Thomas Wolfe, page 381
There was only the dark listening silence: far off the vast brooding murmur of the city rose, the cars clambered by on Broadway, there was the delicate briskness of hooves, but in the street it seemed that life had been fixed in a strong hypnosis, a fascination of disgust and loathing, as it paused to listen. At length, more quietly spoken, but carried even more clearly in the astonishing resonance of her voice, came the final words of shame and grief. It was as if, goaded by some deep madness of fury and frustration, to a foul liberty of speech she had never taken in a more familiar place, and finally maddened because what charm of youth and sex she once had possessed had long since vanished in the general ruin of all her other hopes, she was emboldened now to publish in this alien place (whether truly or falsely no one ever knew) a news of foul infamy that would strip from him the last ray of dignity that remained to him. Her voice, calm, hoarse, broken between words as if she panted to get breath, still carried an amazing resonance:
“. . . You say we ain’t goin’ back. . . . No, I know that. . . . I know we’re not. . . . An’ I’ll tell you why. . . . We ain’t goin’ back because they won’t let you come back. . . . We ain’t goin’ back because they’s no one in that town that would give you a job. They won’t give you a job because everybody knows why you lost yo’ job at Ivans’ (Evans) sto’. They know you lost yo’ job because you’d been stealin’ from Ivans fo’ yeahs. They knew you’d been takin’ Ivans’ groceries an’ sendin’ them home without payin’ fo’ them. . . . An’ I tell you somethin’ else. . . . they know you ain’t comin’ back because you ah afraid of Charley Brissey. . . . They know that Brissey slapped yo’ face and kicked you out in the street when you went an’ tried to get money from him. . . . They knew you tried to get money from him because he’d been goin’ to bed with yo’ wife fo’ yeahs, an’ you wasn’t man enough to do anything about it. . . . Yaie!” she screamed. “I was his woman, I went to bed with him, an’ I’m proud of it. . . . I had me a man, a real man, fo’ once . . . not a little good-fo’ nothin’ rabbit. . . . Yaie! Good-fo’-nothin’. You weren’t even good enough to get a chile of yo’ own. . . . Yo’ own chile is Charley Brissey’s, an evy’body knows it, an’ I’m proud of it. . . . God-damn you, I hate the sight of you, you good-fo’-nothin’ pimp, that’s all you ah. . . .”
Her speech broke into hoarse incoherent sobs, and at length there was silence in the house again, a movement of life along the street. A man knocked out the red cake of ash from his pipe against the stone railing of a stoop:
“Christ!” he muttered, rising from the step. “I hope he smashes every God damn tooth she’s got into her throat!”
And Bella, standing in darkness, her face pooled beside a film of curtain, spoke briefly and quietly through a mouth puckered with ruralism:
“White fokes!”
And someone said: “I wonder how much Charley Brissey misses her,” and laughed softly, bitterly.
And Esther turned and went into the house that had no depth of darkness deep enough for the concealment she desired.
Early Summer, late June: the beginnings of blazing heat, the summer persistent, timeless, an immeasurable weariness—the sweltering stifling blanket of the insistent and merciless heat: at ten o’clock the glazed murky light, the weary murky sky, the mournful acceptances of impure and tormented heat that sank nauseously to the entrails:
“Looks like another scorcher today.” “Yep: It’s going to be hot. It’s not the heat I mind so much: it’s the humidity.” “Oh well! It’s not so bad, taking there’s only six weeks of it. August’s not a bad month: the nights are always cool.”
It was a lie.
“Yes: by the middle of August it’s all over. September’s a good month.”
It was a lie, a lie, and Esther, looking out into the weary forenoon glaze, knew that it was a lie.
Some of the horses wore a body netting, some wore straw hats through which their ears pricked rakishly, beneath which their long heads and enormous mottled eyes stared with their comic and mournful wisdom: the horses suffered horribly, they died by hundreds in the heat, in the deceiving gloom below the elevated structure, the raw horsecar nags were unhitched and rested; drivers with thoughtful faces appraisingly threw buckets of slopping water on the smoking trembling flanks of horses.
