William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (78 page)

Still unwitting, still unaware that Mason had been sacked only the night before, she drove us in her convertible down to Merryoaks on that fatal birthday week end, her gorgeous hair flying out behind her in streams of undulating gold. Like his silent pimply equerry I reclined on the back seat behind Mason (it had been no simple joke the headmaster had reckoned with, but some carnal embrace in which the old doctor, fumbling around and with palsied fingers lighting matches in the chapel basement, had ambushed Mason stark naked with the weak-minded daughter of a local oysterman, both of them clutching bottles of sacramental wine; and no lecture—“He whaled the hell out of me,” Mason later said—but a public proclamation cast in the form of such black anathema that Istill recall how the last part of it read: “… a stench and a rottenness in the Nostrils of Almighty God, and I am grieved to say that it is no lingering fragment of Christian forbearance, but only the law of the Commonwealth of Virginia, which prevents my exacting a retribution more severe than silent and expeditious banishment.”); Mason, unperturbed and elegant in a camel’s-hair jacket beside his mother, would turn his luxurious profile toward her from time to time and lightly peck her cheek, the two of them lost in tender banter, gazing long at one another while the car, swaying from side to side and under no control at all, hurtled down dusty country roads like a runaway rocket.

“Yes, Wendy-dear, the joke about the duchess and the poodle.”

“Well, no wonder, it’s perfectly
vile.”

“How else then, dear heart, is an unmarried man going to get his kicks? In France—”

“Oh, I’m sorry I ever talked to you about France. You’re not a
man.
I hate to tell you this, dear, but when you get to Princeton they’ll consider you the merest boy.”

“Wendy, sometimes you’re such a trial. Besides, remember your promise.”

“What promise, angel?”

“That when I’m eighteen you’ll take me to—what do you call it?—one of those bordellos.”

“Darling! Peter, don’t listen to him! Darling, you’re absolutely vile!”

I was unhappy for Mason’s sake that day, fidgety with apprehension over the scene I knew must come, but Mason and his mother were all high spirits and merriment. Before noon the three of us went sailing in the Flaggs’ trim little sloop, landing across the river at Yorktown, where we spread a picnic lunch upon one of the grassy breastworks so lucklessly defended by Lord Cornwallis. To me Wendy had never looked so devastating as she did that day, all sheen and gold and radiance; with a saucy wink for me, prankishly tousling Mason’s hair, breathing soft phrases of flattery and devotion to both of us, she seemed hardly a mother at all but some grown-up Dulcinea possessing both sexual allure and incalculable wisdom. It was a hot spring day and we had drinks—for Mason and me beer, for Wendy martinis, which with fetching nonchalance she poured from a Thermos bottle. “Certainly not, my pet,” she said to Mason, with a bright little grin, “young lips that touch martinis shall never touch mine. Drink your beer like a nice boy. In a year you can drink anything you like.” Later on, recrossing the river, we met a flat calm which set the sails flappily sagging. “Who cares?” cried Wendy, throwing her arms around the two of us. “It’s birthday time! Oh
Gawd,
to be seventeen again! Let’s drift away, away to the sea!” Even I in my anxiety found her spirit contagious; we all began to sing songs, sprawled out on the deck in sodden contentment while the boat, unhelmed and sideslipping gently downriver, edged out into wide waters toward the sea.

“In the evening by the moonlight,

    You could hear those darkies singing—”

we sang, floating past the mouths of tideland streams on the distant shore, sunny meadows on the slopes above, fish stakes in the water, and once an old Negro out tonging oysters, whose eyes rolled white and wonder-struck as we passed. An hour, two hours went by. “Look at him, Peter,” she murmured sleepily, “isn’t he the adorablest thing? Why, he has practically no hips at all.” To which Mason, inured to this kind of talk but flustered because of my presence, said, “Wendy-dear, sometimes you’re such a trial,” as the wind rose abruptly and whisked us homeward—sunburned, half-stupefied—trailing seaweed in our wake.

