Dolly, of course, might as well have been in Tibet. He saw her on two occasions after Maudie’s death. The first time was when, with misgivings and fear, he ventured out of the house one night, a week or so after his reconciliation with Helen, and went to Dolly’s apartment. He intended to put the situation up to her with as much honor as he could, but he failed wretchedly. No matter how little a man may finally come to feel for a woman, if over a long period of time they have been together and intimate, he will acquire a certain tenderness for her small deficiencies, and remember the dirty dishes in her sink—her third-rate books and queer tastes in music, the broken mirror she never fixed—with as much charity as her lips or thighs. Remembering these about Dolly, his mind had become enfeebled by the time he reached her door and, after coffee and cake, he got up to go with vague promises to see her soon. And when she asked, with a look of foreboding, “When, when?” he could only reply, “Soon, soon,” and then go, haunted by the light in her eyes, which said, “Oh, you are leaving me.”
But he was committed. Let him for one moment think of this particular betrayal, and he knew he would be lost. He tried to forget her, succeeded: she sank from his consciousness like one of those poor people encased in concrete who are heaved over the side and plummet to the bottom of the sea. She didn’t forget him, though. Just when he had put her out of mind she began to call him, and, because he invariably hung up, to send him wistful, pleading notes in lavender ink, scented, and stuffed with humiliating souvenirs: roses they had picked during Garden Week at Westover, a postcard he had bought her on the Skyline Drive, two sticks from Popsicles they had eaten, with elaborate frivolity, at a Richmond fair. They shamed him, enraged him; it was these very things he had once told Dolly about Helen—the nagging, bittersweet memories—which made him frantic with remorse; how, having committed so much wrong, would he ever get out of life alive?
Dolly came to visit him one night. It was a rash thing to do, but she was lucky, because Helen had gone for a week’s visit to her sister-in-law’s in Pennsylvania. It was a terrible scene. Dolly flew in out of a rainstorm with her hair plastered around her face like serpents, clumsily threatened him with a candelabra, got sick on the rug, slipped up and fell in the mess and remained there, in a pale coma. It was the first time he had ever seen her drunk and so he hadn’t known how to cope with her. He cleaned her up a little and drove her to her apartment, where he put her gently to bed and held her hand for a while, listening to her mumble an anguished fantasia of remembrances and longings. “Safe in their alabaster chambers”—lines he had once idly read to her from one of Peyton’s poetry books, lines he had forgotten and could not tell how she remembered—“sleep the meek members of the resurrection.” And she sank back into the pillows, like Camille, finally and mercifully unconscious, while he, sweat on his forehead and his heart wrung with regret, offered up to God or someone the first completely honest prayer of his life.
She troubled him no more. Because of that incident he had to make even more effort to forget her. Late in April he and Helen went on the train for a three-week vacation to a resort near Asheville, and there among the smoky hills, in the cool, ferny air where the sky seemed to be spread like a bottomless lake above them, they both calmed down. He turned her mind gradually away from Maudie and tenderly made her do healthful things, like swimming and riding, walking along the bridle paths. Her face was lined and worn, but her new bathing suit still defined a body receptive and warm to love. He made love to her three times, not particularly liking the act itself but afterward—as she drowsed peacefully beside him—smugly happy, proud that he was here rather than in bed with the vacationing Atlanta divorcee who had made a violent pass at him and whose perfect skin, resting like lacquer upon the pretty young oval of her face, looked as if it would crumble to the touch. Wistfully he thought of Dolly. But, “I love you, my darling,” Helen said again and again; “how could we have wasted so much time? Forgive me,” she’d say, clutching his hand tightly, as if to let go would set them adrift again, “forgive me, forgive me, forgive me, I’ve been such a fool.” And when Helen talked like this, just as they do in the movies, with such conviction, he was unable to decide who really had been the fool, after all—he himself or Helen.
Evenings they drank weak, wartime beer with a Rotarian and his wife from London, Ontario. This man was named Malcolm MacDermott; he affected kilts and a crooked walking stick and to listen to him was like hearing water rumbling into an old washtub. There was no question, Loftis knew, as to who wore the kilts in the family, for he was the type of man upon whose conversation his wife waits in a sort of meek attendance, like a flustered maid, and when she spoke it was as if to rush in timidly and sweep up a crumb, and retire to the wall once more. She was in her early fifties, with a plump, bright-eyed, Canadian face. When Helen mentioned the recent death in the family, Kathy’s swollen little lips grew tragic and she told Helen that she, herself, had suffered the loss of a child, but that she had found a diversion, and she blurted something about goldfish.
