Lancelot (23 page)

Ah, that was a different story. A hard choice between Raine and Troy and the hurricane, and shoring up wavering Tri-Phi pledges. Her Tri-Phi loyalties would have won out, I think, even without my orders.

“Anyhow, Raine's not leaving. She'll be around for a while.”

It was true in a sense.

“Okay, Papa. To tell you the truth, I'm a little scared.”

“Good. Now get going.”

“Okay, Papa.”

Putting her hands on my shoulders, she held me off, setting her head to one side Rainelike. Jesus Christ, the movies.

“Papa, I love you.”

“I love you too.”

The wind was picking up. Now it was sustained between gusts. I went out on the galleries and closed the shutters, shot the heavy bolts. They locked from the outside.

Afterwards I met Raine in the hall on her way to the belvedere with a tray.

“What's the matter with you, Lance?”

“What do you mean?”

“You look awful.”

“I'm tired.”

“Here. I've got drinks right here.”

“No thanks.”

“Then try a couple of these. One now and one later.” She gave me two capsules. “They're the best of all downers. They leave you relaxed but euphoric. You feel absolutely free to choose, to plan and act. You can choose to sleep or not to sleep. You become your true self.”

I looked at her. “Very well.”

The truth was, I needed something. There was a cold numbing sensation spreading from the pit of my stomach. What I really wanted was a drink.

She set down the tray and poured me a drink of water. I swallowed both pills. She looked at me. “Why don't we meet later tonight?”

“Very well.”

She started up the attic steps.

“I wouldn't stay up there too long, Raine. The wind is expected to reach over a hundred. The glass may not hold.”

“We won't. We're just enjoying the lovely sky and clouds and lightning. Did you ever see such a sky? Why don't you join us?”

“Not right now. Send Margot down though. I want to speak to her.”

Margot came down. She stood in the dark hall at right angles to me, arms crossed, foot cocked on heel.

“Margot, will you leave with me now? We can go anywhere you like.”

“No.”

“Then will you come and stay with me tonight?”

“No.”

“That's it?”

“That's it.”

“What do you mean, that's it?”

“I do love you, Lance.”

“But—”

“No buts. I love you as I've always loved you, with the old me. But there are other me's. One grows.”

“Then love me with the old me.”

“What can I do?” She shrugged. She was not too attentive. Her head was slightly atilt as if she were listening for a new overtone in the storm. “The feeling is not there. One can't help one's feelings.”

She hollowed her mouth and cocked her head. I could not hear over the uproar of the storm, but I knew her tongue went
tock tock
against the roof of her mouth.

Something worked in the pit of my stomach. It took hold and caught. I realized it was the drug catching on, meshing into my body like a gear.

She swung around to face me, hands on her hips. Holding herself erect, she set one foot forward and turned slightly out. Her face was severe, unpainted, Scandinavian. Christ, she was already Nora Helmer in
A Doll's House.

“What are you going to do, Margot?” I asked dreamily.

“What am I going to do?”
Tock tock.
“Well, I'll tell you one thing I can't do. I can't just sit here year in and year out waxing furniture and watching the camellias bloom. You can understand that.”

“Sure. Then let's go to—ah, Virginia.”

“Virginia?” Her face strayed two degrees toward me.

“I don't know why I said Virginia,” I said, feeling an odd not unpleasant distance opening in my head. “If not Virginia, then anywhere you please.”

“No. I'm sorry, sweetie.” She kissed and hugged me absentmindedly. In the hug I could feel that her diaphragm was held high. She was breathing in a certain way. She was being Nora.

The drug was acting. A certain distance set in between me and myself. Here's what I hoped for from the pills: a little space between me and the pain. I understood what Margot said but I couldn't stand it. But how do you live with something you can't stand? How do you get comfortable with a sword through your guts? I didn't expect a solution or even relief. I only wanted a little distance: how does one live with it—the way a drunk lives with being a drunk, or a crook lives with being a crook? No problem! I envied both. But this! How do you live with this: being stuck onto pain like a cockroach impaled on a pin? The drug did this: before, I was part of the pain, there was no getting away from it. Now I had some distance. The pain was still there, but I stood off a ways. It became a problem to be solved. Hm, what to do about the pain? Who knows, there might even be a solution. Perhaps there's something you can do to ease it. Let's see.

