He had been in Port Warwick for eighteen years, as assistant rector and then rector of St. Mark’s Protestant Episcopal Church. He had three daughters, to the youngest of whom, Linda Byrd, age five, he gave a moment’s thought now as he paused at the stoplight, since yesterday had been his birthday and he could smell the odor of a shaving lotion which she had presented to him, rising faintly from his cheeks. And as he thought of the little girl—just for a moment intruding upon his thoughts, which all morning had been largely dark and full of melancholy—he smiled, and smelled the shaving lotion. Then he remembered Helen Loftis, and his face became solemn once more, filled with the same youthful, abiding passion—a passion which, though he hadn’t ventured to think it such, was partly the strange and tragic sorrow he felt at never having been able to attain a complete vision of God, and partly devotion—devotion to his duty, a small thing, but which he performed as well as he could.
The light remained red for what seemed minutes. A laundry truck swerved out from behind his car and the driver, a youth with bare skinny arms and an underslung jaw, halted the truck with insolent dexterity beside him. The two of them exchanged listless glances and although Carey made the faintest beginning of a smile, the boy turned to study a clipboard with surly concentration. Carey turned, too, sweating, watching the light, still red, and the intersection where a suburban bus labored sluggishly through the heat, borne westward and out of sight as if upon the poisonous violet waves of its exhaust.
The light blinked “Go”; the laundry truck lurched forward, and with a peevish squealing of tires hurtled in front of him, past him, disappearing around behind the barbecue stand. He started forward; the air, circulating around his face, cooled him off a little, and, because of the heat, because of the urgency of the situation, he thought: I’ve just got to. And he began to speed down the highway at fifty miles an hour.
Carey lived at the opposite side of town from the Loftises. He rarely took this route to the section where the Loftises lived: although a faster way, if one wanted to speed, it was an ugly road, and he was partly conscious of it now: an asphalt highway traversing low marshland, neither industrial nor residential, but occupied by decrepit garages and hot-dog stands and the waterlogged tents of itinerant Madam Olgas and Doreens—palmists mostly—unhappily pitched between the visits of poor, inflamed, neurotic women, astray from God, and the monthly raids of the county sheriff. He saw such a tent now—set off in a grove of trees, with an old foreign woman in apron and spangled bandanna, turning beneath the pines with dim uncertain eyes to watch him. Then she was gone.
But Helen. What would he say to Helen? He feared seeing her, yet at the same time he knew that of all people it was he himself from whom she must draw the greatest strength today. Carey was confused by sorrow. Although he was certain that he felt and saw as deeply as any man, he was conservative and diffident by nature, and even after all these years he felt tongue-tied in the presence of those stricken by grief. He was made uneasy by unbraked hilarity and by extremes of sorrow alike, especially the latter; he preferred life to sail along pleasantly and evenly, and this, he knew, was for him a minor sort of tragedy. For, being so guarded and reserved, how could one ever hope to become a bishop?
Across the pinewoods the shadow of a hawk fled, a wraith, as black as smoke; the pines seemed to shake and tremble but the hawk vanished, sailing up over the roof of a filling station, a dusky shadow, wings outspread like something crucified. Carey looked at his watch: he’d have to hurry. He blew his horn, wheeled past another car recklessly, in spite of a third car, oncoming, looming ahead. His heart gave a leap but the maneuver was finished; the driver of the third car, which was not a car at all but a pickup truck, shook his fist as they passed and shouted something obscene. Trembling, he slowed down a little, thinking: That was close, and again: Poor Helen, poor Helen.
The day seemed plunged in horror. She would never cry; what had he been thinking? It was hopeless. She had lost the capacity for love or grief, like a spring in some arid upland, drained dry by the sun. That was the worst of all. What had he been thinking? Lord, he thought, I must make her see the light. I must bring her and him together again. Lord, give me strength. Eager desire swept through him, his eyes became wet with tears. In Niggertown, past tumbledown shacks vined with summer honeysuckle, women in slow, aproned procession along the dusty roads, he slowed down, carefully, thinking of St. Bernard. “O love,” he said aloud, “everything which the soul-bride utters resounds of thee and nothing else; so hast thou possessed her, heart and tongue.” Wasn’t there a way to lift her up, he wondered, make her whole? All the way through Niggertown he thought about this. He drove on. The idea took hold of him; he mopped his brow, pondering, turning onto a road by the shore where far out, alone in his skiff, becalmed, a colored fisherman mournfully evoked the wind—Lo-ong comin Lo-ong comin—in a voice like dying.
