Lilith

by J. R. Salamanca

  I went on and on, for five or ten minutes, I think, sitting beside her on the floor, saying any kind of nonsense that came into my mind. And I was supposed to be comforting her—my God! It must be the strangest declaration of love that was ever made. But the odd thing is that I think she understood me, because she listened so attentively, so appreciatively, as if I were saying the most eloquent piece of poetry ever written. And when I had finished she laid her head against my knee, closing her eyes and smiling softly. She had stopped crying.

  MON., JUNE 1:

  . . .That inscription on the wall above her bed will drive me mad. What in God’s name can it mean? HIARA PIRLU RESH KAVAWN. I lie and whisper it to myself for hours, seeing the great black letters in my mind. Sometimes there is a gathering sense of revelation, a hectic intensification, as of growing insight, and I feel that in a moment its meaning will burst open in my mind like a great white flower of light, an exploding star; and then I shall know the answer! But it never finishes; always it fades with a ghostly waning grace, like the moon on a cloudy night, and I am left rigid with terrible suspense. What must I do to learn it? She will not tell me—no matter how I threaten or cajole her. This morning I asked her again, and she said, “I can’t tell you, Vincent; please don’t ask me any more. Do you want me to be punished? They would punish me dreadfully.” Looking at me with those great plaintive eyes. Some day I will take her hand and twist and bend her fingers—even if she screams with pain—until she tells me. She has as much as promised me, and by Heaven I mean to know. Arrogant, tormenting creature!

  TUES., JUNE 2:

  . . . I could not help being amused by Bea this morning. I am sure she was trying to outwit me: “I’m worried about Warren; do you think you could persuade her at least to be civil to him?” Now how on earth did she expect me to react to that? Certainly not with such polished self-possession! “I’ll try, if you like. Perhaps I could get her to the tea dance this week, and have her dance with him.” Oh, I have far too much at stake to be deceived by that sort of trumpery! It’s disturbing, however, to think that they may be aware of what I feel. They are very perceptive people, and it would be easy for me to betray myself. I must be extremely cautious. . . .

  Tomorrow I am to take her to the tournament at Kingston! I am blazing, feverish with excitement. I have walked back and forth from the window to my desk twenty times, clenching my hands, pressing my knuckles against my mouth, smiling with delight at the surprise I have in store for her! Yesterday evening when I was coming home I met Howie Elliot in front of the drugstore, his arm in a cast. He is about my age, and used to ride sometimes at the county fair before the war. We chatted for a few minutes, and I asked if he was going to the tournament tomorrow.

  “I’m going,” he said, “but I can’t do no more than watch, now. I was going to ride till I broke this damn thing rabbit hunting last week. You going to ride?”

  “No, I haven’t got a horse any more,” I said.

  “Well, hell, ride mine! He’s all trained and ready to go. I got him entered, anyway.”

  “Do you mean it?”

  “Sure! I’m going to take him over, anyway. You can just ride for me. I’d like to see him win. He’s a real nice little stallion—five years old and real sweet to run.”

  “By gosh, I’d like to!” I said. “But I haven’t ridden since before the war. I’m probably rusty as an old nail.”

  “Hell, you won’t have no trouble. Take a crack at it, anyway. I’d like for somebody to run him. I’ll bring you a lance and all.”

  “All right, I will!” I said. “I’d really like to. Thanks a million, Howie.”

  “That’s the idea. I’ll meet you up there about eleven, then. It don’t start till noon.”

  So I am going to ride for her, after all! There must have been Providence in such an opportunity—there’s really no other way to explain it! I can’t believe my good fortune. It gives me a feeling of pride which is quite unlike anything I’ve ever felt before—but of apprehension, too. I’m so out of practice that I’m afraid I’ll perform disgracefully in front of her, which is too terrible to think about. I don’t expect to win, of course, but if I could come in at least third or fourth, and win a ribbon for her—even a yellow one—it would be the most wonderful day of my life, I think! . Lord, help me win a ribbon for my love!

  THE day of the tournament was an exceptionally beautiful one—one of those early summer days on which the quality of light gives to all objects a pale incandescence. The morning air was so fresh and sweet that I left the bathroom window open while I shaved so that the cool delicious breeze might blow across my naked shoulders. In spite of my haste and my impatience for the day’s events to begin I felt impelled to study my face in the mirror with unusual attention and curiosity while I shaved, almost as one studies the face of a stranger on whom a known felicity is about to descend, feeling that odd combination of envy and respect which such a distinction commands.

  What an odd-looking young man! I thought with a delightfully artificial naïveté. His nose is too large, his lashes are too long. And yet how I wish I were him! His face has a look of importance about it. He will do something of consequence today! And I remember a pathetic look of mortified surprise that came into my eyes at the sudden devastating intimation of my own vanity—vanity of a dimension I had never before suspected in myself. I set my razor down with a little clink on the side of the enamel basin and stood with my eyes closed for a moment in desolate awareness of the things a man may do in the hunger to distinguish himself before his fellows, or before God. But when I had had my coffee in the silent kitchen and stepped out into the moist cool stir of morning I felt myself reclaimed by the passions of the day, and all the way down the street to Poplar Lodge I gathered invisible reins in my clenched hand and hoisted a heavy lance beneath my armpit, sighting and leveling it adroitly while with my knees I steadied my galloping, ghostly steed.

