Thomas Wolfe, page 379
The final separation between the two girls was therefore inevitable. Esther’s nature was profoundly romantic, Georgia’s merely erotic. As time went on Esther began to be vaguely distressed and annoyed by Georgia’s erotic obsession—the fixed monotony of her desire. For Esther at this time the physical world was expanding before her waking sense with a thousand magnificent designs and colors she had never seen before. Each walk to school or through the streets revealed new intensities, new unsuspected glories, and in her passionate and vital spirit a fierce though obscure hunger was now awake—the hunger of a creative spirit for all the beauty in the universe, ravenous, insatiable and at its beginning, cruel, because it has found no means of articulation. In her excitement, she was constantly speaking of these things to Georgia, but the other girl answered her only with a sleepy and dull attention, slothful, without perception. One day, however, she did say in a tone that was good humored but that had a note of impatience in it:
“Esthah, you can spend mo’ time lookin’ at some dirty ole piece of junk than anyone I evah saw! Who wants to spend their time lookin’ at a dirty ole ice-wagon?”—for it was this that Esther had indicated.
“Well, I never said that it was pretty,” Esther replied. “I only said it was painted a wonderful color.”
“Colah!” Georgia shouted derisively. “Why, it was nothin’ but a dirty ole yellow!”
“Oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Esther said angrily. “It was a lovely color. You just don’t look at things.”
“I know I don’t!” said Georgia with a note of anger in her voice. “I know I don’t look at things. I look at people!” I want to see what’s goin’ on! Some fokes I know,” she added pointedly, “might do bettah if they spent less time on things an’ mo’ on people.”
“Yes, I suppose so!” said Esther ironically. “Especially people in livery stables!”
She was sorry the moment she spoke for what she had said; but it was out, and they were as near now to an open quarrel as they had ever come. For some time past Georgia had been carrying on a flirtation with a man who worked in one of the stables on the street. No word had been spoken, but now the man was waiting for them every day as they came from school: he was a young man, well-fleshed and muscular with thick straw colored hair, blue eyes, a thick red neck, and a bold high colored face, sensual, wide-lipped and brutal. He always wore riding-breeches and leggings and he stood in the stable doorway with his legs apart, and his hands thrust into shallow pockets, with a look that was bold, foul and insolent. A strong odor of the stable—animal-hide and hair and horse—hung round him: his glance explored their bodies fully with a quality that was almost as palpable as the touch of a hand. Speech—crude, shameful, and slimy—seemed forever immanent. Esther hurried by with averted eyes and with her heart thudding in her throat. Then she became aware that Georgia did not wish to hurry, suddenly aware that there was something in Georgia’s walk and manner that answered with equal eloquence, with the same foul potent silence. It spoke out of her sensual flesh, with a sly and evil tongue, it spoke indefinably yet unmistakably in every gesture, it spoke in something loose, exultant and inviting, like the phantom of obscene laughter in her face—yet apparently, in all this strange sensual eloquence of their flesh, she never glanced at him, never gave him any visible sign. The next day as they came from school Esther said:
“Georgia, let’s go down the other side. I don’t want to go by there. He’ll be waiting for us.”
“Who?”
“That livery stable man.”
“What you got against that po’ man,” said Georgia good naturedly. “He ain’t done nothin’ to you.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Esther. “I don’t like the way he looks.”
“Don’t like the way he looks!" said Georgia. “Why, child, you don’t know a good-lookin’ man when you see one.”
“You don’t mean to say you think he’s good-looking!” Esther said incredulously.
“Yes, suh! I sho do!” said Georgia emphatically; a flag of color, hard and angry, began to rush in her cheeks. “He’s the best-lookin’ man I seen aroun’ these pahts! A sho-nuff man, I mean!—not one of these little dried up Jew-boys that you see!”
Esther made no answer: in the last words she now recognized an intention that was harsh, wounding, malicious—when they had gone by the man again, and turned the corner, her face was flaming, not with resentment, but with a sense of deep and wordless shame; but whether she felt this for herself or for her friend she could not say. They did not speak to each other on the way home, and when they reached Georgia’s house they did not linger but said goodbye abruptly and formally.
