Thomas Wolfe, page 16
When her boarders defaulted payments she seized their belongings triumphantly, delighting particularly in eleventh-hour captures at the railway station, with the aid of an obedient constabulary, and ringed by the attentive offal of the town.
Eugene was ashamed of Dixieland. And he was again afraid to express his shame. As with The Post, he felt thwarted, netted, trapped. He hated the indecency of his life, the loss of dignity and seclusion, the surrender to the tumultuous rabble of the four walls which shield us from them. He felt, rather than understood, the waste, the confusion, the blind cruelty of their lives—his spirit was stretched out on the rack of despair and bafflement as there came to him more and more the conviction that their lives could not be more hopelessly distorted, wrenched, mutilated, and perverted away from all simple comfort, repose, happiness, if they set themselves deliberately to tangle the skein, twist the pattern. He choked with fury: he thought of Eliza’s slow speech, her endless reminiscence, her maddening lip-pursing, and turned white with constricted rage.
He saw plainly by this time that their poverty, the threat of the poor-house, the lurid references to the pauper’s grave, belonged to the insensate mythology of hoarding; anger smouldered like a brand in him at their sorry greed. There was no place sacred unto themselves, no place fixed for their own inhabitation, no place proof against the invasion of the boarders.
As the house filled, they went from room to little room, going successively down the shabby scale of their lives. He felt it would hurt them, coarsen them: he had even then an intense faith in food, in housing, in comfort—he felt that a civilized man must begin with them; he knew that wherever the spirit had withered, it had not withered because of food and plumbing.
As the house filled, in the summer season, and it was necessary to wait until the boarders had eaten before a place could be found for him, he walked sullenly about beneath the propped back porch of Dixieland, savagely exploring the dark cellar, or the two dank windowless rooms which Eliza rented, when she could, to negresses.
He felt now the petty cruelty of village caste. On Sunday for several years, he had bathed, brushed, arrayed his anointed body in clean underwear and shirting and departed, amid all the pleasurable bustle of Sunday morning, for the Presbyterian Sunday School. He had by this time been delivered from the instruction of the several spinsters who had taught his infant faith the catechism, the goodness of God, and the elements of celestial architecture. The five-cent piece which formerly he had yielded up reluctantly, thinking of cakes and ale, he now surrendered more gladly, since he usually had enough left over for cold gaseous draughts at the soda-fountain.
In the fresh Sunday morning air he marched off with brisk excitement to do duty at the altars, pausing near the church where the marshalled ranks of the boys’ military school split cleanly into regimented Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians.
The children assembled in a big room adjacent to the church, honey-combed to right and left with small classrooms, which they entered after the preliminary service was finished. They were exhorted from the platform by the superintendent, a Scotch dentist with a black-gray beard, fringed by a small area of embalmed skin, whose cells, tissues, and chemical juices seemed to have been fixed in a state of ageless suspension, and who looked no older from one decade to another.
He read the text, or the parable of the day’s study, commented on it with Cæsarean dryness and concision, and surrendered the service to his assistant, a shaven, spectacled, Wilsonian-looking man, also Scotch, who smiled with cold affection at them over his high shiny collar, and led them through the verses of a hymn, heaving up his arms and leering at them encouragingly, as they approached the chorus. A sturdy spinstress thumped heavily upon a piano which shook like a leaf.
Eugene liked the high crystal voices of the little children, backed by the substantial marrow of the older boys and girls, and based on the strong volume of the Junior and Senior Baraccas and Philatheas. They sang:
“Throw out the lifeline, throw out the lifeline,
Someone is sinking to-day-ee”—
on the mornings when the collection went for missionary work. And they sang:
“Shall we gather at the river,
The bew-tee-ful, the bew-tee-ful r-hiver.”
He liked that one very much. And the noble surge of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
Later, he went into one of the little rooms with his class. The sliding doors rumbled together all around; presently there was a quiet drone throughout the building.