I had never been really drunk before that afternoon and I was just sixteen: everything, even my premonitory sense of doom, I remember as in a shimmery haze through which the visions of my mind glowed with beauty and with bright ineffable glamour. Far up its hill above the river Merryoaks stood solitary and colonnaded in imperial grandeur, its windless, porticoed façade serene in shadows above an emerald sweep of lawn where reflections from the swimming pool sent dancing oblong shapes of light against the grass. A Negro, white-jacketed, appeared briefly on the heights, then disappeared. Twilight was drawing in behind the pines, which cast stiltlike silhouettes across the rolling landscaped terraces and flagstone walks. As we approached the dock, closehauled and decks awash in one last windy sweep across the shore, I raised my bedazzled eyes in almost tearful gratitude to this place, and Wendy took my hand, squeezing it gently, as if to indicate, “Because you are Mason’s friend, this too is yours.” But again my exalted mood began to fade a little as we docked, when it occurred to me that still he hadn’t told her. We were met there by Richard, the thin-lipped, poker-faced Alsatian who was the Flaggs’ butler, chauffeur, and factotum, brought down from Rye; a burly fellow, he reminded me of a movie villain, and whenever he smiled, which was practically never, it was with a crude perfunctory smirk that was like a surgical incision. He always left me feeling cowed and intimidated—although this may have been because he was the first white manservant I had ever seen. The two Great Danes leashed to his wrist were as big as panthers and they strained for Wendy as she lurched ashore, whimpering their love as she embraced them and crooned baby talk into their ears, and vaulting finally with great savage groans into the back seat of the Cadillac, where they settled among the three of us licking their chops and shuddering with power.

On the drive up through the pinewoods to the house, Wendy fell softly and suddenly asleep on Mason’s shoulder. As for Mason, for the first time since I had known him he seemed despondent, and crestfallen. Drops of sweat stood out on his brow, and as he tenderly held Wendy against him he drew his mouth tautly down and sent me an abject look of dread. Possibly only then, the giddy voyage downriver finished, had he realized the consequences of the brainless thing he had done. Whatever, this pale glance and then his whispered words—“How am I going to tell her, for Jesus sake?”—made me feel a renewed misery, for Mason, but more now for Wendy—who I felt was the most glamorous mother on earth—and for all of her blasted hopes.

She was not drunk yet, not really drunk as I once had seen her; she was only, as she put it when we climbed out of the car, “fagged out from the sun, my dears,” and needed a nap. So we watched her weave across the portico, golden hair still in place, slacks still neat and trim around her thighs, but faltering as she walked, so that Richard with a murmured “Moddom” rushed to help her on her way, along with Richard’s wife, a parched, aproned little woman who crooked her arm under Wendy’s like a nurse with an invalid and led her into the shadows of the house and up the circular stairs in slow, stately, almost funereal procession, the two dogs prancing and bounding behind them. “If she gets good and drunk … if she gets reallv stoned,” Mason said solemnly, “maybe she can take it when I tell her.” But there was no trace of humor in his voice, and I thought I saw him shiver: he looked cold with panic and fear. In the fading twilight we tried to play a set of tennis, but Mason’s game, usually so expert and aggressive, was listless, and although fogged with beer I beat him for the first time, which made him more downcast than ever. Then over us—almost, it seemed, with a crash—night fell, sending a hot breeze through that grove of oaks whose sprightly, trembling leaves had named the whole plantation, scattering westward a flock of crows which squawked dismally in leaden flight toward the last pink glimmering streaks of dusk. In the darkness his racket clattered off the ground. “Ruined! Destroyed!” I heard him cry in about the only tone of self-reproach I had ever heard him use. “I guess I’ve screwed myself for life on account of a lousy two-bit pig!”

It was the optimism of my youth, I suppose, that led me to hope for a while that Wendy might be unaffected by the news which Mason had to tell her. So blithe and carefree, so understanding—such a
sport
—surely her sympathies would encompass Mason’s awful blunder, and she’d shrug it off, and laugh merrily, and indulge him as she always had. Mason, however, knew better. As the evening wore on he grew more and more dejected and at cocktail hour when Wendy, enfolded in organdy and smoke-colored tulle, joined us in the library, he pressed upon her a whole jugful of martinis with the hopeful, hangdog, solemn expression of someone propitiating a goddess. But something had happened to her: though still weaving slightly she seemed chastened, somber even, as if in her nap or somewhere in the upper reaches of the house she had received a sign or signal, a hint that something terrible was being concealed from her, and she flopped down on the couch, saying: “Oh God, this place is such a bore.”

“Wendy-dear,” Mason began, “I got something—”

“Hush, junior-pie, let Wendy talk. Sit down here. Who’s that on the radio? That awful Kay Kyser. Get something sweet, angel.” A gray sullen look had possessed her features; her skin sagged in places and those two muscles at the neck which turn the head were firmly outlined. To me, suddenly, much of her beauty had faded—though perhaps it was only the shadows—and I realized she must be old, very old, perhaps as old as thirty-five. “I hate to sound like such a
drip
at your birthday party,
chéri,
but this place just bores me to tears. If you just realized how lonesome this place is, with no one around, and no one but Denise and that horrible Richard to talk to. As for the servants—those darkies—I haven’t ever been able to understand a word they say. What do they speak in—Brazilian? Oh Gawd,” she yawned. “Oh, who’s that? Sammy Kaye? Leave that on, angel.”

