The Towers of Love (30 page)

“Of course. Of course you're the only one she would have wanted to talk to,” Edrita said.

“Yes, last night, for a while, we were very close.”

“Who—who found her, Hugh?”

“Reba. Reba went into her room a little after midnight, and she was—it was already too late.”

“If only someone could have got there in time!”

“Ah, what's the point of saying something like that?” he said. “If only—if only. If only a lot of things that happened hadn't happened.”

“I know.”

“Look,” he said. “I suppose I could take the blame for no one getting there in time! I really could. When Dad got home he wanted to go up and say hallo to her, and if he had—well, it might have been in time. But I wouldn't let him go up. It was what she'd asked me to do, of course—but still. Still, someone could blame me. Or Pappy. Poor Pappy, he's all upset because he thinks
he's
to blame. He went into her room with a tray and didn't notice anything wrong, so he just left the tray and went out. Now he thinks he should have noticed something—he's convinced that he's to blame. No one's to blame.”

“No one except—”

“Except who?”

“Except—what is it? Is it Fate? Fate, I guess, was what I was going to say.”

He stubbed out his cigarette slowly in the grass. “Yes,” he said.

“Is he still coming?”

“You mean Jimmy Lord? No. I finally convinced him that he really shouldn't. He wanted to come, of course. When I finally got him on the phone again, he already had a reservation on a plane. But I told him not to—that there was nothing for him to come for now. And he'd been going to go A.W.O.L. to come. And I knew how difficult and unpleasant everybody could make it for him if he came. I told him it was too late for his coming to do any good, and he seemed to understand—finally. I didn't want him to go A.W.O.L. The poor guy's going to be in enough trouble already.”

“Why? What other trouble is he in?”

He was silent for a few seconds, looking across the valley at the trees. Then he said, “Sandy wrote a letter to his commanding officer.”

“What sort of letter?”

“Just—a letter. Saying, or asking rather, if this was the calibre of man our country wanted for an officer in its armed services—the sort of man who would take a young girl out, get her pregnant, and make her elope with him against regulations—that sort of letter, Edrita.”

“But why? Why would she do a thing like that? She had Pansy
back
!”

“She just wanted to get rid of him permanently,” he said.

“Oh, that bitch!” she said.

“Now, look,” he said. “She thought she was doing the right thing for Pansy.”

“No!” she said, and her voice was suddenly angry. “No, she did not! I won't listen to that stupid drivel about her! She did
not
think she was doing the right thing for Pansy. She knew she was doing the wrong thing for Pansy, and she knew it damn' well!”

He felt all at once very tired. The right thing. The wrong thing. The difference between the two seemed now very tenuous and indistinct, the line that divided them so fine, so thin. “It turned out to be the wrong thing,” he said, feeling as though he were reciting some pedantic and unimportant lesson. “But she thought it was the right thing—at the time. She wants what she thinks is the best thing for her children.”

“No!” she cried again, and suddenly she jumped to her feet and ran a little distance away from him across the grass. And when she turned and faced him she was weeping. “No!” she said again. “No, she wants what she thinks is the worst thing! Oh, how can you be so stupid and blind? Stupid and blind! What does it take to open your stupid eyes and make you stop making excuses for her? What does it take to make you
grow up
just a little bit? For God's sake,
what does it take
? I'm so sick—so sick and tired—of hearing you make excuses for her! You said you were trying to reappraise
yourself
. Why don't you try to reappraise
her
while you're at it? I'm sick and tired of holding my own tongue and being polite about her and not saying what I know is true! She's a cruel and destructive woman. She destroys everything she touches. She—”

“Sandy's a hard person to understand,” he said.

“
Sandy!
Sandy is
not
a hard person to understand. She's the easiest thing in the world to understand!”

“She loves her children.”

“That's a lie.
She hates her children!”

“It isn't that simple,” he said.

