“You look awful,” she says. “What’s the matter, Vincent?”
“Lilith,” I demand. “Where is Lilith?”
“She’s gone, Vincent.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s on Fourth. She went all to pieces last night. They’ve just taken her up.”
“She’s on Fourth Floor?”
“Yes. Completely out of contact, I guess—from the report. I didn’t see her; they took her up just before my shift.”
I stare bleakly, plucking at the buttons of my jacket.
“Do you think I could see her?”
“I don’t know. She’s probably still in isolation, but it’s worth a try. Why don’t you go up?”
“Yes. I will. Thank you.”
I take the elevator up two floors, standing very still and erect in a formal, almost military attitude of sufferance, as if awaiting inspection. When I open the door the squalor of the fourth floor assaults me in a wave of noisy, odorous babel. I move down the corridor among the stealthy, stupefied, hilarious or mimicking women, each of them a derelict parody of Lilith’s careless, wanton loveliness. For the first time I feel revulsion toward them.
When I enter the floor office Miss Jackson nods at me briefly; she is a very businesslike, rather distant nurse.
“I hear they brought Lilith Arthur up last night,” I say.
“Yes. She’s in isolation.”
“How is she?”
“She’s quieted down some, but she’s still way out of contact. I think she’s pretty bad.”
“Could I try to talk to her for a while?”
“If you like. You’ve had a good bit of success with her, haven’t you?”
“I get along with her pretty well, yes.”
“Well, go on back if you like. Brewster’s on duty back there; he’ll let you in.”
“All right.”
I go down the hall to the two isolation rooms at the end. An attendant stands outside them, peering occasionally at their inmates’ through the tiny slotted window at the top of each metal door. He smiles and says hello to me. I hear my voice asking with determined casualness, “Which one is Miss Arthur in?”
“Number Two. Are you going in?”
“Yes. I’m going to try and have a chat with her.”
“Okay. I hope you enjoy it.” He grins and, after peering through the window for a moment, unlocks the door cautiously, blocking the exit with his body as I enter. The walls and floor of the room are padded with canvas and there is only a single small, barred window, set high in the outer wall. Lilith stands staring up at it, her hair burnished darkly by the narrow ray of light it casts down through the dimness of the cell. She turns quickly as I enter and backs away from me into a corner, her eyes terrified.
“Oh, no!” she says in a soft stark voice. “You mustn’t come in here with those hands. How horrible to have dead hands! You must take those hands off before you come in here!” She stands divided from me by the sloping plane of light, her shoulders pressed against the canvas padding, her hands lifted and held against her mouth.
“Lilith,” I whisper, “I’m Vincent. Don’t you know me?”
“Oh, no, don’t! Don’t come near me, please! You mustn’t touch me.
“I’m Vincent, Lilith,” I repeat desperately, imploringly.
She stares in confusion. “Vincent?”
“Yes. You know me. You love me. You’re not afraid of me.”
“But then why do you have those hands? Those are his hands. I know they are. I saw him clutch that rose with one of them, when he was dying. So tightly. Crushing it into a little ball. As if it might be the thing he wanted. There was something he wanted to hold, all his life. But then his fingers shivered and he let it go; and all the broken petals blew away out of his hand. They were exactly the color of fire.”
“Lilith, look at me,” I say, moving toward her and holding my hands up into the ray of light that falls from the high barred window. “I’m Vincent. These are my hands. I held the lance for you with them. Don’t you remember the tournament?”
“No, there wasn’t any lance. It was a rose.” She stares at me with somber, hectic excitement. “You think it was an accident, don’t you? That’s what they said it was. But it wasn’t an accident. I know because I saw him jump. Nobody ever knew that, but I did. I never told them. I was standing at my bedroom window combing my hair to come down for lunch and I could see him all the time. Penelope set the glass table on the terrace and there were big red blobs of aspic on the plates. Horrible. He was standing at the edge of the sundeck with his hands on the rails, looking down at them. He didn’t slip, or fall, or anything, like they said. He just tightened his hands on the rails and then closed his eyes and jumped over them. Don’t you believe me? You always want me to tell you things and then you don’t believe me. But I saw him. He fell down through the sunlight and it made his hair blaze, as if it were on fire. Like Icarus. And I was the sun, I think, because that’s what he called me sometimes: Soleille. Like he did on the Ile de France that evening when we were standing by the deck rails looking out at the sea when we were coming back from Paris: Soleille. And then he ran the tip of his finger along my ear.”
She turns her head slowly and looks up along the shaft of sunlight that falls into the cell.
“Lilith, please,” I say softly.
“He hit the iron pipes of that rose arbor underneath on the terrace. That’s what broke his back, the doctor said. And then he just lay there staring up at the sky, all spread out and shivering, among the roses.”
