Lilith

by J. R. Salamanca

  “She comes from a cultured, upper-class family who gave her everything in the world—including love, as far as we can discover. They seem to be stable and rational people who are devoted to Lilith and have raised her in a most generous and affectionate way. She was sent to a private school in Vermont, where she was a brilliant scholar and formed quite normal and apparently happy relationships, both with her classmates and teachers. She had already distinguished herself in several fields—mathematics, philosophy and music—by the time she was fifteen. Then, after her second year at college, she simply began to withdraw. There doesn’t seem to be any immediate reason for it, at all. She just stopped going to classes, stopped seeing her friends, became negligent and contemptuous and, finally, completely dissociated. Apparently she must have expressed some pretty defiant or unorthodox viewpoints, because she was finally expelled from college, and I remember that the phrase ‘unsuitable influence’ was used. But just what that means—whether there was any overt misconduct on her part—is pretty hard to find out, because small, exclusive schools maintain a professional discretion about those things, particularly when there isn’t any tangible evidence; and I’m sure Lilith is too subtle, and somehow too dignified, to expose herself to ordinary mortal policework, anyway.” Bea lifted her coffee cup, sipped at it for a moment and then smiled at me. “I’m a little in awe of her, as you can probably see. Most of the patients have pretty obvious frailties, which sooner or later you discover; but she seems completely invulnerable, somehow. I don’t like to go near her. I really dislike her very much.”

  She paused and frowned into her cup as if somewhat disconcerted by the failure of her objectivity, but in a moment she went on to give me, very briefly, a summary of Miss Arthur’s medical history. I was surprised to learn that she had been here before—about four years ago, when she was only eighteen—treated for ten months and then discharged, at her parents’ wish and with the divided consent of the staff, as having achieved a “cosmetic cure.” This is to say that although she was known not to be permanently and entirely well, it was believed that she could behave responsibly in most social situations and that a gradual reintroduction to outside life, with perhaps a limited degree of professional activity of some kind, might be the best possible therapy for her at the time. She was returned to her home, did part-time work at a public library and went on privately with her studies; but after a time she began to fall back into the same pattern of withdrawal and deep fantasy, and eighteen months ago had been sent back by her parents to the Lodge.

  While we talked other members of the staff arrived, and during the meeting that followed their arrival there were brief periods of sunlight between the morning showers, which made the wet panes of the windows sparkle brilliantly. When I walked across to the main building with Bob there were pools of water in the gray gravel of the walks and many earthworms, dead and bleached pale, lying about on the wet ground. I have always hated this phenomenon after a rain; it is like offal from a flooded sewer.

  The showers were still too frequent and heavy for outdoor activity, and I felt the restlessness of which Bea had spoken among the second-floor patients, who were gathered sullenly in the lounge or stood staring out through the wire netting of the screened porch. Miss Arthur did not answer when we knocked at her door. After waiting for a moment Bob knocked at it more sharply, and when there was still no reply he turned the handle and went into her room. I did not see Lilith immediately, as she was standing at the window directly in front of him, and in the moment of automatic orientation which one’s eyes make on entering an unknown room I had time to take a swift inventory of its furnishings. These were extraordinary, as I have already indicated: a spinning wheel with a spindle of ragged flax, a small monk’s desk with a sloping top on which lay a sheet of manuscript text with a half-completed illumination, a clutter of paintboxes, jars and brushes, and on the wall above her bed, painted in huge black letters, a line of text in her invented language: HIARA PIRLU RESH KAVAWN. There was a scent in the room, too, which I cannot describe—not a perfume, for no other woman I have ever known has used it—but which was always about her and which I can recall now, as delicate and heady as ever, as I write this: a freshness, moist, cool and faintly bitter, like crushed verbena leaves. These impressions were made in a single instant; as Bob moved aside to allow me entrance my eyes went quickly beyond him to Lilith’s figure, where she stood beside the window, following with her finger tip the trickle of a water drop down the wet pane. Although her back was toward us, there was something so startlingly evocative in the posture of her body and in her soft, loose hair, fired into frosty radiance by the sunlight through the wet glass, that I felt the sudden stilling of my breath and body.

  “I did not ask you to visit me,” she said.

  “I know; but I thought you might like to meet Mr. Bruce,” Bob said. “He’s very interested in your music.”

  She turned to face me slowly, and as my recognition—if it was such—grew complete I stared at her, as I have written in my journal, for a full ten seconds, studying with a strange, welling delight the features that I had remembered with astonishing fidelity from one moment of a summer four years past: the pale, fragile face that had peered at me with shy mockery from the parted willows, the dark violet eyes and somewhat savage tenderness of mouth and the lovely hands whose movements had altered the rhythm of my imagination for years. Her eyes seemed to widen for an instant with a look which for some reason I was eager to interpret also as recognition, but after a moment she lowered them and, looking at the floor, said softly, “Does it disturb you?”

  “What?”

  “My music?”

