Monty was shivering so violently it seemed as though he were having convulsions. Ilsa had her arms about him and was holding him tightly against her to try to control the jerking of his muscles.
“Pain, pain,” Monty kept saying.
“Henny?” Ilsa said as I came in.
“Yes. Here’s the milk.”
“Put it right down at my feet. Right here where I can feel it. That’s right. Now go to the hall closet and get me one of the big double blankets.”
I hurried out again. When I came back she was speaking to him sharply. “Monty. Try to tell me. Did you have anything to drink? Did you? Monty! Answer me. It’s all right. I just want to know. Did you have anything to drink?”
“Yes,” he managed to gasp out.
“Here’s the blanket,” I said.
“Wrap it around him.”
While I was doing this she leaned down, felt for the milk, and poured a glass, hardly spilling a drop.
“Can’t drink milk,” Monty groaned. “Makes me sick.”
“Exactly,” she said. “That’s why you’ll drink it.”
He jerked wildly away, spilling most of the glass.
“You’ll have to help me hold him,” Ilsa said to me.
I sat down on the other side of the bed and tried to pinion his arms. Ilsa refilled the glass and forced it to his lips. As soon as he had swallowed the milk he began to retch, and she reached for the basin. He vomited into it, moaning. “It hurts,” he moaned. “Pain. Oh, God, pain.”
“Where?” she asked.
“My stomach. Oh, God, my stomach.”
“Empty the basin and come back as quickly as you can,” she said to me.
When I came back she had her fingers on his pulse. “How is it?” I asked.
“Very weak. Very rapid.”
“Could it be appendix?” I asked.
“No. He had that out while you were in Paris. I’m sure it was the gin. He’s cold and wet. The vomiting. Everything. He’s got all the earmarks.”
“How do you know?”
“Franz told me about a woman in his company who almost died from bad liquor a couple of weeks before they came here. Hold him again. I want to give him some more milk. If I can just clean his stomach out—”
The telephone rang. “Get it, Henry,” Ilsa said sharply. “I don’t want Violetta up here again. I’ll manage the milk.”
I ran downstairs. It was Dolph to say that he couldn’t get hold of the doctor. He’d been following him from house to house, missing him everywhere, and now he was miles across the river on a case.
“My God, aren’t there any other doctors in town?” Ilsa said. “Come on. We’d better take him to the County Hospital. Get Mattie Belle to help you carry him to the car.”
She kept him held tightly in her arms until I came up with Mattie Belle, pressing the glass of milk against his teeth, and holding the basin for him to throw up into. He was delirious now, talking wildly about things that had happened at Togni’s, about the part of his life that was the most shameful. As Mattie Belle and I got him off the bed, Ilsa went downstairs ahead of us, holding on to the banister, her feet feeling for the steps.
“Violetta,” she said. “Have you got your car here?”
Violetta came into the hall from the drawing room. “Yes, of course.” All her string of words seemed to have been frightened out of her. She looked like a pouter pigeon stuck with a hat pin.
“Then please take Brand over to your Cousin Anna’s. Tell them to keep her until I come for her. Henry and I are taking Monty to the County Hospital. You can follow us there.”
“The County Hospital!” Violetta shrieked.
“Be quiet! It’s the nearest and what Monty needs is help as soon as possible.”
“We’re going out to the car now,” I said to Ilsa, pushing out the screen door.
“Violetta, help me out to the car,” she commanded.
She sat in the back, holding him. He was quieter now, moaning only occasionally. I drove recklessly through the lights, dodging cars and pedestrians, and we were at the hospital in ten minutes.
But it was no use.
Monty died that evening.
[PART FIVE]
49
I sat on a dune at the beach and watched the surf. The waves came inexorably, rolling into dark pregnant swells, then rearing themselves up in a luminous green concave wall capped with white, and finally spilling over in a million little crossings and crisscrossings, white-veined and lace-edged. Close to the water were lucent bubbles of foam, rainbow-colored as they caught the sun, instead of the sallow yellow they were when you came up close.
