By-by, Papadaddy. Oh, Jesus. From another pint, he drank. Past him a jalopy fled, carrying young people with pennants, bottles, celebrant smiles. Of course, he thought. The football game. Behind the receding window a girl turned, smiled and winked at him, and held up a pint bottle. He smiled back, and held up his own above the dashboard, but a curve took her out of sight, rocking wildly, enveloped by a boy’s overcoated arm. In the drab county beyond Richmond—so poor, he remembered, that a crow flying over had to carry his own provisions—cornstalks prodded upward stripped and brown. Goochland? Fluvanna? All those funny names. He drank again, desperately. Among the pine woods beyond the nigger cabins smoke curled in the trees, drifted to earth: buzzards circled over, like homing angels swung higher and higher and vanished above him. Once he heard a shotgun, far off, and saw the rump of a panicky deer. Just don’t let her die, please, he prayed to nothing, while he capped his bottle again; for all of our sokes, just keep her alive, even … Outside of Charlottesville a motorcycle roared past, a man and a woman in cowboy suits and airplane caps, and the woman turned blue, infant eyes in his direction and thumbed her nose. Choking with fury, Loftis gave chase, hitting seventy, but lost them, and at eleven o’clock when he drew up in front of the hospital he was soaked in sweat, hard-pressed to find a parking space, and on the verge of getting sick.
In an upstairs corridor he walked aimlessly beneath the lofty gaze of nurses, and it was with an increasing feebleness of soul that he inhaled the familiar hospital smell. Then, startled, he ran into Helen at a corner. He blinked at her stupidly, smelling her perfume, the medical vapor stifled beneath an odor of synthetic gardenias. He took her arms beneath the elbows. She looked awful, and she led him to a sun porch where they sat while she told him about Maudie. The sun porch was clean and uncomfortably warm and rather shoddy. The chair on which he sat was rump-sprung, and somewhere a radiator bore tuneless spanking notes through the corridors. He was very tight, and as she talked, filling his ears with a chant of medical terms too rapidly, too confusingly delivered for him quite to understand, he knew that it would somehow have been the decent thing to remain sober, at least for just this morning. November light, gray and depressing, covered the sun porch. His eyes wandered from Helen’s face—what was it she was saying: an osteo-something, a tuberculous what?—resting briefly upon a pile of magazines, and now, fuzzily, he was gazing out over the college grounds, the leafless trees above walks where boys in overcoats hustled along, and the blue soaring hills. Absently he took her hand. “Yes, yes,” he was saying, “I see,” and looked back again at the sun porch: nearly deserted, it had a mausoleum air; hunched beside a window, an old man in a bathrobe hacked croupily and plucked at the antique blue veins of his hand.
“The doctors say she has a fair chance,” she said finally, in a hoarse and wretched voice.
“That’s fine,” he said, “that’s fine,” and his words must have sounded as strange to Helen as to him—even while he was saying them—for she looked at him curiously, without a blink, her mouth open a little. It was odd, too, he thought, that his mind was on Dolly: nothing in particular—something she had said (to telephone her, wasn’t it? Yes, but it wouldn’t be really for Maudie, but only to talk to him), lingering in his consciousness—and instantly he thought how amazing, how amazing, the way she had seemed to take possession of his life, so subtly, perhaps, but totally. “Fine,” he said again in a soft voice, without thinking, and feeling, at precisely the same instant, with a shock much as if he had been hit on the side of the head by a brick, that truly both of them had lost their minds. Through the gray light his mind floated into a semblance of focus, and he turned quickly to face Helen’s startled eyes, and felt sweat beneath his armpits. “I mean,” he said, too loudly, “I mean, Helen, what on earth happened? There wasn’t anything wrong, much wrong with her when you left. Did something happen up here? What happened, Helen?”
She gazed at him for a moment. Her eyes were huge and redrimmed, and it was obvious that she didn’t quite believe what she heard. Then she closed her eyes and shook her head slowly back and forth, as if the idiocy of his question was just too much to bear. “Oh,” she groaned, “oh, God.” Behind them, framed against the chill sickly light, the old man was bent over the table as he picked through a pile of magazines, with one hand clawing at his crotch; Loftis shook his head, too, violently, striving for light and reason. He saw the old man’s neck go suddenly up like a turkey’s, Adam’s-apple bobbing, as he gazed out, for no apparent reason at all, toward the hills. I will become sober, he thought.
