Lilith (9 page)

“My father says that one of a Christian’s chief duties is to forgive people, no matter what they do to him, and no matter whether he understands it or not,” Laura said. “And I believe that. So I don’t think we have to talk about it any more, Vincent. I think we ought to just pretend it never happened.”

I stared wretchedly at the shadowed lawn, feeling a growing constriction of my breath and blood at the suddenly imminent necessity of my confession. I saw that there was no way to avoid making it.

“I don’t think we can, Laura,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, sometimes people do things that nobody would ever think they were capable of. I don’t think people ever really understand each other. I don’t even think they understand themselves a lot of times.”

“You don’t have to understand people in order to forgive them,” Laura said. “That’s what I just said. It shouldn’t make any difference.”

“I know, but you don’t know the worst of it. You don’t know what else I did; and you wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me any more if you did.”

“What do you mean? What else did you do, Vincent?”

She turned to face me and I stared into her eyes with a look of desperate resolution.

“I hate to tell you this, Laura, but I have to, because I just don’t think it would be right for you not to know about it. I’m not asking you to forgive me, or anything, but I have to tell you. You don’t have to listen if you won’t want to; you can just leave now, and then we won’t have to see each other again.”

“No. I want to know.” She made a slight negative motion of her head and watched me calmly and alertly.

“Well, when I left here the other evening, I didn’t go right home. I went to see . . . someone else. And—well, you know what I wanted you to do—I did it with her, Laura.” I stared at the ground, speaking slowly and miserably. Laura sat silently for a moment and then said with a soft bitterness which I had never heard in her voice before, “I thought you didn’t like any of those other girls. I thought you weren’t interested in any of the things they liked. Well, it looks as if you’re interested in
some
of the things they like.”

“No, it wasn’t any of those other girls at school,” I said. “It was—well, somebody you don’t know at all, Laura.”

She pressed her lips together tightly with emotion. “And I guess that’s where you’ve been all this time. All this time I’ve been waiting for you to come back. I guess that’s why you don’t come to see me any more. I guess you think you’re in love with her or something, don’t you?”

“Oh, no, Laura. It wasn’t anything like that. I thought you wouldn’t want to see
me;
that’s why I didn’t come back.”

She turned again to face me and asked with steady, quiet intensity, “Do you love her, Vincent?”

“No. Oh, my gosh. It wasn’t a
girl
at all, Laura. It was a woman. A woman I used to deliver groceries to.”

“A
woman
?”

“Yes. I went back to her house after I left here, and I did it with her. I mean I didn’t force her to, or anything. I could tell she wanted me to. And she’s pretty old. Maybe as old as my grandmother. That’s what I had to tell you. That’s why I said I couldn’t see you any more.”

I sat silently, clenching my laced fingers together, waiting for her to revile me. But Laura expressed neither the outrage nor disgust which I expected; she sat quietly, and after a pause in which she seemed to have regained her composure completely she lifted her hand to brush her hair back thoughtfully and said, “Well, that’s different, then. As long as you don’t love her, I don’t really think it matters. I don’t see why we can’t just go on the way we were.”

This seemed to me so insensitive, so harrowingly equivocal a thing to say that I could not reply (I have never been able to reply to it), but sat in a kind of afflicted silence. This was broken in a moment by the voice of Laura’s mother. She leaned out of the upstairs window, her face contorted with grief, and called down shrilly, “Laura—Laura, come up right away, please! I just can’t make him answer me. I’m afraid—I’m afraid he’s gone.”

Laura was out of the glider in an instant, murmuring a swift apology to me as she ran across the lawn toward the steps. I did not leave immediately; when she had gone I sat for some time in the glider and looked up at the open window of the old man’s room, watching the white curtains blow out into the yard gently, jubilantly, from the soiled sills.

