What can I say? All I know is that it’s pretty awful that this family should be like this. I do hope you went by and talked to her. If you didn’t, please write her a letter. She’s been so upset with Maudie, but I know what you mean when you say you feel divided and cut in half. That’s the terrific part: I can see both the right and the wrong of this mess, but I don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. Make an attempt, anyway, baby. Your mother’s got a streak of pride a mile wide inside her, but I think she’s changed now and is willing to go halfway—only it’s up to you to make the first step.
It’s not that I’m just concerned about the confusion that seems to reign in this family, although that’s a lot in itself, but the fact that, honey, I just don’t believe I can bear it if you stay away from home like this always. I know that you’ll get married soon and everything, but until then it’s not right for you to be running all around the country and calling other places home. You stayed away all last summer. …
Now. But he mustn’t be like this, so depressing. He drank, full of dreams, and gay hopeful thoughts frolicked past through his mind like children’s balloons. He would put things right. Dolly switched on the radio, filling the room with breezy music.
Listen, baby [he continued], it’s just that I want you home more often that makes me ask you to make up with your mother. So please do this for me. But if something does happen and you don’t get to see her, or if you want to wait a little while, come down here anyway next week end. Give the old man a break. I imagine they will both be still in Charlottesville then, so we’ll have the place to ourselves and we can pile in the car and go have a picnic up at Yorktown or Jamestown or somewhere near the water. Bring along one of your young men, kid, if you want to. I think I can stand the competition. As for not coming home Christmas, well, honey, just don’t worry, everything will all be straightened out by then and when Christmas Eve rolls around …
Christmas. Great God. Something sank within him. He remembered the paper hats, purple and green. He swallowed, filled his glass, and turned toward Dolly.
“Turn down the radio,” he ordered.
She seemed to be a great distance across the room, propped up in an attentive haze.
“O.K.”
“Goddamit, it’s a dirty shame.”
“What’s that, honey?”
“Every time I think about Helen. What a lousy rotten deal she’s given Peyton. Why do I put up with it?” He arose and strode about the room, enjoying his anger and theatrically slicing the air with his hand. “Why? Why do I take it? You’d think I’d have learned my lesson by now, wouldn’t you? Jesus please us, is there really something so overpoweringly noble about my character that I can’t just pick up and leave? How about it?”
Dolly took this as a cue and began to frame a reply, but the question was rhetorical.
“It’s a shame,” he continued loudly, “when you don’t have the guts to get loose from an honest-to-God, dyed-in-the-wool, foursquare-gospel succubus. A real holy one, at that. Oh, God, what have I done to deserve this?”
She got up and went to him, placing her hands on his shoulders. Boldly she removed the glass from his hand and pulled him toward the couch. “Now, honey,” she said, “you’ve had too much, don’t you think? And you’re tired and all and you’d better sit down over here and get calm. Sit down and rest now and tell Dolly all about it.” It was moments like this that filled Dolly with radiance and desire, and like a good boxer she was pressing her advantage, even though the fact that it was not her, but Peyton, who had set off this violence, gave her a frosty pang of envy. “Please calm down, sweet kitten,” she said.
“What’s the matter, dear?” she asked, when he was settled on the couch and had retrieved his drink from the mantelpiece. “Tell Dolly.”
“I’ve said enough,” he replied sulkily.
At another time she would have lapsed into baby talk, saying, “Pooh, baby, Dolly fix,” kissing him and soothing him, or concocting some blithe harmless entertainment to heal this malaise, but now the moment seemed filled with a dizzy and palpitant hope. Slowly she began, “Well, dearest, if you feel this way don’t you think that now it’s about time to make the break, before it’s too late? It’s awful, this stuff you have to take.” She paused, twisting his ring: it was set with an opal and on the stone, in gold, was the seal of the University of Virginia. “Give me your ring,” she said softly. But in the attempt to make the request seem partly a gentle mock command, partly a wistful plea, she succeeded merely in sounding childish, and he drew his hand away.
