William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice

by Styron, William

  Peyton and Harry had begun to carve the cake.

  “Smile!”

  There was a white blossom of light, cheers from the guests. The champagne hit him like a fist. Already he was hopelessly drunk. …

  Six o’clock. Five minutes have passed since the first wedge was cut from the cake. There is a lull in the celebration, for it is the duty of each guest to have some of the cake, although cake goes poorly with whisky or champagne, and it is the last thing the guests want to eat. Few of them would care, really, about eating, but the guests have been to too many weddings. The cake has become symbolic of something and they have to face it: it must be eaten. Besides, it would be a pity to let that huge thing go to waste. Peyton and Harry have eaten the first slice; Ella, aided by one of the colored boys, is carving away the rest. The guests crowd around, their champagne put aside for the moment, and hold out plates. With its golden insides exposed and with white frosting crumbling softly around its edges, the cake looks like a great snow-covered mountain which has had one slope blown away by dynamite; at its peak, as if upon the top of Everest, stands a tiny bridal couple, embowered by pink sugar roses, whose faces have the serenely fatuous looks of store-window mannequins. Part of the groom has been chipped away. You can see through his morning coat to his guts, which are made, quite obviously, of nothing but candy. The bride’s bouquet has become hacked off, too. It rests far below in the gaping crevasse. And now, while Ella chops perilously about the top of the cake, the couple becomes undermined by her knife; there is a rush of avalanching crumbs, bride and bridegroom tilt, totter, lean forward as if looking for the lost bouquet, and almost fall, but are halted by Monk Yourtee who, amid rowdy, pointed laughter, snatches them from the brink and gnaws off the bridegroom’s head.

  Outside, the sun sinks slowly behind a frieze of sycamores. A gentle breeze rises from the bay, filled with the faint, cool snap and odor of autumn. Leaves flutter across the lawn, troop up the slope and over the terrace and, one by one like vandals, begin to invade the room. The waiters close the doors and pull the windows down. Above the sound of music and the laughter the churchbell begins to strike six chimes, and one or two people look at their watches and decide that it’s almost time to leave. Yet no one leaves. Not yet. The cake must be eaten and then there’s space for more champagne. With cake-filled plates and reloaded glasses they scatter to the corners of the room. For a moment the conversation almost ceases. The mouths of the guests are full of cake. A brief contemplative sag has come; there’s more thought than talk, and all good Episcopalian minds turn to thoughts of things done, things left undone, words said in an alcoholic fog, not more than five minutes ago, which would have better been left unspoken. Thus chewing, briefly ruminating, they pause to sanctify Peyton’s marriage—the champagne its mystical blood, the cake its confectionery flesh.

  Regard them now—Peyton and Harry, Loftis and Helen. Peyton is listening—appears to be listening—to Mrs. Overman Stubbs, who talks of her own bridal clothes, of Overman, of their honeymoon in New Orleans. Years ago …

  She turns to Harry. “And your parents?” she asks, a woman with sweetness and solicitude engraved on every part of her plump and rouged, middle-aged face. Sweetness unadulterated, direct and without reticence, almost obsessed in its need to be spread everywhere, it leaves an odor behind her wherever she goes, like the smell that clings to one upon leaving a bakery. She is a good woman and on this day she feels an extraordinary tenderness. She has lived most of her life in Port Warwick, and Harry is the third Jew she has ever met. He’s not strange at all, she thinks, he’s handsome, with a sad sweet look in his eyes, and impulsively she wonders about his home, his family, the mysterious New York Jews, asks again, “Your parents? They couldn’t come?”

  “They’re dead.”

  “Oh——” Almost imperceptibly her lips quiver, she turns blindly away: there, she’s done it again. Her sweetness, her need to be nice. It so often makes her blunder. “Oh,” she says, and looks up and smiles once more at Peyton, timidly, moving aside—“Well, congratulations again!”—bogged down by a swift confusion.

  Peyton drains her glass and squeezes Harry’s hand, then turns. Her face, upon which happiness has rested tangible and alive, making her eyes sparkle, suddenly and just for the briefest moment goes slack and angry, the gay façade dissolving like a film of plaster. “Let’s go soon,” she whispers. The churchbell chimes.

