Thomas Wolfe, page 28
Steve went away with the German woman to Indiana, where, at first, came news of opulence, fatness, ease, and furs (with photographs), later of brawls with her honest brothers, and talk of divorce, reunion and renascence. He gravitated between the two poles of his support, Margaret and Eliza, returning to Altamont every summer for a period of drugs and drunkenness that ended in a family fight, jail, and a hospital cure.
“Hell commences,” howled Gant, “as soon as he comes home. He’s a curse and a care, the lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile. Woman, you have given birth to a monster who will not rest until he has done me to death, fearful, cruel, and accursed reprobate that he is!”
But Eliza wrote her oldest son regularly, enclosed sums of money from time to time, and revived her hopes incessantly, against nature, against reason, against the structure of life. She did not dare to come openly to his defense, to reveal frankly the place he held in her heart’s core, but she would produce each letter in which he spoke boastfully of his successes, or announced his monthly resurrection, and read them to an unmoved family. They were florid, foolish letters, full of quotation marks and written in a large fancy hand. She was proud and pleased at all their extravagances; his flowery illiteracy was another proof to her of his superior intelligence.
Dear Mama:
Yours of the 11th to hand and must say I was glad to know you were in “the land of the living” again as I had begun to feel it was a “long time between drinks” since your last. (“I tell you what,” said Eliza, looking up and sniggering with pleasure, “he’s no fool.” Helen, with a smile that was half ribald, half annoyed, about her big mouth, made a face at Luke, and lifted her eyes patiently upward to God as Eliza continued. Gant leaned forward tensely with his head craned upward, listening carefully with a faint grin of pleasure.) Well, mama, since I last wrote you things have been coming my way and it now looks as if the “Prodigal Son” will come home some day in his own private car. (“Hey, what’s that?” said Gant, and she read it again for him. He wet his thumb and looked about with a pleased grin. “Wh-wh-what’s the matter?” asked Luke. “Has he b-b-bought the railroad?” Helen laughed hoarsely. “I’m from Missouri,” she said.) It took me a long time to get started, mama, but things were breaking against me and all that little Stevie has ever asked from any one in this “vale of tears” is a fair chance. (Helen laughed her ironical husky falsetto. “All that little S-S-Stevie has ever asked,” said Luke, reddening with annoyance, “is the whole g-g-g-goddam world with a few gold mines thrown in.) But now that I’m on my feet at last, mama, I’m going to show the world that I haven’t forgotten those who stood by me in my “hour of need,” and that the best friend a man ever had is his mother. (“Where’s the shovel?” said Ben, snickering quietly.)
“That boy writes a good letter,” said Gant appreciatively. “I’m damned if he’s not the smartest one of the lot when he wants to be.”
“Yes,” said Luke angrily, “he’s so smart that you’ll b-b-believe any fairy tale he wants to tell you. B-b-b-but the one who’s stuck by you through thick and thin gets no c-c-credit at all.” He glanced meaningly at Helen. “It’s a d-d-damn shame.”
“Forget about it,” she said wearily.
“Well,” said Eliza thoughtfully, holding the letter in her folded hands and gazing away, “perhaps he’s going to turn over a new leaf now. You never know.” Lost in pleased revery she looked into vacancy, pursing her lips.
“I hope so!” said Helen wearily. “You’ve got to show me.”
Privately: “You see how it is, don’t you?” she said to Luke, mounting to hysteria. “Do I get any credit? Do I? I can work my fingers to the bone for them, but do I get so much as Go to Hell for my trouble? Do I?”
In these years Helen went off into the South with Pearl Hines, the saddlemaker’s daughter. They sang together at moving-picture theatres in country towns. They were booked from a theatrical office in Atlanta.
Pearl Hines was a heavily built girl with a meaty face and negroid lips. She was jolly and vital. She sang ragtime and nigger songs with a natural passion, swinging her hips and shaking her breasts erotically.
“Here comes my da-dad-dy now
O pop, O pop, O-o pop.”
