Now he yawned, sat up in bed in order to belch more easily and, regarding himself in the window pane, found to his delight that he was still good-looking. Helen, he reflected, had said the same thing just last night during the recess of a Community Concert they had gone to, and it gave him pride to be able to confirm her judgment, by clenching his jaws and making his eyes narrow, so that the resemblance in the window pane was not too unlike Lord Mountbatten. A flaw in the glass, however, transformed him suddenly into a wasted, aging satyr, and he climbed out of bed, a trifle ashamed of his vanity. There was an air of readiness, of preparation in the house, and the sound of movement downstairs. Although it was only nine, there already stood on the drive below, underneath the sycamores, a caterer’s truck, coy in pink painted doves and bridesmaids. This waking joy of Loftis’ was internal and delightful and sensuous, the more intense because during the past few months it had derived from a sense of postponed disaster, like a mountain climber who has had fearful dreams of an avalanche, only to get up in the morning and emerge safely from his tent and breathe the vivacious alpine air. His joy was unrestricted and a bit overwhelming, and in a turmoil of good will he threw up the window and shouted down at Edward, who stole out from behind the caterer’s truck in his colonel’s uniform, drinking what looked like beer. “Hallo!”
Edward squinted upward, raised his glass. “Hallo, old man! Time to get out of the sack!”
“I am out. Isn’t it cold out there for drinking beer? I thought you were going to Williamsburg.”
“I’m supervising. Helen went up by herself. She said I’d do better here, helping out. Ha!” He drank, leaving a lacework of foam on his lip. “Ha! How much can a battle-scarred veteran help at a wedding? Woman’s stuff.” Edward had survived Guadalcanal, with wounds in the neck and what he insisted on calling his “tum-tum,” and he took few pains to conceal the fact. He had arrived from Camp Lee late last night. Loftis refused to be diverted.
“When did she leave?”
“About an hour ago. She’s going to pick up Peyton and her boy at that girl’s house where they’re staying and have breakfast before they come back. Helen called them on the phone. Come on down, old man, and have a short one. We’ll start off this party and——”
Loftis smiled indulgently. “No, thanks, old man, I’m taking it easy.” And pulled the window down, for the chill of the morning had begun to seep into his pajamas. The mention of something to drink sent a tentative cloud of gloom through his mind, for among his resolutions the one concerning moderation was number one. But the feeling went away; Peyton was coming, that was enough, and to the cadences of his own artless tenor he scrubbed himself in the bathtub, singing a Cole Porter song and thinking of life’s rich promise, of discipline and fulfillment. He splashed childishly, making air bubbles beneath the washcloth, and a wreath of soapsuds among the hairs on his belly. And the remarkable thing, he thought—the remarkable thing was that Helen was not only wife, mother, hausfrau again, had not only joined with him to entice Peyton back into the fold again, but had actually volunteered to make the first welcoming gesture. Last night, back from the concert, Helen had been nervous and distracted; Loftis had had to soothe her.
“Do you think she’ll be angry or bitter, Milton? What do you think she’ll say? Should I … make the first motion? You know—kiss her? Tell me, Milton. Oh, I’m so worried. … Tell me, dear, if she’s not still mad why did she stay up in Williamsburg instead of coming right home? Why did——”
He took her gently by the shoulders and went through it all over again: certainly she won’t be angry. Hadn’t her letters to both of them proved that? Hadn’t she, Helen, herself been convinced of that months ago—after all the correspondence between them, at first so standoffish and halting, had finally become tender, tacitly forgiving, just as their letters had been in the old days? Yes, certainly, letters were no final proof, but weren’t they sign enough, weren’t they worth the chance? Don’t be silly, Helen.
