Lilith (35 page)

“You’re going out into the world today,” I said. “And you must dress as the world demands.”

“Won’t you take me if I don’t?”

“No.”

“But I haven’t worn shoes in so long. They’ll hurt my feet.”

“You must get used to suffering again.”

“Oh, you’re going to be sententious! I won’t go at all, if you’re going to be like that. I thought you wanted me to be happy, and I find you only want to make me suffer. You should be ashamed.”

She made me feel altogether ridiculous with these words, and I watched in penitent silence while she searched in her closet, where, after much rummaging about, she discovered a pair of little black ballet slippers, which she stooped to slip onto her feet.

“There. You see what sacrifices I make for you? Will they think I am respectable now?”

“I believe so. As you say, they are very easily deceived.”

She laughed and lifted her head toward me in an intimate and affectionate way that made my heart beat quickly. We descended in the elevator in a kind of silent gaiety, shyly and excitedly avoiding each other’s eyes. She seemed not to have considered how we should get to the tournament, and the sight of the limousine made her eyes sparkle with amused surprise. She entered it silently and demurely, smiling while I started the car and drove it slowly down the curve of the drive. When we had entered the street and driven for a few hundred yards along it she said, “I had no idea you could drive a car. How did you learn?”

“I learned in the army,” I said.

“Really? You don’t look at all as if you could drive. I wanted to see you riding a horse, and here you are driving this huge machine instead. It makes me feel as if you had been deceiving me somehow.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know any other way to get there. It’s much too far to bicycle.” I turned to smile at her. “I haven’t been deceiving you, anyway. It’s just a sort of incidental skill that I’ve picked up.”

“I know. One must be very skillful to live in your world; and I hadn’t thought of you at all as a skillful person. I’m terrified of them.”

“Not of me?” I said.

“I don’t know. I don’t really know anything about you, Vincent. Sometimes I have the feeling that you may do me harm.”

This exchange made a brief hiatus in our happy intimacy. I glanced at her and saw that she sat with a huddled and forlorn look in the corner of the limousine. To get to Kingston, where the tournament was to be held, it was necessary to go through Stonemont and take the north road out of town. As we passed the county courthouse a flag on the tall white pole above the portico was ranting in the blue air, snapping and snarling as if delivering an hysterical manifesto. Lilith watched it with a subdued look of fear.

“Have you been downtown before?” I asked.

“No, not for months. Maybe it’s years; I can’t remember.”

“It isn’t much of a town,” I said somewhat apologetically, for the streets seemed suddenly to have been humbled by her presence.

“But I want to see it. It’s what you want me to come back to, isn’t it? I know it must be wonderful.”

As we entered the commercial section of the street she sat up attentively, looking out at the shop windows with restored interest. While we paused at the traffic light—Stonemont’s single one, an ancient ornamental device, suspended on cables over the center of the principal intersection—she peered with innocent curiosity into the window of Wingate’s Pharmacy, on the opposite curb. Under her scrutiny I became aware for the first time, really, of the ignobility of its contents. There were boxes and bottles of depilatories, mouth washes, cosmetics, perfumes, deodorants, razors, rubber syringes, aspirin, sleeping tablets, cigarettes, and even canned beer—a whole museum of devices, I realized with a kind of personal mortification, for producing illusions of the least glorious sort—for making the human mind less sensitive, less prone to its perceptions, less original; and the human body less restless, less beastlike in appearance, less repugnant in odor, and sterile. Beside these wares there was also a glittering pyramidal display, in brightly bound paper covers, of the New Testament, the Baghavad Gita and a savagely illustrated novel entitled
Dead Virgins Don’t Sing
. In one corner of the window there was a two-color printed poster advertising a double feature at the local cinema:
The Voice of the Turtle
and
The Fiend from Outer Space
.

Lilith turned to smile at me gently. “It
is
wonderful,” she said, “but do you really want me to exchange my loom and my flute for these wonders?”

