Thomas Wolfe, page 397
He was growing bald, his short, silky hair was getting very thin on top and on the sides it crinkled in unpleasant little scrolls. She was conscious of a moment’s distaste and repugnance as she looked at him, but then she remembered what a perfect son he was, how thoughtful and how good and how devoted and how, no matter what the unfathomed implications of those jeering eyes might be he had said nothing—for all that anyone could prove, saw nothing.
“He’s a sweet boy,” she was thinking as she responded brightly to his greeting: “Oh, hello, darling. You’re all ready, aren’t you? Listen,”—she spoke rapidly—“Will you look out for the bell and take care of anyone who comes? Mr. Logan is changing his costume in the guest room—won’t you look out for him if he needs anything? And see if Edith’s ready. And when the guests begin to come you can send the women to her room to take off their wraps—oh, just tell Molly—she’ll attend to it! And you’ll take care of the men yourself—won’t you, dear? You can take them back into your father’s room—is he ready yet? You’d better go and tell him that it’s time. I’ll be out in a few minutes. If only everything!—” she began in a worried tone, slipped the jade ring quickly from her finger and slipped it back again. “I do hope that everything’s all right!” She spoke rapidly, nervously, with a little line of tension between her eyes.
“But isn’t it?” he said in his heavy, smooth and blandly jeering tone. “Have you looked?”
“Oh, everything looks perfect!” she cried. “It’s really just too beautiful! The girls behaved wonderfully—only—” the little furrow came between her eyes again—“Do keep an eye on them, won’t you, Ernie? You know how they are if you’re not around. Something’s so likely to go wrong. And of course I can’t hear everything that’s going on any longer. It’s such a nuisance getting deaf this way!—” she said impatiently—“So please do listen and look out for me, won’t you, dear? And look out for Mr. Logan. I do hope—” she paused, with a look of worried abstraction in her eyes. She began to snap the ring on and off her finger again.
“You do hope what?” said Ernie pointedly, with just the suggestion of an ironic grin around the corners of his heavy mouth.
“I do hope he won’t—” she began in a troubled tone, then went on rapidly—“He said something about—about clearing away some of the things in the living room for his show—”
She looked at him rather helplessly, then, catching the irony of his faint grin, she colored quickly and laughed, shortly richly: “God! I don’t know what he’s going to do. He brought enough stuff with him to sink a battleship! Still, I suppose it’s going to be all right. Everyone’s been after him you know—everyone’s thrilled at the chance of seeing him—Oh, I’m sure it’ll be all right. Don’t you think so? Hah?” She looked eagerly, earnestly at him with her flushed and rosy little face with a look of such droll, beseeching inquiry as she clapped a small hand to her ear that, unmasked for a moment, he laughed abruptly, coarsely, as he turned away, saying:
“Oh, I suppose so, I’ll look after it.”
Mrs. Jack went on down the hall, pausing just perceptibly as she passed her daughter’s door, cupping her hand swiftly to her ear and listening for a moment. She could hear just faintly the girl’s voice clear, cool, and young, humming the jaunty strains of a tune that was popular at the moment:
“You’re the cream in my coffee—You’re the salt in my stew-w——”
The woman listened eagerly, a little smile of love and tenderness suffusing her face as she did so. Then she went on down the hall and entered her room, leaving her door slightly ajar behind her.
It was a very simple, lovely room. It was a room that had a kind of haunting chastity, a moving austerity. At first glance the room seemed almost needlessly severe: There was, in the centre of one wall, a little narrow wooden bed, so small, and plain, and old, that it seemed it might almost have served as the bed of a medieval nun, as perhaps it had. Beside this bed there was a little table with a few books, a telephone, a glass and a silver pitcher and in a silver frame a photograph of a girl in her early twenties. This was Mrs. Jack’s daughter.
