Lilith (20 page)
She lifted her face to me wearily. “No, there are not many.”
I remember feeling a distinct sense of relief at Bob’s re-entry into the room and at the cheerful clink of china which accompanied it.
She served us tea, boiling the water on a small hot plate which she kept in her closet and handing the cups to us with a sedate formality that seemed half parody and half genuine demureness. There were alternate sunlight and shadow on the windowpane which made her hair flame and then wane suddenly, like a blown fire.
Once I looked up from my teacup to see her smiling at me. “Do you think I am successful as a chatelaine, Mr. Bruce?” she asked.
I said I was not sure what the word meant.
“The mistress of a great estate. I like to pretend that I am, sometimes, with many handsome, earnest knights to serve me. Is that what you call a delusion, Mr. Clayfield?”
“Not if you can distinguish it as such,” Bob said.
“Oh, I can,” she said. “You all help me to make the distinction constantly, by so generously refusing to be chivalrous.”
“I don’t call that fair.” Bob said. “Aren’t we always the soul of courtesy?”
“And yet you wouldn’t let me have tin snips in my room to cut the brass for my . . . for my metalwork.”
“Tin snips are also very useful for cutting the wire from windows.”
She smiled and lifted her chin reproachfully, murmuring, “
Honi soit qui mal y pense.
I wish you would make that the motto of this house.”
“What is yours?” I asked, raising my eyes to the printed words on the wall above her bed.
“Oh, mine is very different. Only your mottoes are about evil. Ours are always about joy.” She did not offer to explain it literally, however, but turned her eyes to the window and sat staring at the wet pane. In a moment she set down her teacup and asked, “May I go for a walk?”
“It’s raining,” Bob said.
“Only a little, now and then. And if it starts to rain heavily I promise to come in right away.” Bob stared at her with a droll look of severity. “I’ll be very good,” she murmured.
“All right. But I’ll make you remember that promise if you aren’t.”
“You really are very good to me!” she cried, jumping up delightedly. “I’m sorry I said such hateful things about you. Will you forgive me?”
As we went down in the elevator she stood beside me, staring at the round leather insignia which I had not yet cut from the breast of the old flight jacket I was wearing: a snarling black cat imposed upon the scarlet numeral 13.
“What does it mean?” she asked, touching it with her finger tip.
“It’s my squadron insignia, from the war.”
She ran her finger over the brightly painted surface of the leather disk and asked placidly, “Have you been in a war?”
“Yes, I just got back from one.”
“And are you a hero?”
“No.”
“No, I thought not. It doesn’t fit you properly.”
Bob had no sooner opened the elevator door than she bounded out of it with the fresh, wild gaiety of an uncaged animal and began to run joyfully about the wet grass of the lawn.
“Oh, it’s wonderful!” she called to us. “Come and see. Take off your shoes and run. It feels so wonderful!”
Bob shook his head and smiled. We stood watching her with our hands in our pockets, feeling faintly self-conscious at the somewhat ignominious contrast between her exuberant beauty and our own air of rather uneasily preserved authority. Yet it was delightful to watch her running and pirouetting under the rainy trees, her yellow hair splashing and her blue skirt billowing about her bare legs, vaulting over the stone benches and leaping high into the air sometimes to catch the lower branches of the willows and shake down a shower of raindrops from the wet leaves. She would brush them out of her hair and eyes, laughing with pleasure and shivering with their coldness on her bare arms. When it began to rain again—as it did very soon—she came quite obediently, panting from her run, and stood beside us on the steps of Field House under the shelter of the eaves.
The lawn had been mowed the evening before, and there were many little blades of wet grass stuck to her feet and ankles. She crouched down to remove them, her chin resting on her knee and her hair falling in damp strands across her face as she plucked the grass blades singly from her skin.
“Oh, there are hundreds!” she said impatiently. “I’m covered with them. Mr. Bruce, won’t you help me?”
It seemed so innocent and natural an appeal that one could not refuse without appearing unpleasantly officious or prudish, or without producing a delicately complicated set of reactions which would have been far more provocative, I felt, than a good-natured, spontaneous compliance. Yet, as I knelt down to help her I could not help feeling a faint throe of misgiving as to the entire propriety of my doing so; and I was troubled that evening, as my journal indicates, by the memory of the panting girl with her damp skirts and ragged shining hair, smiling softly as I knelt before her to pick the bright-green blades of wet grass from her white feet.
