The Dying of the Light

by Robert Goolrick

  “Can we first look in the freezer?”

  As everybody got up from breakfast and went their separate ways, Lucius heaved opened the freezer door. There were two shelves, each holding about twenty books. “The ones on the top are ready to be ironed. The ones on the bottom are still drying out.” His eyes were shifty, secretive. Diana instantly knew what was going on, but she said nothing. One of the books was Sir Walter Scott, which she had been reading just last week.

  They took a cup of coffee and walked into the library. It had been totally restored to its former magnificence.

  “Lucius, it’s gorgeous. There’s not a flaw.”

  “Well, there’s a bit of tweaking, and some books left to do.”

  She looked at him closely. “Lucius, I know what you’re doing. You’re taking books you’ve already dried and ironed and wetting them again so the whole process can start all over.”

  “I . . . I want to do my best work.”

  “You want to stay on in this house. By your plan, your work will never be done.”

  He began to argue, but then his face crumpled. “This has come to be my home. I have nowhere else to go. I don’t cause a moment’s bother to anybody.”

  “Lucius, my little duckling, what I’m trying to say is that your work is done here. We’ll be sad to see you go.”

  “Please, do I have to go? You don’t have to pay me. In fact, you haven’t paid me in weeks.” Tears began to stream down his face. “I have nowhere to go.”

  Diana found it both touching and repulsive to see a man crying, but she barreled on.

  “What about the university?”

  “School is finished for me. I’ve gotten my degree. There’s nothing for me but to try to find a job. But teaching library science to a horde of pimply prep-school boys? God, I’d rather die.”

  “I’m terribly sorry, but the answer has to be no. You have so many charms, and I’m sure you can find other people with libraries like this one that need restoration. I’ll write some letters for you. But you can’t stay here. It’s already complicated enough.”

  “I know what you do in the night. You and Gibby. And I know about your son. I know everything.”

  Her eyes went dead. “How dare you try to blackmail me? I was going to tell you that you could leave in two weeks. But now, I think it’s best you leave tomorrow.”

  He burst into tears. “I am so sorry. I should never have said that. I . . . I adore you. Your business is private, and it’s dreadfully wrong of me to poke my nose—”

  “Tomorrow, Lucius. That is the end of our discussion. Priscilla will iron the last of the books. I will write you a glowing recommendation and give you five hundred dollars in cash, but I don’t want to see you anymore. Thank you for such excellent work.” Her voice was frigid with disdain. She looked out at the blue-brown river, calm today. When she turned around, Lucius was gone, and he wasn’t seen the rest of the day. Nobody noticed his absence. Not one of them.

  Conversation was thin. They went as usual through the papers, avidly reading about the war. The painters worked away. The upholsterers unrolled bolts of cloth under Rose’s watchful eye, she often shaking her head and sending the cloth back where it had come from. Now it was no longer a matter of whether they would enter the war, but when, and like the rest of the nation, everything hung in suspense. America was like an enormous firecracker with a fuse that stretched to all parts of the globe. It would explode with the first spark.

  That night in bed, Diana looked at Gibby and thought of Ash. She thought of war, and how he could not bear it; some way must be found to keep him safe. She told Gibby about her cousins, all gone now, about sweet little Uncle Charlie, and Gibby laughed and shook his head.

  Then, soberly and surprisingly, Gibby recited “To an Athlete Dying Young,” and after that they lay in silence, until he kissed her and left her in the cooling bed.

  The next day passed in a crushing silence. She sat in the south study with a cocktail and watched the sunset, really watched it closely, and there it was, the second the sun went down behind the horizon, a brilliant, instantaneous green flash, here and gone in a second, a little thing, everything, her mother, her childhood, the whole weight of Saratoga, her life and what would become of it, here and gone as quick as the green flash itself. They say life is long. It’s not. It’s over in an instant. Things are seen up close, and then almost immediately at a great, unreachable distance, and you are left withered on the shore, old, bent, as thin as the memories that haunt you.

