The Dying of the Light

by Robert Goolrick

  It went on for miles, the hounds losing the scent, then picking it up again, the whole pack, horses and dogs changing direction time and again, her skirt flying, catching on a low limb, the hem coming undone, a branch sweeping across her face, tearing her veil and leaving a swath on her cheek, unnoticed in her focus on the one thing, the speed, the muscle it took just to stay on at such speed, the pack around her, and sometimes strung out behind her like savage warriors come to burn down the gates. As they caught the scent, it was Bluesie who was out in front, keen, close to the ground, not to be denied.

  The fox, spotted and then invisible then spotted again, a flash of red seeking some way, any way, to go to ground and finding none, knowing somehow there was murder behind him, the savage teeth overpowering him and ripping him apart their only desire, blind with bloodlust, trained all their life for this one thing, this one show of blood.

  Fence after fence, for miles they followed him, some riders even changing horses to keep up. Diana didn’t need to change anything. Icarus was implacable. He was crazy, his eyes flashing wildly, following every shift in her weight, taking every jump at exactly the right second, no thought of stopping, his flanks lathered up, his nostrils flared with rage. Her whip in her hand, unused. No point.

  Finally the dogs ran the fox to ground, and the terriers dragged him from his hole. As Diana watched the dogs tear the animal apart, her heart beat with a combination of exhilaration and disgust.

  When there was nothing but a carcass, the master of hounds jumped from his horse. Dipping his finger in the fox’s blood, he made a cross on Diana’s forehead, to welcome her back, back to the hunt, back to the life, her circle of friends. Then he cut off the tail and attached it with a ribbon to her hat, because she was closest to the kill. The day’s hunting was over, and the serious drinking began.

  Diana spontaneously asked them all to Saratoga for the traditional hunt breakfast. She wasn’t sure how Priscilla would pull it off, but as long as there was a ham—and there was always a ham—and eggs and biscuits, nobody would mind, because the bar was copiously stocked. She felt as though her nostrils breathed a new air, just as a fresh need ran between her legs and up her spine.

  IN THE LONG months after Copperton’s death, Diana would wake in the dark, as she always did, and wait for the sun to rise, huge and stunning. At first light Priscilla would bring her coffee on a tray, everything just so, her grandmother’s Limoges coffeepot, and she would sip her coffee, burning her lip, and watch the smooth river turning from black satin to opalescent peach and turquoise, the blue deepening as the shoal dropped off. The tides would come in, as they did every day, endlessly fascinating, endlessly flowing, not just through its banks but through her heart, through her veins. She was a child of the river; the croakers and trout swam through her heart; the herons plunged there, their talons lethal. Ducks would float in a line, driven by some knowledge, some order that she was locked from ever knowing, and at some secret signal they would struggle into flight.

  The window sash concealed the opposite shore, so she saw only water, and every day every single thing was new; the river smooth as glass or chopped and uneven, like unpolished slate. She felt so small, so insignificant, in her grandmother’s big bed, with the monogrammed hangings, deep blue, like the river. She was all that was left of Saratoga’s enormous history, except for Ash, and who could picture where he was or whom he would become?

  Sometimes she would wake up even earlier, at midnight or two, lightning streaking the sky, the wind high and furious, Bluesie pacing, and she would let him get into the bed, where he calmed them both down, and they went back to sleep no matter how fierce the storm, breathing together softly, no longer afraid, waking to a pure dawn, the river running its placid course as though nothing had happened in the night. All the things we never know.

  THE LAND WAS mostly flat—scrub pine and undergrowth, here and there the occasional dogwood, like a bridal veil in the spring. And her garden, so beautiful once, so fulsome, now gone to ruin; it was November, so nothing was expected, but she knew that only the very few strongest things underneath all those invasive plants—the vinca, the creepers, the loosestrife—would try to bloom in the summer: a rose, a lily, strange and mordant and muted.

