Thomas Wolfe, page 237
“What’s that?” my father said.
“The love of a noble woman and the happy voices of the little ones.”
“Now I can smell the ham,” my father said in a cynical tone. “Why, Dick, they could not have kept you off the stage with a regiment of infantry. You sound like all the actors that ever lived.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Brandell with an abrupt laugh, “you’re right. I was talking like an actor.” He bent forward and stared into the mirror of his dressing table. “An actor! Nothing but an actor! ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life—and thou no breath at all?’”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Dick,” my father said. “You’ve got plenty of breath—I’ve never known you to run short of it.”
“Only an actor!” cried Mr. Brandell, staring into the mirror. “A paltry, posturing, vain, vile, conceited rogue of an actor! An actor—a man who lies and does not know he lies, a fellow who speaks words that better men have written for him, a reader of mash notes from shop girls and the stage-struck wives of grocery clerks, a seducer of easy women, a fellow who listens to the tones of his own voice, a fellow who could not go into the butcher’s to buy his dog a bone without wondering what appearance he was making, a man who cannot even pass the time of day without acting—an actor! Why, by God, Joe!” he cried, turning to my father, “when I look into the glass and see my face I hate the sight of it.”
“Where’s that ham?” said Daddy, sniffing about the place.
“An actor!” Mr. Brandell said again. “A fellow who has played so many parts that he can no longer play his own! A man who has imitated so many feelings that he no longer has any of his own! Why, Joe!” he said, in a whispering voice, “do you know that when the news came to me that my own mother was dead, I had a moment—yes, I think I really had a moment—of genuine sorrow. Then I ran to look at my face in the mirror, and I cursed because I was not on the stage where I could show it to an audience. An actor! A fellow who has made so many faces he no longer knows his own—a collection of false faces! . . . What would you like, my dear?” he said to me ironically, “Hamlet?”—instantly he looked the part. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?”—here his face went through two marvelous transformations: one moment he was a benevolent-looking gentleman, and the next the deformed and horrible-looking monster. “Richelieu?”—all at once he looked like a crafty and sinister old man. “Beau Brummel?”—he was young, debonair, arrogant, and a fop. “The Duke of Gloucester?”—and in a moment he had transformed himself into the cruel and pitiless villain he was to portray that night.
It was uncanny and fascinating; and there was something horrible in it, too. It was as if he was possessed by a powerful and fluent energy which had all been fed into this wonderful and ruinous gift of mimicry—a gift which may have, as he said, destroyed and devoured his proper self, since one got fleeting and haunting glimpses between these transformations of a man—a sense, an intuition, rather than a memory, of what the man was like and looked like—a sense of a haunted, lost, and lonely spirit which looked out with an insistent, mournful, and speechless immutability through all the hundred changes of his mask.
It seemed to me there was a real despair, a real grief, in Mr. Brandell. I think he had been tormented, like my father, by the eternal enigma of the theatre: its almost impossible grandeur and magnificence, its poetry and its magic which are like nothing else on earth; and the charlatanism and cheapness with which it corrupts its people. Richard Brandell was not only the greatest actor I have ever seen upon the stage, he was also a man of the highest quality. He possessed almost every gift a great actor should possess. And yet his spirit was disfigured as if by an ineradicable taint—a taint which he felt and recognized, as a man might recognize the action of a deadly poison in his blood without being able either to cure or control it.