These trips were scheduled only tentatively, as, being outdoor projects, they depended for their success on the weather; but as the showers of the previous day had cleared away completely, Bea decided, at the morning meeting, that the trip should take place. Mandel, Wren Thomas—one of the Antioch students—and Bob Clayfield were assigned as escorts, and I was very greatly pleased that Bea asked me to accompany them. It was, on this occasion, a small group of only eight patients, with most of whom I was already acquainted: Warren Evshevsky; Howard Thurmond, the giggling second-floor patient; Sonia Behrendt; Mr. Palakis, the Dostoevski enthusiast; and Lilith Arthur. Those whom I knew only briefly were Daniel Hagan, a scowling middle-aged Irishman from Field House, and two girls from Second Floor. Bea gave us instructions about accidents, insubordination and so forth, and cautioned us especially about keeping Warren and Lilith under surveillance.
“It must be done tactfully, of course,” she said, “but firmly and frankly, nevertheless. Warren, of course, will consider it a heaven-sent opportunity, so you’ll have to be careful that he doesn’t annoy her. Vincent, you can make that your special province, if you like; you get along with him very well. Lilith almost never signs for these trips, and Dr. Lavrier is delighted that she has. We want to encourage her to take more of them, so try to keep her from getting upset. We’ve made special sandwiches for her—no meat or eggs—and I think you ought to let her take her flute, or prisms, or anything else she might want to bring along. I just hope she doesn’t back out before you get her in the car; that’s what usually happens.”
Bea’s fears were justified; when we knocked at Lilith’s door there was no answer. Bob knocked again and asked if she was ready.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Come in.”
She was sitting in her window seat playing with a pair of crystal prisms, which, as we talked, she would hold in the sunlight to cast miniature rainbows, sometimes upon the white flesh of her forearm, sometimes upon the sill or through a square of pale-blue silk that she held draped across her fingers, peering all the while with soft fascination at the livid, glowing bars of color of the projected spectrums and varying the effects she produced in many imaginative and often startling ways. She would let the rays of chromatically divided light fall on a mirror, and from there reflect them to the wall or ceiling where they would form quivering, vivid, many-colored patches of illumination; or sometimes fit the prisms together, their bases opposed, so that the light would enter through one apex and, after being broken into its band of bitter primary hues and then recomposed—re-fused, as it were—in its passage through the crystal, emerge from the other as white light again, its purity and integrity restored.
“We’re waiting for you, Miss Arthur,” Bob said. She breathed on one of the prisms and polished it gently on her sleeve, her eyes declined.
“I’m sorry, I don’t think I can go.”
“Why can’t you go?” he asked.
“They told me not to.”
“Who told you?”
“My people.” She turned her face toward us with a look of genuine regret. “I wanted to go very much. But they came last night and told me that it would be unwise. I mustn’t disobey them.”
“But you signed to go,” Bob said.
“Yes. That was why they came.”
We stood staring at her for a moment in silence, baffled by her unseen counselors. She closed her eyes and turned the prism slowly, casting the light upon her lids, where it lay in tremulous, beautiful disintegration. “It doesn’t matter very much, does it?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter to us,” Bob said. “But I think it would do you a lot of good. You haven’t had a trip for months.”
“I know. And I wanted to see the falls. Are they very high?”
“Yes. It’s a beautiful sight.”
“It must be lovely.” She opened her eyes slightly, still holding the prism to cast the light upon her face, and murmured from behind her mask of luminous motley, “Are you going, then, Mr. Bruce?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I would have liked to talk to you again. But I mustn’t disobey them. You have no idea how they torment me when I do.”
“Why did they say it was unwise?” Bob asked.
“Because I would have to eat meat.”
“No; we’ve made you a special lunch.”
“You’re very kind.”
“So you see, you have nothing to fear. You can bring your paints, if you like, and do a picture. You needn’t speak to a soul if you don’t feel like it.”
