Thomas Wolfe, page 229
Before the advent of the Prohibition Act, he had been a waiter in a large hotel. His wife had run this same house as a lodging house, her clientele being largely derived from actors, vaudeville performers, and somewhat down-at-the-heels theatrical people of all sorts. As time went on, the woman began to provide some of her guests with an occasional meal when they would ask for it, and Joe, whose skill as a chef was considerable, began himself, on his “off day,” to prepare a Sunday dinner, to which paying guests were invited. The idea, begun really as a kind of concession to the lodgers in the house, caught on: the meals were cheap, the food was excellent, people came and came again, returning often with their friends, until Joe’s Sunday dinners had achieved a kind of celebrity, and the man and his wife were sorely taxed to accommodate the numbers that now came.
This involved, of course, the taking on of extra service and the enlargement of the dining space; meanwhile, the Prohibition Act had gone into effect, and now people at these Sunday dinners began to suggest the advisability of his serving wine to those who wanted it. To an Italian, this request seemed not only simple, but completely reasonable; he found, moreover, that although prohibition was a law, the supply of wine, both new and old, was plentiful to those who could afford to pay for it. Although the price was high, as he soon found from investigation carried on among his friends and colleagues, who had also been led in some such way as this into the labyrinth of this strange profession, the profit, once the corks were pulled, was great.
The remainder of the road was certain. There was a moment—just a moment—when Joe was faced with a decision, when he saw the perilous way this casual enterprise had led him into, when it was plain to him the kind of decision he had to make; but the dice were loaded, the scales too weighted down upon one side to admit a balanced judgment. Before him lay the choice of two careers. On the one hand, he could continue working as a waiter in a big hotel, which meant the insecurity of employment, subservience, and dependence for his living on a waiter’s tips; and this way, as Joe well knew, the end was certain—old age, poverty, and broken feet. Before him on the other hand lay a more perilous and more ruthless way, but one made tempting by its promise of quick wealth. It was a way that would lead him, if not into full membership in the criminal underworld, at least into collusion with it; into a bought-and-paid-for treaty with the criminal police; and to violence, dishonesty, and crime. But it promised to him also wealth and property and eventual independence, and, like many another simple man of the corrupted period, it seemed to him there was no choice to make.
He made it, and the results within four years had been more glittering than he had dared to hope. His profit had been enormous. Now he was a man of property. He owned this house, and a year before he had bought the next one to it. He was even now considering the purchase of a small apartment house uptown. And if not in actual fact a rich man now, he was destined to be a very rich one soon.
And yet—that sad, dark face, that tired eye, the melancholy patience with a quiet tone. It was all so different from the way he thought it would turn out—so different from the life that he had thought he would have. It was, in some ways, so much better; it was, wearily and sadly, so much worse—the dense enmeshment of that tangled scheme, the dark, unhappy weavings of the ugly web, the complications of this world of crime, with its constantly growing encroachments, its new and ever uglier demands, the constant mulctings of all its graft, of blackmail, and of infamy, the fear of merciless reprisal, the knowledge that he was now imprisoned in a deadly world from which he could never hope again to escape—a world controlled by criminals, and by the police, each in collusion with the other, and himself so tarred now with the common stick of their iniquity that there was no longer any appeal left to him to any court of justice and authority, if there had been one. And there was none.
So here he stood today, peering out behind the grating of his basement gate, a sad and gentle man with weary eyes, looking out between the bars of his own barricade to see what new eventuality the ringing of the bell had brought to him, and whether enemy or friend.
For a moment he stood there, looking out through the bars with a look of careful anxiousness; then, when he saw the young man, his face brightened, and he said: “Oh, good morning, sir. Come in.”
He unlocked the door then and held it open for his visitors as they came in, smiling in a gentle, kindly way, as they passed him. He closed the gate behind them and stood aside while they went in. Then he led the way along the narrow little corridor into a dining room. The first one they came to had some people in it, but the smaller one behind was empty. They chose this one, and went in and took a table, Joe pulling back the chairs and standing behind Mrs. Jack until she was seated, with the air of kind and gentle dignity that, one felt, was really a part of the decency and goodness of the man.
“I have not seen you for so long, sir,” he said to the young man in his quiet voice. “You’ve been away?”
“Yes, Joe, I’ve been away a year,” said the young man, secretly warmed and pleased that the man should have remembered him, and a little proud, too, that this mark of recognition should be given in front of Mrs. Jack.
“We’ve missed you,” Joe said with his quiet smile. “You’ve been in Europe?”
“Yes,” the other said casually, but quite pleased just the same that the proprietor had asked him, for he was at that age when one likes to boast a little of his voyages. “I was there a year,” he added, and then realized that he had said something of this sort before.
“Where were you?” Joe inquired politely. “You were in Paris, sir, I am sure,” he said and smiled.
“Yes,” the other answered carelessly, with just a trace of the nonchalance of an old boulevardier, “I lived there for six months,” he said, tossing this off carelessly in a tone of casual ease, “and then I stayed in England for a while.”
“You did not go to EEtaly?” inquired Joe, with a smile.
