It was only when he got into his automobile that the Captain remembered the party at his house.
Anacleto did not come home until late in the evening. He stood in the doorway of Alison's room looking rather green and jaded, as crowds exhausted him. 'Ah,' he said philosophically, 'the world is choked up with too many people.'
Alison saw, however, from a swift little snap of his eyes, that something had happened. He went into her bathroom and rolled up the sleeves of his yellow linen shirt to wash his hands. 'Did Lieutenant Weincheck come over to see you?'
'Yes, he visited with me quite a while.'
The Lieutenant had been depressed. She sent him downstairs for a bottle of sherry. Then after they had drunk the wine he sat by the bed with the chessboard on his knees and they played a game of Russian bank. She had not realized until too late that it was very tactless of her to suggest the game, as the Lieutenant could hardly make out the cards and tried to hide this failing from her.
'He has just heard that the medical board did not pass him,' she said. 'He will get his retirement papers shortly.'
'Tssk! What a pity!' Then Anacleto added, 'At the same time I should be glad about it if I were he.'
The doctor had left her a new prescription that afternoon and from the bathroom mirror she saw Anacleto examine the bottle carefully and then take a taste of it before measuring it out for her. Judging by the look on his face, he did not much like the flavor. But he smiled brightly when he came back into the room.
'You have never been to such a party,' he said. 'What a great constellation!'
'Consternation, Anacleto.'
'At any rate, havoc. Captain Penderton was two hours late to his own party. Then, when he came in, I thought he had been half eaten by a lion. The horse threw him in a blackberry bush and ran away. You have never seen such a face.'
'Did he break any bones?'
'He looked to me as though he had broken his back,' said Anacleto, with some satisfaction. 'But he carried it off fairly well went upstairs and put on his evening clothes and tried to pretend that he wasn't upset. Now everybody has left except the Major and the Colonel with the red hair whose wife looks like a woery woman.'
'Anacleto,' she warned him softly. Anacleto had used the term 'woery woman' several times before she caught on to the meaning. At first she had thought it might be a native term, and then it had come to her finally that he meant 'whore.'
Anacleto shrugged his shoulders and then turned suddenly to her, his face flushed. 'I hate people!' he said vehemently. 'At the party someone told this joke, not knowing that I was near. And it was vulgar and insulting and not true!'
'What do you mean?'
'I wouldn't repeat it to you.'
'Well, forget it,' she said, 'Go on to bed and have a good night's sleep.'
Alison was troubled over Anacleto's outburst. It seemed to her that she also loathed people. Everyone she had known in the past five years was somehow wrong that is, everyone except Weincheck and of course Anacleto and little Catherine. Morris Langdon in his blunt way was as stupid and heartless as a man could be. Leonora was nothing but an animal And thieving Weldon Penderton was at bottom hopelessly corrupt. What a gang! Even she herself she loathed. If it were not for sordid procrastination and if she had a rag of pride, she and Anacleto would not be in this house tonight.
She turned her face to the window and looked into the night. A wind had come up, and downstairs a loose shutter was banging against the side of the house. She turned off the light so that she could see out of the window. Orion was wonderfully clear and bright tonight. In the forest the tops of the trees moved in the wind like dark waves. It was then that she glanced down toward the Pendertons' house and saw a man standing again by the edge of the woods. The man himself was hidden by the trees, but his shadow defined itself clearly on the grass of the lawn. She could not distinguish the features of this person, but she was certain now that a man was lurking there. She watched him ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour. He did not move. It gave her such an eerie shock that it occurred to her that perhaps she was really going out of her mind. She closed her eyes and counted by sevens to two hundred and eighty. Then when she looked out again the shadow was gone.
Her husband knocked on the door. Receiving no answer, he turned the knob cautiously and peered inside. 'My dear, are you asleep?' he asked in a voice loud enough to wake anyone.
'Yes,' she said bitterly. 'Dead asleep.'
The Major, puzzled, did not know whether to shut the door or to come inside. All the way across the room she could sense the fact that he had made frequent visits to Leonora's sideboard.
'Tomorrow I am going to tell you something,' she said. 'You ought to have an inkling of what it's about. So prepare yourself.'
'I haven't any idea,' the Major said helplessly. 'Have I done something wrong?' He bethought himself for a few moments. 'But if it's money for anything peculiar, I don't have it, Alison. Lost a bet on a football game and board for my horse ' The door closed warily.
It was past midnight and she was alone again. These hours, from twelve o'clock until dawn, were always dreadful. If ever she told Morris that she had not slept at all, he, of course, did not believe her. Neither did he believe that she was ill. Four years ago, when her health first broke down, he had been alarmed by her condition. But when one calamity followed another empyema, kidney trouble, and now this heart disease he became exasperated and ended finally by not believing her. He thought it all a hypochondriacal fake that she used in order to shirk her duties that is, the routine of sports and parties which he thought suitable. In the same way it is wise to give an insistent hostess a single, firm excuse, for if one declines with a number of reasons, no matter how sound they may be, the hostess will not believe you. She heard her husband walking about in his room across the hall and carrying on a long didactic conversation with himself. She switched on her bed light and began reading.
