Thomas Wolfe, page 313
“Did you see that kid? . . . She came in here about two years ago and got a job. I don’t know where she came from, but it was some little hick town somewhere. She’d been a chorus girl—a hoofer in some cheap road show—until her legs gave out. . . . You find a lot of ’em in this game—the business is full of ’em. . . . Well, she worked here for about a year, and then she began going with a cheap gigolo who used to come in here. You know the kind—you can smell ’em a mile off—they stink. I could’ve told her! But, hell, what’s the use? They won’t listen to you—you only get yourself in dutch all around—they got to find out for themselves—you can’t teach ’em. So I left it alone—that’s the only way. . . . Well, six or eight months ago, some of the girls found out she was pregnant. The boss let her out. He’s not a bad guy—but, hell, what can you expect? You can’t keep ’em around a place like this when they’re in that condition, can you? . . . She had the kid three months ago, and then she got her job back. I understand she’s put the kid in a home somewhere. I’ve never seen it, but they say it’s a swell kid, and Billie’s crazy about it—goes out there to see it every Sunday. . . . She’s a swell kid, too.”
The waiter was silent for a moment, and there was a far-off look of tragic but tranquil contemplation in his eyes. Then, quietly, wearily, he said:
“Hell, if I could tell you what goes on here every day—the things you see and hear—the people you meet and all that happens. Jesus, I get sick and tired of it. Sometimes I’m so fed up with the whole thing that I don’t care if I never see the joint again. Sometimes I get to thinking how swell it would be not to have to spend your whole life waiting on a lot of mugs—just standing around and waiting on ’em and watching ’em come in and out . . . and feeling sorry for some little kid who’s fallen for some dope you wouldn’t wipe your feet on . . . and wondering just how long it’ll be before she gets the works. . . . Jesus, I’m fed up with it!”
Again he was silent. His eyes looked off into the distance, and his face was set in that expression of mildly cynical regret and acceptance that one often notices in people who have seen much of life, and experienced its hard and seamy side, and who know that there is very little they can do or say. At last he sighed deeply, shook himself, threw off the mood, and resumed his normal manner.
“Gee, Mr. Webber,” he said with a return of his former eagerness, “it must be great to be able to write books and stories—to have the gift of gab—all that flow of language—to go anywhere you like—to work when you want to! Now, take that story I was telling you about,” he said earnestly. “I never had no education—but if I could only get some guy like you to help me—to write it down the way it ought to be—honest, Mr. Webber, it’s a great chance for somebody—there’s a fortune in it—I’d go fifty-fifty!” His voice was pleading now. “A guy I knew one time, he told it to me—and me and him are the only two that knows it. This guy was an Armenian, like I said, and the whole thing happened over there. . . . There’d be a gold mine in it if I only knew how to do it.”
It was long after midnight, and the round disk of the moon was sinking westward over the cold, deserted streets of slumbering Manhattan.
The party was in full swing now.
The gold and marble ballroom of the great hotel had been converted into a sylvan fairyland. In the center a fountain of classic nymphs and fauns sent up its lighted sprays of water, and here and there about the floor were rustic arbors with climbing roses trailing over them, heavy with scented blossoms. Flowering hot-house trees in tubs were banked around the walls, the shining marble pillars were wreathed about with vines and garlands, and overhead gay lanterns had been strung to illuminate the scene with their gentle glow. The whole effect was that of an open clearing in a forest glade upon Midsummer Night where Queen Titania had come to hold her court and revels.
It was a rare, exotic spectacle, a proper setting for the wealthy, carefree youth for whom it had been planned. The air was heavy with the fragrance of rich perfumes, and vibrant with the throbbing, pulsing rhythms of sensuous music. Upon the polished floor a hundred lovely girls in brilliant evening gowns danced languidly in the close embrace of pink-cheeked boys from Yale and Harvard, their lithe young figures accentuated smartly by the black and white of faultless tailoring.
