“Don’t worry, old trouper——” Mr. Casper began, but Loftis had vanished and Mr. Casper sat down again and felt the warm green leather beneath his perspiring hands. It was all so strange, he thought. He could see the bay, blue and waveless, resting in a sultry calm. Far out on the other side a tiny purple battleship, silhouetted, floated like a toy boat on a bathtub lake. An insolent gull squawked over the beach, soared upward and out of sight.
Ella Swan darted out on the porch. When she saw him she burst into tears and fled back through the door in a tumultuous rustle of ribbon and lace. “Lawd, Mistah Loftis, he’s here!”
Mr. Casper heard voices floating from the hallway. Uneasily he leaned forward. Loftis was saying, “And so you aren’t coming with me?” and she: “Why should I? I told you I’d come with Carey Carr:” and,
“Helen, haven’t you even——”
“Please, I told you. I don’t want to say anything else about it.”
“But just decency demands——”
“Yes, decency. Yes, decency. Yes, go on and talk about decency.”
“Helen, don’t you realize——”
“Yes, yes, I realize everything. Everything.”
“But I can’t go alone. You said … you know yourself … what will people think——”
“Ha! What will people think! I know. What will people think! Don’t make me laugh.”
“Helen, just listen to me, please——”
“I’ll listen——”
“I know it’s useless to suggest now that we reconcile these terrible things. Well, it seems you’d do this one thing, not for me—but for Peyton.”
“Milton, I’m tired. I’m going upstairs. I slept badly. I’m going upstairs now. There’s a letter for you on the table.”
“Helen, please.”
“No. No.” Her footsteps moved across the floor. “Why don’t you take Dolly? Take your lover sweetheart.”
“Helen, please.”
“Ella’s going, isn’t she? She loved Peyton.”
“Please, Helen, please——”
“No.” The footsteps began to mount the stairs.
“Please, Helen.”
“No.”
Upstairs a door closed. Lord almighty, Mr. Casper thought.
“Please, Helen.” From a distance.
“No.”
With that, Helen closed the door. In her room everything was sunny and clean. A soft breeze shook the curtains; they trembled slightly, as with the touch of a feeble and unseen hand. Outside the window the holly leaves rustled, made thin, dry scrapings against the screen, and then this breeze, so familiar to her because of its nearly predictable comings and goings, suddenly ceased: the curtains fell limp without a sound and the house, sapped of air, was filled with an abrupt, wicked heat, like that which escapes from an oven door.
Downstairs she heard the screen door slam, a noise of feet on the gravel walk. No one said a word. The limousine and the hearse pulled away from the curb, almost inaudibly, and down the driveway. The house was quiet then, very still. Silence surrounded her in damp, hot layers, yet now, breaking this stillness, a single locust somewhere commenced a loud chatter: remote at first, threatening death and rain, shrill, ascending then, like something sliding up a wire, and scraping finally at a point, it seemed, not more than two inches from her ear—a menacing clamor, staccato, outraged and inane. The noise stopped suddenly and the enfolding silence was like an echo, a sound in her ears.
On the sheets of her bed there was a damp place where she had been sleeping the night before. She wondered: How many times have I or Ella let the beds go unmade this late? Not many. She sat down on the side of the bed and picked up the morning newspaper, the one which, for the first time she could remember, she, not Milton or Ella, had retrieved from the front steps at dawn. Vaguely it bothered her, for it had been an act quite out of keeping with the serene and orderly character of her life, and she thought: What did I do? Somehow I can’t think …
Oh, yes. She remembered how odd it had been. Walking down the steps past Milton in the hall, him who, fully clothed, asprawl on the couch, lay snoring with a soft, blubbering sound, and then standing on the porch as she peered out through the chilly dawn light at the deserted street, thinking in this queer, abstracted way: I have brought two children into life and I was a mother for twenty-three years. This is the first day that I have awakened knowing that I am a mother no longer and that I shall never be a mother again.