  As it was known that I would be “specialing” most of the day, I was excused from the morning meeting to make preparations for our trip. I fueled the staff limousine at our private gasoline pump and went down to the kitchen to order a special luncheon for Lilith: honey and watercress sandwiches, a Thermos of milk, and tangerines, all of which I knew she liked especially. I began to be very afraid that she would decide, at the last minute, not to go; but when I arrived at the door of her room I found her not only prepared but as nearly eager to go as I had ever seen her. She was barefoot, however.

  “You’re going out into the world today,” I said. “And you must dress as the world demands.”

  “Won’t you take me if I don’t?”

  “No.”

  “But I haven’t worn shoes in so long. They’ll hurt my feet.”

  “You must get used to suffering again.”

  “Oh, you’re going to be sententious! I won’t go at all, if you’re going to be like that. I thought you wanted me to be happy, and I find you only want to make me suffer. You should be ashamed.”

  She made me feel altogether ridiculous with these words, and I watched in penitent silence while she searched in her closet, where, after much rummaging about, she discovered a pair of little black ballet slippers, which she stooped to slip onto her feet.

  “There. You see what sacrifices I make for you? Will they think I am respectable now?”

  “I believe so. As you say, they are very easily deceived.”

  She laughed and lifted her head toward me in an intimate and affectionate way that made my heart beat quickly. We descended in the elevator in a kind of silent gaiety, shyly and excitedly avoiding each other’s eyes. She seemed not to have considered how we should get to the tournament, and the sight of the limousine made her eyes sparkle with amused surprise. She entered it silently and demurely, smiling while I started the car and drove it slowly down the curve of the drive. When we had entered the street and driven for a few hundred yards along it she said, “I had no idea you could drive a car. How did you learn?”

  “I
learned in the army,” I said.

  “Really? You don’t look at all as if you could drive. I wanted to see you riding a horse, and here you are driving this huge machine instead. It makes me feel as if you had been deceiving me somehow.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know any other way to get there. It’s much too far to bicycle.” I turned to smile at her. “I haven’t been deceiving you, anyway. It’s just a sort of incidental skill that I’ve picked up.”

  “I know. One must be very skillful to live in your world; and I hadn’t thought of you at all as a skillful person. I’m terrified of them.”

  “Not of me?” I said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t really know anything about you, Vincent. Sometimes I have the feeling that you may do me harm.”

  This exchange made a brief hiatus in our happy intimacy. I glanced at her and saw that she sat with a huddled and forlorn look in the corner of the limousine. To get to Kingston, where the tournament was to be held, it was necessary to go through Stonemont and take the north road out of town. As we passed the county courthouse a flag on the tall white pole above the portico was ranting in the blue air, snapping and snarling as if delivering an hysterical manifesto. Lilith watched it with a subdued look of fear.

  “Have you been downtown before?” I asked.

  “No, not for months. Maybe it’s years; I can’t remember.”

  “It isn’t much of a town,” I said somewhat apologetically, for the streets seemed suddenly to have been humbled by her presence.

  “But I want to see it. It’s what you want me to come back to, isn’t it? I know it must be wonderful.”

  As we entered the commercial section of the street she sat up attentively, looking out at the shop windows with restored interest. While we paused at the traffic light—Stonemont’s single one, an ancient ornamental device, suspended on cables over the center of the principal intersection—she peered with innocent curiosity into the window of Wingate’s Pharmacy, on the opposite curb. Under her scrutiny I became aware for the first time, really, of the ignobility of its contents. There were boxes and bottles of depilatories, mouth washes, cosmetics, perfumes, deodorants, razors, rubber syringes, aspirin, sleeping tablets, cigarettes, and even canned beer—a whole museum of devices, I realized with a kind of personal mortification, for producing illusions of the least glorious sort—for making the human mind less sensitive, less prone to its perceptions, less original; and the human body less restless, less beastlike in appearance, less repugnant in odor, and sterile. Beside these wares there was also a glittering pyramidal display, in brightly bound paper covers, of the New Testament, the Baghavad Gita and a savagely illustrated novel entitled Dead Virgins Don’t Sing. In one corner of the window there was a two-color printed poster advertising a double feature at the local cinema: The Voice of the Turtle and The Fiend from Outer Space.

  Lilith turned to smile at me gently. “It is wonderful,” she said, “but do you really want me to exchange my loom and my flute for these wonders?”