I could produce no more than an embarrassed murmur in reply, and felt greatly relieved when the light had changed and I could turn the corner and proceed down the upper length of Main Street. At the end of it stood the music shop into whose window I had so often stared with fascination as a child. I slowed the car instinctively to peer in through the dusty glass at the ancient dulcimer which lay there in the sunlight. (This was an invariable and rather anxious habit of mine, for I dreaded the day when mysteriously, apocalyptically, it would be gone and put forever beyond my reach.) Lilith’s eyes lit softly at the sight of the old wine-colored instrument.

“Oh, how lovely,” she said. “What is it doing here? A dulcimer!”

“I don’t know. It’s been there as long as I can remember.”

“What a nice old shop. I’d like to go in there; is it closed?”

“Yes, I think it must have gone out of business long ago; it’s never been open as long as I can remember. But the dulcimer has always been there. I always wanted to play it, when I was a boy. I used to think that I’d buy it some day and learn to.”

“Why didn’t you, ever?”

“I don’t know—it seemed like kind of a silly thing to do. People said it was, anyway.”

“What people?”

“Well, a girl I used to know.”

She turned toward me curiously. “A girl? Was she your sweetheart?”

“I guess so. I used to think she was.”

“What happened to her, Vincent?”

“Well, she married somebody else, while I was away.”

“Oh.” She turned back to watch the old shop front lingeringly as we drove beyond it, asking in a moment, “Would you still like to play it, Vincent?”

“Oh, I don’t think I could, now,” I said. “And I don’t know if I really want to any more. I have a feeling it would disappear, anyway—crumble away or something—if I touched it.”

She looked at me softly—again with that scarifying look of tenderness—and laid her hand gently on the back of my own, where it rested on the wheel.

“You would have played it beautifully,” she said.

We had driven on beyond the last commercial buildings of the street, and as we entered the open highway Lilith turned to look back for a moment at the diminishing brick and timber façades of the town with the tall portico of the courthouse rising above them. “You have such an angry flag,” she said. She dropped her head, spreading her fingers on the gray upholstery of the automobile seat and falling into thoughtful silence.

It took us an hour to drive to Kingston, a tiny hill town in the shadow of Sugar Loaf. It is one of the loveliest towns in central Maryland, a Revolutionary village with a green, an ancient stone well with a shingled roof, and a main street lined with narrow sagging houses of weathered clapboard. There were beautiful black cockerels with scarlet combs strutting in the sunlight, and the whole town was full of the scent of roses and wild jasmine. Lilith leaned from the open window, her face as radiant, almost, as the sunlight itself, with happiness.

“Oh, Vincent, it
is
beautiful!” she said. “I think you have found me an enchanted village!”

I was more than in accord with this opinion, for on looking into the window of the music shop, we seemed to have left behind us, figuratively as well as in fact, all the ugly merchandise and prosaism of the town; and the morning with its roses, its strutting burnished cockerels and its soft sunlight on the fieldstone of the old cellars seemed indeed to have become a song.

The tournament was to be held in a grove of gray oaks beyond a wooden church at the outskirts of the village. We drove toward it slowly under the clumsily lettered muslin banners that hung above the street, blowing our horn in festive warning to the crowds who drifted with us toward the grounds. Although it was only eleven o’clock, there were already many of them, and the Methodist congregation who were patrons of the event were busily setting up refreshment booths, barbecue pits, ring tosses and horseshoe pitches. An old man with an official’s badge pinned to his faded blue work shirt directed our parking on a square of green lawn in front of the church, and we left the car to saunter about the grounds.

I had experienced, as we left the hospital, a somewhat fugitive feeling, a sense of guilty abdication, which, in spite of my excitement at the adventure, had made me uneasy and unable to appreciate entirely even the air of “enchantment” of the village; but as we strolled about under the old oaks, cool in our summer clothes, among the stir and shouting of the crowd, I felt this anxiety fade away into the warm fragrant air, and became aware of a growing easy delight, a sense of long-desired escape and of private intimacy, like that of eloping lovers, which all the while made me smile to myself with achievement and, even more, with anticipation—for I had still my great surprise to announce to her! There were men carrying long wooden trestle tables up from the basement of the church and setting them in rows under the shade of the trees; already a horseshoe pit had been established, and from far away under the oaks came the ringing clang of metal and the sudden bursts of applausive laughter of onlookers; an electrician in white overalls, clinging to the branches of a giant oak and cheerfully rejecting the suggestions of grinning farmhands underneath, was stringing up a loudspeaker system above the picnic tables. All these preparations Lilith watched in happy silence, looking into my face sometimes to smile as she walked beside me. I did not speak either, for I was so acutely aware of every move she made, and often, when her summer dress or her loose hair brushed against me, so tremblingly sensitive to her presence that I hardly trusted my voice. She stood laughing to watch two small boys staggering with a zinc washtub full of chunks of ice and floating dark-green watermelons. When she called to them they set it down and came shyly to stand in front of her with downcast faces.

