“Vincent,” I said.
“Vincent. Oh, that’s a lovely name. You have the name of a saint, did you know that?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“And I suppose you have a saintly nature, isn’t that right?”
“No, ma’am,” I said.
“You don’t? Well, I’m surprised to hear that. When you were here the other day you certainly behaved like a saint. I was afraid I might have offended you, the way you took off from here.”
“No, ma’am, you didn’t offend me.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that. Because I think what might do you a lot of good right now is a little glass of wine. Being as upset as you are about your horse.”
“I don’t drink wine, ma’am,” I said.
“You mean you never have drunk wine, or you don’t intend to drink wine, ever?”
“I never have drunk any,” I said.
“Well, why don’t you have just a little sip of it, right now, to sort of steady your nerves? I think you might like it.”
She came across the room toward me, shoving the file of papers into the picket of her negligee and bending down to take hold of the neck of the decanter.
“I’m afraid I only have this one glass, but why don’t we share it?” she said. “We can have a little loving cup.” She poured the glass full and handed it to me. “Now, you try that. I think it’ll make you feel a lot better. Go ahead, take just a little sip. It’s zinfandel, a very sweet wine. I think you’ll like it.”
I took the glass from her hand and after staring into the pale red wine for a moment I sipped it uncertainly, then tilted back my head and drank the wine to the bottom of the glass with a defiant, desperate haste. It was cool and sweet, and almost instantly I felt the glow of it in my belly.
“Now, isn’t that better?” she said. She took the glass from me and poured it full again, gazing solemnly into the wine for a moment.
“I know how you must feel,” she said. “Having to do such a terrible thing. When I was a little girl I had a little dog that I loved more than anything in the world, and he ran out into the street one day and got hit by a car. I just didn’t think I’d ever get over it. I don’t think I ever have got over it. I know how much children suffer. And I know much their suffering is misunderstood, or dismissed, by others. I know how sensitive they are.” She sipped from her glass and gazed at me over the rim of it. “I have a very great love of children,” she said. “They are the purest and finest members of the human race. I would do anything in the world to ease the suffering of young people. There is nothing in the world I wouldn’t do to ease their pain.” She put out her hand and laid it against my cheek. “And I think you have suffered greatly,” she said. “I think you’re a very sensitive young man, and it grieves me to know that you’ve been introduced to sorrow so soon in your life. I wish there was something I could do to ease your pain.”
Moved by some monstrous, inexorable impulse that was composed, I suppose, partly of indignation toward Laura, partly of gratitude toward this wonderfully sympathetic woman, partly of raw desire, I lunged out of the chair and found myself kneeling at her feet clutching her to me, as half an hour before I had knelt before Laura and clutched her rigidly unwilling body to my face. She set down the wine glass and stroked my hair.
“Now, don’t grieve, Vincent,” she said. “You’re such a beautiful boy. It’s just not right that such a beautiful young man should be so unhappy. Why don’t you come upstairs with me and I’ll see if I can ease your suffering a little. I think you deserve a little comfort. Now you get up and take my hand, and I’ll try to prove to you that the world is not full of only terrible things. Now get up, sweetheart.”
I stood up and took her hand, gazing down with a kind of strengthless submission at the flowered carpet. I took her hand and she led me gently through the arch of the living room and up the carpeted stairs to the open door of her bedroom, where she turned to put her arms around me and kiss me on the mouth.
I remember that as I left her house, carrying with me indelibly its odors of wine, furniture polish, perfumed sheets, and Mrs. Hallworth’s moist and powdered flesh, I was, for the first time since my mother’s death, crying softly and soundlessly. I don’t think I would have been aware of my tears but for the sudden coolness of the evening air against my wet cheeks.
But however bewildered, however confusedly vindictive I may have felt toward Laura at that moment, it was not for that reason that the bitterness of which I’ve spoken earlier grew between us. After a period of reasonable reflection I could understand the revulsion she must have felt at the suddenness, shamelessness, and violence of my behavior, and I felt a growingly urgent obligation to apologize for it. But the thing for which I’ve never been able to forgive her, the thing whose peculiar and subtle cruelty I’ve brooded on for years, is what she said to me a few days later when I went again to her house to apologize.
I have said a few days—I think it must have been nearer to a few weeks, for I remember that as the weather was much warmer we sat in the steel-and-canvased glider in her back yard and that the wistaria tree above us had begun to bloom, opening its great purple blossoms softly and standing in that dark and mournful beauty which only these trees have. In all this time I had seen Laura only occasionally and distantly at school; she had not telephoned, or made any effort to see me, and I had begun to miss her greatly. In addition, I was beset with a growing feeling of remorse: I became convinced that I had shocked and offended her acutely and that I must make some effort to repair her wounded sensibilities. But however distressed Laura may have been at my behavior, she gave no indication of it; she greeted me with her usual composure at the front door and suggested that we sit out in the glider because it was such a nice evening. She had, in spite of my protest, washed out and ironed my soiled shirt, and she said that it was all ready, if I had changed my mind about accepting it.
“It would be a terrible waste to throw away a perfectly good shirt like that,” she said.
