by H. L. Humes
Sulgrave had the duty Sunday, and the day passed hot and still without incident. Nothing broke the witless blue calm. The shutters of the Commander's quarters remained closed until late afternoon, with Orval coming in and out ministering to household needs as though nothing had happened. Nothing else stirred in the muffling heat. Sulgrave took a swim before sundown, ate dinner by himself, and went to bed early. He hadn't seen Dolfus since they had walked down from the Commander's after helping Orval put him to bed. Dolfus said good night, said he wanted to take a walk. Sulgrave looked in Dolfus' room in the morning; his bed hadn't been slept in.
Sulgrave was awakened at dawn Monday by someone lightly touching his shoulder; for a confused instant he thought he was dreaming. He sat up, looked at his watch, then back at Arielle. She stood silently watching him, her eyes round in the early sunless gloom of the room. He opened a louver and peered at the sky; it couldn't have been much after sunrise.
“What is it?” he asked, rubbing his eyes. He stared at the girl. She didn't answer.
“What's the matter?”
“Can't find Randy,” she said. “Skully won't wake up.”
At first he thought it was an accident, and as he pulled on his clothes, had visions of Dolfus lying unconscious somewhere—a fall or something.
But it wasn't an accident. Leaving the operations area, he quizzed the girl as he walked beside her toward the cut; Dolfus was passed out. “He drink a lot. I never see him sleep so hard. He say never let him sleep past muster time. So I came to get Randy, but he not there. Get you.”
She had a curious singsong way of talking, as though her mother tongue were French. Dolfus had said her father was Spanish.
“You speak French?” he asked.
“Si,” she said.
She had her own shallop, and she crossed the cut alone. Sulgrave didn't bother starting the outboard since the current was slack, but simply poled across. She was waiting for him when he reached the other side.
From that point, she took him by the hand and led him. Her hand was cool and very narrow; she was completely unconscious of Sulgrave studying her as they walked. Her hair was long and glossy blue-black, her cheeks high, her skin mocha. She walked with barefooted grace; the one-piece cotton dress was all she wore. She led him toward the shack near the laundry, where he'd first seen her the first day.
“Can you make coffee?”
She nodded.
“Who's in there?” he asked, nodding to the back room. A curtain was closed across the doorway, but someone else was snoring besides Dolfus.
“Old Woman and Girlchild,” she said.
The stove was in a lean-to in the yard. She took the pot and a coffee can under her arm and went out.
The tiny building was raised on posts, and divided by a middle partition into two rooms. He found Skully on a canvas cot in the first room; his uniform hung over his head from a cross beam. He was wearing a faded sport shirt with all the buttons gone, blue slacks, and he was out cold, snoring dead to the world. The bottoms of his feet were black from going barefoot.
Sulgrave felt edgy and nervous from lack of sleep as he paced the block in front of Vanna's hotel waiting for his watch to make the right angle at nine. He had been the last person out of the Mayflower bar when it closed in the small hours, and had walked again for half an hour before going up to his room. There he'd lain awake the remaining hours unable to sleep, his mind turning over a tumult of thoughts and images like a waking nightmare: of Hake, and Dolfus, both dead; of the child-woman Arielle, gone where?; of the funeral, and the men; of Vanna, and again Vanna, and yet again Vanna. At one point he jumped from bed determined to destroy the letters in the red leather box at the bottom of his suitcase. Instead he sat down on the bed and guiltily read them again, feeling unaccountably angry now, even jealous. Disgusted with himself, he stuffed them back into their box and buried it beneath his shirts again. And the sword that had belonged to her father, then to her husband—surely a skillful craftsman could restore it for service in a museum case: why hadn't he told her about that either? The truth was he knew he wanted to keep it, broken or not.
When the sky lightened toward dawn, he was actually glad for the reprieve from darkness, more glad to get up. He dressed and went out, ate breakfast in an all-night cafeteria where an old man was mopping the floor to start the day. Then he walked in the park, watched an old woman feeding pigeons—apparently her daily ritual, since she had hundreds of them cooing about her feet as she scattered bread crumbs. He noticed that whenever she could, she threw something for the sparrows, who tended to get shouldered to the periphery of the cooing and weaving mass.
“Man, whut you think?”
“What do I think about what? I'm tryin' to get done some readin'.”
“Man, put you' book down and listen to whut the cat sayin'. He telling me all this shit ‘bout the sun coolin’ down and the fire goin' out and we all gone be left freezin' ouah asses off.”