In the centre of the wall at the left as one entered there was an enormous old wooden wardrobe, which she had brought from Italy and which was a product of the Italian renaissance. On the opposite wall, two high broad windows looked out on the street and between these windows there was a small writing table, with some ink, some paper and a pen.
Along the wall that faced the bed and near the door of the big closet were all her beautiful dresses, gowns and suits and the wonderful collection of wing-like little shoes which had been made by hand to house her perfect little feet, and which were one of her special and most proud extravagances. There was a gay old painted wooden chest, a product of the Pennsylvania Dutch, carved and colored in quaint and cheerful patterns. Here she kept her fine old silks and laces and the wonderful and noble Indian saris which she loved so well and which adorned her small but lovely figure with such gracious dignity.
Facing this old chest, along the opposite wall, between the bed and window, there was a small drawing table. It was a single sheet of white perfect wood on which were arranged with faultless precision a dozen sharpened pencils, a few feathery brushes, some crisp sheets of tracing papers on which the geometric figures of design were legible, a pot of paste, a ruler, and a little jar of golden paint. Exactly above this table hanging from the wall in all the clean perfection and beauty of their strength and accuracy were a triangle and a square. At the foot of the little bed there was a chaise longue covered with a flowered design of old faded silk.
There were a few simple drawings on the wall and a single painting of a strange, exotic flower. It was such a flower as never was, a kind of dream flower of the brain which this woman had painted long ago. There was an old chest of drawers with a few silver toilet articles and a small square mirror on its top, and these were the sole adornments of the room.
Mrs. Jack regarded herself for a moment in the mirror. She had a very lovely face, her brown and pleasant eyes were a little tired and there were webbings of fine wrinkles about them. But the healthy, jolly freshness of her rosy cheeks and lips needed the redemptive aid of no artifice of rouge. She never used it. Her hair was brown, a little dull and coarse, just touched a little by filaments of grey. The hair itself was not distinguished by its beauty, but it was clean and healthy looking. The forehead was low, not an impressive one, certainly not showing signs of intellectual grandeur. But the wise eyes were kind and shrewd and sharp and lively and missed nothing. The quality of the whole face had an expression of serious and acute intelligence a little worn by time, by care, by experience and the responsibilities of life and work. The face itself was a fine one: it was almost perfectly heartshaped. The glowing rosy features sloped firmly, perfectly, to a rounded but most determined chin. The chin was slightly cleft. The nose was somewhat too large and fleshy for the contours of the face, which were characterized not only by the strength, the decision, the firmness of the features, but also by a quality of delicacy and loveliness that can only be described as flowerlike.
It was a strange and moving congruence of age and youth, of innocence and maturity, of an almost childlike eagerness, surprise and wonder, with the shrewd intelligence, the driving will and energy of an extremely resourceful, able and experienced child of Eve.
She looked at herself for a moment. She regarded and admired herself. She found herself good.
And, as the woman continued to look at herself in the privacy of her mirror, her face and manner betrayed a childlike vanity that would have been ludicrously comical if anyone had seen her. First she bent forward a little and looked at herself long and earnestly with an expression of a childlike innocence, an air of surprised wonder which was one of her characteristic expressions when she faced and met the world.
Apparently she found the contemplation of her own rosy guilelessness quite pleasing, for in a moment she began to regard herself from first one angle, then another. She put her hand up to her temple and smoothed her brow, and regarded herself with rapt complacency again. Her expression now, indeed, barely escaped a smirk of satisfaction and for the first time, now, there was a sense of looseness about the mouth and nostril, a kind of cynic smirk not wholly good to see.
Then slowly, raptly, she lifted the small, strong hand and looked at it. She flexed the firm and slender fingers and turned her wrist, meanwhile regarding the miracle with a fascinated stare. And now, the look upon her face was truly childlike in its vanity. She admired the old Jade ring upon her finger. She brooded with a kind of dark and smouldering fascination on the thick bracelet around her arm—a rich and sombre chain of ancient India, studded with dull and curious gems.
