Lilith (43 page)
shrill
harp
burgeoning
hyena
lips
flee
roses
after
spume
blinding
stone
roses
It is useless, you see. A prescription from an amateur metaphysician! But taken constantly, I think, it would cure one of the malady of innocence.
Some day it may be interesting to remember the sequence of things that caused me to produce this curious recipe: First, clouds—blown into the air like the flaxen froth of milkweed pods by the breath of witches. And then the light lisping patter of her ballet slippers as she walks beside me along Montgomery Avenue, her head lifted to behold her clouds. A bee droning like a diamond drill against the panes of summer silence. A woman in a rocking chair on a front porch with a great book in her lap, reading to a little boy who sits on the wooden steps in front of her with his face in his hands and his heart in Arcady. A tiger moth floating over jeweled hedges, trailing pennons of vermilion velvet. Two cardinals, a kite string dangling from an elm, hot stone steaming where the spray from a sprinkler darkens it, the odor of verbena—and then, suddenly, rolling from behind a hedge with a charming old-fashioned gravity, as if from the pages of the
Hagerstown Almanacs
stacked up beside the wardrobe in the attic, a child’s hoop (a wicker barrel band, really), bouncing over the curb, across the street, and falling with a quickening circular spin in the opposite gutter. A boy of nine or ten runs down the walk and stands in dismay at the curb, appealing to us while he plucks the buttons of his blouse in agitation. He is not allowed to cross the street, he says. But Lilith is. I allow her. She runs merrily across the black, elm-shadowed asphalt, bends down to snatch up the wooden hoop and rolls it back across the street with her finger tips, dancing behind it like a Druidess. She halts it at the curb and puts it over the child’s head, tugging gently at the rim. He stands, delighted, yoked, in shy servility.
“If it were my hoop,” Lilith says, “I would fasten ribbons to the rim, and they would flutter when it rolled.”
“That’s a good idea, ma’am. I never thought of that.”
“And you could fasten little bells inside it, and they’d tinkle.”
“Yes, ma’am, I could; but they’d cost right much.”
“Then I must get them for you. Vincent, we have some money, haven’t we? It can come out of my allowance.”
Uneasily, although I can think of no specific reason to protest, I take a quarter out of the little purse in which I carry patients’ spending money and hand it to her. She presses it into his palm, closing his fingers over it.
“There. But remember, it’s only for the bells.”
“Yes, ma’am. I sure do thank you.”
“I’ll come by in a few days. When? On Thursday, Vincent?” (Drawing a silent, apprehensive consent from my eyes.) “Yes, on Thursday—and see how you have fixed it.”
“Yes, ma’am. I reckon I can get a half dozen of ‘em with this, anyhow.”
“But you mustn’t forget to be here. I want to hear it tinkle.”
“No, ma’am, I won’t.”
She lays her hand on his head for a moment, her smile fading while she looks into his eyes. We walk on down the street in a chafing, peaceless silence until I mutter churlishly, “I don’t think you should have done that—given him money like that.”
“Why, Vincent?”
“Children are selfish and . . . capricious, anyway. There’s no sense appealing to the worst in them.”
“Oh, I hate to hear that!” she says with defiant impatience. “You are all so terrified of children. I think you really hate them. You’re so afraid of their purity, of their honesty, of their ability to love. They’re the only ones who
can
love—truly—in your world; and it makes you ashamed!” There is a contempt in her eyes which scalds me, seeming, as it does, to include me in the alien and wretched category for whom it is intended. She stares down the street ahead of us, her face flushed lightly, lifting her hand in a moment to clutch her hair thoughtfully. She leaves her arm dangling there, her head bowed with its weight. “But to know that kind of love,” she murmurs, “that pure unselfconscious, freshly minted desire. To possess a child—oh, that would be exquisite!”
I cannot speak. I do not even look at her. My face has gone pale, my hands cold, with a nauseous revulsion. We walk on down the street, our footsteps sounding oddly hollow on the stone—perhaps because I have the sudden dire impression that it is laid upon a vacuum; the blocks of cement are fitted carefully together over an enormous void.
This will be our next adventure in ecstasy, then! And I shall be expected to help her achieve it, of course! I thought I had already reached the depths of degradation, but it seems I have only begun. I am still a novice in the ways of joy! I cannot see any solution to it; I have become a kind of loathsome procurer for her. If I try to think about it rationally, my mind becomes a cauldron of hysterical remorse; if I abandon the effort—if I lapse into a wan, thoughtless despair—then I feel this profound, this indescribably complex, this sovereign dread.
When will it be? On Thursday? How will she manage it? Will she depend on some felicitous accident—like a thunderstorm—or is she planning it already? I wait in an abominable, fascinated anticipation of her ingenuity.
Lord, what is the answer? Is there no solution to this bestial dilemma but to submit to it? No answer. Stare into the bowl, smiling softly. Watch the flakes of tinsel drifting from her wand, the Siamese fishes nibbling her blind, soulless eyes, her rotting hair and decomposing dress falling slowly from her bright china body. Something true will be unclothed. Something indestructible will be revealed, and will remain.
I wondered whether Laura was the same, too. I felt, in spite of the superficial changes I had seen in her on the single occasion when we had met since my return, that she was; and hoped, with a fervor that amounted almost to prayer, that I was not mistaken. I wanted to see her once again and be reassured of it—to hear her humorless talk, to watch her patting her plump moist throat with a white handkerchief, to witness her sober, diligent, invincible propriety, which I remembered like a rejected, long-forgotten blessing.
