Loftis sat in a booth by the window, clutching a beer bottle with both hands, in a kind of sacramental embrace. A radio was playing hillbilly music. In another booth sat Dolly alone and sobbing, trying to find a dry spot in a wad of shredded Kleenex. There was a Negro, too, whom Carey knew—Ella Swan—who was squatting dismally upon a drink case in the rear, among an assortment of tires and oil cans, and who, when she saw him, arose with a little cry of recognition, but he put a finger to his lips and walked over to Loftis. Loftis didn’t recognize Carey at first, merely turned his face dully upward. The streak of silver hair hung limply over his forehead. His cheeks were by now of a greenish color and his eyes, rapt and stunned and bloodshot, looked to Carey, who suddenly recalled a phrase, “like those of a man who has gazed so long into the abyss that the abyss has begun to gaze back at him.” Without a word, Carey sat down across from him.
“Milton,” he said, “I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I want you to know that if there’s anything——”
“No,” Loftis said, with a wave of his hand, “there’s nothing anybody can do.” He tilted the bottle up and drank.
“I can help you,” Carey said, “a little. I don’t know how much I can help you and I know how you feel about … things. I don’t want you to put your faith in me or even in God if you don’t feel like it right now.” He paused, very gently pulled the bottle away from Loftis’ face, which was confronting him like a frightened baby’s sucking on a nipple. “Look, I’m no jackass about these things, but why don’t you put that away for a while. Today, at least. Listen to me for a minute, will you please, Milton?”
“I lost my girl,” said Loftis.
“I know. I——“
Loftis looked away, resting his brow in his hand. “Don’t tell me,” he said softly, “that it’s the judgment of God or any of that crap. I lost my baby. I got to——”
“Milton,” Carey interrupted, “we haven’t got much time. Tell me. Tell me, why do you want Helen back? Don’t you see? That’s the answer. You’ve got salvation in your hands almost. Helen knows it. She’s still too proud. You’ve got to try and try again and make her see how completely you need each other now. Don’t you see, Milton?”
“I’ve tried,” he said listlessly. “I’ve tried. What else can I do?” His voice was weary and lost, but not without a touch of hope. He recaptured his beer and took a large swallow. “She’s crazy. Sick. I’ve done my best. What else can I do?”
“Tell her now.”
“I’m scared to.”
“Scared of what?” Carey asked. “Scared she won’t—?”
“Yes. Scared she won’t say yes.”
“Get this straight in your mind, Milton. Why do you want her back? You’ve got to be sure it’s not just a reaction to all … all of this. Why do you want her back? You’ve got to look into your heart.” Loftis said nothing. Around them, as if in woolen folds, hung the gigantic heat of the afternoon; two jalopies loaded down with Negroes toiled slowly past on the road, leaving behind a trail of greasy blue vapor which rose on the air currents, and fell, and vanished among the pines. A mockingbird began to sing in the woods, then ceased. At once they were aware of the sobs which drifted hoarsely up from Dolly’s booth, but these ceased, too, abruptly. A four-bladed wooden fan revolved over them, and above its alternating flap and whisper came music from the radio, in a cheerless, sweet lament of religion and woe.
Only a tramp was Laz’rus that day
It was he who lay at the rich man’s gate.
Blazing sunlight sloped through the window screen, busy with flies, and fell on Loftis’ cheeks. He moved on the seat.
“Why?” Carey said.
Loftis thrust his head back into his hands. “Jesus Christ, man, I love her!” He looked up. “I’ve always loved her. You don’t have to sit there, do you, and probe about in your smug, smooth way——”
“I’m not probing.”
Loftis’ voice broke, he looked away. “Sorry. You’re doing your best. I just wish this day was over.” He looked at Carey again. “There was a time,” he said softly, “when I thought I’d found some kind of answer. God, we go through life fooling ourselves, thinking we’ve got the answer, only it’s never the answer really. I thought that being without Maudie would mean something to us. And it did, just for a while. It brought us together. I even stopped drinking. I broke down. I said to hell with this other kind of life. I thought there’s something to be said for honor in this world where there doesn’t seem to be any honor left. I thought that maybe happiness wasn’t really anything more than the knowledge of a life well spent, in spite of whatever immediate discomfort you had to undergo, and that if a life well spent meant compromises and conciliations and reconciliations, and suffering at the hands of the person you love, well then better that than live without honor.” He paused to gaze out at the fields, sweat pouring from his face. There would be rain soon; on the horizon a ridge of thunderheads churned and billowed, and a spasm of wind seized a grove of distant pines, rippling shapes of light across its surface like massive fingers. Loftis made a gagging noise, as if he were going to be sick, and at that point Dolly came up and stood by the table, dabbing at her eyes.