“Yes, I was there this Spring,” the traveler replied in an easy tone that indicated that this season of the year was always the one he prefered when taking his Italian holiday. He did not think it worth mentioning that he had gone back again in August to sail from Naples: that trip hardly counted, for he had gone straight through by train and had seen nothing of the country.
“Ah, EEtaly is beautiful in Spring,” Joe said. “You were at Rome?”
“Not long,” said the voyager, whose stay in Rome, to tell the truth, had been limited to a stop between trains. “In the Spring I remained in the North”—he tossed this off with some abandon too, as if to say that at this season of the year “the North” is the only portion of the Italian peninsula that a man of cultivated taste could tolerate.
“You know Milano?” said Joe.
“Oh, yes,” the other cried, somewhat relieved to have some place mentioned at last that he could honestly say he did know. “I stayed there for some time”—a slight exaggeration of the fact, perhaps, as his sojourn had been limited to seven days. “And Venezia,” he went on quickly, getting a lascivious pleasure from his pronunciation of the word.
“Venezia is very beautiful,” said Joe.
“Your own home is near Milano, isn’t it?”
“No, near Turino, sir,” Joe replied.
“And the whole place here,” the youth went on, turning eagerly to Mrs. Jack—“all the waiters, the hat-check girl, the people out in the kitchen, come from that same little town—don’t they, Joe?”
“Yes, sir, yes, sir,” said Joe smiling, “all of us.” In his quiet and gentle way he turned to Mrs. Jack and with a movement of the hand explained: “First one man came—and he writes back that he is doing”—he moved his shoulders slightly—“not so bad. Then others came. Now, I think we are more here than we are left at home.”
“How interesting,” murmured Mrs. Jack, pulling off her gloves and looking around the room. “Look,” she said quickly, turning to her companion, “could you get a cocktail—hah? I want to drink to your health.”
“Well, of course,” said Joe. “You can have anything you like.”
“It’s my birthday, Joe, and this is my birthday party.”
“You shall have everything. What will the lady drink?”—he turned to her.
“Oh, I think—” she meditated a moment; then, turning to the youth, said brightly, “A nice Martini—hah?”
“Yes, I’ll have that too. Two of them, Joe.”
“Two Martinis. Very good, very good,” said Joe, with an air of complaisance, “and after that——?”
“Well, what have you?”
He told them what he had, and they ordered the dinner—antipasto, minestrone, fish, chicken, salad, cheese, and coffee. It was too much, but they had the spirit of true celebrants: they ordered a quart flask of Chianti to go with it.
“I’m not doing anything else all afternoon,” said Mrs. Jack. “I saved it for you.”
Joe disappeared and they could hear him giving orders in fast Italian. A waiter brought two cocktails on a tray. They clinked glasses and Mrs. Jack said, “Well, here’s to you, young fellow.” She was silent for a moment, looking at him very seriously, then she said: “To your success—the real kind—the kind you want inside of you—the best.”
They drank, but her words, her presence here, the feeling of wonderful happiness and pride that the day had brought to him, a sense that somehow this was the true beginning of his life, and that a fortunate and happy life such as he had always visioned now lay immediately before him, gave him an exalted purpose, the intoxication of a determined and irresistible strength that even drink could add nothing to. He leaned forward across the table and seized her hand in both of his: “Oh, I’ll do it!” he cried exalted, “I’ll do it!”
“You will,” she said, “I know you will!” And putting her other hand on top of his, she squeezed it hard, and whispered: “The best! You are the best!”
The wild happiness of that moment, the mounting total of that enchanted day left now only the overpowering sense of some miraculous consummation that was about to be realized immediately. It seemed to him that he had “the whole thing” within his grasp—what, he did not know, and yet he was sure that he had it. The concrete distillation of all this overwhelming certainty, this overwhelming joy—that the great success, the magnificent achievement, the love, the honor, and the glory were already his—lay there palpable, warm and heavy as a ball does, in his hand. And then, feeling this impossible realization so impossibly near that he already had it in his grasp, feeling this certitude so exultantly, the sense of purpose so powerfully, that he was sure he knew exactly what certitude and purpose were—feeling the language he had never uttered so eloquently there at the very hinges of the tongue, the songs that he had never sung, the music he had never heard, the great books, the novels, the poems he had never fashioned—they were all so magnificently, so certainly his that he could utter them at any moment—now—a moment after—within five minutes—at any moment that he chose to make them his!
That boiling confidence of wild elements proved too much for the fragile tenement of flesh, of bone, of thinking, and of sense that it inhabited, and he began to talk “a blue streak.” As if every secret hope, every insatiate desire, every cherished and unspoken aspiration, every unuttered feeling, thought, or conviction that had ever seethed and boiled in the wild ferment of his youth, that had ever rankled, eaten like an acid in the secret places of his spirit, that had ever been withheld, suppressed, pent-up, dammed, concealed through pride, through fear of ridicule, through doubt or disbelief, or because there was no other ear to hear him, no other tongue to answer back, to give them confirmation—this whole tremendous backwater of the spirit burst through its walls and rushed out in an inundating flood.