  I could produce no more than an embarrassed murmur in reply, and felt greatly relieved when the light had changed and I could turn the corner and proceed down the upper length of Main Street. At the end of it stood the music shop into whose window I had so often stared with fascination as a child. I slowed the car instinctively to peer in through the dusty glass at the ancient dulcimer which lay there in the sunlight. (This was an invariable and rather anxious habit of mine, for I dreaded the day when mysteriously, apocalyptically, it would be gone and put forever beyond my reach.) Lilith’s eyes lit softly at the sight of the old wine-colored instrument.

  “Oh, how lovely,” she said. “What is it doing here? A dulcimer!”

  “I don’t know. It’s been there as long as I can remember.”

  “What a nice old shop. I’d like to go in there; is it closed?”

  “Yes, I think it must have gone out of business long ago; it’s never been open as long as I can remember. But the dulcimer has always been there. I always wanted to play it, when I was a boy. I used to think that I’d buy it some day and learn to.”

  “Why didn’t you, ever?”

  “I don’t know—it seemed like kind of a silly thing to do. People said it was, anyway.”

  “What people?”

  “Well, a girl I used to know.”

  She turned toward me curiously. “A girl? Was she your sweetheart?”

  “I guess so. I used to think she was.”

  “What happened to her, Vincent?”

  “Well, she married somebody else, while I was away.”

  “Oh.” She turned back to watch the old shop front lingeringly as we drove beyond it, asking in a moment, “Would you still like to play it, Vincent?”

  “Oh, I don’t think I could, now,” I said. “And I don’t know if I really want to any more. I have a feeling it would disappear, anyway—crumble away or something—if I touched it.”

  She looked at me softly—again with that scarifying look of tenderness—and laid her hand gently on the back of my own, where it rested on the wheel.

  “You would have played it beautifully,” she said.

  We had driven on beyond the last commercial buildings of the street, and as we entered the open highway Lilith turned to look back for a moment at the diminishing brick and timber façades of the town with the tall portico of the courthouse rising above them. “You have such an angry flag,” she said. She dropped her head, spreading her fingers on the gray upholstery of the automobile seat and falling into thoughtful silence.

  It took us an hour to drive to Kingston, a tiny hill town in the shadow of Sugar Loaf. It is one of the loveliest towns in central Maryland, a Revolutionary village with a green, an ancient stone well with a shingled roof, and a main street lined with narrow sagging houses of weathered clapboard. There were beautiful black cockerels with scarlet combs strutting in the sunlight, and the whole town was full of the scent of roses and wild jasmine. Lilith leaned from the open window, her face as radiant, almost, as the sunlight itself, with happiness.

  “Oh, Vincent, it is beautiful!” she said. “I think you have found me an enchanted village!”

  I was more than in accord with this opinion, for on looking into the window of the music shop, we seemed to have left behind us, figuratively as well as in fact, all the ugly merchandise and prosaism of the town; and the morning with its roses, its strutting burnished cockerels and its soft sunlight on the fieldstone of the old cellars seemed indeed to have become a song.

  The tournament was to be held in a grove of gray oaks beyond a wooden church at the outskirts of the village. We drove toward it slowly under the clumsily lettered muslin banners that hung above the street, blowing our horn in festive warning to the crowds who drifted with us toward the grounds. Although it was only eleven o’clock, there were already many of them, and the Methodist congregation who were patrons of the event were busily setting up refreshment booths, barbecue pits, ring tosses and horseshoe pitches. An old man with an official’s badge pinned to his faded blue work shirt directed our parking on a square of green lawn in front of the church, and we left the car to saunter about the grounds.

  I had experienced, as we left the hospital, a somewhat fugitive feeling, a sense of guilty abdication, which, in spite of my excitement at the adventure, had made me uneasy and unable to appreciate entirely even the air of “enchantment” of the village; but as we strolled about under the old oaks, cool in our summer clothes, among the stir and shouting of the crowd, I felt this anxiety fade away into the warm fragrant air, and became aware of a growing easy delight, a sense of long-desired escape and of private intimacy, like that of eloping lovers, which all the while made me smile to myself with achievement and, even more, with anticipation—for I had still my great surprise to announce to her! There were men carrying long wooden trestle tables up from the basement of the church and setting them in rows under the shade of the trees; already a horseshoe pit had been established, and from far away und
er the oaks came the ringing clang of metal and the sudden bursts of applausive laughter of onlookers; an electrician in white overalls, clinging to the branches of a giant oak and cheerfully rejecting the suggestions of grinning farmhands underneath, was stringing up a loudspeaker system above the picnic tables. All these preparations Lilith watched in happy silence, looking into my face sometimes to smile as she walked beside me. I did not speak either, for I was so acutely aware of every move she made, and often, when her summer dress or her loose hair brushed against me, so tremblingly sensitive to her presence that I hardly trusted my voice. She stood laughing to watch two small boys staggering with a zinc washtub full of chunks of ice and floating dark-green watermelons. When she called to them they set it down and came shyly to stand in front of her with downcast faces.