“Peyton’s a honey,” said Edward.
“Yeah.”
“A real honey.”
“Yeah.”
“This Harry’s a lucky boy. How’d he get hooked up with her?”
Loftis sketched in briefly what Peyton had written and had told him, the little he knew.
“He’s Jewish, isn’t he?”
“Yes, he is.”
“He looks like the better kind, though. He must be, or that little sweetheart wouldn’t’ve married him. He seems to be thoroughly O.K., you know, and I liked him from the very first moment I saw him. You know, when I was regimental exec on the ’Canal we had one on the staff. He was one of the best tactical officers I——” But Loftis was no longer listening. He had the funny sensation that, somehow, it was he who was doing Edward’s thinking: he knew precisely what Edward thought, and this knowledge made him unbearably nervous. He swallowed some champagne. Well, so he was a Jew. Did it matter? No. Yes. No, thoughts like that were childish. It was remarkable, when you came right down to it, how blandly both he and Helen had accepted the fact, after Peyton had written them. He had been surprised but not shocked, as he might have been ten years ago, and he had been further surprised how placidly Helen, whom he had never thought of as intolerant but who had always been rather hipped on class distinctions, had accepted the fact. What had she thought? He hadn’t asked her, and had forgotten all about it himself. Until this day. Yes, until this day. In the receiving line just now he had been soothed by Peyton’s kisses—he could still almost feel them, warm on his cheek—and by the sweet, delectable noise of her laughter. They had held hands once, and it was as if by that touch, magically, she had erased his tension and anxiety, comforted him, made him think she was happy after all. Yet—and this angered him—it seemed that he was unable to exist for one moment without a worry; he preyed on them, or perhaps they preyed on him, took up a natural dwelling on his brain, like lampreys upon the belly of a shad. He had, frankly and ashamedly, worried about Peyton marrying a Jew, a painter and a 4-F at that. He was also rather old. Hell, he was almost thirty. So what? one part of him said, she’s happy, look at her, isn’t that enough? Yes, the other part of him said, but he’s a Jew.
And why? Why did he worry? It infuriated him. That he should worry so about Peyton’s happiness. That he should have finally these suspicions about a Jew marrying his own daughter, when all his life he had had no prejudice—perhaps because there were few Jews around, perhaps out of charity or good will—against Jews and only a little, for that matter, against Negroes. His suspicions had infuriated him, so that eventually he had laid them to a rather excessively solicitous attitude toward the guests. What did they think? Miller. His name was Harry Miller. It was one of those names straight from Yorkshire, like Harris or Palmer, which (so Loftis’ New York classmates told him) many Jews claim for their own, so that in places like New York they evolve into names almost exclusively Jewish. What had the guests, having seen Miller on the invitations and thought nothing of it, most likely, thought of this Miller? Yes, he supposed that was what worried him the most. The guests. Well, if they had thought anything at all they had not betrayed it in their looks. They had been ladies and gentlemen. They had turned their bright, protestant eyes upon Harry’s face, found it warm and gentle, and had shaken his hand. Perhaps they had said, “This is a special Jew. He is Peyton’s boy.” Perhaps they had. One way or the other, Loftis was pleased.
Edward smoothed back a sheaf of steel-gray hair, regarding Loftis with the puckered distaste of a bigot trying to be agreeable. “When I was a civilian there were New York Jews I knew in the coal business who were as nice a type——”
Loftis was peeved and bored, and he wanted to say something withering, but he only got up courage enough to put a finger over his lips and murmur, “Just don’t you worry, don’t you worry,” with a wink he hoped was enigmatic, and strolled away. His glass was empty.
Now he found Peyton and Harry standing with Helen. The photographer was a nervous little man with the eyes of a dog who has been unjustly beaten. The light was all wrong, he complained, but the client wanted informal pictures: he’d try his best. He put Loftis between Helen and Peyton, made them all stand cozily together. “There,” he said, “now stay still if you please will,” and moved them about, adjusted lenses and plates, while the guests stood around in a half-circle, making comments.
“Smile if you please will.”
