“Come here to me, beautiful,” Edward said, squatting down, and Peyton started to rush toward her uncle, but Helen heard herself speaking, without anger, calmly. “Come here, Peyton, let me brush you off. You shouldn’t go up there by yourself. I’ve told you.”
Reluctantly Peyton turned, sulking, toward her. “But, Mama.”
“Come here, now.”
“Go to Mama and let her fix your hair,” Milton said. He was wearing white flannels, looking very handsome. “Go to Mama. Then you and Uncle Eddie and I will go see about the bees.”
Peyton stood stiffly against her as Helen brushed and combed and groomed.
“It won’t hurt her to go up there, dear,” Milton said. “There’s a fence, you know.”
“I know,” she said, lightly and without conviction. She felt vaguely foolish, and a hot embarrassed flush rose to her cheeks. Curiously she had the sense that they were all watching her, and with a small forced laugh she said, “Mama’s darling got awfully dirty, didn’t she?”
Peyton struggled and squirmed, reaching for Milton. “Daddy, let’s go see the bees. Now, Daddy. Let’s go see the bees.” She held her tightly for a moment—“Keep still,” she whispered—but she relaxed her grip and Peyton tugged away as Edward said: “There! I’d love to go for a walk with such a pretty girl.”
Helen turned back toward the table and, with a quick shrug, pulled her coat up about her shoulders. She felt chilled and abruptly, terribly empty. The voices faded up the hill behind her. The Polish woman hovered near with a broom, between hoarse Polish wheezes muttering, “That child is spoiled already, Missus Helen. You and him spoil her something awful. You should take care.”
“Yes.”
“She grow up to be a lot of trouble. Me, I got five what got their bottoms spanked most every day.”
“Yes.”
“I got no trouble with them, neither.”
“No.”
“She’s a nice little girl, though. Pretty. You got a pretty daughter, Missus Helen. Me, I love children.”
It’s not I, not I who spoil her—but the feeling she had, disappointment, bitterness, whatever it was, had passed away. She drank the rest of her coffee. Suddenly she wished she were back in Virginia, but that feeling, too, disappeared. How silly, she thought, how silly to imagine that—— How silly. Oh, how silly and absurd. Why, last night she crawled over against me on the bed—“Mama,” she said, “do you love me?” And I said and she said … oh, how silly, selfish.
Maudie. But of course.
She got up quickly, spilling cream; walked past her sister-in-law picking tulips in the garden; hurried through the house with an anticipation that she did not and could not deny but, rather, exulted in, rushing up the muffled, carpeted stairs in a wishful greedy suspense like a child at Christmas and then, halting, tiptoed onto the shadowed sunporch where Maudie sat alone, her braced leg outstretched on a stool. Helen crushed the child into her arms.
“There, there, Maudie,” Helen whispered, “Mama’s here. There, Maudie-poo.” My first, my dearest. She sat down with the child and soon contentment began to steal over her like a warm and loving flame. She felt peaceful and young, very strong, as if she could go on being a mother forever. She was twenty-four.
She was nearly asleep. Faintly she sensed cold streams of sweat on her cheek, once more the locust’s alien chatter, threatening rain, the voice saying, “ ‘Member, Helen, ‘member when we lived in Wilson Court? The apartment? ‘Member the whistle, the way it used to wake us up? ‘Member, Helen, ‘member when Peyton and Maudie came there was so little room? Remember how hot it was … Remember?” He drank again, draining the glass. “And remember …”
Remember. Oh, remember. How remember moments of forgotten time? Where is the way now (she wondered) through that dark up-spreading wood? Leaf, locust, sunlight in the hollow, all those she had known, all had fled like years. Now silence sounds where no light falls, and she has lost the way. Rich. Poor. They were poor then, before her mother died, before the inheritance came. They loved each other. Not so much because they were poor, but because they were both still young and hadn’t had to grow up to things. The apartment was backed up against the shipyard wall; a chill blue fog on winter mornings, rising from the river, cast an elegant mist over the streetlights outside; within, warm in bed, hearing people stirring in the halls around them, they felt propertied and secure; life like this, for all they cared, could go on forever. They slept late then. In the summer Maudie cried. (What’s wrong with the kid? he’d say. She shouldn’t holler like that.) What’s wrong? What’s wrong? The shipyard whistle blew, a weird wail, waking them up. Kick the sheets off. On summer nights his legs were long and white, faintly perspiring. Oh, my sweet, he’d say. Oh, love …
Now, gently drowsing, she remembers the whistle blowing. It surrounds space, time, sleepy summer evenings many years ago: a remote sad wail involving sleep and memory and somehow love. They’d fight on summer nights because it was hot and Maudie cried and the icebox made a dripping noise, and because the whistle blew. But they loved each other, and the whistle—now it’s a part of sleep and darkness, things that happened long ago: a wild, lost wail, like the voice of love, passing through the darkened room and softly wailing, passing out of the sphere of sound itself and hearing.
