So his father had somehow realized that his youth would rise up eventually to betray him, even though he couldn’t have foreseen the final calamity—the son, middle-aged now and a bit flabby, standing here awaiting the symbol of his doom—any more than he could have foreseen that another and crueler war would level the earth or that long after his death, in some unbelievable way, the Democrats would take over—perhaps endlessly. His father. No more than a shadow. A wave of self-pity swept over him. He felt tricked and defeated and it seemed to him that the bigness of his sorrow was too much to bear.
Not just that, Papa. Other things. Life tends toward a moment. Not just the flesh. Not a poet or a thief, I could never exercise free will.
Besides … He watched the ship, the dust, three gulls swerving downward, seesawing on flashing wings. Besides … There was his youth. You forget your youth, that which, reckless, rises up to betray you. It’s your youth, forgotten these years, that you ultimately regret—out of a life begun fifty-some years ago in a cluttered museum of a house in Richmond where his first memory was that of a sunny room murmurous with the sad, hushed sounds of Sunday afternoon and a parade outside with distant band music both bright and disconsolate, his mother’s voice whispering, “It’s music, Milton dear … music … music … music … listen, dear.” The sunlight sifted downward through gently rustling blinds and somewhere infinitely far above, it had seemed, there was his mother’s vacant, hovering face, unseen and finally unknown because she died before he could picture in his consciousness those features his father later said were refined and lovely. There were also walks in the park with his father and the damp, ferny smell of the woods and his best friend, a boy named Charley Quinn, who had a pale face and cheeks with famished hollows and a birthmark on his forehead like a brown-petaled flower, and who was killed at the Somme. My son …
Your first duty remember, son, is always to yourself (he was a lawyer, descended from a long line of lawyers, and until his death in 1920 he sported stiff wing collars and an Edwardian mustache) I do not intend to presume upon your own good judgment, a faculty which I believe you possess in abundance inherited not from me but from your sainted mother, so as you go out into the world I can only admonish you with the words of the Scotchman, videlicet, keep your chin up and your kilts down and let the wind blow.
But his father lacked the foresight to avoid spoiling his son and to realize that sending him to the University at the age of seventeen would produce the results it did: at nineteen he was a campus character known as “Blow,” a sot even by fraternity standards who drank not only because whisky made him drunk but because, away from his father, he found the sudden freedom oppressive. He was talkative, he had a natural curiosity. They said he’d make a fine lawyer. And when he was graduated from the law school he was pleasantly surprised upon reviewing his record to find that he had performed so well, considering the time spent drunk and in the town whorehouse, which catered mainly to college boys: it was a mansion, he remembered, chandeliered, with University seals on the lampshades, and run by a fancy high-yellow named Carmen Metz.
He had been in the Great War, having made gestures toward joining the Army which years later he shamefully confessed to himself were trifling, having been greatly relieved when his father, through government connections, got him a commission in the Army legal branch. During the entire war he was at Governor’s Island. There, by processes more simple than he had ever imagined, he was made first lieutenant and then captain—emerging from the war with that rank and with the colonel’s daughter.
They met at an officers’ dance on the island. Her name was Helen Peyton. Her father was a West Pointer, from an old Virginia family. Wasn’t it a coincidence, she asked Milton as they danced, that her grandfather should have gone to the University, too? That night they walked along the seawall in a drizzling rain and when he bent over, unsteady, very drunk, to kiss her, the city lights drifted like embers across the darkness. Then she fled, the raindrops on her cape leaving a trail of trembling sparks.
Perhaps they were both too young to know better, but a few months later they were engaged to be married. They were both handsome people, and they were wildly in love. They liked parties, dancing; on Saturdays they rode horseback in Central Park. Yet she was strait-laced in many ways, rather severe: No, Milton. We’ll have to wait till afterwards. And drinking. She loved a good time, but a sober good time.
“Now, Little Miss Muffet,” he’d say, smiling, “don’t be scared, a little one …”
“Oh, Milton, please, you’ve had enough. No. No. I won’t!” And running off, unaccountably, weeping a little.