“I’m trying my best.” Peyton giggled softly. Beneath Loftis’ hand her waist was soft, warm, though somehow Harry’s wrist, which he touched, too, was hairy, and it intruded.
“Smile.”
“Hey, Milt, grin like the day you tied Gene Sarazen,” Monk Your tee called. The laughter was general.
“Big smile, please. Mrs. Loftis, lift your chin up if you please will. That’s the ticket.”
There was a flash of light, another, one more; the session was over and the guests scattered back to the punch table, buzzing like flies over the pink tablecloth, already soaked with champagne. And more champagne was brought to the bridal party. The waiters were very careful about this. They came up grinning every five minutes, with loaded trays. After her second glass, Helen declined, but Loftis put his arm around her waist: “You don’t mind if I have some more?” And she smiled and stroked his chin gently with her fingernail, saying, “On this day, dear, anything goes. I have lots of Bromo-Seltzer upstairs.” In ten minutes he had three, accepting the colored boys’ offering with thanks and indiscretion, remembering that he should tip them well, and soon he heard himself talking to Peyton and Harry—rapidly, paternally and lovingly. With Peyton’s hand in his, he was saying the most gallant things imaginable. Youth was in the air, as much a part of it, indeed, as the music or the frivolous silver light, and he felt youthful himself and filled again with the curious, hungry ardor. “Don’t get worried about anything,” he was telling Harry, and he squeezed Peyton’s fingers, “she’s just like her mother here. There’ll be a time when you just can’t imagine how you ever got hooked up with such a fickle creature—they’re always eying anything in pants, you know—but just don’t you worry. You’ll look into those big brown eyes and she’ll laugh at you and what can you do? Take it from me, these Loftis women just make you helpless——”
“Oh, Bunny——”
“Milton——” Helen laughed.
“No, I mean it, Harry,” he said over the rim of his glass, “I really mean it. It’s from the Peyton side of the family. It’s a family of warriors, you see. You’ve got to watch out for them just like you would some top sergeants. Now take a top sergeant I once had in the last war when I was in training. Now that guy could be as mean as he wanted to be, yet there was something gentle and—really sweet about him. He was an Irishman named McNamara——” And he had branched off, he knew, onto something irrelevant, perhaps silly. He had begun with an analogy and ended up with a tall tale, only to impress Harry. That’s what wartime always did. You have to justify yourself, romanticize, if ever so subtly. But Harry’s face, through the bubbly exultant light, was receptive, intent: it was a Jewish face, all right, dark and almost handsome, with eyes that looked as if they rarely condemned or, on the other hand, ever indulged themselves in factitious pity, and there was a deep, oddly patient, waiting quality about them which chiefly seemed to express a desire just to understand. Because of this expression, and partly because of the champagne, Loftis found himself liking this young man more and more, but it also made it seem that Harry saw right through his story, so he came back to the main point. “Anyway, Harry my boy, remember what I say, because I know. They can’t beat you down for long. They really don’t want to. It’s all an act, like a top sergeant. They’ll really love you to death if you give ‘em half a chance. Love you like you was a darlin’ little boy——” Then he kissed Peyton on the cheek.
It was obvious that he was not clicking, that he was lamely striving for a tenderly humorous effect—the reason for which he couldn’t exp
lain himself—and that he was failing completely. Along the line he had said something wrong. Harry was wearing an appreciative, courteous grin, but the smiles on the faces of Peyton and Helen—both of which he sensed, rather than saw, at the same time—seemed fastened on with paste, and concealed a tense and inner reproach. “Oh, Daddy,” Peyton said—rather crossly, he felt—and removed her hand from his and drank quickly from her champagne. “Your father-in-law goes off the deep end at times,” Helen murmured to Harry, still smiling the reproachful smile. Loftis struggled for words to correct himself, anything to unplug this awkward moment, but just then up came the Abbott sisters, looking exactly alike. They were eighteen and nineteen, and, with their erect way of walking and flossy, butter-colored hair which they each wore page-boy style around their faces, they seemed to have all the straight, stemlike grace of a couple of jonquils.
“We’ve had a nice time,” they said in unison.
“You aren’t going so soon!” Peyton said. “Oh, Evelyn, Jeanie!”
