“Milton,” Dolly said, between her sobs, which had become continual now, “Milton, say something to me, honey. Come on, Milton, it’ll do you so much good to talk to someone. Say something——”
He said, “Shut up,” which she did, partially, and now the only sounds in the car were those of her soft, moist sobs and the rustle of Ella Swan’s skirts as she rearranged herself from time to time on the jump seat, her eyes raised to the roof as if in prayer. A fever rose at his brow, sweat soaked him as fast as the wind allowed it to evaporate, and he felt nausea rising inside, a green fountain. Like pictures strange thoughts burned in his mind, old stills from a magic lantern, and waves of weak, humiliating nostalgia, sad pictures that come at the edge of sleep: Helen, Helen, he thought drowsily, my lost, my lovely, why have I forsaken you? Visions white as sunlight, perfect as one flower, a gardenia, once remembered from a dance that never stopped till dawn, they came to him briefly, vanished, and he believed he slipped off for a spell, thinking of Helen dressed like a cat, bearing down on him with a knife: only it wasn’t a knife, it was something else, a flower or something, and they were in Charlottesville, and there was Peyton too, her lips pressed to his, saying Daddy Daddy Bunny dear, the globe revolving monstrously out of night into day again, turning and turning … He opened his eyes. Dolly’s hand lay wet and limp on his, her head was on his shoulder. The hearse had stalled. They were drawing up into a gas station and the sky was filled with smoke.
One Friday night in November 1942 Loftis had done two things which he had promised himself not to do. One of these was getting drunk. Had he known that the next day he was to make the drive to Charlottesville, he might have contained himself, although even this, he admitted later, was unlikely. A hangover, of the sort he had suffered from more and more during the past few years, tended to keep his mind, upon awakening, morbidly aloof from reality. On days like this, which was most every day, each object surrounding him (shoetrees, knobs on the kitchen range, his fearful razor) seemed to send out urgent, vaguely flippant tentacles of sight and sound which suggested that it was not he who existed at all: he was the inanimate one, listlessly humoring a queasy stomach, and these—tricky gadgets of metal and rubber—were possessed of thriving, noisy life and the power to drive one witless with anxiety. At the age of fifty he was beginning to discover, with a sense of panic, that his whole life had been in the nature of a hangover, with faintly unpleasant pleasures being atoned for by the dull unalleviated pain of guilt. Had he the solace of knowing that he was an alcoholic, things would have been brighter, because he had read somewhere that alcoholism was a disease; but he was not, he assured himself, alcoholic, only self-indulgent, and his disease, whatever it was, resided in shadier corners of his soul—where decisions were reached not through reason but by rationalization, and where a thin membranous growth of selfishness always seemed to prevent his decent motives from becoming happy actions.
Here, too, like a sore, dwelt the perpetual consciousness of the failure of his marriage. Sober or drunk, he usually managed to keep this knowledge well back from the forefront of his mind; only in the half-death of a hangover when his mouth was a blister, his head stuffed with mohair, his guts an unquiet pulp, would this knowledge erupt and seep into his awareness and paralyze him with the sense of some evil trickery, of soul-disease, of secret nastiness. Nothing could help him then, not even a triple bromide; he could only wait for the sunshine or wind gradually to disperse his worries, and for his mind, like the slow expanding pupil of an eye, to think bright thoughts of familiar pleasures, familiar consolations—Dolly, for instance, or, more often, Peyton.
Fifty years had left him the appearance of a gratuitous, if somewhat dissipated youngness. His face was lean and florid, and just a little flabby around the jowls. His nose had a slight uptilt which he thought peculiarly aristocratic, and possibly it was, except that it exposed the hair sprouting in his nostrils—which Dolly would soon bring to his attention and which he would begin to clip. Otherwise his body was in good form: he thanked God for the co-ordination which made him a fine golfer—a gentlemanly winner in the Virginia tradition, he nonetheless loved to win, and he would never have taken up the sport merely for the exercise. Whisky, however, had begun to affect his game.
