Lilith Read online

  I murmured with embarrassment. She turned her back against me, her body touching mine, and held the slip for me to read across her shoulder. I stood cringing from the contact of her body, staring at her hands in a kind of grief. They were still firm and strong enough to be womanly, but they were aging hands, the skin dry and freckled with pale-brown patches of pigment, the fingers slightly swollen, puffed about her rings, the veins corded and blue—my grandmother’s hands, as I had watched them sewing so many times. When she lifted one suddenly to clasp my chin in it I felt strengthless with shame, but out of some obscure, fierce sense of charity or dignity, I did not flinch. I smiled at her, my face flaming, while she squeezed my cheek and jaw lightly and said in a voice of dreadful, sweetened fondness, “My, they certainly do have handsome young grocery men these days. I can just see I’m going to have to let Dora off every Saturday morning.”

  I could not move or speak. She held my chin for a moment, smiling at me with heavy, suddenly undisguised concupiscence, while I stared beyond her, my eyes moving in idle, random desperation about the room. I do not know what I should have done—perhaps I should have yielded to her—if I had not chanced to see in that moment the dress which she had dropped into a chair. I realized suddenly that she had just exchanged it, as I was entering the house, for the one she was now wearing—and on the pale-blue silk, exposed as she had dropped it carelessly, I could see a dark-edged, scarlet stain of menstrual blood.

  There was a convulsion of disgust in my throat, and I turned quickly, mumbling some absurd apology, and left the house, lurching against the door frame in my haste and barely controlling an hysterical desire to run as I went down the back steps and along the stone walk to the street. I do not know how I managed to conceal my feelings from Charlie—perhaps his cheerful simplicity made him oblivious to them—but he said nothing. I sat beside him, burning-faced and tremulous, in the truck while we drove through the suddenly oppressive sunlight and parked directly opposite the Lodge. I was, for once, far too distracted to glance in its direction, even to think of it. My hands were still trembling as I opened the rear door of the van to remove the box of groceries, and in my agitation I dropped the carton. A box of eggs fell open and smashed upon the pavement. I stood, staring down at them bleakly: bright-yellow, shining, naked yolks, some of them broken and oozing in livid rivulets, embedded in a pool of glittering colorless slime.

  There came, from across the street, a sprinkle of cool, delightful laughter. I lifted my head and looked across the pavement and the low barberry hedge which bordered it, to the asylum lawn. A girl in a white dress stood watching me in the broken shadow of a willow. Her long yellow hair, very pale and radiant, like sunlight through honey, lay softly on her shoulders, stirring a little in a breath of air which swung the willow trailers gracefully in front of her. She held them apart with her hand, looking through at me. I shall say her face was slender and white, with great violet eyes and a bright, tender mouth, cleft with a hint of cruelty, but merry in that moment, lifted in laughter from her moist teeth; yet nothing I put down here can convey her inexpressible strangeness and beauty. She laughed again—a sound like the crystal prisms of a wind-chime blown together in a breeze of cool, perfumed air—and, while I watched her raptly, lifted one hand, as pale and fragile as a branch of coral, and hid her eyes with it in a shy, alluring gesture, both timid and wanton, letting the willows fall together like a veil. Was she alone? I can never quite remember. Sometimes it seems that there was an attendant, a dark-haired woman in a matron’s uniform, standing a little away from her, but the image fades into nebulosity at its edges, and I cannot quite recall. All that I see clearly is the girl in her white gown, the cruel and tender beauty of her face before she covers it with her hand, the slenderness and pallor of her throat and arms, all softly diffused and delicately shadowed by the sunlight falling through the willows, casting a radiance like golden frost upon her hair; and behind her, rising distantly and mistily with a look of enchantment through the summer haze, the Palace of Fantasy from which she had strayed.

  THAT was the last time I was to see the Lodge as a boy; I was eighteen that summer—the summer I went away to war. It was four years before I returned, and when I looked upon the Lodge again my childhood was past. But I must leave this to be told later, in its place; I must say first a little more about myself and my life in this town before the war.

  I was often alone as a boy. My childhood was not entirely unhappy—it was often far from so—and yet I felt subtly distinguished from my companions, and from the life of our town, by the circumstances of my birth. What those circumstances were I never learned exactly in my youth, for they were never spoken of at home, although they seem to me now fairly certain, and simple enough to be assumed with confidence. But then they were only a haunting source of isolation that made my early life lonely and sometimes very painful. I remember that, on entering the grocery store or Wingate’s Pharmacy to make a purchase for my grandmother, there would be sometimes a moment of silent attentive interest from the townspeople gathered there, while, with burning self-consciousness, I would stand reading the labels of packaged merchandise behind the counter as I waited to be served. Often, coming home from school in the afternoon, kicking a stone ahead of me along the sidewalk in some solitary, smiling game—it might be a racing car whose driver, if he ran off the track onto the grass edges of the sidewalk, would be killed—I would pass a pair of ladies chatting on a front walk and become suddenly aware of their suspended conversation, perhaps hearing scraps of their hushed, quickly resumed talk as I passed:

  “That’s the Robinson girl’s child, you know.”

