Thomas Wolfe, page 377
Thus, like Shakespeare’s Venus, Bella saw her desire before her and could not grasp it. Before she could possess, she must be possessed, before she could hold she must be held: sometimes a frenzy of desperate energy would seize her—she felt that she could push her finger through a wall of brick, that she could tear the world about her into rags, that in an instant she could grasp the palpable warm treasures of the earth she wanted. But always the word, the way, the moment slipped away, and she was left like a wave that breaks upon the shore. At length she would release herself in moments of explosive destruction: she would storm through the house like a fury, hurl books across the room, knock over chairs, sweep stacks of music from the piano to the floor—attack whatever came within reach of her angry hands.
“Bella! In heaven’s name! What’s wrong with you? What do you want?” Rebecca said.
“I want to get my hands on something and smash it up!” said Bella. “I’d like to get my hands on him!” she cried, thinking of her father. “I’d like to shake him till his teeth rattled! God! Beck! Sometimes I think I’ll go mad if I don’t get out of here! I wish I were a man! Think of the fun they have: when I see them passing on the street I want to call out to them, to tell them they don’t know how lucky they are, to make the most of it! God! What fools they are not to do more with it. They can do what they like without asking. Think of it, Beck! They can go where they please and no one will stop them. They walk along the streets smoking big cigars. They go into saloons and order drinks, they stand up to the bar and talk to the bartender, they tell dirty jokes, they eat in restaurants, they go to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, they spit in spittoons—like this—Hock! Ptoo! They work on ships, they ride on trains, they drive wagons and cabs, they ride in them, they curse and fight, they belong to clubs, they go fishing, they live in flats, they go to the theatre and sit in the front row, they make eyes at the girls, they loaf around on street corners, they build houses, they run machinery, they sell meat and groceries, they go to the bank and count their money, they pick their teeth in public with a private gold tooth-pick while a boot-black shines their shoes, they go down to the Bowery, and they go to the houses where those women are. . . . I’ve heard that some of these places are very high-toned. All the men are perfect gents and all the girls are perfect ladies. . . . Beck, do you suppose I’d be any good at a job like that? Maybe we could go into business together. You could be the lady of the house: you could give it tone. We would cater only to the better class of people. Why, there’s our chance. Beck: many a poor girl got her start in life like that—we might pick off a couple of Society Swells from Newport. I’ve been told that some of them go to those places.”
“Well!” Rebecca said. “I must say, Bee, that for a girl who grumbles about leading such a shut-in life you certainly gather very spicy information. How on earth do you ever hear such things?”
“By asking questions when I get the chance and by keeping my eyes open. I tell you, Beck, there’s nothing like asking people questions. If you want to find out anything about them you’ve got to ask them questions.”
“I shouldn’t think it’d be so easy,” Rebecca said. “I should think they’d hate to tell you things about themselves.”
“Hate it!” Bella cried. “They love it. Once you get them started you’d have to strangle them to make them stop. Why Beck, don’t you know there’s nothing people like better than to talk about themselves? . . . I talk to everyone, Becksie, and everyone talks to me. And I could tell you some very strange and interesting things, old girl, that I bet you’d never learn from reading Tennyson and Longfellow. We go along the streets and we pass whole blocks of tenements or brownstone houses and all of them look alike. But inside everyone is different. When you go down a street at night, it’s very peaceful looking, isn’t it? But I want to tell you something: the silent watches of the night are not so very silent as you think. Sometimes there are some very gay doings: you’d be surprised to know what goes on down the street at number 31 on the last Friday night of every month! I mean that pretty little doll-faced Christian, Mrs. Crawford—butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, would it? Oh, no! And isn’t she just devoted to him: did you ever see anything like the way she hangs on his arm? It’s a pity he’s got to leave her for a minute, isn’t it? But he has—the factory is at Hartford and he’s got to go there once a month. . . . If you want to know what happens when he’s gone you want to get acquainted with Mrs. Madden: she’s the cook.”
“Good heavens. Bee!”
