“Which ones?”
“Dem pretty ones dat come from de laundry, right dere on de bureau.”
“What for?”
“Deed I have no idea, but I suspects dey’s for de folks when dey start eatin’.”
“That I’d say would be a logical conclusion,” he admitted. If you were to peel back her skull, he thought, you’d find no convolutions at all on the brain, only a round, thoughtless, shiny sphere. She loaded her arms with napkins, transmitting shock waves of sound across the floor, shifting from foot to foot, her starched maid’s cap on sideways, constantly mumbling. “My, dem folks is sho’ gonna stuff dey guts today,” she said, lumbering from the room, and he opened the drawer, closed it quickly. Below, the guests stood on the lawn talking together, moved from group to group; a balmy wind flicked the skirts of the Abbott sisters, who were scowling at each other, and he saw Commander and Mrs. Kinderman, bloated and stiff in their matching Navy blue. They talked to no one, and were borne staidly about upon gusts of scuttling leaves. He heard Edward’s laughter somewhere, Edward who was already tight, with whom he had, for Helen’s sake, enacted the most strained and touchy friendship, and for some reason the desire for a drink became hot and powerful. There were other footsteps in the hall, and he started, but they faded away; how silly to have this nervous, quarrelsome conscience, that resentment—yes, he had had it, just for a moment, at Edward’s laughter which, in turn, had made him think of Helen and of the ridiculousness of her demands on him, demands he had paradoxically brought on himself—all in all, how silly to have to pussyfoot about like this on Peyton’s wedding day, dredging up such ugly conflicts. Or was it silly? Well, my God, just one. He found two glasses, got the bottle out of the dresser and went back to Peyton’s room, closing the door behind him.
“Oh, Bunny, you’re so clever,” she said, “all in such a cunning little bottle.”
Loftis looked at her sharply. “Baby,” he murmured, sitting down beside her, “do you really want a drink? Why don’t we wait until afterwards? There’s champagne——”
“Don’t be a spoilsport. Make me a drink. This is just for my nerves.” Obediently he poured an ounce or so into a glass.
“Aren’t you going to have one?” she asked.
Why had he suddenly become so depressed? It was unfair of Peyton to seduce him like this, and he found himself saying, “You know, baby, I’ve found that when everything is going along all right you don’t need anything to drink. When you’re happy——”
But she broke in with a laugh, her face rosy with some sudden excitement, “Don’t be so solemn, Bunny, this is for my nerves, buck up, sweetie. …”
He poured himself a drink and with the first swallow, his dark mood fading, he gazed at her, then past her—avoiding those eyes—to say, while the whisky taste began to seem unfamiliarly sweet and strong, “So anyway, honey, you’re here and you’re going to get married to a swell guy and that’s all that counts. Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Yes. I’m here. Thanks to you.”
“It’s not my doing,” he said, “thank your mother.”
“I’ve thanked her,” she said wryly, looking away.
“Now don’t——” he began, for it was wrong, unbearably wrong for her to bring up, on this day of all, the faintest suggestion of regrettable memories; those memories had indeed made this day poignantly perfect, childish in its brazen delight, like the day long ago of the circus or the fair, sweet from its apocalyptic dawning to the last, exhausted, bedtime end; all the near-ruined moments in the family had made this particular day even sweeter, but it was absolutely unfair of Peyton to suggest now that anything had ever been wrong one bit. The illusion of serenity would be swept away like so many dew-drenched spider webs leaving only the unsightly façade, the dusty plaster and all the bricks with their weathered holes. So quit, quit it, he was trying to say, softly but forcibly. … Ah, good, it didn’t matter, she had been perhaps faking after all: “Bunny, what did you do to her? I could have dropped dead this morning when she came up to Williamsburg, with that really sweet smile on her face. Did you make her take hormones or something? Bunny, make me another drink.”
“I——” She squeezed his leg. A churchbell far off struck the quarter-hour and he poured, helplessly, one for him, one for her, while Mrs. Fauntleroy Mayo’s voice floated up from below in haughty, indistinct syllables, like fish bubbles bursting at the surface of a pool. Peyton’s perfume was abrupt and sweet in his nose, with a certain knife-edge sweetness of exotic flowers he didn’t know, perilous blooms of some jungle, and fascinating; his eyes swam a little as she hovered near—but was it the perfume at all, not the excitement, the day, the heat in the room? He arose and threw open the window wider; Mrs. Mayo saw him. Dressed all in patrician white, in jersey, she raised her gloved hand and waved her handkerchief, a speck of lace: “There’s the lucky father,” she cried, and everyone below looked up with a smile.