“Oh, they were the days. And remember how Peyton … Oh——” halting, his face startled and distressed, as if he had had his hand in fire and only then had felt the pain. His lips trembled. He’s going to cry, she said to herself: He’s going to cry.
“Peyton.”
He’s feeling it now. Ah, that sorrow hurries like the wind.
He thrust his head forward into his hands again. ”My little girl.”
Yes, perhaps now it will be upturned, the chalice he has borne of whatever immeasurable self-love, not mean, yet not quite so strong as sin …
“My little girl.”
Upturned in this moment of his affliction and dishonor to find there not that pride he would clasp to his heart like a lover, but only grief. Only grief.
He got up from his chair, weaving toward her with outstretched arms. He could hardly walk. The patch of silver hair lay bristling and disheveled. “Honey,” he said, “oh, honey. Let’s be good to each other. Just now. Let’s be good to each other. Let me stay here tonight.”
She arose silently and turned toward the stairs. “Honey, let me stay. At least just let me stay.”
She didn’t answer as she left the room and began to climb the stairs.
“Would you call Mr. Casper for me?” he said. “I can’t. Will you call him for me? I just wouldn’t know what to say.” There was a moment’s silence. “Honey, let me stay. Even if it’s your house.
“Yes,” he muttered then, “even if it’s yours.”
For an instant, as if conjured out of time and remembrance by the sound of music, those brief, petulant words made her conscious of a desolation she had never in her life felt before. It was as if through those words alone she had discovered the nature of their life together, and she felt closer to him for that moment than she had in years. Her eyes filled with tears and she blurted out, “Yes, stay, go on and stay if you want to!” Rushing up the stairs and standing bewildered above, shouting hoarsely back, “Stay if you want to!” and running to her room, weeping helpless, unfamiliar tears as the voice below cried, “Helen, honey! Helen! Helen!”
She stirred; the holly leaves scraped gently outside the window.
Oh, take me now.
She slept.
A breeze had sprung up from the bay. Huge iron-red clouds of dust blew across the station, swept upward from time to time on sudden gusts of air. Here, high above, the clouds shifted, spread against the sky in a translucent haze the color of rust. Through this haze the sun shone feebly and enveloped everything below—station, people, and all—in an immense coppery light, dim and horizonless as a Turner landscape, where even moving objects seemed to remain suspended, like flies in amber. The interior of the limou
sine in which Loftis sat now was fashioned in livid bluish fabric resembling the color of a bruise. In front of him was a folded-down jump seat, also draped in this cheerless hue, upon which he had thrown one leg, tapping his foot in time to music from a restaurant across the street. A guitar strummed. A plaintive juke-box voice, gentle and long-suffering, sang distantly:
You know that you are free to go dear
Don’t worry if I start to cry …
And Loftis, intent above all to forget his terrible pain, tried to hear the words, humming along with them in a thin falsetto tenor. Past the window, which he had closed against the dust, a woman’s crazy hat drifted, trailing pink cloth flowers on a veil; the woman herself, then, rear-view—big, bovine, in a motley of cheap and tawdry clothes, plump sunburned arms warding off the dust like snow or sleet, and the woman’s countrified voice receding faintly: “My, my, ain’t this a shame.” In her wake Barclay followed, carrying a bucket of water. Watching him, Loftis felt a tug of nausea at his stomach. His head ached dully from the whisky of the night before. He leaped out of the door and walked toward the hearse, following Barclay, panting a little as he strode through the dust. “Hey! Oh, son! Son!” By the front of the hearse the boy turned and paused, wondering.