“Kathy girl,” MacDermott boomed, “what’s a mon to do with goldfish ar-round the house? Nothing but a bother.”
“For her, Malcolm—” she peeped.
“Goldfish!”
The subject perished then and there, but it did introduce a fascinating note into the conversation, for soon, unbelievably, Loftis heard Helen speaking of Peyton. “My daughter,” she said; “she’s my youngest, studying art in New York. She’s such a dear although I guess I have a mother’s prejudice. She hasn’t been home in quite some time and you know the wallpaper I was telling you about last night, the pattern we’re getting? Well, you know, I wouldn’t have thought of getting it made without showing it to her first, she’s coming along so well in New York. …” Loftis felt a crazy shock and later, in their rooms, the first thing he asked her was to repeat, please, what she had said to the MacDermotts.
Helen looked tired, but in her eyes was a look of solemn satisfaction, almost relief, as she came up to him and let her head fall on his shoulder, saying, “Wasn’t it a fierce old lie, darling?” She sighed. “Peyton. We’ve hardly said a word about her, and now I’ve said it. Oh, darling, I do want her to come back home, for a while anyway. I do want to see her so. You do believe me, don’t you, darling? Tell me how to write a letter to her … tell me …” She giggled. “Those funny MacDermotts. Tell me, darling. Let’s go back home….” He had let his head droop, too, softly, while around them the blue evening seemed to dwindle and die and in its smoky waning brought a dozen sounds he had not heard before: crickets and the nimble noise of children, footsteps in the hallway, soft good nights, and her heart and his, thumping like drums. It had been, by almost any standard, the most gratifying moment he could remember, and the night before Peyton’s wedding he had retrieved it, the hearts’ reunion, with a triumphant and savage ecstasy. A man so unaccomplished, he reflected, might achieve as much as great men, give him patience and a speck of luck; though his road slopes off to a bitter sort of doom—and the wind, blustering down the night through chill acres of stars, suddenly made Loftis feel cold, and his life a chancy thing indeed—he has had his moment, a clock-tick of glory before the last descent. You know this man’s fall: do you know his wrassling?
Bring home the bride again, bring home the triumph of our victory.
Bathed, shaved and combed, attired in herringbone tweed and a checked waistcoat, he made his way across the living room, after shaking half a dozen outstretched, congratulatory hands. It was four o’clock, the ceremony was to take place in half an hour, and the house was filled with guests. They had come, the middle-aged men and their wives, the younger men getting bald at the temples and their wives, who were trying at thirty-five to retard a faint dowdiness of flesh, and the youngest of all, the boys and girls in their teens and early twenties who, grinning at everyone and holding hands, were trying to retard nothing at all save thoughts of gloom, maybe, for there was a war on and some of them must go away—all these had come to
make Peyton’s wedding a success. Many of them were friends of Milton and Helen, the younger ones were Peyton’s friends from Sweet Briar and the University and Port Warwick. All the guests had settled into the variety of moods which a wedding brings forth. The younger married women were possessed by flightiness and rapture, with occasional brief depressions of the spirit, while their husbands puffed on pipes and cigarettes and eyed the girls in their teens. These youngest girls, the ones with the soft, virginal drawls and the moist, painted lips and little freckled bosoms that rose and fell elastically as they breathed, stood around twittering, trying to appear prim, but only succeeded in looking more and more excited as the ceremony approached. Among the gray-haired men there was an air of boredom, but though they were patronizing to the younger people they were always kindly, and their wives, who tramped off periodically to marvel at the wedding gifts, became speechless and sentimental and had trouble keeping back the tears.