  She saw nothing of Lucius. She assumed he was packing, talking on the telephone, making a plan. She had paid him handsomely, and he had spent nothing; he must have accumulated a little pile to make his way in the world. She had Priscilla take him some dinner on a tray, but he wasn’t in his room. She left the tray for him on his bed.

  That night, after she and Gibby made love, pledged again eternity, knowing that eternity was about to collapse around their heads, after they turned from their good-night kisses and she watched him go as she always watched him go, with stealth, she fell into bed and drowned in sleep, so deep, her breath and her dreams coming like one single drawn-out note on a stringed instrument, so eternal that neither she nor Gibby heard the pop, the one pop in the night, so nobody knew that Lucius Walter had used a safety pin to trip the lock on the gun cabinet and taken out a Colt 1911, neatly, quietly cleaned it, loaded it with one bullet, and taken it down beside the moonstruck water, where he put it in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and blew his brains out. By the time they noticed his absence, in the late morning, birds were already picking at his eyes.

  26

  WHEN ASH GOT home the next day, he took charge of everything. He had Priscilla wash the body and sew it in gunny sacks from the barn, and then he and Gibby lifted it into the walk-in freezer.

  They called the university, but got very little help. Yes, Lucius Walter had been a student, graduated two years ago. He had been hanging around since then, trying to look useful. In his records, there was very little information about family. An aunt in California. But when they called, the number had been disconnected, no forwarding. Beyond that, they couldn’t help. He had emptied out his lodgings when he came to Saratoga, and even at the university they had had no idea where he had been these last months. He had received no mail in his absence, mail that might have given a clue as to where he was from or who his friends were. He was a complete enigma from nowhere, Lucius Walter, and now he was just a corpse in the meat locker on the hands of people who didn’t even know him. Priscilla knew him. Their paths often crossed when she came in to start breakfast, and he was still diligently ironing at the kitchen table. She knew him to be kind, and respectful, and funny and fascinating. He talked to her as an equal. Her coming was supposed to be the signal for him to go to bed, but often he didn’t. He sat and talked to Priscilla until the house came alive. Then the others, in their beautiful bathrobes, made their sleepy way into the dining room, always sitting in the first chair they had sat in when they arrived, but now each one fraught, charged with secrets and lies and love and fear. At the first sound, Lucius crept up the back stairs, not to be seen again until dinner, except by Priscilla, who took him a sandwich and a lemonade at lunch.

  ON THE MORNING after Lucius Walter put a bullet through his brains, Diana did not appear for breakfast. The boys, however, ate like horses, and after breakfast went down into the basement in search of something suitable to build a box. They found an old two-legged table, immense, and they thought they would use that. There were many things like that down there, broken things, waiting for the day when somebody would take an interest, fix and restore them, and they would arise like the phoenix from the ashes.

  The boys in their jeans and their Carhartt jackets dragged the table from the basement into the barn and built a box. They weren’t very good carpenters, and it wasn’t a very good box, but it would have to do. They needed the freezer back.

  All day, Priscilla bristled about something, and it finally
came out. She wouldn’t let them bury Lucius wrapped in gunny sacks in a pine box, like some poor black man with no family. They explained it wasn’t pine, it was mahogany; they pointed out that he, in fact, had no family; but nothing deterred her. She’d seen white folks’ coffins, rich and soft, like babies’ beds, and she was determined to have that for Lucius. Before he died, he had given her a shoebox tied with a school tie, and told her to open it if anything should happen to him. “Like what, honey?” she’d asked, and he’d shrugged and said, “I don’t know. Just something.” Then, as an afterthought, he asked her to share with Clarence, and asked if he could hug her, which she let him, and then said good night. In the morning, after they found the body, she and Clarence counted the money in the shoebox, laying out the bills in two piles on their bed, and Priscilla just said, “Praise Jesus, he was a nice boy. Never hurt a fly.” By their lights, they were rich. It was his whole salary since he came to Saratoga. But this was too much. She’d simply loved him. She’d loved their secret breakfasts together, when he treated her with such respect and affection and good humor. She laughed the whole time she was making the biscuits, and he taught her to hang a spoon from her nose. And when they were all having dinner, she could hear his voice, and when he spoke, they all laughed when he’d finished, and by her lights, that was enough. To her eye, none of them did anything anyway. White people. They just lounged around, telling anecdotes about that war that was almost a hundred years ago, about who had had lunch here once, about the time so and so did what and where—useless talk, and expecting food on the table exactly when they wanted it, and them dressed up like Mr. Roosevelt was coming to dinner.

