Lilith

by J. R. Salamanca

  The lawn had been mowed the evening before, and there were many little blades of wet grass stuck to her feet and ankles. She crouched down to remove them, her chin resting on her knee and her hair falling in damp strands across her face as she plucked the grass blades singly from her skin.

  “Oh, there are hundreds!” she said impatiently. “I’m covered with them. Mr. Bruce, won’t you help me?”

  It seemed so innocent and natural an appeal that one could not refuse without appearing unpleasantly officious or prudish, or without producing a delicately complicated set of reactions which would have been far more provocative, I felt, than a good-natured, spontaneous compliance. Yet, as I knelt down to help her I could not help feeling a faint throe of misgiving as to the entire propriety of my doing so; and I was troubled that evening, as my journal indicates, by the memory of the panting girl with her damp skirts and ragged shining hair, smiling softly as I knelt before her to pick the bright-green blades of wet grass from her white feet.

  ON the day after I met Lilith for the first time a field trip had been organized to Great Falls. These day-long excursions were a monthly feature of the O. T. department and much anticipated by the patients. They automatically included all second-floor and Field House patients who wished to attend, and any from the third and fourth floors who were considered to be in a responsible enough condition. This generally made up a group of from ten to fifteen people, who, under the supervision of three or four members of the O. T. staff, were driven in the Lodge limousines to such neighboring points of interest as Sugar Loaf, the Skyline Drive, or the monuments and memorials of Washington.

  These trips were scheduled only tentatively, as, being outdoor projects, they depended for their success on the weather; but as the showers of the previous day had cleared away completely, Bea decided, at the morning meeting, that the trip should take place. Mandel, Wren Thomas—one of the Antioch students—and Bob Clayfield were assigned as escorts, and I was very greatly pleased that Bea asked me to accompany them. It was, on this occasion, a small group of only eight patients, with most of whom I was already acquainted: Warren Evshevsky; Howard Thurmond, the giggling second-floor patient; Sonia Behrendt; Mr. Palakis, the Dostoevski enthusiast; and Lilith Arthur. Those whom I knew only briefly were Daniel Hagan, a scowling middle-aged Irishman from Field House, and two girls from Second Floor. Bea gave us instructions about accidents, insubordination and so forth, and cautioned us especially about keeping Warren and Lilith under surveillance.

  “It must be done tactfully, of course,” she said, “but firmly and frankly, nevertheless. Warren, of course, will consider it a heaven-sent opportunity, so you’ll have to be careful that he doesn’t annoy her. Vincent, you can make that your special province, if you like; you get along with him very well. Lilith almost never signs for these trips, and Dr. Lavrier is delighted that she has. We want to encourage her to take more of them, so try to keep her from getting upset. We’ve made special sandwiches for her—no meat or eggs—and I think you ought to let her take her flute, or prisms, or anything else she might want to bring along. I just hope she doesn’t back out before you get her in the car; that’s what usually happens.”

  Bea’s fears were justified; when we knocked at Lilith’s door there was no answer. Bob knocked again and asked if she was ready.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Come in.”

  She was sitting in her window seat playing with a pair of crystal prisms, which, as we talked, she would hold in the sunlight to cast miniature rainbows, sometimes upon the white flesh of her forearm, sometimes upon the sill or through a square of pale-blue silk that she held draped across her fingers, peering all the while with soft fascination at the livid, glowing bars of color of the projected spectrums and varying the effects she produced in many imaginative and often startling ways. She would let the rays of chromatically divided light fall on a mirror, and from there reflect them to the wall or ceiling where they would form quivering, vivid, many-colored patches of illumination; or sometimes fit the prisms together, their bases opposed, so that the light would enter through one apex and, after being broken into its band of bitter primary hues and then recomposed—re-fused, as it were—in its passage through the crystal, emerge from the other as white light again, its purity and integrity restored.

  “We’re waiting for you, Miss Arthur,” Bob said. She breathed on one of the prisms and polished it gently on her sleeve, her eyes declined.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t think I can go.”

  “Why can’t you go?” he asked.

  “They told me not to.”

  “Who told you?”

  “My people.” She turned her face toward us with a look of genuine regret. “I wanted to go very much. But they came last night and told me that it would be unwise. I mustn’t disobey them.”

  “But you signed to go,” Bob said.

  “Yes. That was why they came.”

  We stood staring at her for a moment in silence, baffled by her unseen counselors. She closed her eyes and turned the prism slowly, casting the light upon her lids, where it lay in tremulous, beautiful disintegration. “It doesn’t matter very much, does it?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t matter to us,” Bob said. “But I think it would do you a lot of good. You haven’t had a trip for months.”

  “I know. And I wanted to see the falls. Are they very high?”

  “Yes. It’s a beautiful sight.”

  “It must be lovely.” She opened her eyes slightly, still holding the prism to cast the light upon her face, and murmured from behind her mask of luminous motley, “Are you going, then, Mr. Bruce?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I would have liked to talk to you again. But I mustn’t disobey them. You have no idea how they torment me when I do.”