Almost everyone had come; they spilled out into the dining room, both hallways, both side porches and—because it had become fairly warm—onto the lawn. There was Admiral Ernest Lovelace, who was the naval inspector at the shipyard; he had lost his wife in an automobile accident two years ago. There were the Muncys and the Cuthberts and the Hegertys. All three men were executives at the shipyard. Old Carter Houston himself was there, along with his wife, who remained a Virginia belle at the age of seventy and pronounced Carter “Cyatah”; these two sat in one corner and everyone paid court to them, for he was head of the shipyard. There were the Appletons and the La Farges and the Fauntleroy Mayos, who were F.F.V.’s; and the Martin Braunsteins, who were Jews, but who had been around long enough to be accepted as Virginians. Then there was a contingent of doctors and their wives—Doctors Holcomb and Schmidt and J. E. B. Stuart and Lonergan and Bulwinkle (they all smelled faintly of ether)—and there was Dr. Pruitt Delaplane, making his first hesitant public appearance after his trial and acquittal for criminal abortion. There were poor Medwick Ames, and his wife—who threw fits—and the Overman Stubbses and Commander and Mrs. Phillips Kinderman.
Among the younger people were the Walker Stuarts and the P. Moncure Yourtees and George and Gerda Rhoads, who were, everyone knew, on the verge of divorce, and a men’s clothing dealer named “Cherry” Pye. The Blevinses had come, and the Cappses and the John J. Maloneys. Also the Davises and the Younghusbands and the Hill Massies, who had once won ten thousand dollars in a slogan contest; and a dentist named Monroe Hobbie, who limped. Those among the youngest group—most of the boys in uniform—were Polly Pearson and Muriel West and a willowy boy named Campbell Fleet who, it was generally rumored, had been expelled from Hampden-Sydney College for homosexuality; and the wealthy Abbott sisters—they were beautiful and blonde, and their father had made a fortune in Coca-Cola—and Jill Fothergill, who had arrived with Dave Taylor, and Gerald Fitzhugh. Ashton Bryce was in this group, and a fat boy named Chalmers Winsted, who had flunked out of Princeton, and Bruce Horner. These three were all in naval uniforms, as was Packy Chewning, who was a lieutenant (j.g.) and had won the Navy Cross in the Solomons.
Loftis found Peyton upstairs sitting alone reading a World Atlas, and looking beautiful and somewhat bored.
“Where’s your mother, honey?”
“She went to the kitchen to tend to the champagne. Bunny, did you know that in all of Delaware there are only three counties?”
“No.” He sat down beside her and kissed her on the cheek. “Baby, baby,” he said, “I’ve had hardly any time to talk to you. Aren’t you excited? You look wonderful. I’ve never seen such a beautiful, unexcited bride in all my life. What’s the——”
“Virginia has a hundred.”
“Hundred?”
“A hundred counties, it says so here. Texas has the most——”
He shoved the book away and swept her up toward him, laughing, kissing her helplessly. She lay tender and unresisting against his shoulder; he breathed the perfume in her hair, and was stricken by beauty at the sight of a gardenia pinned there, nestling just beneath his left eye. “Bunny,” she said finally, pushing away from him, “you are such a demonstrative old bum. Come on, quit it now. I’ve got lipstick on your neck.”
“I’ve hidden Harry,” he said.
“You have? Where?”
“I’ve got him locked in on the sun porch with your Uncle Eddie and Carey Carr. Carey’s briefing him on the service.”
“That’s nice,” she said. “Poor Harry, he was in such a stew over the ceremony. He told me just a while ago that he had never seen so many Aryans under one roof in all his life. He said that when he saw Mrs. Braunstein it was like finding his mother at a meeting of the D.A.R.” She chuckled beneath her breath, as if she were being tickled. “What a funny guy! All this business has given him a good case of the creeps. It’s a good thing we’re not High Church and he’d have to cross himself and all that rot. But I think maybe he’s putting a lot of this stuff on. The nervousness, I mean.” Peals of laughter came up from the lawn.
“He seems like an awfully nice boy, honey.”
“He is,” she said, and let her eyes stray musing upon the bay and the dappled blue sky and the windy lawn where all the girls stood chattering, in patches of red and blue. She looked down at her hands. “He is, I guess. I guess he’s about the nicest person I’ve ever met—” and raised her eyes and winked at him—“except you, of course. I mean,” she went on, “I guess he’s got about everything a girl could ever want, if that doesn’t sound banal. I mean there’s something honest and right about him, and I can’t quite describe those qualities without sounding a little silly. After Maudie died I wanted——”
He squeezed her hand and put his fingers to his lips.