“Milton——” she began.
He ignored her. “So,” he said, turning back to Carey, “I tried for a while again. I tried for almost a year. Honor. Then there was Peyton’s wedding——”
Carey nodded. He remembered the wedding too well.
“I just couldn’t take that. I left that day and now I’m sorry because I didn’t realize that honor isn’t given automatically, but you have to fight for it just as strongly as I guess you do for love. Once Helen told me you said that, that you have to fight for love. Today I know, I guess, but it’s too late.” He looked up at Dolly for an instant, and then back at Carey. “So I left and even then it was too soon, not realizing that that day was just one point along the way. I hadn’t fought hard enough. I was impatient, at fifty-one years old I was impatient like a snotty-nosed child to rid myself of the only thing I had left in the world that was worth having—she who sick or not, weird or not, was the only person worth fifty-one years and more of living and was beautiful still—to me—a beautiful goddam rose blossom. …” He began to weep.
“I understand,” said Carey. “I understand——”
The screen door slammed behind Mr. Casper. He came up and stood by Dolly, looking down at Loftis. “We’re ready now,” he said gently. “I’m terribly sorry. I’ve never had anything like this——”
Loftis rose to his feet with a groan.
“Milton,” said Dolly, touching him. He paid no attention to her at all. Carey got up, too. A murmur of thunder heaved up faintly to the west. Light drained from the day for a moment, filling the room with green, cool shadows. From the cluttered corner of the room where Ella sat—or from where she arose now, an angular patchwork of lace and black mourning, to hobble toward them—the guitars surged and strummed, hoisting, as if by the palpable force of their wild woeful chords, a voice, a woman’s, to a sort of tragic rapture.
But they left him to die
Like a tramp on the street …
The blaze of heat returned. Loftis walked toward the door, with Mr. Casper’s hand limply consoling him on one shoulder, and with Dolly tagging at his side. Ella approached Carey just as he turned, and she made a baffled little salute and what seemed to be a curtsey.
“Please suh, Mr. Carey,” she said, “is you gwine preach up dat po’ chile to heaven?”
“Yes.”
“Po’ blessed chile. De onliest thing we got left to do is pray. Pray wid de sperit and pray wid de understandin’ also, like Paul de ’Postle.” She began to snuffle on her sleeve. “God have mercy,” she moaned, “we done sho’ seen de punishment, like de good Lawd say, de end of all flesh is come befo’ me and de earth is filled wid vi’lence everywhere.”
“Yes.” He patted her on the arm, and led her toward the door. “The Lord,” he said—as he bent down to
her—rather wistfully, for the universe suddenly seemed intolerably empty and stark, “in His compassion and His infinite mercy will watch over all of us, forever and ever, be we among the living or the dead.”
At the door he found Loftis standing alone on the steps. Dolly and Mr. Casper were already in the limousine, and Barclay was at the wheel of the hearse once more. The garageman, standing rag in hand at the foot of the steps, splashed into the hot gravel a russet stream of tobacco juice, upon which flies settled as soon as it landed. A cat crept out from beneath the garage, a mouse in its jaws, gave them all a discreet, slit-eyed glance, then loped away.
“She just won’t look at me,” Loftis said, “she just won’t.”
In the car Helen sat staring grimly in front of her, fanning her face with a road map. Carey put his hand on Loftis’ shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said, “afterwards. Afterwards everything’ll be all right. Go on now with Mr. Casper.”
“Yes,” Loftis said, “afterwards. Yes. Yes.”
Loftis went to the limousine with Ella. The breeze stirred again, hot, stifling. There was a sudden sickening odor in the air, sweet and diseased, pestilential, like that of burning flesh. Carey turned. By the pines the corpse of a pig lay smoldering in a barbecue pit. The weeds bent and trembled as a car passed on the road. Carey mopped his brow.
