Lie Down in Darkness (4 page)

“Talk to me.” In an agony, it seemed, of desperation, to communicate his distress, he hurried to the kitchen and told Ella Swan. “Lawd have mercy!” Soon then Ella went home, amid lamentations and wails, piled high with bags and boxes, kitchen debris, garbage for her pigs. She turned at the door, a black wraith with yellowed, aqueous eyes. “Lawd God, Miss Helen, caint I help …” but Milton teetered past her, Ella was gone, and ne slumped back down in the chair. The bottle of whisky was empty. He couldn’t find another, so, rummaging about in cabinets and drawers, mumbling to himself like a chronic and fretful old man in search of his pills, he finally came across an old bottle of sweet vermouth, from which he began to drink steadily, intent. For a long while he was silent, and then he said softly: “Humbly, Helen, with all the humid—” she watched him patiently as he tried to form the words, his tongue clutched to the roof of his mouth like a leech—“wiz all humility I ask you to take me back. We got each other now, that’s all. I been an awful stink—” he paused, tried to smile—“I been an awful damn fool.” His tone became suddenly beguiling, deprecatory. He waved his arm into space, toward God, perhaps, or an invisible witness, or nothing. “She doesn’t mean anything to me. Honest. She doesn’t mean anything. You think Dolly’s been anything but a friend to me, a real good friend?” He leaned forward confidingly. “Lissen, honey, she and I’ve been real good friends, thass all. I know it’s hard f’ you to believe it. But thass all. Real good friends.” For a moment he seemed to have forgotten Peyton; his face was absorbed and reminiscent, as if amid all the tangle of his desolation he were contemplating some brighter, happier place, more placid and reassuring. “ ’Member, Helen? ’Member how we used to drive up to Connellsville in the summer? Marion and Eddie’s? ‘Member the time when Peyton almost got stung by the bees? ‘Member the way she hollered, ‘The bees, Daddy, the bees, the bees!’” He was laughing in thick little chuckles and, ceasing, his voice died in a faint wistful sigh, like wind through a shutter. “
Aaah-hah
… the way she came running down the hill hollering ‘The bees, Daddy, the bees!’ ” And as he spoke she had a sudden glimpse, once more, of her brother’s home in the Pennsylvania mountains where they had visited in the twenties and the thirties, too: safe and serene in the easy mountain sunshine and the easier money of the Mellons and the Fricks—the good life, the happy life, a hundred years ago. There were huge oaks all around, the house was spacious and wealthy; it stood high on a hill, and from the valley below, made faint by intervening oak trees, the sound of traffic ascended—the only reminder of a noisy other world.

“ ‘The bees!’ she hollered. I can see her now … running … ‘The bees, Daddy, the bees!’ ”

Can’t you hear her, Helen?

Peacefully she drowsed, neither asleep nor awake. Sleep was like a light that trembled and died, swelled, sank back like waves on a shore, fathomless upon lost drowned shoals of memory: she saw trees, sea-deep, cold light, a mountain pool.
The bees, Daddy, the bees,
and she looked up from the pool where tropical goldfish swam restlessly beneath green interlaced mountain ferns, looked up startled and then amused at Peyton who, fleeing out of the distant woods, fluttered mothlike for an instant on the sunlit hill, then floated down the bright mossy slope with abandoned, shrill cries of fear and delight—“The bees, Daddy, the bees!”
Why, the dear,
she thought,
she wandered up there all by herself,
and warm, shivery, she arose, her arms outstretched—
why, my dearest baby—
but Milton was running from his chair, intercepting her, tossing Peyton high in the air as the small prim skirt blossomed like a gaudy flower against the sky. And so, nuzzling his face against her neck, he bore her toward the porch, both of them giggling, both of them buzzing like bees.

Helen sat down again. The coffee on her breakfast tray was suddenly without taste, and for a moment she felt a helpless frustration. Milton was buzzing and Peyton was buzzing and her brother and her sister-in-law and the morose Polish cook converged all at once upon the veranda with mild fond murmurings of admiration and approval.

“Did you get bit?” Marion said.

“Come here to me, beautiful,” Edward said, squatting down, and Peyton started to rush toward her uncle, but Helen heard herself speaking, without anger, calmly. “Come here, Peyton, let me brush you off. You shouldn’t go up there by yourself. I’ve told you.”

Reluctantly Peyton turned, sulking, toward her. “But, Mama.”

“Come here, now.”