So eventually she had become calm and had agreed. In fact, he had succeeded so well in convincing her of Peyton’s good intentions that she made a perfectly amazing suggestion. Loftis wouldn’t go. She would drive with Edward to Williamsburg to fetch Peyton and Harry, thus proving to the girl that she wished only to greet her as a mother—solitary, loving, without Loftis, who might only dissipate by his presence the effect she wanted to give: of a woman, alone in the October sunshine, who is both contrite and forgiving and who, by her solitariness, is a symbol of humility and penitence and warm maternal love. It seemed to Loftis vaguely theatrical, but he knew that Helen was not beyond theatrics at times, and he said, “O.K., Helen, anything you think best.” As for the reason why Peyton and Harry had spent the night in Williamsburg (at the house of an old Sweet Briar friend), Loftis had his own ideas—maybe Peyton really was a little afraid of home still, and was trying to make her home-coming an easy, gradual thing—but he didn’t let on to Helen.
Helen had gone to bed then. It was still early in the evening. He had been alone, and although he had been happy because Peyton was finally coming home, he hadn’t, for some obscure reason, been able to define this happiness quite properly. He went through the rooms straightening pictures, flipped a bug out of one of the water-filled vases which stood around the house ready to receive the nuptial flowers. He wandered into the kitchen where Ella and La Ruth, together with La Ruth’s son, Stonewall, were sitting around the table. Ella and La Ruth were making hors d’oeuvres, and Stonewall, who was four, was busy eating them. He was a skinny little boy with the pale, blanched undercolor of the white man who had fathered him, and his eyes were like chestnuts floating on twin pools of milk. When Loftis entered he turned these eyes toward him, in curiosity and in awe, and La Ruth gave him a rap across the fingers.
“Git yo’ messy hand outa dere!” she cried. “Nasty thing.”
“Well look at us,” Loftis said cheerily. “How are we doing?” Stonewall slid beneath the table.
“Us is just dandy, thank you,” said La Ruth prissily, looming large over a bowl of mashed olives, “just havin’ de time of our life out here in de kitchen fixin’ things up fo’ de weddin’. My my, here is cheese an’ green olives an’ black olives an’ florets of collyflower and Heinz’s pickle party asso’tment and roe herrin’——”
“I presume you mean caviar,” Loftis interrupted.
“No, indeed,” La Ruth went on, “dat ain’t what I presumes at all. Mama she tol’ me——”
“Hush up,” said Ella. She looked up at Loftis with a timid, snaggled grin. “Bet you a happy man, ain’t you? Bet you feel de risin’ in yo’ soul, don’t you?”
He agreed, nibbling on a piece of celery, that he was affected spiritually, and he went to the refrigerator for a beer when Ella, her face wrinkled with reproach, said, “Now, ain’t you ashamed?”
“Just one, Ella? The last one before I lose my baby. One won’t hurt, Ella.”
She gave grudging permission with a little nod of her head, bent scowling down toward a pan full of bread crumbs, and La Ruth giggled softly. “Come on out from dere, Stonewall,” she said. “He don’t bite.”
“Don’t tell Miss Helen,” he said, and walked to the back porch, with the beer bottle coldly perspiring beneath his hand. It would be his last, he thought, for a long while. It was very quiet on the water, and chilly, and the moon, hung like a pale lamp above the rim of the bay, seemed to shed only the coolest light over a crowd of fading, dusty stars. Drunken pilgrim, the earth reeled through a host of asteroids, and falling stars drained down the night like streaks of melted glass. In his veiled and perplexing happiness, Loftis could have wept a little, and for the state of tranquillity which, years ago, he never would have believed he could attain.
Helen had been right. The simple touch of a hand redeems us, and who knows, when fingers clasp each other and press to the white, invisible bones, what chemistry then? There is a decency in us that prevails and this touch, perhaps, only reaffirms it. The promises he had m
ade to Helen he had kept and she, though she had no promises to make, had burst forth under the light of his transformation like the flower from which the shadowing stone has been rolled away, which unfolds toward the sun tender leaves of gratitude. It hadn’t been easy for him, or for Helen. He had had to cure something in her, and because she was a reluctant patient, who had taken pains to nourish her suffering, his cure had been forcible, abrupt and highly emotional. Remembering the day in Charlottesville, he had become crazed with guilt, with the sight of the wreckage of their lives, and nothing was too violent for him, as long as he found some sort of equilibrium. Even his love for her, which was honest and deep, became subverted to this goal. He threw himself at her knees, in throes of Byronic remorse, wild-eyed, weeping, hair in his eyes, asking her to forgive him for everything, for Dolly, for not being a better lawyer, for his drinking—realizing, as the whisky fumes seeped up his nostrils and as she arose and moved silently away, the pity of it all: that, in order to convince her, he must cease indulging in the very thing which allowed him to be so grandly humble and contrite. The house was empty. Maudie was gone, and Peyton, too. Helen stayed in her room and slept, lulled by nembutal; she had Ella bring her meals on a tray, saw no one, read all the old Geographics and Lifes. She went to church no more.
