Thomas Wolfe, page 233
“Well, haven’t you got one?”
“No, nothing that’s really good enough. Of course, that was a lovely room I had at home. It faced north, and the light was always good. But now those wretched people have come along and built a big apartment house right in our backyard. So it has become too dark to work in now, and, besides, it’s so hard to work at home. You’re always being interrupted—you’re always having to answer the phone, talk to one of the maids, or one of the family is always coming in.”
“What’s wrong with the room you’ve got at the theatre?”
“Oh, that never was intended as a place to work. It was just a room they had left over where they used to hang costumes they didn’t need any longer. They let me have it because I had to have some place to work and that was all there was. But it’s very difficult to work there, and it’s getting worse all the time. Some of the girls leave their things in there and are always coming in and out. Besides, the light is very bad. . . . Anyway, now that I’m getting all these other jobs to do outside, I really need a place—some place more uptown so that I will not be so far away from all these places where I have to go.”
This was probably true. At any rate, she kept referring to her need of a new working place every day or two when they would meet. Finally, one day she met him in a state of jubilant excitement.
“I’ve a place,” she cried at once, even as she was pulling off her gloves, and before she sat down. “I’ve been looking around all morning—most of them were too depressing.”
“You like this one?”
“It’s simply wonderful,” cried Mrs. Jack, with an air of astounded revelation. “In all your life you’ve never thought of such a place. It’s up at the top of an old house,” she went on. “The kind of old house that I used to live in when I was a child. Only this one is all rickety and gone to seed. You think the steps are going to give way on you, and it’s very dirty. I don’t know, the whole place is empty now, but it looks as if it’s had a lot of sweatshops in it. But it’s been a beautiful house,” she cried, “a noble house. And I’ve taken the whole floor.”
“A whole floor!” he exclaimed.
“The whole thing!” she gleefully affirmed. “In all of your life you’ve never seen such space. There’s a place that you can spread yourself around in.”
“Yes—but it must cost a fortune.”
“Thirty dollars a month,” she said triumphantly.
“What!”
“Thirty—dollars—a—month!” Mrs. Jack said slowly and impressively, and then, seeing a look of surprise and disbelief on his face, she went on quickly, “You see it is not fixed up at all. It’s really very much run down and out of repair, and I suppose they are glad enough to rent it at any price. But, oh!” she cried rapturously, “Such noble space! Such wonderful light! Just wait until you see it!”
She was so eager to show him her great find that she could scarcely wait until he had finished with his lunch, and she seemed barely to touch hers. And he, too, stirred by her description and the elation of her discovery, felt a sharp excitement. After lunch they got up from their chairs immediately and went around to the new place.
It was an old four-story house on Waverly Place that had obviously fallen on evil days. One mounted from the street by a rusty flight of steps. On the first floor as one entered there was a dingy-looking tailor shop. The hall stood open to the winds, the door having been wrenched from its fastening and hanging by one hinge. Then one went up a flight of stairs that was so old and decrepit that it leaned crazily to one side as if its underpinning on that side was giving way. The stairs creaked heavily as one stepped on them, and the old rail sagged—it was as loose as an old tooth.
Upstairs the place was dark and completely deserted. The only illumination was provided by a gas jet in the narrow hallway, which was kept burning night and day. In the walls along the stairs were niches, hollowed in the plastering; they reminded her of a more prosperous and gracious day for the old house, when marble busts and statues had been stationed here. As they mounted they opened a door or two and looked in. The rooms were large and spacious, but they were very dirty and in a pitiable state of dilapidation. Apparently they had been used as work rooms of some sort, for there was a great tangle of electric wiring from the ceiling, and piles of rubbish on the bare floors, cardboard boxes, paper, bits of litter. Thus far the prospect was not very hopeful.
At length, up those steep, winding stairs, they reached the top floor. They came up to a little landing, and stood before a door. The door was just a crude nailed-together kind of gate. It was fastened by a padlock and a bolted hinge. Mrs. Jack fumbled in her purse, produced a key, unlocked the door, and pushed it open. They went in.
The room they entered was really a discovery. Like all the others they had seen, the place was very dirty, but it occupied the whole floor. Like all the others, this room too had been used apparently as a kind of factory: there was again a great tangle of electric wiring on the ceiling, and the fixtures for a great many electric lights. An old, roughly-made, dilapidated-looking table had been left in the room in a good deal of rubbish which she had already swept up into a pile. In the middle of the room there was a skylight opening from the roof, and the ceilings sloped at either end, so that although there was great space and ample standing room in the central portion, one had to stoop a little as he approached the ends. The old whitewashed walls were dirty and in places pieces of plaster had been knocked out, leaving visible strips of dry brown plastering and dry lathing—the body and bones of the old house. The walls also bulged outward in places, and the bare wooden floor sagged and creaked as one walked across it. The whole place had the sag and lean of a old house, the worn modeling of time from which all sharp new edges and all solid holds have been worn away.
