The Dying of the Light

by Robert Goolrick

  Once Diana and Gibby and Ash found themselves down on the dock at sunset, watching the whole miraculous show. Ash turned to his mother. “You look so beautiful. At this exact moment, you are the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  She laughed and ran her hand through his hair. “Sweetheart, everybody looks beautiful in this light. You and Gibby are, at this very moment, the handsomest men on the planet.” And they all locked elbows, in love with each other, in love with themselves, and stood transfixed at all this beauty until it was dark and they had to make their way back to the house, that great glimmering ship, the lights coming on all over the house. Home. Her whole life in those walls. She had slept in the same bed for twenty years, and woken every morning in the darkness, her first sight the river, her timekeeper, her heart, the door that opened to everything else.

  And at that moment, she knew what was to be the idea for the decoration of the house. The house must reflect the grandeur and the color of the river.

  She told it all to Rose, who sat with her for several days through a whole sunset. Rose looked and looked hard. “In England, those snotty people always say red and green must never be seen, and I say, fuck them. I can picture it now, like a jewel box. Tomorrow, in the light, we’ll go through the color book from Farrow & Ball, and we’ll pick all the colors and then we’ll have some local genius at Benny Moore copy them all, room by room. You will be the jewel of the Tidewater. Unconventional, but who wants one of those sad Williamsburg lookalikes? Everything dark. Everything proper. Everything dead as Tut.”

  Then they just sat, Rose sipping the last of her Manhattan, silent, happy. Rose reached out and took Diana’s hand and they just sat there, hand in hand, until it was completely dark, the moon rising over the river, orange at the horizon, then pale gold then white as it rose full into the night sky, glimmering with stars. One of the town girls in her crisp uniform turned on the lights, one by one, until the house glowed on the water.

  And now it was all going to go, and part of her couldn’t wait to see what Rose would do, and part of her wept for the first chair that was moved so much as an inch from where it always sat. Ash stood tall by her side, and helped her through something that Gibby would never, could never, understand. Both felt the same wrenching feeling in the gut, and while they both were committed and excited by Rose’s plans, neither one knew quite why they were doing it.

  The South is littered with big piles like Saratoga, mostly falling apart, through lethargy or destitution, and objects like Uncle Harry’s leather club chair, cracking and tattered as it may be, take on the aura of religious relic. Time ravages them, and generations go on not noticing.

  Rose de Lisle noticed everything. She got up in the dark, watched the river, the glitter of the moon on the slate-black water, until the sun came up. When she came out of her bedroom door, it was as if lightning had struck the house, or like Pallas Athene had appeared, fully armed and ready for work.

  Followed by Clarence and his wheelbarrow and the two boys, followed everywhere by Diana, she would stop in front of an ormolu clock, or a sideboard missing its back leg, held up by books, and she would hmmm and scratch her chin and then she would point her regal finger, and into the wheelbarrow it would go. She didn’t even have to say anything. When the pause came, and the finger pointed, they just knew. “God. I’m beginning to breathe again,” she would say, and they would continue with the march of devastation. Down came the velvet curtains, which had hung in the dining room since 1887; they looked exactly like Scarlett’s dress, fringed in gold bullion, and so old the velvet was shiny. Up came the needlepoint rug Aunt Sally had brought back from China, ten by twelve, not counting the holes where the diminishing rat population had eaten it.

  They opened a closet, and there was china, God, china everywhere, settings for forty-eight of Canton Willow, Rose Medallion, settings for twenty-four, a setting for twelve, French, dark green, decorated entirely with playing cards, odd, must have been for card parties, and more, roses, and deities; apparently near nakedness, offensive in art and statuary, was acceptable when it was covered with asparagus hollandaise.

