Free Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron Page A

had helped seat Maudie gently on the grass, sank down heavily beside him, saying, “Milton, there’s a cigarette burn on the rug. Last night——”
    “Which one?” he said.
    “The Tabriz.”
    “Oh, God. Larry Ellis.”
    “No. Dolly Bonner. She’s an impossible person to ask anywhere.”
    “Daddy,” Peyton interrupted, “what does——”
    “Hush, Peyton,” Helen said, “we’re——”
    “Just a minute, dear,” Loftis said. “Baby, you mustn’t interrupt. Contraband means—well, it means something illegal—something that a policeman is empowered to confiscate …”
    “Confis——” Peyton said, looking up at him.
    “Now one thing at a time,” he said softly. “Now contraband. What are you reading there anyway? All right, say that the U.S.A. has a law against foreigners bringing in perfume, or guns——”
    “Or whisky,” Helen said, finishing his sentence with a chilly laugh. She groped in the pocket of her blouse for a cigarette. “Whisky might be contraband.”
    He lighted her cigarette. “Whisky?”
    “I see what you mean,” Peyton said in a knowing tone, turning back to the funnies.
    Helen stirred in her chair. “It’s like when I ask your father,” she said, “not to drink when the Appletons come and he goes out and buys another bottle. You might call that contraband.”
    A sudden flicker of resentment seized him at that—a moment’s rush of blood to his face, ebbing even while out of the corner of his eye he watched her as she said, “You might call that contraband,” smoke floating away from her mouth in little gusts, blue against the sunlight and the lawn, coiling away invisibly.
    “Now——” he began angrily, but thought Let it pass, let it pass as Helen, sensing this irritation, gave his hand a light, nearly impalpable tap, murmuring, “All right, dear. Temper, temper.” Now she was not even looking at him, he could tell, gazing instead with a smile at Maudie sitting on her pillow in the grass—frail, expressionless, staring up at the sky with sweet, insensible eyes.
    The anger had gone. He watched Maudie, too, and a gentle feeling of compassion came over him, mingled vaguely with bitter distress. Right now—said the doctor, a kindly old man in Richmond, lisping hesitantly—she no doubt knew all she would ever know; too bad, one could never tell—the mystery of birth.
    Great God in heaven, was it his fault! Well, whose? What?
    There, there now, take it easy. No, no, certainly. The mystery of birth——
    Tragic—it happened to any man, in the best of families. Be calm—that’s what he had told himself to do. They had loved her, taken care or her, been good to her—that’s what people said. “Oh,” the older friends would say to him—sad, guileless women with gray faces and a sweet, elegiac air—“oh, Helen is a saint, she’s so good to her. You’re so lucky.” As if, he would think bitterly, Maudie were a burden, even in her affliction, instead of a joy. Yet the child troubled him. He loved her, he longed for an affection that could never really blossom, but those eyes—those sometimes he could hardly bear. Until Peyton was born, bleak doubt assailed him. He looked at his wife’s body with suspicion and his own with infuriate guilt. The mystery of birth … Poor dear gentle child. Now his heart went out to her yearningly. But there was no doubt that at times she caused him dreadful unhappiness.
    Helen arose, knelt down and began to comb Maudie’s hair; tenderly she cupped her hand beneath the child’s chin, turning her face with great delicacy, like that of some fragile little china doll, all the while making soft sounds, laughing gently, saying, “There, see!” or “Pretty!” Loftis got up and squatted beside them, extending the rose to Helen with a grin: “My love,” he said, “is like a red, red rose,” but Helen, preoccupied, turned her head and blinked at him, with a pale smile replying: “Oh.” She put the rose on the ground.