  “No; I think it’s beautiful. I heard you the other afternoon, when I was in the common room.”

  “They only let me play for an hour a day. Do you think that’s fair?”

  “We have to consider the comfort of all the patients, Miss Arthur,” Bob said ingratiatingly. “Most of them enjoy it, I know; but to those who don’t appreciate art, we must be merciful.”

  She smiled and leaned back against the sill, lifting her hand and parting a strand of her long hair. Looking up at me from her lowered eyes, she asked, “Are you the new O. T?”

  “Yes.”

  “And have you come to instruct me in mercy also, Mr. Bruce?”

  “I hope not,” I said, composing myself determinedly. “I don’t trust anyone who teaches virtue. Do you know Shelley’s story about that?”

  “No.”

  “He had a schoolmaster who used to instruct his class in the Beatitudes by saying, ‘Now, boys, be merciful; or I shall flog you until you are.’”

  I hoped fervently that she would laugh—I could not fail to recognize that cool, sweet spray of merriment—and found myself leaning tensely forward in anticipation. I think she very nearly did; but sensing my eagerness for her to do so, she suppressed it and confined herself, with some restraint and out of an imponderable perversity, to a swift appreciative smile.

  “Oh, yes; that’s how they teach mercy, isn’t it?” she said. And after a moment, with a note of grave approval which delighted me: “I’m glad you liked my flute.”

  “Yes, very much. It has a beautiful tone. Bob says you made it yourself.”

  “No, that isn’t true. It was given me by the Elders as my Wisdom Gift. It’s a very old one. Would you like to see it?”

  “Yes, very much.”

  She left the window in a rapid gentle movement and, opening a drawer of her desk, took out a little bamboo flute and handed it to me. It was a double block flute, something like a recorder, with two tubes, for separate fingering with each hand, bound together with little bands of brass and decorated with a design in red lacquer. The holes and mouthpiece were carved with great skill and precision, and the whole instrument was an example of exquisite craftsmanship. She stood watching as I turned it over in my hands.

  “Do you play?”

  “No. I wish I did. It’s a beautiful instrument. What does it mean—a w
isdom gift?”

  “It is given for our first deed of understanding, the first thing we do, or say, or in some way express, that shows the beginning of wisdom.”

  “Like a coming-of-age present,” I said.

  “Yes; but it has nothing to do with age. Some people receive it when they’re five or six, and some never do.”

  I was about to say that it was a charming custom—which indeed it struck me as being—when it occurred to me that it might be a very poor policy to encourage her fantasies by applauding them, however appealing they might seem. Not having dealt before with so persuasive or highly organized a delusion in a patient, I felt suddenly very uncertain as to what degree of acceptance or resistance I should offer it and was consequently grateful for Bob’s comment that he could not understand why she preferred to believe the flute had been given to her. “I would be very proud of having made it myself,” he said.

  She took the flute from me without replying and laid it back in the drawer, looking down at it for a moment and smiling as she touched the slender lacquered tubes with her finger tip.

  “Can you remember the first wise thing you ever did, Mr. Bruce?” she asked.

  “No. I’m afraid it has yet to occur.”

  “Good. Then perhaps I shall have the opportunity of witnessing it.” She looked at me gaily as she said this, and I smiled at her.

  “I hope you won’t have to stay here that long,” I said. “I’m afraid it may be some time yet.”

  She sat down on the bed and laced her fingers, dropping her hands into her blue skirt and looking down at her bare feet, her head a little inclined. The window had darkened suddenly and the room was gray.

  “I’d like to offer you some tea,” she said, “but I only have one cup and saucer. Or do you drink tea in the morning?”

  “Not ordinarily,” Bob said, “but it sounds like a very good idea. I’ll see if I can get some cups from the office.”

  “Thank you.”

  He went out into the hall and I stood silently for a moment, looking down at the sheet of decorated manuscript on her desk.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “It’s a very old copy of the Data—a section of the Gospels—which I have been permitted to illuminate because I have a certain skill with my hands.”

  “It’s beautiful work,” I said.

  “Thank you.” She sat motionless, watching me gently. “Won’t you sit down, Mr. Bruce?”

  “Thank you.” I sat down in the chair facing her, meeting with some difficulty the level studiousness of her eyes.

  “Why did you come here?” she asked in a moment.

  “Well, I had to have a job.”

  “Of course; but you could have gone to work in a butcher shop.”

  “No. I’ve been working in a butcher shop for the last three years. I wanted to do something that would . . . help.”

  “Not just for adventure?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m not much of an adventurer.”

  “Oh, I think you are,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Will you think I’m rude? You will.”

  “No.”

  “Well, adventurous people always look rather ill at ease. They are shy, you know—not bold at all, as people believe. They go stumbling about the world, being scolded, breaking things, always looking for a place where they will feel they belong. They have that crooked look.”

  “That crooked look?”