“It
is
that simple! Look at what she's done to them. Look at what she's done to you. Look at what she's done to Pansy. She's a monster! Look,” she said again, stepping closer, her fists clenched at her sides. “Do you want to know the truth about her?”

“Yes. What is the truth about her?”

“Then listen to me. You've told me about that movie she watches all the time—that movie of Billy. Do you want to know why she watches that? Do you? It's because if she loves anybody, she loves Billy. And do you know
why
she loves Billy?”

“Why?”

“Two reasons! The first is because Billy was her happy, healthy son. And you were her sick, lame son. And do you know what the second reason is?”

“What is the second reason?”

“Because he's dead! That's the second reason. She loves him because he's dead. She'll begin to love Pansy now, perhaps. Because she's dead. And she'll probably drag out some old home movie of Pansy, and watch
that
, now that Pansy's dead. And you? When you're dead, she'll have a movie of you, and she'll watch that. She'll sit and watch all three movies of her dead children, and she'll love you all then. She'll love
you
then, Hugh. But until you're dead, she hates you. She hates you.”

“But she's my mother …”

He lay back quickly on the grass and looked up at the bright disc of the sun overhead. For a moment or two it seemed to him such a new thought—that his mother hated him. Lying there, he wondered how long it would be before he became accustomed to its presence in his head. The thought stood there now, unmoving, a sullen shape that refused to march away. In a way it was like what happened when someone that you love very much has died; you had to prepare yourself for the looming vacancy ahead, to the finality of the absence of that person from all the rooms of your life from now on. It would take him a while to get used to the idea that his mother had died from him, just disappeared from his existence and yet, of course, hadn't he really known it before Edrita had put it into words? Hadn't he known it last night, with Pansy, or even before last night? Hadn't he begun to know it when he first came home, or hadn't he known it really a long, long time before that? And hadn't he, knowing the inevitability of it, hadn't he for a long time kept it a secret from himself, kept its truth buried from his consciousness, hoping that perhaps—perhaps—

“I love my children with a love that borders on passion,” she had said.…

“You hate me! You hate me!” he could remember screaming at her. How old had he been then? Ten, perhaps. Nine or ten. It was when Pansy was a baby, anyway, and what had that quarrel been about? Something of Pansy's, he remembered. A doll, a toy—something of Pansy's. He had taken it and had refused to give it back. Yes, it was a stuffed lion. Pansy's stuffed lion that she'd carried about with her, and he had taken it. Out of meanness, out of jealousy. And Miss Miles, the nurse, had tried to make him give it back, and he remembered Pansy's shrill screams and Miss Miles trying to make him give the lion back, and when he would not give it back she had called his mother.

“It belongs to Pansy, dear,” his mother had said. “Give it back to her.”

“I won't!”

“Give it back to her this minute, darling,” she had said.

“I won't! I won't!”

And from her great height over him she had reached down, seized his arm, and wrenched the lion away from him, and tossed it to Miss Miles. “Don't ever say ‘I won't' to me, dear,” she had said.

That was when he had screamed, sobbing. “You hate me! You hate me.”

She had taken him by the arm then, into her bedroom, and closed the door. She had sat him down on the bed beside her. “Never say a thing like that,” she had said. “That I hate you.”

“You do! You hate me.”

“I want to tell you a little story,” she had said, patting his knee. “Would you like me to tell you a little story?”

“All right,” he had said.

“This is the story of the Queen who could have no children,” she had said. “Once upon a time there was a Queen who lived in a beautiful fairy castle, and the thing she wanted more than anything in the world was children,” she said. “She wanted them more than golden crowns or thrones or ruby sceptres. But the doctors, the Royal Physicians, told her that she should never have children. They told her that something was wrong with her body, some tiny thing wrong with the way her bones were put together, that meant that if she ever gave birth to a child, she might die. But she wanted children more than the stars, and the King, her husband, was very strong and powerful, and he wanted her to have children. So she had a child.”

