Lilith Read online

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  O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

  Alone and palely loitering?

  The sedge has withered from the lake,

  And no birds sing. . . .

  I met a lady in the meads,

  Full beautiful—a fairy’s child,

  Her hair was long, her foot was light,

  And her eyes were wild. . . .

  —John Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci

  I GREW up in a small Southern town which was different from most other towns because it contained an insane asylum. At the time I was growing up there, however, I did not think of this as a distinction. As we had been aware of it from birth, it had for us who lived there no aspect of novelty; it was simply one of the facts of our existence, and belonged, with the fire station, the clinic, the schoolhouse and the granary, among those elemental institutions by which life is both sustained and interpreted. I thought all towns had asylums. With the equanimity of a child I accepted the fact that there was madness everywhere, just as there were conflagration, illness, ignorance and hunger. I can, indeed, remember being disconcerted, somewhere around the age of twelve, by the discovery that other towns did not have asylums, and engaging in much troubled speculation as to how the insane people of these communities were disposed of.

  So that, although there was mania somewhere beyond the shadows of its quiet elms and the shop windows of its main street, our town was not compromised in its pleasantness. It was a clean, pretty, leisurely town in central Maryland, with wide streets and two-story frame houses with great cool, awning-shaded porches. For subsistence it depended mainly upon the grain and dairy products of the rolling grassy farmland which surrounded it. The wheat was sacked and shipped from a large commercial grain elevator at the edge of the city; a spur line ran into it from the Baltimore & Ohio Railway, and one of the delights of my boyhood was to compile the names of roadbeds from the boxcars standing in the yards. I remember how bright the rails were in the sun, the sprinkle of brass-colored wheat and grain dust that blew about in the cinders, the silent yawning vastness of the empty cars with their steel-bound planks and hieroglyphic inscriptions of tonnage, load weight, cubic content and so forth; and the beauty and mystery of their names—to an inland boy as beautiful as the names of ships to a coastal dweller—Wabash, Santa Fe, Great Northern, Seaboard Air Line. And I can remember yet the quick bright thrill of excitement on seeing for the first time a legend unknown to me: The Hiawatha, Route of the Buffaloes.

  Our district was also famous for its fruit, and at harvest time I would often work as a picker in the apple and peach orchards of the countryside. For this work I was paid a dollar a day, a great deal of money for a boy in those times; but I should rather—for the memories it has given me of long September days, standing on my ladder waist-deep in sweet-scented oceans of Elberta leaves, of heavy yellow peaches, hot with sunlight, softly furred and blushed with bluish crimson, and of country girls with brown arms and blowing hair, half hidden by the branches, singing ballads in the tops of apple trees—for these memories I should rather have paid the owners of those enchanted orchards.

  Our town, which is called Stonemont, was the county seat. Its main street was laid out in an inverted L, like the move of a knight on a chessboard. On its shorter, lower, segment, set far back from the street on a high lawn to which a flight of five stone steps ascended from the sidewalk, stood the county courthouse, an old building of rose-colored brick, its two-columned portico paved with foot-worn stone and shadowed by giant elms. Directly in front of it the main street was divided by a narrow island on which, facing the courthouse, stood the statue of a Confederate soldier, his arms crossed upon his breast, his face shadowed by a slouch hat, one foot placed forward with a look of noble resolution which gained in pathos from the shabbiness of his tattered uniform and the empty scabbard that hung against his thigh. Beneath him, on the tall granite pedestal, was inscribed a legend which I never failed to reread when I passed and which never failed to give me the same warm glow of tragic pride:

  TO OUR HEROES OF POPE COUNTY

  That We Through Life May Not Forget To Love

  The Thin Gray Line

  The upper segment of the street was perhaps five blocks in length, and lined with the establishments familiar to all small towns: a barbershop; a small, false-fronted motion-picture house; the United States Post Office, before which an American flag hung over the sidewalk, casting, on windy days, its writhing, tormented shadow—a convulsive ghost—upon the pavement; a hardware store; an independent grocery and a two-story stuccoed office building with worn wooden corridors, open at either end to the afternoon sunlight. The doors of the offices were always propped open with rubber wedges, so that, walking through the corridors—as I did every Thursday afternoon to deliver magazines—one could look into the old-fashioned, high-ceilinged rooms, where the town’s realtors, lawyers and insurance agents, big red-faced men in shirt sleeves and suspenders, lounged in swivel chairs, chuckling and drawling into telephones, looking up, as one walked by, to wink or toss a stick of chewing gum from the littered desk top through the open door. At the end of that street, as if its commerce faded into fantasy, was a music shop, always locked and silent, in whose sunny window a dulcimer lay forever, its strings furred with dust, its warm, wine-colored wood glowing softly. I can never remember that shop being open, and the dulcimer was never moved. Every year the dust grew heavier upon it, and the faded page of sheet music which lay beside it in the window grew paler with age, so that one could barely read the dying letters: I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen. That locked shop, with its hushed and sunlit window, is for me still full of its strange, soundless music.