She had come to him six years ago, he remembered, on a rainy Sunday night in October when the leaves of sycamores lay upon the rectory lawn in drenched disordered piles and a gathering wind, blowing in chill and premonitory gusts from the river, had made him think wistfully of a new furnace and despairingly of his God who, he had prayed, would reveal Himself finally this year and preferably before Advent. It was a season for him of self-searching and vague, amorphous sorrows. The war had arrived and it was a difficult thing for him to speak of faith to people whose faith, so tenuous anyway, had evaporated upon the threatening winds of “a cosmic cataclysm,” as he had put it that morning, in an amended sermon. There had been personal matters, too. Termites had eaten up most of the timbers in the basement, directly beneath the dining room; this he had only lately discovered, after a carefree, unwitting summer, and meals in the dining room had become fidgety and precarious, with the constant thought of repair bills giving him worry. Other bills were piling up: his two little girls were going through their year of childhood ailments, and had exchanged diseases in the careless way of children; he owed the pediatrician two hundred and forty dollars. In fact, it had been seeing the doctor on this particular night that had heightened his mood of quiet despair.
He had been standing at his front door; Adrienne had gone upstairs with the children, the younger of whom seemed to be coming down with something. “Nothing serious,” the doctor said; “Don’t worry.” And he went down the steps. Standing on his glassed-in porch with a prescription in his hand, watching the taillight of the doctor’s car recede into the night, it had occurred to him, as it had a thousand times before, that it was the most awful thing—you went through life expecting things to get better, hoping for the vacant, idle day when you would be free from worry, and although you were conscious of the folly of expecting a giddy bright time like that, you nevertheless went on hoping, sustaining your poor illusions: he groped for something meaningful—but his thoughts dwindled off into a prosy and confused prayer which he left half-completed. He gazed at his lawn, the seawall, the river beyond. The sycamores tossed nakedly; the faintest moonlight, yielded up through a rent in the clouds, outlined silver fish stakes, whitecaps, the masts and booms of sailboats upraised to the heavens like silver, suppliant arms. Cloud shadows fitfully crossed and darkened the moon which suddenly seemed too wild and ghostly for Port Warwick, and it was through this light, just as he was about to turn, that Helen Loftis approached him, alighting from her car, alone, and rushing up the walk in the rain.
He took her hand. “Helen Loftis,” he said, “what brings you out in the rain?”
There was a constrained and agitated motion in the way she removed a green silk scarf from her hair, shaking it once so that the fine drops of rain scattered away, but she laughed as she stepped onto the porch, saying vaguely, “Well, I just thought I’d come.”
He was surprised, mystified from the very beginning. But helping her off with her raincoat, he made casual talk, as if it were the commonest thing in the world to receive one of his flock—a lone married woman, at that—at ten-thirty in the evening, and he was worried about
being in his shirtsleeves.
“Well,” he said cheerfully, “this is a very nice surprise. Adrienne’ll love to see you. I hope I can get her down here. She’s upstairs with Carol——”
She touched him lightly on the hand. “No,” she said intently, but with the same disarming smile, “you let her stay. I want to see you.”
“Oh.” He laid her coat on a table and, embarrassed, a welter of silence surrounding both of them, he led her to his study: a converted side porch, paneled in ugly oak, upon which varnish lay dark and shiny like lampblack, a place he had always considered both austere and cozy, because of the artful mingling of the secular and the orthodox; a Velasquez reproduction, for instance, dominated one wall, yet upon the adjoining wall there was the presiding bishop, handsomely framed and autographed. He could work here, shut away from the family, or just meditate. On his severe boxlike desk there was a silver crucifix he had bought in Canterbury years before. Swiveling about in his chair, he might simply gaze at the pitilessly romantic stretch of waves and shore: deep blue and placid, but often given to wild moody squalls. Both crucifix and river, in their different ways, sometimes offered contentment and poignant, fugitive hints of another world.