“I mean, Helen—oh, you see what I mean. You say the doctors say she’s got a chance and all——”
“Milton,” she broke in, “I don’t think I can stand this anymore. I can’t stand seeing you like this. I just can’t. I’ve just had enough. Don’t you see what’s happening?”
He looked at her for sympathy, in sodden distress, and he felt that he would have given all his wealth for the ability to pay one moment’s sober penance. “Helen, I see——”
“Don’t say anything. Just don’t say anything. Your own daughter, as sick as she is, and you aren’t even sane—yes, sane enough to know what’s happening. You——”
Below, Halloween horns blew amid a garland of cowbells, a football sound, and the old invalid suddenly strangled behind them, horribly and obscenely, with a noise like the last gurgle of water sliding down a drain. They both turned; the man looked up, perfectly composed. He had a huge scimitar of a nose from which the skin had begun to peel away in flakes, eyes pressed so deep in his head that they seemed, to Loftis, like billiard balls sunk in their pockets. With a shock Loftis realized that the man had no hair on his body at all. And with the disregard for convention which is the privilege of lonely old people, he made no introduction but stared at the two of them from the caves of his skull and stretched a skinny, hairless arm toward the hills.
“Might as well be frank,” he said. “I came up here to die. I came up to die near Mr. Jefferson. There he is—” he pointed toward Monti-cello—“there he is, up on the hill. On clear days you can see it from here. Yes sir, I sit here in the afternoon and look up at the hills and it takes a lot of the pain away to know you’re near Mr. Jefferson when it comes time to shuffle off this mortal coil.” His voice rose, thin, tremulous and old; Loftis saw a tiny flake of skin fall from his nose, but now there was a touch of color, too, on his cheeks, somehow rather dangerous. “I came all the way from the Eastern Shore to spend my last days here and Mr. Jefferson, if he was alive he’d appreciate it, I think. He was a gentleman. He was——”
A flicker of sunlight entered the room and at the same time a squat, officious nurse. “Mr. Dabney!” she said. “You know you aren’t allowed out of that chair. Bad boy! Now it’s back to bed with you.” Mr. Dabney had no opportunity even to say good-by. He merely said, “Yes, ma’am,” and humbly shambled out after the nurse, leaving behind the faint smell of rubbing alcohol.
“I’m sane enough, Helen,” Loftis said quietly, turning back to her, “I’m sane. I’m sorry, too. Can I see her now?”
“No,” she said, “she’s sleeping right now.”
“Oh.” He hesitated for a moment. “Well, what are we going to do?”
She buried her face in her hands. “We’ve just got to wait.”
It was painful, but they waited, saying nothing to each other. On the street below cars passed steadily, covered with streamers and Confederate flags, toward the stadium. Helen began to chain-smoke, glancing sightlessly through a Reader’s Digest. Loftis tried to think of Maudie, but somehow his thoughts didn’t seem to make sense: how, just how, was one supposed to feel now at a moment like this? Was this, after twenty years not of love but only a sort of sad, evasive fondness, all one felt—neither fear nor grief but just a wistfulness, a need to be left alone? It was cruel not to love or feel as one was supposed to. It was hell. And now it was even crueler, feeling as he did so anxiously the desire to say a sedative word, to know that he had al
ready failed utterly in Helen’s eyes and that she would dismiss his comfort as graceless or phony, and perhaps both. Yet he held out his hand, saying, “Helen, don’t worry, everything’ll be all right, don’t worry,” and with a mild shock he felt her take it by the finger tips, looking up at him with eyes sorrowful, almost kindly—as if for once, just for this once, perhaps—she was suspending from him the eternal crushing weight of her judgment.
“Stay with me,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I will, Helen.”
“Stay with me,” she repeated.
“Yes,” he said.
“I’ve never felt anything like this in all my life.”
“That’s all right, honey, everything’ll be all right. Just try to take it easy.”