He had an astounding repertory of plays which ranged all the way from the great music of Hamlet to grotesque and melodramatic trash which he had commissioned some hired hack to write for him, and he would use his great powers in these parts with as much passion and energy as he used in his wonderful portrayals of Iago, Gloucester, or Macbeth. Like most men who are conscious of something false and corrupt in them, he had a kind of Byronic scorn and self-contempt. He was constantly discovering that what he thought had been a deep and honest feeling was only the posturings of his own vanity, a kind of intoxication of self-love, an immense romantic satisfaction at the spectacle of himself having such a feeling; and while his soul twisted about in shame, he would turn and mock and jeer himself and his fellow actors bitterly. Thus he would corner one of them so that he could not escape, and bear down upon him relentlessly:
“Oh, please let me tell you all about myself. Let’s just sit right down and have a good, long talk all about myself. I can see by the look in your eye that you are just dying to hear, but you’re too polite to ask. I know you’d love to hear me talk about myself. Of course, you have nothing to say about yourself, have you?” he would sneer. “Oh, dear no! You’re much too modest! But what shall it be now? What do you most want to hear about first? Would you like to hear about the house I had in Lima, Ohio? Or would you rather hear of Cairo, Illinois? I had them hanging to the edges of their seats there, you know. It was marvelous, old boy! Such an ovation! They stood and cheered for ten minutes! Women hurled flowers at me, strong men broke down and wept. Are you interested? I can see you are! I can tell by that eager look in your eye! Now do let me tell you some more. Don’t you want to hear about the women? My dear fellow, they’re mad about me! I had six notes in the mail this morning, three from Boston heiresses and two from the wives of prominent feed and hay merchants in Minnesota. . . . But I must tell you about the house I had in Cairo, Illinois. . . . I was playing in Hamlet that night. It’s a good part, old boy—a little old-fashioned maybe, but I fixed that: I had to write a few of the speeches over here and there, but no one knew the difference. I made up some marvelous business for some of the scenes—absolutely marvelous! And my boy, they loved me! They adored me! I had sixteen calls at the end of the third act—they wouldn’t let me go, old man; they kept calling me back—until finally I simply had to say a few well-chosen words. Of course, I hated to do it, old boy—you can imagine how I hated it—after all, the play’s the thing, isn’t it? We’re not there to get applause for ourselves, are we? Oh, dear no!” he sneered. “But do let me tell you what I said to them in Cairo. I can see you are burning up to hear!”
That night was the last time Mr. Brandell ever saw my father. Just before we left he turned to me, took me by the hand, and said very simply and earnestly: “Esther, earn your living in the sweat of your brow, if you have to; go down on your hands and knees and scrub floors, if you have to; eat your bread in sorrow, if you have to—but promise me you will never attempt to go on the stage.”
“I have already made her promise that,” my father said.
“Is she as good as she’s pretty? Is she smart?” said Mr. Brandell, still holding my hand and looking at me.
“She’s the smartest girl that ever lived,” my father said. “She’s so smart she should have been my son.”
“And what is she going to do?” said Mr. Brandell, still looking at me.
“She’s going to do what I could never do,” my father said. He lifted his great hands before him and shook them suddenly in a gesture of baffled desperation. “She’s going to take hold of something!” Then he took my hands in his and said: “Not to want the whole earth, and to get nothing! Not to want to do everything, and to do nothing! Not to waste her life dreaming about India when India is around her here and now! Not to go mad thinking of a million lives, wanting the experience of a million people, when everything she has is in the life she’s got! Not to be a fool, tortured with hunger and thirst when the whole earth is groaning with its plenty. . . . My dear child,” my father cried, “you are so good, so beautiful, and so gifted, and I love you so much! I want you to be happy and to have a wonderful life.” He spoke these words with such simple and urgent feeling that all the strength and power in him seemed to go out through his great hands to me, as if all of the energy of his life had been put into his wish.
“Why, Dick,” he said to Mr. Brandell, “this child was born into the world with more wisdom than either of us will ever have. She can go into the Park and come back with a dozen kinds of leaves and study them for days. And when she gets through she will know all about them. She knows their size, their shape and color—she knows every marking on them, she can draw them from memory. Could you draw a leaf, Dick? Do you know the pattern and design of a single leaf? Why, I have looked at forests, I have walked through woods and gone across the continent in trains, I have stared the eyes out of my head trying to swallow up the whole earth at a glance—and I hardly know one leaf from another. I could not draw a leaf from memory if my life depended on it. And she can go out on the street and tell you later what clothes the people wore, and what kind of people wore them. Can you remember anyone you passed by on the street today? I walk the streets, I see the crowds, I look at a million faces until my brain goes blind and dizzy with all that I have seen, and later all the faces swim and bob about like corks in water. I can’t tell one from the other, I see a million faces and I can’t remember one. But she sees one and remembers a million. That’s the thing, Dick. If I were young again I’d try to live like that: I’d try to see a forest in a leaf, the whole earth in a single face.”