This lingering vitality was partly responsible for the resentment he felt at growing old, for the murky, suspicious resentment he bore toward Helen. “I am a fool maybe,” he’d say to himself, or to Dolly. “She’s right, you can’t just uproot these roots. You know what it does to kids—” and passing quickly over this disagreeable thought—“but listen—I’ve got youngness in me yet. And she—her hair is getting gray, her face pinched with bitterness, or religion. That fruity preacher.” Helen took no pains to conceal her new interest from him, and the fact that it should come to this—her becoming, after all, old before her time, obsessed, a little weird—sent him off into spasms of quiet, ineffectual anger.
He might have known; thirty years ago he might have guessed it, during their ambiguous, frustrated courtship; something might have informed him then, but he had been young and stupid, and it was too late now for recriminations. What else could he do, except stay married? What else? That they had lived so long together anyway, was, he often thought sourly, a matter for record; yet, because he was an idler of the most accomplished sort (this he was aware of); because, set out on his own, he could never earn enough, he knew, to maintain his self-imposed, patrician standard of living—he was still dependent upon Helen. And she, as she said, “for the children’s sake,” upon him.
Even though this was not all. Yes. This was not all. For though their supper conversation was guarded, and so chilly that it seemed their breath must turn frosty on the air, there yet had remained beneath the mistrust and suspicion that enveloped both of them the tiniest germ, some memento each of them had unconsciously salvaged, that cautioned them to keep their voices down and remember, hush: listen—the aerial melody of departed gaiety, as fragile as the smoke from burning dance cards, candles, midnight fires, might still be heard, very sad and distant, if you closed your eyes and let the years fall away. They had never closed their eyes, but the sense of something small and winking and indestructible remained; they had attended concerts together, and church (he on Trinity, Ash Wednesday, Easter and Christmas), exchanging valiant smiles and greetings with those friends who suspected all there was to suspect about them, but who turned away with frowns of doubt: “Oh, I can’t believe there’s any trouble there. Look at the way he laughed at her!” And then, hidden from curious eyes, they would drive home together in mountainous silence, say polite good nights and go to bed—she in her room and he in his—and on at least two occasions which they both remembered their forefingers touched and twined together, embarrassed and tentative and somehow disembodied, like little vines, but fell quickly away, while they marched briskly toward their separate rooms, pausing at their doors to turn, not looking at each other but still back to back, heads cocked to one side, listening for the aerial muted strand of vivacious music that was to both of them familiar but not ever quite heard, and so forever lost.
They stayed with each other. It was a perverse, heartless business. For a while everything would go along smoothly, considering the circumstances. Loftis would keep Dolly skillfully in the background, thus in a way managing to have his love and a certain serenity, too, for he noticed that whenever—by lies and disguise or, more often, merely by a large show of acting “naturally”—he screened his affair from Helen, she was almost pleasant again to live with. They would listen to the radio together, talk desultorily about the war, and often she fed him sandwiches and coffee, or supper, on the nights Ella and La Ruth had off. But it was a heartless business for the most part, full of uneasiness and sudden, painful surprises. On certain days, either by a misstep, a revealing gesture on Loftis’ part, or for no actual reason that he could figure out, Dolly would loom large in Helen’s consciousness. He could always tell. Then she’d stop speaking to him and play with h
er garden, take Maudie for long lonesome drives in the car, or disappear at night (which gave him an opportunity for visiting Dolly) to see Carey Carr. Often she’d go to bed with an obscure ailment.
These times were for Loftis brutal and agonizing. They made him realize the precarious sort of life he was living and brought him closer and closer to the decisions he knew he would eventually have to face. And moreover, where these moments of confusion—as they often did—concerned Peyton, they left him shaken and furious, but even less able to act, like a bug wriggling upside-down on the floor. There had been last Christmas, for instance, in 1941, when Peyton came home from Sweet Briar for the holidays. That had been close to the end of everything, but not really. And why not? Lord, it had been those hats, he thought, those awful paper hats, which had made the season so grotesque and had finally clinched the issue. Crumpled tissue, purple and green, they had crowned Christmastime not with gaiety but with the sick hue of disaster, and long afterward they had given him dreams—floating about like gaudy sails in his consciousness. Actually it all shouldn’t have been that way; at least it hadn’t looked that way in the beginning. Here was Helen a few days before the holiday began, blithely energetic, hanging up wreaths and ribbons and tinsel bells. Fixing things up—she let it be known in an offhand way—for Peyton. Now wasn’t that surprising? he had thought. He just couldn’t figure her out. Maybe she was becoming normal again, for a time. But he was miserable for thinking it was odd: why shouldn’t a mother want to make her daughter happy?
