Lie Down in Darkness (40 page)

Loftis found Peyton upstairs sitting alone reading a World Atlas, and looking beautiful and somewhat bored.

“Where’s your mother, honey?”

“She went to the kitchen to tend to the champagne. Bunny, did you know that in all of Delaware there are only three counties?”

“No.” He sat down beside her and kissed her on the cheek. “Baby, baby,” he said, “I’ve had hardly any time to talk to you. Aren’t you excited? You look wonderful. I’ve never seen such a beautiful, unexcited bride in all my life. What’s the——”

“Virginia has a hundred.”

“Hundred?”

“A hundred counties, it says so here. Texas has the most——”

He shoved the book away and swept her up toward him, laughing, kissing her helplessly. She lay tender and unresisting against his shoulder; he breathed the perfume in her hair, and was stricken by beauty at the sight of a gardenia pinned there, nestling just beneath his left eye. “Bunny,” she said finally, pushing away from him, “you are such a demonstrative old bum. Come on, quit it now. I’ve got lipstick on your neck.”

“I’ve hidden Harry,” he said.

“You have? Where?”

“I’ve got him locked in on the sun porch with your Uncle Eddie and Carey Carr. Carey’s briefing him on the service.”

“That’s nice,” she said. “Poor Harry, he was in such a stew over the ceremony. He told me just a while ago that he had never seen so many Aryans under one roof in all his life. He said that when he saw Mrs. Braunstein it was like finding his mother at a meeting of the D.A.R.” She chuckled beneath her breath, as if she were being tickled. “What a funny guy! All this business has given him a good case of the creeps. It’s a good thing we’re not High Church and he’d have to cross himself and all that rot. But I think maybe he’s putting a lot of this stuff on. The nervousness, I mean.” Peals of laughter came up from the lawn.

“He seems like an awfully nice boy, honey.”

“He is,” she said, and let her eyes stray musing upon the bay and the dappled blue sky and the windy lawn where all the girls stood chattering, in patches of red and blue. She looked down at her hands. “He is, I guess. I guess he’s about the nicest person I’ve ever met—” and raised her eyes and winked at him—“except you, of course. I mean,” she went on, “I guess he’s got about everything a girl could ever want, if that doesn’t sound banal. I mean there’s something honest and right about him, and I can’t quite describe those qualities without sounding a little silly. After Maudie died I wanted——”

He squeezed her hand and put his fingers to his lips.

“Yes, I know, I’m sorry,” she went on, “I’m sorry, Bunny. We promised not to talk about that, didn’t we? Well, by every letter in the alphabet I promise you that I’ll forget.” She paused and closed her eyes. There arose a tender blur of memories, phantoms, shadows, as he listened to her repeat the old hocus-pocus he hadn’t heard in years; with her eyes closed and her lips drawn sweetly down she looked six or eight, just for an instant, and he could have hugged her to his breast. “So anyway, when I went up there I was ready to go absolutely wild. I guess I did for a while. All last winter and last spring I lived like a tramp, though I didn’t let on when I wrote you. I lived like that, thinking I was worldly or something, and was miserable. Really, Bunny, you don’t know how miserable I was. I think it was only the letters you wrote me which kept me going. And then even so I’d go out and drink too much with some of these horrid, awful people I knew—they were in the fashion business or they were interior decorators or they drew pictures for the expensive magazines, and all of them were slick and talked chic and none of them had any heart or soul—and then I’d come home with a funny feeling that I’d been betrayed, but only because I’d allowed myself to be betrayed, and then your letters for some reason didn’t seem to help at all. They seemed stupid and silly and maudlin and rather futile—you were so far away and lost, too, and you didn’t seem to understand me at all. And I tore most of them up, and then cried afterward, when I woke up the next morning, because I’d destroyed them. Oh, Bunny, you don’t know how miserable I was then. I guess I hated everyone. I tried to pretend that I liked these new people, any people at all, but I didn’t. I don’t even guess I liked myself.”

“Baby,” he said, “you don’t have to go over all those sad old things. Not today. All those things are buried and done with. …”

“I know, Bunny—it’s just that I’m all worked up today.” She laughed. “Here I am trying to be sober and sophisticated and modern and I feel like I was twelve again and back in Mr.—what was his name?—that pansy’s dancing class. What was I about to say? Oh, yes, Harry. I was talking about Harry. Don’t you think he’s nice? He’s so gentle, Bunny, and
real.
Does that sound like so much stuff to you, Bunny?”