“Yes, I know, I’m sorry,” she went on, “I’m sorry, Bunny. We promised not to talk about that, didn’t we? Well, by every letter in the alphabet I promise you that I’ll forget.” She paused and closed her eyes. There arose a tender blur of memories, phantoms, shadows, as he listened to her repeat the old hocus-pocus he hadn’t heard in years; with her eyes closed and her lips drawn sweetly down she looked six or eight, just for an instant, and he could have hugged her to his breast. “So anyway, when I went up there I was ready to go absolutely wild. I guess I did for a while. All last winter and last spring I lived like a tramp, though I didn’t let on when I wrote you. I lived like that, thinking I was worldly or something, and was miserable. Really, Bunny, you don’t know how miserable I was. I think it was only the letters you wrote me which kept me going. And then even so I’d go out and drink too much with some of these horrid, awful people I knew—they were in the fashion business or they were interior decorators or they drew pictures for the expensive magazines, and all of them were slick and talked chic and none of them had any heart or soul—and then I’d come home with a funny feeling that I’d been betrayed, but only because I’d allowed myself to be betrayed, and then your letters for some reason didn’t seem to help at all. They seemed stupid and silly and maudlin and rather futile—you were so far away and lost, too, and you didn’t seem to understand me at all. And I tore most of them up, and then cried afterward, when I woke up the next morning, because I’d destroyed them. Oh, Bunny, you don’t know how miserable I was then. I guess I hated everyone. I tried to pretend that I liked these new people, any people at all, but I didn’t. I don’t even guess I liked myself.”
“Baby,” he said, “you don’t have to go over all those sad old things. Not today. All those things are buried and done with. …”
“I know, Bunny—it’s just that I’m all worked up today.” She laughed. “Here I am trying to be sober and sophisticated and modern and I feel like I was twelve again and back in Mr.—what was his name?—that pansy’s dancing class. What was I about to say? Oh, yes, Harry. I was talking about Harry. Don’t you think he’s nice? He’s so gentle, Bunny, and real. Does that sound like so much stuff to you, Bunny?”
“No.”
“And he’s going to be a great paint
er someday. Emily Genauer saw some of his work and she thinks he’s got terrific promise. But like he says, Bunny, it’s not so much all that business about becoming a great something or the finest this-or-that, it’s being true to yourself inside. That’s what he is, he’s right inside—oh, damn, I can’t talk without sounding like a fool.”
He patted her hand. “I get you, baby. You don’t have to explain to me. I know that any guy you liked would be——“
“No, Bunny, not any guy would be O.K. Just because I liked him. Remember that Lieutenant Timmy Washburn I wrote you about last spring? I liked him and——” She made a look of violent displeasure. “Oh, well.”
“Incidentally,” he put in, as he reached for her hand, “while we’re talking about the life and loves of Peyton Loftis, just what happened to Dick Cartwright?”
Her eyes sparkled, grew wide with what appeared to be sadness and she dropped the subject hastily, as if she were brushing a bee away, with a quick, “Oh he was such a child.”
“So—?”
“I don’t guess brides can drink before the wedding, can they?”
“No,” he said, “definitely not.”
“An eentsy one?”
“No, now, baby——”
“Just a wee dram?”
Her voice touched him with worry, vague and somber, but because she was so beautiful, so fetching in the way she cocked her head to one side and repeated, in the soft supplicant voice, her quaint request, he got up—“Baby,” he said, “we’ve only got twenty minutes”—and went to his bedroom. There, hidden amid a nest of mothballs in his dresser drawer, he found the cough-sirup bottle, a full half-pint. He uncapped it, stuck its mouth up to his nostrils and breathed deeply, thinking of Helen, satisfied that rye could be mistaken for terpin hydrate after all. He held the bottle up against the light, sniffed again, turned it about in his fingers. “No,” he said half-aloud. He recapped it quickly, hearing footsteps in the hall, and stuffed it back in the drawer beneath a pile of shirts. It was only La Ruth. She frolicked in, graceless as a whale, humming the “Jersey Bounce.” “ ’Scuse me,” she said, “Miss Helen, she say she wants dem napkins up dere.”