Lie Down in Darkness (11 page)

“She’s had a rough time. …”

Oh, talk about someone else. Talk about us.

“Now she and Harry. Harry’s a nice guy, but I think they resented each other somehow, almost from the very beginning. She should have taken more time! You go North—you become expatriated, exiled. You reach out for the first symbol that completes your apostasy—you become a Communist or a social worker or you marry a Jew. In all good faith, too, yearning to repudiate the wrong you’ve grown up with, only to find that embracing these things you become doubly exiled. Two losts don’t make a found. Marry a Jew or a Chinaman or a Swede, it’s all fine if you’re prompted by any motive, including money, save that of guilt. My father told me when I went barreling off to the University, ‘Son,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to be a camp-follower of reaction but always remember where you came from, the ground is bloody and full of guilt where you were born and you must tread a long narrow path toward your destiny. If the crazy sideroads start to beguile you, son, take at least a backward glance at Monticello.’ You see …”

She nodded, smiling vacantly. She had caught the word “Jew.” It sent her mind astray again. Why doesn’t he talk about us? Jews, How true. Like Milton she felt herself to be a liberal Democrat; about six years ago—soon after they had first made love, but before Loftis’ political hopes had completely withered—he had mentioned something about her becoming National Committeewoman, if and when they were married. This had excited her teiribly—even though she somehow felt the remark was meant lightly—during the mid-hours of one hot, sweet night at the Hotel Patrick Henry in Richmond. How lovely that had been. Their best, really their best. There had been an exquisite secrecy; untried as she was—for, though she had entertained many alluring fantasies, this had been her, first out-of-town adultery—the knowledge of misdoing added enchantment to the night. The old Virginia drawl. “Miz Roosevelt, ah’m Dolly Loftis. How you? National Committeewoman from Virginia. Mah husband’s tol’ me so much about you and Pres’dent Roosevelt. Or shall ah say Franklin?” A neon sign winks shamelessly; red sinful splashes fill the room. She gets up, pulls down the shade, hiding her guilt beneath the darkness. Should I? Should I still? He’s married. Stern pentecostal watchwords out of the gray November small-town past, making her sweat: Forswear adultery and other such iniquities. It passes. She crawls back into bed beside him, strokes his face, exalted, thinking: I don’t care. He needs me. … “Milton,” she says, “wake up, sweetheart.”

He was still talking about Peyton, and now the evening started to get horrid. In filmy yellow waves, a bilious sort of despondency took possession of her; from the last martini, somehow swallowed wrong, a vaporous gas rose up in her nose, smelling faintly of juniper, and, looking out of the corner of her eye, she felt that two people, at least, were staring at her. She wished she might see a familiar face, for these, all strange to her, seemed suddenly to damn and accuse. A tawny light spilled over the grass below; through this light a motorized lawnmower, towing a sleepy Negro, moved like a boat across the green, showering a billow of bright grass before it. A man wandered out to the green and removed the flag; in the sunset the little red pennant had been so pretty, she was sad to see it go. The band began to play, and the sound of music, too, filled her with vague, remote sadness, and a fidgety yearning; hungrily, her mind sought old places, old events …

His room.

How can I talk about, tell anyone of this tender rapture? Loving a man so for all these years. Now untied from the tie that binds, poor Pookie gone to Knoxville, Tennessee, and Melvin at college, my tie is to him alone. Together we can never die. A farm girl from Emporia: what would Papa say now? I sophisticated and fancypants, vice-chairman of the Red Cross and member in good standing of the Tidewater Garden Club too. Sweet and ruinous, Milton says, with a soft sweet corruption about the mouth. I love him so.

Wanting him for so long, holding off, having to, sitting back on these hips he says drive him frantic, like a saint yearning for perfect communion. Holding off. Having to because he says we’re both upcaught in the tragedy of a middle-class morality.

Still the gossip runs, but we go to his room, up there, now because he says he’s free of that succubus which has so long held him in bondage, free now, legally and without error, and the hell with the paltry petty ruck of envious people who can’t get shut of a virago or a jackass who holds them helpless, too. That’s what he says. So we go to his room now, up there. I know it well. There is something dear and sweet about it. It encloses you with the scent or maybe just the feeling of him: a male smell like heather or tweed, his shirts unwashed and hanging over things, shirts I take home to the apartment to carefully wash and iron myself. I love him so. Knowing he wants me, that’s what’s so good. …

He says I’m the dearest thing and age has made the fiber sweeter. And we are upcaught in the tragedy of a middle-class morality. We do not care, Milton and I, for that will all be over October twenty-first.