Now wouldn’t you know? There’s an Army brat for you. Crazy as hell, the unstable life caused it. Moving around always. But he loved her, God he loved her. For a long time he drank nothing. For her.
They talked bravely, brightly of the future. His father had a little money; he’d set Milton up in practice in Port Warwick, “a growing town,” as the saying goes. They could have a good time there. It wasn’t much money his father was giving them, but it would do for a while. They’d manage.
Then she told him. When her mother died she was due to inherit a hundred thousand dollars. “Oh, baby,” he said, mildly protesting but elated, and so they were married with the bright hollow panoply attending such military affairs, the ceremony that disturbed him because of the untroubled thrill it gave him. The sweet excitement that came from the flags and the music, of which he was faintly ashamed, was not mere patriotism. It was rather the pride he had in his rank, which he had attained only through his bride and he knew it, but which nonetheless sent through him a fierce adolescent upsurge of exciting arrogance—the twin silver bars and the starched dress uniform, impeccably white. Nor was the feeling of sham and fakery canceled by the news brought by his father, now a diffidently mild, still doting old man in whom patience was no longer a virtue but a habit, who stood shyly in one corner of the officers’ club at the reception, the ends of his once-proud mustache twitching sadly, and told him in an apologetic, mournful tone that Charley Quinn had been killed overseas, it was bad, too bad.
So the anger mounted silently in the younger man as he expressed a faint regret for the death of a boy he had lost track of long ago, barely concealing the resentment he felt at having been told such a thing on his wedding day—as if his father, in atonement for his ill-advised move in getting his son’s commission in the first place, had passed the remark as a reminder that war was not all champagne and flowers and the tinkly laughter of officers’ wives. And he had hardly restrained himself from saying something very bitter, archly insulting to his father as the old man stood there, the damp, feeble blinking of his eyes reflecting the weakness for which Loftis had felt all his life a quiet contempt. He wanted to get him out of there and on his way back to Richmond. He despised his father. The old man had given him too much. My son (he was living in a boardinghouse then; the old house had been torn down, a cigarette factory erected on the site, the steel and concrete walls impermeable to the lingering ghosts of a quiet and departed tradition or even to the memory of a dozen ancient cedars which had cast down a tender, trembling light upon that vanished ground) my son, your mother was a joy and indeed a deliverance to me and I hope and pray if only out of honor to the blessed memory of her who brought you into life that you will as the Preacher said live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity which he hath given thee under the sun all the days of thy vanity for that is thy portion in this life and in thy labor which thou takest under the sun. My son …
A sudden, quick ache of pity and sadness came over him, he fumbled stupidly for a word to say, but Helen’s face floated near, uptilted, offering him a kiss, and she led him away to meet someone. His father stood awkwardly in the corner then, groping in conversation with a bored young lieutenant while he, the new captain, listened to the rhythmic wedding small talk of a general’s wife, nodded, smiled, and thought of the pale boy with the blemish like a flower,
the brother he had never had, and of his father whom he had never known. “Really, Helen,” the general’s wife was saying, “I think you have the pick of the Army. Such a peach!” And her laughter shattered the air like falling glass.
Think of now. From a boat somewhere a whistle gave a loud blast. Loftis looked up through the dust, the slanting frames of light. “Helen,” he said absently, groping for her hand, but it was Dolly whose glove lay so consolingly on his arm and, turning to meet her eyes, he heard the train rumbling far down the tracks. “No!” he cried. “I can’t go through with it!”
The hearse was parked near the coal elevator. Each time Mr. Casper bent over to explain to Barclay what was wrong with the motor, a gondola car was upturned on the tracks above them, and his words were lost in the furious roar of coal plunging seaward, swallowed up in a ship’s hold with a hollow booming noise.
“Lyle,” he would begin, “maybe the fan belt isn’t turning over. LYLE!” Nervously he wiped dust from his cuffs, trying to keep calm. “Maybe the fan belt isn’t turning over.” Barclay climbed into the front of the hearse, let the motor run for a few seconds, but the fan was working. He turned the motor off.