  Stonemont was the site of the annual county fair, and for this event a permanent fairground had been built at the outskirts of the city, just beyond the cemetery, on a sloping hillside wooded thinly with fine old shade trees, white oaks and hickories. Among this grove were built the exhibition halls for domestic arts, farm produce and machinery, and the many long, low-gabled barns for livestock. The yearly fair is one of the most pleasant memories of my youth. It was held in late summer, on five blue days of August, when the apples on the hills were ripening and there were great golden, burnished pumpkins glowing in the stubble of the mown fields. How I loved the fair and the clear, late-August days! The air had the first faint winey reek of autumn and there were sudden fresh gusts of wind that made the pennants snap on the tent tops; the Ferris wheel turned slowly against the hard, blue, burning sky; there was the pungent, resiny smell of sawdust from the soft carpet of tanbark with which the grounds were scattered, the rich, wry, dusty scent of alfalfa and the royal smell of animals from the barns; the lowing of cattle and the droll bleating of sheep, blended with the murmur and milling of the crowds, the shouting of pitch-men, the soft footfalls in the sawdust, and the pennants snapping in the wind.

  At the edge of the fairgrounds was a picnic grove where, in the early afternoons, people sat with spread blankets and open hampers in the shade of the gray oaks. One could look down from there, as I often did, and see, far below on the hillside beyond the brightness and clamor of the fair, the cemetery—silent in the sunlight, with its bleached headstones and tall, still cedars—where my mother lay buried, all her yellow ribbons extinguished by the rain.

  Have I said enough about this town? It was, as you see, an ordinary provincial place, sunny, pleasant, unhurried. The insane asylum we seldom saw, as it was in a secluded residential area, considerably apart from the town’s commercial district.

  During my last year of high school, however, I saw it much more frequently, as at that time I began to work as delivery boy on a grocery truck. It was my job to assemble the orders in cardboard cartons in the stock room of the market, load them into the truck and then to accompany the driver on his rounds through the residential area, carrying the cartons, when he stopped to make a delivery, from truck to kitchen. It was one of the most satisfying jobs I have ever had. I do not know exactly what
there was about it that I found so pleasant, but there was something gravely rewarding, almost revelatory, to me about handling food. Packing the boxes and bags of provisions, effecting and accompanying their course from market to table, gave me an intimate and fundamental sense of labor, as if I were working directly at the very sources of life.

  It seems to me now as if those Saturday mornings were invariably warm and sunny, and I can remember sitting beside the driver, a cheerful contented man named Charlie, as we drove through the quiet shaded streets under the great elms, smiling dreamily, comforted by the closeness of sacks of clean white flour, melons, scarlet onions in string bags, moist, dripping packages of meat. Let me remember more closely: once a squirrel fell—the only time in my life I have seen it happen. Somehow it misjudged its leap in the branches that arched across the street and plunged down, twisting in its fall, from a great height, striking the stone heavily just in front of our truck, where it lay shivering.

  We often made deliveries in that part of the town where the asylum was situated. It was in the “fashionable” part of Stonemont, a district of large old-fashioned houses with stained-glass attic windows of vivid red and blue and front walks paved with polished fragments of bright-colored stone. Several of these houses, to which we delivered regularly, were on the same street as the asylum, so that I had the frequent opportunity of surveying it in the course of our rounds.

  The building itself was difficult to see. It was set far back, perhaps fifty yards, from the street, behind beautifully landscaped grounds. There were avenues of arbor vitae, several magnificent poplar trees, from which the Lodge took its name, and a group of tall, low-hanging willows, under which a pair of Grecian stone benches glowed in the shadow. The driveway was bordered with privet and wound in a graceful curve from the street between the boles of the poplars. At the back of these grounds, thickly planted at its base with rose-of-Sharon bushes, stood the main building. It was actually a converted mansion (although I did not learn this until many years later), three stories in height, with a wide screened porch surrounding it on three sides, from which a set of broad wooden steps descended to the drive. It was an old Gothic building, typical of the early part of the century, full of bays and towers and long dormers, surmounted by a slate mansard roof, through which five ivy-covered chimneys, their moist bricks showing between the leaves, projected comfortably. All of its many windows were barred with heavy diagonal wire netting. (To the side were several small auxiliary buildings which I never noticed in very great detail: a small cottage, a shed, and a kind of converted loft with a flight of outside stairs ascending to it.)

  It was always very quiet. In the late afternoons the blend of sunlight and shadow lying on the soft lawns and the ivied walls was calm and lovely. There was nothing grim or terrible about it; never were there faces peering from the high barred windows, or the sound of screams or violence within. With its elaborate and spacious grounds and its air of age and dignity, it had, indeed, a peaceful, almost an idyllic, aspect. And yet, standing in the sunny street to look at it, as I so often did, I would feel my mind shadowed and solemnized for a moment with a sudden delicate pall of awe, for children are moved by the mystery of madness, as they are moved by the other mysteries of life.

  There is one picture of the place which I must set down here: the most enduring which I have of it. When I think of the Lodge this is the way I always see it, in a sudden wan, bright image, apparently preserved forever, which is projected somewhere in my mind.