So odd of me. To get the
She began to read the newspaper. The Bomb again, a truce in the offing with the Japanese; a picture below showed a film actress, known for her legs, and an eminent cafe owner with a face like a mouse, wed yesterday in Las Vegas, Nevada. Married. Unable to concentrate, she laid the paper down. A huge emptiness began to creep over her, so familiar a thing, this easy, physical sense of languor and infirmity—as if everything had suddenly drained forth from her flesh, leaving her as limp as some pale jelly that floats in the sea. She arose and walked to the window, touching the sill with her finger tips. The locust was still. How merciful that is. Beyond the garden, the trellis and the swollen blooms of honeysuckle, beyond the dead azaleas, she heard a car pass on the road. The sound approached, faded, died.
Life, others.
She turned and stood by the dresser and examined her face in the mirror. An old woman’s face, she thought, haggard and spooky: And I not yet fifty … half a century undone timeless like the memory of ruined walls. She swept back her white hair, pressing it against her head with hands that were pale, nearly translucent. Beneath the shiny skin of her hands the veins were tessellated like a blue mosaic, shining, like an intricate blue design captured beneath glass. Now she did something that she had done many times before. She pulled the skin of her face taut over the cheekbones so that the web of lines and wrinkles vanished as if it had been touched by a miraculous and restorative wand; squinting convergently into the glass, she watched the foolish and lovely change: transfigured, she saw smooth skin as glossy white as the petal of gardenia, lips which seemed but sixteen or twenty, and as unblemished by any trouble as those she had held up to another mirror thirty years before, whispering “Dearest” to an invisible and quite imaginary lover. She dropped her hands, turned away from the glass and, as if in afterthought, walked over to the bed and picked up the paper again. She scanned the page once more, neither with purpose nor out of any expectation, for she knew no notice would be there. Rather out of emptiness, remembering Milton the night before—seeing him for the first time in months—as he telephoned Frank Downs, the local publisher, saying: “Yes, Frank. My daughter, my little girl … yes, violent … so if you’ll keep it out of … Yes, Frank … thanks, Frank—” and sobbing into the mouthpiece— “Frank, boy, she’s gone, she’s gone from me!”
He had come in the evening yesterday as she stood, after her solitary supper, in the hall. (Ella had said, “Kin I have de day off tomorrow, Miss Helen? Daddy Faith, he——” but Helen had said, “Yes,” and Ella had gone back to the kitchen.) She had heard his car draw up and on the walk his slow and hesitant footsteps. It was nearly dusk. There had been a thunder shower before; the garden was wet and drooping. As he approached, a noisy flock of sparrows swooped up from the lawn like scraps of paper on a sudden blast of wind and disappeared into the boxwood, swallowed up, invisible, still cheeping raucously as the hedge showered down a tiny storm of rain. He stood at the door for a moment, his face flushed, bewildered, saying nothing; then he blurted, “Helen, Peyton killed herself,” and entered. She made no reply, the sudden shock striking somewhere inside her chest like an electric bolt, flickering at her finger tips, numbing her cheeks, but receding swiftly as she remembered, thought so, so, well—receding even as swiftly as the storm which, passing, drifted with remote grumblings over the ocean, while unseen clouds cast into the garden a pink flushed twilight, swiftly fading. In the kitchen, amid the rattle of pots and pans, Ella Swan was singing a tune. About Jesus.
She cou
ld tell that he was already a little tight. They sat down across from each other, she on the sofa and he in his chair by the secretary, where the liquor was kept, unopened since he had left her almost two years ago. He poured straight shots from a new pint bottle of Old Forester—she watched his fingers, watched them tremble—into a dusty wineglass he had found on the shelf. Then he began to speak—a rush of words which he halted only long enough to drink, his face thrown back in the familiar mechanical motion, then bobbing forward as though by springs, ugly and distorted in a quick spasm of distaste as if even after all these years he were unable to cope with the smell, the taste of the stuff which had been for so long his balm and salvation.
“Harry called me at the club,” he said. “Horrible … I don’t …” He paused, bemused, and his eyes (she knew exactly what was happening) were not yet grieving but still perplexed, wearing the vaguely startled look of a man who is plotting a way out, an escape.