She turned proudly and stood looking at him with a bright and hopeful smile, as if to say: “There, now. What did I tell you? Isn’t it fine?”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, but he was conscious at first of a feeling of disappointment. He had expected something grander and better kept, and for a moment the shabby dilapidation of the whole place gave him a feeling of distress. Then he began to walk back and forth across the length of the whole floor: the great space of the room and the sense it gave him of unimpeded and expansive movement delighted him. After the cramped confinement of his own small room, and all the cramped confinements of the city, where space had become the last and dearest luxury, this delighted him. The old floor gave and creaked precariously, and in one place it was so loose and giving that it seemed unsafe. But the sense of release, of quietness, and of privacy was wonderful.
She watched him anxiously as he walked up and down:
“Do you like it? Of course, you have to stoop there at the end. But isn’t it a wonderful room? The space is so grand. And the light!” she cried. “Isn’t the light marvelous? It’s such a perfect light to work by. Don’t you think it’s grand?”
Through the skylight over her, the light came down, soft, silent, steady, unperturbed; the brutal stultification of the streets, the unending tumults of the city were here stilled; and the effect upon his soul was like that quality of light itself, an effect of silence and of peace and of asylumage.
She was talking now, quickly and enthusiastically as she moved around, already full of busy plans of renovation:
“Of course, it’s very dirty. . . . It’s simply filthy! But I’m having a man in tomorrow to wash the windows and to scrub the floors. And I’m sending some things down from the house—my drawing table and my instruments, an old couch that we’ve no use for, and some chairs. You’ve no idea what a difference it will make when it looks clean and has a few things in it. . . . I thought I’d put my drawing table here? Below this light? Don’t you think so?” She stood beneath the light and gestured to him. The strong, soft radiance came down from above and shone upon her fresh and ruddy face, so full of eagerness and hope, and for a moment he turned away, suddenly and deeply moved, he did not know why.
When they went out she locked the door behind her, and for a moment, before she put the key away into her purse, she shook it in his face with a gleeful and exultant little movement, which plainly said, “This thing is ours.”
Then slowly, carefully, holding each other by the hand, as people unaccustomed do, they started down those old winding stairs. The floor treads creaked and sagged below their feet, and behind them in the dark there was a sound of a single drop of water that gathered, swelled, developed, dropped, in its steady, punctual monotone, like the sound of silence in the old house of life, alone.
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25
A NEW WORLD
A miraculous change had been effected in Monk’s life, and, as so often happens, he was scarcely aware at first that it had come. He did not see at first the meaning that Esther had for him. It was not merely the fact of romantic conquest that had wrought the change: in its essential values it was probably this fact least of all. Much more than this, it was the knowledge that for the first time in his whole life he mattered deeply, earnestly, to someone else.
Without being quite aware of it, this wonderful fact had an almost immediate effect on him. He was still likely to be crotchety, still too quick to take offense at a slight, whether real or imagined, still walking around with a chip on his shoulder daring someone to knock it off—but the chip was not so large now, nor so perilously tilted. He had a sense of inner security, of self-belief, that he had not had before. And he believed in himself because someone else believed in him. His war against the world was somewhat abated because his own war with himself was reconciled. As for all the minor grievances and annoyances, the surliness of nincompoops and the stupidity of fools, the tissue of paltry intrigues, envies, venoms, gossips, rumors, and petty politics that poisoned the life of the School for Utility Cultures, where he worked, and the little flicks and darts of daily life that had at first whipped his spirit into lacerated scorn—all this had now slipped back into its proper place. He saw them as the trivialities they were, if not with equanimity, at least more temperately, in their true proportion.
The woman had, in fact, begun to give a kind of frame, design, and purpose to his life that it had never had before. Although he did not know it at the time, she had herself become a kind of goal and purpose in his life, a kind of target at which his tremendous energies, so long exploded, scattered, misdirected, or diffused into thin air, could now be aimed. It would not be true to say that he actually “lived” for the times when he would meet her. As a matter of fact, his life in between these times now passed more evenly, more temperately, and with a more proportionate judgment than it had done before. It was as if all the elements in his life had suddenly begun to take on the proportionate form, the balance in the distance, of a picture. He saw her now three or four times a week, but the sense of his contact with her life was daily, constant, and united.
She called him up every morning, usually before he was out of bed. The sound of her quick, bright voice, itself already so full of life, morning, and of business, awoke in him a healthy desire to be up and at his work, for he was now writing furiously every moment he could snatch from his duties at the school. She would always be full of her plans and projects for the day—the places where she had to be, the appointments that she had to meet, the work she had to do. If she was going to be in his “part of town” at lunch time, they would have lunch together; and since she loved the work she did, she always brought to these meetings a sense of healthy energy, of happy activity, of the movement, the excitement, the vitality of the world itself. Occasionally they would meet for dinner in the evening, but more often he would meet her later, after the performance. He would make the long, exciting drive into the East Side alone. Then they would leave the darkened theatre and come uptown together, usually stopping off at a Childs restaurant in a quiet neighborhood—their favorite one was on Fifth Avenue just above Madison Square—for a midnight lunch and an hour of talk together.