She looked at her slender fingers, at her warm, slightly worn neck, and traced out with her fingertips the strange and opulent design of the old necklace, also a work of India, that she wore. She surveyed her smooth and naked arms, her smooth, bare back, her breast and gleaming shoulders and the outlines of her small and lovely figure and arranged half consciously with practiced touches of an expert hand the folds of her simple, splendid gown.
She looked demurely at her small feet, shod beautifully in golden wings. Then she lifted arm and hand again and half-turning with the other hand upon her hip she ogled herself absurdly in the friendly mirror.
But even while this ritual of adoring self was taking place, its spellbound abbess was discovered in the act. As the elder woman turned and worshipped at the shrine of her own beauty a girl, young, slender, faultless, cold and lovely—with the hard perfection, the perfect convention of Egyptian Nefratete, whose likeness she so strikingly suggested—had entered through the bathroom that connected two rooms and, standing in the door, paused in a moment of cold irony as she caught the other woman in the act.
Slowly the mother turned, arm raised and hand extended in the orbit of her own self worship. Slowly she turned, still rapt in contemplation of her loveliness, gasped suddenly with surprise and fright, and uttered a little scream. Her hand flew to her throat in a gesture of alarm and realizing now that she was not alone she looked up and saw the girl. Her face went crimson as a beet. For a moment longer the two women continued to look at each other, the mother utterly confused and crimson with her guilt, the daughter coolly and appraisingly with the irony of sophisticated mirth.
Then, as they continued to look at each other and full consciousness of the moment dawned upon the older woman, something quick and instant passed between them in their glance. Like one who has been discovered and who knows that there is nothing more to say, the woman suddenly cast up her head and laughed, a rich, full-throated, woman’s yell of free acknowledgment, unknown to the race of man.
As for the girl, now grinning faintly, she approached and kissed her mother, saying, “Well, Mother, was it good?” And again the woman was shaken with a rich hysteria of helpless mirth; then both freed from all argument by that all-taking moment, were calm again.
Thus passed there in a flash the whole tremendous comedy of womankind. No words were needed, there was nothing left to say. All had been said there in that voiceless instant of complete and utter understanding, of mutual recognition and conspiracy. The whole universe of sex had been nakedly revealed for just a moment in all its horror, guile, deception and its overwhelming humor.
And the great city, the unceasing city, the unnumbered temporal city, with its seven million lives roared on unwittingly around that secret cell and never knew that here for a moment had been revealed a buried force more strong than cities and as old as earth.
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THE PARTY BEGINNING
But now the guests were beginning to arrive. The electric thring of the doorbell broke sharply and persistently on accustomed quietness. People began to come in and fill the place with the ease and familiarity of old friends. In the hallway and in the rooms at the front there arose now the confused but crescent medley of a dozen voices—the rippling laughter and quick excited voices of the women with the deeper and more vibrant sonorities of the men. One could listen and without looking sense and feel and hear the growing momentum of the party.
It was a mixture smooth as oil, the ingredients of a liquor which mixed, and fused, and grew, and mounted steadily with each arrival. There were, with every sharp electric ringing of the bell, with every opening and closing of the door, new voices and new laughter, a babel of new greeting, new gaiety and new welcome. There was the tinkle of ice in shell-thin glasses, voices and people coming closer, voices and people moving down the hall, voices and people moving in and out of rooms, weaving back and forth, circulating everywhere in beautiful and spontaneous patterns as natural and as fluent as all life until the whole place was invaded, filled, completely inhabited with the flashing iridescent gaiety of all these voices, all these people.
Already the party, like all the parties Mrs. Jack had ever given, seemed to run itself. Without any sense of strain or supervision it was mounting swiftly, easily, naturally to full swing. People were coming down the hall now, women were coming in to Mrs. Jack’s room, greeting and embracing her with the affectionate tenderness of old friendship. And outside, the voices of the men could be heard engaged in solemn discussion or in jesting interplay of wit, going in and out of Mr. Jack’s apartment, moving back and forth from one end of the place to the other.
