Thomas Wolfe, page 230
Almost all the performers had departed. One of them had paused for a moment at the bulletin board and was scanning the announcements. As they started up the stairs, two more came swiftly down; all spoke quick greetings as they passed and then hurried away, with the look of people who have finished their work. Upstairs, all was silent and deserted. She got out her key and unlocked the door of her own room, and they went in. The sound they made was the sound that people make when they are entering an empty place.
“Look,” she said, “I thought I’d get my coat and hat and we could go uptown—to a Childs restaurant, or some place like that. I’m simply starved. I had only time to get a sandwich before the show, and I’ve been going ever since.”
She put her purse down on the table and turned to get her coat off the hook upon the wall.
“I’d like to say—” he began.
“I’ll only be a moment,” she said quickly. “We can get started then.”
He stopped her as she started to move away, and said:
“I’d like to tell you about yesterday.”
The woman turned to him and took him by the hands.
“Listen,” she said, “there is nothing to tell between you and me. There is nothing to explain. When I saw you on the boat I knew that I had always known you, and it has been the same way ever since. When I got your letter—” he winced, and she went on quickly—“when I saw the writing on the letter, I knew it was from you. I knew again that I had found you and that I had always known you, and that it would always be the same. Yesterday, when I came to meet you, when I saw you, and you were walking away, the thought came to me you were leaving me. It was as if a knife had been turned and twisted in the heart, and then you turned, and you were there again, and then we were together and there were just you and I. And that’s the way it is, and I have always known you, and we are together. There’s nothing to explain.”
A heavy door had slammed below, and for a moment there was the lean and lonely sound of footsteps walking away upon an empty pavement. Then there was nothing, just the hushed, still silence in the house. They stood there, holding each other by the hands, as they had done the day before, and this time there was nothing more to say, as if that stormy meeting of the day before had somehow erased, wiped out for each of them, all confusion, all constraint, the need of any further explanation. They stood there with held hands and looked each other in the eye, and knew that there was nothing more to say.
Then they came together and he put his arms around her and she put her arms around his neck and they kissed each other on the mouth.
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23
ESTHER’S HOUSE
Mrs. Jack lived in a house on the West side, between West End Avenue and the river. At night she could hear the boats blowing in the river, and she could hear the ships putting out to sea. It was a five-story building of that familiar reddish brownstone which is now disappearing, but of which there were even then many miles left in the city. The material is ugly, but it is ugly with an evocative memory that is much more poignant and wonderful than most things that are considered beautiful. For in these ugly and desolate blocks of buildings of which the old New York was made, are the memories of primitive America, of “1887,” of “1893,” of “1904,”—that lost time which is more remote, more strange, and, to some men, more beautiful, than the Middle Ages—and the sounds of those times are more lost than Persepolis.
But the house in which Mrs. Jack lived was not ugly. It had an elegant and luxurious look. It was not lumpy and involved, with deep and dull indentures, or stiff, harsh, and angular, as many of these structures are. The front was flat, plain, and delicate-looking, and to the left of the entry door there was one big, gleaming window of sheeted glass, in which there was always set an enormous bottle. The bottle was of green, delicate texture, so thin that it trembled to the touch, and gave forth a quivering, crystalline resonance.
Whether this ornament had been set there deliberately by the expert and subtle theatricalism of its owner, or whether the magic intuition of her taste, which was no less certain, but less conscious, accounted for it, it is impossible to say, but it remained in the memory forever after. That flat and elegant façade, set with its one great sheet of glass and its immense green bottle, was like a picture of its owner’s talent, which was delicate, opulent, and pure.
Before this house Monk now stopped. He had come uptown by the subway; with eager stride, he had walked down one of the streets that lead to the river, and walked along the Drive past Mrs. Jack’s street, trying to guess which house was hers. Then he had made a complete circuit of the block, and now he was here before her house. He mounted a step or two, rang the bell, and in a moment a young Irish woman in maid’s dress opened the inner door and let him in. He asked the girl if Mrs. Jack was there, told her his name, and in a thick, rich voice she said he was expected, and would he come with her.
The entrance hall was large, darkly paneled, and floored with a walnut tiling. Before he followed the girl upstairs he looked through a door she had left open and caught a momentary glimpse of young Irish maids around a table, and a big policeman with his coat off. They turned flushed and merry faces on him for a moment, there was a burst of music from a phonograph, the door was closed. Then he mounted the broad, dark stairs behind the girl.
The house was somewhat narrowly built, but it was deep. There was just space for one big, nobly-proportioned room across its width; those big rooms ran back three deep, there was an air of spaciousness and calm; and the lovely and certain touch of the woman, which was at once delicate and immensely strong, was everywhere in the house.
The furniture was old, and of a dozen different styles and periods. There were chairs, tables, chests of drawers marked with the incomparable clean simpleness of colonial America, there was a great chest from fourteenth-century Italy, there was a piece of old green Chinese silk upon the mantel, and a little green figure of one of the lovely and compassionate goddesses of infinite mercy, there were magnificent drinking glasses from Vienna, there were cupboards from the farmhouses of the Pennsylvania Dutch, and cabinets with the gay, crude little figures of the Bavarian peasants, there were wonderful knives and forks and spoons, heavy and plain, from eighteenth-century England.
