Lilith Read online

  “Are you tired?” I asked.

  “No. Do you know my name?”

  “No.”

  “It’s Laura.” She looked into my eyes for a moment. “Do you have a girl friend?”

  I murmured in embarrassment that I did not.

  “I think you ought to,” she said. “I could be your girl friend, if you like. I mean, we don’t have to say we love each other, or swear eternal devotion, or anything like that; but it’s nice to have somebody to do things with, and to talk to about your troubles, and everything. I’d like to, if you would. We could stop any time you wanted.”

  I looked down at her silently, both confused and moved by her candor, and feeling in myself a flowering of startling affection. But I was disturbed by a subtle complexity of emotion: there is often, in the relationships of lonely people, a kind of gentle bitterness. They will not, out of pride, permit themselves too easily to accept affection. From secure people, there is always the fear of condescension in such an overture; and if it is made by people equally as lonely as themselves, there is a kind of shared shame, as if two diseased and outcast persons had applied to each other for comfort. Since they are aware of this essentially negative and ignoble nature of their relationship, there very often exists between them a deeply buried, mutual disrespect. My sensitivity to such things made me recoil for a moment with the swift instinct of caution and alarm that people like myself feel at a proposal of such intimacy. I do not mean that Laura was such a person, but I feared it. I could find in neither her eyes nor manner, however, either condescension or this kind of shyly desperate appeal. She watched me steadily and serenely, with a look of frank and simple equanimity that I found strangely touching.

  “Do you want to?” she asked. “I think we could have fun. I’m not jealous, either, so you don’t have to worry about that.”

  “Well, I don’t know how to dance, or anything,” I said softly.

  “We don’t have to dance, if you don’t want to. But I think I could teach you. I’m a very good dancer. You just have to have confidence.”

  I felt the light stir of a falling leaf in my hair. She raised her hand to pick it away, and through the short sleeve of her blouse I could see the unshaven soft brown hair of her armpit. She held the leaf by its stem, a pale golden poplar leaf, like a blunt star. “Isn’t it pretty?”

  “Yes.”

  I put my hands lightly on her shoulders and we looked into each other’s eyes for a moment before I kissed her—timidly at first, and then with considerable passion, for she was the first girl I had ever kissed, and there was in my embrace many years of loneliness and the longing of boyish fantasies.

  It was in this way that Laura and I became sweethearts. We “went together” throughout that and my final year of high school; and although it gave to both of us much comfort, companionship, and a kind of formal tenderness, it was also, in many ways, an unfortunate alliance. I write these sentences with great deliberation, for I feel it is extremely important that I be completely just in describing our relationship; but I must be honest as well. Laura was kind, intelligent and generous in many things; but there was about her a quality—not of coldness, but a kind of wry aplomb—as if, at the center of herself, something was withheld, as if something had been sacrificed to a social image which she held of herself and which she was determined to preserve and to confirm. There are people who move among us with all the forms of liberal living—with poise and charity and principle—who yet, although they have established an identity for themselves by these virtues and conventions, are somehow stunted by them, too, who remain somehow aloof, eternally virgin, spiritually amateur. For Laura, I think, this was the penalty of convention; whatever she gained by it must be measured against what was lost: the exercise of the great insight and compassion of which I felt that she was capable, and the flowering of that rare and delicate contact of our natures for which I always longed and which I never knew. If I had not thought her capable of it I should not consider this tragic; but there are very few persons with whom one feels it to be possible, and when one sees the possible aborted one cannot but mourn. She seemed to have mastered the techniques of living, and in this achievement to have somehow stifled and deformed her talent for it. I know that this is a crucial, and perhaps a querulous, premise, and I hope that Laura will forgive me for these words. I know, too, that they may be written out of the bitterness which was created by what occurred between us later; and if this is so, Laura, be as charitable with me as you can allow yourself to be, for I have need of charity today.

  A FEW miles from Stonemont there was a turf farm with a large artificial lake, whose owners permitted the townspeople to use it as a park. It was a lovely lake, surrounded by willows and water maples and bordered with soft green turf which grew to the water’s edge. We went there often, in the summer to swim and in the winter to ice skate. Laura was not graceful or particularly expert at either of these sports, but I liked to watch her. She swam and skated with a stubborn methodical competence which, to someone like myself who does not have it, is strangely comforting. And yet I disliked intensely her appearance as she came out of the water and can still, in remembering it, feel my eyes clench slightly closed against the image, as they did then: plump, pale, dripping body, large breasts bouncing heavily under the drenched wool of her swimming suit, short stout thighs, white as lard, glittering with water, thick fingers plucking at the wet wool, stretching it away from the contours of her body.

  She taught me to dance on summer nights in her living room, with a phonograph playing on the dining table, the windows open onto the front porch and the curtains blowing softly in the warm night air. She danced beautifully, with a lyric lightness and skill and with something as near to total joy as I ever saw in her. I do not understand how someone who performed all other things with such mechanical earnestness could, in dancing, become suddenly so subtle, graceful and grave. It delighted me to watch her eyes while we danced; they were always turned away, gazing softly and sightlessly, filled and welling with that tender awareness of something other than reality which I always longed and rejoiced to see in them. She had a way, when I faltered or became confused, of stopping suddenly, taking my hand very gently and pressing it against her hip, leaning and swaying her body in a slowly and luxuriously accelerating motion, drawing me with her into the trance of the rhythm and murmuring to me softly, “Slowly, Vincent. Slowly. It’s like dreaming. You have to let yourself dream.” Is it poor comfort, Laura, to know that if I ever loved you truly it was when we danced together?

  Afterward we would sit together on her porch swing in the summer darkness, hearing the shrill of insects in the trees and the soft mutter of quiet talk from neighboring porches. Patting her moist temples and her plump white throat with a linen handkerchief, speaking in her composed and solemn way about the school events and daily trivia which made up most of our conversation—how different she seemed from the flowing, fervent being who had guided me about the parlor a few minutes before! And however much I longed to restore or preserve the feeling which had animated her while we were dancing—this profound, spontaneous joy—however much I wished it to warm and illumine all of our intercourse, I could not; for only in dancing would she yield herself to it. Our conversation lapsed into banalities; our relationship was not the constant quiet rapture of communion for which I longed but an exchange of miscellanea, opinions and advice:

  “You did awfully well tonight, Vincent. You’ll be a good dancer.”

  “No, I don’t think so. I just can’t do it. I make a mistake and then go all to pieces.”

  “It’s just learning the steps. When you know the steps you’ll feel safe, and you won’t get lost like that.”

  “No, that isn’t it. I know the steps, but I just can’t do it. You can’t learn to dance the way you do, Laura, by just learning the steps; you’ve got to have some kind of music inside you. And I don’t have it.”

  “You’re too impatient, Vincent. You’ve got to be patient about thi
ngs.”

  Sometimes her father would call her from inside the house, and she would excuse herself and go upstairs to take care of him. He was an invalid who had been increasingly bedridden for the last two years. During the day, while Laura was in school, her mother took care of him, and in the evenings, to relieve her, Laura attended to him. Looking in through the open windows, I would see her leading him along the upstairs hall to the bathroom—a frail old man with a sunken chest and a stubble of gray beard, shuffling along the hall in a stained woolen bathrobe while he clutched at her tremblingly. He looked unclean and—quite irrationally—evil to me, and it made me cringe to see Laura’s physical closeness to him, his bent body in the dirty robe pressing against her, his dark blotched hands fumbling at her arms and shoulders for support. Sometimes she would carry a bedpan from his room, clutching the rim of the white enamel basin firmly in her strong hands as she went quickly down the hall toward the bathroom. I would turn my head away with revulsion at the sight.

  “What’s the matter with him, Laura?” I asked her once.

  “He has some kind of a blood disease. Nobody seems to really know what it is.”

  “He doesn’t seem to be getting much better, does he?”

  “No, he’s getting worse all the time; he’s in bed most of the time now. I think he’ll die before next spring.”

  I sat silently for a few moments in deference to this impending tragedy, feeling oddly oppressed by the matter-of-factness of her tone.

  ‘What will you do then, Laura?”

  “Oh, Mother and I will stay on here. She’ll have money enough to last until she dies, I think, with her dressmaking—and if we take in roomers. We’ll have two extra bedrooms after Father dies. We’re going to try and save up enough for me to go to business college in Baltimore for two years; I can get a much better job that way.”

  “Oh. What kind of work are you going to do, Laura?”

  ‘Well, if I can go to business college I can get a junior-executive job, I think. It’s certainly worth the investment, if we can manage it. If not, just do stenography or secretarial work. Of course, what I really want to do is get married. I want very much to have children. But you have to plan for everything.”

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  She lifted her handkerchief and fluttered it before her face to drive away the midges and in a moment said, “What are you going to do, Vincent?”

  ‘What am I going to do?”

  “Yes. I mean, have you decided what you would like to do in life?”