“And what happened?” he asked her.

“She was very sick. The doctors had been right, you see. She was very sick, and she nearly died.…”

He remembered her smiling at him with a calm intensity. “You know how children are born, don't you?”

“Yes. From their mothers' tummies.”

“Yes, but this particular Queen could not have her children the way most mothers can. She was very sick, for hours and hours, and finally the doctors had to make a long slit in her stomach to take her baby out, and after that she almost died.”

“Did the doctors sew her up again?”

“Yes, of course they did. And eventually she got better. She knew there were a lot of women who had to have their babies like that. Little Julius Cæsar was born the same way, from his mother. So the Queen wasn't the only one, and eventually she got better.”

“And then what happened?”

“Then she had two more children because she and her husband the King wanted more children—children to play with their first child. But each time she had a child, of course, she was very sick, and the doctors had to do the same thing. The second two times weren't as bad as the first, to be sure, but they were bad and painful enough. And so do you know what the point of the story is?”

“What is it?” he had asked her.

“The point is that when a woman has been tortured that way and hurt that way and has nearly died to have the children she wanted, she loves those children more—much more—than any ordinary mother. Because she feels she has given up a little bit of her own life to give her children life. She has sacrificed more for them, right from the beginning. So she loves them more. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” he said.

“Do you know who that Queen was?” she had asked him, smiling.

“Was it you?”

“Yes,” she had said. “It was me, Hugh. So don't ever say that I hate you. Because I love you all—you and Billy and Pansy—a great, great deal more than other mothers love their children. I worked harder to bring you into the world than most. And shall I tell you another secret?”

“Yes.”

“Promise never to tell Billy, never to tell Pansy?”

“I promise.”

“Because you were the hardest one for me to have, because I came closest to dying when I had you, I love you the most of all.”

He had sat very quietly on the bed beside her, thinking about it.

“Don't ever say I hate you,” she said. “I love you the most of all—my little Julius Cæsar!” She had kissed him then, and said, “Now run along and play.”

He had run along and played. But he had thought about the Queen, and her three children, for a long time after that. He could see why she loved them. But for several months afterwards, he had had a recurrent nightmare and a fantasy in which he saw the Queen, his mother—and sometimes it was neither a queen nor his mother, really, but an indistinguishable person. Her long body was spread out on a table in a white room, alone. He was the only spectator, the only witness to the ritual of mutilation that was being, or had already been, performed. Her whole body had been slashed down the very centre of its length, and the skin had been pulled apart and was stretched open and pinioned to the table. And from her open body were spouting great bubbles of blood, and huge dark gobbets and pieces of her flesh were pouring out, all about the table.

And remembering this fantasy now, and how, for a while, it had wakened him in terror in the night with its fierce explicitness and how, later on, it had become blurred and jumbled with his own hospital dream, he wondered—looking up at the sun's pulsing shape overhead—which she had hated first: him or his father, who had placed the seed of him within her.

Edrita came and knelt beside him. “Hugh, I'm sorry,” she said. “But it's true. It's true.”

“Caught in a trap, Pansy said.”

“She was right. And shall I tell you another thing? A thing I've never told you before?”

“What is it?”

“She tried to buy me off once. To keep us apart.”

“What do you mean? You mean she offered you money?”

“No, she wasn't that stupid. She wasn't that obvious. But she tried to bribe me, just the same. It was blackmail—a very genteel sort of blackmail.”

“What did she do?”

“It was the summer after you graduated from college. She came to me and asked me what my intentions were—whether I planned to try to marry you. And she said—”

“What did she say?”

“She said that if I did, if I had any such plans or intentions, I had better abandon them right away. Because, she said, if I didn't—if I didn't stop seeing you—there were certain things, things about my father, that she knew. Things that she said he had done when he was on Wall Street, right before the crash, and right after—things that she said she would see to it got spread all over this town, all over the state, if I didn't give you up then and there.”