“No, no,” he answered, “it’s not very bad. I don’t think it is. The doctors——” His voice faltered. He hated the sympathy, but at the same time desperately would have liked Hubert to stay with him.
“That’s goddam tough, Milton,” Hubert said, shaking his head.
“Yes,” Loftis said.
“God damn tough.”
“Yes.”
Hubert slapped Loftis’ knee. “Look,” he said, “let’s go over to the house and have a drink. The boys are warming up for the game. It’ll do us both good.”
“No, thanks, Hubert. I’ve got to wait for Helen. She’s with the doctor now.” He looked nervously up the hall. It was airless and deserted. In an adjoining room a man groaned, and a fat, middle-aged woman came out, poking damply at her eyes with a handkerchief and calling feebly for a nurse. Panic seized him and suddenly he thought of Peyton—finally, finally thought of Peyton. He turned. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, “let’s go over just for a minute. You got a car? I’ll follow you in mine.”
Hubert slapped him on the back and stood up. “Buck up, old fella,” he said. “We’ll beat this goddam thing yet.”
In the KA house at noon there was an air of intense gaiety. Young people milled about on the portico, in the hallway and in the chapter room, and everybody said, “Hey! How you?” very loudly to one another. Although it was too early to drink or dance, everybody casually did both, to the noise of horns and saxophones, and the girls’ faces became pink and lovely and excited, so certain was each girl that this day was meant for her alone. At the bar, in an atmosphere of calculated darkness, boys and girls stood drinking hot rum from Mason jars, and here a perspiring brother at the piano splashed happily through an improvised boogie-woogie. Couples drove up in polished automobiles, stayed for a moment, and left, but they would return in ten minutes, after a short drive to nowhere, like fledglings come home to nest. No one could remain away for long at an hour like this—not merely because gasoline was rationed, but because there was something in the air which demanded noise and companionship. Solitude, two lovers together—these were for another time, this evening, perhaps, and the football game itself was hardly mentioned: it was only a hurdle to be overcome before the real happiness began. So the piano competed thinly with the phonograph and there was a pleasant ripe smell of liquor everywhere and the girls’ flushed pink faces passed from door to door, from room to room, sprouting like frivolous blossoms amid waves of laughter and the muted notes of saxophones.
Into these preliminaries Loftis walked, feeling old and somewhat out of place, with Hubert MacPhail hobbling at his side. There was a sprinkling of gray-haired men about, and Loftis greeted each by name and shook their hands, although without much spirit, because most of these fellow alumni he had seen not more than a month ago, at a football game in Norfolk. Hubert limped off to hunt for Buzz, his son. Loftis looked for Peyton, but she was not around and he was told by a scholarly-looking boy, who regarded him with a patronizing gaze and called him “Brother Loftis,” that she and Dick Cartwright had driven downtown to fetch some ice. Loftis thanked the boy for the drink he gave him, and warily placed himself against the wall, between a velveteen drapery and a very drunk blond girl, waiting for her date, who eyed him coyly and was able, at his most casual word, to disgorge peals of high hysterical laughter. The mood of pleasing melancholy returning, he felt very fatherly toward her, and concerned, and he once tried to prevent her from slipping, in a spasm of mirth, down the side of the wall, but at that moment her young man came up to make a laborious rescue, and then their arms about each other’s waists, the two of them weaved out of sight.
It was not quite one o’clock yet, but the mood had already become one of celebration, as if the game, a formality at most, were already won: at least no contest could be lost, encouraged as this one was by such dizzy rejoicing. Outside it was getting grayer and colder, but here, warmed by the nearness of other faces and the fraternal glow of alcohol, it seemed that every cheek was lit by a beautiful flame. The phonograph played louder and louder, the piano kept rattling in a persistent off-beat, and the half-dozen boys now dancing led their partners in ever-widening, ever more precarious circles around the room. Through a haze of smoke, wide-eyed girls with pennants and cowbells wandered, to pet, and be petted by, the graying alumni, and they cornered people in doorways and chattered breezily of party-party-party—in Richmond last year, or last month, or they couldn’t remember. The boys in the meantime had begun to gather up their football trappings—blankets, raincoats, a flask to keep them warm—but the music went on, now a sad love ballad, dropping guitar notes on the air like silver dimes.