  It was time for her to get on her hands and knees, to plunge her hands into the dirt.

  It was time for her to order plants and bulbs and put them in the ground in the hope that the moles and the deer would not get everything, that they would leave something to blossom in the spring.

  And it was time for her to open her heart.

  It was time for Diana Cooke Copperton to love again.

  Let the river run.

  11

  WISTERIA BLOSSOMS BEFORE it leafs out, and so it was with Ashton. And now there was this: Ash was being sent down from Yale. The letter said that although his grades were more than adequate, he was too “dreamy.” What did that mean? The world stood on the brink of chaos, and he was being asked to take a year off and return to Yale more focused. His work was perceptive and often brilliant, the letter said, in an off-kilter kind of way, but it was also often late, and filled with fanciful extrapolations that strayed from actual facts into pure imaginings.

  In the nine years since the Captain died, everything had changed except Diana and Ash’s love for one another. Ash grieved deeply for his father. Diana did not. They never spoke of it, each alone, in grieving or lack of it. But in every other thing they were allies. They wrote to each other almost every day, and saved the letters. They rarely spoke on the telephone. Only when she knew he was having a migraine did she call. “You’re having a migraine,” she would say, and at first he would say, “How did you know?” But then he just came to accept that it was part of the remarkable bond between them, that she could feel the searing pain on the right side of his head, an agony that began as an aura of sparkling light and turned almost immediately into nauseating, stabbing tremors. She just knew, and her voice was more soothing to him, as he lay in his dark room with cool cloths over his eyes, than any medicine. He was not wrapped in the solitude of his pain in those moments when she called.

  They both lived for the days he could come home from school for his vacations. Even though, once he learned to drive, he spent his time largely staying out with his friends and sleeping until noon, they were happy being under the same roof, and Diana was pleased that, more and more, he preferred the nights when his friends came to Saratoga to drink cheap beers and listen to the phonograph and smoke cigarettes, although she wasn’t supposed to know. She became, for his rowdy friends, their “other mother.” And she was pleased that they could sit in the kitchen with her and discuss their traumas and distresses and the love affairs that were always knives in their hearts, even as their faces blossomed with agony and joy in discussing them.

  Ash knew she was poor, and he vaguely knew that he was not. He noticed more than she knew, more than was ever spoken of. He was embarrassed for her, but had no idea how to help. The lawyers declined to send her money. He offered to pay for the phone calls, but she refused, and he didn’t want to insult her pride by pressing the issue. He had only a vague memory of the way things had been when there were fourteen to help in the house, and he never saw his mother on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floors, or waxing the long table. He didn’t see as his mother drove the lonely miles to Richmond to sell this diamond or that, wrapped carefully in a pristine handkerchief, not saying that she needed the money, just that she was selling a few pieces she didn’t wear anymore. She almost believed it, since it was almost true; the days of the house parties and the ball gowns were over, long over, the orchestra packed up and gone home for good, the dance floor warping in the barn.

  Now the big house was empty but for Diana and Priscilla and Clarence. She began to take her meals with them in the kitchen; the big dining room was too lonely and too expensive to heat. It was awkward at first, very awkward. They didn’t know what to call her. For weeks, they ate in silence. Then she became
part of the kitchen landscape, and eventually Priscilla would have to ask her to pass the butter or the salt, and spoke to her as Miss Diana, and Diana answered her as Miss Priscilla, and that opened the gates, at least between the two women, who after all were now doing the same amount of housework. Unconvinced, Clarence ate in stony silence, glowering at them as they grew to talk like sisters. When the meals were over, it was still Clarence who cleared the table and Priscilla who did the washing up, although Diana put everything away.

  The heavy silk damask curtains had begun to shred and sag in the harsh summer sun, but there was nothing to be done. She just closed room after room and turned a blind eye to all that was falling apart.

