“She said, ‘Don’t smother me!’ in the most vicious, ugly way. She said—and she was drunk, too, when she said it—she said——”
“Wait a minute, Helen. What difference does it make what she said, or the way she looked, or how much she’s had to drink? Just really what difference does it make? Good heavens, a girl comes home on her wedding day, to a house where relations, to put it mildly, have been strained. She’s excited, she gets a little tight, her father is jolly and tight, too, and maybe a little bit too affectionate, and so she snaps at him. And you say she’s persecuting him. Well, by heaven, I think you’re dead wrong, and furthermore I think—— By heaven, Helen, what’s wrong with you? How can you talk about Peyton like this?”
It was getting dark and cold. Some of the guests were leaving. At the top of the slope car doors slammed; there were farewells, the sound of wheels on gravel. Lights went on in the house. Helen drew near Carey, touching his hand again, lightly, tentatively. How can you talk about Peyton like this? That was too simple. How could she make Carey understand? He was such a sweet, stuffy, funny man, with his airs and his graveness and his suffering dark eyes. Although less than ten years separated them, she felt, close and alone as now, a strange, sweet pang: she wanted to mother him or something, fondle him, feel the rough, coarse fabric of his suit beneath her fingers. Such a dear, funny, stuffy man: how could she make him understand about Peyton and her troubles, her own misery and such things? Funny man. He’d ask her to come back to church or something. Now, when it was too late. Didn’t he know she had found her God? Didn’t he know that the devil had been slain, that Milton was her Prince of Light, come back all virtuous after befouling himself; once smeared with the sluttish filth of an evil woman, he had finally been won over: her own lure had recaptured him. He had been contrite, penitent, crushed with guilt. She, Helen, had raised him up, re-formed him in the image of decency, exalted him. Didn’t Carey realize these things? Dear, honest, funny man.
A shiver ran up her backbone as she approached him, caught his blunt, honest fingers in her own. He was such a gentle, incorruptible type; perhaps, after all, she had been too violent in her attack. Perhaps softer, subtler words would win him over. And she found herself saying, “Carey, you must think terrible things about me. Don’t you, Carey? But listen, honestly I’ve never been bitter toward anyone in my life without reason. You think it’s unnatural of me to talk about Peyton like this, don’t you—?”
She heard his voice, honest, gentle, incorruptible. He disengaged his fingers and thrust his hands in his pockets. “I think, Helen,” he said, “that we’d better go in now. If you really want an answer, I think you’re a very sick woman. I don’t know whether it’s proper to call a spade a spade in such a case, but you asked me. There’s something wrong with you beyond curing, beyond anything I can do, anyway.”
He was not looking at her. He was gazing straight out at the bay, blinking solemnly, his prissy mouth set in a small, grim line. And it suddenly occurred to her: how unfortunate. To have a funny, prim mouth like that, with such a fine mind, really a fine, noble mind to go with it: a mind that needed a big, wide man’s mouth and a firm, manly jaw, too. But she felt the faint chill again and pulled the coat tightly about her, wondering. What had he said? She tried to remember. Oh, yes.
Sick.
“Carey,” she chided him, “what a funny thing to say. Sick. Why, I’ve never felt better in my life.”