  Priscilla went into the attic and found some purple brocade curtains fringed with weighty gold bullion. Nobody used them anymore. There was a time when the house was religious, when the curtains in the south study were changed for the ecclesiastical seasons—red and white and green and so on. Purple was for Lent, the season of repentance and redemption.

  She found an old moth-eaten mattress and ripped out the horsehair batting and lined the coffin with that, and then she went in the freezer, afraid as she was of dead people—haints—and sewed him into his heavy purple silk brocade shroud, tucking and sewing so that the bullion went down the front of his body and around his face. Then he was ready, and they nailed the box shut and carried it to the family plot, and lowered him into the hole Clarence had dug. Ash and Gibby were fairly drunk by this time, and it was gray and drizzling, so that at the last minute the strap broke and the coffin fell with a thud into the muddy, collapsing hole, helter-skelter, and Priscilla yelled out, “Sweet Jesus!” but by this time the pale sun was setting through the thin cloud cover, and there was no time to do anything, so that’s the way Lucius Walter was to spend eternity. Only Priscilla wept.

  Dinner was cold salads, served late. Priscilla entered the dining room regally with her tray, a large silver spoon hung from her nose, but nobody noticed, a joke gone bad. Diana maintained her absence, so Gibby and Ash took the opportunity to get really drunk and have mock fistfights and jump on the furniture like children half their age. As though they had forgotten. Finally forgotten the death in the river. And then that turned into the emotional part—I love you, buddy, you’re the only real friend I’ve ever had—until about midnight, when they struggled arm in arm up the stairs.

  That night, when Gibby knocked his usual knock, Diana lay still and cold in her bed and did not move. He knocked again. And then one more time.

  She got out of bed and locked the door. She drew the heavy velvet curtains, turned out the nightlight so there was nothing but darkness. She had to feel her way in the black. There would be time. Not much, but some. She was safe only in the dark.

  There was a final soft knock, at five, and this time she opened the door. Gibby stood, concern and love in his eyes. She didn’t move aside so that he might come in. There was a long silence in the dark.

  Finally Diana spoke.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said, and closed the door.

  27

  WHY DO TERRIBLE things happen in such splendid weather? Two days later, on a dawning day in late October, Gibby and Diana left in first light for Richmond and her regular doctor, whom she had been seeing since she was a girl.

  The silver sliver of a moon still hung in the lightening sky, the river smooth as mercury on a plate, waiting for the thin golden veil that would fall on everything when the sun came up, the leaves russet and scarlet, one of fall’s gifts, the warm golden dawn.

  They might have had a picnic, chicken salad sandwiches down by the river. They might have gone riding. They might have made love on the secret rock. He might have twirled her over his head again, his arms bulging, Diana feeling like the ducks flying over the river, the freedom of being above the ground, her wings spread.

  There might have been so much joy. They might have been freed from the shackles of age, on this explosive fall day, just two bodies joined in every way two bodies can be joined, coming home with grass and sand inside their clothes. They might have forgotten Ash’s pain, and his rage.

  Instead, they pulled the ancient Rolls out of the garage while everybody else was sleeping and headed for Richmond and this awful, awful thing that awaited her, awaited him as well, his lesson in being a grown-up.

