Lilith (12 page)

A short time after this I was wounded by anti-aircraft fire during a raid on a Japanese base at Lifu. A flak fragment hit me in the lower part of the abdomen, chipping off a piece of my left hip bone and leaving a dark-blue, wedge-shaped scar, like a half-closed jackknife. I was sent back to a general hospital at New Caledonia and after three months discharged and returned to the United States.

ON my return to Stonemont I was greeted by my grandfather with an extraordinary demonstration of feeling. In addition to the Purple Heart I had been awarded an Air Medal with four Oak Leaf Clusters, which transported him. This is a decoration which was awarded regularly and almost automatically, after the completion of a certain number of combat hours, and involved no conspicuous valor of any kind—an explanation which my grandfather knowingly rejected. He had the medal framed and hung beside his coat-of-arms above the sofa, and on Palm Sunday, which occurred very shortly after my return, he brought home from church a frond of palm leaf and hung it across the top of the frame; it is still draped there, dry and brown. My grandmother was very quiet, with that luminous, speechless joy of old people that borders upon tears, and she seemed, in her age, to have become more beautiful than I remembered her. She used to come into the parlor in the evenings when I was reading the newspaper and sit beside me on the sofa, taking my hand and pressing it silently between her own while she gazed at me with a look of inexpressible happiness. On the first night of my return, sitting beside me in this fashion, she said softly, “Oh, Sonny, you don’t know how I’ve prayed. You don’t know how often I’ve sat in this room and prayed that God would return you to us.”

“Yes, Grandma. I could tell. I always felt as if you were real close to me.”

“God has been very good to us in our old age.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I smiled at her and, leaning toward her, touched her soft silver hair lightly with my lips. In the pale and radiant sweetness of her presence a flood of images from my youth poured over me, so pure and lovely that they seemed never to have been darkened by the veil of time that had fallen over them: blowing curtains, moonlight on village roofs, wistaria blossoms, the hot golden breath of horses. Oh, my grandmother, your life was a long gentle act of duty and mercy, and I thank you for it. How greatly it weighs in the scales against the darker things I have recorded here!

One evening, shortly after my return, when we were sitting after dinner on the front porch, my grandfather broached again, for the first time since my return, the subject of my future.

“Perhaps you remember, Sonny, that we had a long talk about your education just before you went in the army; and I want you to know that I’m as good as my word. Now, the fall term will be starting in a few months—time flies, you know—and I don’t think it’s too soon to start thinking about getting you enrolled, Lad.”

“I don’t think I’ll go, Grandpa,” I said.

“You don’t think you’ll go?”

“No, sir. I don’t feel as if I’ve earned it.”

I was stricken with remorse, even while the words were forming in my mouth, but I could not restrain myself from speaking them. He sat fondling his pipe bowl with his large hairy fingers in a startled, unmistakably hurt way, and said slowly, with the barest suggestion of a tremble in his voice—a sound which made a pain in my heart: “Why, it wasn’t a question of earning it, Lad. I’m sure you realize that.”

“Well, I just mean that I don’t think I’m the type of person who could profit from it enough to make it worthwhile. If I wanted to go to college now, I could use the G. I. Bill, anyway—for a couple of years.”

We sat for a couple of minutes without speaking, and then he asked softly and humbly, “Well, but this G. I. Bill, Sonny—it wouldn’t see you all the way through, would it? And then I’m sure that you’d get only a very limited allowance outside of your tuition; you’d still need a lot of help, Lad. And I’d be proud to give it to you.”

“Well, anyway, it’s kind of late for that now,” I said. “I’m twenty-two already, and I’m kind of anxious to start working at something.”

“Oh. Yes. I see.” After a moment he added gently, “What kind of work did you have in mind, Sonny?”

I had nothing in mind; my vision of the quiet neighborhood bookstore had vanished with Eric into the Philippine Sea, and nothing had replaced it. But on an inspiration of the moment—or was it, after all, entirely of that moment?—I said suddenly, “Well, I’ve been thinking about Poplar Lodge. Maybe I could get some kind of a job over there, where I could help those people, somehow. Mother always wanted me to do something like that.”