I watched the waves roll in for a long time, until their constant repetition left me almost hypnotized, each wave so similar to the one preceding it, and to the one following, yet each with its own infinite variations. As no leaf on a tree is ever precisely like another, so each wave of the ocean is in some way different, has its own individuality. And it came to me that if we could look at our own lives a thousand years from now, our years would be like that, too, each with its individual wars and passions, its cities rising and falling, its people dying and being born, each so closely related to the others, yet each rounding itself out, full cycle, individual, isolated, alone in itself, like each leaf torn from the branch, each wave rejected by the sea.
As I looked back on the past eleven years, the eleven years since Monty’s death, I could see only the similarities, the rise and fall of the days, the hours and minutes swelling and receding, one after the other, one after the other, crepuscular in their sameness.
Morning after morning uselessly spent at the mill, getting in Papa’s way, getting in Dolph’s way, knowing and despairing of my own uselessness, yet doing nothing about it. Papa had quite given me up. We lived together, but saw each other only occasionally at the mill office, or across the long mahogany dining table at home, where we ate in antagonistic silence, seldom speaking except to comment on the weather, or to ask for the corn bread. Then evening after evening, like the tide following the involuntary command of the moon, I would go to Ilsa’s, to find Lorenzo Moore there before me, evening there before me, darkness there before me, knowing what a weak fool was Henry Porcher, Henry Randolph Porcher, and yet not caring enough to remedy it, not caring enough to be unhappy about it.
Lorenzo would sit playing on the mandolin I had given Ilsa; Brand would hunch over the desk doing the accounts, Ilsa standing beside her, dealing with complaints, giving orders to Mattie Belle. Soon after Monty’s death she had started taking in boarders to help pay off the debts which were all that Monty had left her, and to support herself and Brand. It was one of the few things a southern lady could do to earn her living, this turning of her home into a boarding house, and about the only thing she could do in her blindness. At first I was horribly against it. Then one night something happened that, in a way, reconciled me, because then, at any rate, she would not be alone at night in that huge house with only the child for protection.
50
It was quite late. Mattie Belle had gone home and Brand was upstairs asleep. Ilsa was alone downstairs. It started to rain and she groped her way around to the windows, holding out her hand to see if the rain were coming in, when suddenly she sensed that someone had come in by one of the French windows and was standing in the drawing room.
She was in the hall. She stood very still and listened. She could hear breathing, and a faint creaking of the boards when whoever it was shifted his weight. She knew the floors of the old house like the back of her hand. Stealthily, avoiding the most creaking places, she tiptoed to the big closet under the stairs, where the coats were kept, and in the back of which Monty had hidden his liquor and his gun. She knew the gun was loaded. Very quietly she fumbled for it, tiptoed out again, stood still, just out of sight of the drawing-room door, listening. She could still hear the breathing. Quickly and with determination she walked into the drawing room, holding the gun. She knew from Ira and her father how to hold a g
un and how to shoot.
She said that she stared where she heard the breathing so that the intruder would think she could see him, and said, “Get out of this house and stay out.”
There was no sound of anyone moving. She could still hear the breathing, fast, a little frightened now.
“Get out,” she said, “or I’ll shoot, and you can see by the way I handle this gun that I know how.”
She heard him turn and leave the room. She heard him on the stone flags of the terrace and she heard him brush through the grass on the way to the river. He walked silently and stealthily as a cat. A few weeks ago, she said, she would not have been able to hear him like that.
When she knew that he had gone she went around and bolted the windows, and spent the rest of the night sitting up straight in a chair, the gun across her knees. She was grateful that Médor was asleep up in Brand’s room. There was no telling what the poor half-witted dog might have done otherwise.
I nearly died when she told me.
“Now, for heaven’s sake, Hen, don’t breathe a word about it to a soul. I won’t have Brand frightened, and if Mattie Belle ever got wind of it she’d never cross the threshold again, fond of me as she is. The only reason I told you was because I want you to see if there are any footprints. Maybe I dreamed it. I don’t know. I didn’t dream sitting up with the gun, at any rate. Go have a look, will you?”
There were footprints.
“You’re not to sleep in this house alone another night!” I shouted at her.
“Henry, don’t get hysterical,” she said crossly. “Where would I sleep?”
“At Cousin Anna’s.”
“I am no longer of an age to be anybody’s ward. And I proved to myself last night that I can take care of myself. I’m glad I didn’t imagine it. That really would be something to worry about. If you’re nervous about my being here alone, see what you can do about digging me up some boarders.”
I gave up and left for the mill. There was no use arguing with her. She came out onto the porch as I left and stood there, her hand on one of the weather-grayed pillars. The rain of the night before had stopped, and the air was fresh and clean-smelling. She stood on the porch, the wind blowing her wild hair on end and whipping the skirt of her cotton dress about her legs. I thought, as she stood there, her head thrown back, breathing the free fragrant air, that she looked like one of the golden figureheads on the huge sailing vessels that first came bravely across the ocean, breasting the wild unknown.
Ilsa had once shown me an old explorer’s map that had been her father’s. According to this map the sea was peopled with all sorts of strange monsters. Nothing that Ulysses encountered in his voyages was more terrifying or more unknown than the fancied dangers of the early explorers—dangers perhaps more frightening to them than the actual ones.
But on the prow of the boat was a golden figurehead, with bits of cold blue glass for eyes, breasting the dark waves with courage and excitement in her face.
51
“Well, Henry, when you and Ilsa Woolf going to get married? We’re all waiting,” Mrs. Jackson cooed in the drugstore, Mrs. Jackson sniggered on the corner, Mrs. Jackson giggled as she poked me in the ribs at the parking lot by the butcher’s.
“I hear Ilsa Woolf is going to marry you, and we’ll all have to find somewhere else to stay,” Myra Turnbull said acidly, passing me on the stairs. “I thought she had better taste than that.”
Well, perhaps not better taste, Myra Turnbull, but certainly different.
I wanted to write, to pour everything out of my soul in a wild impassioned torrent of poetry, in the ecstatic ravings of novel. Paper and pen before me, my mind seethed, my brain seemed to quiver like sunlight on a hot day, and all that would come out was Oh God, oh God, oh God—nothing but that agonized repetition—nothing, nothing else.
Now as I sat on the warm cradling sand of the beach, I knew that I was not strong enough to absorb strength from nature, that I must as usual go running to the only human being who could put courage into my precarious soul and who dispensed this intransigent stability with the lavishness of ignorance. Or did she know? That is something, I suppose, that I shall never know.
I looked again at the ocean and begged for help, but received none. It rejected me as unimpassionedly as it accepted Ilsa. She saw only the impersonal vastness and strength of the sea, while I could not help personalizing it. Its very indifference troubled me. I would watch the waves carelessly caressing the shore and caring nothing for it, and remember that three years ago, not far from where I sat, Lorenzo had been attacked and badly bitten on the leg by a barracuda, that further down the beach Silver’s little Henry Porcher had been caught in the undertow and nearly drowned trying, uselessly, to save the life of a companion. And while we waited, trying to hold and fan the flame of his faint breath, the moon had come up radiantly over the dark water’s edge, proclaiming her light-hearted self-satisfaction. I watched the ancient skin of the sea and remembered the storms that tossed the wreckage of fishing vessels on the shore and the storms that came down the coast to destroy homes and lay waste the land.
I walked back up the beach to the car. I was quite near July Harbour; the houses of the village caught the gleaming sun. We were no longer able to use Dr. Brandes’ house when we went the beach except in the winter, because in the summer, hen many of the boarders were away and there was not so much money, Ilsa rented it.
How she had hated to do that.
“But I have to, Henny,” she said. “There’s so much to do to this horrible old house in town. By the way, the boathouse went in the last storm, and the dock’s a mass of debris. I’ll have to have it cleared.”