“I don’t know why. I don’t know!” he said, his voice swelling. “Why would she——”
“Hush, Milton, not so loud,” she said quietly. She spoke to him twice that evening. This was one of those times, and she thought, even as she spoke: The suffering hasn’t come quite yet. Not yet. It will take a while longer. He doesn’t quite believe it, feeling with that certainty of selfish men that he will never come by misfortune. The suffering will come suddenly, though. And soon.
Night came quickly. The descent of darkness was almost tropical. Abruptly—like that—it was dark outside, and she arose silently and turned on a lamp. In the garden a lone frog made a shrill piping sound. She sat down again on the sofa, hands folded across her lap, calmly regarding the man who was no longer her husband and yet not a stranger, but something somewhere between the two. “Helen, I swear I don’t know … Riding over here I was wondering what I’d say. Wondering because God knows we’ve lost something. Wondering because thirty years ago I didn’t think all this would happen.” He would halt, thrust his head into his hands for a moment, concentrating. Then, snatching the wineglass from the table in an awkward, greedy motion, he would drink, drain it in a gulp, and replace it on the edge of the table, from which it once fell unbroken and noiselessly to the carpet. He leaned over unsteadily and picked it up, saying, “I didn’t think all this would happen.” He paused. “You won’t believe me, will you?”
She didn’t look at him any more. She gazed through the window at the mimosa tree, bedraggled in the darkness, dripping rain. “You won’t believe me but the first thing I thought of was you. You think I’m not telling the truth, don’t you? You think I’m saying that because … You think …” He thrust his head into his hands. “Oh, God knows what you think.”
The grief is coming now, she said to herself: He’s beginning to know what suffering is. Perhaps that’s good in a way. Even he. Perhaps that’s good for a man—finally to know what suffering is, to know what a woman somehow knows almost from the day she’s born.
He looked upward. He was silent for a moment. She heard him fumbling on the table with the whisky. Outside the mimosa seemed to come alive; the pink, mossy blooms groped at the air: something trembled, shuddered, sighed, although it was only the early evening wind. She heard the frog’s throbbing voice, a late-summer sound of waning life, feeble-and steadfast and unafraid. He spoke again: “Why don’t you say something? What’s the matter? Why don’t you say something? What’s the matter?” She could feel him bending forward in the chair, the voice coming as from a great distance—querulous and half-drunk, very tired, “Answer me, Helen. What’s the matter? Don’t you feel anything? You haven’t said a word all night.” Again he ceased talking. She watched the mimosa, saw a glow from the kitchen and, faint among the distant pantry sounds, heard Ella Swan’s tireless, patient lament. She said nothing. “Helen, say something to me. Helen! Now. Say something. Helen!”
Perhaps not yet suffering. Or grief. But quick. And soon.
She took a spoonful of medicine, swallowed it with water from a glass on her dresser: A cigarette. I’d give anything for a cigarette, but Dr. Holcomb … She sank down on the bed, on the damp place, and stretched out across the sheets. The sunlight in the room didn’t fade; it glowed without shadow on the walls and ceiling. In a vase on her dresser four dahlias were withering. There were so many things … She had forgotten them. There were so many things … She shut her eyes for a moment. I must throw them out, she thought: the dahlias, I must throw them out before I leave. And in the darkness the fancied smell of old rancid water was sour and strong. She opened her eyes. By the dahlias light fell upon the figurine dresser lamps, upon those beribboned eighteenth-century lords and ladies frozen timeless and unaltered in some grave and mannered dance, the light and the heat and the silence in the house suddenly all becoming one, with form, it seemed, and with substance, inert and unyielding. She closed her eyes again, thinking: I must somehow get that fan fixed. And slowly thinking: Carey Carr is coming at noon. I must be ready. Not moving or stirring because of the weariness that had emptied her like a vessel. I have always been so sick. All my life I have yearned for sleep. Remote and apart from the silence in the house she was aware of faint noises outside: half-heard, half-remembered sounds flickered like shapes through her mind—a gull’s cry, a car on the road, water sucking at the shore. She drowsed somewhere between sleep and waking, seeing the sparrows’ wild fluttering swoop once more and the trembling drops of rain. “… killed herself,” he murmured, and entered. Then he was saying, in the rapt and stricken voice, “Ah, she was too young. God! Too fine. How——
“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 fro
m 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.