Heat, thick glazed heat, humid and sweltering heat: from day to weary day the man-swarm thrust and jostled in this heat until all their memory and hope—all brilliant recollections of bright-nailed cold, of the frozen and immense solitude of stars, of the piercing exultancy of wind and frost, of the cry that leapt out in the wind—were lost under the thick dense envelope which pressed soddenly upon man’s spirit, and which shut him off from every memory, swift, soaring and exultant that joined him to cold lonely space;—heat that melted him out in hopelessness, that leveled out the keen and sharp defiance of self, the lean and secret architectures of vanity, beyond private dignity into a general nucleus of wet, weary and hopeless flesh, an uneasy atom in its world and inter-flux with a degrading identity of melting gropings, unmemoried and unmindful of anything but the uncaring moments, interfused of one drab stuff of rootless, quivering and impotent life. Hope, belief, joy—every strong and sudden energy that goes leaping through the blood and that makes life valuable drowned miserably in the glazed swelter of that heat, and Esther, who hated its miseries particularly, now felt a sense of exasperation and dislike for people themselves, as if they accepted this ugly and uncomfortable existence because their sense and aspiration were both too coarse to want (she knew not how or where) some better one: she resented the misery and discomfort of their sweltering lives, the fetid cells they lived in, their rancid body smells—and, with a sort of hatred for her own race, the rancid stench of Jewesses with unwashed armpits—as if these people had in some way willed and desired the wretchedness in which they dwelt. And then, with only the stay of a moment’s breeze, some seconds’ pause and flutter of a tired belief, a feeling of pity and wonder would surge back into her heart as she saw, below the dull greasy yellows of their disturbed and contorted faces, a look that was, in all the base indignity of their shabby, sweaty lives, patient, tenacious, dogged, and wistfully enduring—and suddenly the wonderful enigma of living, the sad, terrible, patience of living, came to her: suddenly she saw that man, out of the full sum and multiple of his twenty thousand miserable, sweaty, vile and loathsome days, might wrench ten hours of joy and ecstasy—ten moments, if he were lucky, when an almost perfect joy might not be fouled and mutilated by the infinite little diseases and destinies of his flesh, the itches, aches, and vague discomforts of his paltry body, of the insistent rasp of his tortured nerves, the pressure of his ragged and inept memories with their grotesque swarm of fears, hates and duties—and that it was only in hope of these ten possible moments that he lived or desired to live, that this and this alone, this mirage of some future and impossible bliss made him endure the desolation and horror of the existence he was forced to lead, kept him alive in all this sweltering misery from which he rarely gained a moment’s respite.
A sense of horror and desolation which seemed too much for her to bear swept over her suddenly: it seemed to her that life was unendurable, and she hated people for enduring it as it was and for not resenting its ugliness and misery. It seemed to her that these people with their inept, confused, and frenzied lives actually loved the discomfort and ugliness in which they weltered—as if the horrible weather of these hot glazed skies, with their nausea of steaming heat, was also the weather of men’s souls, and as if she could no longer draw her breath in peace in a world where such things and people lived. In herself she felt only the desire for joy, wonder, and exultancy—for the discovery of an earth which had once seemed wonderful but had now betrayed her: she felt herself drowning, the only fish that could not swim or breathe in this sea of abject grey misery and dullness of mankind.
Heat—and misery; and in the midst of this the Barnhills were moving. The cavernous maw of an enormous moving van stood backed to the curb to receive the dingy furnishings of the house, and in the street two powerful grey horses dropped their great heads doggedly before the heat, dug heavily at the pavement, and stiffly brushed their rumps with coarse dry whiskings of their tails. At length it came—upon the shoulders of three sweaty Irishmen: it came endlessly and horribly, the accumulated trash of a lifetime—the cheap dressers, with warped and blistered drawers, their mottled glass, the dirty stained mattresses, the rickety and dilapidated chairs, the long, rattling wide-width pictures, the rocker with carpeted seat, the fancy pincushions with their borders of dirty ribbon, the calendars, the organ with broken and sunken keys, the stereoscope, the accordion hat-rack, the grit and grease encrusted kitchen pots and pans, the chamberpots, the bedding—it all came out under the eye of the merciless sun with a sense of shameless and degrading exposure—as if the poverty, the lunacy, and defeat, and the dirty confusion of these lives was made legible and published nakedly in the ill-assortment of these possessions.