“Go to Mama and let her fix your hair,” Milton said. He was wearing white flannels, looking very handsome. “Go to Mama. Then you and Uncle Eddie and I will go see about the bees.”

Peyton stood stiffly against her as Helen brushed and combed and groomed.

“It won’t hurt her to go up there, dear,” Milton said. “There’s a fence, you know.”

“I know,” she said, lightly and without conviction. She felt vaguely foolish, and a hot embarrassed flush rose to her cheeks. Curiously she had the sense that they were all watching her, and with a small forced laugh she said, “Mama’s darling got awfully dirty, didn’t she?”

Peyton struggled and squirmed, reaching for Milton. “Daddy, let’s go see the bees. Now, Daddy. Let’s go see the bees.” She held her tightly for a moment—“Keep still,” she whispered—but she relaxed her grip and Peyton tugged away as Edward said: “There! I’d love to go for a walk with such a pretty girl.”

Helen turned back toward the table and, with a quick shrug, pulled her coat up about her shoulders. She felt chilled and abruptly, terribly empty. The voices faded up the hill behind her. The Polish woman hovered near with a broom, between hoarse Polish wheezes muttering, “That child is spoiled already, Missus Helen. You and him spoil her something awful. You should take care.”

“Yes.”

“She grow up to be a lot of trouble. Me, I got five what got their bottoms spanked most every day.”

“Yes.”

“I got no trouble with them, neither.”

“No.”

“She’s a nice little girl, though. Pretty. You got a pretty daughter, Missus Helen. Me, I love children.”

It’s not I, not I who spoil her
—but the feeling she had, disappointment, bitterness, whatever it was, had passed away. She drank the rest of her coffee. Suddenly she wished she were back in Virginia, but that feeling, too, disappeared. How silly, she thought, how silly to imagine that—— How silly. Oh, how silly and absurd. Why, last night she crawled over against me on the bed—“Mama,” she said, “do you love me?” And I said and she said … oh, how silly, selfish.

Maudie. But of course.

She got up quickly, spilling cream; walked past her sister-in-law picking tulips in the garden; hurried through the house with an anticipation that she did not and could not deny but, rather, exulted in, rushing up the muffled, carpeted stairs in a wishful greedy suspense like a child at Christmas and then, halting, tiptoed onto the shadowed sunporch where Maudie sat alone, her braced leg outstretched on a stool. Helen crushed the child into her arms.

“There, there, Maudie,” Helen whispered, “Mama’s here. There, Maudie-poo.”
My first, my dearest.
She sat down with the child and soon contentment began to steal over her like a warm and loving flame. She felt peaceful and young, very strong, as if she could go on being a mother forever. She was twenty-four.

She was nearly asleep. Faintly she sensed cold streams of sweat on her cheek, once more the locust’s alien chatter, threatening rain, the voice saying, “ ‘Member, Helen, ‘member when we lived in Wilson Court? The apartment? ‘Member the whistle, the way it used to wake us up? ‘Member, Helen, ‘member when Peyton and Maudie came there was so little room? Remember how hot it was … Remember?” He drank again, draining the glass. “And remember …”

Remember. Oh, remember. How remember moments of forgotten time? Where is the way now (she wondered) through that dark up-spreading wood? Leaf, locust, sunlight in the hollow, all those she had known, all had fled like years. Now silence sounds where no light falls, and she has lost the way. Rich. Poor. They were poor then, before her mother died, before the inheritance came. They loved each other. Not so much because they were poor, but because they were both still young and hadn’t had to grow up to things. The apartment was backed up against the shipyard wall; a chill blue fog on winter mornings, rising from the river, cast an elegant mist over the streetlights outside; within, warm in bed, hearing people stirring in the halls around them, they felt propertied and secure; life like this, for all they cared, could go on forever. They slept late then. In the summer Maudie cried. (What’s wrong with the kid? he’d say. She shouldn’t holler like that.) What’s wrong? What’s wrong? The shipyard whistle blew, a weird wail, waking them up. Kick the sheets off. On summer nights his legs were long and white, faintly perspiring. Oh, my sweet, he’d say.
Oh, love
…

Now, gently drowsing, she remembers the whistle blowing. It surrounds space, time, sleepy summer evenings many years ago: a remote sad wail involving sleep and memory and somehow love. They’d fight on summer nights because it was hot and Maudie cried and the icebox made a dripping noise, and because the whistle blew. But they loved each other, and the whistle—now it’s a part of sleep and darkness, things that happened long ago: a wild, lost wail, like the voice of love, passing through the darkened room and softly wailing, passing out of the sphere of sound itself and hearing.