Her face falls into a weary look of pain. She closes her eyes and bites her fingers, shuddering.
“Lilith, listen to me, please. I have to tell you what I’ve done. You can’t leave me now. Lilith, please.”
“What? What do you want, Doctor? You always want me to tell you things. Don’t you know enough about me?” She raises her eyes to mine, smiling slyly. “Did you know I made them up sometimes? I do, lots of them. But not that about Ronnie. I saw that. I couldn’t make up anything as terrible as that. And shall I tell you something else? Something worse? Oh, there’s much worse. You’ll make little disgusted faces, like Mother does. Perhaps I ought to make you a cup of tea first, so you can stir it sadly and silently, with that look of suffering, clicking all those little jet things on your collar with your fingernail. Or tell me about Cousin Priscilla’s virtue, which earned her the Junior Vice President of the Corn Exchange, or some damn thing. Only I know she sat on the subway once all the way to Van Cortlandt Park, because she didn’t want anybody to see that stain on her dress. The Shame of Eve, she called it. Cousin Priscilla’s vocabulary was just as extravagant as her virtue. But she wouldn’t have made Mother suffer like that. She suffered so much; ever since that time at the beach cottage on the bay when she caught me standing on the hamper to look over the top of the shower stall when Ronnie was taking a shower. All salty and sticky when he tackled me while we were chasing the ball, with a little line of white rime running along the brown skin on his arm. Oh, that taste of hot brown skin and salt, and the way his hair got all sticky, and you could see the down on the tips of his ears when we were playing the pinball machines in the evening, when we walked in to Rusty’s barefooted along that sand road that smelled of jasmine in the dark. I don’t think she really knew anything; she just suffered and tapped her beads and stirred her tea. Even when I came out of the room she didn’t really know anything. She couldn’t have. When I said, ‘Mother, I want to be alone with him for a little while,’ she just stood there by the piano with Daddy stroking her hair, and those jet beads going click-click-click, as if maybe I’d come in too late from a dance or lost the aspirin bottle or something. So I went in and closed the door and locked it, turning the key very hard, so she would be sure to hear it. Then I went and sat by his bed and laid my hand on his cheek. His skin was still warm, and he was so beautiful. All the pain gone out of his mouth at last, and his face so still. He was only nineteen. His hands were b
rown from the beach, with a little band of white around his middle finger, where she had taken his ring off. Oh, why did she do that? She knew I wanted his ring! They were still limp and warm, and with that same look of yearning. I even thought they were trembling a little, as if he knew it was the last time we would ever be together; the way they trembled when he brushed the sand out of my eyes when we fell down there in the tall sea grass on the dunes when he tackled me, brushing my eyelids so softly with his finger tips. His voice trembled, too, when he said, ‘Oh, Lil, did I hurt you?’ He thought he had hurt my breast, because I was holding it; but it was only because I had to hold my heart suddenly. I turned his hand over on the sheet and his fingers curled up a little. They looked so empty, so hungry. So I unbuttoned my blouse and made my breasts naked, and then I leaned down over him and put my breast into his hand, so he could hold it at last, the way he wanted to there on the dunes—the way he always longed to. But I felt how cold his hand was suddenly, and that was when I really knew that he was dead.”
Her face has grown quite still with a strangely beautiful look of austerity. I stare at her in terror, utterly forsaken, reaching out toward her with trembling, destitute hands.
“Lilith, come back! You mustn’t leave me now! You have killed me. Lilith come back to me!”
“So you can have two roses,” she says, raising her eyes to mine gently. “A white one and a fire-colored one. They are both here somewhere.”
“Lilith,” I cry softly, “please come back. Please, please, please.”
She comes toward me, smiling, the bar of sunlight striking her a sudden dazzling blow as she moves through it. “Yes, I will. I’ll come back to you. And you won’t jump this time, will you? You won’t be afraid any more, because I’ve taught you not to fear.”
LILITH never recognized me again. I spoke to her twice more, but each time she was more confused and remote than before, and her progressive deterioration was more than I could bear to witness. I stayed on until she left the hospital, in the desperate hope, I suppose, that she might be restored, that I would come some morning and find her in her room again, with her loom and manuscripts and paints, playing her flute or studying the sunlight with her prisms at the window sill; but I knew, really, that she had gone forever. When she left the hospital I went up to the second floor—I could not say goodbye to those blue, uncomprehending eyes—and from the windows of the common room watched the black limousine carrying her away. She was seated in the middle of the rear seat with an attendant on either side of her, so that I could see only the barest flash of her yellow hair inside the car as it turned out of the shadows of the poplars and into Montgomery Avenue. When I turned away from the window I saw that Mrs. Meaghan was standing in the door.