They earned as much as $100 a week sometimes. They played in towns like Waycross, Georgia; Greenville, South Carolina; Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
They brought with them the great armor of innocency. They were eager and decent girls. Occasionally the village men made cautious explorative insults, relying on the superstition that lives in small towns concerning “show girls.” But generally they were well treated.
For them, these ventures into new lands were eager with promise. The vacant idiot laughter, the ribald enthusiasm with which South Carolina or Georgia countrymen, filling a theatre with the strong smell of clay and sweat, greeted Pearl’s songs, left them unwounded, pleased, eager. They were excited to know that they were members of the profession; they bought Variety regularly, they saw themselves finally a celebrated high-salaried team on “big time” in great cities. Pearl was to “put over” the popular songs, to introduce the rag melodies with the vital rhythm of her dynamic meatiness, Helen was to give operatic dignity to the programme. In a respectful hush, bathed in a pink spot, she sang ditties of higher quality—Tosti’s “Goodbye,” “The End of a Perfect Day,” and “The Rosary.” She had a big, full, somewhat metallic voice: she had received training from her Aunt Louise, the splendid blonde who had lived in Altamont for several years after her separation from Elmer Pentland. Louise gave music lessons and enjoyed her waning youth with handsome young men. She was one of the ripe, rich, dangerous women that Helen liked. She had a little girl and went away to New York with the child when tongues grew fanged.
But she said: “Helen, that voice ought to be trained for grand opera.”
Helen had not forgotten. She fantasied of France and Italy: the big crude glare of what she called “a career in opera,” the florid music, the tiered galleries winking with gems, the torrential applause directed toward the full-blooded, dominant all-shadowing songsters struck up great anthems in her. It was a scene, she thought, in which she was meant to shine. And as the team of Gant and Hines (The Dixie Melody Twins) moved on their jagged circuit through the South, this desire, bright, fierce, and formless, seemed, in some way, to be nearer realization.
She wrote home frequently, usually to Gant. Her letters beat like great pulses; they were filled with the excitement of new cities, presentiments of abundant life. In every town they met “lovely people”—everywhere, in fact, good wives and mothers, and nice young men, were attracted hospitably to these two decent, happy, exciting girls. There was a vast decency, an enormous clean vitality about Helen that subjugated good people and defeated bad ones. She held under her dominion a score of young men—masculine, red-faced, hard-drinking and shy. Her relation to them was maternal and magistral, they came to listen and to be ruled; they adored her, but few of them tried to kiss her.
Eugene was puzzled and frightened by these lamb-like lions. Among men, they were fierce, bold, and combative; with her, awkward and timorous. One of them, a city surveyor, lean, highboned, alcoholic, was constantly involved in police-court brawls; another, a railroad detective, a large fair young man, split the skulls of negroes when he was drunk, shot several men, and was himself finally killed in a Tennessee gun-fight.
She never lacked for friends and protectors wherever she went. Occasionally, Pearl’s happy and vital sensuality, the innocent gusto with which she implored
“Some sweet old daddy
Come make a fuss over me.”
drew on village rakedom to false conjectures. Unpleasant men with wet cigars would ask them to have a convivial drink of corn whisky, call them “girley,” and suggest a hotel room or a motorcar as a meeting-place. When this happened, Pearl was stricken into silence; helpless and abashed, she appealed to Helen.
And she, her large loose mouth tense and wounded at the corners, her eyes a little brighter, would answer:
“I don’t know what you mean by that remark. I guess you’ve made a mistake about us.” This did not fail to exact stammering apologies and excuses.
She was painfully innocent, temperamentally incapable of wholly believing the worst about any one. She lived in the excitement of rumor and suggestion: it never seemed to her actually possible that the fast young women who excited her had, in the phrase she used, “gone the limit.” She was skilled in gossip, and greedily attentive to it, but of the complex nastiness of village life she had little actual knowledge. Thus, with Pearl Hines, she walked confidently and joyously over volcanic crust, scenting only the odor of freedom, change, and adventure.