But there had been, Carey remembered, a moment in which a breath of divine grace had blown upon the family; in which, like a slender miracle, all their affairs seemed straightened out for a while, giving promise of improvement, if not of perfection. This was during the year following Maudie’s death in Charlottesville. When he left the house after Maudie’s funeral, recalling Helen’s haggard distress (she had not said “good-by” to him, only muttered something about “waiting,” “all my life I’ve waited”), he had expected any kind of violence: murder, suicide, God knew what all. Yet nothing messy or gruesome had come about. He had left her alone for a while, feeling, with a powerful sense of inadequacy, that his presence would only hurt her, irritate her, stir up memories of a time when, together, they had dwelt in a climate of hopefulness. So there was no God, that was that; let her find peace among her flowers, in the consoling heart of sleep which, he knew by now, she embraced like the breast of a mother; let her go to a doctor now, sick woman. That was that. He couldn’t have foreseen the change in her, the change so emphatic—yet which came about with such seeming casualness—that his better senses should have run up a red flag of warning.
He visited her a couple of months later. Beforehand, there had been noncommittal phone calls; her voice had been placid, unhysterical, and at least, he figured, she was holding her own. Then he found them together one bright February afternoon, drinking tea. She arose from Milton’s side to greet him—smartly dressed in what appeared to be a vague gray concession to mourning, with powder tastefully applied in a not too successful attempt to hide the rings beneath her eyes—and he could have been floored on the spot with a broomstraw. And grazing about upon the fringe of the conversation—which not once mentioned Maudie, or the stern hand of destiny, or anything depressing, for that matter, but which involved only certain changes to the house, plans for the garden in spring, a whole jumble of serene, practical matters—he had learned indirectly, and to his astonishment, just how matters stood. Loftis, it seemed, was accomplishing a personal revolt. It was happening, beneath an aura of exquisite torture, right before his eyes: while Helen spoke dreamily and with a faint, pensive hope of the good things in store for them, Loftis stirred restlessly and fidgeted, and his face wore a subdued, broken look as he gazed out the window and sipped the distasteful tea. Loftis, and not Helen, was the one who was achieving the impossible. He had begun to grab hold of himself. It was exhilarating to watch, and from one point of view vaguely disappointing—for what had taken place was not a matter of any mystical faith but apparently involved just guts, the revolt of a man against the pure footlessness which had held him in bondage for half a lifetime. Had he stopped drinking? Obviously. Now he was learning the pleasures of tea. Had he cut Dolly off? It certainly seemed so. What had happened? Had his guilt, like something monstrous and hairy and unutterable, prowled about his bed at night, filling his dreams with such thoughts of loss, of death, that he knew, upon awakening, that this ordeal was the only answer? Had it been pity for Helen? Or love? Or, in Charlottesville, had the bleak face of disaster so chilled him that he just fell on Helen, in a convulsion of necessity?
Carey didn’t know, but the poor fellow was making a valiant try of it, and if he wasn’t saving himself he had gone a long way toward saving Helen who, certainly far from happy but no longer sunk in the suicidal despair of a few months ago, said gently, over the rim of her cup, “Sometimes just the touch of a hand can redeem us, don’t you think, Carey? Isn’t that right, Milton dear?” And without shame, in a naked movement of intimacy, her hand had stolen out upon the sunlit satin pillow toward Loftis’, lay lightly for a moment upon his pink, outstretched, unprotesting palm, and squeezed it until the skin became positively bloodless.
After that, Carey felt that he was through trying to figure her out. He had thought that Maudie’s death would prostrate her, kill her. It almost had, he imagined, in the first few days, but he hadn’t reckoned on the therapeutic powers of Loftis’ conversion. His heart rejoiced at this, yet it was still faintly disappointing—that a death should accomplish overnight what all his talk about faith had failed to do in years.