He ducked back in. “Baby, we should put all this away.”
“What did you do to her, Bunny? I just couldn’t believe my senses.”
It was the whisky. There was no doubt of that: the rationed rotgut which had filled his eyes with fuzz, made his stomach ache. It was like drinking acid. He put the glass on a table, banished a gnat from its rim. “I don’t know, baby,” he said, smiling down at her, “I don’t know. It was you, you see. I mean, you see …” This was difficult. “I think she never knew how much she loved you until … oh, what the hell, you know, baby, how confused she always was. I don’t know, I just guess she figured too that once you get to a point where everything is on the rocks you’ve got nothing left, so you turn to what you started out with, the beginnings again. …” She was listening to him no more; with her glass in hand, she had got up and walked to the window, looking down at the guests. How could he have explained it to her anyway, convincingly and without embarrassment? How could he explain to this child a fact of life he hardly understood himself: a love which had been held together by the merest wisp of music, faintly heard only during unwitting moments when memory washed at their minds like breakers against crumbling stones; a love in which the principals involved might have dwelt at opposite rims of the universe, only to be drawn back always by some force he could never define—the impalpable, thin strand of music, a memory of lost, enfolding arms, or the common recollection of a happening very ordinary, but which had happened to them together—these and all the gardenias and roses, ruined scents that hovered in the air so many years ago, in the grass-green light of another dawn? A romantic old ass like him, as Peyton might put it, could never place his finger on any of these things, he could only somehow feel them; he could certainly not explain them to a child who, he hoped, still would not have to discover them so painfully for herself.
But she had turned to him from the window; she hadn’t even heard the first part of what he had said. Her glass was empty, her eyes restless with a look that seemed to be neither anxiety nor excitement but just plain restlessness, and she said, in an abrupt, vaguely unhappy tone which startled him, “Daddy, please lay off of it a little bit today. Please do——”
“Why, baby, it wasn’t my idea——”
“No, not the whisky. I mean—oh listen, Bunny, you’re a dear and I love you but please lay off all the sentimental slop today. I like being back here—in a way I do,” she added in a thoughtful voice, “with everybody trying to be nice again—but I feel that you’re so worked up about it all that you’re ready to just smother me. Please don’t smother me,” she said crossly, tossing her hair, “just don’t smother me, Bunny! I wasn’t doing you a favor by coming back here, it was a favor for me. I’ve had my time of wandering around. Do you think I’ve enjoyed being the so-called wild bitch, which I’m sure everyone has thought? Some girl I met in New York from school, she had been down here on a vacation, and she said that everybody thought I had been kicked out of school. How do rumors like that get started?”
“I don’t—baby, now don’t. It was—??
?”
“Small-town crap, that’s what it was. What makes older people love, just adore, thinking the younger people are hell-bent for destruction? They just love sitting around on their fat behinds figuring out some sort of new moral perversion that the younger generation is indulging in.”