“Oh, the private life of doll-faced Christians is not always dull, my dear! . . . There’s the home-life of Italian fruit merchants—that’s worth looking into, I can tell you! Mrs. Scarsati has told me all about it! . . . Her husband beats her, Beck—he beats her once a week, and, what is more, she likes it!”
“What does he beat her for?”
“Oh, for one thing or another,” Bella said. “One time he beat her because she took a bath. . . . He was really mad that time . . . the Italian men don’t like their wives to bathe, she says. . . . It spoils the way they smell. . . . But, usually, he just beats her for fun!”
“Well, he’s a low brute if he does—that’s all I’ve got to say!” said Rebecca angrily. “Somebody ought to beat him, and beat him good! I don’t see why she stands for it! Why doesn’t she call a policeman and have him arrested?”
“Why Beck, you are a goose! Why should she call a policeman? Most of the police are married men, anyway. They’ve got wives of their own to beat. How do you think the tired working man spends his time Saturday night? You don’t think he spends it playing checkers, do you? He’s got to have some rest and relaxation, hasn’t he? If he doesn’t beat his wife, what’s he going to do?”
“Well, it’s a dreadful thing, if it’s true,” Rebecca said. “If that’s the kind of life you complain of missing, I think you’re better off the way you are.”
“Yes. I suppose you’d call it dreadful,” Bella said, “but it’s—God, Beck! it’s so beautiful!” she said. “They get their hands on one another! Oh, I can’t tell you how it is!” she exclaimed with a sudden half-checked gesture of fury and frustration. “It’s like getting a hold on something! It’s like finding a single word that would make the whole thing clear.”
She paused: for a moment she stared somberly at the window.
“Do you know what I’d like to do?” she said abruptly. “I’d like to give a great party and invite everyone I know to it.—I’d like to have Mr. & Mrs. Scarsati, and old lady Witzenstein, and Ed O’Hare, and Miss Hilda Berniker, the dressmaker, and old man Berniker, and Bertha, and the two Rosenzweig boys and George Innes, and Mrs. Madden, and Hunter and Post, the grocers, and their families, and Captain Groen, and Jim Earnshaw, the horse car driver, and Wayne Mears, and Mr. Norodny who runs the tobacco shop, and Mr. Haddad, the rug merchant, and old Doctor Purefoy, and—”
“Why, Bee!” Rebecca said. “You can’t mix people up that way. Do you think anyone would come to a party like that?”
“Would anyone come!” said Bella. “You mean, would anyone stay away? Why, you couldn’t keep them away with a shot-gun. Do you think people are going to refuse a chance to have some fun for a change? They’d come in flocks and droves: I’ll bet you that for every one who failed to turn up there’d be three new ones who weren’t invited. We’d have the house full, never fear!”
“But how would they pass the time after they got here?” Rebecca said. “What could they do?”
“They could eat!” cried Bella. “That’s what they could do! They could begin by eating and drinking, and you can be sure they’d get around to talking and singing together later on.”
“I wonder what we could give them,” Rebecca said reflectively.
“I’ve thought about that,” said Bella. “My idea is, it would be a mistake to serve them hot food—I mean an elaborate cooked dinner. I think if we gave them something cold—some light refreshments—and let them mix around together and help themselves, it would be better.”
“We might give them chicken salad,” said Rebecca.
“Yes,” Bella said. “That’s the very thing! I’d thought of that. Then we might get Else to cook a ham a day or two before and stick it full of cloves. I thought we could lay it all out on the dining room table in a tasty manner and let them help themselves.”
“Oh, the table would be much too small for all these people,” Rebecca said.
“Why, no,” said Bella. “It’s big enough. We’d pull it out and put in two or three extra leaves. No one would sit down anyway: they’d move around and help themselves. It would all be very informal. I thought we could put Else’s ham at one end of the table, and perhaps a cold roast turkey, or a duck at the other end—I thought we might have a great pyramid of all sorts of different fruits in the centre of the table: I’ve thought of it many times, I can just see how it would look, it would be beautiful. Joe Scarsati told me he would furnish the fruit himself—I thought we could have pears, oranges, bananas, raisins, plums, tangerines, and big red apples with maybe a few pineapples around the base and some bunches of Concord and Malaga grapes. Joe would arrange it so it would knock your eye out: the way he does it is a marvel—he’s an artist at it. Honestly, it’s a pity to spoil it after he gets through building it up.”