  “Yes, I thought it was. He looks like her, doesn’t he?”

  “Oh, I think he looks more like him.”

  “Yes, he does. Now that you mention it, why, he does.”

  Ido not know by what manner I learned to interpret the difference in attitude which was expressed by the omission of my mother’s first name when she was spoken of; but slowly, and profoundly, I became aware of it. Other women were Amy Pritchard, or June Hogan, or Belle King; but my mother was always “the Robinson girl”—a kind of formal, habitual opprobrium which made me feel all the more keenly a sense of warm, bewildered indignation in that the speakers themselves were hardly aware of casting it. My grandparents are the only people I have ever heard call my mother by her beautiful name.

  “Beth, your dress is soiled, dear. Right there on the collar.”

  “Oh, is it? Thank you, Mother Bruce.” (Lifting her hand to the litter of yellow ribbons woven into the lace collar of her blouse.) “Do you think I ought to change it?”

  “I think it might be better, dear.”

  She died when I was eight, and I was brought up by my grandparents. My mother and I had lived with them for many years before her death—I think almost from the time that I was born—although they were not her parents. They were my father’s people, but they loved my mother and cared for her as devotedly as if she had been their own child, although her gentle, distracted efforts to “pay her way” by helping my grandmother with the housework were generally more troublesome than helpful.

  My father I never saw. So far as I can understand it now, I believe that his marriage to my mother was enforced—brought about, I am more than certain, by my grandfather’s unobstructable sense of moral duty—and that, soon after it, he deserted her. Her own parents were dead, and her single close relative, the maiden aunt by whom she had been raised, had grown senile and was now a county ward. Although there was a little property in her name, including her family house, it was falling to ruin and was almost “eaten up,” as they say, by unpaid taxes, so that she was very nearly destitute. My grandparents, not only to redress their son’s abuse of her, but out of their own great natural compassion and affection for my mother and me, had taken us in to live with them.

  All this I have pieced together mostly by silence and by sorrow, for, as I say, my father was never spoken of in our house, and nothing was kept
in his memory; there was none of his toys or childhood possessions, no pictures, no clothing, no souvenirs—nothing to indicate that he had ever existed, or that my grandparents had ever had a son, except myself. Only my mother kept, in secret, a relic of him: a small, oval, sepia-colored photograph in a silver frame, which she kept hidden in a drawer of her dressing table. One of the last and most vivid memories I have of her was the discovery of that photograph.

  She had sent me to fetch her manicure scissors from the dressing table, and, rummaging in the drawer, I had discovered the picture, wrapped lightly in a lilac-colored cambric handkerchief. Whatever scruples a child of eight may have had (they must have been small) as to his elders’ privacy, they were immediately overcome by the burning sudden crisis of years of lonely curiosity; I could tell from the shape and weight of the object that it was a photograph, and almost before unwrapping it I was certain of its identity. I lifted off the handkerchief and stood staring with a kind of mournful fascination at the darkly handsome face in the old photograph. Although I never saw it again, I can remember the features very vividly: large somber eyes with fine, highly arched brows; a sullen, sensitive mouth, almost as beautiful as a woman’s; very small, delicate ears; and a mass of black curls fallen over the high forehead. There was something very unpleasant about the face, and yet it resembled my own enough for me to feel a melancholy pride. As I stood staring at it I heard someone enter the room and, looking up quickly into the mirror, saw my mother standing behind me at the door. I watched her for a moment, flushing, and dropped my eyes.

  “That is your father, Vincent,” she said after a considerable pause.

  I murmured, “Yes’m.”

  “It is not a very good picture of him; but it was taken before our marriage, and I’m very fond of it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  There was another moment of silence, and she lifted her hands and held them close to her breast with the tips of her fingers pressed together as if she were praying, looking down closely at her bitten nails.

  “He could be very tender,” she said. “I want you to know he was often very tender with me, no matter what . . . you may learn of him. And he had the most beautiful hands I have ever seen.”

  I murmured again, watching her lowered face in the mirror in a sudden trembling rush of grief. She stood for a moment looking down at the tips of her fingers in a humble, anxious way, and then turned suddenly and left the room. I folded the photograph into the lilac handkerchief as I had found it and went after her. She had gone out onto the front porch and was leaning against one of the white posts, her lips sucked in between her teeth, staring out at the street and crying softly. I stood behind her for a moment, staring at the fallen ribbons hanging untied from her sleeves, trying desperately to think of something that would comfort or divert her; but all that I could find to say was “What do you want for Christmas this year, Mama?” I burst into tears as I said it, and buried my face against the curve of her hip, hugging her slender waist against me fiercely. We clung together, weeping, while yellow poplar leaves fell down slowly through the afternoon sunlight.

  In a moment she quieted her breathing and placed her hand on my hair, saying in a cool, precise voice, “Your father was the only love of my life. I want you to believe that, Vincent.”

  That was the only direct knowledge I ever had of him, and afterward I began to hate my unknown sire, whose profligacy had brought me into the world and caused my mother so much anguish. I believe her pathetic devotion to him made me despise him even more. Every year she used to write to him, although she never knew his whereabouts. I learned this only a few weeks before she died, when she had gone to bed with the illness from which she never recovered. It was in November. She called me into her room one cold bright morning and held my hand for a moment while I sat on the edge of her bed. She was sitting up, propped against her pillows, with a litter of stationery on the bedclothes in front of her.

  “I want you to do an errand for me, Vincent,” she said.

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “I’d like you to mail this letter for me, dear. I would do it myself, but I’m afraid I simply could not get as far as the post office this morning. I feel a little weak today.”

  She put the envelope into my hand and I glanced at it involuntarily, for I had never known her to write to anyone. She waited for a moment, watching me, and dropped her head.

  “It is to your father,” she said. “Today is our anniversary, Vincent. I write to him every year on our anniversary.” I did not answer her, but sat staring at the envelope in my hands. She said softly, “I wish I had not had to ask you. I always mail it myself, but I’m afraid I can’t, today. I did get up, to get the stationery, and it made me feel quite faint.”

  “You didn’t put any return address on it, Mama,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “You see, I don’t know where he is, but I like to feel that he gets them. So I just send them out like this, and when they don’t come back to me I feel that he does, somehow.”

  “Yes’m,” I murmured.

  “I’m sending it to Capri this year. I think that would be such a lovely place for him to be. That’s in Italy, Vincent; a lovely, sunny island.” She blushed faintly through her pallor and lowered her eyes again. “I know it’s a silly thing to do; but it does make me feel as if I can still reach him, in some way.”

  “I think it’s a real nice idea, Mama,” I said.

  She laid her hand on my hair and smiled at me. “And you won’t say anything to Grandma and Grandpa about it, will you? I’m afraid they would think it was very foolish.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She died three weeks later. On the morning of her death I went again, as I had every morning of her illness, to her bedside. She was very weak, and I could see that it was an effort for her to open her eyes. When she did so she lay for a long time, smiling at me while she moved her fingers gently in my hair.

  “You are a beautiful boy, Vincent,” she said at last. “And you have a beautiful name. I have named you for the gentlest and kindest of all the saints. He loved all the poor and the destitute, and he cared for them and gave his life to them. I think that is the finest thing a man can do, and I would like you to try to be like him all your life. Will you do that for me, Vincent?”

  “Yes’m,” I murmured, clutching her hand against my face and adding in a trembling voice, “Get well, please, won’t you, Mama?”

  “I will try,” she said. “But if I shouldn’t, I want you not to cry too much. You must turn your tears into something finer, as St. Vincent did. There are too many tears in the world.” She closed her eyes and lay smiling, her fingers stirring my hair.

  That was the last thing she said to me. She died during the night. There must have been a crisis of some kind in her illness, for I was awakened by the hall light shining through my half-opened door and the sudden commotion in the house. I remember running out into the hall in my pajamas and struggling hysterically with the doctor, a stout old man in a dark suit who was hurrying up the stairs with my grandmother—beating at him frantically with my fists and breaking the gold chain that stretched across his vest. Its bright links fell sprinkling onto the carpet like a serpent’s shattered, golden spine. He held me away with mild astonishment while I kicked and shrieked at him: “Get out of our house! She doesn’t need you! My mother is all well, and she doesn’t need any doctor, or anybody! Go away from our house! Please, please, please!”

  AFTER her death, as I had promised her, I did not often cry; but I was silent, with that terrible silence of children who have been touched too soon by tragedy. I recovered very slowly from her death—perhaps it would be truer to say that I became very slowly the person whom her death had created from my earlier self—and when I did, the world was changed for me. It was still a place of beauty, pleasure, and often of happiness, but that deep mine of peace and perpetuity which I had known to exist at its core was no longer there for me, or held another kind of ore. “There had pa
ssed away a glory from the earth,” although the rainbow came and went, and the rose was as lovely as before. Yet, as I say, there was much pleasure and happiness, for children heal readily, and grow, and are endowed with an infinite will to survive. Nor was I ever wholly destitute, for I was always aware of the abiding love and kindness of my grandparents. My devotion turned entirely to them and was fulfilled.

  I used, at fair time, to help my grandmother in the kitchen, preparing the chutney and chili sauce and mint jelly which she exhibited every year. She was a stout, strong, handsome woman with very soft silver hair which she pinned up carefully every morning in the same pompadour style she had worn since she was a girl in England. I loved to see her bustling about the huge old kitchen over her steaming pots, slicing tomatoes and bright crimson peppers, chattering to me in her cheerful Midland accent while I sat crushing herbs with a china pestle in a wooden bowl: “Have them good and fine, Sonny, as we did last year. There’s a good lad.” When I think of her now I remember the little yellow horn combs in her silver hair and the ancient bittersweet pungence of bay and rosemary. I remember also her smiling, carefully controlled pride when she won, as she invariably did, red or blue ribbons for her sauces, and, one year, the Grand Award in Home Arts—a great purple rosette—for a tatted counterpane on which she had worked for many years.