At length, the last piece was roped into the end of the bulging and loaded van, the great horses strained and pulled off slowly, and Barnhill, his wife, and a little later, Georgia, came down the steps, and left the house. Esther waited at the window, and for a moment she thought Georgia had glanced in her direction and would come to speak to her. Esther’s heart was thudding fiercely, her legs trembled, she felt a wild impulse to rush out in the street, call to the other girl, and embrace her. But she didn’t. After a moment Georgia turned and walked slowly down the street behind her parents. They all turned south on Broadway, and vanished from her sight. The street seemed empty when they were gone, inhabited only by the fierce glare of the sun. They were lost in the heat, the glare, the scaring confusion of the city. She never saw any of them again.
[¬]
thomas wolfe
THE PARTY AT JACK’S
The University of North Carolina Press, Suzanne Stutman and John L. Idol, jr., eds., 1995
[The text follows the first edition.]
THE PARTY AT JACK’S
[¬]
Morning
Morning · Jack Asleep
Morning · Jack Erect
Morning · Jack Afloat
Morning · Mrs. Jack Awake
Morning · Mrs. Jack and the Maid
Morning · Jack and His Wife
Morning · The World that Jack Built
The Great Building · (April, 1930)
The Elevator Men
Before the Party
Piggy Logan
The Family
The Party Beginning
The Guests Arriving
The Lover
Mr. Hirsch Was Wounded Sorrowfully
Piggy Logan’s Circus
The Guests Departing · The Fire
The Fire · The Outpouring of the Honeycomb
The Fire · The Tunneled Rock
After the Fire · These Two Together
Love Is Enough?
MORNING
“Hartmann!”
“Hier, Herr Professor.”
“Das wort für garten.”
“Hortus, Herr Professor.”
“Deklination?”
“Zweite.”
“Geschlecht?”
“Maskulinum, Herr Professor.”
“Deklinieren!”
Hartmann stiffened his shoulders slightly, drew a deep breath, and, looking straight before him with a wooden expression, rapidly recited in an expressionless sing-song tone:
“Hortus, horti, horto, hortum, horte, horto; horti, hortorum, hortis, hortos, horti, hortis.”
“So. Setzen sie, Hartmann.”
Hartmann sat down blowing slightly at the corners of his thick mouth. For a moment he held his rigid posture, then he relaxed warily, his little eyes wavered craftily from side to side, he stole a look of triumph and of satisfaction at his comrades.
He was only a child in years, but his limbs and features held in miniature the mature lineaments of a man. He seemed never to have been young or child-like. His face was tough, sallow and colorless: the skin looked as thick and rough as a man’s and it was covered unpleasantly with thick white hair which was not visible until one came close to him. His eyes were small, red, and watery looking and thickly lashed and browed with the same silken, unpleasantly white, hair. His features were small, blunted, and brutal: the nose small and turned up and flattened at the tip, so that the nostrils had a wide flaring appearance, the mouth was coarse, blurred and indefinite, and the cheekbones also had a blunted flattened-out appearance.
Hartmann’s head was shaved, a bluish stubble of hair covered it evenly, and the structure of the skull was ugly, mean, and somehow repellent: it seemed to slant forward and downward from the bony cage at the back of the brain to a pinched and painful brow. Finally Hartmann’s body was meagre and stringy looking, but immensely tough, his hands were disproportionately large and raw, and dangled crudely and clumsily at his sides. Brutal in mind and body, neither his person nor his character was pleasing, and Frederick hated him. And this hatred Hartmann returned on him with cordial measure.
“Jack!”