“I don't say right away. It goin' to take time. You all be long gone when it happens. Millions of years gone.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Do you believe in that?”
“I don't know but what the Book say. The Book say the world goin' end by fire.”
“You show me where it say that. I looked all through it and couldn't find it once. Sunday school teacher couldn't find it neither.”
“What happened?”
“Tole me to hush my mouth and not be so smart. But I don' believe it in there.”
“That's what I don't believe either. Sun's goin' to cool down, I tell you.”
“Man, you cats always arguin'. Whyn't you argue some place else? Get some peace and quiet around this barracks,”
“Man, don't you never stop reading?”
“I ain't got time to spend worryin' about where the world's goin'. I'm too busy worryin' ‘bout where Vm goin. Because ‘when you gone, you a long time gone. What else you want to know?”
At eight, he had found a florist opening and had ordered flowers to be delivered to Vanna's hotel later that morning; he left their choice up to the woman in the store, explaining only that they should be “cheerful.” It was chilly outside, and after ordering the flowers, he had three more cups of coffee in that many different places as he killed time before nine o'clock. When finally he turned on his heel and headed for the revolving door, he was as tense as a drawn bowstring.
He went up in the elevator without announcing himself at the desk, his mind a witless blank as he found his way through the corridor to her room; the door was ajar. He knocked, heard her call Come in—from deep inside.
She was sitting up in bed propped with pillows, a newspaper lying discarded on the covers, a breakfast tray on the floor beside her. He took off his coat in the doorway.
“I was so hungry I couldn't wait,” she said. “I had breakfast hours ago. How'd you sleep?”
He hardly trusted himself to speak—he just grunted, shook his head negatively.
“Come here, let me look at you.” She examined his face narrowly. “You look terrible. Sit down.”
He sat down on the bed, the paper slid off onto the floor.
“I didn't sleep much either,” she admitted. “It was the funeral, and all the strain. I couldn't stop thinking about it.”
She looked drawn and tired, and to Sulgrave all the more beautiful. She had very little makeup on; what she wore she had applied with care. Her face was tired, but her hair had been brushed till it shone in the light that poured in the window. The nightgown, or whatever the thing was she was wearing, was white froth shot with ivory lace. Her shoulders and arms were bare, only partly covered by a bed jacket of pale blue silk.
He couldn't stop looking at her; passively she stared back. Looking at his face, she seemed to see that there was little need for pretense, and gradually her carefully prepared countenance changed from false cheerfulness to the geunine strain she was feeling.
“The only decent moment of the whole
day was when I fell asleep in the car. I'm just beginning to realize what it means to be thirty-eight,” she said. “I don't have the emotional stamina I used to. I don't bounce back as I did when I was your age. It's harder to break out of old forms, to find new life. To resurrect yourself when part of yourself has died.”
“I'm not so young as you think, then.”
“I've never seen before how young you really are,” she said. “Last night you were the gallant and handsome squire. This morning you've changed. If you look younger, I must look older than ever.”
“You're beautiful.”
“You're very kind.” She said it coldly, looked down at her hands, her mouth hardened to a line. Her face was peculiarly strained, almost as though she were about to scream or break into tears. The last layer of pretense was falling away; beneath the mask showed the real state of anguish in which she had passed the night. Her disguises were crumbling so fast that it was bewildering. “I wonder what you'd think if you really knew me, if you saw all of me.”
“I didn't say that to be kind. You are beautiful. You're one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen. It's not a compliment. It's just the plain truth.” He was baffled, panicked at having offended her.
She looked at him unbelievingly. He almost wanted to look away from her gaze, as gradually her face took on again the same peculiar look of intense tension. She looked at him as though any second she might, might—he didn't know what. There was a long strained silence as she searched his face, for what? For the truth? He saw one thing clearly in her eyes: fear. Suddenly she wrung her hands once, and leaned forward, pleaded with him, “What must I do? Please tell me, what must I do?”
“Why do you have to do anything? This is no time to try to decide anything. How can you even think after a night with no sleep?”
“What do I have to do?” Even her eyes were beseeching. “I need you.”
He shrugged defensively, suddenly alerted to an electric situation; it was something in her tone, the strange hollow-ness. Suddenly she lay back and relaxed against the stacked pillows, oddly calm. No words were adequate to the sensation he felt in his stomach; something was going to happen. Then he realized that he himself must look the same way she did, falsely calm; he had been unconsciously controlling his face to offset her edging hysteria. The tension between them was like a tuned wire. How could all this have happened in just the few minutes he'd been here?
“All right,” she said, coldly exasperated.