He was now in a class composed entirely of boys. His teacher was a tall white-faced young man, bent and thin, who was known to all the other boys as secretary of the Y.M.C.A. He was tubercular; but the boys admired him because of his former skill as a baseball and basketball player. He spoke in a sad, sugary, whining voice; he was oppressively Christ-like; he spoke to them intimately about the lesson of the day, asking them what it might teach them in their daily lives, in acts of obedience and love to their parents and friends, in duty, courtesy, and Christian charity. And he told them that when they were in doubt about their conduct they should ask themselves what Jesus would say: he spoke of Jesus often in his melancholy, somewhat discontented voice—Eugene became vaguely miserable as he talked, thinking of something soft, furry, with a wet tongue.
He was nervous and constrained: the other boys knew one another intimately—they lived on, or in the neighborhood of, Montgomery Avenue, which was the most fashionable street in town. Sometimes, one of them said to him, grinning: “Do you want to buy The Saturday Evening Post, Mister?”
Eugene, during the week, never touched the lives of any of them, even in a remote way. His idea of their eminence was grossly exaggerated; the town had grown rapidly from a straggling village—it had few families as old as the Pentlands, and, like all resort towns, its caste system was liquidly variable, depending chiefly upon wealth, ambition, and boldness.
Harry Tarkinton and Max Isaacs were Baptists, as were most of the people, the Scotch excepted, in Gant’s neighborhood. In the social scale the Baptists were the most populous and were considered the most common: their minister was a large plump man with a red face and a white vest, who reached great oratorical effects, roaring at them like a lion, cooing at them like a dove, introducing his wife into the sermon frequently for purposes of intimacy and laughing, in a programme which the Episcopalians, who held the highest social eminence, and the Presbyterians, less fashionable, but solidly decent, felt was hardly chaste. The Methodists occupied the middle ground between vulgarity and decorum.
This starched and well brushed world of Sunday morning Presbyterianism, with its sober decency, its sense of restraint, its suggestion of quiet wealth, solid position, ordered ritual, seclusive establishment, moved him deeply with its tranquillity. He felt concretely his isolation from it, he entered it from the jangled disorder of his own life once a week, looking at it, and departing from it, for years, with the sad heart of a stranger. And from the mellow gloom of the church, the rich distant organ, the quiet nasal voice of the Scotch minister, the interminable prayers, and the rich little pictures of Christian mythology which he had collected as a child under the instruction of the spinsters, he gathered something of the pain, the mystery, the sensuous beauty of religion, something deeper and greater than this austere decency.
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12
It was the winter, and the sullen dying autumn that he hated most at Dixieland—the dim fly-specked lights, the wretched progress about the house in search of warmth, Eliza untidily wrapped in an old sweater, a dirty muffler, a cast-off man’s coat. She glycerined her cold-cracked hands. The chill walls festered with damp: they drank in death from the atmosphere: a woman died of typhoid, her husband came quickly out into the hall and dropped his hands. They were Ohio people.
Upstairs, upon a sleeping porch, a thin-faced Jew coughed through the interminable dark.
“In heaven’s name, mama,” Helen fumed, “why do you take them in? Can’t you see he’s got the bugs?”
“Why, no-o,” said Eliza, pursing her lips. “He said he only had a little bronchial trouble. I asked him about it, and he laughed just as big as you please: ‘Why, Mrs. Gant,’ he said—” and there would follow an endless anecdote, embellished with many a winding rivulet. The girl raged: it was one of Eliza’s basic traits to defend blindly whatever brought her money.
The Jew was a kind man. He coughed gently behind his white hand and ate bread fried in battered egg and butter. Eugene developed a keen appetite for it: innocently he called it “Jew Bread” and asked for more. Lichenfels laughed gently, coughed—his wife was full of swart rich laughter. The boy did small services for him: he gave him a coin from week to week. He was a clothier from a New Jersey town. In the Spring he went to a sanitarium; he died there later.
In the winter a few chill boarders, those faces, those personalities which become mediocre through repetition, sat for hours before the coals of the parlor hearth, rocking interminably, dull of voice and gesture, as hideously bored with themselves and Dixieland, no doubt, as he with them.