A sense of disaster, immanent, foreboding, pressed like a weight upon her heart: she kept thinking,
“What will her people say if they find out? What will they say?”
A memory of grand dignities, of noble families, of high untarnished prides, of fiercely arrogant poverty, of “death but not dishonor,” of an ancestral line of gentlefolk, brave, high, and rare, that ran straight back into the past with the gleaming strength of an unrusted and unbroken lance—all this, evoked through Mrs. Barnhill’s assertion of a remote, princely, and awful antiquity—swept through her mind now like a curtain of dark and tragic splendor against which Georgia’s infamy was made to seem more complete and terrible than if this panoply of past time had not existed.
Although she still called for Georgia on her way to school, the other girl avoided her on their return, and she accepted the evasion willingly: she understood now that her old friend did not want her company on the way home, and for her part, she was glad that she must no longer suffer the lewd loose foulness of the livery man’s stare. For she knew he had no interest in her whatever: now that she was alone, she could pass the stable without being noticed.
One day, when she had left school late, she saw, as she approached the stable, the man and Georgia talking to each other. He had one hand stretched forth and leaned against the open door, the other was upon his hip, and the girl was indolently swinging her books by their straps as she talked: her manner was casual, bantering, hesitant—his was insinuating, sly, easily careful—the look of a man who is feeling his way. Before Esther had come near, the other girl glanced up, saw her, bade the man goodbye, and went on down the street alone. The man’s grin, reflective, loose, went after her: then he shook his head decisively, laughing, dropped his hand, and turned back into the stable.
As Esther hurried by, she was aware of a circle of grinning faces gathered about him: he stood, with his back turned—a back in whose carriage boastful confidence was legible—and she heard one of the men about him say:
“Y’ought t’be ashamed of yerself! Robbin’ the God-damn cradle!”
Esther hurried by.
“Ah! he won’t get nowhere!” another said. “I know that kind—a little teaser, she’s laughin’ up her sleeve at him right now.”
“She is, eh?” the hero said: his tone was hard, quiet, confident. “Say: I want to tell you something—if I don’t have that little son-of-a-bitch up the pole within a month you can kick my God damn a—all over the stable!”
There was a burst of laughter, harsh and derisive, and their speech, a replica of millions of others, pursued unweariedly its twin topics of horses and women.
Yet, if Georgia could have heard them it is not likely she would have been repelled or displeased. Her true desire—a fantasy of what she wanted most—had little that was sentimental in it: she did not even trick it out with the morals and fancy manners of romantic fiction—her lust, her version of “good-lookin’ men”—was animal, save for a caste of color, negroid: she wanted the thick red neck, the muscular buttocks, the coarse vacant regularity of the face, the complete full hunger of a brutal energy.
“I wonder what her mother would say if she knew,” thought Esther, and suddenly, it seemed at once, the conviction came to her that Mrs. Barnhill would say, would care, nothing. The sum of their actual lives, as she had herself witnessed them, with all that was trivial, disorderly, impure, slothful, of low desire and aspiration, and which formerly had weighed nothing against the sum of their grand assertions, now shattered in an instant that iridescent bubble of romantic and gentle ambiguity in whose reality she had believed. She thought of the kitchen and the slatternly negro girl with her dirty, unheeled white stockings, her run-down shoes and the strong black smell, thick and salty, niggery, which soaked out of her, the litter of unwashed dishes, unscoured pans, the bucket of decaying garbage, the strong blue buzz of flies, the most actual sign of force and purpose in the room; and then the house with its assortment of rickety furniture, its inept souvenirs of the past—its burnt-wood trinkets, with bows of dirty ribbon, its ancient calendars, its dilapidated beds, warped blistered dressers and untidy sewing machines, with their cigar boxes filled with loose unmatched buttons, threads, thimbles, swirls of wool and ribbons, its odd collection of chairs, squeaking rockers, and finally she remembered the day she had for the first time gone into Mrs. Barnhill’s own bedroom on an occasion when “company” from the South was calling, and when Mrs. Barnhill did not wish any let or hindrance to impede the full flow of envenomed gossip:
“You children go somewheh’s else to tawk.”