AFTER this my feelings toward Laura were never the same. Whatever intimacy or ardor may have existed between us was almost entirely extinguished, and I no longer held any hope for its development into the profound and meaningful attachment which I had once thought possible. I still saw her occasionally; I would walk home from school with her sometimes, and I think we went once or twice to a motion picture together, sitting on her front porch afterward and talking for a while in a constrained and artificial way. But the only moment of anything like true feeling that I experienced with her again was on the morning, a few months later, when I left Stonemont to join the army Laura came to the station to see me off and brought me a box lunch which she had packed for me to eat on the train. My grandparents were there also—both with wet eyes, looking suddenly terribly small and old—so that it was possible for us to speak only in the most inane and formal manner. She gave the box to me, still holding it by the string after she had placed it in my hands, as if in a final, fugitive contact with me, and said with a curious shy smile, “There’s half a fried chicken and a piece of pumpkin pie that I just made this morning. You like pumpkin pie, don’t you, Vincent?”

“Yes. Thank you very much, Laura.”

We stood uncomfortably, shifting our feet on the stone of the station platform; and then she looked up into my face and said quite gently, “I had to come down, because I wanted to say that I’m so proud of you, Vincent, for enlisting; and I know you’ll do something wonderful, and then everybody in Stonemont will know what you’re really like.”

I shook my head, smiling painfully.

“And please take care of yourself, because we want you to come back to us.”

“Yes, I will, Laura.”

I was strangely affected by the incident. Whether it was due to the compassion which, mistakenly or not, I sensed in Laura’s gesture, or to the natural pathos of the situation, I do not know; but at any rate I carried away with me a fond final memory of her which seemed to supersede all the other, less fortunate, ones, and on the strength of it I exchanged letters with her throughout the war—something which, considering how perfunctory our relationship had become since that day of her father’s death, I should surely not otherwise have done. Was this what Laura intended? It is difficult to know, and perhaps not charitable to speculate; but I do know that her letters—all but the final one—were a source of much pleasure and comfort to me during the long two years that I was overseas.

I have never been sure whether my enlistment was not partially due, at least, to the deterioration of my affair with her; but my more conscious motives were simple expediency, a nebulous but rather moving concept of soldiery which I had as a boy and a revelatory, deeply disturbing speech of my grandfather’s which he delivered as we walked out under the elms to the end of Frederick Avenue one evening after having a soda together at the corner drugstore. That was in the summer of 1942—the summer during which I worked as delivery boy on the grocery truck—and Stonemont, like the rest of the world, was infected with the excitement, the dark vitality, of war. I had graduated from high school in the spring of that year and had just turned eighteen. The world which lay before me, the world which had seemed so remote, so pleasantly vague and fabulous until the moment when I walked down from the bunting-draped commencement platform in my cap and gown, clutching the fragile wand of my maturity—the ribbon-bound parchment scroll of my diploma—had become suddenly a shadowed and rather ominous region whose unknown and unavoidable terrain filled me with a vague sense of alarm. We passed the statue of the Confederate soldier, blue with evening and seeming more poignant, more full of brave significance than ever, so that I looked at it with even more than ordinary thoughtfulness.

There was for me at that time something peculiarly inspiring in the image of a soldier. I do not mean by this that I felt any of the usual romantic or chauvinistic sentiments about warfare, for I think that even as a boy I was aware, with the casual irony of youth, that God is on the side of all armies in all battles and that the principles for which men die in one season will be archaic by the next; it was not the nation, the principles or the institutions they defended which made soldiers seem glorious in my eyes (for any of these, from another point of view, might be considered absurd or infamous), but their simple act of sacrifice itself, the blind submission of their lives and fortunes to something greater than themselves, their beautiful obedience. Perhaps it was for me an image of life, in which, in very much the same way—fighting for principles which are never really understood, against odds they do not know and enemies whom they might love, serving captains they may despise and distrust, in a cause which may be hopeless—men nevertheless go on, struggling, suffering, killing, obeying their humanity in a blind and valiant act of sacrifice. I think it was this that moved me; for people who are subtly estranged from their environment, their institutions and companions, both by temperament and fortune, as I was in my youth, are apt to be more keenly and more wistfully sensitive to such a concept than are others. Feeling their separateness, and the unaccountable guilt of loneliness, they feel the need, perhaps, to redeem it by an act of service or sacrifice, in the company of comrades. It is a way for them to rejoin humanity.