One gray, windy afternoon in January—on purpose, she later told him—she took a small overdose of pills and Dr. Holcomb had to hurry around and lay a stethoscope over her feebly pulsing heart and stick her with a syringe. When Helen revived, the doctor left, telling Loftis, in a guarded, confidential voice, that he should take her somewhere for care. Because he was an old man, suspicious of progress, he used the word “alienist,” and this archaism, coming from one whom Loftis felt should know what he was talking about, made him weak with a weird and peculiar fright. He went back upstairs to the place where Helen sat by the window, bundled in blankets. He took a lighted cigarette from her fingers. “He said you shouldn’t smoke.”
“Yes, I know.”
He sat down beside her on a stool, startled by a hot water bottle, which he removed from beneath him. She let him take her hands.
“Helen,” he said, “it takes a long time for a man to learn to believe in life. Some men, that is.”
“Yes, and——” she began.
“What, honey?”
“Nothing.”
“I guess it’s taken me a long time. When I was a kid, even beyond that—when I got older—I thought I was living. I’ve just learned things—recently. I think it probably takes something terrible to happen to you before you learn how precious life is.” It was the first time he had used words like these; he was aware of their inadequacy, and it was the first time that he—a man who all his life had been spendthrift with words—had become so intensely aware of the inadequacy of words in general. So he pressed down hard on her hand, stroked her fingers, to make up for his lack.
“Look how sober I am,” he said.
It was as if she had been struck dumb forever. There was a statue of a woman, he remembered, left alone among the woods of his childhood somewhere—he could not remember—overgrown by ferns and laurel in a damp place where toadstools grew in a fairy ring. Time had not effaced its loveliness so much as rain, for it was made of a poor kind of stone, and it was a pity it couldn’t talk, because with all its frowzy defects of ravaged eyes and storm-stained hair, it yearned, out of some monumental voicelessness, to sing a song or speak a word; its parted lips struggled for speech, it had a throat that lived. Loftis remembered, gazing at Helen. Was she trying to say something? He couldn’t tell, because the light was fading from the room. She cleared her throat, something trembled on her lips, but she remained silent.
“Do you understand, honey, what I mean? Tell me you do. About what I’m trying to say.”
Outside, there was no division between sea and sky; where the bay met the ocean, a foam-capped reef, breakers mounted into the gray, as white and as soundless as snow. He told her again, with love in his throat, how much she meant to him, how, after all his errors, he had come to realize that his existence was a fairly useless thing if she was not a part of it; Dolly was gone now, and for her, Helen, he had trampled upon his weaknesses; wasn’t all this enough? He told her these things in a subdued, passionate, desperate voice. As he talked it seemed her lovely face took on more and more each second the lines of a sick and determined refusal, and by the way her jaw grew tight he knew at least that she heard him. Her hair, he noticed, had gray in it like streaks of milk. “Don’t you see what I mean?” he said again, squeezing her hand, but she appeared, with eyes that still glassed in like watch crystals the hollow reflection of shattered nembutal dreams, an incarnate No—reasonless and mute. He got up; patience fled him.