At two o'clock in the morning it came to her suddenly, without warning, that she was going to die that night. She sat propped up with pillows in the bed, a young woman with a face already sharp and aged, looking restlessly from one corner of the wall to another. She moved her head in a curious little gesture, Biting her chin upward and sideways, as though something were choking her. The silent room seemed to her full of jarring sounds. Water dripped into the bowl of the lavatory in the bathroom. The clock on the mantelpiece, an old pendulum clock with white and gilt swans painted on the glass of the case, ticked with a rusty sound. But the third of these sounds, the loudest and the one which bothered her most, was the beating of her own heart. A great turmoil was going on inside her. Her heart seemed to be vaulting it would beat rapidly like the footsteps of someone running, leap up, and then thud with a violence that shocked her all over. With slow, cautious movements she opened the drawer of the bedside table and took out her knitting. 'I must think of something pleasant,' she told herself reasonably.
She thought back to the happiest time of her life. She was twenty one and for nine months had been trying to work a little Cicero and Virgil into the heads of boarding school girls. Then when vacation came she was in New York with two hundred dollars in her pocketbook. She had got on a bus and headed north with no idea where she was going. And somewhere in Vermont she came to a village she liked the looks of, got off, and within a few days found and rented a little shack out in the woods. She had brought her cat, Petronius, with her and before the summer was over she was obliged to put a feminine ending onto his name because he suddenly had a litter of kittens. Several stray hounds took up with them and once a week she would go into the village to buy cans of groceries for the cats, the dogs, and herself. Morning and night, every day of that fine summer, she had her favorite foods chili con carne, zwieback, and tea. In the afternoons she chopped firewood and at night she sat in the kitchen with her feet on the stove and read or sang aloud to herself.
Alison's pale, flaky lips shaped whispering words and she stared with concentration at
the footboard of the bed. Then all at once she dropped the knitting and held her breath. Her heart had stopped beating. The room was silent as a sepulcher and she waited with her mouth open and her head twisted sideways on the pillow. She was terrified, but when she tried to call out and break this silence, no sound would come.
There was a light tapping on the door, but she did not hear this. Neither for a few moments did she realize that Anacleto had come into the room and was holding her hand in his. After the long, terrible silence (and surely it had lasted more than a minute), her heart was beating again; the folds of her nightgown fluttered lightly over her chest.
'A bad time?' Anacleto asked in a cheerful, encouraging little voice. But his face, as he looked down at her, wore the same sickly grimace as her own with the upper lip drawn back sharply over the teeth.
'I was so frightened,' she said. 'Has something happened?'
'Nothing has happened. But don't look like that' He took his handkerchief from the pocket of his blouse and dipped it in a glass of water to bathe her forehead. 'I'll go down and get my paraphernalia and stay with you until you can sleep.'
Along with his water colors he brought a tray of malted milk. He built a fire and put up a card table before the hearth. His presence was such a comfort that she wanted to sob with relief. After he had given her the tray, he settled himself cozily at the table and drank his hot malted milk with slow, appreciative little sips. This was one of the things she loved the very most about Anacleto; he had a genius for making some sort of festival out of almost any occasion. He acted, not as though out of kindness he had left his bed in the dead of the night to sit up with a sick woman, but as though of their own free will they had chosen this particular hour for a very special party. Whenever they had anything disagreeable to go through with, he always managed to follow it up with some little treat. And now he sat with a white napkin over his crossed knees drinking the mixture with as much ceremony as if the cup had been filled with choice wine although he disliked the taste of the stuff quite as much as she did, and only bought it because he was attracted by the glowing promises on the label of the can.
'Are you sleepy?' she asked.
'Not at all.' But at the very mention of sleep he was so tired that he could not keep from yawning. Loyally he turned away and tried to pretend that he had opened his mouth in order to feel one of his new wisdom teeth with his forefinger. I had a nap this afternoon and then I slept awhile tonight. I dreamed about Catherine.'
Alison could never think about her baby without experiencing an emotion so loaded with love and grief that it was like an insupportable weight on her chest It was not true that time could muffle the keenness of this loss. Now she had more control over herself, but that was all. For a while, after those eleven months of joy, suspense, and suffering, she was quite unchanged. Catherine had been buried in the cemetery on the post where they were stationed. And for a long time she had been obsessed by the sharp, morbid image of the little body in the grave. Her horrified broodings on decay and on that tiny lonely skeleton had brought her to such a state that at last, after considerable red tape, she had had the coffin disinterred. She had taken what was left of the body to the crematorium in Chicago and had scattered the ashes in the snow. And now all that was left of Catherine were the memories that she and Anacleto shared together.