But this partnership came to an end. The intention of Pearl Hines’ life was direct and certain. She wanted to get married, she had always wanted to get married before she was twenty-five. For Helen, the singing partnership, the exploration of new lands, had been a gesture toward freedom, an instinctive groping toward a centre of life and purpose to which she could fasten her energy, a blind hunger for variety, beauty, and independence. She did not know what she wanted to do with her life; it was probable that she would never control even partially her destiny: she would be controlled, when the time came, by the great necessity that lived in her. That necessity was to enslave and to serve.
For two or three years Helen and Pearl supported themselves by these tours, leaving Altamont during its dull winter lassitude, and returning to it in Spring, or in Summer, with money enough to suffice them until their next season.
Pearl juggled carefully with the proposals of several young men during this period. She had the warmest affection for a ball-player, the second baseman and manager of the Altamont team. He was a tough handsome young animal, forever hurling his glove down in a frenzy of despair during the course of a game, and rushing belligerently at the umpire. She liked his hard assurance, his rapid twang, his tanned lean body.
But she was in love with no one—she would never be—and caution told her that the life-risk on bush-league ball-players was very great. She married finally a young man from Jersey City, heavy of hand, hoof, and voice, who owned a young but flourishing truck and livery business.
Thus, the partnership of the Dixie Melody Twins was dissolved. Helen, left alone, turned away from the drear monotony of the small towns to the gaiety, the variety, and the slaking fulfilment of her desires, which she hoped somehow to find in the cities.
She missed Luke terribly. Without him she felt incomplete, unarmored. He had been enrolled in the Georgia School of Technology in Atlanta for two years. He was taking the course in electrical engineering, the whole direction of his life had been thus shaped by Gant’s eulogies, years before, of the young electrical expert, Liddell. He was failing in his work—his mind had never been forced to the discipline of study. All purpose with him was broken by a thousand impulses: his brain stammered as did his tongue, and as he turned impatiently and irritably to the logarithm tables, he muttered the number of the page in idiot repetition, keeping up a constant wild vibration of his leg upon the ball of his foot.
His great commercial talent was salesmanship; he had superlatively that quality that American actors and men of business call “personality”—a wild energy, a Rabelaisian vulgarity, a sensory instinct for rapid and swingeing repartee, and a hypnotic power of speech, torrential, meaningless, mad, and evangelical. He could sell anything because in the jargon of salesmen, he could sell himself; and there was a fortune in him in the fantastic elasticity of American business, the club of all the queer trades, of wild promotions, where, amok with zealot rage, he could have chanted the yokels into delirium, and cut the buttons from their coats, doing every one, everything, and finally himself. He was not an electrical engineer—he was electrical energy. He had no gift for study—he gathered his unriveted mind together and bridged with it desperately, but crumpled under the stress and strain of calculus and the mechanical sciences.
Enormous humor flowed from him like crude light. Men who had never known him seethed with strange internal laughter when they saw him, and roared helplessly when he began to speak. Yet, his physical beauty was astonishing. His head was like that of a wild angel—coils and whorls of living golden hair flashed from his head, his features were regular, generous, and masculine, illuminated by the strange inner smile of idiot ecstasy.
His broad mouth, even when stammering irritably or when nervousness clouded his face, was always cocked for laugher—unearthly, exultant, idiot laughter. There was in him demonic exuberance, a wild intelligence that did not come from the brain. Eager for praise, for public esteem, and expert in ingratiation, this demon possessed him utterly at the most unexpected moments, in the most decorous surroundings, when he was himself doing all in his power to preserve the good opinion in which he was held.
Thus, listening to an old lady of the church, who with all her power of persuasion and earnestness was unfolding the dogmas of Presbyterianism to him, he would lean forward in an attitude of exaggerated respectfulness and attention, one broad hand clinched about his knee, while he murmured gentle agreement to what she said:
“Yes? . . . Ye-e-es? . . . Ye-e-e-es? . . . Ye-e-es? . . . Is that right? . . . Ye-e-es?”
Suddenly the demonic force would burst in him. Insanely tickled at the cadences of his agreement, the earnest placidity and oblivion of the old woman, and the extravagant pretense of the whole situation, his face flooded with wild exultancy, he would croon in a fat luscious bawdily suggestive voice:
“Y-ah-s? . . . Y-a-h-s? . . . Y-ah-s? . . . Y-ah-s?”