This was the coming-out party of a fabulously rich young lady, and the like of it had not been seen since the days before the market crashed. The papers had been full of it for weeks. It was said that her father had lost millions in the debacle, but it was apparent that he still had a few paltry dollars left. So now he was doing the right thing, the expected thing, the necessary and inescapable thing, for his beautiful young daughter, who would one day inherit all that these ruinous times had left him of his hard-earned savings. Tonight she was being “presented to Society” (whose members had known her since her birth), and all “Society” was there.
And from this night on, the girl’s smiling face would turn up with monotonous regularity in all the rotogravure sections of the Sunday papers, and daily the nation would be kept posted on all the momentous trivia of her life—what she ate, what she wore, where she went, who went with her, what night clubs had been honored by her presence, what fortunate young gentleman had been seen accompanying her to what race track, and what benefits she had sponsored and poured tea for. For one whole year, from now until another beautiful and rich young lady from next season’s crop of beautiful and rich young ladies was chosen by the newspaper photographers to succeed her as America’s leading débutante, this gay and care-free creature would be for Americans very much what a royal princess is for Englishmen, and for very much the same reason—because she was her father’s daughter, and because her father was one of the rulers of America. Millions would read about her every move and envy her, and thousands would copy her as far as their means would let them. They would buy cheap imitations of her costly dresses, hats, and underclothes, would smoke the same cigarettes, use the same lipsticks, eat the same soups, sleep on the same mattresses that she had allowed herself to be pictured wearing, smoking, using, eating, and sleeping on in the handsome colored advertisements on the back covers of magazines—and they would do it, knowing full well that the rich young lady had set these fashions for a price—was she not her father’s daughter?—all, of course, for the sake of sweet charity and commerce.
Outside the great hotel, on the Avenue in front of it and on all the side streets in the near vicinity, sleek black limousines were parked. In some of them the chauffeurs slouched dozing behind their wheels. Others had turned on their inside lights and sat there reading the pages of the tabloids. But most of them had left their cars and were knotted together in little groups, smoking, talking, idling the time away until their services should be needed again.
On the pavement near the entrance of the hotel, beside the huge marquee which offered shelter from the wind, the largest group of them, neat in their liveried uniforms, had gathered in debate. They were discussing politics and theories of international economy, and the chief disputants were a plump Frenchman with a waxed mustache, whose sentiments were decidedly revolutionary, and an American, a little man with corky legs, a tough, seamed face, the beady eyes of a bird, and the quick, impatient movements of the city. As George Webber came abreast of them, brought thither by the simple chance of his nightly wanderings, the argument had reached its furious climax, and he stopped a while to listen.
The scene, the situation, and the contrast between the two principal debaters made the whole affair seem utterly grotesque. The plump Frenchman, his cheeks glowing with the cold and his own excitement, was dancing about in a frenzy, talking and gesticulating volubly. He would lean forward with thumb and forefinger uplifted and closed daintily in a descriptive circle—a gesture that eloquently expressed the man’s conviction that the case he had been presenting for immediate and bloody world revolution was complete, logical, unshakable, and beyond appeal. When any of the others interposed an objection, he would only grow more violent and inflamed.
At last his little English began to break down under the strain imposed upon it. The air about him fairly rang with objurgations, expletives, impassioned cries of “Mais oui! . . . Absolument! . . . C’est la vérité!”—and with laughs of maddened exasperation, as if the knowledge that anyone could be so obtuse as not to see it as he saw it was more than he could endure.
“Mais non! Mais non!” he would shout. “Vous avez tort! . . . Mais c’est stupide!” he would cry, throwing his plump arms up in a gesture of defeat, and turning away as if he could stand it no longer and was departing—only to return immediately and begin all over again.
Meanwhile, the chief target of this deluge, the little American with the corky legs and the birdy eyes, let him go on. He just leaned up against the building, took an occasional puff at his cigarette, and gave the Frenchman a steady look of cynical impassivity. At last he broke in to say:
“O.K. . . . O.K., Frenchy. . . . When you get through spoutin’, maybe I’ll have somethin’ to say.”