She took her hand away and said in a toneless voice: “You see, like we always expected, something happened. You see, don’t you? I’ve told you how all my life I’ve been dreading this time. Remember what that doctor in Richmond told us years ago? How with her like she is you never knew what might come up to make her take a turn for the worse. Now this—” She paused. “But I know,” she went on in a monotone, “I know. I know what’s happened.” She hesitated again, continuing in a voice more agitated: “Yes, I know, Milton. And I’m the only one that knows. Only if anything happens I’ll tell you. Do you understand what I mean?”
“No,” he replied, “no, Helen, I just don’t see——” Listening to her, he could have sworn that for a moment she had gone mad, but now again she was clutching his finger tips, saying calmly, “Stay with me, Milton. Stay by me now. Stay with me, Milton.”
“Yes, Helen, but what was it that——”
The same dumpy nurse appeared at the door with a busybody rustle and a tray bristling with thermometers and it occurred to Loftis that she looked like Mayor LaGuardia of New York City. “Mrs. Loftis,” she said, “Maudie’s still asleep, but Dr. Brooks would like to see you for a minute.”
Helen got up quickly. “I’ll just be a minute, Milton.”
He rose from his chair. “All right,” he said. “Don’t you want me to——”
“No,” she said, “that’s all right. Dr. Brooks, he—he knows me and——”
Clumsily he took her by the arm. “Don’t worry, honey,” he said. “She’ll be O.K. We’ll all——” But she had left.
He walked to the window, thinking of the women in his life. He yearned for a drink, and wistfully his mind sought the glove compartment of the car. From below came the noise of moaning horns and a faint sad sound like distant tambourines, and people walked beneath the leafless trees. Against the hills a big blue kite rose and fell. Four young people passed in an open convertible, singing, waved an orange banner, and were gone, while behind him, borne through the odor of medicine, came a woman’s voice demanding Dr. Hall, Dr. Hall in surgery: heavy the scalpel of him who cuts, heavy the knife, heavy the guilt. Professional men like himself, they knew the power of specious knowledge. He licked his lips; they were dry. He was a little surprised to feel a nerve twitching beneath one eyelid. What was it that Helen meant about Maudie? Or had finally just something snapped inside her? Poor little Maudie, he thought, just don’t let her … The kite soared against the gray sky, swooped nervously and caught its tail in a tree. Two boys went up after it, groping among the branches, but finally gave up, and the kite hung disconsolately among the topmost limbs, a splash of blue, like a jaybird snared in honeysuckle. Below it there was a lane, a row of houses, and the cottage, a seedy place, he remembered, but somehow redeemed even then, and that was thirty years ago, by the wild roses which grew around the porch, as in a novel by Gene Stratton Porter. They called it Sleepy Time Home, in the way of lovers who are eighteen years old; and eluding her father, who was a brakeman on the C & O Railroad and who despised University boys, was an exciting and dangerous thing. Late spring and Papa was away to Waynesboro or Staunton or somewhere, and they lay down in the darkness holding each other while she cried, saying: “Oh, honey, I just can’t stand it. If Papa was to find out what happened he’d kill me, he’d kill me——” And bravely, resolute but frightened, and feeling even then desire like smoke rising between their bodies: “Don’t worry, Audrey. Don’t worry, honey, nobody’ll find out, I’ll get a doctor or something. … I know a fellow … somewhere …” How like that fear was this fear he had now, how long ago it was! He pressed his brow against the window, trying to remember. My God, Audrey—Audrey what? But he had been lucky; it had been so simple at that age to be cruel, since eighteen has no heart.