He liked the summers better. There came slow-bodied women from the hot rich South, dark-haired white-bodied girls from New Orleans, corn-haired blondes from Georgia, nigger-drawling desire from South Carolina. And there was malarial lassitude, tinged faintly with yellow, from Mississippi but with white biting teeth. A red-faced South Carolinian, with nicotined fingers, took him daily to the baseball games; a lank yellow planter, malarial from Mississippi, climbed hill, and wandered through the fragrant mountain valleys with him; of nights he heard the rich laughter of the women, tender and cruel, upon the dark porches, heard the florid throat-tones of the men; saw the yielding stealthy harlotry of the South—the dark seclusion of their midnight bodies, their morning innocence. Desire, with bloody beak, tore at his heart like jealous virtue: he was moral for that which was denied him.
Of mornings he stayed at Gant’s with Helen playing ball with Buster Isaacs, a cousin of Max, a plump jolly little boy who lived next door; summoned later by the rich incense of Helen’s boiling fudge. She sent him to the little Jewish grocery down the street for the sour relishes she liked so well: tabled in mid-morning they ate sour pickles, heavy slabs of ripe tomatoes, coated with thick mayonnaise, amber percolated coffee, fig-newtons and ladyfingers, hot pungent fudge pebbled with walnuts and coated fragrantly with butter, sandwiches of tender bacon and cucumber, iced belchy soft-drinks.
His trust in her Gantian wealth was boundless: this rich store of delight came from inexhaustible resources. Warm lively hens cackled cheerfully throughout the morning neighborhood; powerful negroes brought dripping ice in iron talons from their smoking wagons; he stood beneath their droning saws and caught the flying ice-pulp in his hands; he drank in the combined odor of their great bodies together with the rich compost of the refrigeration, and the sharp oiliness of the dining-room linoleum; and in the horsehair walnut parlor at mid-day, good with the mellow piano-smell and the smell of stale varnished wood, she played for him, and made him sing: “William Tell,” “My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice,” “The Song Without Words,” “Celeste Aïda,” “The Lost Chord,” her long throat lean and tendoned as her vibrant voice rang out.
She took insatiable delight in him, stuffing him with sour and sugared relishes, tumbling him, in a random moment of her restless activity, upon Gant’s lounge, and pinioning him while she slapped his squirming face sharply with her big hand.
Sometimes, frantic with some swift tangle of her nerves, she would attack him viciously, hating him for his dark brooding face, his full scalloped underlip, his deep absorption in a dream. Like Luke, and like Gant, she sought in the world ceaseless entertainment for her restless biting vitality: it infuriated her to see other people seek absorption within themselves—she hated him at times when, her own wires strumming, she saw his dark face brooding over a book or on some vision. She would tear the book from his hands, slap him, and stab him with her cruel savage tongue. She would pout out her lip, goggle her face about stupidly on a drooping neck, assume an expression of dopey idiocy, and pour out on him the horrible torrent of her venom.
“You little freak—wandering around with your queer dopey face. You’re a regular little Pentland—you funny little freak, you. Everybody’s laughing at you. Don’t you know that? Don’t you? We’re going to dress you up as a girl, and let you go around like that. You haven’t got a drop of Gant blood in you—papa’s practically said as much—you’re Greeley all over again; you’re queer. Pentland queerness sticking out all over you.”
Sometimes her sweltering and inchoate fury was so great that she threw him on the floor and stamped on him.
He did not mind the physical assault so much as he did the poisonous hatred of her tongue, insanely clever in fashioning the most wounding barbs. He went frantic with horror, jerked unexpectedly from Elfland into Hell, he bellowed madly, saw his bountiful angel change in a moment to a snake-haired fury, lost all his sublime faith in love and goodness. He rushed at the wall like an insane little goat, battered his head screaming again and again, wished desperately that his constricted and overloaded heart would burst, that something in him would break, that somehow, bloodily, he might escape the stifling prisonhouse of his life.