Alison waited until her voice should be steady and then she asked: 'What was it you dreamed?'
'It was troubling,' he said quietly. 'Rather like holding a butterfly in my hands. I was nursing her on my lap then sudden convulsions and you were trying to get the hot water to run.' Anacleto opened his paint box and arranged his paper, brushes, and water colors before him. The fire brightened his pale face and put a glow in his dark eyes. 'Then the dream changed, and instead of Catherine I had on my knees one of the Major's boots that I had to clean twice today. The boot was full of squirming slithery new born mice and I was trying to hold them in and keep them from crawling up all over me. Whoo! It was like '
'Hush, Anacleto!' she said, with a shiver. 'Please!'
He began to paint and she watched him. He dipped his brush into the glass and a lavender cloud showed in the water. His face was thoughtful as he bent over the paper and once he paused to make a few rapid measurements with a ruler on the table. As a painter Anacleto had great talent of that she was sure. In his other accomplishments he had a certain knack, but at bottom he was imitative almost, as Morris said, a little monkey. In his little water colors, and drawings, however, he was quite himself. When they were stationed near New York, he had gone into the city in the afternoons to the Art Students' League, and she had been very proud, but not at all surprised, to observe how many people at the school exhibition came back to look at his pictures more than once.
His work was at once primitive and over sophisticated, and it laid a queer spell on the beholder. But she could not get him to take his gift with proper seriousness and to work hard enough.
'The quality of dreams,' he was saying softly. 'That is a strange thing to think about. On afternoons in the Philippines, when the pillow is damp and the sun shines in the room, the dream is of one sort. And then in the North at night when it is snowing '
But already Alison had got back into her rut of worry, and she was not listening to him. 'Tell me,' she interrupted suddenly. 'When you had the sulks this morning and said you were going to open a linen shop in Quebec, did you have anything particular in mind?'
'Why, certainly,' he said. 'You know I have always wanted to see the city of Quebec. And I think there is nothing so pleasant as handling beautiful linen.'
'And that's all you had in mind ' she said. Her voice lacked the inflections of a question and he did not reply to this. 'How much money do you have in the bank?'
He thought a moment with his brush poised above the water glass. 'Four hundred dollars and six cents...Do you want me to draw it out?'
'Not now. But we might need it later.'
'For Heaven's sake,' he said, 'don't worry. It does not a particle of good.'
The room was filled with the rose glow of the fire and gray flickering shadows. The clock made a little whirring sound and then struck three.
'Look!' Anacleto said suddenly. He crumpled up the paper he had been painting on and threw it aside. Then he sat in a meditative gesture with his chin in his hands, staring at the embers of the fire. 'A peacock of a sort of ghastly green. With one immense golden eye. And in it these reflections of something tiny and '
In his effort to find just the right word he held up his hand with the thumb and forefinger touched together. His hand made a great shadow on the wall behind him. Tiny and ' 'Grotesque,' she finished for him. He nodded shortly. 'Exactly.'
But after he had already begun working, some sound in the silent room, or perhaps the memory of the last tone of her voice, made him turn suddenly around. 'Oh, don't!' he said. And as he rushed from the table he overturned the water glass so that it shattered on the hearth.
Private Williams had been in the room where the Captain's wife lay sleeping for only an hour that night. He waited near the outskirts of the woods during the party. Then, when most of the guests were gone, he watched through the sitting room window until the Captain's wife went upstairs to bed. Later he came into the house as he had done before. Again that night the moonlight was clear and silver in the room. The Lady lay on her side with her warm oval face cupped between her rather grubby hands. She wore a satin nightgown and the cover was pushed down to her waist. The young soldier crouched silent by the bedside. Once he reached out warily and felt the slippery cloth of her nightgown with his thumb and forefinger. He had looked about him on coming into the room. For a time he stood before the bureau and contemplated the bottles, powder puffs, and toilet articles. One object, an atomizer, had aroused his interest, and he had taken it to the window and examined it with a puzzled face. On the table there was a saucer holding a half eaten chicken leg. The soldier touched it, smelled, and took a bite.
Now he squatted in the moonlight, his eyes half closed and a wet smile on his lips. Once the Captain's wife turned in her sleep, sighed, and stretched herself. With curious fingers the soldier touched a brown strand of hair which lay loose on the pillow.
It was past three o'clock when Private Williams stiffened suddenly. He looked about him and seemed to listen to some sound. He did not realize all at once what caused this change, this uneasiness to come in him. Then he saw that the lights in the house next door had been turned on. In the still night he could hear the voice of a woman crying. Later he heard an automobile stop before the lighted house. Private Williams walked noiselessly into the dark hall. The door of the Captain's room was closed. Within a few moments he was walking slowly along the outskirts of the woods.
Carson McCullers - Reflections In A Golden Eye Page 7