  “What’s the matter, honey?”

  “This … all this——”

  “What? Take it easy on the champagne.”

  “I don’t like this,” she said.

  “Why, honey?”

  “I—I don’t know. I—oh, Tommy!” The happy look reassembles mechanically: she smiles, throws her arms about a young naval officer, who steadies her, because she is tottering a little.

  Far off to the west the last chimes waver, die, fading seaward like great globes of brass borne upon a powerful and uncanny wind. The music ceases. There is a loud, drunken shriek of female laughter, cutting through the murmurous undertow of voices, yet above both of these, laughter and voices, the bell sounds roll toward the sea, return foreshortened on vibrating blasts, fade, return, and sink finally out of the sphere of hearing.

  Loftis says, “Yes, yes.” Monroe Hobbie has him clutched by the elbow, in a raw, anguished, dentist’s grip. He speaks of love, of olden times, of lost ladies and one, in particular, who left him for a dirty wop. His eyes, bifocaled, reflect sorrow, his voice the memory of a vanquished love, but Loftis doesn’t hear. Lost himself, his heart hollow as a drum, he watches Peyton through the crowd, thinking not of vanquished love, but of chimes and bells. He drinks. The bells toll on through his memory. Seaward-borne, they strike reefs of recollection, shatter and recover, come back to smother his soul like something heavy and outrageous. Time! Time! he thinks. My God, has it finally come to this, do I finally know? And lost in memory, thinking not of Peyton but of this final knowledge—this irrevocable loss of her—he recalls the incessant tolling bells. With a steady, brazen certainty they had struck off the passing hours, marched through the house night and day forever. It seems that he had heard them for the first time, though they are silent now, motionless in their yokes. The guests reel giddily before his eyes, on his arm the dentist’s clutch is raw and painful. Those bells, he thinks, those bells. Why now did they return to afflict him with such despair? Count off twenty years. The light in the room deepens toward gold, sending sandy threads through Peyton’s hair.

  A vision swarms through his mind, as sudden and as irretrievable as smoke. It vanishes. He looks down into the dentist’s mouth, a fishlike opening, straining for breath like one who dies not for lack of oxygen, but of asphyxiation of heart and spirit, and the dentist’s eyes fill up with tears: “For a dirty little sailor she left me,” he whimpers. “Milton, man, she was the finest …”

  The vision returns, and the bells. He sees the lawn outside, Peyton, summer. Peyton is a little girl with clean pink legs, a pink ribbon in her hair. Around them the grass grows thick and high and crickets jump through the spikelike weeds. Together they stand beneath the cedars, her hand in his; across the morning water flash gulls and sails, wings, waves sparkling like fire. She looks at her book, says, “Tiddely-pom,” rubs her head against his arm gently, musingly, her long, soft hair falling on his knees. The air is full of heat, insect noises, the smell of summer and now, like the stroke of a pendulum, the first voice of the bells. “Bong,” go the chimes, “bong,” says Peyton, and turns, saying, “Daddy, tell me about the bells.” He squeezes her hand, pulling her along. “Come on,” he says. They go through the weeds out into the sunlight, across the lawn and up the new-mown slope, taking care not to slip; the dew is still cold and bright on the grass. They walk in silence, for, though Peyton talks incessantly, he has forgotten the words she said. Now they are on the gravel drive, walking past the house, the mimosas, the grape arbor drowsy with bees, the honeysuckled fence, and strolling together, her hand moist in his, down t
he drive and up the tree-lined street. So in this way, drunk with champagne, he feels, with his mind blank to the dentist’s stricken words, blank to everything save the light woven through Peyton’s hair, immersed in time: nine times the bells are tolling, birds sing in the sycamores, and he is with Peyton, holding hands.

