Carey stirred uneasily and lighted his pipe.
“And severe and strict he was. But it was good for me. I learned what’s right and what’s wrong. We’d go to chapel every Sunday, no matter where we were. And when we sang hymns I’d watch him out of the corner of my eye—the way he sang so loudly in a lovely proud baritone and his mustache flicking in a stern and impressive way.
“Oh, but yes. You see, for a while we were happy, Milton and I. You’ll never know. Then there were the four of us; we lived in an apartment up by the shipyard. We had an old broken-down Ford and on Sundays there’d be the four of us driving out to the beach, lying in the sun, picking up shells. Once the car got bogged down in the sand just as we were ready to go home, so we left it there until seven or eight that night, not caring, and went back and sat in the sand and watched the sun go down and drank chocolate milk, with Maudie and Peyton who were five and four then, I guess, respectively. Wasn’t that a happy thing, to let your old broken-down car just stay stuck in the sand, while you went back to the beach and drank chocolate milk?
“But that was happiness, something else. I couldn’t put this thing out of my mind. Let me tell you. …”
Long ago he had begun drinking. She had no idea what it was; maybe his need for her died, if Carey knew what she meant, or maybe it was Maudie, his disappointment and all that. An awful, awful thing, but it was that that she suspected the most—the last—though, as she said, it might have been both. Well (as Carey should realize), she was no prude, but he began drinking all the time—and it was then that he stopped going to church. Oh, she could see it all coming so very plainly. One has no idea what it is to stand by quietly and watch those bricks you’ve so carefully put together—safe and sound, you thought—crumble away, begin to topple off. It starts so slowly, takes you by surprise and sneaks up on you a little more month by month until then, at one point, you look around and discover that this whole structure you’ve so carefully built—and not yet completed—has begun to dissolve like sand in water, melted off with all the cruel underneath edges showing, so that you want to throw a cloak over the whole mess—your pride wants that first—and then, later, wanting not so much to hide it all but frantically to pick up those fallen pieces and by some shrewd, decorous masonry to repair, repair, saying, “Oh, please stop, please stop,” all the while.
His drinking. And his way with Maudie—nothing obvious, Carey must understand, but insidious and unfeeling and utterly detestable. How could he do such a thing? And then the woman, Mrs. X. She was the thing, Helen said, which had torn off her skin of decency and reason, had stripped her naked with the meanness showing.
For six years (Helen went on)—long after she had reconciled herself to such a way of living, where her only hope was to recoup each loss as gracefully as she could, not fuss, but to supply her soul each day with new attitudes, new bulwarks, new hopes—for six years she had watched him turn to this woman, following his stupid progress as she might a fly in a spider’s web, down in some ugly cellar—indifferent all this while, aloof, and only a little sad: look! they’re apart, yet touching each other, antenna-wise—a lewd and diligent woman and her poor Milton who, fascinated, tries vainly to pry himself out of that awful mess. Flies and spiders, the underground chill. It was easy: though she couldn’t see them, she sensed a trembling, acquiescence, the sweet convulsive entanglement. Done. How many times she couldn’t tell. Victory for that other woman. And oh, her poor Milton.
Yet how could you really be sad about all this when sadness belonged to a long time ago, to memory?
So damn them both, she said. God please damn them.
It was a sinful thing, but she was righteous, wasn’t she, wanting to see them swallowed up in their own filth? Carey would never know how hurt she was.
“Why can’t a man stay with the wife who loves him so? You could see this injustice. It made me sicker and sicker; each night I prayed that this wouldn’t go without reproach. But sin. Haven’t I sinned, too? God, what is sin? Sometimes the logic of this life defeats me so completely that I think there isn’t any reward here on earth, or vindication. Sometimes I think life is just one huge misunderstanding and God must be really sorry for confusing the issues so.
