William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Read Online Free PDF Page A

door closed. Lord almighty, Mr. Casper thought.
    “Please, Helen.” From a distance.
    “No.”
    With that, Helen closed the door. In her room everything was sunny and clean. A soft breeze shook the curtains; they trembled slightly, as with the touch of a feeble and unseen hand. Outside the window the holly leaves rustled, made thin, dry scrapings against the screen, and then this breeze, so familiar to her because of its nearly predictable comings and goings, suddenly ceased: the curtains fell limp without a sound and the house, sapped of air, was filled with an abrupt, wicked heat, like that which escapes from an oven door.
    Downstairs she heard the screen door slam, a noise of feet on the gravel walk. No one said a word. The limousine and the hearse pulled away from the curb, almost inaudibly, and down the driveway. The house was quiet then, very still. Silence surrounded her in damp, hot layers, yet now, breaking this stillness, a single locust somewhere commenced a loud chatter: remote at first, threatening death and rain, shrill, ascending then, like something sliding up a wire, and scraping finally at a point, it seemed, not more than two inches from her ear—a menacing clamor, staccato, outraged and inane. The noise stopped suddenly and the enfolding silence was like an echo, a sound in her ears.
    On the sheets of her bed there was a damp place where she had been sleeping the night before. She wondered: How many times have I or Ella let the beds go unmade this late? Not many. She sat down on the side of the bed and picked up the morning newspaper, the one which, for the first time she could remember, she, not Milton or Ella, had retrieved from the front steps at dawn. Vaguely it bothered her, for it had been an act quite out of keeping with the serene and orderly character of her life, and she thought: What did I do? Somehow I can’t think …
    Oh, yes. She remembered how odd it had been. Walking down the steps past Milton in the hall, him who, fully clothed, asprawl on the couch, lay snoring with a soft, blubbering sound, and then standing on the porch as she peered out through the chilly dawn light at the deserted street, thinking in this queer, abstracted way: I have brought two children into life and I was a mother for twenty-three years. This is the first day that I have awakened knowing that I am a mother no longer and that I shall never be a mother again.
    So odd of me. To get the
    She began to read the newspaper. The Bomb again, a truce in the offing with the Japanese; a picture below showed a film actress, known for her legs, and an eminent cafe owner with a face like a mouse, wed yesterday in Las Vegas, Nevada. Married. Unable to concentrate, she laid the paper down. A huge emptiness began to creep over her, so familiar a thing, this easy, physical sense of languor and infirmity—as if everything had suddenly drained forth from her flesh, leaving her as limp as some pale jelly that floats in the sea. She arose and walked to the window, touching the sill with her finger tips. The locust was still. How merciful that is. Beyond the garden, the trellis and the swollen blooms of honeysuckle, beyond the dead azaleas, she heard a car pass on the road. The sound approached, faded, died.
    Life, others.
    She turned and stood by the dresser and examined her face in the mirror. An old woman’s face, she thought, haggard and spooky: And I not yet fifty … half a century undone timeless like the memory of ruined walls. She swept back her white hair, pressing it against her head with hands that were pale, nearly translucent. Beneath the shiny skin of her hands the veins were tessellated like a blue mosaic, shining, like an intricate blue design captured beneath glass. Now she did something that she had done many times before. She pulled the skin of her face taut over the cheekbones so that the web of lines and wrinkles vanished as if it had been touched by a miraculous and restorative wand; squinting convergently