She had been lucky, too, had later told him, “I’m all right now, honey. I was just scared for a couple days, I guess.” Asking him to kiss her again, like he used to. “No,” he had said. “No, I’m going now.” And her sorrow then, her horrible gasping enormous sorrow. “I’ll kill myself.” Frightened, he had replied, “Go on, I don’t care,” and had walked out into the swollen May evening, waiting for a shot, a shriek that never came, and disillusioned, for the first of many times, with love. At that age he was clear-headed enough to understand that he was not alone in a world of mismated passions: others betrayed and were betrayed, and got tired of loving. But his soul was romantic, and although he never saw her again he felt pity for her, and despised himself (just a little) for his misprision. Yet to have even that much conscience now, how noble it would be: he might have become a great man, a great lawyer, a poet. And pettishly, as he gazed at the kite in the tree, he tried to curse himself, but couldn’t, and found himself cursing instead the obstinate female flesh which had destroyed his conscience even more brutally than time, and had brought him to these convulsive days and untidy evenings. He thought of Maudie dying, and of Helen, and he felt sick with fear and sorrow. The kite trembled in the wind, fell to another branch and then lay still. The row of houses looked gray and cold and shabby. That was so many years ago, she’d be nearly fifty, a woman run long ago to fat, with bad teeth and a house smelling still, most likely, of kerosene. He would walk up the steps, knock at the frayed screen door, watching the cottonwood tree, filled with leaves in spring, now bare and rusty, shaking in the wind: it would be taller now, bigger, arching heavy branches over the house. She would come to the door, a slattern in rags (Why, he wondered, did he snobbishly picture her like this?), with the odor of the milk of her grandchildren, and she would ask him, maybe nicely, what it was he wanted and who he might be.
He would tell her, then right off say, “Why did you betray me, girl? Why didn’t you tell me what love was? You knew, you knew. You had the secret. The trouble we had, it should have bound us together: it only made me arrogant and cruel. You knew what love was, you could have told me. You betrayed me.” And she would say, “Ah, no, honey, it was I who was betrayed. I gave you the secret, and that for the last time. Your last love was with me, and you never knew it. I tried to tell you that love wasn’t in the mind or the heart or the flesh, either, but something that comes as easy as morning and never leaves. But you were afraid, even then——” And he would put in quickly, “But I was young then, and though I was cruel I guess I had more conscience than I do now. Have a little charity——” But she would say, “Charity, honey, don’t talk about charity. You can’t undo time. Go back to your life and stop thinking about what can’t be retrieved and remember how love comes as easy——”
“Don’t you see, though?” he would cry. “Don’t you see? I want to know the secret——” Then she would be gone, the door would close, and he would be alone on the porch. He’d try to call out her name, but his voice would fail him and he would go too. He’d leave behind him forever the cottonwood tree, the bare withered vines, thwarted by longing: that woman’s flesh should never become real, but reside only in memory, and that love should be just a sound which rose like a kite through long-ago darkness—a word, a laugh, a sigh, something like that, and the noise of sagging springs and the rustle of half-drawn blinds.
He turned from the window; his hands were sweaty and his face, save for a crescent of his
brow which had been against the pane, prickly with fever. The sun porch seemed unbearably depressing, and he felt that he had to get out of there, go someplace, anywhere—anywhere to think things over. He went out into the corridor. There was no one in sight. A metal box, one of those vessels in which knives and such things are made sanitary, percolated briskly, sending up a cloud of steam. He was completely sober, but his eyes watered and his head ached and he was afraid. If only he could get to the car for a moment, if only he could go somewhere and concentrate and think things over …
“Milton!”
He turned. Smiling, Hubert MacPhail bore swiftly down upon him from the end of the corridor, or as swiftly as he could, considering his limp. Hubert was a Charlottesville lawyer and a KA, and he stood a good chance of being a federal judge if Harry Byrd would only die. Loftis liked him, in an unexcited way, but seeing him now for some reason was actual delight and he grabbed Hubert’s hand.
“Hubert,” he said, “what’s the matter with your foot?”
“I stepped on a goddam roller skate,” he said. “The thing was rusty and for a while they thought they’d have to take my goddam foot off. I’ve been on sulfa for a week now——” And so forth. They sat down on a hard bench for a moment, to rest Hubert’s foot. He was a large enthusiastic man with fawn-colored pouches beneath his eyes and an indecisive mustache which looked as if it had been sprinkled on; Loftis had always got on well with him, although he remembered that when he drank he became smug and aggressive. They were still holding hands, and Loftis was embarrassed. And sad. When Hubert asked him why he was there, Loftis told him and felt his eyes blurring up with tears.
“Is it—is it bad?” asked Hubert gently.