“Listen—
“Two weeks ago, after supper one evening, we were sitting on the lawn beneath the willow tree. It was the day before Peyton was going off to school, and I had been helping her pack all afternoon. The next day all four of us were planning to drive up to Sweet Briar. I had been tired and hot—I’d driven downtown that afternoon to get Peyton a new handbag and a hat, and I’d had to contend with the crowds—you know how it is. Then after the iced tea and coffee I felt relaxed. You see, a week or so before, at a dance I’d given Peyton, I had had a fight with her which had worried me for a long time, but we had ‘come around,’ you know, and weren’t angry with each other anymore. We’d had so much fun, really, packing and all and getting excited together about going off to school, that I felt very happy—even along with that sort of sadness you get when you know your child’s leaving you for the first time—and so I just sat there and watched the ships going out to sea and the hummingbirds in the flowers—things like that, you know. Maudie said she had a headache, so I helped her upstairs and gave her some aspirin and told her to lie down for a while and call me when she was rested. And she said, ‘Yes, Mamadear,’ and then she lay back on the sheets and closed her eyes and in a moment she was asleep. She has so little trouble in finding sleep, poor girl. …”
Carey thought: Come to the point. But he listened closely. She went on, telling him how she had stood by Maudie’s bed and watched her for a while. The sun had already gone down, leaving a foggy light around, filling the room with shadows. She could hear Ella shuffling on the porch below, Milton and Peyton talking together on the lawn, sudden laughter—that was all. It was still summer, but there was something of fall in the air; you can feel it at this time of the year—the moment’s pause at sunset when the wind dies, when into this hollow of silence a cool breath rushes, and a single leaf falls from an oak tree—tick-tack-tack it goes, falling through the twilight—as if it had been touched by something perilous and final and strange. She had stood there smoking a cigarette, looking at Maudie and around her at the shadow menagerie on the walls—the pigs and kittens and ducks in sailor suits which stayed because Maudie still wanted them there; now they seemed to achieve a fragmentary sort of motion in the dusk and danced and jigged and nodded ever so slightly if she watched them long enough. But even as she watched, they began to diminish, first in the corners and then above the bed—pigs, ducks, kittens and all, silently dancing, receding one by one. Down below she heard Peyton, very gay: “Bunny! That’s not so, silly.”
The instant comes—a word, a color, a breath of wind—and there you are, thinking Life is not bad, this peace will go on and on—and pop! like starbursts such reflections scatter away and then come frightful thoughts of death and dying.
“Bunny, that’s not so, silly!”
Maudie stirred and turned and slept. Helen went to the window. She could see them below beneath the willows, Peyton on the arm of his chair as together they looked at something—a paper or a catalogue; Peyton was stroking his hair. He was in his shirtsleeves; through the bars of the chair you could see the damp places beneath his arms where he had been sweating.
“She sat next to him,” Helen said. “Her back was to me, too. She was in shorts; I could see her hips, the cotton drawn tight against them and shameful things occurred to me: that that body which I bore … no, I won’t repeat it. Yes, then. That that same body which was part of mine (the way she was pressed against him now, you could tell already how not-so-innocently good she was at doing with men—you know, even though I don’t mean with Milton) … I thought of it. Yes, I did. Stretched out in the woods at Sweet Briar, astray from home and unsupervised and all the rest. So vulnerable to some sleek boy from the University. And all the rest. You know. I’m her mother. I thought all this. A
nd I kept on watching, hating too.”
She couldn’t remember how long it all lasted. Motionless in her hand, the cigarette burned down and ashes fen to the windowsill. Five minutes perhaps … and behind her she could hear Maudie breathing. What happened to her in that time? She felt that the devil stood by her side while she looked at them, while the cigarette burned down and this cold and threatening silence took possession of the house, the lawn, the dying sunlight, and each natural blade of grass and flower and bush around them: the hummingbirds had vanished, the trees were absolutely still. He said: Look at them, look at their sin, look how they have betrayed you both: you and that feeble beloved heart behind you that must vanish soon. One has betrayed you through in-fidelity and one through vice and meanness: the ingratitude of a shameless child.