“Like last Christmas,” he said. He hadn’t been paying attention to her, and she was tired, tired, tired of hearing about last Christmas, about Peyton.
“Yes, I know,” she replied. “That was just awful,” and then quickly, “Oh, darling, why don’t you do something about all this?”
“Oh, God, not now. I’m worried. I just couldn’t, the way Helen would take anything like that now. Not even Helen.”
“Yes, I know. Even Helen. Poor Maudie.” There was a thoughtful pause. “You’re just too good a person, I guess,” she said sadly. “But that’s the way it should be. I can wait until the right time comes, I guess, but it’ll sure be hard.”
He wasn’t listening. In his mind bitterness still perched like an ill-natured owl, blinking vengeance: Goddam. Rotten to treat my baby like that.
“I think you’re right.”
“What’s that?” Dolly said hopefully.
“Nothing. Every time I think about things like that I feel just like letting the whole mess go to pot. Leave. Wash my hands of everything.”
“What really happened, honey?” she asked, and thought, oh oh, too late. She had heard the story over and over again for nearly a year; now by some reflex, by some patient will to please, she had inadvertently asked to be bored, tortured. Anything distressed her—with a sense of exclusion—in which Loftis and his family, and not she herself, were involved. She didn’t want to hear about Peyton again; she wished rather to have him caress her, ask her to spend the night, and she felt like kicking herself for this other encouragement. In order to divert him, then, she began quickly: “Honey, make me a drink …”
He surprised her. He seemed to have forgotten the story entirely, and he was drunk. Heaving himself to his feet, he didn’t reply, but made an unsteady path to the secretary, where he poured out two huge drinks.
“Not that much——” she began.
He jerked about slowly, whisky slopping down the sides of the glasses, over his hands: it was like watching a puppet on wires, the way he turned. Now he was facing her, his mouth slack, his face red with whisky and anger, and eyes filmy, dilating, the size of quarters. He was breathing heavily; with each breath she heard a thin phlegmy string of noise escape from deep in his chest. Vaguely he frightened her. He stood there, breathing noisily, and she wished he’d clear his throat.
“More in fear and desperation,” he said finally, “than in anger.” He paused, smiled a bit, adding a genteel, “my dear.
“More in desperation,” he repeated, “than in anger.” Drunkenness brought forth the rolling periods, memory, his father. “‘My son,’ my father used to say, ‘we stand at the back door of glory. Now in this setting part of time we are only relics of vanquished grandeur more sweet than God himself might have imagined: we are the driblet turds of angels, not men but a race of toads, vile mutations who have lost our lovewords and our——’” He paused again, blinking thoughtfully, his head tilted to one side as if to hear anew, like peals from a distant belfry, the sour, defeated incantation. “I think,” he murmured, “I think—I think he said, ‘We have lost our lovewords.’ “
“Yes, Milton,” Dolly said.
“When he was alive I hated him. Now he’s gone. That’s all I can say. It’s different. Different. He could remember Franklin Street in Richmond when Lincoln came in April, eighteen sixty-five. The trees were turning green, he said he was never so hungry in all his life, and all the niggers
were running out hollering, ‘Marse Linkum come save us like sweet Jesus himself!’ He was nine years old, the trees were turning green and when he stood there in the sunshine Lincoln himself came by and his big old shabby stovepipe hat fell off. My father remembered that. He told me. How he came by, grave and thoughtful and tragic, my father this little boy nine years old standing there in the gutter, barefooted and hungry as hell, watching that hat go bang off a signboard over the walk and sail tumbling down into the street. And Lincoln bending down, unbending rather six and a half feet of agonized body even then only a week from death, unbending there right beside my father, picking up the hat with a little grunt. But pausing——”
“Pausing,” Dolly said.