There was this great variety of times and fashions, and yet the result was not a hodgepodge of ill-assorted relics, but a living unity. These things fused warmly and beautifully into the unity of the house; they had been chosen slowly, at many different times and places, because they were beautiful and useful, and because she had known they were right for her house. Everything in the house seemed to have been put there to give joy and comfort to people, nothing was there simply as a museum piece to be stared at, everything was in use, and everywhere there was the sense of tranquil dignity, ease, and abundance.
The impression they gave, which would certainly have been justified, was that no one who ate or drank here ever went away hungry or thirsty. The house was one of the most hospitable and abundant places in the world. One of the finest elements in the Jewish character is its sensuous love of richness and abundance: the Jew hates what is savorless and stingy in life, he will not stand for bad food or dreary discomfort, he will not make jokes about them, or feel it a fine thing to cheat the senses. He feels there is something mean and degraded about poor living, he loves warmth and opulence, and he is right.
This wonderful house, therefore, was one of the finest places in the world. Although modest in size and appearance, it was certainly unlikely that anything to approach its warmth and beauty could have been found among the great establishments of England, where people have dozens of ancient rooms and scores of servants, but rub their raw, chapped hands over Brussels sprouts and mutton, and huddle miserably over half-pint fires; nor in France, where things are too gilt and brittle; nor in Germany, where there is an immensely high, but immensely heavy, standard of good living.
American joy is the sharpest and most exultant joy on earth: a house like this is set in a magical ether, and the belief in success and golden wealth and glory touches everything. So does it seem to a young man. For him, it is much better to know rich people than to be rich himself; for youth, it is not wealth but the thought of wealth that is wonderful. The youth does not want money: he wants to be invited to the homes of rich people and to eat rich dinners, he wants to know wealthy and beautiful women, and to have them love him, and he fancies that just as their clothes, their stockings, all their garments are of the finest and rarest textures, so the texture of their flesh, the spittle of their mouths, the hair of their heads, and all their combining sinews, tissues, and ligaments are fairer and finer than those of poorer people.
Monk had never seen the inside of such a house as this one, nor was he accustomed to its subtle, rather worn quality and flavor, and at first he was disappointed. He had formed lavish notions of Mrs. Jack’s wealth. He had named sums to himself since the man on the boat had said she was “immensely wealthy”—he had thought of thirty or forty million dollars, and he had expected the house to be something immense and brilliant. Now it seemed to him old and a little shabby, but it also seemed friendly and comfortable. He was no longer afraid and awed by it as he had been before entering.
As he turned to ascend the second flight of stairs he had a moment’s glimpse of the living room, with its worn and friendly look, and of low bookshelves all around the walls. There were hundreds, thousands of books, but they did not have the stiff-bound, sumptuous look of the unread treasures in the houses of rich, unlettered people. The books had the warm, worn smell and coloring of books which have been read and handled.
Then, more briskly and confidently, he went up after the maid, and they passed by bedrooms, spacious and bright, with great four-poster beds and thick quiltings; and finally, at the top of the house, they came to the little room which Mrs. Jack used as a workshop. The door was partly open, they went in, and Mrs. Jack, very businesslike and earnest, was leaning over her drawing table at work, and with one trim foot crossed jauntily before the other. She looked up as they entered. Monk was momentarily shocked because she was wearing horn-rimmed spectacles. They gave her small, delicate face a motherly appearance, and she peered at him comically over the top of the lenses, calling out in cheerful voice:
“There you are, young fellow! Come in!”
Then with a quick, nervous movement of her small hand she removed the spectacles, put them on the table, and came around to greet him. At once, now, she was the warm little creature he remembered. Her tender face glowed with its warm color, only, now, she became suddenly a little formal and embarrassed, she shook hands somewhat nervously and stiffly, and said: “Hello, Mr. Webber. How are you—hah?” in a somewhat cracked, shrill, and impatient city voice. Then she stood rapidly slipping the ring on and off her finger with the nervous and impatient movement that worried and somewhat annoyed him. “Would you like to have some tea—hah?” she said again in her somewhat protesting tone, and when he said “Yes,” she said, “All right, Katy bring us some tea.” The girl went out and closed the door.
“Well, Mr. Webber,” said Mrs. Jack, still slipping the ring on and off, “this is my little room where I do my work. How do you like it—hah?”
He said that he thought it was a nice room, and added lamely, “It must be a fine place to work in.”
“Oh,” she said earnestly, “it’s the most wonderful place you ever heard of. It’s simply marvelous,” she added solemnly. “You get the most wonderful light here all day long, but now they’re going to ruin it all,” she said, gesturing out the window where the gaunt framework of a large building was being erected. “They’re putting up one of those big apartment houses, and it’s simply going to smother us. Isn’t it a shame?” she went on indignantly. “We’ve lived here for years, and now they’re trying to drive us out.”
“Who is?”
“Oh, these apartment house people. They want to tear down this whole block and put up one of those awful places. In the end I suppose they’ll drive us out.”