  It was a question I dreaded, for I did not have the slightest idea. Whenever I was so challenged—as I had been several times by my grandfather—I would sit staring wanly, my mind accelerating in a desperate effort of concentration, as if by an act of will I might somehow invoke an inspiration. On one occasion, when he had questioned me with more than usual insistence, I had tried holding my breath and narrowing my eyes, hoping to achieve some mystic and spontaneous state of insight in which all my instincts, energies and aptitudes would flower forth suddenly in a revelation of my true vocation. How I longed for some specific, cherished ambition to declare! How I should have liked to announce my devotion to some ancient, honorable institution which my grandfather, and all men, would commend! But however much I wished—and often tried, sincerely—to consider my destiny in transcendental terms, in sober academic generalities, I could produce only the most vivid and vagabond particulars: What would I like to do? Why, I would like to make Laura gasp with passion. I would like to be able to play “Greensleeves” and “Can Ye Sew Cushions?” on the dulcimer. I would like to win the senior jousting tournament at the county fair. I would like, some afternoon, to kiss Mrs. Murchison as she stepped out of the drugstore with the wind blowing her red hair. I would like to steal into the cemetery at night with a chisel and chip the terrible graven dates and the terrible words THY WILL IS OUR PEACE from my mother’s headstone.

  And yet—as appealing and significant as these things seemed to me—I recognized, with humiliation and a great sense of inadequacy, the hopelessness of producing them as evidence of a firm and zealous purpose in life.

  “I really think you ought to start planning your life, Vincent. You’re a junior already, and you’ll be out of school next year.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair and said uncertainly, “I know. I think I’d like to do some kind of charity work, or something like that, if I could.”

  “Some kind of charity work?”

  “Yes. I promised my mother I’d do something like that. She wanted me to do something that would help poor people, and destitute people, if I could.”

  “Is that what you really want to do?”

  “Well, I don’t really know. Sometimes I think I’d like to play a musical instrument of some kind. You know that shop at the end of Main Street?”

  “Which one? Oh, the one that’s always closed. Yes.”

  “Well, did you ever notice that dulcimer in the window? I’d love to know how to play a dulcimer. I’ve never heard one; have you?”

  “No. Why do you want to play something that you’ve never even heard?”

  “I don’t know. I just like the way it looks. It looks like it would make a wonderful sound.”

  She was silent, lifting her handkerchief to pat her throat thoughtfully.

  “I don’t think there’s very much opportunity for musicians of any kind,” she said after a moment. “They have a very hard time finding work. And I never even heard of a dulcimer player. I don’t think there’d be any demand for them at all.”

  “No, I guess not,” I said. “I haven’t really thought very much about what I want to do. I think my grandfather would like me to go into the restaurant with him. But I promised my mother I’d help people somehow.”

  “Well, what would that mean? Wouldn’t you have to study social work, or something like that?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  “It seems to me that social work is very highly specialized; I think you’d have to have a master’s degree, at least, to get anywhere. And that’s six years of college. Do you think you could afford to study that long?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I couldn’t ask my grandfather for that much money. Maybe I could work my way through, or something. I’m not sure yet.”

  When I left her in the evenings we would stand on the front steps in the shadow of the wistaria vine and kiss, shyly and tentatively, holding each other’s arms, but never with the wholehearted passion of our first embrace. I say that our relationship was banal and obtuse, and yet I can remember very clearly the immediate loneliness for her that I used to feel, walking home through the quiet dark streets, and the sense of peace and compensation that the knowledge of her affection for me, and her quiet competence, and our few fumbling moments of passion gave to me.

  Yet sometimes I would become fiercely indignant at what I considered the ignominy of our relationship. I was shamed by the lack of vitality of her feelings and because the compassion in which our friendship was founded was not as profound as I felt that it might and should have been. I would not tolerate an intimacy with anyone which was fatuous and conventional.

  I broke out in exasperation at her once: “Laura, look at my face—you say you like to look at me.”

  “I do. It’s very handsome. Is that what you want to hear? You’re very handsome, Vincent.” She smiled and brushed my lips with a shaft of wheat that she had plucked.

  “No, be serious, Laura. Nothing ever seems to—well, to move you. I want you to be moved by something. Look at my hands, then. Watch when I move my fingers. Don’t you see? Doesn’t anything ever move you?”

  “What’s the matter, Vincent? Are you angry?”

  “No. It’s just that I don’t want us to be—well, ridiculous. Can’t you understand that? If we go on . . . courting, or whatever it is that we’re doing, just because we happened to meet each other, and not to be in love with anybody else—well, then it’s ridiculous. Don’t you understand t
hat?”

  “No. I think you’re angry. You’re too intense, Vincent. You’ve been alone for such a long time that you’ve been dreaming about girls. But girls aren’t the way you dream about them.”

  “What are they like, then?”

  She dropped her head for a moment and clasped the back of one hand with the other. I waited for her to answer, but she did not.

  “What are they like, then?” I asked her almost angrily. “Are they like you?”

  “Some of them are. I am, Vincent.”

  It was a cool fall evening, and we were sitting under naked trees beside a stony spring to which we often walked. We had built a fire of oak twigs, and it was dying, the embers glowing bitterly, like a heap of rubies, under the gray ash. I stirred them with a branch, watching the exposed coals bloom into a livid incandescence. She watched the fire for a moment and said, “Do you want to stop, then?”