The library itself was a visitation from the eighteenth century, with its glittering chandeliers and opulent walnut paneling and glossy parquet floors, a vessel of antique elegance set down, as if by magic, into an age of chrome, and demanding almost palpably some saving grace of glowing tapers or of cocked hats and a harpsichord’s splashing keys, instead of ourselves, so anachronistic, with beer cans and the sound of squalling horns and trombones. Yet I felt positively embowered in luxury, inflamed by a sad, nostalgic fever. I watched in fascination as Wendy got drunker and drunker. “Your father,” she said once to Mason, stroking his hair and gazing dreamily out through the open French doors, “your father has taken flight from Wendy. Your father is now romancing with—No! No names. Where? Tell me, angel-pie. Where’s Father? Out on the coast? You won’t fly away from Wendy, will you,
chéri?”

“What coast?” I asked innocently.

“What coast! Jesus Christ, listen,” said Mason, laughing for the first time in hours.

“Let’s ask Peter, darling,” she went on, draining her glass. “No, angel, Wendy doesn’t want another drinkle. All right, just a little bit. There. Let’s ask Peter, because he loves us and we love him. Peter, sweet, what do you think about fathers who go running around with other girls?”

“It’s for the birds,” I said, trying to affect Mason’s detachment, but I grew hot with confusion.

“See there? Peter knows. Peter can tell what’s right.” She paused, and I thought I heard a sob, far back in her throat. Then, caught up in some reverie, she began a fretful soliloquy, her fingers never ceasing their meandering course through Mason’s hair, and spoke about things largely incomprehensible to me in a voice that grew more and more thick and garbled. “You see, my dears, you never knew Cold Spring Harbor. Well, you did once, Mason angel, but you were such a little boy then. I mean, you’ll never know how wonderful it was there, before I met your father. Daddy Bob—oh, that was Mason’s grandfather, Peter—Daddy Bob and I lived all alone there after Mummy died. We had horses, a whole stable full. Now why didn’t your father have horses?” she said, looking sorrowfully down at Mason. “Why wouldn’t he get horses? If we had horses I could stand it here. And ride like we did when Daddy Bob was living. It was so wonderful and green then—green and free and oh, just wonderful, not like it is now with all the horrible old highways and cars. I mean, all the old estates were still there, and it was just like one big bridle path, and we’d ride to Huntington and sometimes all the way to Syosset. But no, your father wouldn’t get horses. I mean,” she said, her voice growing level and emphatic and harsh, “he just
refused to get me a horse.
’No!” he said. ’I hate the gawd-damn things! No!’ he said. He honestly said this, believe me: ’Gwendolyn, I’d see you riding a rhinoceros before I’d see you
astride
one of those gawd-damn stupid animals.’ He said: ’I don’t have enough money to buy a stable, Gwendolyn. Who do you think I am, the Aga Khan?’ As if I
asked
for a stable.
One horse
is all I asked for. One miserable, single horse. Just to ride around here like I used to do with Daddy Bob. I mean, to break the monotony, that’s all.” She paused, downing her martini. “Really, that’s all. He’s got his gawd-damn boathouse, doesn’t he? I mean, it’s perfectly hideous to stay here day after day after day with nothing to do but stare at that loathsome Richard, and feel life just flow away around you. Oh, it was all right for the longest while. I mean, it wasn’t so bad when we were having company and all the people came. But all that stopped. Last winter. I’m
alone!
I don’t have
anything to do.
Take Noel, for instance. Or take Norma. Do you think they care for your father? For him? I mean, do you think that they fly all the way to Baltimore or Washington, then hire a car, then drive all the way down here through this miserable country, fifty, sixty, seventy miles, just to bask in the tremendous aura of Justin Flagg? Angel-pie, do you realize I knew
both
Noel and Norma long before I knew your father, when he was a nobody Princeton boy running errands on Wall Street? Did I ever tell you that, angel? They came to see
me,
darling—Wendy, I mean, the dearest sweetest people—of friends, I mean —and he’s alienated all of them! Oh, angel-pie, sometimes I get so wretched!” Choked-up now, her eyes filmed with tears, she made a lunge for Mason, throwing one arm around his neck and drawing him against her. “Listen, listen,” she murmured in a small stricken voice. “Always be good, my adorable one, always be bright. Manly. Proud and poised. You’re all Wendy has. Remember? You see, you’re the bright star in my crown. No, darling, no more. I just can’t possibly.
No,
angel!”—in a queer convulsive tone now pitched between giggles and grief. “No, Wendy’ll
die!
All right. B’just half a glass.”