The old sagging bed had been rudely made: its soiled counterpane was awry and rumpled, its pillows unsmoothed. Upon the dresser there had been a strewn wilderness of hairpins, soiled powder puffs, brushes chocked with hair, and thickly gummed combs; and under the bed, both visible and odorous, a full chamberpot, swimming, rancid. And from below the woman’s insistent, incessant monologue:
“They don’t know white fokes when they see ’em up heah! . . . These fokes don’t cayah who you ah. . . . No, suh! . . . All they think about is makin’ money. . . . An ig’rant! My lan’! . . . These ole fawr’ners that you see! . . . Why, it’s awful! Ha’f of them c’aint read ner write. . . .”
Now, suddenly, as Esther remembered all these scenes and moments, a laugh, short, explosive, angry, burst from her: she felt tricked and cheated, resentful, and when she got home, she flung her books down angrily, and began to wander sullenly and indecisively about the room.
“What’s wrong with you?” said Bella.
“Nothing,” she said morosely.
“Is everything all right at school?”
“Yes. Look here,” she burst out suddenly, in an exasperated tone. “If the Barnhills are such a wonderful old family as they say they are, it looks like they might try to keep that house better. Why it’s filthy!”
Bella laughed. “Oh it’s the white fokes!”—this was the name, the inevitable name she always called them by. “White fokes don’t have to wash. Don’t you know that yet? It’s only Jews and niggers who get dirty.”
“Oh, white fokes!” Esther muttered. “They make me sick!”
“What’s the matter with you? Have you and white fokes had a falling out?”
Esther made no answer: she went over to a chair and sat down wearily and dejectedly. At length she said in the same sullen and dejected tone:
“I don’t care.”
Bella looked intently at her for a moment:
“I knew this would happen,” she said at length, slowly, and with a kind of triumphant, although not malicious, emphasis. “I knew it!” She paused for a moment. “Well, let me tell you something,” she continued. “You haven’t lost anything. . . . You may think you have, but you haven’t. . . . You’re better off without these people.”
Later on the same day she told Joe about it:
“She’s had some sort of trouble with the white fokes. I think it’s all over between them.”
“I wondered how much longer it was going to last,” he said.
The sense of freedom that Esther now felt, however, also carried with it the sense of loss. She felt, even more than the feeling of repulsion and disgust that Georgia’s conduct with the livery man had caused her, a feeling of bitter resentment, a feeling that was touched with jealousy. She thought of Georgia’s slow maturing charm—her peachy perfection of skin, her languid ripeness, her warm calm eye, the unutterable ease of the careless and slothful spirit that dwelt in her—and she felt frightened, stripped by her loss of some essential, some inestimable support. There was no doubt that the feeling was strongly physical: among women, when their feeling for each other has not been envenomed with a sense of rivalry or jealousy, there is a quality of affection which is unlike the affection men have for each other—it is intimately physical, caressing, and somewhat lesbic. Esther had almost a lover’s tenderness for Georgia’s physical beauty: she liked to put her arm around the other girl, to embrace her, to nestle in to her, to stroke with a sense of affection and wonderment, the velvet and perfect texture of Georgia’s skin.
This was the only time she played a lover-like and suitor’s role with another woman. Curiously, as she grew older, and as her own beauty, which was delicate and ripe, matured, she inspired in other women the same feeling that she now felt for Georgia. These other women were always much larger physically than Esther: one was a nurse, a big, gaunt, raw-boned woman, with hands as large and strong as a man’s; another was a powerfully built Russian woman—a masseuse; and another was a tall, handsome, and passionate Jewess—a rich young woman devoured by a stupid fury and pride of possession: for her it was not enough to share with others a friend’s love—she had always to be a dominant and over-shadowing first, to hold off rivals at an outer wall. For her, possession died by what it feeds upon—glutton and niggard in one breath, crafty, insinuating, trivial, and meanly contriving, and beaten at length by its base stupidity.