  “Why did they say it was unwise?” Bob asked.

  “Because I would have to eat meat.”

  “No; we’ve made you a special lunch.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  “So you see, you have nothing to fear. You can bring your paints, if you like, and do a picture. You needn’t speak to a soul if you don’t feel like it.”

  She lifted her head with an expression of grateful appeal. “Really? You wouldn’t mind? I can’t stand it when they babble and cluster around me. Especially in the cars. I can’t breathe.”

  “You can sit by a window, if you like,” Bob said. “It isn’t a long drive, anyway.”

  She set the prisms down on the window sill and began to tie the blue silk scarf about her throat, saying with an air of gentle reproach, as if to indict us for having persuaded her, “I’ll come, then. I’ll be punished, but I will.”

  Bob and Mandel drove the two limousines, while Wren and I, sitting on the back seat of either car, kept order among the patients. As it was a fine warm morning, and they were full of the cheerful excitement of the outing, this was not difficult. Lilith sat directly in front of me beside Bob, turned away to face out of the open window so that, from the rear seat, I could see her plainly, clasping her flying, snapping hair to her head with her spread fingers, her eyes narrowed and her lips a little parted, drinking the wind with a ravenous, intoxicated look.

  Great Falls is a beautiful and awesome place, only a few miles from Stonemont, where the waters of the Potomac, thundering down from the sheer granite shelves of the Piedmont Plateau, run roaring and foaming over a mile-long race of deep, boulder-strewn rapids. The banks are very high at this point, rising over a thousand yards above the boiling channels below, and half a mile across this vast stone cauldron one can see the green, heavily forested slopes of the Virginia shore. There are observation platforms cut out of the rocky cliffs, railed with iron pipe and furnished with coin-operated telescopes; but what is more enjoyable is to lie flat on the great gray boulders in the sunlight, staring up into the blue sky and listening to the endless thunder of the falls below, or to roam among the willow and laurel thickets of the many narrow islands which have b
een sliced off from the mainland and isolated by a network of vagrant torrents, threading off from the main body of the river. Here one can search for herons or blackberries, or plunge one’s wrist into the icy water of the inshore channels to bring up, cold and dripping in one’s clenched fingers, a round, bright, perfectly polished pebble that has spun chortling for centuries in one of the worn potholes of the shore. Although a beautiful and unusual place, it was one that would require, because of its many natural hazards, exceptional vigilance from we attendants, and I was filled with determination to justify Bea’s confidence in sending me along as escort.

  To reach the falls one must cross the old Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which runs parallel with the Potomac as far as Cumberland. Although its former purpose as a freight canal has been long outmoded by the railroads, the locks are still maintained, and many of the tollhouses—fine old buildings made of native granite—have been restored. At Great Falls there is a splendid one that has been made into a museum and luncheon pavilion; here we parked the limousines and unpacked our provisions. Lilith had brought her paints in a wooden box, a drawing pad and a portable easel with collapsible legs. As I was removing them from the trunk, Warren, who as a matter of discretion had been placed in the other car, approached us and asked in a voice of hesitant reverence if he might carry the equipment for her. As the question was addressed to Lilith, and obviously constituted a grave and courteous overture on his part, I felt that in spite of my authority it was not my province to answer and that she should be allowed to indicate for herself whether or not she desired his company. But Lilith, after gazing at him for a moment, turned to me with a winsome air of submissiveness and said, “Why, I don’t know. May he, Mr. Bruce?”

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “Can you manage the easel and box both, Warren? I’ll take one of the lunch baskets, if you can.”

  “Oh, yes, easily.”

  He accepted the burdens happily, and, joining the group, we crossed the small bridge that spans the canal and followed a well-worn footpath through the thickets beyond toward the river. The small islands along the riverbank are joined by a series of wooden foot bridges built over the rushing torrents which divide them. We crossed these cautiously, pausing sometimes to lean on the sleeve-worn handrails and stare down at the swift, glassy turbulence of the water below. I thought several times that Warren would speak to her, but his initiative appeared to have been exhausted by his offer to carry her baggage, and he seemed content to stand shyly, following the direction of her eyes with his own and then returning them unobtrusively to her face, as if simply to share some common object of vision with her made him mysteriously happy. Once she set down her paintbox and, catching her hair in two strands with her hands, leaned over the railing and spit into the stream. The white patch of her spittle slid down swiftly over the glittering surface, dissolving as it did so, and disappeared beneath the planks of the bridge. Warren laughed softly with a strangely primitive sound of delight which I found quite unpleasant.

  I remember Dr. Lavrier reminding me once, in a conversation about Lilith which I shall record presently, that the word “rapture” in the English of Shakespeare’s day meant “madness,” and adding, in the gently evocative manner which I came so greatly to admire, “I think all of us here are concerned with rapture in some way—I told you once that I liked to consider psychoanalysis as an art rather than a science—and when a man devotes himself to studying the nature of rapture he may find himself dispossessed, as it were. Categories dissolve, values and verities reverse themselves, things he reaches out to touch for comfort or guidance startle, and sometimes sicken, him with their unfamiliarity. It is a thing we are all aware of in this profession.”