“Why don't you come up to the belvedere with us? It is absolutely spectacular.”

“No. There're some things I have to do.”

“Very well.” She kissed me distractedly with a loud kinfolks kiss, smack.
Tock tock.

When I finished locking the shutters, I returned to the pigeonnier. One had to lean into the south wind. There was wind between the gusts. The storm was like a man who can't get his breath.

The space between me and myself widened. I was sitting in my plantation rocker feeling a widening in my head.

The next thing I knew I was still sitting in my rocker. It was moonlight outside. The moonlight was coming in. I got up and opened the door. It was still. An orange moon rose behind the English Coast. A great yellow rampart of cloud filled the western sky beyond the levee. It looked as solid as the Andes and had peaks and valleys and glaciers and crevasses.

Leaving the door open, I went inside and sat in the rocker and thought of nothing. I breathed. My eye followed the line between the moonlight and the shadow of the doorjamb which ran across the floor of St. Joseph bricks set in a herringbone pattern.

OUR LADY OF THE CAMELLIAS

I must have dozed off because the next thing I remember was the certain sense that there was someone in the room with me. No mystery: I was looking straight at her. Therefore I must have dozed or I would have seen this person come in. But the interval must have been very short because the angle of moonlight lying across the bricks had not changed.

There in the straight chair across the desk from me sat a woman I seemed to know, or at least seemed to be expected to know. She knew me. I started guiltily, smiled, and nodded to cover my lapse of manners. Christ, you remember, Percival; there must have been forty women in that parish of a certain age who look more or less alike, who have a certain connection with one's family, but whose names one never gets straight. They are neither old nor young. They could be thirty-five or fifty-five. They look the same for thirty years. Was this Miss Irma or Cousin Callie or Mrs. Jenny James? They are dark-complexioned, have full figures and a certain reputation from the past. Something had happened to them but we did not speak of it—one's father had got them out of trouble. Oh, you remember what happened to Callie. Perhaps she had run off with an older married man. For the next forty years they do well enough. Often they hold down a small political job at the courthouse, or sell Tupperware—perhaps Cousin Callie has been Judge Jones's mistress for twenty years. At any rate, they outlive everybody. They are healthy. They show up at funerals, weddings, and New Year open houses. One can't imagine what they do between times.

The only thing I could be certain of was that this person seemed to have every right to be there in my pigeonnier.

And that she knew me and I was expected to know her. She smiled at me with perfect familiarity. No doubt she had come to seek shelter from the hurricane at Belle Isle, the strongest building hereabouts.

She sat bolt upright yet gracefully, smoothing down her dress into her waist, showing her figure to good effect. It was a knit dress which perfectly fitted her full breasts and hips.

Now she arched her back and sat even more bolt upright. It would never have occurred to me to ask: “Who are you and what do you want?”

Her hair was dark, perhaps a bit gray, heavy, long, and looped around her head in a not unattractive way. It had not been recently washed. I caught a whiff, not unpleasant, of unwashed woman's hair.

I looked at her. She smiled at me, a winning smile, but her eyes glittered. She was the sort of woman, Percival, you remember from childhood, who was extraordinarily nice to you, who spoke well of your parents, who said how nice they were, how handsome you were. Yet at the mention of her name your parents exchanged glances and fell silent.

She was also the sort you might well remember if you remember how a voluptuous forty-year-old woman attracted a fifteen-year-old youth, how if we were playing football and lounging on the grass at a time-out, sweaty, tired, and cheerfully obscene, and she passed by in the street, erect, heavy in the thigh and small in the waist, we'd fall silent until the inevitable: How would you like some of that?

Then I noticed the camellia pinned at her shoulder—and at the same moment it came to me that this was not yet the season for camellias—a large open flesh-colored bloom with a sheaf of stalks sprouting from the center bearing stamens, pistils, pollen, pods, ovules.

She was real enough, I think, though I cannot explain the camellia. The slight embarrassment of not being able to remember her name was all too familiar and not like a dream. She'd come for shelter, she said (doesn't this prove she was real, in dreams explanations are not required), but she'd changed her mind. She didn't want to impose on us. Maybe she'd better stay with a relative in town, Cousin Maybelle.