The whole place, and all its rooms from front to back, was now thrown open to the party. Mrs. Jack, her face glowing and excited, her eyes sparkling with the joy and happiness that giving parties, meeting people, welcoming old friends, the whole warm and brilliant flux and interplay of life, of movement, beauty, color, conversation and design around her always gave to her, had now left her room and was moving up the hall greeting people everywhere, stopping to talk to everyone with a voice and manner and a rosy, beaming face, that showed plainly her state of eager and somewhat surprised delight.
This quality of surprise and wonder was now indubitably real—somewhat akin, no doubt, to her own deafness—the effect of which was not to give her the expression of a person who feels that delighted wonders will never cease. Although she had invited all these people, although she had known most of them for years, although she must have known that all of them were coming, her manner now as each greeted her in turn in her triumphant progress through the throng was the manner of one who is really taken aback, a little bewildered and stunned by the happiness of an unexpected and unhoped-for encounter with an old friend that one has not seen for a long time. And this was really true, the woman had great goodness in her, and her feeling towards her friends was deep and warm.
Her voice, as she talked, grew a trifle higher with its excitement, even at times a little shrill, her rosy, glowing little face was seen everywhere, blooming like a flower, one could see her bend forward eagerly and clap her hand to her ear as she strove to catch every word of what people were saying to her. And people smiled at her; almost as people smile who look at a happy and excited child, they looked after her and smiled.
And when new people would come up and speak to her she would turn with her rosy face fairly burning with excitement and earnestness. Her whole face would light up with a kind of bewildered and delighted surprise as she saw who her new guest was. One could hear her voice saying excitedly and in an almost confused tone:—“Oh, Steve! I didn’t see you! I didn’t know that you were here! I am so glad that you could come! And Mary—Did you bring her with you? Is she here too? Hah?—” And she would clap her hand up to her ear and bend forward with her rosy beaming face eagerly focused to hear all that was being said.
The whole party was in full blast now, moving wonderfully, miraculously, beautifully, in full swing, with a wonderful harmony, with spontaneous rhythm; people were moving in and out of rooms with glasses in their hands, people were leaning against walls talking to each other, splendid, distinguished looking men were leaning on the mantle engaged in the casual earnestness of debate, the seriousness of mutual interests, the informal conversation of old acquaintanceship and chance meeting, beautiful women with satiny backs were moving through the crowd with velvet undulance, the young people had gathered together in little parties of their own, spontaneously attracted by the crystalline magic of their youth.
Everywhere people were talking, laughing, debating, chattering, bending to fill glasses with long frosty drinks, moving around the loaded temptations of the dining table and the great buffet with that “choosey,” somewhat perturbed and doubtful look of people who would like to taste it all but know they can’t. And the clean, sweet, rosily and smiling maids were there to do their bidding, help them, urge them just to have a little more. It was wonderful, greeting one another, weaving back and forth in a celebrated pattern of white and black and gold and power and wealth and loveliness and food and drink.
And through it all, like the magnetic star, through it all like the thread of gold, the line of life, through all the wonder of this wealth of life, warmth, joy and gaiety together, through it all like some strange and lovely flower, bending and welcoming on its gracious stem, moved the flushed and rosy face, the dancing eye, the warm heart and the wise, the subtle, childlike, magic spirit that was Mrs. Jack.
She seemed to give a tongue to loveliness: to weave a magic thread into the labyrinth of movement and of sound. And to the pattern of this swarming web she seemed to give the combining purpose of her presence, the unifying magic of her one and single self. Here, in these rooms, between these walls, was now collected a good part of all the best in strength, in power, in talent and in beauty that the city could produce or that life could know. And all of it had been miraculously resumed, fused to a flower of life by the unique genius of a single spirit. And the result of that great fusion was—as it had always been solely and inimitably itself:—a party at Jack’s.