“Oh, son!”
“Yes, sir?” Barclay said. He was a pale slim boy of about nineteen. He had pimples and on his upper lip a fringe of timid pubescent hair, and he stood gaping in wonderment as Loftis bore down upon him, breathing heavily.
“Ah, well. Is it——” Loftis hesitated.
The boy said nothing. Although it was not his fault, he was afraid he would be held to blame for the broken radiator pipe. All morning he had worried: about whether he would please or not; about the fit of his brand-new black suit. He was conscientious and incorruptible and right-minded, a young man born to worry. Already the complexities of life, and of becoming a mortician, were oppressive and somehow unjust; he worried about these, too. The morning had given him no end of trouble. He felt that surely Mr. Casper was going to fire him and because he had worried about this he had scarcely let himself notice Loftis, even though he knew now that the man standing before him was the nearest kin to the remains he had driven all this way to fetch.
“Yes, sir?” he repeated hesitantly.
There was a faint grin on Loftis’ face. “Uh … having trouble?”
The boy smiled back uneasily. “Yeah … Yes, sir. It’s fixed now, though.” He turned toward the engine and opened the hood. “The pipe here …” Poor guy, he thought: I reckon he is grief-stricken.
Loftis leaned over his shoulder. “You know these Packard motors are funny,” Barclay heard him say. “They’re funny. I had a Packard once back in thirty-six. Now I like Packards—I’ve got an Olds now—I like Packards O.K. But I had the damndest time with my feed line. I reckon I took that car down to Pritchard’s five times before I got it straightened out.”
“Yes, sir,” Barclay said. He was pouring water into the radiator, the can held high, his elbow almost in Loftis’ face.
“An Olds I like because of hydramatic drive. Here, let me help you there. …” He took the can and edged in front of Barclay. “Taller than you,” he said with a little chuckle. The water began to slop over the engine and Barclay thought: Hell, I got to go get some more.
“Some people don’t like hydramatic drive. I do. Pickup’s slower and all, that’s true, but if you drive around town as much as I do it’s a pretty good thing.” He put the can down. “My daughter was always after me about getting a convertible; a Packard convertible was what she always wanted. For herself, I mean. You know how kids are about cars.” He looked at Barclay. “How old are you, around twenty? My daughter was a few years older than you she was——” He glanced at his hands. “You got something I can wipe my hands on?”
Barclay handed him a rag, thinking: the poor guy. He watched Loftis’ hands tremble with a sort of palsied agitation, as he rubbed furiously at them.
The poor guy, Barclay thought, wondering: What would Mr. Casper say to make him feel better?
Then Loftis paused, looked around tentatively, aimlessly, as if he considered walking off toward town. His expression was neither of grief nor of fear. It was an expression, Barclay thought with sudden bewilderment, of absolutely nothing at all. He merely stood there, the rag clutched tightly in his hand, his face beaded with sweat but as blandly composed as a deacon’s. I should say, the boy was thinking: I reckon I should say—— But Loftis’ skin was suddenly the color of chalk, an incredible shade of white that Barclay didn’t think possible even in a corpse, let alone alive: the face still composed and expressionless, but as drained of color as if color had never existed there, and Barclay watched in a sort of bewitchment as the dry, bloodless lips parted and said: “I’m sick.”
Loftis said nothing else. Conscious only of a vague commotion around him—people walking through the dust, astonished voices like those of children caught in a sudden rainshower—he stood with one hand lightly, almost casually, resting on the fender, the other hand still clutching the rag. Then leisurely, in the methodical fashion of a sleepwalker, he let the rag drop from his hand and walked away through the dust. As he started off across the street his first thought was: I mustn’t get sick here. I must get to a place where I can vomit—fighting back the nausea which surged up from his belly in hot demanding waves and then, in the near-deserted restaurant, walking past the juke box now mute and gaudy with shifting kaleidoscopic light, red and blue and green, and into the filthy toilet in the rear where in spasms, bending over an unflushed bowl, he was sick.