It was not merely that he was in love with her. In addition to that, through his association with her it seemed to him that now at last he had begun to “know” the city. For, in some curious way, the woman had come to represent “the city” to him. To him she was the city he had longed to know. Hers was not the city of the homeless wanderer, the city of the wretched, futile people living in the rooms of little cheap hotels, the city of the lost boy and the stranger looking at a million lights, the terrible, lonely, empty city of no doors, and of the homeless, thronging ways. Hers was the city of the native, and now it seemed to him that he was “in.”
She was the city’s daughter just as he had been the product of the town. The city’s ways were not strange ways to her, nor were its crowded highways lonely ones, nor were its tongues and faces to her hard and cold and new. Rather, the city was the familiar neighborhood of her whole life—the yard in which she played when she was young, the place where she had gone to school, the “different parts of town” where she had lived, grown up, been married, moved to—and all of it was a province as warm, as friendly, as familiar, as were ever the cribbed horizons of a little town.
The woman really loved the city. She loved it not with ostentatious show, self-consciously; nor coldly, like feeble people who show off an old house which their ancestors built and, unable to make a real life in the world they have, trump up a false one of the world which they have lost. No, for Mrs. Jack the city was her living tenement; it was her field, her pasture, and her farm; and she loved it so because she was herself so much a part of it, because she knew and understood it so, because it was the stage and setting of her own life and work.
For her, the city was a living, breathing, struggling, hoping, fearing, hating, loving, and desiring universe of life. It was the most human place on earth because it had in it the most “humanity,” the most American because it had in it the most Americans. All the grandeur and the misery; the high aspiration and the base desires; the noble work and the ignoble strivings for mean ends; the terror, violence, and brute corruption, and the innocence, the hope, the dreaming, and the loveliness; the huge accomplishment and a constant, raw unfinish of things still doing, never ended, getting done—all of it was here, and so to her the city was America. And in all of this, of course, because this vision and this understanding was so healthy, sound, and true, Mrs. Jack was right.
She carried this sense of health, of life, of work, of human understanding with her everywhere she went; it radiated from her like a strong and sweet vitality of happiness. It was as if, Antæuslike, Mrs. Jack derived her own strength, her own health, her own energy of work, of wanting, and of business, that radiated from her rosy face, that was legible in every movement of her energetic figure, that was described in every small, brisk step, in every gesture, from her constant, living contact with the bones and body of her native earth—which was that swarming and immortal rock on which she trod.
She brought this grand exhilaration of the city’s life to all the meetings that she had with him. There on the parapets of furious noon, upon these mounting pinnacles of day, these two would meet, and instantly for him it would be as if the huge, sweet cargo of the morning had been borne in upon him too. A dozen tales of life and business would form upon the lips of this excited voyager, and suddenly it would seem to him that a vast and moving pageantry, the whole imperial chronicle of day, was there.
She had been “here and there” about the town. At nine o’clock she had been at work among the tailors in the garment district, where she was employed two mornings in the week to make designs. Even as she spoke, the whole scene spread before his eyes—the enormous buildings of the district, the huge “lofts,” the great warehouse room, with its tables and its bolts of cloth, the coarse, clean smell of wool, the fitting rooms, and cutting rooms, with the tailors sitting cross-legged on the tables. “In all your life you’ve never seen such skill as these men have! The way they use their hands! It’s all so swift, so sure, so delicate—it’s—somehow it makes you think of some great orchestra!—But God!” suddenly her shoulders shook, her face turned crimson—“The way it smells! Sometimes I have to hang my neck out of the window!”
At half-past ten she had been to the costume fitter’s. Here was the world backstage again, the life of the performers: “I got Mary Morgan fitted up. She’s going to look lovely. The poor kid!” Suddenly her face was earnest and indignant, full of pity and concern: “She has been out of a job for almost a year. This is the first work that she has had to do! And she was so frightened, so ashamed when she came in. She pulled me by the arm and got me off into a corner and told me her underwear was simply in rags. She said, ‘I simply can’t let these people see me as I am, I’ll drop dead if they do. What am I going to do?’ The poor kid was almost crying. I gave her some money and told her to go out and buy herself some decent things. Honestly! if somebody had handed her the moon upon a silver platter she couldn’t have been half so happy! She threw her arms around me and hugged me, and said, ‘When you die and go to heaven they’ll have to turn the Holy Mother out and give you the best room in the house.’ She’s a Catholic,” said Mrs. Jack and laughed, but then her face grew earnest in its indignation, and she said: “Well, isn’t it a shame! A kid like that pounding pavements for eight months until her shoes had holes in them, and her clothing is of rags! And God knows what she has lived on, how she has kept from starving! And then rehearsing her three weeks without a cent of pay! And if the show is a flop, she gets nothing and is out upon the street again, looking for a job! . . . But gee! You should have seen her when we fitted her! She was lovely! There’s a girl for you, young fellow!” cried Mrs. Jack, with twinkling eyes. “You should have seen her this morning when she got that dress on! She would have knocked your eye out! She’s got the most beautiful arms and shoulders I have ever seen. She’s playing the part of a society girl in this play——”