“Pausing. Looking into my father’s eyes. These other eyes tragic and sweet and sorrowful: deep and old as time, my father said; it was like looking into two pieces of coal that had lain for ten million years in darkness. Pausing. Then he said, ‘Sonny,’ that was all. Unbending then, or rebending, straightening up and ambling on down the street like a great black giraffe. And my father, barefooted there, a little Confederate hungry as God knows what, remembering that face, those eyes all his life. As if he had looked into the eyes of Christ, like he said: the last angel, the last great man who ever walked on earth.” He put the glasses down on the secretary. “We are a race of toads,” and waved one hand ambiguously toward the sea, the war, adding, “The hell with their battles, anyway. I wouldn’t be a colonel in their goddam cheap, mechanized war.”
“Honey, you sound so bitter tonight. Being colonel——”
He waved his hand again, dismissing her. He was still standing by the secretary, and the unsteady, dangerous arc his shoulders described as they weaved about made Dolly, too, a bit giddy. “Sit down——” she began.
“Not bitterness, honey,” he asserted loudly. “Something else. We lost our lovewords. Not the South or the North, or any of those old things. ’S the U.S.A. We’ve gone to pot. It’s a stupid war but the next one’ll be stupider, and then we’ll like my father said stand on the last reef of time and look up into the night and breathe the stench of the awful enfolding shroud.”
“Who will we fight in the next war?” she asked mildly.
“Canada.”
Dolly turned fretfully away. “Oh, Milton, sometimes I think——” She looked up at him again, with a smile. “Now come here, darling; sit down. Don’t drink any more.”
“We’ve lost our lovewords,” he went on wildly; “what are they now? ’I am the Resurrection and the Life.’ What does that mean?”
“Milton!”
“What have I got? I’m perverted, religion’s perverted—look at Helen. Look at how religion’s perverted her. What have we got left? What have I got? Nothing! God damn her anyway!”
“Milton!” She had risen from her seat, her eyes wide and imploring.
He teetered slowly against the wall and said softly, “Go home.”
“No, I——” She was close to weeping.
“Go home,” he said thickly, “’M a gentleman. Morals. Not in m’ own house anyway.”
“Milton, what on earth? Oh, honey, you’re so drunk. Just——”
“Please go home, sweet kitten.”
“Oh, Milton.”
He straightened up suddenly and smoothed back his hair. How handsome he looked, how changed! And how relieved she felt, watching him approach her now, the frenzy, by all appearances, gone: his eyes were tender, rather sad, and blinking a little. He opened his mouth once, made no sound; against the blackout gloom of midnight the curtains rustled, groped the air, and caught against his shoulder: capelike surrounding him, just for a second, they fell away then, and she was in his arms. His eyes were closed like a man in violent prayer. He kissed her on the mouth until it hurt. Pleasure and astonishment went down her back, and what a shock it was: chapped lips against hers saying like the old lost little boy she knew so well, “Oh, honey, no, don’t go home. No, don’t.”
“Oh, my darling.”
“You won’t go home. Stay right here. I’ll show her!”
“Darling, kiss me again. There.”
“Oh, Jesus, I’ll show her.”
“Oh, darling.”
The fear and worry she had wasted! All this was so simple: going upstairs hand in hand like lovers the first time (though pausing halfway, both of them, to descend silently and solemnly turn out all the lights), and swaying down the hallway, their arms about each other, to the door of his bedroom, the sanctum she had yearned for but had never even seen.
“Here, darling?” she was saying.
“Oh, Jesus, I’ll show her.” Over and over.
“Here, darling?”
He said nothing.
Then, “Wait,” he said. He put his hand inside on her breast, paused, drew his hand away. He took her arm and guided her through the darkness to another room—a woman’s, she could tell: perfume hung in the air, and a sharp smell of medicine. “I’ll show her,” he was saying. From the sea, wind brought the odor of salt and rain, but here all was emptiness, repose and promise, the silence of an abandoned room. Her heart beat faster and faster; she felt like a famished wanderer come back from a land where there wasn’t any love: here, like all those other places, like the Hotel Patrick Henry in Richmond, or that funny little tourist camp—was it Chevy Chase or Silver Springs?—she could find, in the mystery of a strange and untried room, new passion, new annealment, as hot as desire, for their love, still so futile and lame. Two and three and her apartment, four places, and this made five. Poor Milton, such a lost little boy. He fumbled toward her and they undressed. In the darkness, taking his hand, with nothing troubling her secret glow of triumph, she lay down next to him on Helen’s bed. Soon, “Have you?” she said.