But where did she get the camellia?

She still spoke well of everyone. “Your father was such a perfect gentleman. What perfect tact and understanding!”

“Understanding?”

“Of Lily. Your mother. Oh, Lily. What a lovely delicate creature. Like a little dove. Not like me. I'm more a sparrow. Plain but tough.”

“A dove?”

“Maybe more like a lovebird. She lived for love. Literally. Unless she was loved, she withered and died. Maury understood that. God, what understanding he had! And he also understood his own limitations and accepted them. He understood her relationship with Harry and accepted that. That man was a saint.”

“What was her relationship with Harry?”

“You're joking. La, it was not secret.”

“They were lovers?”

“For years. Everybody knew. So romantic! They were like Camille and Robert Taylor.”

Everybody but me. Does everybody know everything but me?

“That was after my father's—uh—indictment?”

“Yes. Poor Maury was crushed, even though it was all just dirty politics and nothing was proved. I've always thought his illness had something to do with what he thought of as his disgrace. Pooh, men are ridiculous. And he was too—tenderhearted. But so aristocratic!”

I was looking in my father's sock drawer for the small change he kept in the fitted scoops for collar buttons and caught sight of something under the argyle socks. There it was, the ten thousand dollars, dusky new green bills in a powdered rubber band neat and squared away like a book, and there it was, the sweet heart pang of horror. I counted it. The bills felt like stiff petals, not like paper, like leaves covered by pollen. My heart beats slowly and strongly. Strange: I was aware that my eyes were doing more than seeing, that they were unblinking and staring and slightly bulging. They were “taking it in,” that is, devouring. For here was the sweet shameful heart of something, the secret. For minutes there was an awareness of my eyes devouring the money under the socks, making little scanning motions to and fro, the way the eye takes in a great painting. Dishonor is sweeter and more mysterious than honor. It holds a secret. There is no secret in honor. If one could but discover the secret at the heart of dishonor. …

Harry Wills was undressing, taking off his duke's costume in the auditorium locker room after the ball. There was the usual drinking and horsing and laughing. No Robert Taylor, he was oldish, blue-jowled, big-nosed, hairy-chested, strong-bellied, thin-shanked, not a Realsilk salesman any more but a Schenley distributor: a traveling salesman! Wet rings from the glass of whiskey shimmered on the bench beside him. Except for his green satin helmet, sword sash, and red leatherette hip boots, he was naked. His genital was retracted, a large button over a great veined ball. As he caught sight of me, I watched him, gazed into his eyes, and saw his brain make two sluggish connections. One was: Here I was, a young Comus knight, the very one who had run 110 yards against Alabama. The other: here was I also, the son of Lily. (Jesus, was I also his son?) The two revelations fused in a single great rosy Four Roses whiskey glow of fondness, perhaps love. (A father's love?) Rising unsteadily, he grabbed me around the neck and announced to the krewe: “You know who this is! This is Lancelot Lamar and you know what he did!” They knew and their knowing confirmed the terrible emotion swelling within him. He told them anyway. “This boy not only ran back that punt 110 yards. He was hit at least once by every man on the Alabama team—twice by some. Haven't y'all seen the film?” The other dukes nodded solemnly. They had. They drank and gave me a drink and shook my hand. Hugging my neck, Harry sat down, pulling me down into a heavy air of lung-breathed bourbon, cigarette smoke, and genital musk.

“Jesus,” he said, shaking his head at the wonder of it and cursed from the very inchoateness of the terrible unnamed feeling. “Have a drink! Goddamn … !”

Do you remember my mother? I never thought of her as “beautiful” or “good-looking” but rather as too pale, with wide winged unplucked eyebrows which gave her a boy's look. You thought she was beautiful? Perhaps I don't remember her after she began to drink. Later she became sly and even a little voluptuous. After years of secret drinking, there came to be a tightness and glossiness about her face. Her chin receded a little. Her eyes became brilliant and opaque and mischievous as if she knew a joke on everybody. You know, I've since known several genteel lady drunks who develop this same glossy chinless look. Is that a facial syndrome of woman alcoholics? Or a certain kind of unhappy Southern lady? Or both?