During these first several college years, in the summers and during Peyton’s vacations, she and Peyton had managed to get on together with a minimum of friction: although they seldom wrote to each other, arrivals and departures were solemnized by kisses, they exchanged small gifts, and in general disguised their feelings, whatever they were, beneath masks of smooth feminine guilelessness. Loftis was aware that Peyton and Helen were not “close,” but he knew that there was a certain love between them—an abstract sort of love, perhaps, but love nonetheless. My God, naturally. That they were not “close” he attributed just to the obscure quirks in human nature, Helen’s unfortunate neurosis, or, more probably, some furtive and unnatural sorcery practiced by Carey Carr. Anyway, he had been glad, if surprised, to see Helen exerting herself—so long as it was really true that she was preparing the house for Peyton’s arrival on Christmas Eve. He had a few suspicions but he overlooked them. He glowed. Pearl Harbor had come three weeks before and was already half-forgotten: he felt that he could get an Army commission, perhaps a colonelcy, but that could wait. The season was filled with the odor of pine and cedar, as raw and heady as new-planed timber; there were eggnogs, dances, boisterous open fires; and old friendships, withered by the year’s mercenary hustle, flowered anew, unless one was caught kissing another’s wife too long beneath the mistletoe. His manner with Helen became fairly ingratiating, and he gradually forgot her; in the round of parties he even forgot Dolly, too, until she telephoned on Christmas Eve to remind him of his defection. He had instructed her never, never to call him at the house, but she had disobeyed—and at the wrong time. Ah, the horrible, chancy, luckless wrong time. At an eggnog party that afternoon, partly in honor of the new-born Christ and partly for Helen’s brother from Pennsylvania, Edward, a bluff, red-faced man who had made the transition from coal broker to Army colonel with no noticeable loss of stuffiness. He was stationed at Camp Pickett. Loftis hadn’t seen him for years and was peeved to note that he had got rid of neither his cavalier attitude toward Southerners nor his gruesome juvenile politics.
“Pearl Harbor was a surprise,” he had been saying, “but we’ll win this war. To think of those yellow apes climbing on an outfit as big as the U.S.A.” Cold, erratic winds buffeted the walls, and windblown shapes of snow prowled around the house, swarmed at the windows, dissolving in a fine white shudder. The wall clock sounded five notes, borne above the rattle of conversation, through the mellow pine-scented air. By the dining-room door, unlistening and unconcerned, Maudie played with a doll, turned tired brown eyes sunward through the window, toward the ice-rimmed bay; Edward turned, too, and his eyes, seeking the sunlight, the far horizon, sparkled with tiny, propitious fires. “There’ll come a time after this war when America will dominate the world scene. Then we’ll seek military men for leadership. Five years ago I told you … you Southerners have a strange implicit faith in Roosevelt. … Mind you, this is no authoritarianism I preach … as Lord Acton said … but—when is Peyton coming?” On his neck a vein throbbed, a gentle convulsion passed through his throat while he drank.
It happened then. Helen, with a knowing look and a terrible mock smile, beckoned Loftis from across the room. He pushed his way through the crowd to the telephone. “It’s a woman,” he heard Helen say acidly. And then, furiously reproaching Dolly, he watched Helen disappear up the steps. She never returned to the party. Loftis said good-by to Dolly angrily. Yes, dammit, kitten; he’d see her soon. The afternoon wore on, dusk came; Loftis tried to keep the party going, but something heavy and vindictive hung in the air. The guests sensed this. Most of them knew of the Loftises’ “trouble,” and some of them, at least, had been cheered when they noticed that Helen didn’t seem to be the withdrawn, tragic figure which gossip, for a long time, had made her out to be. But the telephone call had fixed all that. Nothing sends so chill a wind over conviviality as the knowledge of some approaching domestic unpleasantness; so the guests drifted out, leaving behind them, to sparkle with soapy rainbow hues in the twilight, their empty eggnog glasses.