  Diana thought of Sherman’s march through Atlanta. Nothing was left unscathed. Nobody understood the South. Nobody realized how dear Aunt Lucia’s cracked vase was. Nobody understood the sorrow of the irreplaceable, however battered. Jeb Stuart had sat in that chair, and tatty as it was, it would never leave where it stood. His muddy boots on the bottom rung, Stratford Hall just up and across the river. People of distinction had dropped their coffee cups on the floor, just there, and the pieces had been swept up and glued back together and put into a cabinet and never used again, and whoever had remarked on the brilliant painting on the porcelain, or on the obvious, jagged cup, had been told, simply, “That was the General’s cup,” thus ending the discussion because everybody knew, everybody knew it had a value beyond its lost usefulness as a drinking vessel.

  Rose pointed her imperious finger at the battered wicker wheelchair next to the drinks table and said “Gone.” Diana stood before it as though she were the last soldier at the Alamo. “My father sat in this chair for over fifty years,” she said. “It will not ever be gone, or even moved. That’s where he watched the river, day after day, the calm, the tides, the whitecaps when the wind was up. Noël Coward got up from the table outside and came indoors and took his lunch with him, right there. Isadora Duncan danced for him in that hallway. No. Not ever.”

  Diana had spoken.

  17

  THE HEART IN love has its bright places and its dark places. This is the price you pay for the stilling of the monotony of the endless gong of the lonely years, the nights spent alone, the sheets changed with the humiliation of only having been half slept in, the mournful eye of Priscilla, who believed woman was not meant to be alone, Priscilla who had slept lovingly beside her husband for twenty-seven years and knew every inch of his body as well as she knew her own, who believed when the horse collapses under you, you get up and get right back on another one. The memory never leaves you, the expectation of return, corners of your lonely heart that cannot be illuminated, no matter how fiercely you may love. And you do not forgive for this, not your dead husband, not your limber lover who tells you again and again that he loves you, as though he knows what love is. You do not forgive because there is no forgiveness in your heart. You accept, accept even with gladness, but you do not forgive.

  So, however much you love, the heart remains both enraged and enraptured. And you wish it were not so; you look at the funny face of your lover, who looks back at you with adoration, and you wish to accept, to worship in return, but you suddenly find you can’t, you won’t, and the worst, most infuriating thing is that he understands all this, so much so that you don’t even have to talk about it, understands it with a patience that would shake Job. He understands, and he meets you for two minutes or five or half an hour, or at four in the morning if that’s the only time you feel safe. Whenever, he looks at you with an unbidden adoration that anybody can see; your own son, who grows more jealous by the day, becomes a seething ball of jealousy, because although he doesn’t know what’s happening, time and place, caress and kiss and penetration, he knows the essence, the adoration and the gladness in your heart. He might have accepted, even welcomed a stepfather, an athletic, duck-shooting ruddy man he could ride to hounds with, smoke cigars with, but this, this that he knows without knowing a single detail of time or place, this tears him apart. Gibby has been his for eight years, both at Exeter and Yale; he meant in his dreamy heart that it would be so forever. Now he feels a seismic shift, and his heart is slowly breaking.

  SHE WAS BRUSHING his hair, still wet from the shower, and she thought he had gone to sleep. But he opened his eyes and spoke like a sleepy four-year-old.

  “Mama?”

  “Yes, darling?”

  “I’ve always wondered . . .”

  “Wondered what, baby?”

  She had a way of saying it that was so endearing, it wasn’t in
fantile at all, there was nothing childish about it; she only used it when she was deeply affectionate, and the only one she ever used it with was her son. It was something between them that meant they were bonded by an affection so intense that they only used this in private, only alone, usually in the dim rose-colored light of her vast bedroom.

  “Well, this is hard. Why did you never . . . never pick me up?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Mammy Evelyn, before she left.”

  “I was afraid.”

  “I was a baby!”

  “You were the most beautiful baby I had ever seen. That anybody had ever seen. And you have to remember, I was only twenty. I couldn’t get close to you. You were a very small baby, you know. Fine-boned. Very fragile. I had your portrait painted and hung in my bedroom so I could see you day and night, or at least the thin veneer of what some painter thought you looked like. I had you photographed by all the famous photographers. The photographs, a dozen or so, sat on my night table and I kissed each one before I went to bed at night. I’ll show them to you.