She lifted her head with an expression of grateful appeal. “Really? You wouldn’t mind? I can’t stand it when they babble and cluster around me. Especially in the cars. I can’t breathe.”
“You can sit by a window, if you like,” Bob said. “It isn’t a long drive, anyway.”
She set the prisms down on the window sill and began to tie the blue silk scarf about her throat, saying with an air of gentle reproach, as if to indict us for having persuaded her, “I’ll come, then. I’ll be punished, but I will.”
Bob and Mandel drove the two limousines, while Wren and I, sitting on the back seat of either car, kept order among the patients. As it was a fine warm morning, and they were full of the cheerful excitement of the outing, this was not difficult. Lilith sat directly in front of me beside Bob, turned away to face out of the open window so that, from the rear seat, I could see her plainly, clasping her flying, snapping hair to her head with her spread fingers, her eyes narrowed and her lips a little parted, drinking the wind with a ravenous, intoxicated look.
Great Falls is a beautiful and awesome place, only a few miles from Stonemont, where the waters of the Potomac, thundering down from the sheer granite shelves of the Piedmont Plateau, run roaring and foaming over a mile-long race of deep, boulder-strewn rapids. The banks are very high at this point, rising over a thousand yards above the boiling channels below, and half a mile across this vast stone cauldron one can see the green, heavily forested slopes of the Virginia shore. There are observation platforms cut out of the rocky cliffs, railed with iron pipe and furnished with coin-operated telescopes; but what is more enjoyable is to lie flat on the great gray boulders in the sunlight, staring up into the blue sky and listening to the endless thunder of the falls below, or to roam among the willow and laurel thickets of the many narrow islands which have been sliced off from the mainland and isolated by a network of vagrant torrents, threading off from the main body of the river. Here one can search for herons or blackberries, or plunge one’s wrist into the icy water of the inshore channels to bring up, cold and dripping in one’s clenched fingers, a round, bright, perfectly polished pebble that has spun chortling for centuries in one of the worn potholes of the shore. Although a beautiful and unusual place, it was one that would require, because of its many natural hazards, exceptional vigilance from we attendants, and I was filled with determination to justify Bea’s confidence in sending me along as escort.
To reach the falls one must cross the old Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which runs parallel with the Potomac as far as Cumberland. Although its former purpose as a freight canal has been long outmoded by the railroads, the locks are still maintained, and many of the tollhouses—fine old buildings made of native granite—have been restored. At Great Falls there is a splendid one that has been made into a museum and luncheon pavilion; here we parked the limousines and unpacked our provisions. Lilith had brought her paints in a wooden box, a drawing pad and a portable easel with collapsible legs. As I was removing them from the trunk, Warren, who as a matter of discretion had been placed in the other car, approached us and asked in a voice of hesitant reverence if he might carry the equipment for her. As the question was addressed to Lilith, and obviously constituted a grave and courteous overture on his part, I felt that in spite of my authority it was not my province to answer and that she should be allowed to indicate for herself whether or not she desired his company. But Lilith, after gazing at him for a moment, turned to me with a winsome air of submissiveness and said, “Why, I don’t know. May he, Mr. Bruce?”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “Can you manage the easel and box both, Warren? I’ll take one of the lunch baskets, if you can.”
“Oh, yes, easily.”
He accepted the burdens happily, and, joining the group, we crossed the small bridge that spans the canal and followed a well-worn footpath through the thickets beyond toward the river. The small islands along the riverbank are joined by a series of wooden foot bridges built over the rushing torrents which divide them. We crossed these cautiously, pausing sometimes to lean on the sleeve-worn handrails and stare down at the swift, glassy turbulence of the water below. I thought several times that Warren would speak to her, but his initiative appeared to have been exhausted by his offer to carry her baggage, and he seemed content to stand shyly, following the direction of her eyes with his own and then returning them unobtrusively to her face, as if simply to share some common object of vision with her made him mysteriously happy. Once she set down her paintbox and, catching her hair in two strands with her hands, leaned over the railing and spit into the stream. The white patch of her spittle slid down swiftly over the glittering surface, dissolving as it did so, and disappeared beneath the planks of the bridge. Warren laughed softly with a strangely primitive sound of delight which I found quite unpleasant.