All these women later lived to put their hands on Esther: the strong gaunt woman stroked her face and forehead, and the rich woman held her in her arms and kissed her. She loved affection: as one saw her rich and delicate figure clothed in splendid robes upon a couch, her rosy and beautiful face bloomed like a pansy, and her whole body seemed to yield itself up gratefully to the tender stroking of the strong gaunt hands like some rare and splendid flower expanding toward rich warmth and light.
As one saw Esther thus in later years, one’s feeling toward her would not have been tinged with any repulsion: one would have had, on the contrary, a good and tender feeling for her because her attitude as she responded to the caresses of these women was plainly innocent, sensual, and hungry as a child for affection. As for the women, the strokers and caressers themselves, one’s feeling might have been tinged by repulsion, anger, and disgust: as old Rapp, her great frame dried and withered now by loveless and sterile years, a web of insane and degrading illusions (such as: that lustful men were pursuing her constantly, with intentions of rape and defilement, so that now, past sixty, with her rusty hank of hair all dyed a dry harsh red, she nevertheless wore three pairs of drawers to protect more securely what she was pleased to think of as her “honor”)—on whose lank scorned visage as her great-knuckled fingers gently stroked the flowering pansy of the face below her, was legible a look of hypnotic contemplation in which an expression of tender love was mixed with a quality as repellent as a senile male lechery. And yet this quality itself was at once denied and complicated by a dozen other elements: a sense of noble tenderness, devotion, and changeless love as she spoke of Esther, of her childhood, and of her beauty as a young woman—a quality of love and profound understanding which played marvelously upon the lank leathery yellow of her features a luminous radiance. Thus, her mind, old, broken, and diffuse, caught hopelessly in a web of manias and impossible persecutions, would be focused suddenly upon some memory of Esther’s youth, and for a few moments, with a convulsive and splintered coherence, she would speak of her:
“That time!—O! . . . I shall never forget it. . . . I want to tell you. . . I was thinking about it the other day. . . . In all your life you never. . . . If you could have seen her! (Here she drew her breath in with a rusty intake.) O! Her little feet. . . . I lifted her like a child. . . . ‘Why’ (I cried!) Her little toes so straight. . . . And O! That great hunk of a thing inside her tearing her to pieces! . . . Why! Enough to make you hate the sight of men! Yes, and him!” she said scornfully. “Playing cards! When she asked him for a drink of water . . . one time we were all sitting on the stoop. I’ve never had any use for him since. Do you think he would! I could have told her then.” (This in a mincing tone of envenomed bitterness.)
“Rapp, Rapp,” said Esther gently. “That was before.”
“But O! the birds . . . outside. . . . O my no! . . . He was too fine a gentleman. He said, ‘Get it yourself!’” This in a curt blunt tone. “But it was the longest night I ever. . . . For fourteen hours she was. . . . I’ll never forget . . . a lovely young . . . these Germans. . . . Always despised them. . . . Things they did in the war. . . . Think of that. O! do you remember what you kept saying all the time? . . .” She began to laugh in a rusty and clumsy manner, holding a few large gnarled fingers loosely over her mouth.
“Yes,” said Esther. “I remember your face as you bent over me: it kept going in and out like a concertina. . . . I kept saying ‘Rapp, you mustn’t do your face so funny! I don’t like it!’”
“O yes! I remember!” Rapp screamed rustily, rocking slowly back and forth. “But you kept saying ‘For who would fardels bear! For who would fardels bear!’”
“That’s what I said!” said Esther. “God, it was hot! And just at day all of the birds began to sing! Don’t you remember!”
“O! if you could have seen her then!” cried Rapp. She drew in her breath with a sort of rusty ecstasy. “Her little hands and feet! . . . Her slender little body. . . . In all your life you never. . . . O! I thought! . . . She was the loveliest little. . . .”
