Lie Down in Darkness Read Free Page B

future. His father had a little money; he’d set Milton up in practice in Port Warwick, “a growing town,” as the saying goes. They could have a good time there. It wasn’t much money his father was giving them, but it would do for a while. They’d manage.
    Then she told him. When her mother died she was due to inherit a hundred thousand dollars. “Oh, baby,” he said, mildly protesting but elated, and so they were married with the bright hollow panoply attending such military affairs, the ceremony that disturbed him because of the untroubled thrill it gave him. The sweet excitement that came from the flags and the music, of which he was faintly ashamed, was not mere patriotism. It was rather the pride he had in his rank, which he had attained only through his bride and he knew it, but which nonetheless sent through him a fierce adolescent upsurge of exciting arrogance—the twin silver bars and the starched dress uniform, impeccably white. Nor was the feeling of sham and fakery canceled by the news brought by his father, now a diffidently mild, still doting old man in whom patience was no longer a virtue but a habit, who stood shyly in one corner of the officers’ club at the reception, the ends of his once-proud mustache twitching sadly, and told him in an apologetic, mournful tone that Charley Quinn had been killed overseas, it was bad, too bad.
    So the anger mounted silently in the younger man as he expressed a faint regret for the death of a boy he had lost track of long ago, barely concealing the resentment he felt at having been told such a thing on his wedding day—as if his father, in atonement for his ill-advised move in getting his son’s commission in the first place, had passed the remark as a reminder that war was not all champagne and flowers and the tinkly laughter of officers’ wives. And he had hardly restrained himself from saying something very bitter, archly insulting to his father as the old man stood there, the damp, feeble blinking of his eyes reflecting the weakness for which Loftis had felt all his life a quiet contempt. He wanted to get him out of there and on his way back to Richmond. He despised his father. The old man had given him too much. My son (he was living in a boardinghouse then; the old house had been torn down, a cigarette factory erected on the site, the steel and concrete walls impermeable to the lingering ghosts of a quiet and departed tradition or even to the memory of a dozen ancient cedars which had cast down a tender, trembling light upon that vanished ground) my son, your mother was a joy and indeed a deliverance to me and I hope and pray if only out of honor to the blessed memory of her who brought you into life that you will as the Preacher said live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity which he hath given thee under the sun all the days of thy vanity for that is thy portion in this life and in thy labor which thou takest under the sun. My son …
    A sudden, quick ache of pity and sadness came over him, he fumbled stupidly for a word to say, but Helen’s face floated near, uptilted, offering him a kiss, and she led him away to meet someone. His father stood awkwardly in the corner then, groping in conversation with a bored young lieutenant while he, the new captain, listened to the rhythmic wedding small talk of a general’s wife, nodded, smiled, and thought of the pale boy with the blemish like a flower, the brother he had never had, and of his father whom he had never known. “Really, Helen,” the general’s wife was saying, “I think you have the pick of the Army. Such a peach!” And her laughter shattered the air like falling glass.
    Think of now. From a boat somewhere a whistle gave a loud blast. Loftis looked up through the dust, the slanting frames of light. “Helen,” he said absently, groping for her hand, but it was Dolly whose glove lay so consolingly on his arm and, turning to meet her eyes, he heard the