  Across a field they go, over the ditch they jump, and over a stile. In the houses, the proper, middle-class homes with the light meters shining in the light and the garages closed and the clipped, pruned hedges—in all these houses people are sleeping, for it is Sunday; no one stirs. Peyton’s sandals flap-flap along the sidewalk, she talks of boys and cats and birds, and of bells; the chimes still ringing, a hymn now—Jesus calls us—they reach the church, gazing up at the ivy walls. The doors are open; they walk in, through the deserted, damp-smelling halls, past stained windows of Galilee and Capernaeum, reds like melted iron, blues the color of drowned men’s lips, past parables and saints and miracles and the diamond eyes of Peter, intercepting the morning sun like lenses of a microscope. Now up the creaking stairs they climb, brushing a dust of plaster from the walls. Peyton sneezes, the chimes grow louder above them—

  O’er the tumult

  Of our life’s wild, restless sea

  —and then, emerging above in a burst of light, they stand at the belfry door, laughing together, deafened by the noise. In their arches the hammers draw back like bowstrings, leap forward, descend on the bell throats as swiftly and as wickedly as birds of prey. The timbers shudder and Peyton, frightened, clings to him. He shouts something back to soothe her but, squeezing the flesh of his leg until it hurts, she bursts out into a fury of weeping. Then suddenly there is silence, abrupt and shocking, louder than the noise: one high note quivers on the air, its vibration trailing seaward behind the deep ones, returns briefly, fades and vanishes, returns no more. Peyton continues to weep, silently, desperately, sobbing. He lifts her to the ledge and puts his arm about her, telling her not to be frightened. Beneath the eaves sparrows scuttle in their nests and fly off with a raucous sound. A twig falls from a sycamore. A car horn blows somewhere. He smooths dust from her skirt, saying, “Peyton, don’t be scared,” and then kisses her. The weeping stops. Beneath his cheek he can feel cool, tiny beads of sweat on her brow.

  He doesn’t know why his heart pounds so nor, when he kisses her again, in an agony of love, why she should push him so violently away with her warm small hands. …

  Now in his memory the bells fade, finally die. The dentist snuffles, lifts up his bifocals to wipe his pink, inflamed eyes. Loftis says nothing. He has heard nothing. Across the room he sees Peyton break away from the young lieutenant, her arm crooked at the elbow in a curious, disjointed way, groping behind her for the empty champagne glass. It is a willful gesture, almost frantic, and though he cannot see her face, he imagines it: tense, glowing with artificial joy, like his own a mask, concealing the bitterness of memory. He wishes to go to her side, to talk to her alone, and explain. He wants only to be able to say: forgive me, forgive all of us. Forgive your mother, too. She saw, but she just couldn’t understand. It’s my fault. Forgive me for loving you so.

  But at this moment, when he suddenly sees Helen, white with fury, throw a coat over her shoulders and go out onto the porch with Carey Carr, he knows that explanations are years too late. If he himself could love too much, only Helen could love so little.

  Carey felt benevolent after three glasses of sherry, and he wasn’t prepared for Helen, or her hysteria. He had been standing in a doorway talking to Dr. DeWitt Lonergan and his wife. Both of them were parishioners of his. He was rather fond of the doctor, who had a naïve way of thinking Carey liked off-color stories, which in fact he did as long as they stayed reasonably clean, but Bernice, who had big hips and wide-spaced teeth like the wife of Bath, and a mannered, nervous laugh, he found gross and somehow unwholesome, and he usually discovered, to his embarrassment, that he ignored completely what she had to say. She also had the habit of sprinkling her chatter with “You know’s?” and “See what I mean’s?” which, since politeness compelled him to make a reply, made his abstracted air all the more difficult, because he rarely knew what she meant at all.

  And he was watching Peyton, with a dim, unaccountable feeling of sadness; he sensed something wrong, but he didn’t know what. It had been the same at the ceremony. Watching her—yes, God knows she was beautiful—he had been troubled by the identical thought: sad, that’s what she is. When she spoke the vows her lips parted not like all the brides he’d ever seen—exposing their clean, scrubbed teeth in a little eager puff of rapture—but rather with a kind of wry and somber resignation. It had been a brief shadow of a mood, just a flicker, but enough for him to tell: her “I will” had seemed less an avowal than a confession, like the tired words of some sad, errant nun. Not any of her put-on gaiety could disguise this, not even now when, from behind Bernice Lonergan’s hefty shoulder, he saw Peyton turn from the navy uniform, wheel about and fill her glass, in a frenzy.