“Oh, Bee, we couldn’t let him,” said Rebecca. “Why-he-he spits upon the apples, to make them shine.”
“Oh, he does not!” said Bella, beginning, however, to laugh heartily.
“Why he does!” said Rebecca. “I’ve seen him do it!”
“Oh well, it’d be all right,” Bella said easily. “I could arrange all that—just tell him in a tactful manner not to spit. He’d understand. . . . Now I think, Beck, we ought to have some cold meats, too—say, a cold sliced tongue and a roast of beef. We could also have some plates of little sandwiches—I think some dainty little sandwiches—caviar and cucumber and cheese, you know—and then we could have hot chocolate and coffee for whoever wants it. After all, people don’t expect a great deal: once you get them started talking and laughing they’re not going to pay much attention to what they have to eat. Of course, we’ll have to have ice cream and cakes for the children: Jim Earnshaw said he’d take care of the ice cream—he’d freeze it, and Mr. Hunter will send assorted candies—I think it would look nice in all these little silver dishes: we could set it about in various places on the table and on the sideboard.”
“I could make a big cake,” Rebecca said.
“Yes,” said Bella. “I think one of these frosted layer cakes you make, with nuts in between the layers and an edge of maraschino cherries and some strips of lemon peel would be nice. Of course, we could have some little ones, too—cookies, ginger bread, wafers, and things like that—the children like them.”
“It would be nice to do,” Rebecca said. “It would be fun. . . . But of course we couldn’t!” she added regretfully, but decisively.
Bella was silent for a moment: her vital, generous features smouldered for a moment with a sullen, a resentful energy.
“I will! Someday I will!” she said.
For a few moments, gripped by the excitement of desire, the sisters had forgotten that such a party as they planned was only a hopeless wish: they had believed in its reality as they planned it, and now they were left with nothing but a sense of the full joy that somehow lay within their sight, beyond their grasp.
Rebecca, the younger sister, bore herself more patiently and quietly than Bella at this time, but her hostility to the life they were forced to lead was as implacable, and her determination to escape from it as fixed. She had a more contained and enduring soul than Bella’s; she could endure to be alone, and she could wait more tranquilly, with patience. But Bella’s hunger for the earth and for people was imperative: as limited as her life was, she fed fiercely on the colors and movements of the earth, on every human relation. She talked to everyone who came within the confined circle of her life—to cooks, grocers, coachmen, cab drivers and horse car drivers, newsboys, street urchins, to the Jews, the Irish, the Italians, the Germans, to passengers on ships and to Dutch sea captains—and they responded, revealing their lives to her with instant confidence because they knew and understood her at once.
She loved the city. The rock of life bordered between its gleaming tides, mast hemmed, exultant, was the richest earth her heart had ever known. Even the years she had spent in Holland with her uncle’s family, living a life that was immeasurably freer, more generous, and more gay than she had ever known in her father’s house, she had felt inexplicably the sharp, the piercing ache of nostalgia for Manhattan, with its cold wet jaws of ocean running waters. Even then as now, as always and forever, a fabulous light of time fell over it—it was its own legend, a living sorcery, and as she thought of it from the humid flatness of Dutch fields, its myriad sights, its shapes and swarming motions, the harsh din of its million voices, were sunken and seductive as the seanotes of a dream. Fenced with its delicate forest of young masts, it glittered in enchanted light, bent in upon the under cheek of an incredible earth, remote, wistful, savage, young and unspeakably exultant.