  I shall have to regress a little in order to reconstruct it fully, for I feel that the picture for some reason would not be complete unless it were presented together with—framed by, as it were—the event which immediately preceded it. Nothing ever is seen clearly; always the pathos of the perceiver helps to create the thing perceived, as the image of water in sunlight is illumined by the thirst of the observer. In some such way, I believe, the event of which I speak helped to color and create this image of the Lodge which was to become so important for me, whose magic was to cast so deep a spell upon my life.

  A short time earlier I had delivered a box of groceries to a Mrs. Hallworth. Her house was in the close neighborhood of the Lodge, a prosperous, well-kept place with a gardener usually busy in the front yard, mowing the lawn or kneeling at the walk to clip the edges. She was a regular customer of ours; and this was the fourth consecutive week that I had delivered her order, although I had never seen her. Ordinarily I was admitted to the kitchen by the maid, a sullen young Negress who opened the door silently with an expression of great suspicion and dislike. On this morning, however, she did not appear. No one answered my tapping against the light frame of the screen door which opened onto the back porch. I pressed my face against it and called, “Groceries!”

  From a small high window in the side wall of the house a petulant female voice shouted, “What is it?”

  “Groceries, ma’am,” I repeated.

  “Well, the door is open. Bring them in and set them on the kitchen table.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I opened the door toward me and, holding it with my shoulders, carried the box up the steps and across the back porch into the kitchen. I put it on the large porcelain-topped table in the center of the floor, pushing aside several unwashed dinner plates on which a coating of orange-colored sauce had hardened and a slim-stemmed glass, still beaded with sweat and cool to my hand. From the hall which entered into the kitchen I heard the muted cascade of a water closet, a sound which suddenly increased in volume as a door was opened into the hallway and a middle-aged woman appeared, buttoning the front of a light summer dress. She held crumpled under her arm a garment of some type—another dress, apparently—of pale-blue silk, which she made a perfunctory attempt to conceal against her body.

  “Here are your groceries, ma’am,” I said with some embarrassment.

  She came into the kitchen, her hands lingering upon, and then abandoning, the upper button of her dress, looking at me longer and more reflectively, I felt, than was required by the casualness of the circumstance. She was perhaps fifty, with graying hair and a round, soft, still pretty face, oddly combining a middle-aged, maternal benevolence with something avid, a look of candid, unquenched sensuality in her very pale-blue eyes. Her heavy-breasted, still vigorous-looking body was voluptuous in a plump, matronly way, and obviously uncorseted under her light cotton dress.

  “Oh, thank you, young man,” she said. “I’m just all at odds and ends this morning because that damn maid didn’t show up.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “You just cannot depend on these nigras. She claimed to have a toothache, but you know how they are.”

  She smiled at me and lifted one hand to brush back with a movement of artificial, somehow unpleasant delicacy a strand of loose pale hair that had fallen across her forehead.

  I murmured, “Yes, ma’am,” again and stood for a moment looking into her eyes, held in some kind of a profound, spontaneous communication with her. It seems almost absurd in transcribing the event, but I felt that quick, impulsive, strangely zealous contact of my look flower suddenly, not beautifully or rarely, perhaps (but there are common flowers), into a relationship. My gaze was a moment too long. There was an instant when I knew I should have turned away toward the door, and, having done so, would have successfully dismissed another of those experiences from which the profound convention of modesty protects us; but I did not, and, having delayed that instant, I felt myself compromised, drawn with her into a covenant of confidence, both primitive and very subtle, from which I could not now, without dishonesty, renege. When I did break our gaze and make my belated movement toward the door I was not surprised, therefore, to hear her say, “I think perhaps you had better wait just a minute, young man. I just want to check this order and make sure everything has been sent.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, turning again toward her.

  She dropped the crumpled dress she had been carrying onto a chair and began to rumma
ge with assumed concern among the groceries.

  “Isn’t there an order sheet in here? There ought to be.”

  “Yes, ma’am, it’s there somewhere,” I said.

  “I’m just entirely at a loss this morning. I was so upset about that maid that I had to have a cocktail to quiet my nerves. Can you imagine that! A cocktail for breakfast!”

  She lifted her head toward me with an expression of spurious, gay vitality that made her pleasant maternal face almost ugly with imposture. “I wonder if you could help me find it?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I murmured. “I know it’s there, because I put it in myself.”

  I moved toward the table and bent above the carton to search with her. From her body there came a warm, strong smell of flesh, undisguised by perfume or cosmetics, moist and earthlike, which I could not escape. I knew that she leaned forward purposely to expose, beneath the fallen front of her dress, her heavy naked breasts, and I lowered my eyes quickly, shifting my hands among the groceries. I found the order slip and gave it to her, relinquishing it hastily to avoid the touch of her hands.

  “Here it is, ma’am.”

  “Oh, yes. Thank you. Now, let me see.”

  She studied the slip of paper for a moment, frowning and shaking her head. “I just can’t make out a thing without my glasses. I wonder if you’d read it off to me. I know you won’t have any trouble reading it, with those lovely big brown eyes.”