“We’ve got to go back to Chapel Hill,” the one on the left said, “exams. You know how it is.”
Peyton kissed them both. Everyone said good-by, and they walked off arm in arm. Loftis was grateful to them for the interruption, but when he turned back to the family he was conscious only of the fixed smiles and the almost shocking silence. What on earth had he said? The room itself was filled with noise. The ceremony had been the spring part of the affair, it had passed; that was all innocence and had withered like April. Then there had been the summer, season of nonchalance, easy acquaintance, the first mellow glow, through which the guests had drifted (alcoholically speaking) as through a mist of August sunlight. Now early autumn of the reception had come, and if you closed your eyes you could hear its sound: the loose, high, windy laughter of the women, the male voices filled with a sudden, hoarse bluster, like the rattle of leaves. Thus do all parties move toward the cold of winter and a final numb extinction.
Loftis was aware of the noise but for a solitary instant he felt—looking at Peyton and Helen and Harry—islanded in silence. And during this moment he again tried vainly to recall what he had said or done to bring on such a tense and obvious, such a mutual sense of uneasiness. Ah, those smiles, those smiles. Was it the kiss he gave Peyton?
Then all at once he had a flicker of insight and during this moment—so brief that it lasted, literally, one blink of Peyton’s eyes—he knew what the smiles were about and he had a crushing, chilling premonition of disaster. Harry smiled politely, but he faded before his sight, for Loftis was watching Peyton. She held her glass in the air, touched it to her lips. But along with her smile there was something else he was conscious of, too: she had already drunk too much. Her face rubbed pink as if by a scrubbing brush, she glowed with a fever, and in the way her eyes sparkled, her lips moist and parted, he knew somehow, with a plummeting heart, that she was beyond recovery. It was a moment of understanding that came sharp and terrible. He felt that he had waited all of his life for this moment, this flash of insight to come about. He had just said crazy, unthinking, harmless words, but he had said words like “fickle” and “love” and “death,” and they, in their various ways, had sent a secret corrosion through these two women’s hearts. God help him, hadn’t he known all along that they hated and despised each other? Had he had to spend twenty years deceiving himself, piling false hope upon false hope—only to discover on this day, of all days, the shattering, unadorned, bitter truth? Those smiles … of course … how Peyton and Helen had always smiled at each other like that! There had been words, too, attitudes, small female gestures which it had been beyond him to divine, or even faintly to understand.
And he had gone on for years deceiving himself—too proud, too self-conscious, maybe just too stupid to realize that it had always been he himself who had been at the focus of these appalling, baffling female emotions. Not anything he had done or had failed to do had made them hate each other. Not even Dolly. None of his actions, whether right or wrong, had caused this tragedy, so much as the pure fact of himself, his very existence, interposed weaponless and defenseless in a no-man’s-land between two desperate, warring female machines. Now he had kissed Peyton, said the wrong words, and he had somehow hurt her. And the smile she wore concealed her hurt—to everyone else, at least—just as Helen’s smile, echoing Peyton’s, concealed only the wild, envenomed jealousy which stirred at her breast. What had she done? Why had Helen deceived him like this? Those smiles. He was chilled with a sudden horror. Those smiles. They had fluttered across the web of his life like deceptive, lovely butterflies, always leading him on, always making him believe that, in spite of everything, these two women really did love each other. That, deep down, there was motherly, daughterly affection. But no. Now he saw the smiles in a split moment for what they were: women smiles—Great God, so treacherous, so false, displayed here—himself between them—like the hateful wings of bats.
Oh, Peyton, I love you so. …
He reached out his arm, the smiles dissolved. There was a sudden squeal from the kitchen. In came La Ruth, scattering guests in every direction with her pushcart, upon which rested an enormous cake. Her face was a single grin; tramping forward, she made blissful little quacking noises, bowing left and right to the guests, who were convulsed. But something was wrong. In some way a chain of hot dogs had become tangled up behind her, in the strings of her apron. Oblivious, ecstatic, she trailed them after her on the floor—ten of them, at least—and she came on toward Peyton, whooping and shouting, shoving her cart, propelled forward by waves of high, hysterical laughter. Then, right in front of Peyton, she stopped and looked around her. “Here de cake,” she said, her smile fading; “What I done wrong now?”
