Free Set This House on Fire by William Styron Page A

after a pause he added: “I don’t know. Those people down there on the plain, they’re so lousy poor, I doubt any of them could afford a license, even if there were such a thing. All those songs about bella Napoli, bella campagna, say otherwise, but I don’t think most of those people get a hell of a lot of fun out of life. I suppose a ride on a borrowed motor scooter is a big thing for some of them. They get all jazzed up and I guess something like this is bound to happen once in a while.” Then as if suddenly aware of the thought running through my mind (you bleeding-heart) he said: “Well, I know that’s one hell of a consoling thing to say to you now. Here, what you need is a slug of Sambuco rosso”
    But I turned down the wine bottle he held out toward me. “I’ve got to get up to Mason’s,” I said shortly. “I’m sorry I don’t have room enough to take you all up.”
    Poppy, perched in the distance on the branch of a lemon tree, called down from the orchard above us. “Mr. Levenson! Mr. Levenson!”
    “Yes?” I said.
    “It’s Leverett, Poppy, for God sake!” Cass shouted.
    “What did you say, darling?”
    “Leverett! Leverett! L-e-v-e-r-e-t-t!”
    “Well, Mr. Leverett!” she cried. “When you see Rosemarie de Laframboise! Do you hear me, Mr. Leverett! When you see Rosemarie! You know, Mason’s girl! When you see Rosemarie when you get up to Sambuco will you ask her something for me!”
    Her shrill little voice grew dim; we could barely hear her.
    “Do you understand me, Mr. Leverett!”
    “No, Poppy, dammit!” Cass yelled. “We can’t hear you. Come down!”
    “Yasker alendus cheska!” And something else, in a remote caroling voice, that sounded like “Fullishagold!”
    “What’s she talking about?” I asked him. “Who’s this Rosemarie? De Laframboise?”
    His face broke apart in a funny wide smile, not quite lewd but in the same general area. “That’s Mason’s bimbo,” he said. “You’ll meet her.”
    “Rosemarie de Laframboise?”
    Then all of a sudden I realized why the “we” left so unexplained in Mason’s letter had never really puzzled me, since I had known all along that Mason, wherever he was and at whatever time, might be expected to be living with some woman, even one with a name like Rosemarie de Laframboise.
    “Rose-marie de La-fram-boise,” Cass said in careful, fruity syllables. “The works.”
    In the depths of exhaustion—at least in the depths of my exhaustion, I have found—there comes a moment when the spirit makes one last flight outward toward consciousness and reason, before breaking up into crazy splinters, or being extinguished by sleep. At this point all of the senses, worn raw by tiredness, are for an instant uncommonly tender and as receptive to the mildest stimulation as new skin over a recent wound. I suppose this explains why, as Cass spoke, a confusion of emotions swept through me—a sense of wild, glamorous beauty but of something ominous, too, way off in the distance, as if against my tingling eardrums there already beat a sound of catastrophe inaudible to normal ears. For at that moment the sun had sunk far down behind the hills, so that everything in the grove around us—vines, stone walls, and trees—had become shadowy and blue, touched by this early, peculiar dusk. The little boy played in the gutter beside us, thrashing at the stones with a branch and uttering tiny solemn squeaks. Far up the slope Poppy still warbled sweetly away in high tones, not only half-unheard but now half-unseen in the twilight, poised in ghostly suspension among the leaves of her lemon tree. Music drifted up from below, a splash came from across the water. And all about us swam a wanton late-summer odor of earth and lemons and flowers, which sent a sharp blade of nostalgia through me, and phantoms of loveliness to galloping in my mind, and filled me with a rich, sudden craving for something I could not name.
    Then at some moment during this seizure