  “I took to creeping into your room very late at night when you were deep asleep, and Mammy Evelyn was sleeping on her cot in the corner, and I would sneak in and I would pick you up, and nobody knew, until you opened your eyes and howled, and Mammy Evelyn would wake up instantly and take you from me and you would calm down and go back to sleep and I would go back to my bedroom and go to sleep. Then you started getting the rash, and nobody could tell why, until we took you to a very learned pediatrician and he said it was because you were always being woken up in the night by the total stranger, and it scared the wits out of you. You literally didn’t know who I was.

  “They had no idea what to do about it. The smartest doctors in the country, totally stumped. But Mammy Evelyn did. She taught me how to be your mother. She taught me how to change your diapers, and feed you, and hold you when you were afraid, and tell you stories to pass the time until the storm was over, as you clutched my skirt.

  “And one day, I remember it exactly, you got up, we were at breakfast, and you threw your arms open and you said, ‘Mama!!’ and I knew we had won, Evelyn and I. I knew I had a son—and that my son had a mother.”

  “I remember that, too. And then Mammy Evelyn packed her bags and went away somewhere. Did we ever know?”

  “She cried so hard when she left. But she said her work was done. I told her she could stay here for the rest of her life, but she said it would hurt her inside too much and she had to move on. I drove her to the bus.”

  “But where did she go?”

  “Cleveland. Cards came at Christmas.”

  “Is she still living?”

  “I suppose so. The cards stopped coming when . . . when everything changed.”

  His hair was long dry, but she kept running her fingers through the curls, so soft, so shiny. He was almost asleep.

  Gibby would be here in an hour. Throughout the whole conversation, she had kept her eye on the clock, ticking the minutes away.

  At the door, Ash stopped. “Will you come rub my feet, at least?”

  She was about to say no, to say how ridiculous it was, Ash a grown man, but then she remembered all the times, all the party nights, when he couldn’t sleep, and he had sent Mammy Evelyn down to ask if she would come up and tuck him in, rub his feet until he fell asleep, and she had refused, caught up in the fun, the dancing and the drinking, refused, and left him to his sleepless bed, so that he wandered the halls and kissed her image through the diamond panes of the bay windows, and she owed it to him, she had a debt, and she hesitated but she said yes, trembling, and followed him down the hall to his room, and stood awkwardly as he took off his silk dressing gown and dropped it on the floor, and got into bed, his cotton pajamas so perfectly pressed, Priscilla must iron them every day for him, and she sat at the foot of his bed, and he stuck his feet out from under the covers and she massaged them, and watched as he calmed.

  “Do you remember? Do you remember the prayer we used to say every night?”

  “Of course. I still say it.”

  Together they said the prayer, straight from the prayer book, from the prayers for children:

  Oh Lord support us

  All the day long

  Till the shadows lengthen

  And the evening comes

  And the busy world is hushed

  And the fever of life is over

  And our work is done.

  Then in thy mercy

  Grant us a safe lodging

  A holy rest

  And peace at the last.

  Amen.

  His voice left hers. She was softly speaking alone. He was already asleep. She put his feet under the covers, and tucked him in tightly, and smoothed back his silky hair, and kissed him on the forehead, leaving the nightlight on because he was afraid of the dark, and quietly left, closing the door softly, and returned to her own room to wait.