“Why, Esther,” Mr. Brandell said. “Have you discovered a new country? How does one get to this wonderful place where you live?”
“Well, I tell you, Mr. Brandell,” I said. “It’s easy. You just walk out in the street and look around and there you are.”
“There you are!” Mr. Brandell said. “Why, my dear child, I have been walking out and looking around for almost fifty years, and the more I walk and look, the less I see that I care to look at. What are these wonderful sights that you have found?”
“Well, Mr. Brandell,” I said, “sometimes it’s a leaf, and sometimes it’s the pocket of a coat, and sometimes it’s a button or a coin, and sometimes it’s an old hat, or an old shoe on the floor. Sometimes it’s a tobacco store, the cigars tied up in bundles on the counter, and all of the jars where they keep the pipe tobacco, and the wonderful dark smell of the place. Sometimes it’s a little boy, and sometimes it’s a girl looking out a window, and sometimes it’s an old woman with a funny hat. Sometimes it’s the color of an ice wagon, and sometimes the color of an old brick wall, and sometimes a cat creeping along the backyard fence. Sometimes it’s the feet of the men on the rail when you pass a saloon, and the sawdust floors, and the sound of their voices, and that wonderful smell you get of beer and orange peel and Angostura bitters. Sometimes it’s people passing underneath your window late at night, and sometimes it’s the sound of a horse in the street early in the morning, and sometimes it’s the ships blowing out in the harbor at night. Sometimes it’s the design of the elevated structure across the street where a station is, and sometimes it’s the smell of bolts of new, clean cloth, and sometimes it’s the way you feel when you make a dress—you can feel the design go out of the tips of your fingers into the cloth as you shape it, and you feel yourself in it and it looks like you, and you know nobody else on earth could do it that way. Sometimes it’s the way Sunday morning feels when you wake up and listen to it—you can smell it and feel it, and it smells like breakfast. Sometimes it’s the way Saturday night is. Sometimes it’s the way Monday morning feels, you get all excited and nervous, and your coffee goes bouncing around inside you, and you don’t enjoy your breakfast. And sometimes it’s like Sunday afternoon, with people coming from a concert—this feels terrible and makes you blue. Sometimes it’s the way you feel at night when you wake up in Winter time and you know it’s snowing, although you can’t see or hear it. Sometimes it’s the harbor, sometimes the docks, and sometimes it’s the Bridge with people coming across it. Sometimes it’s the markets and the way the chickens smell; sometimes it’s all the new vegetables and the smell of apples. Sometimes it’s the people in a train that passes the one you’re in: you see all the people, you are close to them, but you cannot touch them, you say goodbye to them and it makes you feel sad. Sometimes it’s all the kids playing in the street: they don’t seem to have anything to do with the grown-ups, they seem to be kids, and yet they seem to be grown up and to live in a world of their own—there is something strange about it. And sometimes it’s like that with the horses, too—sometimes you go out and there is nothing but the horses, they fill the streets, you forget about all the people, the horses seem to own the earth, they talk to one another, and they seem to have a life of their own that people have nothing to do with. Sometimes it’s all the different kinds of carriages—the hansoms, the four-wheelers, the victorias, the landaulets. Sometimes it’s the Brewster Carriage Works on Broadway: you can look in and see them making them down in the basement—everything is very delicate and beautiful, you can smell the shavings of the finest wood, and new leather and harness, and the thills, the springs, the wheels, and the felloes. Sometimes it’s all the people going along the streets, and sometimes there’s nothing but the Jews—the old men with the beards, and the old women poking and prodding at ducks, and the girls and the kids. I know all about this and what is going on inside them, but it’s no use telling you and Daddy—you’re both Gentiles and you wouldn’t know what I was talking about. Well—there’s a lot more—do you give up?”