“I don’t have any idea, Lad; but if that’s what you want to do, I think it would be a very fine thing. It’s an honorable kind of work, and I think it would have made your mother happy, as you say. But I don’t know how much of a future you would find in it without a college education behind you.”

“Well, I don’t really care about making a lot of money, or being a great success or anything, Grandpa. I just want some kind of a job where I can make enough money to live on, and maybe do something to help people who aren’t as fortunate as we are.”

“Yes. I had hoped that maybe medicine or law would interest you. Those are fine fields for a young man these days. But of course I wish you great success and happiness in whatever you decide to do; and I want you to know that I’m willing to help you in any way that I can, Lad. It would be an interesting thing to try for a while, anyway.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you very much,” I said. “I think that’s what I’d like to do.”

I COME now to what is properly, as I have said, the beginning of this story—the part of it which concerns Poplar Lodge and which will be, if I have the strength and ability to set it down, a history of that strange transfiguration of the world and of my heart which began when I first entered its grounds and whose spell, in so transcribing it, I hope to break forever. For although it is finished now, I do not know if, having heard such music, one is ever wholly free from it again. Is it unregenerate of me to make such an admission, even now? I hope not; I hope I have become secure enough in honesty to confess that whatever else it may be that has driven me to set it down at all, it is partly this, at least; and if I were to undertake the task with any less candor it would be useless to begin.

A few days after this dialogue with my grandfather I walked, for the first time in my life, up the stone path from the sidewalk toward the huge screened porch behind its pale purple bower of rose-of-Sharon blossoms. It was strange, after so many years of distant, awed speculation about those grounds, to be entering, them; and I had a certain mild sense of trespass—even of desecration—as of one who, by the requirements and privileges of his maturity, is brought at last, a little reluctantly, to invade one of the myths of his childhood. It was a bright warm morning in late April, the early sunlight so hot that the grass was already dry, although it was only eight o’clock, and I saw no one about except a middle-aged man in a soft tweed jacket who was reading a book on one of the stone benches near the driveway. He lifted his head as I approached, and when I said good morning to him he smiled shyly, returning his eyes hurriedly to the pages of his book. The driveway divided in front of the Lodge, one section turning in a loop in front of the main building and the other continuing on past it to the group of cottages beyond. I went up the wide wooden steps and, opening the screen door, entered the long, veranda-like front porch.

I do not know exactly what I expected it to resemble, but I believe I had a pair of rather vague alternate conceptions—either of clinical white-tiled corridors, or of a paneled, deeply carpeted, severely formal look—and it may be that the great contrast between either of these and its actual appearance was responsible for the strange and lasting impression it made on me. It was furnished in the manner of an old-fashioned country hotel, with wicker rocking chairs and settees and a row of ancient cast-iron radiators along the wall. Behind the screens the porch was fitted from floor to ceiling with movable glass shutters of the kind called “jalousies”—now much more common, but at that time the first that I had ever seen—so that it could be used, even throughout the winter, as a kind of greenhouse—a facility which had been exercised with exuberant results, for the whole porch was a veritable jungle of potted plants, their leaves, fronds, trailing vines and blossoms stirring gently in the mild breeze that blew through the screens. There were rubber trees in wooden tubs; enormous
Monstera
plants with deeply lobate, darkly glittering leaves; tiers of begonias of every variety, some with sinister-looking, dark-red, hairy foliage and tiny delicate pom-poms of salmon-colored blossom; hanging moss baskets from which long trailers of Wandering Jew drooped stilly; harlequin plants with splashed and speckled leaves of pink and white; brown orchids, their blossoms shuddering in the green gloom; the scarlet maws of tuberous begonias; and a latticed panel of climbing philodendrons, worked with wonderful accidental patterns of coiled vine and tremblingly suspended heart-shaped shields, each with its tip turned downward, like a heraldic tapestry of luminous and translucent green.