“Seulement un mot!” replied the Frenchman, out of breath. “One vord!” he cried impressively, drawing himself up to his full five feet three and holding one finger in the air as if he were about to deliver Holy Writ—“I ’ave to say one vord more!”
“O.K.! O.K.!” said the corky little American with cynical weariness. “Only don’t take more than an hour and a half to say it!”
Just then another chauffeur, obviously a German, with bright blue eyes and a nut-cracker face, rejoined the group with an air of elated discovery.
“Noos! I got noos for you!” he said. “I haf been mit a drifer who hass in Rooshia liffed, and he says that conditions there far worser are——”
“Non! Non!” the Frenchman shouted, red in the face with anger and protest. “Pas vrai! . . . Ce n’est pas possible!”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the American said, tossing his cigarette away with a gesture of impatience and disgust. “Why don’t you guys wake up? This ain’t Russia! You’re in America! The trouble with you guys,” he went on, “is that you’ve been over there all your life where you ain’t been used to nothin’—and just as soon as you get over here where you can live like a human bein’ you want to tear it all down.”
At this, others broke in, and the heated and confused dialogue became more furious than ever. But the talk just went round and round in circles.
George walked away into the night.
The lives of men who have to live in our great cities are often tragically lonely. In many more ways than one, these dwellers in the hive are modern counterparts of Tantalus. They are starving to death in the midst of abundance. The crystal stream flows near their lips but always falls away when they try to drink of it. The vine, rich-weighted with its golden fruit, bends down, comes near, but springs back when they reach to touch it.
Melville, at the beginning of his great fable, Moby Dick, tells how the city people of his time would, on every occasion that was afforded them, go down to the dock, to the very edges of the wharf, and stand there looking out to sea. In the great city of today, however, there is no sea to look out to, or, if there is, it is so far away, so inaccessible, walled in behind such infinite ramifications of stone and steel, that the effort to get to it is disheartening. So now, when the city man looks out, he looks out on nothing but crowded vacancy.
Does this explain, perhaps, the desolate emptiness of city youth—those straggling bands of boys of sixteen or eighteen that one can always see at night or on a holiday, going along a street, filling the air with raucous jargon and senseless cries, each trying to outdo the others with joyless catcalls and mirthless quips and jokes which are so feeble, so stupidly inane, that one hears them with strong mixed feelings of pity and of shame? Where here, among these lads, is all the merriment, high spirits, and spontaneous gayety of youth? These creatures, millions of them, seem to have been born but half made up, without innocence, born old and stale and dull and empty.
Who can wonder at it? For what a world it is that most of them were born into! They were suckled on darkness, and weaned on violence and noise. They had to try to draw out moisture from the cobblestones, their true parent was a city street, and in that barren universe no urgent sails swelled out and leaned against the wind, they rarely knew the feel of earth beneath their feet and no birds sang, their youthful eyes grew hard, unseeing, from being stopped forever by a wall of masonry.
In other times, when painters tried to paint a scene of awful desolation, they chose the desert or a heath of barren rocks, and there would try to picture man in his great loneliness—the prophet in the desert, Elijah being fed by ravens on the rocks. But for a modern painter, the most desolate scene would be a street in almost any one of our great cities on a Sunday afternoon.
Suppose a rather drab and shabby street in Brooklyn, not quite tenement perhaps, and lacking therefore even the gaunt savagery of poverty, but a street of cheap brick buildings, warehouses, and garages, with a cigar store or a fruit stand or a barber shop on the corner. Suppose a Sunday afternoon in March—bleak, empty, slaty grey. And suppose a group of men, Americans of the working class, dressed in their “good” Sunday clothes—the cheap machine-made suits, the new cheap shoes, the cheap felt hats stamped out of universal grey. Just suppose this, and nothing more. The men hang around the corner before the cigar store or the closed barber shop, and now and then, through the bleak and empty street, a motor car goes flashing past, and in the distance they hear the cold rumble of an elevated train. For hours they hang around the corner, waiting—waiting—waiting——
For what?