“Oh, they were the days. And remember how Peyton … Oh——” halting, his face startled and distressed, as if he had had his hand in fire and only then had felt the pain. His lips trembled. He’s going to cry, she said to herself: He’s going to cry.

“Peyton.”

He’s feeling it now. Ah, that sorrow hurries like the wind.

He thrust his head forward into his hands again. ”My little girl.”

Yes, perhaps now it will be upturned, the chalice he has borne of whatever immeasurable self-love, not mean, yet not quite so strong as sin …

“My little girl.”

Upturned in this moment of his affliction and dishonor to find there not that pride he would clasp to his heart like a lover, but only grief. Only grief.

He got up from his chair, weaving toward her with outstretched arms. He could hardly walk. The patch of silver hair lay bristling and disheveled. “Honey,” he said, “oh, honey. Let’s be good to each other. Just now. Let’s be good to each other. Let me stay here tonight.”

She arose silently and turned toward the stairs. “Honey, let me stay. At least just let me stay.”

She didn’t answer as she left the room and began to climb the stairs.

“Would you call Mr. Casper for me?” he said. “I can’t. Will you call him for me? I just wouldn’t know what to say.” There was a moment’s silence. “Honey, let me stay. Even if it’s your house.

“Yes,” he muttered then, “even if it’s yours.”

For an instant, as if conjured out of time and remembrance by the sound of music, those brief, petulant words made her conscious of a desolation she had never in her life felt before. It was as if through those words alone she had discovered the nature of their life together, and she felt closer to him for that moment than she had in years. Her eyes filled with tears and she blurted out, “Yes, stay, go on and stay if you want to!” Rushing up the stairs and standing bewildered above, shouting hoarsely back,
“Stay
if you want to!” and running to her room, weeping helpless, unfamiliar tears as the voice below cried, “Helen, honey! Helen! Helen!”

She stirred; the holly leaves scraped gently outside the window.
Oh, take me now.
She slept.

A breeze had sprung up from the bay. Huge iron-red clouds of dust blew across the station, swept upward from time to time on sudden gusts of air. Here, high above, the clouds shifted, spread against the sky in a translucent haze the color of rust. Through this haze the sun shone feebly and enveloped everything below—station, people, and all—in an immense coppery light, dim and horizonless as a Turner landscape, where even moving objects seemed to remain suspended, like flies in amber. The interior of the limousine in which Loftis sat now was fashioned in livid bluish fabric resembling the color of a bruise. In front of him was a folded-down jump seat, also draped in this cheerless hue, upon which he had thrown one leg, tapping his foot in time to music from a restaurant across the street. A guitar strummed. A plaintive juke-box voice, gentle and long-suffering, sang distantly:

You
know that you are free to go dear
Don’t worry if I start to cry
…

And Loftis, intent above all to forget his terrible pain, tried to hear the words, humming along with them in a thin falsetto tenor. Past the window, which he had closed against the dust, a woman’s crazy hat drifted, trailing pink cloth flowers on a veil; the woman herself, then, rear-view—big, bovine, in a motley of cheap and tawdry clothes, plump sunburned arms warding off the dust like snow or sleet, and the woman’s countrified voice receding faintly: “My, my, ain’t this a shame.” In her wake Barclay followed, carrying a bucket of water. Watching him, Loftis felt a tug of nausea at his stomach. His head ached dully from the whisky of the night before. He leaped out of the door and walked toward the hearse, following Barclay, panting a little as he strode through the dust. “Hey! Oh, son! Son!” By the front of the hearse the boy turned and paused, wondering.

“Oh, son!”

“Yes, sir?” Barclay said. He was a pale slim boy of about nineteen. He had pimples and on his upper lip a fringe of timid pubescent hair, and he stood gaping in wonderment as Loftis bore down upon him, breathing heavily.

“Ah, well. Is it——” Loftis hesitated.

The boy said nothing. Although it was not his fault, he was afraid he would be held to blame for the broken radiator pipe. All morning he had worried: about whether he would please or not; about the fit of his brand-new black suit. He was conscientious and incorruptible and right-minded, a young man born to worry. Already the complexities of life, and of becoming a mortician, were oppressive and somehow unjust; he worried about these, too. The morning had given him no end of trouble. He felt that surely Mr. Casper was going to fire him and because he had worried about this he had scarcely let himself notice Loftis, even though he knew now that the man standing before him was the nearest kin to the remains he had driven all this way to fetch.