All of a sudden the door opened. A gust of cold wind entered, and Peyton and Dick Cartwright, flanked by two moon-faced boys who began to brandish whisky bottles.
We come from old Virgin-i-a, they sang, where all is bright and gay …
The crowd turned, a cheer went up, and the two boys, their arms around Peyton and Dick, led a brassy encore: “Are you ready? Get set!”
Wha-hoo-wah,
Wha-hoo-wah,
Uni-v, Virginia;
Hoo, rah, ray!
Hoo, rah, rayl
Ray! Ray!
U.V-a.
“Peyton!” someone cried.
“The Body!”
“Lover!”
And part of the crowd swept past Loftis toward the quartet, laughing and shouting and holding up glasses, while Peyton and Dick and the moon-faced boys, smothered by the rush, disappeared from view. Loftis tried to catch sight of her, but couldn’t. The two drinks he had drunk, both stiff ones, had clouded his mind and had heightened, rather than suppressed, his sense of fatigue: he remembered that he had eaten nothing since last night. Pawing through the crowd toward Peyton—“Excuse me,” he was saying with a fixed smile; “I’m Peyton’s father”—it occurred to him that there were two things he should be horribly worried over: well, of course, Maudie, about which he must tell Peyton right away, and the other: what? It made no difference. All that mattered was that he see Peyton, and what was all this commotion anyway, a joke, a ceremony? A boy’s elbow glanced off his cheek and slowly, amid the press of bodies, amid yells and laughter, and with the silly set grin on his face, he was being squeezed, funneled toward a chill gray rectangle which was the open door. Someone’s drink slopped over his shoulder, beneath someone’s shoe his own foot was mashed—permanently, it seemed—and now, while a dark-haired girl with giddy eyes laughed up at him sympathetically, he was propelled, off-balance, out onto the portico. He stood there blinking. “Peyton,” he called weakly, raising his hand. But she hadn’t even seen him. Already she was with Dick Cartwright in a convertible, going down the driveway, and he saw her look out of the back window and wave an orange and blue pennant.
In the house Hubert MacPhail was standing next to a crackling open fire, warming his injured foot. Loftis walked up to him. “Hube——”
“Hello, Milt. Did you get a drink? Oh, yeah, I can trust you. Milt, this is my son, Buzzie.” He unceremoniously nudged with his elbow a thin and pallid boy, faintly handsome. “Buzzie’s not going to the football game,” Hubert went on, without looking at the boy. “Buzzie’s going to waste a seat on the goddam fifty-yard line to stay in where it’s warm. Isn’t that right, Buzzie? Buzzie doesn’t like football, Milt.”
The boy laid a limp sensitive palm in Loftis’ and gave him a tortured smile. Although he made no reply to his father, his eyes, just for an instant, darted nervously, resentfully, and without any doubt at all they mirrored a very special sort of detestation. “How do you do, sir?” he said.
“How are you, son? Say, Hubert——” he began, but Hubert had placed a hand on his shoulder and was talking. “What do you think of that, Milt? Wait three months for the biggest game of the year and find out that your own son has chickened out on you. I guess this generation’s just lost the goddam Cavalier spirit don’t you? Buzzie never was much for football though, were you, Buzzie? Lord knows what the g
oddam Army’s going to do with him—” Throughout all this Loftis watched the boy shift uneasily from foot to foot, his teeth clenched over a miserable smile, and he felt sorry for Buzzie, and for Hubert a sudden thorough dislike, and yet something else troubled him, wretchedly: Peyton, Peyton, where had she gone, and why, and had this day indeed finally become the nightmare which he had dreaded so, and—by instinct, by some vague oppressive mood of fatality—had sensed would be inevitable? The music had ceased, the young people were leaving for the game—early, in order to get seats: pert and eager, with polished skin and shining eyes, the girls dragged the boys behind them, and the boys, though drunk, obeyed, for on this day and for this game you brought the girl you thought you loved. In an alcove, bent over a wash pail, a lone stag was getting noisily sick.
