Lie Down in Darkness Read Free Page A

music both bright and disconsolate, his mother’s voice whispering, “It’s music, Milton dear … music … music … music … listen, dear.” The sunlight sifted downward through gently rustling blinds and somewhere infinitely far above, it had seemed, there was his mother’s vacant, hovering face, unseen and finally unknown because she died before he could picture in his consciousness those features his father later said were refined and lovely. There were also walks in the park with his father and the damp, ferny smell of the woods and his best friend, a boy named Charley Quinn, who had a pale face and cheeks with famished hollows and a birthmark on his forehead like a brown-petaled flower, and who was killed at the Somme. My son …
    Your first duty remember, son, is always to yourself (he was a lawyer, descended from a long line of lawyers, and until his death in 1920 he sported stiff wing collars and an Edwardian mustache) I do not intend to presume upon your own good judgment, a faculty which I believe you possess in abundance inherited not from me but from your sainted mother, so as you go out into the world I can only admonish you with the words of the Scotchman, videlicet, keep your chin up and your kilts down and let the wind blow.
    But his father lacked the foresight to avoid spoiling his son and to realize that sending him to the University at the age of seventeen would produce the results it did: at nineteen he was a campus character known as “Blow,” a sot even by fraternity standards who drank not only because whisky made him drunk but because, away from his father, he found the sudden freedom oppressive. He was talkative, he had a natural curiosity. They said he’d make a fine lawyer. And when he was graduated from the law school he was pleasantly surprised upon reviewing his record to find that he had performed so well, considering the time spent drunk and in the town whorehouse, which catered mainly to college boys: it was a mansion, he remembered, chandeliered, with University seals on the lampshades, and run by a fancy high-yellow named Carmen Metz.
    He had been in the Great War, having made gestures toward joining the Army which years later he shamefully confessed to himself were trifling, having been greatly relieved when his father, through government connections, got him a commission in the Army legal branch. During the entire war he was at Governor’s Island. There, by processes more simple than he had ever imagined, he was made first lieutenant and then captain—emerging from the war with that rank and with the colonel’s daughter.
    They met at an officers’ dance on the island. Her name was Helen Peyton. Her father was a West Pointer, from an old Virginia family. Wasn’t it a coincidence, she asked Milton as they danced, that her grandfather should have gone to the University, too? That night they walked along the seawall in a drizzling rain and when he bent over, unsteady, very drunk, to kiss her, the city lights drifted like embers across the darkness. Then she fled, the raindrops on her cape leaving a trail of trembling sparks.
    Perhaps they were both too young to know better, but a few months later they were engaged to be married. They were both handsome people, and they were wildly in love. They liked parties, dancing; on Saturdays they rode horseback in Central Park. Yet she was strait-laced in many ways, rather severe: No, Milton. We’ll have to wait till afterwards. And drinking. She loved a good time, but a sober good time.
    “Now, Little Miss Muffet,” he’d say, smiling, “don’t be scared, a little one …”
    “Oh, Milton, please, you’ve had enough. No. No. I won’t!” And running off, unaccountably, weeping a little.
    Now wouldn’t you know? There’s an Army brat for you. Crazy as hell, the unstable life caused it. Moving around always. But he loved her, God he loved her. For a long time he drank nothing. For her.
    They talked bravely, brightly of the