It was the fabulous place, the timeless city, and as Bella remembered it from the smooth, suave reality of Holland, from the subtle and secret opulence of Dutch life, which is the most desolate and sophisticated life on earth, she felt a deep and wordless longing to return to it again. Her vision pierced through the soft, grey, humid enervation of the foreign air, a thousand scenes and memories of the city she had left returned to her, she heard again all its familiar sounds, she saw its brawling pageantry of life, and all of it seemed lost and sunken in a dream. She saw the island with its forest forge of masts, and its nose thrust out into sea-running tides, she saw its vast sliding traffic of boats and lighters, its immense and joyful ugliness. She saw its solid decent blocks of coffee-colored brown and its streets of young thin buildings, packed, ragged, grimed with work. She saw the jaunty lines of horse cars along Broadway, the jammed confusions of wheel and hoof, the curses and threats of drivers, the shrill harsh cries of the dirty newsboys as they charged in among the crowds flaunting the latest rag of thrill and scandal, and she saw its crowds again, rude, hoarse, thrusting, pushing, swarming—visibly thickened year by year by new tides and dumpings from abroad, with its brawling arrogance of Irish, its proud dark potency of Jews. Here it was, again, the fabulous city, the great encampment, rootless, save for the rock it rested on, unbounded, save by the gleaming bracelet of bright sea-running waters that girdled it forever—a threat, an insolence flung like a cry into the maw of the all-taking ocean. The blare and glitter of loud hot brass, the full loud coming-on of drums, the hard grain of marching music in the bright air, the tramp of marching men, the roar of the crowd, the love of parades and pageantry, the crude, gilt splendor of the millionaires, the teetering of proud, groomed horses in the park, the rubber flash and rumble of rich carriages, the rich men’s wives and daughters in the park, the coaching hacks with their style of whips and reins, the prim, the smug, the murderous, the threat and swagger of the rough; and all over, life, cursing and shouting out of doors, foaming across forbidden places, bursting out of bounds, swarming, thronging, pulsing, spreading by moments of perceptible growth—over all the litter, refuse, rickets, shambles, dives and diggings, over all the immense indifference and carelessness of this shifting encampment of a city, which was the stupefaction of ugliness, and yet the most exultant and beautiful place she had ever known.
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VII
ESTHER
She hated school with a deep-rooted and constantly growing hatred which she dared confess to no one, and which she was unable to articulate even for herself. Curiously, this hatred of school went hand in hand with a perfect diligence and punctilious service to the thing she hated: she was never tardy, never absent, never late or unprepared with work which had been assigned. Her loathing of the whole school ritual, in fact, manifested itself in a feeling of sickening terror lest she be remiss in some detail of her duty. For several years during her childhood this terror had grown to such proportions that Bella had at length become alarmed and called in a physician. In some way it seemed to be related to that nameless, dreamless, unpalpable horror which woke her out of sleep screaming with terror, unable to speak, unable to know or tell its cause. Her greatest fear was that she would be late for school in the morning: she was never late, had never been late, yet the fear grew until she was obsessed by it.
When she went to bed at night, her heart would pound with dread as she thought of the possibility of being late the next morning; she would go off to sleep at last with this uneasy fear grown dull but not quiescent, coiled like a snake at the edge of her brain. At length she began to awake suddenly in the morning fully clothed. One morning Bella, who had been troubled by her increasing nervousness and unrest, and by something nameless and terrifying of which she would not speak, awoke to hear her stirring in her room! It was not yet six o’clock. Bella got up quickly, flung a wrapper over her shoulders, and went softly down the hall to Esther’s room. When she entered, the girl was sitting on the edge of her bed, completely dressed for school, save for her shoes, which she was putting on and now began to lace rapidly with impatient trembling fingers. By the dim light Bella could not see her plainly, but, surprised and shocked, she called out sharply to her.
“Esther, what on earth are you doing out of bed at this hour?”
Instantly, as soon as she had spoken, she saw that Esther was asleep. As she spoke, the girl’s hands faltered at their work, a strong sigh of weariness and slumber stirred her, her eyes opened and for a moment rested on Bella with a blank stricken stare. Then with a tone and movement of deep agitation she cried:
