Then Harry, too, was gone—somewhere, Loftis didn’t know. Once he thought he saw him talking to the Cuthberts, or perhaps it was the Houstons; he was unable to remember how Harry had broken away from him, or why. As for himself, time and motion slowed down to the most creaking rattletrap pace, and from then on he seemed to be borne along through the festive rooms like something drunken and frightened and old. He kept up appearances, smiled, cheered the departing guests on their way with a chuckle and a hand pat and an occasional big hoorah, but all the time he was thinking, wondering, What will they do to each other?
At one point he met Cherry Pye, who had a fat rosy face and crumbs of hors d’oeuvres on his lips, which Loftis wanted desperately to wipe off.
“Betcha Poppy’s gonna have a hot time inna old town tonight!” he mumbled through a mouthful of something, waving his glass.
“Yessiree!” Loftis said loudly.
“Yessiree Bob!”
“Drink ’er down, Cherry Pye, drink ’er down!”
“Drink ’er down, Poppy Loftis, drink ’er down!”
They embraced, singing, clinking glasses, and Monk Yourtee and Polly Pearson trotted up, joining them in a song.
Across the room six guests lingered to shamble gluttonously around the serving table. These were the eaters; the drinkers, most of them younger, gathered in clusters about the walls to talk, to make quartets of their own, and Loftis, singing in a quavering tenor—for the song was pitched too high—heard the high, hoarse soprano of Dora Appleton and suddenly broke away. “Come back, Milt!” shouted Cherry Pye.
He teetered across the room, warily, conscious of his grin, spilling champagne. Now in the embrace of new music, new friends, he put his arm about Dora, who, having been kissing publicly, had lipstick smeared on her face; together with Campbell, the strange, pale boy with eyes like violets and huge, transparent ears, they made a trio. Loftis had one hand on Dora’s breast while they sang: “‘I’m the reluctant dragon.’ ”
“What a sweet voice, ol’ handsome!” Dora yelled. Campbell simpered prettily, but it was Loftis she had shouted to, and he tickled her in the ribs.
“Such a cute girl,” he said.
“Ol’ handsome.”
“Sweetie-pie. Give Poppy a kiss, too.” Her face drifted toward him. In despair he kissed her, the rouged, smeary mask, and felt her tongue touching his, with the sweet taste of whisky. Blushing, aching with fever, he moved away. Darkness fell across the lawn. At the door he shook hands with Dr. Holcomb, who had his coat and scarf on; he heard—thought he heard—the doctor say, “Take care of her, Milton,” while the old eyes watered gravely, and he wondered, Take care of whom? But the doctor had gone: the door shut to behind him, there was a swirl of chill air in the foyer, and Loftis, his glass fallen from nerveless fingers, looked down to survey the splinters and the whisky creeping across the rug.
His heart gave way. He sank weakly down onto a chair. There was no doubt about it, no doubt at all. He had to do something. Here alone he could hear the diminishing noise of the reception, weary laughter, weary songs: “‘I adore you, ba-by mine …’ ” they sang, and the winds of evening which rustled outside seemed to sweep the notes along like withered leaves. Two girls passed snickering down the hall. In the darkness they didn’t notice him; one stepped on his toe. Through the window the moon shone bright as a flashlight, and the evening seemed filled with a blue and shifting dust. On the water there were leaves and floating gulls, the wrinkled shadow of a breeze. Yes, there was no doubt about it; this was the time for decision. And he thought: So maybe all my life I’ve been wrong. Maybe I did cause all this. Then Helen was right. I killed with kindness the only thing I ever cared for, really. Maybe we’re all just too highstrung, like Father said. They should have never put the idea of love in the mind of an animal. …
He was seized with a violent fury. “No,” he said aloud, staggering to his feet, “no, goddamit!” He tramped through the spilled whisky, weaving toward the stairs. A blaze of light met him at the living room, shrill, weary voices, still singing, and then Edward, quite as drunk himself, who put a hand on his arm; Loftis went on. “Where ya goin’, o1’ buddy byddyroe? Le’s have a smile from the old daddy himself! And a big, big han’shake——” And he threw his arm about Loftis’ shoulder. “Y’ know,” he went on, “s’ good thing I came to Peyton’s nuptials. T’ see all zeze people. Y’ know if we were on a desert island you ’n I an’ zeze people, why, you an’ I’d be president and vice-president respectively. On accounta——”
“You just go straight to hell, Edward,” Loftis muttered, shoving him away. He plodded on upstairs. In the hallway it was dark and silent. The sounds from below came up muted and indistinct. For a moment he stood at the head of the stairs with his nose in the air, sniffing, reconnoitering. He couldn’t see a thing but in the darkness shapes and shadows reeled indiscriminately, and he had to steady himself against the wall. He felt his heart pounding, and a cold dread. He pulled himself together some and moved down the hall on precarious tiptoe, trying to avoid knocking things over. Finally from Helen’s room he heard voices. A voice, rather: Helen’s. He stole near the door. It was closed but not locked, and a thin wedge of light fell onto the hallway floor. He heard Peyton say, “Words, words, words—why don’t you get to the point?” Later he was unable to recollect, because of the fog in his mind, just what came next, but it went something like this:
Helen’s voice, unemotional, polite, but direct: “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, my dear. No, I didn’t expect you not to drink some. Do you think I’m a member of the W.C.T.V.? Certainly not. But my dear girl, it’s this other thing that matters to me. Really, Peyton, after all we’ve done to plan this affair for you, do you think——”
Peyton’s voice cut in angrily: “Do I think what? What? Will you please explain?”
“This business with your father. Do you really think you have any right to treat him like you have? After all he’s done for you? I saw what happened just now. Really, Peyton, you needn’t pretend that it didn’t happen or no one saw it. Because I saw it. I saw it, I tell you.”
“What?”
“Just this.” Her tone grew short and harsh. “Just this. Lashing out at him like that. In front of everybody. I wasn’t the only one who saw it. Chess Hegerty saw it, and the Braunsteins. Everybody. After all I’ve planned. After everything I’ve tried—not tried but had to forget about you, in order to make this whole affair come off right. I said to myself, ‘Well, I’ll forget everything that she’s done.’ For the sake of morality, for the sake of Christian principles. For the sake of everything decent I’ll overlook the things you’ve done——”
“What things?”
“Never mind. I said I’d overlook them for the sake of everything decent. So you could be married properly, in your own home. The home you forsook easily, too. That was the irony. Anyway, for all these decent things, for their sake, I said I’d make this wedding a success. If it killed me. For your father’s sake, too. Now see what you’ve done. Everyone knows you hate me. That doesn’t matter. But for them to know you hate him, too! After all these years of your faking and your flattery and your seductions——”
There was a sudden thump, a creak of springs, as if someone had fallen abruptly back upon a bed. There was laughter, too, Peyton’s, tense and somewhat hysterical but also muffled, the laughter of someone lying horizontal: “Oh, God, really. If that isn’t the limit. Poor Helen, you’ve really suffered, haven’t you? Poor Helen. You’re a sad case, you know, and I really shouldn’t be talking like this. I really should be silent and forbearing, charitable, really, but I just can’t. You’re such a wretched case I can’t even feel pity——”
“You shut up. You respect your elders. Your parents who——”
“You can’t even suffer properly,” Peyton broke in, her voice solemn now; “you’re like all the rest of the sad neurotics everywhere who huddle over their misery and take their vile, mean little hatreds out on anybody they e
nvy. You know, I suspect you’ve always hated me for one thing or another, but lately I’ve become a symbol to you you couldn’t stand. Do you think I’m stupid or something, that I haven’t got you figured out? You hate men, you’ve hated Daddy for years, and the sad thing is that he hasn’t known it. And the terrible thing is that you hate yourself so much that you just don’t hate men or Daddy but you hate everything, animal, vegetable and mineral. Especially you hate me. Because I’ve become that symbol. I know I’m not perfect but I’m free and young and if I’m not happy I at least know that someday I can be happy if I work at it long enough. I’m free. If I’d hung around in Port Warwick and married some simpleminded little boy who worked in the shipyard and lived in a little bungalow somewhere and came to see you and Daddy every Sunday, you’d be perfectly content. You’d have your claws in me then. I’d be obeying your precious code of Christian morality, which is phony anyway. But it’s not that way. I’m free and you can’t stand it——”
“You hate——”
Peyton’s feet hit the floor; Loftis could hear them, the snapping, outraged heels. “I know what you’re going to say! You’re going to say I hate Port Warwick, Daddy, everything. Well, it’s not true! I don’t hate anything that you haven’t forced me to hate and, damn you, you’ve forced me to hate you——”
Helen’s voice rose on a high, hysterical wail. “You tell me these things and you don’t know … you don’t know,” she cried wildly, “and you come here and make a mockery—with your—airs … and after all your sleeping around … you don’t know … and your filthy little Jew …”
Loftis moved toward the door, but it was too late. The moment of silence which lasted between Helen’s final word and what came next seemed to possess at once brevity and infinite length; this silence, so brief and so timeless, had, in its sense of awfulness, all the quality of a loud noise. Then Loftis heard it, a scuffling sound and a single, agonized moan, but he was still too late; he threw open the door. Peyton rushed sobbing past him into the hallway, down the stairs. He reached out for her, but she had gone like air, and he stood wobbling in the doorway, watching Helen. With her hands at her face she was moaning, but through her fingers ran trickles of blood and he looked at these, with a sort of remote and objective fascination, and paid no attention to her moans. He never remembered how long he stood there—perhaps half a minute, perhaps more—but when, sensing his presence, she removed her hands and looked at him, her lips moving soundlessly and her cheeks so dead and white beneath the raw, deep slits gouged out by Peyton’s fingernails, he only said—making a bad job of it because of his perverse, whisky-thick tongue: “God help you, you monshter.”
Then he went downstairs.
Did he call Dolly before Peyton left, or afterward? This part, too, he was unable to reconstruct with any accuracy, only there was a time, he remembered, some minutes later, when he was holding Peyton, holding her to his breast while she wept, saying, “That’s all right, baby. That’s all right, child. That’s all right, baby.” Over and over.
She had her coat on. Her bags were in the hallway beside her. When Harry, to whom he’d given the keys to his car, backed it out of the garage, they’d be ready to go.
The things he could think to say now were impersonal, futile. “Tell him to leave the keys with the man at the ferry. I know him. I’ll pick up the car tomorrow. I’ll send your presents.”
She brightened up a little, erased her tears with powder from a compact. “O.K.,” she said. “I’m sorry, Bunny. I’m really sorry, aren’t you? Things’ll be better someday.” She gazed around the dark hallway with a lost look. “We don’t have any whisky. Do you——” He went to the kitchen and got a pint from one of the colored boys. She put it in her bag.
He bent down to kiss her. She didn’t move when he kissed her cheek, her ear, her hair. He kissed her on the mouth. “Don’t——” she whispered, pushing him away. “Bunny dear … sober up.”
Then he and she both, somehow, and Harry, were all propelled toward the porch in a shower of cheers and yells, falling rice. “Good-by …” everyone shouted, “good-by … good-by … good-by!” The car vanished down the driveway, followed by two frantic Chevrolets loaded with young people. He walked back to the door, almost fell down amid the slippery rice, but was caught by Monk Yourtee, who shrieked something about wedding nights, grandchildren.
“Go away.”
Then, he remembered—and it suddenly all became clear—he was in the hallway, dialing Dolly again and again, a new drink beside him. He watched them from where he sat by the telephone: the last dogged guests—Polly Pearson, Monk Yourtee, Cherry Pye, the willowy boy named Campbell Someone doing an impromptu, lonesome dance, Edward passed out in a pool of champagne—and the anxiety drained away from him quickly and completely. Everyone was very happy. The music which was playing he didn’t remember, but he hummed along with it, thinking of a new order in life, and when Dolly finally answered he said, “Kitten, guess who?”
“Milton!”
“That’s right,” he said, “it’s all over over here.”
“Oh, darling, what do you mean?”
“I’ll get a taxi.”
Unless you drive a car, to get to Florida from Port Warwick you must take the train in Richmond, which is far out of the way to the north, or go by ferry across the bay to Norfolk and take a different train from there. It is an inconvenient arrangement, and it is one of the reasons why many people of Port Warwick have become, in their geographic dislocation, perhaps more than ordinarily provincial; but it makes money for the ferry company and it is a pleasant trip, and everyone has become used to it by now. The ferry slip is not far from the railroad station, in fact adjoins it, in an atmosphere of coal dust, seedy cafés, run-down, neon-lit drug stores where sailors buy condoms and Sanitubes and occasionally ice-cream cones. The salt air is strong here. The wind rustles the weeds in vacant lots. Along the railroad track the Negro cabins are lit with the yellow glow of oil lamps, and in the moonlight a black figure appears to pull down the washing. The bus wheezes up to the ferry slip, takes on a group of drunken sailors and is gone. Silence descends. A restaurant door flaps noiselessly in the winds; water laps around the slip, and in front of the office, about the feet of some dozing, waiting passenger, a newspaper curls quietly. Occasionally a body is found in one of the vacant lots and, if the victim is Caucasian, the police begin their pogrom with sticks and flashlights and ominous sirens, causing nervousness and despondency among the Negroes.
Because it was not too cold, Peyton and Harry sat on a bench out in front of the waiting room, Peyton drinking whisky and water from a paper cup. The stars were out, and a big harvest moon. They had been sitting there for fifteen minutes, with only an old woman, who had a parrot in a cage, for company. Peyton and Harry said little to each other. Occasionally the parrot yelled, “My, my, why not!” in a cracked, sad voice, and the woman bent down and rapped on the cage with a withered hand, saying, “You hush, Spottswood, or I’ll cover you.” Peyton poured another drink.
A police car rolled slowly onto the slip, its siren purring adventurously and for no apparent reason at all. It halted in front of the waiting room. A puckered, elderly face and eyes blurred by steel-rimmed glasses surveyed them with cranky disapproval. The cop had a flashlight, too, which had been handed to him by his partner in the shadows, and this he turned on Peyton and Harry, although the area was flooded with light.
“You seen a big nigger around here?”
“How big?” said Harry.
“Six feet three,” he recited, “light complexion, mustache, scar above the nose.”
“Not lately. What’s he done?”
“Slugged a old white man. Left him lyin’ right in the middle of Warwick Avenue. Thought maybe somebody down here had seen him.”
“Slugged him?” Harry said. “How do you know?”
“We got clues.”
“What kind of clues?”
“All kinds of clues. Fingerprints. He left a footmark
. Say——” He halted, regarding them suspiciously. “What are you askin’ so many questions for? What business is it of your’n?”
Harry borrowed Peyton’s cup and took a drink of whisky. “I’m a taxpayer,” he said. “I’m interested in law and order.”
“My, my,” said the parrot, “why not!”
“Hush, Spottswood,” the old woman said, giving the cage a crack.
Peyton poured whisky into another cup. The policeman’s mouth became a severe and puritanical line. “Is that whisky you’re drinking, young lady?” he said.
Peyton looked back at him unblinking. “If you’ll take that silly light out of my eyes,” she said, “I’ll answer you.”
The light snapped out. “It is,” she went on, holding up the pint. “ ‘Old Overholt,’ ” she read from the bottle, “ ’straight rye whisky, one hundred proof bottled in bond under government supervision at our distillery at——’ ”
“There’s a law you know. Commonwealth of Virginia, Public Law number one fifty-eight,” he said competitively, “prohibiting the display of intoxicants in a public place——”
Peyton yawned. “Oh, for heaven’s sake …”
The cop looked at Harry. “What’s your name? Let me see your draft and registration cards. I think I’ll run you in——”
“His name is Harry Miller,” Peyton said, rising to her feet.
“What’s your’n?”
“Mrs. Harry Miller, nee Peyton Loftis.”
“Nay what?”
“Peyton Loftis.”
“You Mr. Milton Loftis’ girl?”
“Yes.”
“Well, bless my soul,” he said with a wintry smile, “you must of just got married. We had a special man sent out there last night, to take care of burglars. Bless my soul, you’re right pretty, too.”