“You’re sick and I’m sorry,” he said bitterly. “Well, God help me, what else can I do? I offer you myself and that’s all I can offer. I say there are these things that can make us find a way, these things and nothing else, and it’s like I was talking to the goddam bloody wind. You’re sick. Certainly you grieve, but you’re not the only one who’s grieved, I’ve done my share of that. What makes you think you can afford the luxury of this particular kind of self-pity and self-hate? Why, by God? Helen, I’ve done my utmost damndest to make you see how much I care. How much I care to the extent of doing everything I know to make you see that I’m not the broken-down, unredeemable wreck you thought I was. I wasn’t noble, either, about it, or self-conscious about it. I figured that along with all the crap I’ve put up with you I’ve done my share of the wrongdoing and I was willing to keep my mouth shut about some of the things I thought if only I could change your way of thinking. If only you could see that I who I admit am nothing great, I guess, was still willing to do anything to start things right again. God almighty, Helen, forgive me for saying this if you’re as sick as I think you are, but what have you wanted from me, my manhood guts and balls and soul? What in Christ’s name have you wanted? I’ve offered you everything I’ve got——”
He stopped, because when he looked down he found that she had turned toward him a little. Her face lost its hardness, and he figured that in her mind he must have stirred up, finally, memory or recognition, for something crumbled in her eyes. Her lips moved again but she said nothing.
He bent down once more, hopefully. “You haven’t lost everything, honey. You still got me, if you want me. You’ve got Peyton. Who loves you. We’ll write her together, tell her everything is O.K. now. She can go back and finish school next year, like she should. Honey, if you’d just realize that people do love you, you’d know that you’ve got years more of—Christ—grandchildren——” Caught up in his own hopefulness, a rich philoprogenitive vision came to him for an instant, of babies, dozens of them, frisky and pink against the green timeless grass. “Don’t you see, Helen? Peyton doesn’t hate you. She’s the most understanding kid in the world. All we have to do is let her know how things are and then everyone’ll be happy. Helen, you’re all I’ve got, I’m all you’ve got. If you’ll believe me, why, by God, the best years of our lives are ahead. I tell you Helen that we can defeat fear and grief and everything else if you’ll only believe me and love me again. Honey, we can never die. … “
Somehow it had worked, his persuasions had touched her, and he marveled now, on the eve of Peyton’s wedding, as much as he had then, nearly a year before. The bay was filled like a bowl with silence, and upon its surface, as if scraped off from the moon, lay a litter of careless silver. It was almost ghostly, this quiet, and if Loftis had heaved the beer bottle out over the seawall to break the water with a noisy splash, it could have fractured its silence no more abruptly than he finally had penetrated Helen’s. He could only still wonder what he had said, which charmed word it had been to cause her to rise and throw off her blankets, to approach him with her eyes closed and her sickness still white and dusty on her cheeks like some fabled, lovely, medieval lady raised by potent magic from the tomb, and to put her arms almost weightlessly about his nec
k and murmur, “Oh my darling, you do understand me, after all.”
No, he hadn’t understood her, ever, but at that moment there had been no need of understanding: she was his once more, they were together and she believed in him. It was as if he had lifted by his self-abasement all the troubles from her shoulders, and afterward it was only when the desire for whisky became almost impossible to bear that he began to think glumly that he had let himself in for a hell of a situation. “Darling,” she had said that afternoon, “darling, darling, you have learned, haven’t you? You have learned what I need, haven’t you? You have learned. I believe you. Oh, yes, together we can never die!” But later it was hard for him to keep his equanimity every day, knowing that he had, voluntarily and submissively, let her get the upper hand. His pride rebelled fiercely at times, but he beat it down, thinking of the good things yet to come—of a life lived soberly and honestly, yet partaking of the decent and rewarding pleasures, golf still and talk with good friends; Peyton coming home to visit them—with tragic thoughts and tragic events but safely behind, as in the minds of all real Virginia gentlemen. He had made wild headlong promises to Helen, and it was a struggle, but he didn’t hold it against her that she expected them to be kept. He felt lucky when she said one day, “Don’t be silly, darling, I don’t care if you drink if you just use a little caution,” and with a faint laugh, “Heavens, Milton, has it taken you all these years to find out I’m really no puritan?” So he drank a little, with caution.