This satisfied her desire; it was what deeply she had wanted—she had found purging release in her savage attack upon him, and now she could drain herself cleanly in a wild smother of affection. She would seize him, struggling and screaming, in her long arms, plaster kisses all over his red mad face, soothing him with hearty flattery addressed in the third person:
“Why, he didn’t think I meant it, did he? Didn’t he know I was only joking? Why, he’s strong as a little bull, isn’t he? He’s a regular little giant, that’s what he is. Why, he’s perfectly wild, isn’t he? His eyes popping out of his head. I thought he was going to knock a hole in the wall.—Yes, ma’am. Why, law me, yes, child. It’s good soup,” resorting to her broad mimicry in order to make him laugh. And he would laugh against his will between his sobs, in a greater torture because of this agony of affection and reconciliation than because of the abuse.
Presently, when he had grown quiet, she would send him off to the store for pickles, cakes, cold bottled drinks; he would depart with red eyes, his cheeks furrowed dirtily by his tears, wondering desperately as he went down the street why the thing had happened, and drawing his foot sharply off the ground and craning his neck convulsively as shame burnt in him.
There was in Helen a restless hatred of dullness, respectability. Yet she was at heart a severely conventional person, in spite of her occasional vulgarity, which was merely a manifestation of her restless energy, a very naïve, a childishly innocent person about even the simple wickedness of the village. She had several devoted young men on her list—plain, hard-drinking country types: one, a native, lean, red-faced, alcoholic, a city surveyor, who adored her; another, a strapping florid blond from the Tennessee coal fields; another, a young South Carolinian, townsman of her older sister’s fiancé.
These young men—Hugh Parker, Jim Phelps, and Joe Cathcart, were innocently devoted; they liked her tireless and dominant energy, the eager monopoly of her tongue, her big sincerity and deep kindliness. She played and sang for them—threw all her energy into entertaining them. They brought her boxes of candy, little presents, were divided jealously among themselves, but united in their affirmation that she was “a fine girl.”
And she would get Jim Phelps and Hugh Parker to bring her a drink of whisky as well: she had begun to depend on small potations of alcohol for the stimulus it gave her fevered body—a small drink was enough to operate electrically in her blood: it renewed her, energized her, gave her a temporary and hectic vitality. Thus, although she never drank much at a time and showed, beyond the renewed vitality and gaiety, no sign of intoxication, she nibbled at the bottle.
“I’ll take a drink whenever I can get it,” she said.
She liked, almost invariably, young fast women. She liked the hectic pleasure of their lives, the sense of danger, their humor and liberality. She was drawn magnetically to all the wedded harlotry, which, escaping the Sunday discipline of a Southern village, and the Saturday lust of sodden husbands, came gaily to Altamont in summer. She liked people who, as she said, “didn’t mind taking a little drink now and then.”
She liked Mary Thomas, a tall jolly young prostitute who came from Kentucky: she was a manicurist in an Altamont Hotel.
“There are two things I want to see,” said Mary, “a rooster’s you-know-what and a hen’s what-is-it.” She was full of loud compelling laughter. She had a small room with a sleeping porch, at the front of the house upstairs. Eugene brought her some cigarettes once: she stood before the window in a thin petticoat, her feet wide apart, her long sensual legs outlined against the light.
Helen wore her dresses, hats, and silk stockings. Sometimes they drank together. And, with humorous sentimentality, she defended her.
“Well, she’s no hypocrite. That’s one thing sure. She doesn’t care who knows it.” Or,
“She’s no worse than a lot of your little goody-goodies, if the truth’s known. She’s only more open about it.”
Or again, irritated at some implied criticism of her own friendliness with the girl, she would say angrily:
“What do you know about her? You’d better be careful how you talk about people. You’ll get into trouble about it some day.”
Nevertheless, she was scrupulous in her public avoidance of the girl and, illogically, in a moment of unreasoning annoyance she would attack Eliza:
“Why do you keep such people in your house, mama? Every one in town knows about her. Your place is getting the reputation of a regular chippyhouse all over town.”
Eliza pursed her lips angrily:
“I don’t pay any attention to them,” she said. “I consider myself as good as any one. I hold my head up, and I expect every one else to do likewise. You don’t catch me associating with them.”