For a full minute, time passed like water dripping on a rain puddle, each moment expanding outward in the senses in slow rings. He stared at her, sensing every movement of flesh, every tremor of muscle—his own and hers—as though the slow flutter deep in his gut were hers, was her. He saw the pulse beat of her throat, almost heard the irregular rise and fall of her breasts. He felt strung to the point of vague nausea—too much coffee, no sleep, tension of undreamt dreams: all of it was nothing to the tension she was creating in him by looking at him in that deadly calm way. One shoulder was no longer under the jacket.
As each of them came to terms with the silent tension, its nature became inescapable, clear. Her face relaxed, was no longer so grimly calm, but merely expressionless. Only her slight breathing betrayed her.
She spoke so softly that her voice was almost a dry whisper. “I didn't want to be the one responsible,” she said. “I've wanted you all night. I almost called you.”
He understood her, understood exactly his own failure to act, even his incapacity to act now. He could think of nothing to say, no way to close the terrible distance still between them, except to lunge at her so she wouldn't see his face. But a failure of courage seemed better than a failure of grace, although he knew he'd already failed her in both. As for his failure of himself, he felt completely at sea, like an adolescent before the mysteries. He simply nodded his admission.
“Would you like to look at me?” Her voice was very soft, hollow with excitement, yet curiously gentle, almost contrite.
In the pale silence the question beat in his ears, its thick meaning almost overwhelming. Uncertain, he was almost unwilling to speak. He barely nodded.
Without taking her eyes off his face, she very slowly pulled the bed jacket off her shoulders and dropped it off the bed to the floor, then paused, watching him. He gazed at her naked shoulders, at the ripeness of her, guessed wildly at her breasts still hidden.
The look in her eyes was peculiarly flat, lusterless, her face still without expression as she raised her hands and searched in the lace of her bodice until she found the hook and eye and first hidden button. She unbuttoned it with perfect deliberation; dropped her fingers to the next; undid it; then down to the next—all the time gazing at his face unblinkingly with that flat, distant look in her eyes.
She proceeded with careful precision from the first button to the next, over the nice curve of herself, and down to her waist, and stopped. She paused again, examining his face before going on. A tiny river of naked flesh ran up from her waist to the delta below her neck; she tilted her chin up in a minuscule gesture and light caught her eyes, suddenly brought them alive. She sat for a moment with her hands in her lap.
Then, measuring his reaction, she raised her hands, caught the lace front in both hands and arched her back. Smoothly, as though opening a stage curtain, she spread wide the opening of her gown and exposed her nipples erect to his stare. The pulled straps slipped off her shoulders one at a time.
He sat looking at her, at this splendor before him, and felt almost paralyzed with incomprehensible relief, dark rejoicing of his flesh.
Suddenly she threw back the covers, and in a naked flash of legs was out of bed, naked to the waist. She moved toward the full-length mirror on the bathroom door, and turned before it like a dancer watching herself. Then she walked halfway toward him, stopped, gazing at him as though from a dream. Undoing the last few buttons, she worked the gown off her hips and let it slide to the floor. Suddenly she giggled. The mysterious dark shock was like a hammer blow on his senses. Paralysis gave way like a dam cracking, and he was on his feet undressing for joy and good fortune. A moment later he was naked as a hat rack and went down laughing on the bed with her, laughing like a madman.
Yessum
Ringleader no use I'm in it now. That man gone, all the way gone. If you white you right, even crazy white. you brown get down black get back
I'm too late to get back this time, too late and too old. Big Randolph, you on to be a biggity nigger for sure this time
Mutiny. Leastwise Brother Boy ain't sittin' here, kept him straight leastwise. He got to keep up learnin' to type
Tell Skully, ask him
Black man, you in one helpless fix. Ain't doing no one no good here, can't even look out for last blood kin should know better to fool with a ofay crazy man
White-crazy. Man, figger bigger, nigger.
Man, listen to ol' Digger snore. Must be dreamin'
Some white officer chasin' him with a sword, that wild sword. Can't even figger what goes in the head of a man like that to make him so twisted up like an ol' swamp root, used to think they were snakes sometimes. Ghosts at night. Ghosts are white, son, be proud you black.
You gotta look after him, you promised her. Help him learn something keep him out of trouble ask the Lord for guidance
Yessum
Don't want you and him dying in a shack like me, get him out, Randolph. Come him up in the world. Go north and provide
Yessum
“… afraid to let him touch me. Finally he courted me so …”
“Did he love you then?”