The words rushed from him in wild phrases, hurled spears, flung and broken staves of thought, of hope, of purpose, and of feeling. If he had had a dozen tongues, yet he would not have had the means to utter them, and still they charged and foamed and thrust there at the portals of his speech, and still not a thousandth part of what he wished to say was shaped or uttered. On the surface of this tremendous superflux he was himself whirled and swept away like a chip, spun round and carried onward, helpless on his own raging flood; and finding all the means at his disposal insufficient, failing him, like a man who pours oil on a raging fire, he ordered one drink after another and gulped them down.
He became very drunk. He became more wild, more incoherent all the time. And yet it seemed to him that he must say it finally, get it out of him, empty himself clean, get it all clear and straight and certain.
When they got out in the street again, darkness had come and he was still talking. They got into a cab. The thronging streets, the jammed congestion of the traffic, the intolerable glare, the insane kaleidoscope of Broadway burned there in his inflamed and maddened vision, not in a blur, not in a drunken maze, but with a kind of distorted and insane precision, a grotesque projection of what it really was. His baffled and infuriated spirit turned against it—against everyone, everything—against her. For suddenly he realized that she was taking him home to his hotel. The knowledge infuriated him, he felt that she was deserting him, betraying him. He shouted to the driver to stop, she caught hold of his arm and tried to keep him in the car, he wrenched free, shouted at her that she had gone back on him, sold him out, betrayed him—that he wanted to see her no more, that she was no good—and even while she pled with him, tried to persuade him to get back into the car with her, he told her to be gone, slammed the door in her face, and lunged away into the crowd.
The whole city now reeled past him—the lights, the crowds, the glittering vertices of night, now bedimmed and sown with a star-flung panoply of their nocturnal faëry—it all burned there in his vision in a pattern of grotesque distortion, it seemed cruel and insane to him. He was filled with a murderous fury, he wanted to batter something into a pulp, to smash things down, to stamp them into splintered ruin. He slugged his way through the streets like a maddened animal, he hurled himself against the crowd, lunged brutally against people and knocked them out of his way, and finally, having stunned himself into a kind of apathy, he reached the end of that blind and blazing passage, he found himself in front of his hotel, exhausted, sick, and with no more hope for a singing in his heart. He found his room, went in, and fell senseless and face downward on the bed.
The flask of ether had exploded.
[¬]
22
TOGETHER
She telephoned next morning a little after nine o’clock. He stirred, groaned, and sat up dizzily with a head full of splitting rockets, sick at heart and sick at stomach, and buried at the bottom of a pit of shame.
“How are you?” she said quietly, at once, in the tone people always use on such occasions, which is neither very sympathetic nor forgiving, but just a flat interrogation of a fact.
“Oh . . . well, pretty bad,” he said morosely. “I . . . guess I was pretty bad yesterday.”
“Well—” she hesitated, and then laughed a little. “You were a little wild,” she said.
He groaned to himself, and he said miserably and without much hope, “I’m sorry,” having the feeling a man has on such occasions that mere sorrow does not make things right.
“Have you had any breakfast yet?” she said.
“No.” His stomach turned at the thought of it.
“Why don’t you get up now and take a shower? Then go out somewhere and get your breakfast, you’ll feel a lot better when you do. It’s a beautiful day,” she went on. “You ought to get out and take a walk. It would do you lots of good.”
It seemed to him that he could never again take an interest in such things as breakfast, walking, or the weather, but he mumbled that he would do as she advised, and she went on at once as if outlining a practical working program for the day:
“And what are you going to be doing later on—I mean tonight?”
This seemed so impossibly far away, it conjured up such melancholy vistas of the miserable eternity that must elapse before night could come again to shelter his guilt in its concealing darkness that he could not answer for a moment. He said: “Oh, I don’t know—I hadn’t thought of anything.” And then, miserably, “Nothing, I guess.”
“Because,” she went on quickly, “I was wondering if you would care to meet me tonight?—That is, if you weren’t doing something else.”
For the first time, excitement stirred him, he felt hope.
“But, of course I would,” he stammered. “You mean you would like to——”
“Yes,” she said quickly and decisively. “Look—I wonder if you could do this. Could you come down here tonight after the show? I mean—I didn’t think you would want to sit through the whole thing again, and I’ll be free after that—and I thought if you could come down a little after eleven, there’d be more time and—maybe we could go off somewhere and talk.”
“At what time shall I come?”
“About a quarter after eleven?—Is that all right?”
“Yes, I’ll be there. And . . . and I’d just like to say about yesterday . . . about the way I——”
“Well, that’s all right,” she interrupted him, laughing. “You get up now and do what I told you to do, and you’ll feel better.”
He felt immensely better already, still dizzy and still queasy in the flesh, but with a tremendous lift and relief of the whole spirit, and he felt more hopeful of his life when he went downstairs.
The performance was over and the theatre empty when he got to it that night. She was waiting for him in the lobby. They shook hands with a sense of formal constraint, and started backstage through the corridor. The stage hands had almost finished with their work, a few men were still about, but there was only a single light burning on the stage, a very big, bright one which cast a great light, but which gave to the shadows all around, in the vaulted spaces and the depths behind, the mysterious distance of a shadowy and unexplored dominion.