So she watched them from the window and, as she did, it seemed that everything wrong and hateful in the world had gathered around the house and the lawn, drawn there in the evening for one brief moment and still more unbearable because she knew she was being evilly tempted, knew that their guilt was no worse than her own. Something happened then. During the instant she heard that voice it seemed that time itself had stopped: nothing stirred, no leaf fell; beyond the shore the incoming waves lay without motion in piled-up billows, suspended one behind the other in endless, furrowed procession around the bay, as silent and unyielding as if they had been carved from glass. The evening wind had frozen in the trees. Below, Milton and Peyton sat like statues together, and Peyton had one hand raised to a place where sunlight had gathered in her hair. There was no sound or movement anywhere, except for the furious quick beating of Helen’s heart.
Something happened. Wind rustled in the trees again, a leaf fell, children shouted far off, and as once more the waves began to wash against the sand, Peyton’s arm went around his shoulder, he looked upward, they laughed and turned their heads down to read-all as if her mind had been a film projector in which the film had stopped to offer her motionless detail of the scene before her, and had just then, at this instant, begun to move again. The anger disappeared and, she told Carey, her only distress was in knowing that she would feel this way once more-in five minutes, ten, a day, a week. How could she tell? But for the time she felt unburdened: the light was as gentle and lovely as it had ever been: the hummingbirds had returned to nod and bump around her flower bed; Peyton’s voice, now teasing—“Well, I don’t care what you say, Bunny”—filled her with pain and longing.
“I kissed Maudie and went downstairs again and sat with Peyton and Milton on the lawn.”
Here Helen had paused, Carey remembered, and had turned away, confused, with the air of one who has said, “Let me tell you a story,” only to stop midway because she has forgotten the way it’s all supposed to end.
He leaned forward, clearing his throat, and said: “So you had a moment of real hatred—or evil and temptation, as you put it?”
“Yes,” she said, after a pause. “Yes, I guess that’s it.”
“And you feel you’ve sinned because you yielded to that temptation with anger?”
“Partly,” she replied, “it’s partly that——”
“But, Helen,” he said reasonably, wishing she hadn’t stopped at this point where, to cover up the embarrassment of silence, he could only temporize, “Helen, that’s not really bad, you know. All of us have shameful thoughts. Why, if the mind of the average person—average, mind you—were exposed to public view I daresay he’d be stoned to death in a minute. Of course, in the light of inward health it’s no doubt a finer thing if one could control one’s impulses, put them away before temptation really gets a foothold—did you ever read Montaigne?”
“No.”
“Well,” he said, thinking: Here’s an intelligent woman and rather tragic at that—but actually it was the tragedy of frustration, probably sex, and if you could just humanize her and—well, what else …
“Well,” he went on, “get his essays and read ‘On Some Lines From Virgil,’ on the advantage of casting out demons before they populate your mind. That’s——”
“But listen,” she interrupted. “Let me tell you! Let me go on!”
“Oh.”
“Can’t I tell you?”
“Why, yes.”
She went on, and he relaxed again, looking at her thoughtfully. Really an odd woman. And how nice, a member of his church … and all that business about evil. It showed that perhaps they weren’t all asleep. Of course, it was true: what he knew of psychology had led him to believe that too powerful a consciousness of evil was often the result of infantile emotions: hence primitive fundamentalism, especially the American brand, which he scorned. The cowardly Puritan, he had always thought, or the cowardly fundamentalist, unwilling to partake of free religious inquiry, uses the devil as a scapegoat to rid himself of the need for positive action: “The devil forced me,” he says, instead of, “I turned my eyes from Christ’s example,” and by this process of negativism is enabled to perform any crime under the sun against humanity and reason. But this woman seemed different: in spite of her confusion, something strong and sincere and questing emanated from her, and he was moved to sympathy. She wanted no substitutes. No Montaigne. Really an odd woman—at least different. As for the devil: that still sounded like so much bosh, but let her have her symbol—at worst it was merely childish. His mind had been straying around; he thought of the neo-Orthodoxy, and he wondered sometimes if he wasn’t in need of a symbol himself.
