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

into the glass, she watched the foolish and lovely change: transfigured, she saw smooth skin as glossy white as the petal of gardenia, lips which seemed but sixteen or twenty, and as unblemished by any trouble as those she had held up to another mirror thirty years before, whispering “Dearest” to an invisible and quite imaginary lover. She dropped her hands, turned away from the glass and, as if in afterthought, walked over to the bed and picked up the paper again. She scanned the page once more, neither with purpose nor out of any expectation, for she knew no notice would be there. Rather out of emptiness, remembering Milton the night before—seeing him for the first time in months—as he telephoned Frank Downs, the local publisher, saying: “Yes, Frank. My daughter, my little girl … yes, violent … so if you’ll keep it out of … Yes, Frank … thanks, Frank—” and sobbing into the mouthpiece— “Frank, boy, she’s gone, she’s gone from me!”
    He had come in the evening yesterday as she stood, after her solitary supper, in the hall. (Ella had said, “Kin I have de day off tomorrow, Miss Helen? Daddy Faith, he——” but Helen had said, “Yes,” and Ella had gone back to the kitchen.) She had heard his car draw up and on the walk his slow and hesitant footsteps. It was nearly dusk. There had been a thunder shower before; the garden was wet and drooping. As he approached, a noisy flock of sparrows swooped up from the lawn like scraps of paper on a sudden blast of wind and disappeared into the boxwood, swallowed up, invisible, still cheeping raucously as the hedge showered down a tiny storm of rain. He stood at the door for a moment, his face flushed, bewildered, saying nothing; then he blurted, “Helen, Peyton killed herself,” and entered. She made no reply, the sudden shock striking somewhere inside her chest like an electric bolt, flickering at her finger tips, numbing her cheeks, but receding swiftly as she remembered, thought so, so, well— receding even as swiftly as the storm which, passing, drifted with remote grumblings over the ocean, while unseen clouds cast into the garden a pink flushed twilight, swiftly fading. In the kitchen, amid the rattle of pots and pans, Ella Swan was singing a tune. About Jesus.
    She could tell that he was already a little tight. They sat down across from each other, she on the sofa and he in his chair by the secretary, where the liquor was kept, unopened since he had left her almost two years ago. He poured straight shots from a new pint bottle of Old Forester—she watched his fingers, watched them tremble—into a dusty wineglass he had found on the shelf. Then he began to speak—a rush of words which he halted only long enough to drink, his face thrown back in the familiar mechanical motion, then bobbing forward as though by springs, ugly and distorted in a quick spasm of distaste as if even after all these years he were unable to cope with the smell, the taste of the stuff which had been for so long his balm and salvation.
    “Harry called me at the club,” he said. “Horrible … I don’t …” He paused, bemused, and his eyes (she knew exactly what was happening) were not yet grieving but still perplexed, wearing the vaguely startled look of a man who is plotting a way out, an escape.
    “I don’t know why. I don’t know!” he said, his voice swelling. “Why would she——”
    “Hush, Milton, not so loud,” she said quietly. She spoke to him twice that evening. This was one of those times, and she thought, even as she spoke: The suffering hasn’t come quite yet. Not yet. It will take a while longer. He doesn’t quite believe it, feeling with that certainty of selfish men that he will never come by misfortune. The suffering will come suddenly, though. And soon.
    Night came quickly. The descent of darkness was almost tropical. Abruptly—like that—it was dark outside, and she arose silently and turned on a lamp. In the garden a lone frog