  When Ash came home for Christmas or vacation, she’d open all the rooms again, but he never spoke of the destruction that was happening every minute all around him. He loved the house as he always had, despite its decline. She even gave parties, like in the old days, selling a brooch or a necklace to stock the wine cellar and lay good food on the table and fill the house with guests. Ash finally got his wish—to sit at the dinner table with the grown-ups—and he played his part well, with a natural charm and manners that went beyond anything you could learn. He had learned to tie a bow tie. He made people laugh. He often told hilarious stories about his adventures with his roommate. He enchanted women and men alike. He rode and hunted with the men, and the women who increasingly went in for sport, and he danced like an angel.

  Ash slept in his old bedroom, and Diana still brushed his hair dry before he went to bed, Ash sitting on the floor and leaning against her legs as she sat at her dressing table, purring like a dreaming cat as the soft bristles of his grandfather’s silver hairbrush ran through his dark hair. Diana still made it a point to say good night to him before she went to sleep, even if the sun was already up. He never remarked on the plainness of her dress, her lack of jewelry.

  But now this, this homecoming, this was a different thing. Things would change in the house that was, after all, his. She decided to move him into his father’s old bedroom, with the heavy desk and bed, the gun racks and the mounted stag’s head. She knew that he missed his father, had never stopped missing him. He often visited his father’s grave up on the hill when he was home, spent long hours alone up there. He was his father’s son, grown now, and it was only right he move into his father’s room, with its view of the back lawn, down the long sweep of the lawn to the wide river where the sun rose every morning.

  Nine years ago, now, they had carried Copperton home on the back of a flatbed truck, his body cradled in bales of hay. She had thought at first that he was drunk and sleeping. They had to explain it to her, and then, only then, did she notice the twist of his neck, the unnatural set of his head on his shoulders; only then came the sharp intake of breath that was all she did to mark his death. It was harder on the boy. He couldn’t believe it, that his father was gone from this body so seemingly unharmed. Ashton had howled and fallen and been helped up and pulled himself together as he knew was expected of him. He behaved nobly throughout the funeral, greeting every mourner—and there were many—with grace and selfless kindness, getting this one a drink, that one a ham biscuit, holding every hand and giving, not asking for, comfort.

  This river land, which Ashton now owned five thousand acres of, spread out before her through the diamond panes of her dead husband’s room. The land, so gentle to the eye, was less gentle to farm, punched with rock, mostly clay. Tobacco loved it, though. Cotton loved it. Peanuts loved it. She had lived her life by this river every single day, except for the trips to Paris and London and one disastrous trip to New York, where she had been so unhappy alone in their room at the Plaza, where the Captain had been abusive to a waiter at the Oyster Bar because they didn’t have shad roe and had refused to tip him, causing the waiter to follow them onto the street, rip up the bill, and spit in the Captain’s face. No, she had always been happiest here, even alone, by the long amazing shoreline, endlessly variable, its moods matching her own.

  In valuing these old river houses, shoreline was everything. With every foot, the value grew. Saratoga had miles of pristine sand.

  But she had not been happy in this room. She remembered the nights she had been called to this huge bed with the Captain, terrified, as he had forced his sex on her, his unforgiving body like green timber, his zeal frantic, her breasts scrubbed raw by the bristles on his chest, his thrustings, entirely forgetful of her, without patience or delicacy, ripping her nightgown to get at it, to get at her, to get it over with and be done with her.

  She was so happy when she got pregnant; if it was a boy, there would be the end to it. And it was, it was Ashton, for some unknown reason called Ashton III. She would never answer the knock on her door again, or take the long walk down the dark hallway to Copperton’s shrouded bed. Now she was spreading fresh sheets for her son, smoothing them so there was not a single wrinkle. She considered putting flowers by the bed, then changed her mind.