“Oh, La Ruth,” he heard Peyton say, amused.
The room was suddenly quiet. Even the music had stopped, and the guests turned, peering over their glasses to see what would happen. La Ruth examined her skirts, scowling, looked behind her, but found nothing. There were titters from the crowd. Then this is what Loftis saw next: he saw Ella Swan push through the milling people, hobbling down upon La Ruth irate and frantic, her apron flapping. She flew swiftly through the crowd like an outraged black bantam hen, punch ladle in hand, a shriveled black Cassandra, muttering threats and doom. It was a scene that should have been avoided, but no one thought to halt it and Loftis, his head still giddy from drink and the slow encroaching premonition of disaster, stood stiff in his tracks, and saw Ella snatch the hot dogs from La Ruth’s apron and hold them dangling before her. “Looka here,” she yelled in a quavering, aged voice, “look what you done. Tol’ you to wait. Git on outa here!”
“Mama, I——“
“Hush yo’ mouf! Messin’ up Peyton’s weddin’! I’ll knock you to yo’ knees directly!”
“Mama, I diden’——”
“You hush up!” she yelled, brandishing ladle and hot dogs. “Draggin’ dem weenies in here like dat. I oughta knock you in de head one!”
“Ella!” he heard Helen say, moving toward her, but it was too late: with her head buried in the folds of her apron, La Ruth had begun to cry. A great, agonized tremor of grief ran through her body; hair askew, hands over her face, she threw back her head and howled. “Ooo-oo, Jesus! I’nt mean to do it! Dey all got scritched up offa de table someways.” And broke down again, incoherent, and hid her face in her apron, in a new convulsion of misery. Sweating, Loftis wondered how long all this could go on; it was low comedy enacted, it seemed—because of the horror which had seized him—upon the stage of high tragedy, and the foolish guests, egging La Ruth on with snickers, were unaware of the calamitous events about to proceed from the wings.
Then Peyton darted forward. He saw it in a flash. Saw her set the glass down on the table, unsteadily—she was tight, her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright with glaze—and move toward Ella, calming her with a touch of her hand and a brief murmur. Then, lone in her command of the situation, she went up to La Ruth and put her arms about her shoulders with
a little hug, saying, “That’s all right, La Ruth. Thank you for the lovely cake. Everything’s O.K., La Ruth.” It was that quick. It took no more than five seconds, but immediately the colossal awkwardness of the scene had vanished. The music began again with a soggy lurch and the air was touched with the murmur of voices, the tinkling kiss of glasses. La Ruth dried her eyes, looked up gratefully at Peyton and trudged back to the kitchen. It had been a gesture neither lofty nor patronizing, but spontaneous and unaffected, and it afflicted him with such love that he hardly knew how to bear it. Now don’t be an ass, his conscience said, but she seemed to be fading from him, vanishing in a powder of crushed-up dreams, and he found himself beside her, kissing her in front of everyone, much more than a father.
“Don’t smother me,” she whispered, and pushed him away angrily. “Don’t smother me, Daddy! You’re crazy! What will people think! Daddy, don’t!” Beads of champagne rose up between them, a green smell of grapes, and she had indeed pushed him away furiously, where he stood witless with horror and desire, his heart pounding, a smear of red grease sticky across his lips. What had he done? “Don’t smother me,” she said again in a thick voice—for she had become suddenly and astonishingly befuddled. “Damn you, Daddy! You’re spoiling everything!” And turned and weaved toward the cake with unsteady steps, the skirt about her hips shining slickly in the light. He stood shattered and bewildered in the center of the floor, thankful for the confusion which had hidden from other eyes his moment of madness. No one had noticed or heard, thank God. He turned … but yes, Harry had noticed. He caught Loftis’ eye, looked away quickly, his dark face red with embarrassment. Harry had heard and … oh, Jesus … Helen, who stood in a bright oval of sunlight, staring not at him but at Peyton’s retreating back, cruelly and with icy loathing.