her eyes, and love; she was so desperate to convince them all of the wonder of her lovely, lost land.

“You could have stayed in your sweet Arcadia,” said Lennie.

Peyton had halted then, for the first time in the evening speechless, her mouth working nervously, trying to make words. “No——” she said, and more firmly, “No.” It was as if she were no longer aware that they were in the room: she had seen something, past the walls, either saddening or frightening. She had lost the argument. She put her finger tips against her brow; she was tired, she said. Would Harry take her home?