  “I mean what with war and all I think people are more and more getting back to religion, see what I mean, Carey?” Awkwardly he looked up to meet Bernice’s uncomplicated gaze. “I mean,” she went on, “there’s such a real need——” But at this point, just when he had about decided to go talk to Peyton, to calm her, Helen came up and grabbed him by the arm. “Can I see you?”

  She excused herself to the Lonergans and, taking a route through the hall so they’d not be seen by the guests, led him outside. In silence he followed her across the lawn, all the way down to the seawall. It was chilly and he began to protest but at the edge of the seawall she turned and faced him, clutching his hand.

  “Did you see it?” she said. Her voice was a hiss, like gas escaping from a bottle of soda.

  “What, Helen?” he said. “What do you mean?”

  “Her. What she did.”

  “I—I don’t know——” He was appalled by her look, and a little frightened. Popeyed, trembling, she seemed so distraught as to be on the verge of some striking biological change, and her skin, in this fading light, was as colorless as the whites of her eyes. He shivered, drew his hand away. A dim sound of music floated across the slope, and crazy laughter.

  “Didn’t you see it?” she said again.

  “No, Helen,” he said sharply, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. And besides——”

  “The way she’s acting. Toward him. Didn’t you see? Carey, you must be blind. You——” She took his hand again.

  “Helen——” he put in sternly.

  She went on, bearing down on his fingers. “She’s behaving like the little tramp she is! Already she’s drunk. Already! She’d been drinking before the ceremony, I could smell it on her breath! Now this. Didn’t you see the way she acted toward him? Didn’t——”

  “Toward who, Helen? Who?”

  “Him. Milton. Don’t you see what she’s doing to him? Oh, I can’t stand this! Let it go on——” She drew her coat tight around her shoulders, and ran one white, bony hand through her hair. “After all I’ve planned and worked and sacrificed. Just for her and for him. Knowing how much she means to him, and how much he loves her! All this time I’ve been ready to forget that he’s spoiled her rotten. That hasn’t mattered one bit to me. I was willing to forget that as long as I knew it made him happy. To have her home again, I mean. It’s pathetic, that’s what it is, Carey. I mean, that he should love her so, when it’s obvious she despises him. Hates him. Not just me. But him. After all we’ve——”

  Less sherry in him and he might have reacted with considerably more intelligence, but all he could do was turn away, shocked and despairing, his eyes on a piece of driftwood bobbing below, his mouth opening and closing, struggling vainly for words. “Helen …”

  “You mustn’t look like that, Carey,” she said, more calmly. “It’s the truth I’m telling you. I’ve been willing to overlook that terrible fact all my life. That he’s ruined her, spoiled her half to death. I’ve been willing to
overlook that because I’ve loved him. With all his weaknesses and all his faults I’ve loved him more than you could ever imagine a woman loving a man. I was willing to overlook that woman and his drinking and everything. I was willing even to overlook the way he spoiled Peyton. And now, look. Look at what’s happened!”

  He threw his arms into the air, a vast stage gesture brought on by drink, and entirely inadequate. “What has happened, Helen?” He turned to face her. “What on earth has happened? What are you driving at? By heaven, I haven’t seen anything! Yes, Peyton looks utterly wretched. But maybe something’s wrong besides Peyton. Maybe——”

  “There’s nothing wrong with anybody except Peyton. Oh, the cruelty, the shame of having a child like that. And I’ve loved her, Carey, I’ve loved her! We’ve had our misunderstandings and all that sort of thing, but even when I knew she hated me the most I loved her. Loved her as only a mother can love someone. Only a mother——”

  He took her by the arms. “Calm down now, understand, Helen? Listen to me. You’ve got to get hold of yourself. What are you driving at? Just what has Peyton done?”

  “She’s persecuting him, that’s what she’s doing. You can see it in her eyes. I planned this wedding just for her. And for him. Milton.”

  “How about for yourself? Don’t you do anything for yourself?”

  “I … I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean, so you see a look in her eyes, hear a word, and you figure she’s persecuting him. Just what do you mean by that? What did she say?”