“All right. Thank you very much, Laura.”
“I was going to give it to the Salvation Army if you didn’t come back to get it.”
I stared at the ground for a moment and then said, “I guess you didn’t care whether I came back or not, after the way I acted.”
“I thought you might,” she said. “So I saved it for a while.”
There was a breath of evening breeze that made the big tree stir softly, and I looked up and watched the white curtains blowing out into the yard from the open windows of the upstairs bedrooms—a clean, blithe, gentle billowing which I have always loved for the sense of purification which it suggests: the cleansing out of old, fraught, winter-stale houses in a sweet, cool, vernal bath of air.
“How is your father, Laura?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s getting weaker all the time. I guess we just have to expect the worst.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“He had another attack this morning. Mother’s upstairs with him right now.”
“That certainly is too bad.”
“It’s such an awful strain on her; that’s the worst part.”
“Yes.”
There was a long pause, during which I gathered the determination to make my apology.
“The main reason I came back, Laura,” I said, “was that I wanted to tell you I was very sorry for the way I acted the last time I was here. I’m very sorry about it, and I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings, or anything.”
“Thank you, Vincent. It’s nice of you to say that.”
“I don’t know why I did it, but I hope you don’t feel too—well, too disgusted with me.”
“No, I don’t, Vincent. I know you were very upset about your horse, and people do all kinds of things when they get very upset like that.”
“Yes.” I felt a vague sense of chagrin at the ease with which she apparently forgave me, and wondered, with a swiftly growing apprehension, whether I had really expected or desired it.
The sense of guilt which my adventure had created in me lay like a monstrous weight on my heart, and I bore it with the terrible sensitivity of which only a boy of that age is capable. I felt unclean and vicious; and I think for this reason I experienced my sudden doubt as to whether I could ever decently resume my relationship with Laura: I was not worthy of her; I could no longer honorably enjoy her affection and companionship with so foul a secret on my conscience. I almost wished that she would refuse to accept my apology, or ever to see me again, and thus relieve me of the imposture—the feigned respectability—that I would otherwise have to make.
“My father says that one of a Christian’s chief duties is to forgive people, no matter what they do to him, and no matter whether he understands it or not,” Laura said. “And I believe that. So I don’t think we have to talk about it any more, Vincent. I think we ought to just pretend it never happened.”
I stared wretchedly at the shadowed lawn, feeling a growing constriction of my breath and blood at the suddenly imminent necessity of my confession. I saw that there was no way to avoid making it.
“I don’t think we can, Laura,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, sometimes people do things that nobody would ever think they were capable of. I don’t think people ever really understand each other. I don’t even think they understand themselves a lot of times.”
“You don’t have to understand people in order to forgive them,” Laura said. “That’s what I just said. It shouldn’t make any difference.”
“I know, but you don’t know the worst of it. You don’t know what else I did; and you wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me any more if you did.”
“What do you mean? What else did you do, Vincent?”
She turned to face me and I stared into her eyes with a look of desperate resolution.
“I hate to tell you this, Laura, but I have to, because I just don’t think it would be right for you not to know about it. I’m not asking you to forgive me, or anything, but I have to tell you. You don’t have to listen if you won’t want to; you can just leave now, and then we won’t have to see each other again.”
“No. I want to know.” She made a slight negative motion of her head and watched me calmly and alertly.
“Well, when I left here the other evening, I didn’t go right home. I went to see . . . someone else. And—well, you know what I wanted you to do—I did it with her, Laura.” I stared at the ground, speaking slowly and miserably. Laura sat silently for a moment and then said with a soft bitterness which I had never heard in her voice before, “I thought you didn’t like any of those other girls. I thought you weren’t interested in any of the things they liked. Well, it looks as if you’re interested in some of the things they like.”
“No, it wasn’t any of those other girls at school,” I said. “It was—well, somebody you don’t know at all, Laura.”
She pressed her lips together tightly with emotion. “And I guess that’s where you’ve been all this time. All this time I’ve been waiting for you to come back. I guess that’s why you don’t come to see me any more. I guess you think you’re in love with her or something, don’t you?”
“Oh, no, Laura. It wasn’t anything like that. I thought you wouldn’t want to see me; that’s why I didn’t come back.”
She turned again to face me and asked with steady, quiet intensity, “Do you love her, Vincent?”
“No. Oh, my gosh. It wasn’t a girl at all, Laura. It was a woman. A woman I used to deliver groceries to.”
“A woman?”
“Yes. I went back to her house after I left here, and I did it with her. I mean I didn’t force her to, or anything. I could tell she wanted me to. And she’s pretty old. Maybe as old as my grandmother. That’s what I had to tell you. That’s why I said I couldn’t see you any more.”
I sat silently, clenching my laced fingers together, waiting for her to revile me. But Laura expressed neither the outrage nor disgust which I expected; she sat quietly, and after a pause in which she seemed to have regained her composure completely she lifted her hand to brush her hair back thoughtfully and said, “Well, that’s different, then. As long as you don’t love her, I don’t really think it matters. I don’t see why we can’t just go on the way we were.”