“No.”

“And he’s going to be a great painter someday. Emily Genauer saw some of his work and she thinks he’s got terrific promise. But like he says, Bunny, it’s not so much all that business about becoming a great something or the finest this-or-that, it’s being true to yourself inside. That’s what he is, he’s
right
inside—oh, damn, I can’t talk without sounding like a fool.”

He patted her hand. “I get you, baby. You don’t have to explain to me. I know that any guy you liked would be——“

“No, Bunny, not any guy would be O.K. Just because I liked him. Remember that Lieutenant Timmy Washburn I wrote you about last spring? I liked him and——” She made a look of violent displeasure. “Oh, well.”

“Incidentally,” he put in, as he reached for her hand, “while we’re talking about the life and loves of Peyton Loftis, just what happened to Dick Cartwright?”

Her eyes sparkled, grew wide with what appeared to be sadness and she dropped the subject hastily, as if she were brushing a bee away, with a quick, “Oh he was such a child.”

“So—?”

“I don’t guess brides can drink
before
the wedding, can they?”

“No,” he said, “definitely not.”

“An eentsy one?”

“No, now, baby——”

“Just a wee dram?”

Her voice touched him with worry, vague and somber, but because she was so beautiful, so fetching in the way she cocked her head to one side and repeated, in the soft supplicant voice, her quaint request, he got up—“Baby,” he said, “we’ve only got twenty minutes”—and went to his bedroom. There, hidden amid a nest of mothballs in his dresser drawer, he found the cough-sirup bottle, a full half-pint. He uncapped it, stuck its mouth up to his nostrils and breathed deeply, thinking of Helen, satisfied that rye could be mistaken for terpin hydrate after all. He held the bottle up against the light, sniffed again, turned it about in his fingers. “No,” he said half-aloud. He recapped it quickly, hearing footsteps in the hall, and stuffed it back in the drawer beneath a pile of shirts. It was only La Ruth. She frolicked in, graceless as a whale, humming the “Jersey Bounce.” “ ’Scuse me,” she said, “Miss Helen, she say she wants dem napkins up dere.”

“Which ones?”

“Dem pretty ones dat come from de laundry, right dere on de bureau.”

“What for?”

“Deed I have no idea, but I suspects dey’s for de folks when dey start eatin’.”

“That I’d say would be a logical conclusion,” he admitted. If you were to peel back her skull, he thought, you’d find no convolutions at all on the brain, only a round, thoughtless, shiny sphere. She loaded her arms with napkins, transmitting shock waves of sound across the floor, shifting from foot to foot, her starched maid’s cap on sideways, constantly mumbling. “My, dem folks is sho’ gonna stuff dey guts today,” she said, lumbering from the room, and he opened the drawer, closed it quickly. Below, the guests stood on the lawn talking together, moved from group to group; a balmy wind flicked the skirts of the Abbott sisters, who were scowling at each other, and he saw Commander and Mrs. Kinderman, bloated and stiff in their matching Navy blue. They talked to no one, and were borne staidly about upon gusts of scuttling leaves. He heard Edward’s laughter somewhere, Edward who was already tight, with whom he had, for Helen’s sake, enacted the most strained and touchy friendship, and for some reason the desire for a drink became hot and powerful. There were other footsteps in the hall, and he started, but they faded away; how silly to have this nervous, quarrelsome conscience, that resentment—yes, he had had it, just for a moment, at Edward’s laughter which, in turn, had made him think of Helen and of the ridiculousness of her demands on him, demands he had paradoxically brought on himself—all in all, how silly to have to pussyfoot about like this on Peyton’s wedding day, dredging up such ugly conflicts. Or was it silly? Well, my God, just one. He found two glasses, got the bottle out of the dresser and went back to Peyton’s room, closing the door behind him.

“Oh, Bunny, you’re so clever,” she said, “all in such a cunning little bottle.”

Loftis looked at her sharply. “Baby,” he murmured, sitting down beside her, “do you really want a drink? Why don’t we wait until afterwards? There’s champagne——”

“Don’t be a spoilsport. Make me a drink. This is just for my nerves.” Obediently he poured an ounce or so into a glass.

“Aren’t you going to have one?” she asked.