  “Yes. Of not matching anything. Other people are sort of smoothed-down looking, you know; they get worn away by life until they fit it. But really adventurous people never do—they’re full of points and angles that stick out everywhere. They have that crooked look. That . . . terrible uniqueness.”

  The quality of her voice changed as she spoke this last phrase, as if the effort of discovering and pronouncing it had suddenly solemnized her thought. She sat watching my hands for a moment in reverie.

  “Their hands, for example, don’t seem to fit anything in the world; not a plow handle, or a keyboard, or a sword. Nothing that we know.” She made a slight oppressed movement of her head. “And when they are dead they lie so empty, as if they had never held the thing they yearned for. Never, in all their life. As if they begged to hold it—even for an instant—even in death.”

  I had taken, I must confess, an immodest pleasure in her obvious, if indirect, attention to myself and in what I was pleased to consider the cunning of her reference to my “breaking things”; but seeing suddenly the austerity of her eyes, I felt myself—I am aware of the absurdity of the word—betrayed; betrayed and inexplicably repelled by her aspect. Still staring at my hands, she turned her own over in her lap, curling the fingers upward slightly in a strengthless, groping attitude, to illustrate the image she had spoken.

  “A golden apple, or a scroll of fire. Or the breast of some impossible girl that they could never touch.”

  I folded my hands involuntarily in a quaint, fastidious way, as if to dissociate them from any such desire, asking, “Have you known many such adventurers?”

  She lifted her face to me wearily. “No, there are not many.”

  I remember feeling a distinct sense of relief at Bob’s re-entry into the room and at the cheerful clink of china which accompanied it.

  She served us tea, boiling the water on a small hot plate which she kept in her closet and handing the cups to us with a sedate formality that seemed half parody and half genuine demureness. There were alternate sunlight and shadow on the windowpane which made her hair flame and then wane suddenly, like a blown fire.

  Once I looked up from my teacup to see her smiling at me. “Do you think I am successful as a chatelaine, Mr. Bruce?” she asked.

  I said I was not sure what the word meant.

  “The mistress of a great estate. I like to pretend that I am, sometimes, with many handsome, earnest knights to serve me. Is that what you call a delusion, Mr. Clayfield?”

  “Not if you can distinguish it as such,” Bob said.

  “Oh, I can,” she said. “You all help me to make the distinction constantly, by so generously refusing to be chivalrous.”

  “I don’t call that fair.” Bob said. “Aren’t we always the soul of courtesy?”

  “And yet you wouldn’t let me have tin snips in my room to cut the brass for my . . . for my metalwork.”

  “Tin snips are also very useful for cutting the wire from windows.”

  She smiled and lifted her chin reproachfully, murmuring, “Honi soit qui mal y pense. I wish you would make that the motto of this house.”

  “What is yours?” I asked, raising my eyes to the printed words on the wall above her bed.

  “Oh, mine is very different. Only your mottoes are about evil. Ours are always about joy.” She did not offer to explain it literally, however, but turned her eyes to the window and sat staring at the wet pane. In a moment she set down her teacup and asked, “May I go for a walk?”

  “It’s raining,” Bob said.

  “Only a little, now and then. And if it starts to rain heavily I promise to come in right away.” Bob stared at her with a droll look of severity. “I’ll be very good,” she murmured.

  “All right. But I’ll make you remember that promise if you aren’t.”

  “You really are very good to me!” she cried, jumping up delightedly. “I’m sorry I said such hateful things about you. Will you forgive me?”

  As we went down in the elevator she stood beside me, staring at the round leather insignia which I had not yet cut from the breast of the old flight jacket I was wearing: a snarling black cat imposed upon the scarlet numeral 13.

  “What does it mean?” she asked, touching it with her finger tip.

  “It’s my squadron insignia, from the war.”

  She ran her finger over the brightly painted surface of the leather disk and asked placidly, “Have you been in a war?”

  “Yes, I just got back from one.”

  “And are you a hero?”

>   “No.”

  “No, I thought not. It doesn’t fit you properly.”

  Bob had no sooner opened the elevator door than she bounded out of it with the fresh, wild gaiety of an uncaged animal and began to run joyfully about the wet grass of the lawn.

  “Oh, it’s wonderful!” she called to us. “Come and see. Take off your shoes and run. It feels so wonderful!”

  Bob shook his head and smiled. We stood watching her with our hands in our pockets, feeling faintly self-conscious at the somewhat ignominious contrast between her exuberant beauty and our own air of rather uneasily preserved authority. Yet it was delightful to watch her running and pirouetting under the rainy trees, her yellow hair splashing and her blue skirt billowing about her bare legs, vaulting over the stone benches and leaping high into the air sometimes to catch the lower branches of the willows and shake down a shower of raindrops from the wet leaves. She would brush them out of her hair and eyes, laughing with pleasure and shivering with their coldness on her bare arms. When it began to rain again—as it did very soon—she came quite obediently, panting from her run, and stood beside us on the steps of Field House under the shelter of the eaves.