“Look——” Loftis turned to Buzzie. “Look, Buzzie, you know Dick Cartwright. You see, he’s with Peyton. Do you know where I could find them?” He made a venturesome smile. “Gosh, I don’t know what all the fuss was about just now. I saw Dick and then I saw Peyton——”
“Buzzie,” Hubert went on querulously, “has always had what we might call an antipathy——”
“Wait a minute, Hubert,” Loftis said irritably, feeling a little as if he were interrogating a prisoner: “Buzzie——”
Buzzie’s eyes lit up and he smiled hesitantly. “Why, Mr. Loftis, I thought you knew. Dick and Peyton got pinned up last night.”
“Pinned?” Loftis said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Pinned?”
“Congratulations, Milton old boy,” said Hubert with heavy gusto, “now you’ll have a son-in-law with piles of jack, with connections, and when you’re an old old man maybe they’ll let you have Harrison Cartwright’s mansion to die in, just an old shanty, you know.”
“So she got pinned?” Loftis repeated.
“Yes, sir.”
It had made him feel as abruptly old as anything since his fortieth birthday.
“Well,” he said, “at least she got a KA.” Not that it mattered. He felt utterly left out of things, and he drained his glass. “Do you know where she is, son? Do you know where I could find her? She pulled this vanishing act just now.”
Buzzie was glad of the opportunity to say something. “Well, Dick’s my roommate and I know that he said they were going to the game. He said they were going to meet Tommy Ames at the Virginian first, though, and I reckon that’s where they went to just now.”
“That’s the same Virginian—the restaurant down at the Corner?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, thanks.” He turned to Hubert. “Hube, I think I’ll run down to the Corner. I want to see Peyton, it’s pretty important. You know——”
“Yeah, I know Milt. About the hospital?”
Loftis turned to go, pulling on his overcoat. Hubert called him back. “Look, Milt—” he paused, jerking his head contemptuously toward Buzzie—“since I’ve got to go to the goddam game alone, why don’t you take one of these tickets and meet me there if you can. I don’t want to sit there and freeze by myself.”
“Thanks, Hube. I can’t make it. I’ve got to go back——”
“Here, take the goddam ticket, anyway.” He thrust it into a pocket of his suit. Buzzie had slunk quietly upstairs and Loftis left, too, with a hurried flap of his arm at Hubert, who stood alone in the chapter room, bitterly nursing his foot in front of the dying embers.
It seemed as if he blundered into noise and jubilation at every turn. But it seemed, too, that gaiety fled whenever he appeared: as quick as startled children, a herd of young people galloped from the Virginian waving pennants, blowing horns, and he was alone with a sinister feeling and his bottle clenched in one hand, listening to their cowbells vanish up the street, remote and tinkling, like the tiny bells borne aloft on the wings of Chinese pigeons. With a sense of frustration which not even one more long, long pull on his bottle could dispel, he was quite alone. He stood by the cashier’s desk, looking up at the clock. It was 1:30. A half-hour more and the game would begin; a half-hour more and Peyton, too, would be there, her hand on Dick Cartwright’s arm and her eyes shining and excited (he could see them) and a little tearful, most likely, from the cold. And oh, Christ was all he could think, he had missed her again.
With a glass borrowed from a boy behind the counter, he sat down in a booth to think things over. Nothing, he reflected, was more boring than to drink alone, and that was a certain comfort, to be true: he was only rarely a solitary drinker. Ah, but Milton, that’s not true at all, said his conscience, weakly calling like a drowning man from the flood of whisky, you are a solitary drinker, a solitary man. True? Was it true? How could it be? Yet there was something in it. Maybe. Something in the way he drank, even among crowds, to retreat within himself deeper and deeper and—rather than to talk—to sink into silence and morosely ponder the days that had vanished like last year’s leaves. Maybe! Not maybe. Surely. You are a solitary drinker. He put a nickel into the juke-box attachment on the wall, struggling for argument, for words. Then he drank, hummed to himself and smiled, thinking of Peyton. Just at that moment a tall woman with a lovely vacant face came through the door, followed by Pookie Bonner, dressed in a shark’s-tooth overcoat and carrying a huge Confederate banner.
“Milton!”
Loftis tried to hide, to turn away, to sink somehow beneath the table, but it was too late: Pookie was on top of him, abruptly and ferociously, bruising the air with preposterous cries of greeting. He slapped Loftis on the back and shook both hands, and in the pandemonium the flag, wet from rain, fell backward and enveloped the woman in a soggy crumple of stars and bars. “Milton, dammit, boy!” Pookie roared. “How long’s it been since I’ve seen you? Why, doggone, boy, it’s been a coon’s age and I swear I don’t believe you’ve changed a bit! Look at him, Harriet. This is old Milton Loftis I’ve told you about.”