  For all they had corresponded, she knew so little of him. She was, she had to admit, nervous. How would he find her? And what would he think of Saratoga, so diminished from what he knew? There was, in the end, the final question she couldn’t even ask herself, as she smoothed out the heavy blue silk coverlet, embroidered by her with his initials: What if Ashton didn’t like her, had forgotten his love, threw her out? What if he asked her to leave her own house? A vacation was one thing, an hors d’oeuvre, a folly. But this was to be their life, continuous and endless. Mother and son. When he married, what would become of her? He wouldn’t make her leave this house, even if she had to move to obscurity on the third floor, like her mother and father. There was no reason to imagine he would cast her out. But still.

  The letter from Yale had said that in the previous six months, he had rarely left his rooms, rarely bathed, ate with no one but his roommate, and had, on his desk, a stack of letters, all unopened, mostly presumably from her. Who else would be writing to him? Was there a sweetheart, some secret sorrow?

  But not to open letters he obviously knew were from her? Which he obviously knew were expressions of her love for him? She never asked him questions about his life at Yale, and he never spoke of it, except to mention his roommate, Gibby, occasionally, and this or that outing they had taken together. They had roomed together since prep school. She wrote to him about the river, her endless fascination with it, its colors and tides, the way the light caught its risings and fallings, the ducks and swans riding the caplets and the troughs. She spent whole days watching the river, her lover, her friend. She ran to the window to catch every sunset, each one a miracle, different every day, entrancing long after darkness had sucked the last ounce of color out of the indigo sky. She never complained in her letters, never gave a hint of how hard it was to hold it all together—the shredding curtains, the fractious tenant farmers, ready to rob a woman of every nickel they could, the hollow left by the ending of the dancing weekends. She always wrote brightly of her renewed love of gardening, which was only partly a lie. She always sent love from Priscilla and Clarence, and sometimes a ham on the bus. She told him never to forget the constancy of her love for him.

  And now, the letters never opened, all her efforts to paint a bright picture gone into the oblivion of Ash’s feverish dreaminess. Perhaps Saratoga and the river flowing once again through his heart could waken him from the dream.

  NOTHING HAD CHANGED in this room since the Captain had died. Nothing had been moved on his desk. His cigars were still in their humidor, the sterling cigar cutter beside it still, polished and ready. His silk dressing gown still hung on the closet door, his slippers by the bed. The tweed hacking jackets and the gleaming riding boots, and all that paraphernalia, and the tuxedo and the tailcoat and the white dinner jacket, now yellowing slightly. Was Ashton supposed to simply walk in and be his father, in an instant? If that’s what he wanted, every accoutrement was ready for his return. The entire equipage of the Virginia squire. Even his father’s ebony razor from Geo F Tr
umper in Jermyn Street.

  “Dinner be almost ready,” Priscilla said.

  There was no need to ask what dinner might be. Chicken. It’s all they ever ate. Every afternoon Clarence would kill a chicken, and Priscilla would try to do something new with it, but whatever she tried, it was still and always chicken.

  Tonight it was curried chicken with the standard boys—peanuts, avocado, coconut, chutney, rare treats for a rare night—and an aspic. They ate early, because there was a big storm moving in, and Clarence had to get out the Rolls and drive to Richmond to the train station to pick up Ash at eleven. They hardly ever drove the big old car anymore, driving the smaller and more practical Ford for daily chores, but this was a state occasion, the homecoming of the prodigal son, the return of the master of the house, and it seemed only fitting that he be met and ferried in style. Clarence had spent days cleaning and dusting the car, cleaning, as well, the engine, making sure there would be no mishaps along the way. They were all tense and ate little. They took up so little space at the ten-foot kitchen table. The house, usually dark, spread around them in its illuminated vastness, every light lit, room after room of things handed down and taken care of, the history of a family in which the Captain had been no more than a slight bump on the map of history, a life, a history, in which more was saved than was lost, each thing taken care of, nothing neglected.

  They ate in silence, each thinking of something he might have overlooked, hearing the low peals of thunder coming from Richmond, closer and closer. The radio that kept them company was filled with news of the storm—bridges out, trees down, roads disrupted.