He seated Helen and opened a window, to let out the stuffy air. He turned. “Will you have a drink, Helen?”
“No,” she said, “no, thanks.” Then brightly, “Yes, yes, I will. I’ll have just a little whisky in a glass. Neat.”
He smiled. “All right. I’ll just be a minute. Let me get my coat, too.”
“Don’t bother, Carey,” she said quickly. “All this formality!”
Something about her—her aimlessness, the way she stirred in her chair—made him uneasy, but he laughed elaborately and patted her on the shoulder, leaving her to thumb through a copy of Life as he went out to fix the drinks. In the kitchen he opened a drawer, poking about amid a heap of egg beaters, ice picks, spoons, for a bottle opener, and it was then, startled (for until that moment—perhaps because he was sleepy—his mind had been almost totally blank), that it occurred to him what Helen had come for. Not precisely. Because, even so, what would she want with him, to arrive so nervously at this hour of the night, and in the rain? But he thought he knew: there had been all that talk—scraps and hints and winks which he had taken note of at gatherings and which, as he had told Adrienne, set his teeth on edge.
They had begun just lately—rumors about the Loftises, rumors about “another woman,” whisperings which disturbed him not so much because they concerned the Loftises—whom he didn’t know too well, in any case—but because they upset his notions about the prevalence of human decency.
“Well, after all, dear,” Adrienne had said—in the occasional brittle way she had, combing her blond, lovely hair at night with that brisk, self-assured, woman-of-the-world gesture which he had never dared tell her really set his teeth on edge, tossing the words over her shoulder—“well, after all, dear, you know extracurricular sports like that are not entirely new to the human race. If Alice La Farge let that fall it was because she talks too much anyway and she really should have had better sense in front of the clergy, but, after all, most everyone knows or at least should be able to tell that Helen Loftis is a nest of little hatreds. I can’t say that I blame Milton much anyway. In France——”
But, “Adrienne!” he had said sternly, “I won’t have that sort of talk,” and then, mollified, sitting down beside her on the dressing stool, patiently telling her that he knew of course she was joking, that it was true this was not France, that, as he had pointed out before, the glory of this latter-day Protestantism was its liberality; however, she very well knew that the home was sacred, et cetera—of course she had been joking, they both laughed then—and so on and so on. That had been months ago, he had forgotten it; even so, for a while vague conflicting visions had possessed his mind: of Loftis, handsome, good-natured, talkative, for whom (since despite Carey’s biennial urgings he had humorously refused to become a vestryman, or even to attend church) Carey had conceived a mild dislike; and of Helen—how could they be a match for each other? She had come prompt and obviously alone to Sunday school each week, herding the two girls, those amazing, dissimilar children—who did look feverish and unhappy and cold. Cold was the word; he thought of Loftis and of Helen, and then of Adrienne, who was really quite gentle, steadfast and full of the warmest and sweetest passion. And then he had put it all out of his mind.
He drew on a sweater and turned out the kitchen lights. When he brought in the drinks to the study—rye for her, a little brandy for himself—he was thinking wearily: If I had been a Baptist everything would be black and white, I’d pick and choose, either sinfulness or sinlessness. But Helen, standing at the window, turned to face him. She looked gently composed, casual, but he thought she had been crying. He tried not to notice.
“Sit down, won’t you, Helen?” he said quietly, and took his seat behind the desk. “Now, what can I do for you?” Was he being too officious? “Business or pleasure?”
She took a handkerchief from her pocketbook and noisily blew her nose. Then she began to sip her whisky cautiously and with distaste. The chair squeaked and wailed beneath him as he leaned back to close the window; outside a gust of wind caught a pile of leaves, sent them whirling upward across the lawn. Finally she said in a shy voice which, if it weren’t for the solemn way she was looking at him, he would have thought almost flirtatious—cold though, he was thinking—”Carey, don’t you hate hurt women?”