He turned toward her. “Helen, I think we’d better go in,” he said in a curt, sharp voice. “I have no intention of standing here listening to you revile Peyton. On her wedding day. Peyton has——”
Peyton. Carey’s words floated off into the dusk. On some naval ship, anchored in the channel, a klaxon groaned, and a knot of sailors on the deck—she could see them, far out, as tiny as pins—scattered away like a broken cluster of pearls. Three ducks settled on the water, and the wind, in a sudden gust from the beach, brought a ripe, raw smell of sewage. She lifted a finger to her brow, in an attitude of deep thought, thinking: What is he trying to tell me about my sickness? “Furthermore,” he was saying now, “I think there’s something unutterably smug about your attitude toward Milton. I’m only saying this because I know you well enough, so be calm, Helen dear. That you should impute to yourself these strange, divine powers of healing is not only sinful in the abstract, but false and unjust, too. I should think you’d have a little more common humility. If I’m any judge of the situation, it’s Milton who’s accomplished the miracle, not you. What makes you think … as for Peyton …”
What was he trying to tell her? She stood listening to him, her eyes cocked, her mouth turned up in a bright, receptive smile. Yet she was really only half-listening to him: his words, angry, indignant, seemed to make not the slightest impression, and she felt suddenly that it was unfair, most completely unfair for him to be lecturing her, when it was she who had begun all this in the first place. And her mind sought back a few moments. She struggled to remember something, and memory fumbled through her brain like old yellowed fingers in a littered drawer: I must make him believe me. Peyton. Now he was talking of Peyton, saying, “From just the little I can gather, Helen, Peyton’s had a pretty rough time of it. You asked my opinion and now you’re getting it. In the first place, you’ll have to admit that you never got on with her at all. Or she with you. You told me all that three or four years ago. In the second place, why should I (though don’t get me wrong, Helen, I’m not attacking you) why should I have to accept your statement that she’s just a little tramp? If as you say she’s making a fool out of herself today, why do I have to believe that she’s doing it because she’s bad at heart? And even if that’s true surely you can manage it without making a scene. So she is getting a little drunk. So she is! So, by heaven …”
Ah, she’d found it. This. Stupid Carey. Did he really believe for one instant it was the drinking, the vicious words to Milton, that mattered? How could he be so dull and stupid? Couldn’t he see the deeper things she was getting at, trying to tell him? He was an angry man, all right. Listen to him, look at that plump, outraged face. All right, let him talk. She’d have her triumph. She’d always—though a whole array of ministers, doctors, men (men! she thought) protest her stubbornness, her wrongness—cherish the suffering of her life. What did they know of a woman’s suffering? They should have kept their poor, inept men’s fingers on her pulse all these years. How shocked they would be, what sober, pompous male mutterings would be heard, could they just feel the course of her pounding, angry blood. “How sick she is!” they’d say, and “ah” and “ahem” in their nasty male way, leaning over her bed with their coarse, male, armpit smells. “How sick she is!” they’d say. “Feel this pulse, Reverend, Doctor!” And she’d be repelled, but would delicately, graciously submit to their proddings, if only to see the light in their eyes—the wild, frightened light—when they darted swift glances at each other, saying, “The world has never seen a pulse like this. Has never seen such a sick woman. Feel, Reverend, Doctor, feel the pulse of the angriest woman on earth! How she must have suffered!” And she’d lie there drugged by the quieting nembutal, compliant, submissive, but with a sure, glad triumph swelling at her heart. For this would be an acknowledgment of a woman’s fury, and (of course they’d realize it) the defeat of men in general. Milton might be there, too—poor Milton, whom she had loved, poor, blind, dumb Milton who had realized the error of his ways. Who had come back to her, as she had always known he would, literally on his knees, dragging his heels, remorseful, in tears. Milton she would excuse, of course. Milton had yielded to her. Milton had said, “I quit,” had admitted she had been right all along.
Or her dreams. What did foolish men know of a woman’s dreams? Of a woman like herself—despised, rejected, but always patient, reveling in the violent surge of her blood—whose dreams were always crowded with enemies, dreams bizarre and frantic, villainous beyond men’s wildest imaginings? How simple-minded men were, after all! Carey there, puffing like a toadfish, roun
d-faced and futile. What could he—with a switch now jerked from a bush, petulantly thrashing the seawall, saying “Now Helen, I insist that you leave that girl alone today!”—what could he know about the suffering that drenches a woman’s life, soaks into her dreams like blood, makes her awake each morning with her teeth hurting, from all the gnashing and grinding while she slept? What could he know about her dreams?
Three enemies had always dwelt there, in her dream country, three enemies and a friend. Maudie had been sweet, like something musical, always hobbling near (looking past Carey’s pink, petulant face she saw two gulls descend like scraps of rag across the dusk, and thought of Maudie with a sudden stab at her heart; thought, her lips trembling: No, I mustn’t think of Maudie now), and Maudie she had always hid behind her in her dreams, hiding her from sight of the planetary, fearsome half-light, the fingering shadows, the enemies who, somehow, would rape Maudie first, then her. Maudie had been her friend. Then there had been the big enemy, once the most fearsome of all, now dead, vanquished, done with: Dolly Bonner. That bitch, that whore. Many times Dolly had died in her dreams, often by the knife that Helen wielded, grinning, but more often by disease. In this landscape there were always the vaguest outlines of a city, with many ornate towers, from which pestilence rose like smoke through the air. It was a city of corpses and a faint moldering odor which troubled her sleep, yet the odor was not of death so much, or putrefaction, but of an indefinable, musky rancidness, like cheap perfume or rotten gardenias. Through this vapor Helen strolled, clad in her party best, and always with a man. Though now and then the man was Carey or her father, it was more likely Milton or someone in a mask. The corpses which lay strewn about were faceless, iridescent with decay, soft in parts or part leathery, invariably female. So, fanning themselves, sedate, she and Milton or whoever he was strolled for infinite miles, it seemed, through this land of the female dead, offended by, and commenting upon, the musky, floral odor, but mutually delighted by one corpse in particular, faceless like the rest, head down in the shadows, with its legs—suppurating, clotted by a swarm of sucking, avid flies—unmistakably Dolly’s.
If this was a vision more revolting than any she would tolerate when she was awake, it nonetheless possessed an adequateness, a rightness, which removed its nightmare quality and made her ghoulish stroll, in spite of the strange, sick smell, even pleasant. The more loathsome parts of the dream—the dried-up female organs, the yellowed, scabious flesh, which looked only too much like pictures she had once seen in a medical book—these faded away quickly upon awakening, leaving her with just the breath of the dream, the peculiar smell, and with a vague feeling of triumph. Yet she had remained fiercely discontented. That dream had come only in the past few years and, triumph or not, the ensuing days always seemed gray and bleak with a crushing guilt. She had never had such wicked, grim imaginings before and she asked herself: Am I going crazy? Besides, sometimes it was Maudie whose legs, outstretched and with the metal brace, were dead, and then she would wake up sweating and weeping.
It was so easy to defeat one’s enemies in a dream. Dolly, a soldier in armor, she sometimes slew on the field of battle, the horse, white and named Champ, just like her father’s, sinking its sharp hooves into Dolly’s skull—the final blow. Sometimes Dolly died with stilettos in her back or in the electric chair, but always the corpse returned to its destined place in the plague-ridden city—disgraced, ugly, with sprawling, indecent legs. Thereafter, face-downward, she would float past on a sluggish stream and this time, with Milton at Helen’s side murmuring sadly, “Too bad. I never loved the bitch,” as they watched her drift away, Helen awoke cleansed and healthy, knowing she would never have to dream of Dolly, or of the city, again.
Sometimes the dreams became all mixed-up, and these were the hardest times of all. Then it seemed that she was the enemy, she was the one who threatened people, frightened them. Everyone fled her—men and women, everyone she had ever known—a whole army of them, until she stood on the moonlit, moonlike plain, alone and lonesome, crying out, “Won’t someone please help me?” Then her second enemy, the Man, appeared: Milton, or Carey, sometimes her father, it made no difference—they all hated her, threatened her, asked her why she’d been so bad.
A terrible guilt fell over her. She watched Carey thrash the switch about, wanting to take it away from him. “If you’d just be calm, Helen,” he was saying, gentler now, “you’d see that everything’s going to work out all right. Look——” He approached her, trying to smile, but the smile was so forced and artificial, and he seemed so confused because of the wine he’d been drinking, that Helen felt he was losing all control, that he was threatening her, too, play-acting, faking, and again she desperately wanted to take the stick away from him. “Look Helen, suppose you and I get another drink and go upstairs for a minute and calm down and talk this thing——” Ah, Carey, she thought, and she raised her hand a little, as if to ward him off. Did Carey know he was one of the Men? One of the enemy? Wouldn’t he be surprised! To know how much a part of her he’d become, to know (and now she thought, He really is weak and silly and doesn’t understand, why have I had any faith in him and his silly, weak ways?) how she’d dreamed of him, while he, no doubt, had been dreaming of silly, worldly things, furnaces and things, that silly wife of his, Adrienne, or of becoming a fat bishop with folds of fat covering up his tiny little worshipful you-know-what. How shocked and angry he’d be! And she recalled the dream again, with an inward, chilling fright.