And when at length too late she became aware of this drowning flood of demonic nonsense, and paused, turning an abrupt startled face to him, he would burst into a wild “Whah-whah-whah-whah” of laughter, beyond all reason, with strange throat noises, tickling her roughly in the ribs.
Often Eliza, in the midst of long, minutely replenished reminiscence, would grow conscious, while she was purse-lipped in revery, of this annihilating mockery, would slap at his hand angrily as he gooched her, and shake a pursed piqued face at him, saying, with a heavy scorn that set him off into fresh “whah-whahs”: “I’ll declare, boy! You act like a regular idiot,” and then shaking her head sadly, with elaborate pity: “I’d be ash-a-amed! A-sha-a-med.”
His quality was extraordinary; he had something that was a great deal better than most intelligence; he saw the world in burlesque, and his occasional answer to its sham, hypocrisy, and intrigue was the idiot devastation of “whah-whah!” But he did not possess his demon; it possessed him from time to time. If it had possessed him wholly, constantly, his life would have prevailed with astonishing honesty and precision. But when he reflected, he was a child—with all the hypocrisy, sentimentality and dishonest pretense of a child.
His face was a church in which beauty and humor were married—the strange and the familiar were at one in him. Men, looking at Luke, felt a start of recognition as if they saw something of which they had never heard, but which they had known forever.
Once or twice, during the Winter and Spring, while she was touring with Pearl Hines, Helen got into Atlanta to see him. In Spring they attended the week of Grand Opera. He would find employment for one night as a spearman in Aïda and pass the doorman for the remainder of the week with the assurance that he was “a member of the company—Lukio Gantio.”
His large feet spread tightly out in sandals; behind the shingreaves his awkward calves were spined thickly with hair; a thick screw of hair writhed under the edge of his tin helmet, as he lofed in the wings, leaning comically on his spear, his face lit with exultancy.
Caruso, waiting his entrance, regarded him from time to time with a wide Wop smile.
“Wotta you call yourself, eh?” asked Caruso, approaching and looking him over.
“W-w-w-why,” he said, “d-don’t you know one of your s-s-s-soldiers when you see him?”
“You’re one hell of a soldier,” said Caruso.
“Whah-whah-whah!” Luke answered. With difficulty he restrained his prodding fingers.
In the summer now he returned to Altamont, finding employment with a firm of land-auctioneers, and assisting them at the sale of a tract or a parcel of lots. He moved about above the crowd in the bed of a wagon, exhorting them to bid, with his hand at the side of his mouth, in a harangue compounded of frenzy, passionate solicitation, and bawdry. The work intoxicated him. With wide grins of expectancy they crowded round the spokes. In a high throaty tenor he called to them:
“Step right up, gentlemen, lot number 17, in beautiful Homewood—we furnish the wood, you furnish the home. Now gentlemen, this handsome building-site has a depth of 179 feet, leaving plenty of room for garden and backhouse (grow your own corn cobs in beautiful Homewood) with a frontage of 114 feet on a magnificent new macadam road.”
“Where is the road?” some one shouted.
“On the blueprint, of course, Colonel. You’ve got it all in black and white. Now, gentlemen, the opportunity of your lives is kicking you in the pants. Are you men of vision? Think what Ford, Edison, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Julius Caesar would do. Obey that impulse. You can’t lose. The town is coming this way. Listen carefully. Do you hear it? Swell. The new courthouse will be built on yonder hill, the undertaker and the village bakery will occupy handsome edifices of pressed brick just above you. Oyez, oyez, oyez. What am I offered? What am I offered? Own your own home in beautiful Homewood, within a cannonshot of all railway, automobile, and airplane connections. Running water abounds within a Washingtonian stone’s throw and in all the pipes. Our caravans meet all trains. Gentlemen, here’s your chance to make a fortune. The ground is rich in mineral resources—gold, silver, copper, iron, bituminous coal and oil, will be found in large quantities below the roots of all the trees.”