Sometimes I wish he’d get that faraway look out of his eyes. I worry. What is he thinking about? Sometimes I don’t know what he’s thinking about.

He says I’m the dearest thing. I think he loves me more than Peyton. Peyton is a bitch, although it’s not his fault, but the fault of that succubus who treated her so badly. It’s somehow Freudian, he says.

His room. We go there now and he pays the nigger a dollar to keep the hall door locked and because of this I can awake on Sunday morning before he spirits me out as he says and feel the sunlight on my face and think well Dolly Loftis you’ve come a long way for a farm girl and think too as he says in the soft morning sunlight that there are miles to go before we sleep and miles more to go before we sleep. …

A waiter appeared at Loftis’ side, mumbled something about New York on the phone.

“Thanks, Joe.” He arose still talking, terribly feverish, Dolly thought, reluctant to be unchanneled from his singing flow of words. “Well, I’ve forgotten about becoming a statesman. Content with working on bond issues. Content with everything.” A strand of celery had become caught in the back of her throat, dangled there itching against her palate. “Hell,” he said expansively, “I might even start back to church. I might …” But he didn’t finish the sentence for—perhaps because of the placid fading light, softening her face so that now, even more, she looked like a little girl—he seemed to understand that she had not been listening to him. Her wandering eyes, she sensed with sudden fright, had betrayed her, and he gazed down at her with an odd sad smile.

He must know. He must know.

“Milton——” she tried to say, but “What do you see in me anyway?” he had said, then turned, walked across the terrace and through the ballroom; she watched him until he disappeared behind a potted palm, and she lapsed back into her chair with a little groan, thinking: Oh something’s happening.

A wisp of music unspooled from the ballroom, saxophone, drums; and thunderheads like Christmas snow rose in disordered piles high above: they would go over, she thought, over the city. People around her talked softly together, laughed in low, gentle tones; all of them, she felt, were watching her, but the band, the moaning saxophone, made her think of a dance right here, long ago. Peyton’s birthday. The first time, after all the waiting, they had ever made love.

She waited. Then he came back and his face, gray as water, was full of agony and horror. He started toward her, but without a word he paused, turned and walked over to Sylvia Mason. The woman got up with a little cry, bracelets jangling, and put her great maternal arms around him. “Ahhh, Milton,” Dolly heard her say. “Ahhh, Milton.” People shuffled, turned about in their chairs; there was great confusion. “Ahhh, Milton,” said Sylvia, “I’m so sorry for you,” but Loftis said nothing, or if he did Dolly could neither see nor hear him, for his back, looming toward her, seemed to be slumped in pure despair against the whole vast evening sky.

Dolly arose. “Milton,” she called, “what’s wrong——” but they were already walking through the ballroom. And the Mason woman had her fat arm around his waist. Dolly sank down again. She didn’t know what had happened, or where he was going. But she had the premonition. Funny little serpents, stars like minute flowers floated on her vision.

He doesn’t love me any more.

She fussed miserably with her handbag, her hat. Then she ran to the edge of the terrace and saw him drive away, alone.

It was just her woman’s intuition: Oh, please, God. Again. He’s going back to her. Again.

Now here at the country club in August, 1939—the time that Dolly remembered, that first time—Peyton had had her sixteenth birthday which, to call back ancient history, was the day before the war began. There was talk about a Corridor—and what was
that?—
but in Port Warwick, attuned to a mood the papers all called “festive,” thirty thousand people waved flags and cheered as the nation’s largest pleasure ship slid down the ways, soon to transport well-to-do folks to Rio and France. There was prosperity on that afternoon in Port Warwick, and on the terrace where they danced a five-piece band was playing and Negroes in white jackets hovered in doorways, behind columns, as from any of a dozen scattered lawn tables one could hear the chilly laughter of beautiful young girls and the sound of distant, captivating music. Helen went around and around, dancing with Milton in a dizzy blur of light, organdy, taffeta rustling about her, the young girls’ perfume sweet and innocent on the summer air. “Oh, Milton,” she said, “I’ll sit this one out. I’m hot.”

He smiled broadly. “But, honey,” he said, “we just started.”

She slid away from him.

“Don’t be a——”

Wet blanket. That’s what he’d say.

I’m so very hot. And tired.

Then he danced with Peyton; he danced with Dolly Bonner, holding her too close, and he danced with Peyton again. He laughed loudly, having, as usual, drunk too much. His fingers were pressed tightly against Dolly’s back. He is not deceiving me. He nodded left and right to the young people who danced around him.

Nor is it, she was thinking, sheer coincidence that she should be here. Because of Melvin she is here. Indeed. Not sheer coincidence. He is not deceiving me.

She was sitting alone in a chair at the edge of the terrace. Above was a clear blue sky, below, waxed flooring, which had been drawn out for the dance, slippery beneath her feet. At the far wall of the terrace was a long mirror in which, past the bright dresses shifting constantly before her, she could see the young girls dancing, eying themselves slyly as they tried to catch sight of the gardenias pinned in their hair. She saw herself, too, and in a paneled glass door behind the chair her whole back was reflected from the mirror, and the effect was not of one, but of two Helens sitting as if in a game of musical chairs, back to back. Sunlight fell upon her cheeks; she was a little past forty, but she looked much older. Somewhere long ago she had surrendered up most of her beauty, which had been considerable, to the passing of time, but a whisper of loveliness still lingered on her face. It was a face full of discontent and now, in repose, of sullen-ness, but there were fine lines in it, gentle arcs and swerves, prominences beautifully recovered into one agreeable symmetry. As she sat there, never allowing her eyes to stray above their level, but gazing only at waists, skirts and the mirror, her expression from time to time became unpleasantly clouded over: thoughts, ugly things, wrinkled her face. Yet now and then it would relax; a bright impromptu content would appear, and a sweet and casual loveliness.

And even now, as she looked up at the mirror, a waiter banged through the door behind her; the door swept to, flapping in and out, so that the twin-reflected Helens, blue-gowned, back to back in their musical chairs, swung wildly out into space above and beyond the dancing forms, multiplied endlessly against the yellowing slant of afternoon light.

I must see how Maudie is.

A young boy with acne and a smirk asked her dutifully to join him in a dance. She refused, shortly. She was watching. Peyton, she believed, had been drinking. Her face so flushed, too happy. The boy protested, urged. She made a polite vague noise, gazing past him at the river. He left, smirking, and the band played beneath the trees.

When the deep purple falls
Over sleepy garden walls
…

The terrace echoed to gay music, sad music, sad as a flute, and the air above, festooned with red bunting and white paper bells, was full of soft laughter and young sweet melancholy. She arose and walked through the dancing crowd. Milton went past, smiling down at Dolly—he
is not deceiving me—but
in the ladies’ room an odor of powder lingered, and the colored girl looked up with a grin, saying, “Mercy me, Miz Loftis——”

“Listen,” she said, “I want you to tell me if you see any of these girls drinking. Do you know my daughter?”

“Yes’m. I does.”

“You tell me if you see, hear?”

“Yes’m.”

“I suspect that some of them are drinking.”

“Yes’m, dat’s what I suspects too.”

“You tell me, hear?”

“Yes’m.”

The black devil. She won’t tell.

She opened the door, went out, and music swelled around her like tropic air. She returned to the terrace, sat down again, and a woman named Mrs. La Farge, whose son, Charles, was here, came up and sat next to her.

“Helen, such a lovely dance! Such a lovely girl you havel” She was a jolly person with a wide, jolly face, and she batted her eyes from time to time, which somehow gave her an air of vague and intermittent wonder.

Helen turned to her with a cheerful smile. “Yes, it is nice, isn’t it? But actually, you see, it’s not my doing. You see, Peyton and Milton planned it all. I just stood by and took care of some of the little details.”

“Oh, dear Helen, that’s a storyteller!” She reared back and laughed, displaying on her chest a mosaic of sunny freckles which cascaded down into the vast privacy of her bosom. “Oh, dear Helen.” She paused. “Charlie says Peyton’s going to Sweet Briar next month.”