“I sat there for a while,” she continued. “I was knitting. Ella came and went, carrying away cups and dishes, and then finally Milton folded up the card table and took it into the house. I looked at Peyton. She was curled up in a chair reading one of those information booklets that colleges send you when you’re a freshman: where to come and who to see first and the rules and all that. I said, ‘I think that hat will go well with the new suit.’ Then she just said, ‘Mm-hhh,’ and I said, ‘Of course, red will go well with it, too. The suit, I mean. It’s a fall color.’ And she said, ‘Mm-hh,’ again, just that. In that inattentive, sort of half-hearted way I’ve become accustomed to. Even with Milton she does it, although there’s no wonder: he’s spoiled her rotten. That hat, you see—at the last minute we remembered she needed one, and it was I who drove down in all the crowds and heat to get it for her. I picked out a nice one, too. She liked it right away. But her insolence. I put it aside in my mind: It’s her way, he’s caused all that, and besides I’ve always said, ‘She’s young, she’s young.’ I said, ‘Remember, dear, like I told you you should change your sheets once a week. Put the bottom sheet in the laundry bag and take the top sheet and put it on the bottom. …’ Silly details about going off to school, but I was concerned, you know. She looked up scowling, as she often does with me, prissy-polite, you know, and she said, ‘Mother dear, for heaven’s sake you’ve told me all about those things,’ and turned to read without another word. That did it. I was only trying to help, but he’s done these things … Never mind. I tried to keep the anger out of my voice and I said something like ‘All right then, O.K.,’ or something. Then I put my knitting down and got up and went to the flower bed.”
She wished she could tell Carey how much her garden meant to her. Whenever the dreadful depression came back, she would fly toward her garden as one dying of thirst runs toward water. She’d pluck and weed and pick, and as she knelt on the cool ground she felt, she said, absolutely rooted to something firm and substantial, no longer a part of the family. Now her back was to Peyton. Presently she heard Milton’s footsteps on the terrace, then heard him as he sat down heavily next to Peyton. She heard the clink of ice, too, which meant, of course, that he was drinking.
He started to say something to her—“Helen dear,” he began—but he said nothing else and she didn’t answer. He talked to Peyton, they talked together—trivial, harmless things, father and daughter—it didn’t matter what they said. For five or ten minutes she knelt there. The sunlight was dying fast, and to make the mos
t of this contentment she had to hurry, plunging her fingers into the soil, pulling up weeds which she laid on a paper beside her, leaning forward from time to time to smell the blooms.
Ella Swan came out on the kitchen porch with her hat on. “Well, good night all,” she said in her shy way; Peyton and Milton told her good night and Helen turned and called good-by to her. “Good night, Ella,” she said. “Remember I’d like you early tomorrow morning.” She watched her standing on the porch, partly obscured by the willows, old and bent and stooped-over, dressed fantastically in one of the cast-off gowns Helen had worn in the twenties, looking like a wrinkled ape someone had costumed for a side show in silk and tassels and clinging beads. She raised her hand to her eyes, squinting at Helen, although the sun was behind them.
“Mr. Loftis has to leave early to take Peyton up to school,” Helen said then. She spoke in a bland yet not unfriendly tone—with what she hoped was just the right inflection—so that although her accent was impersonal it was also excluding in effect, making plain to Milton that somehow she had been insulted. The “Mr. Loftis” had done that, she hoped. And already, she told Carey, she knew that by those unfortunate words she had committed herself—knew that she wouldn’t be going with Peyton to Sweet Briar.