  18

  DOWNSTAIRS, IN THE kitchen, Lucius Walter carefully removed the sheets of paper he had put in the now-thawed book before him and began to iron each page, pushing away the troubling thoughts of handsome men that haunted him constantly, particularly in the dark, at three o’clock, when everybody was asleep in their beds and he was alone. He was happiest then, saving the books, one by one, but still the thoughts darted in and out of his mind, like a goldfish in a bowl. The man, in this instance, in the dead of this particular night, looked surprisingly like Gibby Cavenaugh. He heard, or thought he heard from upstairs, a door open and close, but he wasn’t sure. Old houses make noises at night. You don’t even have to listen very hard. A creak here, a crack there, floorboards rising and falling. History meeting itself on the stairs, each tread a moment in time, a dark second in a long history.

  Then he cocked his head. Another door opened and closed. There was no mistaking it. So. There were only so many options. Somebody had gone into somebody else’s bedroom. And at three o’clock in the morning, there could only be one reason for that kind of behavior. Lucius, ironing, reviewed the possibilities. The two boys? Such a dazzling prospect that he burned the page he was pressing. Unprofessional and tragic, but there were so many books, and probably nobody ever read them anyway, nobody would ever know. He stopped pressing and gave himself over fully to imagining the scene of Ash and Gibby alone in the high-ceilinged bedroom, naked, muscular, in the dark, the moon flecking their bodies with light as they twisted and turned for possession one of the other. Because wasn’t it a war? thought Lucius. Wasn’t there, finally, a winner and a loser?

  As much as Lucius would like to dwell on that scene, he realized there were other possibilities. There were Ash and his mother. Lucius had seen the way he looked at her, his eyes never leaving hers, following her every move like a puppy with its new owner. It was clear the boy was in love with her. Rich people. They were capable of anything, thought Lucius, who had his clothes and not much else. It might have been going on for years, since the death of the husband or even before.

  But, no. That couldn’t be it. Too gothic. Too perverse. So that left the gymnast boy. He lifted his iron from the page and sat down in one of the kitchen chairs, trembling with longing. A shiver went up his spine. He could see it all. The silken clothes slipping off, left to lie carelessly on the floor. Her waist as slender as a schoolgirl’s; her hair still damp from the bath, for surely she would have bathed for her lover. This would be no surprise visit, and it was not, Lucius was sure, the first time. His legs like tree trunks, the muscles in his arms hardly straining as he picked her up, called her mother, and put his mouth to hers, her expensive scent filling the air around them. Jicky, she wore; it smelled of citrus and lavender and hay, both feminine and masculine. Her skin was smooth as silk, touched with rare oils, his rougher, but clean. He was so young, so young, and his skin had not yet acquired that leathery quality that an older man had, but years of gymnastics had given him rough and callused hands, no matter how much cream he put on them every night, and he was car
eful, when he touched her, to use his hands gently, to caress with a sweetness and a graciousness that showed his love and his desire. “Diana,” he might say. “Diana, are you happy now?” He smelled like a baby. “I love you.” And she knew it before he said it and wondered what was to be done with all that, that world of information.

  And she would look at him with her glittering eyes and say “Completely and divinely happy,” and she would think she meant it, would mean it, if only for that exact moment.

  He would carry her to the bed and draw back the covers, Lucius could see it, sitting in the half-dark kitchen in his plain, threadbare terry robe, his monogram almost worn away, could hear the sigh that came from Diana as he laid her gently down on the pristine sheets, embroidered with hyacinths. Gibby wouldn’t so much lie on top of her as float above her like a cloud, hover like a hummingbird, darting here and there, drinking the nectar of her body. A hummingbird has to keep moving, darting into flower after flower. Its heart beats so fast that if it stops to rest, its heart may not start again, and so it stays on its relentless quest for the sweetness of the floral world. And she, in turn, would open like a flower, so that he might drink his fill wherever he landed, before he moved on, each place a surprise to her, a revelation. She had largely, in the years since the Captain died, forgotten her body, taken it for granted, carried it around like a satchel packed for a weekend with friends. Now she possessed it again, owned it fully so that she might give it away to this boy, who had taken possession of her the instant their eyes met, twenty years her junior, now making love to her while her own beloved son slept not forty feet away, her son who was afraid of the dark.