Why had he suddenly become so depressed? It was unfair of Peyton to seduce him like this, and he found himself saying, “You know, baby, I’ve found that when everything is going along all right you don’t need anything to drink. When you’re happy——”

But she broke in with a laugh, her face rosy with some sudden excitement, “Don’t be so solemn, Bunny, this is for my nerves, buck up, sweetie. …”

He poured himself a drink and with the first swallow, his dark mood fading, he gazed at her, then past her—avoiding those eyes—to say, while the whisky taste began to seem unfamiliarly sweet and strong, “So anyway, honey, you’re here and you’re going to get married to a swell guy and that’s all that counts. Isn’t it wonderful?”

“Yes. I’m here. Thanks to you.”

“It’s not my doing,” he said, “thank your mother.”

“I’ve thanked her,” she said wryly, looking away.

“Now don’t——” he began, for it was wrong, unbearably wrong for her to bring up, on this day of all, the faintest suggestion of regrettable memories; those memories had indeed made this day poignantly perfect, childish in its brazen delight, like the day long ago of the circus or the fair, sweet from its apocalyptic dawning to the last, exhausted, bedtime end; all the near-ruined moments in the family had made this particular day even sweeter, but it was absolutely unfair of Peyton to suggest now that anything had ever been wrong one bit. The illusion of serenity would be swept away like so many dew-drenched spider webs leaving only the unsightly façade, the dusty plaster and all the bricks with their weathered holes. So
quit, quit
it, he was trying to say, softly but forcibly. … Ah, good, it didn’t matter, she had been perhaps faking after all: “Bunny, what did you
do
to her? I could have dropped dead this morning when she came up to Williamsburg, with that really sweet smile on her face. Did you make her take hormones or something? Bunny, make me another drink.”

“I——” She squeezed his leg. A churchbell far off struck the quarter-hour and he poured, helplessly, one for him, one for her, while Mrs. Fauntleroy Mayo’s voice floated up from below in haughty, indistinct syllables, like fish bubbles bursting at the surface of a pool. Peyton’s perfume was abrupt and sweet in his nose, with a certain knife-edge sweetness of exotic flowers he didn’t know, perilous blooms of some jungle, and fascinating; his eyes swam a little as she hovered near—but was it the perfume at all, not the excitement, the day, the heat in the room? He arose and threw open the window wider; Mrs. Mayo saw him. Dressed all in patrician white, in jersey, she raised her gloved hand and waved her handkerchief, a speck of lace: “There’s the lucky father,” she cried, and everyone below looked up with a smile.

He ducked back in. “Baby, we should put all this away.”

“What did you do to her, Bunny? I just couldn’t believe my senses.”

It was the whisky. There was no doubt of that: the rationed rotgut which had filled his eyes with fuzz, made his stomach ache. It was like drinking acid. He put the glass on a table, banished a gnat from its rim. “I don’t know, baby,” he said, smiling down at her, “I don’t know. It was you, you see. I mean, you see …” This was difficult. “I think she never knew how much she loved you until … oh, what the hell, you know, baby, how confused she always was. I don’t know, I just guess she figured too that once you get to a point where everything is on the rocks you’ve got nothing left, so you turn to what you started out with, the beginnings again. …” She was listening to him no more; with her glass in hand, she had got up and walked to the window, looking down at the guests. How could he have explained it to her anyway, convincingly and without embarrassment? How could he explain to this child a fact of life he hardly understood himself: a love which had been held together by the merest wisp of music, faintly heard only during unwitting moments when memory washed at their minds like breakers against crumbling stones; a love in which the principals involved might have dwelt at opposite rims of the universe, only to be drawn back always by some force he could never define—the impalpable, thin strand of music, a memory of lost, enfolding arms, or the common recollection of a happening very ordinary, but which had happened to them together—these and all the gardenias and roses, ruined scents that hovered in the air so many years ago, in the grass-green light of another dawn? A romantic old ass like him, as Peyton might put it, could never place his finger on any of these things, he could only somehow feel them; he could certainly not explain them to a child who, he hoped, still would not have to discover them so painfully for herself.

But she had turned to him from the window; she hadn’t even heard the first part of what he had said. Her glass was empty, her eyes restless with a look that seemed to be neither anxiety nor excitement but just plain restlessness, and she said, in an abrupt, vaguely unhappy tone which startled him, “Daddy, please lay off of it a little bit today. Please do——”