It was at that moment, Loftis remembered, when the last guest (a young bachelor, very drunk, who had lingered to scrape moodily at the dregs in the serving bowl) had staggered away, that a wild sort of panic seized him. Where was Peyton? Why didn’t she come? What had happened? His beautiful, gay party had been instantly shattered, like a Christmas-tree globe trampled by wayward feet. For some unknown reason, he was almost sober. He wanted to kill Dolly, but instead he said, “I’ll be back in a minute, Edward,” and with a curious irrational remorse went upstairs, passing the room where Ella, laced and ribboned, with a sprig of holly pinned to her breast, was putting Maudie to bed. He knocked at Helen’s door; it was unlocked, and he entered. She was in bed. It was warm in the room and only a sheet covered her. There were no lamps on in the room; red fire, reflected from the snow, the sinking sun, had fallen upon the bed, and her folded arms seemed to gather this light to her breast like roses. Motionless, she lay in an attitude of death, a crimson marble sepulcher.
“You left,” he said.
“Yes,” she answered, looking straight upward.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why?” he said, more loudly. “You could have been a little less rude, you know.”
“I don’t know. I think I’m catching a cold.”
“Good God,” he said.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he answered. He sat down in a chair beside her.
“When is Peyton coming?” she asked.
“About now, I hope,” he said.
“I want to see her,” she said indifferently.
“All right,” he replied. “Do you need any kind of medicine? Why don’t you take a hot bath?”
She didn’t answer him. Then, “Milton——” she began.
“Yes.”
“Do you think we can ever forgive each other?”
“For what?” he said.
“For all this business. This misery.”
“It’s not misery, Helen,” he replied, “unless you want to make it that way. I’m through trying to figure all this out.”
“Oh, yes, it is.” She stirred a little, and the fine red light poured in rivulets down through the folds of the sheet. “Oh, yes. No one will ever know what I go through. Isn’t it funny? Here I work hard for a week and I’m happy and maybe I know that people say, ‘Helen Loftis, look at Helen Loftis, look, she’s become reborn.’ Maybe they say that. But right now
it’s as if I had never been born at all, or ever wanted to be.”
“Helen——”
“Oh, Milton, there’s something wrong with me——” She sat up in bed, pushing the sheets down around her knees.
“What can I do?” he said, looking into her eyes. “I’ve said I’ll go and you say no. I can’t go anyway. Maudie——”
“Maudie,” she said passionately. “Yes, Maudie. But not Maudie. Me! Here I’ve said to myself that it makes no difference anymore about love, or anything like that; we stay together like boarders or something and just hold together the formal things. All the rest doesn’t matter. Be boarders together, that’s all; all the rest doesn’t matter.” She paused, ran her hands through her hair, and coughed.
“Cover up——” he began.
“Wait.” She laid her hand on his, and turned toward him, in the fading light, with her eyes moist and passionate. “I talk like that, you see,” she went on, “but that’s not thinking. I remember. Oh, listen——” She halted, drew herself close to him, and pulled the straps of her nightgown off both shoulders so that, noiselessly, it fell about her waist. “Look here,” she whispered, “look at me.” She placed her hands under her breasts and drew them up a little, and he was suddenly conscious of the smell of perfume. He gazed at her and a sad, gentle wave of memory ran through him, and he reached out and touched one of her breasts. It was hot and soft, very smooth and familiar. She covered his hand with her own and pressed it strongly against her. “Feel that,” she said, trembling; “haven’t I got love down there, too? Once you held me in your arms and kissed me. I remember the apartment. How we talked to each other so much then. All the time talking. And at night, Oh, love, you said, holding me. That’s what you’d say. Remember?” Her fingernails dug into his hand; swiftly she pushed his arm away and sank back into bed. Her breasts, still exposed, fell toward either side heavily, no longer youthful, rising and falling a little as with the effort of her breathing, and because she was shivering he covered her with the sheet. Again the crimson glow returned to envelop her, but it was almost night; light in the sky above the bay swam toward darkness, and so touched her body, the room, his still outstretched hand, with the softest shade of blue. He withdrew his hand and, leaning down, pressed his face toward hers, and even before their cheeks touched he felt the glow of her fever. “Helen,” he said, “you’d better—— You’re hot.”