Lilith knelt to look into their eyes. “It must be very heavy,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am, it’s right heavy,” the older of the boys said. “And you’ve splashed your trousers with water. It must feel lovely and cool.”

“Yes, ma’am, it does, because that’s real hot work.”

“Hit’s real hot work,” the smaller boy said.

Lilith smiled at him. “How much are your watermelons?” she asked.

“Twenty-five cents,” the older boy said. “The big ones is twenty-five cents.”

“And how much is the ice?”

“We’re not sellin’ the ice, ma’am.”

“Oh. I think I’d rather have a piece of ice. Do you think you could let me have just a tiny piece?”

“Yes, ma’am.” They walked soberly ahead of her to the tub and he lifted a dripping kitchen knife from the water.

“I want to chop it,” Lilith said. I had a moment of anxiety as he handed the knife to her, but she crouched down beside the tub and hacked at the floating ice with innocent absorption, the pale-blue splinters flashing in the sunlight. She dipped her hand into the tub and picked out a lump of ice, holding it in her palm like a cold sparkling jewel.

“It’s like a diamond,” Lilith said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

She lifted her hand and took the ice into her mouth from the flat of her palm.

“She swallit a diman,” the small one said.

“Hit’d cut her all up inside, if it was,” the older boy said. “She’d bleed. Dimans ah hard.” He watched, fascinated, while Lilith bit the lump of ice, shuddering as she swallowed the cold chips. Her teeth made a sharp ferocious sound. “You bitin’ it, ain’t you?” he said.

“Yes. I ate the diamond. Do you want to see my blood?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Touch my lips.” He reached out shyly and laid his finger tips on them. Now look.”

“Hit ain’t none,” he said, withdrawing and examining his hand. “I known you was foolin’.”

“Oh, there is, but you can’t see it, because it’s clear, like water.”

“She got white blood,” the small one said.

“Yes. What color is yours?”

“Mine’s red,” the older boy said. “I get cut a lot.”

“No, it’s blue,” Lilith said. She raised her hand and touched the fine blue vein that ran down his throat. “Hot and blue.” He stood with a quality of somber obedience under her touch. “I can’t pay you for the diamond,” she said in a moment. “I have no money. Shall I give you a kiss instead?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She leaned forward slowly and pressed her lips against the shallow hollow of his temple. As she did so she murmured something which made him drop his head.

“We’ll have to hurry if you want to see the horses in the paddock,” I said. “They’ll be running soon.”

“Yes, Vincent.”

She stood up and smiled down at them. “Goodbye. And thank you; it was delicious.”

“How come she to kiss you, Jerome?” the smaller boy asked. “Hush. Because,” the older one said. He added softly in a moment, “She had real cold lips.”

He stood watching us, bemused, as we walked away. Lilith turned to wave to them.

“How sweet they are!”

“Do you like children?” I asked.

“Yes. They’re so alive, so aware. And so wise!”

“Would you like to have some of your own?” I said, watching her. Her face changed utterly at this question. All the animation faded from it instantly, leaving her with a still, austere expression, almost frightening in its suddenness and severity. She lowered her eyes, saying, “No,” in a dull, tense voice that was very foreign to her; and I was forbidden by her demeanor to pursue the topic.

We had come to a clearing in the oaks where the list was being roped off with long yellow coils of new hemp cord. Inside the boundaries there were men on stepladders decorating the arches from which the rings were to be hung, wrapping the wooden poles with red and blue crepe-paper bunting.