“Baby——”
“Not you, Bunny.” She flourished both hands outward and down, in an exasperated motion, spilling drops from her glass. “I don’t mean you. You’d love me half to death if you could. But don’t you see, don’t you see, Bunny? I come back here all sweetness and light trying my best to play the good sweet role, the prodigal daughter come back home at her parents’ whim, seeing the error of her ways, back in the fold of the family. Well I’m playing it pretty well, aren’t I? Kissing Mother back when she kisses me, pretending to forget everything. Don’t you see, Bunny, I’ve got my own reasons for coming home. I’ve wanted to be normal. I’ve wanted to be like everybody else. These old folks wouldn’t believe that there are children who’d just throw back their heads and howl, who’d just die, to be able to say, ‘Well now my rebellion’s over, home is where I want to be, home is where Daddy and Mother want me.’ Not with a sort of take-me-back-I’ve-been-so-wrong attitude—because, Bunny, you can believe me, most kids these days are not wrong or wrongdoers, they’re just aimless and lost, more aimless than you all ever thought of being—not with that attitude, but just with the kind of momentary, brief love recognizing those who fed your little baby mouth and changed your didy and paid your fare all the way. Does that sound silly, Bunny? That’s all they want to do, that’s what I’ve wanted to do and I’ve tried, but somehow today it all seems phony. I don’t know why. I lied. I’m really not excited at all. Maybe I’ve got too many sour memories.” She paused and looked at him, her eyes enormously sad, and he approached her, with the day in its crumbling promise going before his vision, tried to put his arms around her. “Baby——”
“Don’t,” she said, “don’t, Bunny. I’m sorry.” She held him off without even a look, for she was gazing down at the lawn, at the guests moving toward the house, all together, silent, but with a sort of giddy haste, like picnickers before the storm—holding him off as much by her silence as if she had finished erecting between them a curtain of stone, then said gently: “I’m sorry, Bunny.” She looked up at him. “I can’t figure where the trouble starts. Mother. She’s such a faker. Look at this circus. Flaunting the blissful family. Oh, I feel so sorry for us all. If just she’d had a soul and you’d had some guts … Come on now,” she said, grabbing his sleeve, “let’s go downstairs, sweetie. I’ll put up a real good front for you.”
He stood rooted to the rug, wishing to faint there forever. He had been bludgeoned half to death, not so much by these truths, he told himself while he drained the sedative glass, as by necessity.
“O.K., baby,” he said.
The ceremony was carried out in fine style, although the living room was crowded, which made some people sweat a little. In secular times like these it is often the custom to get married in a hotel or in the city hall or in a vine-covered cottage across some state line, where an elderly JP waits in a soup-stained vest; one can get married there for as little as five dollars. Some people who are titillated by religion but who don’t believe in it get married in a hotel filled with palms and ferns, with a friendly old judge in attendance, and have readings from a book of oriental poetry called “The Prophet.” To most people it really doesn’t matter how they are married, except to Episcopalians, who are often partial to the home and always partial to the poetic quality of their service. The service does have considerable poetry in it, and an observer at this wedding who happened to be keen on aesthetics would have been a little awed by Carey’s performance. Among people he was no actor, and in his natural reticence he preferred to leave histrionics to highly charged individuals, the great Northern ministers in their marble and collegiate churches and such; he was not bishop material, but in his own mild and plaintive way he was a sweet singer of the liturgy, and could embroider upon the fabric of Christian poetry, already so rich in texture, the most exquisite designs. An altar cloth had been laid across a gate-leg table, and there were candles, and as he read from the service the flickering light covered his spectacles with orbs of fire and made him look—with his plump cheeks and small round chin and the deep furrow running from his nose to his pursed, budlike mouth—like a compassionate, brunet owl.
On the creaking camp chairs, rented for the occasion, the guests sat silent and bemused, and though the canvas of one ripped with a squeal beneath Mrs. Turner MacKaye, who was a large woman, no one noticed, for Carey’s voice rose soft and sweet, insidiously compelling above the almost breathless breathing and the rustle of clothes and the distant bluster of the wind. It was a rich voice, slightly husky, in the middle register, and it became, as if singing, a strong, melancholy yet uneffeminate tenor upon the word “love,” and mystically, caressingly baritone when it said, “Lord.” Thus, in the fashion of an oratorio, this splendid voice seemed to express with each modulation of the text all manner of human longings—tenderness and love and hope—and cast a spell through the room that was at once celestial and erotic; it was a voice unique and compelling, and many women wept out loud.