“But do you think you’ll be able to rent it?” I asked.
“Why not?”
“It’s so far away from everything and everybody.”
She shrugged. “There are probably a few people,” she said, “who still feel about privacy as I do.”
I got into the car and started back to town. I was in a bad mood, had been for several days, and I wasn’t sure why. The past eleven years had been very peaceful and happy on the whole, and I couldn’t put my finger on the reason for this gloom that had suddenly descended on me. I felt like a sulky child in need of comforting instead of the rational, if not dynamic, adult I presumed I was.
I tried to clutch at memories that were pleasant in order to throw off my mood. This coming down to the beach instead of running pellmell to Ilsa had been in itself an unusual (and futile) declaration of independence.
How does the Declaration of Independence begin? All men are created equal.… Beautiful utter nonsense. As long as some men are born with more intelligence, more will power than others, how can there be anything but inequality?
—Enough of that—I thought—That will get you nowhere. The happiest time I could remember was one Christmas when Ilsa had left the house and the boarders in Mattie Belle’s charge and gone down to the beach with Brand for a week. I went too, in spite of Papa’s protests. He was sure that people would talk, but he calmed down a bit when I told him that Ilsa had asked Cousin Anna, with Barbara to take care of her, to come too, and Cousin William and Lorenzo Moore.
I remember all of us standing around the piano after the lamps were lit and singing Christmas carols—Ilsa, Brand, Ira. Cousin Anna, Barbara, Cousin William, Lorenzo, and myself. I remember trimming the Christmas tree Ira brought in from the woods, and Ilsa flinging tinsel at the branches and laughing. And I remember Ilsa walking for miles on the beach wearing a pair of Eddie’s old gray flannel trousers—he was so slight they were the right size for her—and a sweat shirt of Ira’s, and Médor continually getting under her feet and tripping her. And then the day before we went back to town it was suddenly, unseasonably, hot.
“I know I’m foolish,” Ilsa shouted at us, “but I’m going swimming!” And she found her old blue-serge bathing suit and ran recklessly down the beach, stumbling over a washed-up log and rolling over and over, picking herself up and
tearing into the ocean, flinging herself at the breakers that tossed her about like a bit of driftwood, while that moron hound Médor rushed at the surf and barked hysterically, furious with it for daring to buffet Ilsa, running in screaming terror whenever a wave lapped at her toes, and finally dashing into the churning water to rescue Ilsa and, of course, having to be rescued herself; and then Ilsa, blue with cold, coming back to the house and standing in front of the fire in her bathrobe, warming her hands around a bowl of donax soup.…
52
I remembered these things all the way in to town, but I was still depressed. The porch was deserted as I drove up to the Woolf house; the sun was still beating down on it, and it was too hot. On my way in I bumped into Joshua Tisbury, one of the boarders, an ugly young man with a weak chest who spent most of the day hunched over a typewriter in one of the small back rooms. He greeted me cheerfully as I went through the rice portieres and into the drawing room. Brand and Lorenzo were there, Lorenzo sitting on the piano bench, Brand on the bamboo chaise longue, eating a persimmon.
At nineteen Brand was pretty in a quiet way; her brown eyes had Monty’s long lashes, her thick curly hair the ruddy sheen of his. But she always looked lost, to me, as though she were outside a house on a dark night, forced to look through the windows at the warmth and life inside, in which she would never be allowed to participate.
“Hello, Uncle Henry,” she said as I came in.
“Hello, honey. Where’s your mother?”
“Down by the river.”
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
“She shouldn’t be,” Lorenzo said. At twenty-one he still looked like a skinny little bird, his eyes as huge, his nose as beaked as ever, but he had a kind of serene determination that continually astonished me.
“Of course she should,” Brand said angrily. “I wouldn’t have let her go, otherwise.”
“You do anything your mother says, whether it’s right or not.” Lorenzo rested his arms on the keys of the piano.
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