Perhaps it was this. Or perhaps it was the fact that the warrior whom our town commemorated and for whom I felt such reverence was a Rebel, disarmed, defeated, and eternally, magnificently defiant. I have never known, really. That bronze statue was one of the chief poems of my youth and, like all poems, full of mystery.

All of these emotions and speculations were made peculiarly relevant by my grandfather’s conversation on that evening. He strolled with his arms clasped behind him in the small of his back in a habitual European manner, his cane held between them, straight up and down his back like a poker, removing it occasionally to touch the brim of his Panama hat with its gold head in salute to an acquaintance or to point out to me some object about which he held an unusual or amusing scrap of information.

“Look at that bird, Sonny, on the lawn there. It has golden eyes, do you see? That’s a Brewer’s Blackbird. It’s the only blackbird that has golden eyes.”

“Yes, sir. That certainly is interesting.”

My grandfather was an inveterate reader of encyclopedias; he had very little formal education and, like many such men, a passion for miscellanea, which he innocently expected others to construe as erudition. One of his most touching pretensions was to illustrate, every time we went walking together, the universality of his interests and learning by delivering a constant stream of lore on every possible topic of art or science which might be represented on the way.

“Do you see those columns, on the courthouse? They’re Doric. Doric columns always have acacia leaves at the top; that’s called the lintel.” (His acquaintance with many subjects was as imperfect as it was unfailingly enthusiastic.)

“Where does it get the name, Grandpa?” I asked, indulging his authority.

“Doric. Why, that’s taken from the people who first designed them: the Dorians. A Middle Eastern people.” He paused for a moment with a look of some disconcertion, having apparently exhausted his information on the subject, and then went on with a marvelous imposture of benignity, “I’d like to go into it further with you, Sonny, but I really prefer that you look it up for yourself. A thing that’s looked up like that, out of genuine interest, is never forgotten. Never.”

“Yes, sir.”

Although he had managed to meet the occasion with this splendid piece of improvisation, I felt that I had caused him some embarrassment, and resolved to limit my responses in the future to a murmur of pleasurable enlightenment. We walked on through the quiet dusk, watching the golden twilight flooding the widow’s-walks and wind vanes of the tall old wooden houses and glittering on the attic windows. Anyone who loves small towns as I do (I would have a world of small towns if I could) will understand the strange, sweet melancholy that falls upon them in the evening when the elms are still, the long shadows dying on the lawns, the porches vacant and the stir of supper not yet started in the kitchen windows. Oppressed by the gentle sadness of this atmosphere and my sudden somber awareness of the world’s vast incumbency, I fell into silence as we walked. After a while my grandfather said, “Have you something on your mind, Sonny?”

“Oh. No, sir. I was just thinking about that soldier, mostly, I guess.”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s in the air.”

We had come abreast of Poplar Lodge, and my grandfather nodded at the great dark slope of mansard roof behind the spruce and poplars of the drive.

“Fine old place,” he said. “Most beautiful old house in town. There’s a bit of irony in that, Sonny, if you want to look for it.”

“Yes, sir, I guess there is.”

I looked in at the quiet darkening grounds as we walked past and felt blow across my heart a breath of the mysterious delight which had possessed me, only a week or two before, when I had looked across the barberry hedge into the eyes of the graceful, haunting creature who stood laughing at me from the shadow of the willows.

“I wonder what they’re doing in there right now?” I said musingly.

“Dreaming their poor, mad dreams,” my grandfather said. “Poor souls. Lost souls.”

We walked on to the end of the avenue and at the edge of the town stood looking out across the blue, rolling hills of the Upper County. There were lights on in the distant barns for milking, and shadowy herds of Holsteins standing mournfully at pasture gates.