“Good God, yes!” said Mr. Brandell, picking up a towel from his dressing table and waving it at me, “I surrender! Oh, brave new world that has such wonders in it! . . . O Joe, Joe!” he said to my father, “will that ever happen to us again? Are we nothing but famished beggars, weary of our lives? Can you still see all those things when you walk the streets? Would it ever come back to us that way again?”
“Not to me,” my father said. “I was a Sergeant, but I’ve been rejuced.”
He smiled as he spoke, but his voice was old and tired and weary. I know now he felt that his life had failed. His face had got very yellow from his sickness, and his shoulders stooped, his great hands dangled to his knees; as he stood there between Mr. Brandell and me he seemed to be half-erect, as if he had just clambered up from all fours. And yet his face was as delicate and wild as it had ever been, it had the strange, soaring look—as if it were in constant flight away from a shackling and degrading weight—that it had always worn, and to this expression of uplifted flight there had now been added the intent listening expression that all deaf people have.
It seemed to me that the sense of loneliness and exile, of a brief and alien rest, as if some winged spirit had temporarily arrested flight upon a foreign earth, was more legible on him now than it had ever been. Suddenly I felt all the strangeness of his life and destiny—his remoteness from all the life I knew. I thought of his strange childhood, and of the dark miracle of chance which had brought him to my mother and the Jews—an alien, a stranger, and an exile among dark faces—with us but never of us. And I felt more than ever before a sense of our nearness and farness; I felt at once closer to him than to anyone on earth, and at the same time farther from him. Already his life had something fabulous and distant in it; he seemed to be a part of some vanished and irrevocable time.
I do not think Mr. Brandell had noticed before how tired and ill my father looked. He had been buried in his own world, burning with a furious, half-suppressed excitement, an almost mad vitality which was to have that night its consummation. Before we left him, however, he suddenly glanced sharply and critically at my father, took his hand, and said with great tenderness:
“What is it, Joe? You look so tired. Is anything wrong?”
My father shook his head. He had become very sensitive about his deafness, and any reference to the affliction that had caused his retirement from the stage or any suggestion of pity from one of his former colleagues because of his present state deeply wounded him. “Of course not,” he said. “I never felt better! I used to be Joe the Dog-Faced Actor, now I’m Joe the Dog-Faced Policeman, and I’ve got a badge to prove it, too.” Here he produced his policeman’s badge, of which he was really very proud. “If that’s not a step up in the world, what is it? Come on, daughter,” he said to me. “Let’s leave this wicked man to all his plots and murders. If he gets too bad, I’ll arrest him!”
We started to go, but for a moment Mr. Brandell stopped us and was silent. The enormous and subdued excitement, the exultant fury which had been apparent in him all the time, now became much more pronounced. The man was thrumming like a dynamo, his strong hands trembled, and when he spoke it was as if he had already become the Duke of Gloucester: there was a quality of powerful cunning and exultant prophecy in his tone, something mad, secret, conspiratorial, and knowing.
“Keep your eyes open tonight,” he said. “You may see something worth remembering.”
We left him and went out into the theatre. It was the last time Brandell ever saw my father.
When we got out into the auditorium the house was almost full, although the people were still going down the aisles to their seats. Because of my father’s deafness, Brandell had given us seats in the front row. For a few minutes I watched the people come in and the house fill up, and I felt again the sense of elation and joy I have always felt in the theatre before the curtain goes up. I looked at the beautiful women, the men in evening clothes, and at all the fat and gaudy ornamentation of the house; I heard the rapid and excited patter of the voices, the stir and rustle of silks, the movement—and I loved it all.
Then in a few minutes the lights darkened. There was a vast, rustling sigh all over the theatre, the sound of a great bending forward, and then, for a moment, in that dim light I saw the thing that has always seemed so full of magic and beauty to me: a thousand people who have suddenly become a single, living creature, and all the frail white spots of faces blooming like petals there in a velvet darkness, upturned, thirsty, silent, and intent and beautiful.