  I am always reminded of his statement when I think of Lilith’s face as, stepping out of the willow thicket through which we had followed the path toward the river, she stood on the granite bluffs above the water and looked out at the mighty tumult of the falls; for if ever I saw rapture in a human face, or felt in myself the beginnings of such troubled contemplation of it, it was at that moment. Her eyes widened with gathering joy and then fixed in a look of idle brilliance, as if she were held in some bitterly beautiful dream, while her features fell softly into an almost weary expression of ecstasy which seemed to me, remembering suddenly my mother’s face as she lay dead in the winter sunlight of her bedroom, to represent the total opposite of that look of consummate composure. There was a rough wind blowing off the falls; it flattened her skirt against her thighs and scattered her hair across her face, tangling strands of it about her lips and eyes. She raked it away with her finger tips and stood clutching the box of paints against her breast, staring out at the massive sheets of water thundering down from the great shelves of the falls and murmuring to herself in the strange sharp syllables of her own tongue. She turned toward me in a moment and said softly, her voice distorted by the roaring of the rapids, “Don’t you think that water is the most beautiful of all things, and demands a sacrifice?”

  “It is beautiful,” I said. “But I don’t understand why it should demand a sacrifice.”

  “Oh, I do,” said Warren, who stood beside me clutching Lilith’s paraphernalia in a comically conscientious way, his eyes shining with happiness at this opportunity to express a concord with the creature that he loved. “I think all beautiful things do. I remember going to the cathedral once at Eastertime with my sister when I was only twelve years old. They sang the ‘Mass in G Minor’ by Vaughan Williams, and it was so beautiful that I cried. I was wearing a new blazer with brass buttons on it; they had the arms of my school engraved on them, and I loved them very much. So I cut them off with my penknife and put them in the tray. I had a dollar in my pocket that my mother had given me for the offering; but that would not have been a sacrifice, you see. So I cut the buttons off my jacket. There were four down the front and three on each sleeve.” This was the longest and most fervent speech that I had ever heard him make.

  Lilith listened, smiling, and said, “Mr. Evshevsky understands, you see. Haven’t you ever had such a feeling, Mr. Bruce?”

  “No. I can’t remember it, if I have. The only thing that makes me feel as if I ought to make a sacrifice of some kind is misery.”

  She dropped her eyes as I said this and fondled the latch of her paintbox for a moment, saying quietly, “How ugly, how brutal. I would not like to be served in that way. I would like people to love me and make sacrifices to me because I was beautiful, not as a tribute to my wretchedness.”

  “Yes, that’s what I mean!” Warren said excitedly. “That’s what I felt in the cathedral. That God wants to be served in that way, too—not because of the miserable symbols of His power, but because He is beautiful.”

  Lilith raised her eyes to his in a long thoughtful glance and turned back to the falls, lifting her head to breathe deeply the gusty air with its fresh smell of mist. The rest of the group had assembled to our left along the wide mound of rock on which we stood—an advantageous place for our picnic, as it was a large level area with a fine view of the falls, and yet lay back ten or fifteen yards from the steep and dangerous edge of the bank cliffs. I saw that Bob had reached the same conclusion, for he called to me, “I think this is a good place to eat, Vince. Let’s unpack the baskets.”

  “All right.”

  “I have Miss Arthur’s here, if you want to come for it.”

  “Oh, let me get it,” Warren said. “I would be glad to.”

  He set down his burdens and went quickly in his awkward shambling stride across the rocks to fetch it for her, returning in a moment with the waxed-paper parcel of sandwiches held carefully in his fine hands, grinning with satisfaction. Lilith took it from him silently. While Warren and I unpacked the hamper I had carried from the limousine, she sat down on the smooth warm face of the boulder, clasping her knees and bowing her neck in the sunlight. It was a most perfunctory luncheon; Warren bolted his food with abstracted voracity, watching Lilith constantly in his innocent and ardent way and speakin
g, at every opportunity, with a nervous elation and at a length I had never known in him. Lilith ate idly, her eyes almost constantly upon the falls, breaking her sandwiches into pieces with her finger tips and then nibbling and abandoning them one by one. She half turned toward him once, keeping her eyes upon the blown foam of the rapids, and asked, “Do you think power is beautiful, Mr. Evshevsky?”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” he answered eagerly. “And it is made beautiful by the things on which it is inscribed. I think that when there is a power abroad we must submit to it; it is a kind of natural obedience. How would we know that lightning is magnificent if we didn’t see it split the rocks and blast the trees? It is the rock’s destiny to be split, and the tree’s destiny to be blasted, because that is the only way the magnificence of the lightning can be revealed. We must submit to God’s power, too, because it’s the only way that He can be revealed. Don’t you feel that? That it’s our destiny to reveal His nature by yielding to it with our own?” He lifted and clasped his long hands excitedly as he spoke, bending his head forward in a yearning and zealous way, as if borne toward her by the torrent of his thought. “Surely you felt that when you said the river was beautiful.”