“Why, Helen,” he said, with a smile, “I don’t think I know what you mean. What——”
“I mean,” she broke in, “don’t you despise women who are so insecure or stupid or something—maybe both—that they’re always running around crazily trying to find something to hold on to. You know what I mean.”
“No,” he said, “I don’t despise them. I think I know what you mean, though.”
“Those kind of women,” she went on, “are always hurt women.” She paused. “That’s what I call them.” She looked away from him, out of the window. For a moment she seemed very grave and studious, calmly analytical. But there was nothing grim about all this. Indeed, she looked very handsome: he wondered how old she was. About forty—like some advertising man’s idea of a woman professor, with impossible, lovely skin and placid, unprofessional eyes. It was a remarkable thing, for she never had seemed interesting to him before, and he suddenly had the impulse to make a joke—but she turned and said in a wistful voice: “Oh, Carey, I don’t want to be a hurt woman.” And then, brightening a little, “Can I tell you these things?”
He was not tolerant of her self-pity; his mother had had the same disease. Yet he said, “Go on, Helen, tell me what’s the matter.”
“I’ve wanted to come and see you for a long time, Carey.”
And “Helen, you should have come,” he replied.
“I would have come but I’ve been scared of everything. Scared of myself in a way, because I’ve been carrying these things around for so long, keeping quiet, keeping secret, you know, feeling that if I let them out, why I’d somehow be betraying myself. That understanding I’ve got, you see, which is so horrible in a way. I mean, knowing that the fault’s mine partly. Not all, mind you—” her eyes were level upon him, and once more he had the impression that she knew exactly what her trouble was, but that the difficulty was in the telling of it—“not all,” she repeated, accenting the word all, ”but enough to know that if I stayed burdened with all this too long I’d go crazy. Dr. Holcomb——”
She paused, raised her hand with a sort of swift, harassed motion to her throat. “I won’t tell names!” she said. “I won’t tell names!”
“Shh-h, Helen,” he cautioned, and Adrienne, in a bathrobe and hair curlers, peered in the door for a moment: “Excuse me—” with a cool nod to Helen—“Carol’s all right now. I’m going to bed.”
“Good night,” Carey said.
“Good night, dear.”
“Good night,” Hele
n said. The door closed. “I won’t betray anyone. No one at all,” she said excitedly. He held out a match for her cigarette, the third she had smoked, in chain fashion, and which she held to her lips with quivering fingers as she bent toward him.
“Take it easy now, Helen,” he said softly. “Finish your whisky.”
She did as she was told. He watched her, and then, when she had put the glass down, he listened. She was calmer now. He turned his eyes away and looked out the window. A misty driving rain filled the night. From isolated branches the last leaves were falling in endless spirals of loneliness. He sensed a strange kinship with this woman: what was it? But, eyebrows cocked a little, attentive, he heard her say: “I couldn’t put it out of my mind, the idea of them—Milton and this woman, Mrs. X—which I’ll call her since I have no intention of betraying her, even in her guilt. I couldn’t put it out of my mind. It was enough to drive you crazy. You see, I’ve known about the two of them for a long long time—six or seven years, at the very least. I’m afraid that all my life I’ve been very sensitive about right and wrong. My parents were Army people, and it was funny in a way: They were strict and severe with me, not a bit like some people might imagine Army people to be. My father was on Pershing’s staff during the war. His own father had been a chaplain and Daddy was very religious. ‘Helen,’ he’d say, ‘Helen, sweetheart. We must stand fast with the good. The Army of the Lord is on the march. We’ll lick the Huns and the devil comes next. Your daddy knows what’s right’—and go swaggering off in his jodhpurs and riding crop, and I thought he was just like God. The men loved him. He put the fear of the Lord in them, sitting on his horse (he was in cavalry then, and you’ve never seen anyone mounted so handsomely, so commanding. Really commanding). Fort Myer, with the beautiful woods and the river so full of the softest pastels—you could see them at evening parade. And Daddy on his mount—a silver gelding it was, named Champ, I remember. Daddy saying: ‘I’ll tolerate no misconduct in my outfit. We’re marching like men to war, not like rummies and sinners.’ They called him Blood and Jesus Peyton. And I standing by the parade ground, sixteen or so, watching him. The men just loved him.”
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