Carey dislodged a stone from the seawall; it went tumbling onto the beach below, smacked sharply against the sewer drain, and the ducks flew up, the gulls, too, piping shrilly, leaving a floating waste of feathers. From the house came a renewed spasm of music, hoarse, Viennese, with the whine of an accordion, and she thought, Silly ass, he doesn’t know. How naked to the waist he’d been one night, fat and pink with his belly button showing, pulling her along angrily after him through woods of fern and laurel, through her garden, trampling down the azaleas. She had screamed, “But, Maudie, she’s gone!” and he had turned, threatening her with a big stick. Fat and pink, his titties bobbing with greasy yellow fat beneath, like butter on oatmeal. Threatening her with the stick, saying, “You must believe! You must believe! I am the way, the truth and the life!”
She retreated two steps backward along the seawall. Carey came toward her, brandishing the threatful switch. She had dropped her handkerchief, wondered if he’d be so much the gentleman enough to pick it up, but neither handkerchief nor switch seemed so important now as this matter of her enemies.
“You’ve been my enemy, too!” she said, only faintly aware of the choking in her voice, and of the big, salty tears which unaccountably had begun to flow down to the corners of her lips. “You haven’t wanted to help me. You and your church! Honestly, Carey, how could you be such a hypocrite? Pretending to understand my problems all these years. Mocking me behind my back!” She groped for something crushing, annihilating to say, to this her enemy. “Your God God is a silly old ass,” she said, “and my God … my God is the devil!”
“Hush, Helen, don’t talk like that,” he said gently. “You’re all wrought up and nervous. Come on inside. Look, it’s getting dark. We’ll have something to calm us ’down and then you’ll see Peyton. …”
Peyton! She wanted to shriek the name aloud. How could he be such an enemy! Wasn’t Peyton precisely the one she’d been talking about for the past fifteen minutes? Did he think she’d been talking to the air, for a joke, for fun? She held up her hand. “No, don’t come closer with that stick,” she said hoarsely, sobbing, “you stay right there! Right there!” Carey stopped in his tracks. “Did you conspire, too? With that tramp, that little whore? Is she on your side, with my poor, weak Milton in the middle? You should die of shame! Don’t you see what she’s done to this family? Don’t you see how she’s used him right up to the very end? The shameless bitch. Excuse these words. …”
And she paused for a minute, to dry her eyes.
“Excuse these words, Carey. What else can I say about a shameless little seducer who’s used her father’s love to get everything she wants in life, who half-killed her own sister through negligence—did kill her in fact, she let Maudie fall! Who used her father’s love, played on it like a sheer music box, rubbed herself up against him until he was half-crazy——” She lifted her hand again. “Don’t come near me with that stick! I’ve seen it all my life. He was putty in her hands, sheer putty! She’s drained him dry! My money, too, drained through him, my poor, weak Milton! You should die of shame for taking sides with a shameless bitch! After all my suffering, after all I’ve done for her. Now she comes home drunk, thinking so long as she’s married she can get away with torturing him. Torturing my poor, weak Milton, who I slaved and suffered over to get back again. Comes home with a little Jewish artist she’s been sleeping with for months! A little Jew. I thought I would overlook that, too, if just to make Milton happy. Anybody she was married to, all right, I said, even if he’s not from Virginia and is from a mongrel family. Anything! Anything, I said! So long as Milton was contented once more. Now she gets drunk and lures him on with her sinful little tail twitching and then turns on him like a dog. ‘Don’t smother me!’ she said, ‘Don’t smother me!’
“Carey, don’t you come near me with that stick!”
“Helen, poor Helen,” he said, “you are mad.”
A wave of agony swept over her. The air, the perishing twilight, thick with October leaves blown up from the lawn, was thicker with enemies. Something caved in on her mind: she saw Peyton, her gestures, her sinful hips, as round as moons. She saw Milton and Peyton together, and the tender, corrupt solemnity of their caresses: a multitude of red, soft lips, Milton’s hair, Peyton’s breasts, the torture of twenty years. “Damn you, Carey,” she said, “damn you for not understanding me!” And as she spoke she knew that it was not Dolly’s legs, but Peyton’s, which had shone with the rainbow of decay, sprawled out so indecently in the dreaming, pestilential dust.