Nothing. Nothing at all. And that is what gives the scene its special quality of tragic loneliness, awful emptiness, and utter desolation. Every modern city man is familiar with it.
And yet—and yet——
It is also true—and this is a curious paradox about America—that these same men who stand upon the corner and wait around on Sunday afternoons for nothing are filled at the same time with an almost quenchless hope, an almost boundless optimism, an almost indestructible belief that something is bound to turn up, something is sure to happen. This is a peculiar quality of the American soul, and it contributes largely to the strange enigma of our life, which is so incredibly mixed of harshness and of tenderness, of innocence and of crime, of loneliness and of good fellowship, of desolation and of exultant hope, of terror and of courage, of nameless fear and of soaring conviction, of brutal, empty, naked, bleak, corrosive ugliness, and of beauty so lovely and so overwhelming that the tongue is stopped by it, and the language for it has not yet been uttered.
How explain this nameless hope that seems to lack all reasonable foundation? I cannot. But if you were to go up to this fairly intelligent-looking truck driver who stands and waits there with his crowd, and if you put to him your question, and if he understood what you were talking about (he wouldn’t), and if he were articulate enough to frame in words the feelings that are in him (he isn’t)—he might answer you with something such as this:
“Now is duh mont’ of March, duh mont’ of March—now it is Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn in duh mont’ of March, an’ we stand upon cold corners of duh day. It’s funny dat dere are so many corners in duh mont’ of March, here in Brooklyn where no corners are. Jesus! On Sunday in duh mont’ of March we sleep late in duh mornin’, den we get up an’ read duh papers—duh funnies an’ duh sportin’ news. We eat some chow. An’ den we dress up in duh afternoon, we leave our wives, we leave duh funnies littered on duh floor, an’ go outside in Brooklyn in duh mont’ of March an’ stand around upon ten t’ousand corners of duh day. We need a corner in duh mont’ of March, a wall to stand to, a shelter an’ a door. Dere must be some place inside in duh mont’ of March, but we never found it. So we stand around on corners where duh sky is cold an’ ragged still wit’ winter, in our good clothes we stand around wit’ a lot of udder guys we know, before duh barber shop, just lookin’ for a door.”
Ah, yes, for in summer:
It is so cool and sweet tonight, a million feet are walking here across the jungle web of Brooklyn in the dark, and it’s so hard now to remember that it ever was the month of March in Brooklyn and that we couldn’t find a door. There are so many million doors tonight. There’s a door for everyone tonight, all’s open to the air, all’s interfused tonight: remote the thunder of the elevated trains on Fulton Street, the rattling of the cars along Atlantic Avenue, the glare of Coney Island seven miles away, the mob, the racket, and the barkers shouting, the cars swift-shuttling through the quiet streets, the people swarming in the web, lit here and there with livid blurs of light, the voices of the neighbors leaning at their windows, harsh, soft, all interfused. All’s illusive in the liquid air tonight, all mixed in with the radios that blare from open windows. And there is something over all tonight, something fused, remote, and trembling, made of all of this, and yet not of it, upon the huge and weaving ocean of the night in Brooklyn—something that we had almost quite forgotten in the month of March. What’s this?—a sash raised gently?—a window?—a near voice on the air?—something swift and passing, almost captured, there below?—there in the gulf of night the mournful and yet thrilling voices of the tugs?—the liner’s blare? Here—there—some otherwhere—was it a whisper?—a woman’s call?—a sound of people talking behind the screens and doors in Flatbush? It trembles in the air throughout the giant web tonight, as fleeting as a step—near—as soft and sudden as a woman’s laugh. The liquid air is living with the very whisper of the thing that we are looking for tonight throughout America—the very thing that seemed so bleak, so vast, so cold, so hopeless, and so lost as we waited in our good clothes on ten thousand corners of the day in Brooklyn in the month of March.