As if in answer to this rueful invocation the porch light suddenly switched on above the door, bathing the wooden floor and the front steps in an aura of amber-colored light; and almost immediately afterward the front door opened inward, revealing in its widening rectangle of illumination Laura’s sturdy, indestructible silhouette. She carried a milk bottle in each hand, bending to set them down on the porch floor. As she did so I made a swift involuntary movement of withdrawal into the darkness, startled and—in spite of my nebulous desire to see and speak with her again—chagrined at being discovered in such a strange and unexpected attitude of apparent supplication. But I caught my toe in a crack of the sidewalk as I turned, and the sound of my stumbling made her raise her head. She stared into the darkness for a moment, her vision apparently impaired by the surrounding circle of light; then, catching sight of me at last, she stood up quickly and stepped out onto the porch floor, calling softly, “Vincent?”
“Oh, hello, Laura,” I said with an idiotic attempt at casualness.
“Why, Vincent—my goodness, what in the world are you doing here?” She spoke with a hesitant, appealing modest quality of surprise, as if she might have sensed and respected my nostalgia.
“Oh, I was out taking a walk, and I just happened to be passing by.”
“Oh. Yes, it’s a lovely night, isn’t it?” We stood for a moment in gentle embarrassment. “It’s very nice to see you again. Are you in a hurry?”
“Well, I’m just out walking.”
“We’re just about to have our coffee. Why don’t you stop in for a minute? Would you like to have a cup with us?”
“Oh, I don’t want to interrupt your dinner or anything.”
“No; we’ve finished dinner. We’re just going to have some coffee in the living room. Why don’t you come in? I know Norman would like to meet you very much.”
“Well, if you’re sure it isn’t any bother. I’d like to meet him, too.”
The last emotion in the world with which I would have expected myself to enter that house again—particularly on the occasion of my being presented to her husband—was the humble, redescending calm which I felt as I went up the front walk and mounted the wooden steps. Laura held the door open for me, saying as I passed her into the hall, “We just had a late snack tonight, because Norman has to go to the United Citizens’ meeting in a little while.”
“Oh, I see. Well, are you sure it won’t hold him up, or anything?”
“Oh, no; we always have coffee after dinner, anyway.”
While she switched off the porch light I stood uncomfortably for a moment in the hall, nodding and smiling rather foolishly through the open door at Norman, who, having arisen to investigate the intrusion, stood in the middle of the parlor floor clutching a newspaper in his hand and nodding back at me with vague affability. Laura guided me by the elbow into the parlor—a look of rapt anticipation developing on her husband’s face as I approached him—and said in a voice of artificial gentility, “Norman, this is Vincent Bruce, that I told you so much about.”
“Well, how do you
do
!” His strange, tense look of expectancy broke suddenly into one of joyful revelation as he thrust the newspaper under his arm and held out his hand to me. “My golly, we’ve been long enough waiting for this pleasure!”
I shook his hand rather weakly, muttering, “How do you do, Norman. It certainly is a pleasure to meet you finally.”
He was a small man of about thirty-eight with a gray face, thinning ash-colored hair through which his scalp gleamed yellowly, and a manner which corresponded exactly with his gray, pained, avid and oddly resolute eyes.
“Vincent just happened to be passing by when I went out with the milk bottles,” Laura said. “He’s going to have a cup of coffee with us.”
“Well, that’s fine. Wonderful.” He waved his newspaper at the sofa, retreating toward it invitingly while he spoke. “Come on and sit down, Vince, while Laura stirs us up some coffee. You won’t be long, will you, honey?”
“No, I won’t be five minutes.”
“Remember my meeting.”
“I don’t see how I could forget it,” Laura said in a soft, expressionless way as she moved to the door. Norman nodded wryly at her disappearing figure as he seated himself on the sofa, twisting his body toward me.
“Women and business,” he said with confidential sufferance. “They just don’t understand the importance of these civic things. A man spends an evening attending to his civic responsibilities, and they feel deserted.”
“Yes, I guess they do,” I said, smiling inanely.
“I’ve got a U. C. meeting at nine-thirty that’s going to be a really decisive one for this town. We’re getting up a petition to present to the town council. I don’t mind telling you there’s going to be some fireworks.”
I stared at him with forged interest.
“You know that piece of property down back of Clark’s Esso station? That big empty lot with all those oil drums in it?”
“Oh, yes. Yes.”
“Well, there’s been some pretty hot bidding for it, as I guess you realize. The biggest offer was from an anonymous group of investors who called themselves Ham’s Enterprises. Well, we did a little digging around, and it turns out they’re a bunch of Gentlemen of Color—can you beat that? I don’t know where they got the money from, but there’s talk they’re being subsidized by some big national organization. They want to put a Colored People’s Recreation Center, as they call it, in there—bowling alleys, dance floor, all that sort of thing. It was a pretty slick piece of work, I can tell you. So we’re getting up this petition to rezone the place as residential; only way to get around it that we can think of. But I tell you, they’re getting slick.”
I ducked my chin, giving a little grunt of incredulity which I felt was expected of me, and settled back in the sofa, folding my arms and stealing a quick glance around the parlor, trying to reorient myself in it again. Its look of aggressive Victorian gloom seemed unchanged: the same dark overstuffed chairs and monolithic pieces of hewn mahogany; the same enormous sideboard, with marble top and mirrored back; and on the wall the same glass-covered print of “The Helping Hand” in which the same small boy—miraculously unchanged, miraculously innocent, for all his years of toil—grappled with the great oar in the immovable dory.
“Well, I guess you’re mighty glad to be back,” Norman said. “Laura told me she ran into you on Main the other day. How long have you been in town?”