“… well, I married him, and after that I thought it would be easy to have it, but when you've been years building up the idea that something is wrong and sinful, just because you're married doesn't change what you've taught yourself and so it took time. I hadn't had much experience with how awful things like that can be, but I lied to you when I told you before that I was a virgin for him. I told him I was because i
t seemed too terribly important to him and actually I was, except physically. It was a terrible lie for me, and I had to make myself believe it before I could tell it—I can't explain more than that. You're the first person I've even told, not even my doctor, not another soul, not even … I'm telling you because it shouldn't matter now. Because even after I knew he was dead I kept thinking that I had never been unfaithful to him until after Sevie's death, until then when you asked me and it was like being forced into remembering something I'd forgotten. I knew of course, only I've been pretending for so long that I guess I really didn't know any more or almost had forgotten. He married me because I was an ideal for him, everything he wanted to be himself. He wanted me to stay on a pedestal. Yes, he loved me then. But I married him because he was everything I wanted and needed, or so I thought. He was rough. When I firstmet him I was only fourteen and he was one of the officers on the base at Norfolk. Four years later when my father was at the Academy, he came to the house to make his duty call and six months later we were married. Daddy hated him almost from the start, I think because he saw that he was trying to be something he wasn't. He was trying to be an officer and a gendeman. As an officer, he was brilliant, even the Old Admiral, Daddy, admitted that—he was forty-one when I was born, Mother said they had given up hope of having children. But as a gentleman, in those days he wasn't as polished as he was by the time you knew him. His father was a Baptist preacher in a West Virginia coal town, a part-time miner on weekdays. He was ashamed of his father and his background, but couldn't admit it to himself. He looked just like his father. His father once saved the life of a miner who later became a power in the union and got Severn a congressional appointment to the Academy. He always used the name Severn because it sounded more gentlemanly than Bonuso, which was the name of his mother's father. His mother was dead when I married him and I could never get much out of him about her family. To him I was everything that she hadn't been. But after we were married, instead of relaxing and being himself, he got worse. And in his eyes I got worse too. He once called me a slut because I wanted to leave a party and go home and make love. It took nearly a year before I could have one every time, but after it first happened I wanted to keep at it for fear I'd lose it. I was sure it was a matter of practice and I tried very hard—not to please him but to please myself. He couldn't understand I was just becoming a woman. He wanted me to be a lady. Well, I'm not a lady—I married him to escape being a lady I suppose. But little by little he managed to kill the things in himself that had attracted me to him—the rough earthy things that made him a man to me. And when our son was born everything went wrong from the start. He wouldn't let me pick him up when he was crying for fear I'd spoil him, but I guess I spoiled him anyway. I don't know. He didn't want to go to Annapolis. He didn't like football and rowing. He liked to read and collect things from the time he was a little boy, and I suppose I encouraged him. Perhaps it was wrong of me, I don't know. I don't know. I remember once when he was nine, he had a collection of seashells—he never went in the water, just walked along the beach looking for shells—and his father gave them away when he went off to school in the fall. He said he was spending too much time indoors, poring over them, putting them in glass frames with cotton under them. He was very serious, knew all the Latin names for them. And they were beautiful. I blame myself terribly for … I never knew how to take his part without infuriating his father. There was a terrible scene when he came home for Thanksgiving and found the shells gone. His father was away at sea, and I was alone. Perhaps I was wrong, but I bought him another collection from a dealer and gave it to him for Christmas. But he hardly ever looked at the shells after that. I still have the collection in the attic in Annapolis. After his death I couldn't look at them without crying. It was after that—I feel I want to tell you everything, although I can't help feeling like a betrayer even though he's dead—it was after the death of our son that the marriage seemed to fail … Severn blamed himself, but secretly I think he blamed me. At any rate, he changed. He went back to duty and left me alone to blame myself, and that was why I went to see Ben Dolfus one day. He was the only person who had ever shown any interest in the child—I guess he was no longer a child if he was at prep school. Perhaps it's true that I didn't want to see him become a man, but I think that is an unfair accusation. I wanted him to grow up, but in his own way. But after that nothing was the same. Severn still wanted me as a woman, but it got worse and worse. When he was home, bedtime became something we both learned to put off —or Fd go to bed and he would stay up reading. At first it was never out in the open, because when we came home from a party where we'd been drinking then it would be all right. Then we began having a few drinks at home, nightcaps more or less—we still hadn't discussed it openly, it was