“How can they do that? Don’t you own the place?”
“Oh yes, we own it, but what can you do about it if they want to force you out? They’ll put up big buildings all around you, they’ll shut out all light and air—they’ll simply smother you. Do you think people have any right to do things like that?” she burst out with her plain, kind indignation, which with her jolly, wholesome, and indignantly flushed little face was tremendously appealing, and gave people a tender and humorous feeling towards her, even when she protested angrily. “Don’t you think it’s dreadful—hah?”
“It’s too bad, it looks like a nice house.”
“Oh, God, it’s a wonderful house!” she said earnestly. “It is the most magnificent place you ever saw. Some day I want you to see it all—I’ll show you all around. When we leave this place I’m going into mourning.”
“Well, I hope you’ll never have to.”
“Oh, we’ll have to,” she said gravely and sadly. “That’s New York. Nothing lasts here. . . . The other day I went by the house where I lived for a time as a girl. It’s the only house left on the street—all around it are these enormous buildings now. God, it was like a dream! You know how time makes you feel? It’s as if you’ve lived forever or only five minutes, you don’t know which—there’s something strange and terrible about it. I got frightened and gazooky,” she said comically.
“What’s gazooky?”
“You know—they way you feel when you are looking down from a high building. . . . I must have lived in that house a year or two. It was after my father died, and I was staying with my uncle. He was an enormous man, he weighed over three hundred pounds, and God!—how he loved to eat! You would have adored him. The very best was just about good enough for that fellow!” As she uttered these words her tender and delicate face was glowing with humor, and she emphasized the words by almost whispering them, and by pressing the thumb and forefinger of her strong little hand together and gesturing in a way that showed she meant something of almost superhuman excellence by “the very best.” “Gee! he was a grand fellow! The doctors said he kept alive fifteen years longer by sticking to Scotch highballs. He used to start about eight o’clock in the morning and kept it up all day. You never saw anything like it in your whole life—the amount of liquor that fellow could consume. You just wouldn’t believe it possible. And he was so smart—that was the strangest thing, it didn’t seem to make any difference to his work. He used to be Police Commissioner, he was one of the best they ever had. He was great friends with Roosevelt, and Mr. Roosevelt used to come there to that house to see him. . . . God! it all seems so long ago, and yet I remember it all so well—I feel just like something in the museum,” she went on, laughing. “One night he took me to the opera, I must have been about sixteen, and God! I felt so proud to be with him! It was one of those operas of Wagner’s, and you know how everybody gets killed in them, and we were coming up the aisle just before the end and Uncle Bob came booming out, ‘They’re all dead except the orchestra!’” Here her voice imitated the full, booming quality of the enormous man in such a way that one saw him vividly. “God! I though they’d have to stop the show! You could hear him all over the place, his voice carried everywhere.”
She paused, animated, laughing, flushed with the eagerness of her story. She paused by the river of life and time. And for a moment Monk had a blazing vision of lost time, he heard the strange, sad music that time makes. For here, delivered unto the punctual and unshadowed minutes, was this warm, breathing flesh stored with the memories of a lost world and the ancient days. The ghosts of the forgotten hours now moved about her, and the strange brown light of memory shed its unearthly glow upon the moment’s actual light. A vision of old prints and readings, a potent and evocative memory of a past Monk had not seen but which was mixed with his blood like the foods of the earth he lived on flashed through his spirit its vivid and unspeakable sorrow.
He saw the moments of lost time, he felt the pang of hunger and intolerable regret that all lost time, and the thought of all the life that has been lived upon the earth, and that we have never seen, awakes in us. He heard the myriad sounds of the forgotten feet, the speech and movement of the tongueless dead, the vanished clatter of hoof and tire—things lost, and lost forever. And he saw forgotten fume-flaws of soft smoke about Manhattan, the vanished cleavings of bright ships upon the endless waters, the forest of masts about the magic island, the grave faces of the derbied men who, caught in some casual moment of a nameless day by an old camera, paused, in their broken stride, in queer and incompleted gestures, as they moved out of time across the Bridge.
All these had cast their shadows on this delicate and rosy-hued face, all these had left their echoes in her memory, and she stood here now, a child, a woman, a phantom, and a living being—the fleshly unity that bound him suddenly to the ghostly past, a miracle of deathling loveliness among great spires and ramparts, a jewel found by chance upon the seas, a part of the enormous wistfulness and loneliness of America, where all men wander and are sick for home, where all things change but change itself, where even the memory and relic of love falls to the wrecker’s hammer, gapes for a moment like a ruined wall upon the earth’s blind eye, and then is drawn under and erased by the unrelenting tides of change and movement.
Mrs. Esther Jack was fair; she was fair, she had the flower face; it was October, nineteen twenty-five, and dark time was flowing by her like a river.
Shall we save one face from the million faces? Shall we keep one moment from the adyts of lost time? Was no love living in the wilderness, and was there nothing but the snarl and jungle of the streets, the rasp and driven fury of the town? No love? Was no love living in the wilderness, and was there nothing but unceasing dying and begetting, birth, growth, pollution, and the cat’s great snarl for blood and honey? Was there no love?