“Did you check …”
Ree-ee-eep. CaaaaARWONG!
Bitter exasperation tightened like a knot in Mr. Casper’s mind. He had had hardly any sleep the night before and the scene around him had a giddy and abstract air. “Now, Barclay,” he said, “are you sure you checked the water?”
“Yes, sir,” he said bleakly.
“Because I warned you the last time. This hearse cost nearly six thousand dollars, son, and we don’t want anything to happen to it, do we?”
Barclay looked up from the engine. Mr. Casper smiled gently downward. About Barclay he felt warm and paternal, he had no children of his own. Lyle was slow, but a nice boy; nice but … well, slow. This was no day——
“Here,” he said, removing his gloves, “let me look in there.” On the backs of his hands there were freckles, large red ones lightly spired with carroty tufts of hair. As he bent over a sour gust of smoke went up his nostrils. He groped forward blindly, smearing grease on his cuffs. Then he lost his balance and as he grabbed wildly for support his hand struck the radiator. Scalding pain ran the length of his arm.
“Damnation, Barclay!” He whirled, leaped away from the engine and clutched his hand. He looked fearfully downward where a blister was already forming: a small place, but it hurt, and the pain filled him with irrational anger. “Fix it, boy,” he said softly, as softly as he could. “Fix that radiator. If you can’t, I will.”
Two Negro dockhands walked past, a length of clanking chain between them. Mr. Casper heard a chuckle. “Dead wagon. Man!” Mr. Casper was ashamed of his anger.
While he stood and sucked at the blister, Barclay found the trouble: the rubber pipe leading from the radiator had broken loose from its connection and most of the water had drained away. He stuck the pipe back in place. As Barclay went off to fetch a bucket of water from the Esso station, Mr. Casper fastened the hood and stood erect, wiping grease from his hands. He put on his gloves, heard a faint whistle up the tracks. He looked at his watch: eleven-twenty. The train. Above, a coal car slid down the incline of the elevator: a wild, descending lisp of steel on steel. The noise ground unbearably at his nerves. Damnation. Hurriedly he walked toward the group on the dock. A porter, emerging from the baggage room, laden with suitcases, bumped against him: “ ‘Scuse me, suh.” He climbed the steps onto the dock, and a clean, cool gust of salt air struck his face. Then, breathing in deeply, he heard Loftis’ distant, husky voice, high-pitched now and agitated, rocking tremulously on the edge of that sad hysteria he knew so well.
“I can’t go through with it!” Loftis said, loud enough for a fat man passing Mr. Casper to stop and look back with questioning eyes. “I tell you … than I can bear … WON’T!”
Mr. Casper was a kindly man. Anguish communicated itself to him with the swiftness of light; learned, practiced in sorrow, he could easily distinguish between real and counterfeit grief. This was the real thing. He strode up and patted Loftis on the shoulder.
“There, there, Mr. Loftis,“ he said. “Buck up.”
“No, I won’t go up there. No, I don’t want to see it. No, I won’t. I can’t. I’ll just go …”
“All right, old trouper,” Mr. Casper interposed gently, “you don’t have to go if you don’t want to. You just go and sit in the limousine.”
The train rumbled ponderously onto the dock, sending down a vaporous white plume of smoke which swarmed and swirled about them. The engine shuddered to a stop, panting like a sudden and enormous beast beside them as the sunlight glinted brightly on a dozen greased wheels.
“Yes,” Loftis said quietly, subdued now. “I’ll just go sit in the car. I don’t want to see it.”
“That’s right, old trouper,” Mr. Casper replied, “just go sit in the limousine.”
“Dat’s right, po’ ol’ thing,” Ella whimpered, “jes go set in de lemmosine.”
“Yes, dear,” Dolly added, “the car.”
Loftis turned toward Mr. Casper with a look of deliverance, a wild-eyed and grateful expression that stirred Mr. Casper warmly and he repeated, “Yes, sir, you go sit down in the limousine if you want to. Everything’s in my hands.” And Loftis hurried off toward the car, murmuring, “Yes, yes,” as if Mr. Casper’s words had settled the issue.