Frederick did not hear that word of harsh command. His dark eye brooded into vacancy, his mind was fixed and lost in stellar distances, his spirit was soaring far away across the surging blue, the immense and shiny wink of an ocean that washed the shores of all the earth. And a channel of bright water led him straight to the goal of all his dreaming. Upon the decks of clean white river-steamers he went down the river Rhine. He went from Koblenz on to Bonn, from Bonn, to Köln, from Köln to Düsseldorf, and then through Holland to the sea. And then he put out to sea upon another mightier ship. The sea was blue and shining, but there was also gold upon it: it was never grey. The great ship foamed and lifted with a lordly prancing motion, like a horse, he felt the rock and swell, the infinite plangent undulance of the sea beneath that foaming keel, and the great ship rushed onward day by day into the west.
And now, after many days, Frederick saw before him the outposts of the land. He smelled the brave familiar fragrance of the land, the spermy sea-wrack and the warmth of earth, and he saw before him first pale streaks of sand, a low coast, and then faint pallid greens, and little towns and houses. Now, the ship entered the narrow gateways of the harbor, and now Frederick saw before him a great harbor busy with the play and traffic of a thousand boats. And he saw before him, at the harbor’s base, a fabulous city, built upon an island. It swept upward from an opalescent cloud, from which it seemed to grow, on which it was upborne lightly, and as magical as a vision, and yet it was real and shining, and as solid as the rock on which it had been founded. And by the city flowed a river—“ein Fluss viel schöner als den Rhein”—a thing almost incredible, and yet it must be so, for Uncle Max had seen it, and sworn just the night before that it was true. Beyond the city was an immense, fertile, and enchanted land—“ein Land von unbegrenzte möglich keiten,” Uncle Max had sworn, and surely Uncle Max had known, for he had come back from that country speaking its strange nasal accents, wearing its strange garments, rich with the tribute of its enormous bounty. And he had said that some day he would come and take Frederick back with him, and Frederick, dreaming of the wealth, the gold, the glory and the magic of that far shining city that floated upward from its cloud of mist hoped for this more than for anything on earth.
“Jack! Jack! Ist Friedrich Jack hier?”
He came to with a sharp start of confusion as that harsh and choleric voice broke in upon his revery, and the class whose attention had been riveted for some seconds on his dreaming face burst into a sharp and sudden yelp of glee as he scrambled frantically to his feet, straightened his shoulders, and stammered out confusedly,
“Hier, bitte. Ja. Ich bin hier.”
That high and hateful face, hairless, skull-like, seamed and parchment dry, scarred hideously upon one sallow cheek, with its livid scorpion of saber wounds, and with thin convulsive lips drawn back above a row of big yellow teeth, now peered at him above its glasses with a stare of wall-eyed fury. In a moment the stringy tendons of the neck craned hideously above the choker collar, and the harsh voice rasped with fury as old Kugel’s ramrod form bowed with a slightly ironic courtesy in its frock coat sheathing of funereal black.
“Wenn sie sind fertig, Excellenz,” he said.
“Ja—Ja—fertig,” Frederick stammered foolishly and incoherently, wondering desperately what the question was, and if it had already been asked. The class tittered with expectancy, and already unnerved by his shock and confusion, Frederick blurted out with no sense at all of what he was saying: “Ich meine—Ich bin fertig—Onkel!”
A sickening wave of shame and mortification swept over him the moment that he spoke the words, and as the instant roar of the class brought to him the knowledge of his hideous blunder. Onkel! Would he ever hear the end of this? And how could he have been such a fool as to identify, even in a moment of forgetfulness, this cruel and ugly old ape with the princely and heroic figure of his Uncle Max. Tears of shame welled in his eyes, he stammered out incoherent apologies and explanations that went unheard in the furious uproar of the class, but he could have bitten his tongue out for rage and mortification.
As for Kugel, he stood stock still, his eyes staring with horror, like a man who has just received a paralytic stroke. In a moment, recovering his powers of speech, and torn with fury between the roaring class and the culprit who stood trembling before him, he snatched up a heavy book, lifted it high above his head in two dry, freckled hands, and smashed it down upon the table with terrific force.