Loftis hardly heard the words. Somewhere during the ceremony, the guests all arose. He stood in the front row of chairs, for some reason not next to Helen but next to Edward, who was visibly weaving, his breath coming hoarsely, pumping out with each wheeze a fruity odor of beer. Helen he could see from time to time out of the corner of his eye. She was standing stiffly on the other side of Edward, watching the proceedings with a look that was intent and thoughtful—almost analytical, it occurred to him; it was a look neither pleasant nor unpleasant as she stared at the backs of Peyton and Harry, or moved her head ever so slightly to get a better view of Carey. It was rather just a calm and studious expression, but touched with a curious, fleeting light of triumph, and Loftis had the sudden picture of some humorless philatelist gazing at a particularly valuable stamp. Why she should look like this he couldn’t say, nor did he try to anymore, for he felt unbelievably depressed, and neurotic, and he had to go to the toilet very badly; yet he only faintly knew the cause for these feelings. There was no doubt about it: Peyton had been cruel, she had refused to become a part of the spirit of the day—he gazed up now at her back, to the place where her legs met her skirt, made of some green stuff that looked like satin, and she suddenly said, “I will”—and by not becoming a part of this spirit, which had really been just his joyful spirit, she had begun to destroy it … damn. He stirred. Harry said “I will,” a deep pleasant voice with a New York inflection, and a woman snuffled somewhere in the room.
Why? Why this unbearable depression? Peyton’s dress was drawn tightly against her hips; he could see them, the two crescent shadows that a tight girdle makes when you look at a woman’s behind, joining above like a curved Dutch roof: it was too obvious, or something; she should have dressed more demurely. Now it wouldn’t be long, the ordeal would be over, for Harry was slipping the ring over her finger. Carey suddenly said a few words which, though they escaped Loftis, seemed impossibly theatrical and hollow. Soon it would be over and there’d be the reception and of course by then Peyton’s mood would have changed: he’d kiss her, she’d laugh, he’d shake hands with Harry, they’d all be one big happy family while, with one arm around Helen and the other about Peyton, he’d nod to the guests and smile, tip bubbling glasses of champagne, and hear Peyton whisper, “Oh, Bunny, I am glad to be home.” Yet before this, he knew, there were these last fading minutes and he was suffering boundless, inexplicable anxiety, and consumed by the same hunger he had felt so gluttonously this very morning. It was different. But this hunger was different, because it was inverse and oppressive and awful. He felt that the room had suddenly shrunk to the dimensions of a small hothouse in which the flowers and perfumes and powders and rouge, all the woman scents, had been compressed into one monstrous
tropical odor; through this spongy stuff, above Carey’s lilting words, across the slant of October sunshine, through the sound of sniffles and the brief, lecherous smacking of lips, through all these his anxious hunger groped like antennae, seeking refuge and escape. He let his eyes close, began to perspire, and thought of the blessed release whisky might give. Yet it was not only this; his eyelids slid open, he saw Peyton, those solid curved hips trembling ever so faintly; he thought desperately, hopelessly, of something he could not admit to himself, but did: of now being above—most animal and horrid, but loving—someone young and dear that he had loved ever since he was child enough to love the face of woman and the flesh, too. Yes, dear God, he thought (and he thought dear God, what am I thinking?) the flesh, too, the wet hot flesh, straining like a beautiful, bloody savage. He thought vaguely of Dolly, wondering why she was not here. Well …
No, it was not fair—and his senses returned just a little, and he opened his eyes—it was not fair of Peyton to ruin his hopes like this. It was most certainly not fair of her to shatter his dreams of a perfect day and he had the sudden impulse to rise and call off the whole proceedings, tell everybody here that the ceremony was postponed to a more auspicious time, when he and Peyton would have things straightened out. It was almost over. He saw Carey turn and face the altar; Helen bent forward, rapt and studious and without emotion, and pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. Edward coughed, rattling phlegm in the back of his throat, and Loftis groaned aloud, though nobody heard. And his hunger went forth again, sending fingers through the crushed, vegetable air; only this time, helplessly, his thoughts became flaccid and wet and infantile, and he hungered to go to the toilet more than anything else; in spirit he wandered down the aisle, mincing painfully past the lulled and turgid guests. They didn’t notice him or, if they did, paid him no heed. Their heads would be bent in prayer—his too, in fact—but now he was standing in the downstairs bathroom, in fancy watching the mosaic of tiles, the immaculate tub, feeling all anxiety flow blissfully away, along with the lemon-clear stream. My God, he thought, my God, my God, so far away. Desire and hunger settled over him, and he thought of things past and passing, of all things fleeting, and of himself a child again standing above the ancient plumbing forty years ago; watching it then, that yellow jet, why hadn’t he been made sick with the strangeness of the water flowing from him so promiscuously? Sick as he was now, stifled by roses in a strange room, and knowing that to be born is unbelievable.