Although the porch faced north, the light seemed to reach and penetrate it (in that curiously oblique manner in which the Lodge was always illumined from without) and, stained and muted by the leaves, filled the whole veranda with an aqueous, pale-green radiance. I can think of nothing it resembled so much as the silent sun deck of an ancient liner, sunken in cool green water and filled with gently waving sea grasses, through which pale rays of light fell downward from the surface. It did not seem extraordinary to suppose that I would see in a moment, flickering through the dense, dim atmosphere, a school of dainty, coral-colored fishes, coming to nibble at my lips and eyeballs and my bleached and wrinkled finger tips; or a great golden carp, gliding between my arm and body with inquisitive, graceful languor, plump and cool and slippery, coated with burnished slime. I filled the vacant wicker chairs with imaginary, drowned passengers who would sit forever, staring out across the railings of the glassed-in deck while the little coral fishes nibbled the flesh from their faces, their chairs rocking gently in the current until their skulls fell off into their laps. They had watched me as a boy, walking past with my grandfather and delivering groceries to the far houses on summer afternoons. One of them, a slender girl with floating yellow hair, smiled with frayed lips to see me standing at the back of a grocery truck and staring in, astonished, from the street.

I stood for several moments, entirely bemused by this atmosphere and somehow loath to interrupt it. It was as if the myth which, a few moments before, I had felt a certain rue at having to intrude upon and dispel, rather than submitting to any such subversion on my part, had begun, on the contrary, to absorb me into it, as many of the fallen cultures of antiquity—a subject of constant fascination to me in my school days—had seduced and assimilated their invaders.

The main building itself, as I saw when I had entered it through the large double doors which opened onto the veranda, although much more formal and institutional in appearance, was pervaded with this same strangely oppressive atmosphere—an atmosphere not of dilapidation (for to say this would not be justified by the cleanliness and order with which it was maintained) but of decline—a sad, silent air of debility, which was evoked, I think, by the fact that the building had been erected not as an asylum but as a home. Everywhere was dignified and tragic evidence of its former purpose: hand-wrought brass hardware, antique doorknobs and key plates of fine Limoges china in pastel-colored floral designs—now chipped and crazed with age—lintels and wainscoting of hand-carved oak, marble-paneled mantels, the fluting of their decorative columns crusted and blunted with countless layers of shiny-surfaced, “practical” paint, and a magnificent plaster ceiling with dentiled molding and, at its center, a huge circular frieze of flying cherubs, massed about the vacant base of a deracinated chandelier. There was a melancholy obsolescence about this elegance, and a painful incongruity between the quiet graceful life it had been built to house and the madness which, with disturbing facility, it had been converted to contain. The ground floor had been given over entirely to administrative quarters, and the huge old high-ceilinged rooms divided into small offices, consulting rooms, a medical library and a lounge, furnished with chintz-covered chairs and an upholstered sofa. In this room a young nurse in a blue-and-white uniform sat holding a paper cup of coffee in one hand and leafing through a magazine. When I paused in the doorway she looked up pleasantly and asked if she could help me.

“Yes, I wanted to apply for a job. I wonder if you could tell me who to see.”

“Oh. Miss Crowe is in charge of personnel. Her office is just at the end of the hall, on the right.”

“Thank you.”

I found the office open and Miss Crowe, a middle-aged nurse in an all-white uniform, with gray hair and glasses, sitting behind a desk which bore her name on a brass plaque. She looked up and smiled at me as I entered. I said, “Good morning,” rather stiffly, in a sudden spasm of self-consciousness, and added abruptly that I wished to apply for a job.

“I see. What sort of work did you want to do? Is it a professional position?”

“Well, no, I’m not qualified for any kind of professional work. I thought there might be some kind of a job as an attendant, or something of that kind.”

“Yes. Well, I’m in charge of the nursing staff—which includes the floor attendants—and I’m afraid there isn’t anything at all right now. But I think there might be something in Occupational Therapy. That’s Miss Brice’s department, if you’d like to inquire.”

“Yes, I would.”

“Well, her office is outside. It’s the first little cottage on the right as you go down the drive. It’s a tiny little place—I don’t think you can miss it.”

“Thank you very much.”

“I’m not sure she’s in right now, but she ought to be soon.”

“Thank you.”