“Not yet.”
“Have you?”
“No. I can’t,” he groaned.
“Now.”
“Yes, yes,” he said.
It was a lie but she couldn’t tell. In a moment she fell asleep, sleeping heavily, and she didn’t wake when he stirred beside her: smothered by dreams of shame, he had been on a ship at sea, gazing toward a barren arctic headland. Beside him at the rail Peyton turned to face him, lips upturned for a kiss; but a breath of coldness, darkening the ship, sea and land, swept over them like a blast of hail. “I’m cold,” she said, “I’m cold,” turning her eyes sadly away and she was gone, and now it seemed to be the uttermost ends of the earth, this land of rocks and shadows, walls sheering off to the depths of a soundless, stormless ocean, while far off on the heights there was a blaze without meaning, twin pyres that warned of a fear blind as dying, twin columns of smoke, a smell, a dreaming blue vapor of defilement.
Who is burning now?
Dolly slept. He turned from the sea, awoke, his head throbbing, and sat on the edge of the bed. He looked away from the sheets, the white, sprawling arms, and stared at the bay. Rain came down in torrents. Foghorns gave groans of warning all the way to Cape Henry, and searchlights prodded the darkness; the night was full of dizzy eyes. In the barracks in the field the soldiers slept. He thrust his head into his hands and thought of war and time, of headland fires and of great men, and of the shame of being born to such dishonor.
He could have died when the phone beside the bed rang, and the Western Union girl read, in weary hired tones: MAUDIE IS BADLY OFF. YOU MUST COME AT ONCE.
Even in autumn, season of death, time brings forgetfulness to thoughts of death, lost loves and lost hopes. Men (for instance, Loftis) whose fathers have lain for twenty years in darkness are often grateful that time has given them a dispassionate eye with which to view the hidden bones, the fleshless smirk, the hairless skull smothered among the roots and vines. Loftis could take refuge in time’s conscience-obliterating flow just as easily as he could in whisky; as a matter of fact, it was a combination of the two—several incautious swigs from his bottle before he had driven as far as Yorktown, and contemplation of the fact that, no matter how bad things seemed, they w
ould be over soon—which steadied his nerves for the entire trip. Death was in the air: he thought briefly of his father, of Maudie; but wasn’t autumn the season of death, and all Virginia a land of dying? In the woods strange, somehow rather marvelous fires were burning: across the gray day, the road still shiny with last night’s rain, gray smoke drifted, bringing to his nostrils the odor of burned wood and leaves. Ghosts of Rochambeau and McClellan, old campfires of earlier falls, with smoke just as blue as this, just as fatal. He thought of other things: a two under par he’d made last August, the thread of a song: what party was it, what dance? He drank.
He had taken Dolly to her apartment at dawn, kissed her good-by, miserably. She had said, “Oh, do call me when you get there. When you find out how everything is.” He had hardly answered. “O.K., kitten. Good-by.” The dawn itself was bleak, extraordinary: overcast, it spread against the western sky a pale reflection, more like dusk than morning. His head ached, he thought of Maudie. God, he thought, and all my life I have given such little thought to her. Now this …
And quickly he forgot her, pushed her rather, mercifully, out of his mind: a new vision appeared, filling him with relief and a momentary contentment—Peyton. For a while he had almost overlooked the sweet, glorious fact of the matter; now it came back to him with all the tender pleasure of finding, at the dry tag end of a party, four surprise bottles of beer: she would be in Charlottesville, too. He’d hunt for her, she’d be with that Cartwright boy. See, God: it is the law of compensation; for my fright you have let me still have this loveliness. Peyton, my darling dear … Thank you also for the C card; perhaps there’ll be gas enough for both of us (even the Cartwright boy, if he wants to come along) to drive up to the mountains, to Afton.