Peyton’s wedding took place on a Saturday afternoon in October of the same year. It was a brilliant, mild day, filled with the bluster of wind and leaves, and bringing from the water that same acute, clean, salty air which seaside resorts advertise as “salubrious.” The wedding was to be at home (Carey had had, a week before, a genial chat about it over the phone with Loftis, who had said that everything was “fine, fine” now, Helen sends her regards, we’re both looking forward to seeing Peyton, and so on) and as he drove over that afternoon with Adrienne, it occurred to him, not very originally, that no ceremony in the Christian culture is more exciting, or grand, or awe-inspiring, than a wedding.
“It is the symbolic affirmation of a moral order in the world,” he said out loud.
“Don’t be so pompous,” said Adrienne mildly. That shut him up. They drove on a way in silence.
Finally he said, “It’s still awfully hard to figure out.”
“What?”
“This understanding they’ve come to.”
“Who?”
“The Loftises. Of course.”
“Why?” she asked.
“I mean—I mean. Oh, so many things. I have a great deal of regard for Helen Loftis, but I can’t understand why, considering Milton for what he is, he would stay with her. I wouldn’t, I know. As a husband.”
“Maybe,” Adrienne murmured coolly, “it’s because she’s got the dough.”
“That’s not funny,” he said.
“Why not?”
“As a poor man’s wife you should know that money isn’t the tie that binds.”
“Sometimes it is,” she said.
“Don’t be cynical,” he replied, “no man’s that dependent. I mean—well, even if you are dependent, say financially, you still don’t torture yourself crazy. Not for money.”
“Maybe it’s not torture,” she said, “maybe he loves her. Or it.”
“It. What do you mean, ‘it’?” he asked, rather sharply.
“Maybe he enjoys being emasculated. Finally.”
“Oh, Adrienne,” he snorted, “honestly. You sound like you’ve been rereading one of those psychiatrists who simplify everything for the layman.”
“No, dear. I’m just putting two and two together. After all, it doesn’t have to be it. It could be love, you know. That’s what we Christians are supposed to call——”
“Adrienne,” he put in, “I deplore your flippancy in matters like this. I won’t——”
She patted him on the hand. “All right, sweetheart,” she said, smil
ing, “I was only fooling.”
His sinuses hurt, and he felt that, for his own part, the wedding wasn’t getting off to much of a start, but to keep things jolly he returned her hand pat and said, “I just guess it’s what I get for marrying a Bryn Mawr girl, who is too much of this world.” It was an old joke they had, and each of them made a mechanical, appreciative chuckle, and Carey, because he had quelled what might have developed into a nasty, day-long tension between them, felt as physically relieved as if he had taken off a wet pair of shoes. They talked no more of Loftis or Helen, but before they reached the house they had put Dolly to rout, agreeing that it was tough about her, but that it was her own fault really. Who else was to blame if she had to live like a Carmelite nun, practically a recluse, looking like a wraith with at least twenty pounds shed in her mourning for Loftis? Didn’t that show you that the wages of sin is not death, but isolation? They wondered about Peyton, too, for neither of them had known her after she had grown up. And, in the light of the rumors which had floated about town concerning her reasons for leaving school, and her questionable conduct later in New York City, they agreed that it was a fine thing that she should finally be married here at home, where her roots were. Although Carey had to caution Adrienne about the faintly arch tone she used when she mentioned the husband-to-be—Harry Whatever-his-name-is—just because he was a Jew, “and a painter to boot.”
“Why do you suppose they came back here?” Adrienne said. “After all this business between her and Helen.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know, dear,” and was about to mention the touching, mysterious bonds that connect a father and daughter—for he had little girls himself—but he thought better of it and drove on. Life was strange.
The fact of the matter was that Loftis had been responsible for bringing Peyton home for the wedding, and when he awoke that day, with the early sunlight making a mellow, diagonal streak across the blankets and the frosty air, with its hint of distant blazing leaves, fanning his cheeks through the window crack, he felt happier than he had in years, and youthful and oddly hungry, with a deep, visceral, drowsy hunger such as he had not experienced since those days long ago at boarding school when, waking on Sunday mornings to the sound of a lazy bell, he had yawned and stretched, watched the myriad, swarming October light, stained with smoke and pollen, and yawned and stretched some more, inhaling the odor of fresh pancakes from the kitchen downstairs, and felt an inexpressible and drowsy and luxuriant hunger—for precisely what he couldn’t tell, perhaps the pancakes, perhaps a woman to crawl into bed beside him, most likely both.