This seemed to me so insensitive, so harrowingly equivocal a thing to say that I could not reply (I have never been able to reply to it), but sat in a kind of afflicted silence. This was broken in a moment by the voice of Laura’s mother. She leaned out of the upstairs window, her face contorted with grief, and called down shrilly, “Laura—Laura, come up right away, please! I just can’t make him answer me. I’m afraid—I’m afraid he’s gone.”
Laura was out of the glider in an instant, murmuring a swift apology to me as she ran across the lawn toward the steps. I did not leave immediately; when she had gone I sat for some time in the glider and looked up at the open window of the old man’s room, watching the white curtains blow out into the yard gently, jubilantly, from the soiled sills.
AFTER this my feelings toward Laura were never the same. Whatever intimacy or ardor may have existed between us was almost entirely extinguished, and I no longer held any hope for its development into the profound and meaningful attachment which I had once thought possible. I still saw her occasionally; I would walk home from school with her sometimes, and I think we went once or twice to a motion picture together, sitting on her front porch afterward and talking for a while in a constrained and artificial way. But the only moment of anything like true feeling that I experienced with her again was on the morning, a few months later, when I left Stonemont to join the army Laura came to the station to see me off and brought me a box lunch which she had packed for me to eat on the train. My grandparents were there also—both with wet eyes, looking suddenly terribly small and old—so that it was possible for us to speak only in the most inane and formal manner. She gave the box to me, still holding it by the string after she had placed it in my hands, as if in a final, fugitive contact with me, and said with a curious shy smile, “There’s half a fried chicken and a piece of pumpkin pie that I just made this morning. You like pumpkin pie, don’t you, Vincent?”
“Yes. Thank you very much, Laura.”
We stood uncomfortably, shifting our feet on the stone of the station platform; and then she looked up into my face and said quite gently, “I had to come down, because I wanted to say that I’m so proud of you, Vincent, for enlisting; and I know you’ll do something wonderful, and then everybody in Stonemont will know what you’re really like.”
I shook my head, smiling painfully.
“And please take care of yourself, because we want you to come back to us.”
“Yes, I will, Laura.”
I was strangely affected by the incident. Whether it was due to the compassion which, mistakenly or not, I sensed in Laura’s gesture, or to the natural pathos of the situation, I do not know; but at any rate I carried away with me a fond final memory of her which seemed to supersede all the other, less fortunate, ones, and on the strength of it I exchanged letters with her throughout the war—something which, considering how perfunctory our relationship had become since that day of her father’s death, I should surely not otherwise have done. Was this what Laura intended? It is difficult to know, and perhaps not charitable to speculate; but I do know that her letters—all but the final one—were a source of much pleasure and comfort to me during the long two years that I was overseas.
I have never been sure whether my enlistment was not partially due, at least, to the deterioration of my affair with her; but my more conscious motives were simple expediency, a nebulous but rather moving concept of soldiery which I had as a boy and a revelatory, deeply disturbing speech of my grandfather’s which he delivered as we walked out under the elms to the end of Frederick Avenue one evening after having a soda together at the corner drugstore. That was in the summer of 1942—the summer during which I worked as delivery boy
on the grocery truck—and Stonemont, like the rest of the world, was infected with the excitement, the dark vitality, of war. I had graduated from high school in the spring of that year and had just turned eighteen. The world which lay before me, the world which had seemed so remote, so pleasantly vague and fabulous until the moment when I walked down from the bunting-draped commencement platform in my cap and gown, clutching the fragile wand of my maturity—the ribbon-bound parchment scroll of my diploma—had become suddenly a shadowed and rather ominous region whose unknown and unavoidable terrain filled me with a vague sense of alarm. We passed the statue of the Confederate soldier, blue with evening and seeming more poignant, more full of brave significance than ever, so that I looked at it with even more than ordinary thoughtfulness.
There was for me at that time something peculiarly inspiring in the image of a soldier. I do not mean by this that I felt any of the usual romantic or chauvinistic sentiments about warfare, for I think that even as a boy I was aware, with the casual irony of youth, that God is on the side of all armies in all battles and that the principles for which men die in one season will be archaic by the next; it was not the nation, the principles or the institutions they defended which made soldiers seem glorious in my eyes (for any of these, from another point of view, might be considered absurd or infamous), but their simple act of sacrifice itself, the blind submission of their lives and fortunes to something greater than themselves, their beautiful obedience. Perhaps it was for me an image of life, in which, in very much the same way—fighting for principles which are never really understood, against odds they do not know and enemies whom they might love, serving captains they may despise and distrust, in a cause which may be hopeless—men nevertheless go on, struggling, suffering, killing, obeying their humanity in a blind and valiant act of sacrifice. I think it was this that moved me; for people who are subtly estranged from their environment, their institutions and companions, both by temperament and fortune, as I was in my youth, are apt to be more keenly and more wistfully sensitive to such a concept than are others. Feeling their separateness, and the unaccountable guilt of loneliness, they feel the need, perhaps, to redeem it by an act of service or sacrifice, in the company of comrades. It is a way for them to rejoin humanity.
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