When he had gone, Dolly burst into tears. “Poor Peyton,” she wept, “poor poor girl.” Her grief had a faintly dishonest ring, Mr. Casper thought. Of course, it was hard to tell about women: they were likely to be that way. He expected them to weep after all … but what was her connection with Loftis anyway? Something—a remark or a word he had heard—clamored for attention in his mind, but it was quickly lost. He had things to do. He walked up the tracks, peering through the dust for the baggage car, and a troublesome uncertainty plagued him. He had felt it somehow all morning and for a restless time last night in bed, but it was only the moment before—a funny look in Dolly Bonner’s eyes?—that he really had begun to get uneasy. Something, he thought, is rotten in Denmark. Mr. Casper took pride in his work. The fact that Mr. and Mrs. Loftis seemed to be taking such a secretive—even un-Christian—attitude toward the remains of their own daughter shocked him profoundly and, in some obscure fashion, seemed an insult not only to him but to his profession.
He had received the Loftises’ call the night before, not at his house but at the funeral home where—because of a stupid error he had made in his accounts the month before—he was going over the books with Mr. Huggins, the auditor for the Tidewater Morticians League. It was Mrs. Loftis’ voice. He recognized it instantly, having had casual business with her from time to time in the Community Chest fund: the cultured, precise tone, polite but faintly superior. She told him the facts—which he jotted down in a notebook—in a voice oddly calm and devoid of feeling, and it was only after he had hung up, concluding with the usual condolences, that he remarked to himself and then to Mr. Huggins: “That was funny, she sounded so … cold.”
Mr. Casper had no taste for the emotional congestion that usually afflicts women at times of great strain; often he had told Barclay that “a weeping woman is worse than a wildcat with wings,” yielding to the boy one of his facetious epigrams, so carefully hoarded, by which, like the rakehell quip of a soldier before battle, he hoped to soften a little the austerity of their mission. But at the same time there was something within him—a feeling for dignity harmonizing with the nature of his work—that demanded that the bereaved, especially a woman, give some small token of distress, if only pale, drawn lips trying bravely to smile; eyes which, though dry, expressed endless grief. It was with great curiosity, then—remembering the tone of Helen Loftis’ words, cool, heartlessly so—that he had approached their house that morning. She greeted him at the front door, her face as composed as if she were meeting the groceryman. True, he thought, her skin was worn. A fine tapestry of wrinkles had t
raced itself across the ghostly face. Sad, he thought, sad. But they—all those wrinkles and tiny little lines and convolutions—had been there before. They—along with the lovely hair, stark white, although she couldn’t yet be fifty—belonged to some other sorrow. Then he remembered in a flash: something else a few years before—another daughter, a cripple. Who had passed away. Wasn’t she feeble-minded? Barnes, his competitor, had handled … Lord almighty, he thought.
She made an attempt to smile.
“Come in,” she said. “Mr. Loftis is upstairs. He’ll be right down.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, “I want to say——” Gentle words of consolation began to rattle in his head like dominoes. “I want to say——”
“That’s all right, Mr. Casper, won’t you come in?”
He entered the screened-in porch hesitantly, unnerved and bewildered. The morning sun was hot against his back. Around the porch hovered the odor of honeysuckle and verbena, bees, a couple of tiny hummingbirds.
“I would like——” he began.
“Please, Mr. Casper,” she said with an impatience that startled him, “if you’ll just sit here.” She disappeared into the house silently, and her silk wrapper rustled weirdly behind her. He sank into the glider, warm with the smell of leather, and he began to sweat. Through French windows he could see the dining room, shadowy, empty. Crystal and silver laid out on the sideboard reflected pools of light against the walls. Her work, he thought. Very neat and ordered.
Milton Loftis came out in rumpled clothes, with bloodshot eyes. He spoke softly, in a voice that was husky and tired. It was to be strictly private. No announcement in the newspapers—no, none at all. Flowers? No, they wouldn’t be necessary. Yes, he knew it was all out of the ordinary but the rector had given his sanction. Yes (with a thin unhappy smile), yes, he was at the end of his tether.