“Has she gone?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I have her prisms.”
“How did you get them?”
“There was a good deal of confusion when they took her upstairs. I simply walked into her room and took them off the window sill.”
“I see.”
“I thought you might like to have one.”
“Yes, I would, very much,” I said.
She took one of the triangular crystal prisms from the pocket of her skirt and handed it to me.
“I thought, for us, they would be particularly significant.”
“Yes. Thank you very much.” I closed my hand upon the crystal, staring at it. “It feels quite warm.”
“Yes, I’ve been using them.” She smiled at me in her allusive way. “I have always been intrigued, as she was, by the number of colors it takes to make up what we call pure light. She loved the vividness of primary colors—of violet, particularly.”
“It was the color of her eyes,” I said.
“Yes. Violet is a beautiful color.”
I put the prism in my pocket and said again, “Thank you very much.”
“I suppose you will be leaving shortly?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“I see. Good afternoon, Mr. Bruce.”
“Good afternoon.”
Shortly after her relapse Lilith was removed, at her parents’ decision, to a European clinic, for treatment by a Viennese physician whose combined drug-and-analytic technique was at that time enjoying considerable publicity. Her departure from the hospital added less to my desolation than might be imagined, for I had come to realize, as I say—although scarcely permitting myself a conscious realization of the fact—that she had already left me forever; and whatever hopes I may have had for her recovery were tempered, I think, by my remote but certain knowledge of the dilemma which would have attended it. For how should I have behaved if she had been restored to me? It must have been evident, in spite of my sense of loss and destitution, that I could never have resumed my relationship with her. I have even asked myself—having read enough in these succeeding years to be able to imitate, at any rate, the manner of the wise—whether her destruction was not my own wish and, in an abominably involuted way, my own achievement. I say these things now, from the security of almost fifteen years of perspective—and yet I do not wish to give a false or pedagogical impression of my liberation from her, or of my present independence or piety. To the latter I have, of course, forfeited all claim forever; and as for the former: liberation, in such an absolute and final sense, is something I never experienced from Lilith—either when she left the hospital or when I heard from Bea, many months later, after I had resigned my job, of her death. How, indeed, should I behave today if, leaning from my window some summer evening, I should see the flash of her yellow hair among the maple leaves beneath, or if, walking past the Lodge—as I often do on my way home from the tavern—I should hear the sound of her flute drifting out among the willows? Yet these are questions upon which I have come to realize that it is useless to speculate; for Lilith is gone, and they can never be more than rhetorical now. They might be asked, with as much hope of a pertinent reply, of anyone, and have no true significance. What alone has significance for me is that I have survived, and preserved my will and reason sufficiently to make at least a partial atonement.
I tried desperately for a while to continue with my work when she had left the hospital, feeling that by doing so—by dedicating what remained of my life and energy to these people—I might make the feeble beginnings of an act of expiation. But I knew within a very few days that this was impossible. The loneliness of the place without her presence, the constant reminders of her (that would bring me, staring sightlessly, to a halt, lost in anguished memory), the daily contact with the people whom I had betrayed, the constantly revisited scenes of my ecstasy and treachery—all these made it impossible for me to perform my duties with competence, far less with devotion. I was incessantly anxious and distracted, and had lost as well—as I came to realize very soon—all faith in my ability to help them. It was Bea herself who suggested that I should “take a long rest” and Dr. Lavrier who supported the suggestion. No explanation was necessary; the disaster to the two patients for whom I had had such obvious affection seemed reason enough for my incapacity. I do not honestly believe they ever suspected any other; nor have I ever offered any—except here, in these pages. I was to return, at any time that I felt sufficiently recuperated, to take up my duties; my job would be held open for me. Both were particularly solicitous that I should come to visit the Lodge whenever I wished; they would always be delighted to see me.
I think Bea realized, when I said goodbye to her, that I would never return to work there. She always seemed very pleased, however, when I accepted, as I frequently did, her latter invitation. There was a period when I went as often as twice a week, to drink coffee and chat for a while in her office, although my visiting her was only a pretext. I went really to sit on the veranda for an hour or so, as I invariably did when I had left her. I was almost always alone there, for it was seldom used by patients, and in the cool gloom of its eternal submarine season I felt curiously at home. It was pa
rticularly lovely in the fall, because the poplars had begun to change their color, and all along the drive I could see the great yellow leaves falling slowly through the autumn sunlight. I would sit in a wan trance of memory, recalling with sudden excruciating vividness snatches of our conversation or fragments of scenes that we had played out together, and occasionally, out of habit, feeling for the tendril of vine that she had slipped onto my finger while we were sitting there. (It is gone now; I lost it long ago.)
Lilith Page 41