all unspoken as though if we ignored it it wouldn't be a problem. He began to drink more and more—it seemed to be the only way he could relax and be himself. But finally even that failed— he would drink so much that it was worse than if he hadn't had anything. He ascribed it to age, but it wasn't age, it was something in him that was eating at him. All during this time —especially during Christmas holidays and such, when he was home and school was adjourned—we were seeing Ben socially. Severn liked Ben immensely and tried to help him. They would stay up talking half the night over brandy—history, politics, literature, mathematics, I don't know what all. I've told myself so many lies about this that I can't remember which lies I've told you. But the truth is that Ben and I didn't want to carry on an affair—we both felt it was terribly wrong. After those first times, I didn't see him for nearly a year. It was Severn who brought us together again by insisting that we ‘owed’ something of ourselves to Lieutenant Dolfus for having been kind to … our son. I tried saying I didn't like him—that only infuriated my husband. He said I didn't really know him, and that I should make an effort. Well, I made an effort. We were terribly careful, but to this day I'm terrified at the thought that Severn suspected something. He had no reason to, but he seemed to go out of his way to throw us together, almost like an entrepreneur. I'm sure it's only my guilty imagination. In fact, I know it is. But I have to tell you—and I despise myself for this—when they told me about the disaster, it never even occurred to me that Severn would be dead. For one thing I thought they would have told me that first, before they told me anything else. All I could think of was whether Ben had been hurt. But then when I found out that my husband was dead, too, suddenly it was all over. Ben's death simply vanished from my mind. It was as though he had never existed. How do you explain that? Please don't think me horrid for telling you this, but if I don't tell you the truth I'll never be able to tell myself the truth. Perhaps that's why I need you so desperately, to be my confessor more than my lover. I guess they're the same thing if you think about it. Ben was my one great sin, and I guess I was glad to forget it. I don't think we loved each other in any romantic way, it was a mutual need. But I always felt guilty, almost whorish. I was raised as a young puritan, and something like that stays with you until you're dead. I feel guilty being here with you right now. Rather I don't now, but I probably will. Yet I know that if I wasn't here with you, I'd probably be dead drunk, or maybe just dead. Or maybe with someone else. God. I wasn't made to be raised a puritan. I just wasn't made for it. The first man I kissed, I also … that was the time I meant. This is what I've really been trying to make myself tell you. Please be patient with me, because I've kept this inside me for twenty-two years. I was sixteen. The war was just over. I was stage-struck and used to sneak out of school to go to the theater matinees. I met a young ensign—Naval Reserve—he was about twenty, and he took me backstage to meet this actress who was in the play. It was very glamorous at the time. Then … Then … please try to understand. I know you'll say I'm being irrational, but if you can understand how I was brought up —no, don't nod your head, just listen and try to understand. I don't think so now, but then I knew that I caused my mother to die. You see, she had been ill but the doctors didn't think it wa
s serious. But two weeks after that time, she caught influenza and died. Can you understand? I hardly knew where babies came from, and yet the first man to kiss me … I let him come inside me. I didn't even know what I was letting him do. It didn't even hurt me. No one had ever told me it was supposed to hurt. From the moment he put his hands on me I was too amazed and surprised at what I felt—-I didn't want him to stop. He must have thought I was—I know he thought I wasn't a virgin—he told me later. And when he put his hand there I almost fainted from the sensation. I remember trying to speak—not to tell him to stop, but just to utter words—and I couldn't. I was paralyzed, a molten paralysis that I've never experienced before or since. I was frightened, yes, but only at the terrible strangeness of him, the moving around inside me, the feel of him against me. I don't think a man can even imagine how awesome he is to a young girl, the rough feel of him, and the smell. Mind you, I knew utterly nothing about sex. I didn't even know that I could become pregnant—it's hard for you to believe because you're younger and things are different today. But I didn't know until he said something about taking care of myself. I asked him what he meant, and he said, You don't want to be pregnant, do you? I almost died. The word pregnant was like a four-letter word in those days, at least in my family it was. The only thing that shocked me was his use of the word, not the act. I looked at him in terror and said, You mean I can have a baby from this? I'll never forget his face. You see, we were in a cornfield near the river—there's a State Department Building there now, I think—and I'd let him take all my clothes off. I'm not lying or making any of it up—I just didn't know anything—I had the idea that babies came from an operation of some kind that a doctor did, I guess from the association of babies and hospitals. But anyway, here I am, thirty-eight, and I still can't quite believe it myself. It's no wonder I later came to pretend it didn't happen. And two weeks later my mother died. I don't know why, but that's what I had to tell you.”