  The weather so pristine, sullied only by the event that was to happen. A girl. A boy. A human bean just six weeks old. Gone into a bucket. Louisa Regina. Thomas Maitland. Never to be. Sleeping peacefully curled now in her womb. In another time, another society, the child might have grown to term and emerged and lived. There might have been a christening with the family christening dress, yellowed with age. But she wasn’t that brave. She hadn’t slept for forty-eight hours, trying to find the courage to defy them all, to tell them all to go to hell, the first families of Virginia, the whisperers, with their smirks, but it just wasn’t in her.

  Like dominoes stacked to fall, the knowledge would get out. First to Ash, and it would kill him—his tiny baby brother or sister, the next in line—or he would kill Gibby, for trespassing, for his evil audacity. Either way, there would be blood, and a coffin, and the sliding into the earth, into the eternal dark, either way, her life’s love gone into the ground not to return, then a reception at the house, ham biscuits and chicken salad, and the gracious smiles and the thanks for coming and then the quiet that would never ever end. The ticking of the clock. The perfect morning. The fetus in a bucket.

  They drove in silence. Diana shivered. Gibby turned up the heat in that car until it was tropically hot. Still she shivered in her fur coat, her grandmother’s purloined mink from Montaldo’s. The landscape went by them. She turned her face to the window so Gibby wouldn’t see her tears.

  They were two entirely separate people in the same car.

  Several times Gibby started to speak, then cleared his throat and shut his mouth, jaws clenched to keep the words in his heart. Now was not the time for revelation or words of consolation.

  Finally he said, as the skyline of the city came into view, “Dr. Howland is going to help you. Everything will go on, until today is yesterday, and all of this is a fading memory.”

  “You don’t understand a single thing. Not about women’s hearts. Not about me. Not about the way real life grinds you down. Dr. Howland will give me his congratulations and a big hug and wish me well.”

  “Then why are we seeing him at all?”

  “We have to start somewhere. I hope he’ll know somebody, a retired nurse. An alcoholic doctor, somebody. I hope he’ll be generous and kind.”

  They rode in silence for twenty minutes. The day grew more gorgeous with every moment as the sun rose and they entered the streets of the city.

  Diana rolled down the window. The cool wind rushed into the car, lifting the silk scarves they both wore. She turned on the radio and through the static said, “Give me a cigarette.”

  “You don’t smoke.”

  “I want a cigarette.”

  He reached in
to his pocket and pulled out his Luckies and lit two, one for each of them. She barely drew the smoke into her mouth before she blew it out. She turned off the useless radio.

  “Gibby.” Her tone was flat, without affection. “Except for my parents, except for Ash, I have never loved anybody until I met you. So please listen to what I’m going to say.” She threw her cigarette out the window.

  “I love Ash beyond anything. He comes first, whoever he is, whatever happens. I would lie down on the railroad tracks for him. He came out of my body and that creates a connection and that connection can never be broken. It’s blood. Not ever. Not for you. Not for anybody. He’s my son.

  “You have given me something I have never had, and I want to have it forever. There is not a moment in the day I don’t want you with me. You have my body, forever. It’s a gift I’m giving you, and I hope your fascination with it never fades. You could have anything I have, and I have a lot of things.

  “We come from a noble family. I have been told that since I was a baby. The Cookes of Virginia. Now I’m . . . I’m . . .” Her voice caught, and she was silent for a moment while she gathered herself. “I’m throwing one away, like garbage after a dinner party. Unless Ash has children, and that possibility seems to have vanished like smoke, there will be no more. All that fine breeding. An historical child. But you, I ennoble you. You are the king of my heart. And you always will be, and yes, I would marry you. Yes, I already have married you. And we could step into the light—the beautiful dress, the veil, light as air, flying like a cloud behind me as I rush down the lawn to meet my love, my heart, my . . . husband, if, if only . . .” She stopped again, this time for a very long time.

  “And there is the end of the story. We are the king and queen of If Only. There is no more. There is no after.”

  Gibby stared straight ahead and drove. He had, in his young heart, a thousand things to say that would never be said. But there were too many secrets. Secrets and silences.