Afterward he went out and sat on a stool at the edge of the counter where he could watch the limousine—still shaken but feeling better as the nausea subsided, thinking: I’ve got to get hold of myself. I’ve got to be a man. A taxi driver who had been eating at the other end of the counter got up and paid and went out, saying, “See you, Hazel.” Dully, Loftis watched him through the flyspecked window: strolling past, sucking on a toothpick with the poky, shiftless look of taxi drivers south of the Potomac—casual trifling ease. Then he disappeared beyond the window frame. Loftis, looking absently around him, found the place deserted except for Hazel.
“Hiya, what’ll it be?” the woman said. “Ain’t the dust awful?”
“Coffee,” he said.
“Say, you look real sick,” she said. “You must of hung one on last night.” She went back to the coffee urn. There was a familiar sour odor about the place, neither clean nor particularly unclean: grease, stagnant dishwater, flabby, uneatable bakeshop pastries many days old. He gagged and thought he would be sick, and would have been had he not just finished being sick. He started to leave, rose halfway up from the stool, but the woman returned with the coffee, saying: “I seen you run back to the gentleman’s room just now. I figured you was probably sick.” He began to drink the coffee, saying nothing.
“Say, you got the shakes. What you need is a BC.” He made no reply, thinking: If I can last out this day I might be all right. It’ll get well before you’re married, time cures all, must …
“I told Haywood—he’s the driver just left—I told him you looked kind of green. I don’t drink myself although I’ve always said what’s good for the gander’s good for the goose, to turn around an old parable …”
And Helen. I will bring her back to me today, cure her, make her well, tell her that our love never went away at all.
“… deerlord knows a woman’s heavy enough laden to want to hang one on once in a while. In fact …”
He was thinking: Quiet, just hush, quiet—knowing that at another time he would himself have broached any subject of possible interest: the weather, prices, even the God of the Baptists—anything to make conversation. He was a lawyer, he sensed a need for the common touch, and above all he wanted to feel accepted by a class of people with whom he naturally felt ill-at-ease. In his dealings, no matter how casual, with people whose station in life was palpably lower than his own, he felt embarras
sed and guiltily mistrustful. Laundry people, gardeners, Negro handymen appearing at his back door with suppliant grins and appeals for cast-off clothes—all these caused him mild confusion. But long ago, through conscious effort which finally had become a habit, he had found he could disburden himself of any uneasiness by merely talking. And so he had talked, being indeed always the first to talk, even invoking subjects of the wildest absurdity—not only because he wanted to be liked by everyone, which was true, but because he liked to talk, because he liked the round meaningful shapes of words, and because he was afraid of being alone.
But now the woman appalled him, filled him with desperation, and he had a moment’s fright because he didn’t seem to understand a word she said. She seemed to be one with the anxiety and the dust and the nausea: a symbol, horribly purposeful, of all that can plague a man when he most needs peace and repose. She was a tall, raw-boned, sallow blonde of about forty with bulging eyes and pushed-in masculine features. She leaned slackly against a glassed-in case full of razor blades and stale cigars, gazing vacantly out of the window while she talked steadily, stridently and without enthusiasm, as if it made little difference that no one ever agreed with or listened to her—either Loftis now or that echoing, unlistening choir of taxi drivers and trainmen who, drifting in each noonday like flies, gave back to her across the counter what abstracted grunts they could afford between swallows of beer and the slow, indolent buzz of their conversation.
“No,” she was saying, “I got nothing against drinking personally and as I say I can’t see why a woman shouldn’t drink, too, and it’s a known truth that doctors often prescribe intoxicants for certain nervous disorders, ah, my sister-in-law in Newark had a chronic condition of the uterus and had to have it taken out and was prescribed by her doctor to take a shot of whisky each night before retiring …”
Peyton, Peyton, he was thinking; successful as he had been for many hours in forgetting all except the loss of her, she came back now to him swiftly, the thought of her exploding against his consciousness like a fist. A fly lit on the counter in front of him; numbly, he watched the black bearded proboscis probe against some sticky film and withdraw, iridescent wings fanning upward, downward, coquettishly. Somewhere an electric fan droned without end, in a still and constant minor key.