Harriet floundered out from beneath the banner and, smiling, gazed down at him with sweet empty eyes. “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” she said.
“Won’t you—won’t you sit down?” Loftis said uncertainly. Surely this was worse—much worse—than meeting a cast-off lover, and he wished that he was in Pookie’s place. With a diminutive gesture of fellowship—a faint wave of his hand—he indicated the empty seat. “Have a drink,” he added, in a spiritless voice.
Harriet sat down smiling, elaborately tucking her skirts under, and Pookie slid in beside her with a thump. “We got to go to the game in a minute,” he said. “We just came for some milk. I’m on the wagon now, Milt. I got ulcers.”
“It started out with gastritis,” Harriet put in quietly, “but Sclater just kept on drinking, anyway. Then he went to the Medical College Hospital in Richmond and they did a gastroscopy and found this peptic ulcer just above the duodenum.”
“Harriet used to be a nurse,” Pookie volunteered.
“Well, it wasn’t bad, really,” Harriet went on, in her mild casual voice. Loftis looked at her again; she was all of forty, but beautiful. “It was very small, nothing more than a sort of tiny membranous inflammation. I keep telling Sclater there are much worse things to have, especially in the digestive tract. Colitis, for instance.”
“Yep, that’s right,” Pookie said. There was a brief silence, and Loftis felt that certainly the ache of his embarrassment must reach out in some way and touch them both. The boy came up and Pookie ordered milk for himself, coffee for Harriet, while Loftis, saying nothing, drank again, now with a sort of violent determination to merge with his anxiety over Peyton, over Helen and Maudie (and some other fear, too: what was it?)—to merge with these his disgust, and the sudden maddening resentment he felt, for Pookie and this abominable Harriet. Slyly he raised his glass. “Here’s looking at you all,” he said.
Pookie, in return, toasted him heartily with his milk, and Loftis wished for anything—reproach, recriminations, surliness, even a fight—anything but this grin of Pookie’s, and his docile, agreeable eyes. He was talking about Kno
xville, Tennessee, a contract he had to build some houses there near a war plant, and wasn’t it a swell thing, Milt, to have got in on the ground floor? How about that, Milt?
“Bully for you,” Loftis said sourly.
And oh God: Pookie was saying it——
“How’s Dolly, Milt?”
“She’s—” he yearned to be three inches high—“O.K., I guess.”
“What a swell kid!” Pookie went on. “Do you know what that kid said to me when we broke up? Listen, Milt. She said, ‘Between us there’s no bitterness, only sad recollections.’ You know what she wrote? She said, ‘Where’er you walk I’ll think of you because there are miles more for both of us before we go to sleep.’ Wasn’t that a swell thing to say?”
“Yeah.” Dolly. The cheap bitchy hypocrite.
“It’s my feeling, too,” Harriet put in, with sudden enthusiasm; “she must be an adorable girl. When Sclater and I are married, of course, there won’t be any regrets or bitternesses. It’s not the modern way, I don’t think. I believe in laissez-faire very much.” She risked an anemic faraway smile. “When we’re married we hope to see a lot of both of you——” She stopped abruptly. The smile lingered on her face but the light had gone out of her eyes like a burst of scattered beads, and she regarded Loftis emptily, apologetically, still smiling. “That is,” she added weakly, “that is—of course—if you’re going to be married. …” The voice sloped off into a tedious little snicker. “Ha, ha! That was a faux pas!”
“Yes,” said Loftis, “it was.”
His remark went unnoticed, at least by Pookie. He broke in, “Listen, Milt, when you see Dolly tell her I send my love and all, and all’s the same with me as far as I’m concerned.” A clumsy, sheepish look came to his face and he looked down at the table and fingered his napkin. “Each month I send her her check I always write her a note, you know, to tell her … you know—but she doesn’t answer.”
“Sclater and I believe,” Harriet added, squeezing Pookie’s arm, “that a lot of life is governed by circumstances and a lot of these things a person just couldn’t help. Isn’t that right, Sclater?”