Thomas Wolfe, page 422
I looked her straight in the eye: “Now,” I said, “knowing that, you let me marry him, a divorced man, without sayin’ a word! Now, why didn’t you tell me about it?” I said—of course, she’d never said a word about it, if I’d waited for her to tell me I would never have found out. Here it was, you know, months after we got married, and it all came to light by accident. I was cleanin’ out the bottom drawer of that old walnut bureau, lookin’ for a place to put his shirts, and there it was—a stack of old letters and papers, you know, that he’d put away there, I reckon meaning to destroy them. Well, I picked them up, I didn’t intend to look at them, I was goin’ to put them in the stove and burn them up. “Now he’s left them there,” I said, “intendin’ to destroy them,” but I had a premonition—I don’t know what else you’d call it—it flashed over me all of a sudden, I reckon some providence left them there for me to read, here it was, the final papers of his divorce from Maggie Efird, and I could see it, I could read it! There it was! a-starin’ me in the face.
Well, I waited for him to come home, you know, I had them in my hand, said: “Here are some old letters I came across cleanin’ out your bureau drawer today. Do you want them?” I didn’t let on, you know, I just looked at him as innocent as you please. Well, his face was a study, I tell you what, it was. “Give me those papers,” he said, and made a snatch for them. “Did you read them?” he said. I didn’t say a word, I just looked at him: “Well,” he said, and his face had a mighty sheepish look, I tell you what, it did, “I intended to tell you about it, but I was afraid you might not understand.”
“Understand,” I said, “why what is there to understand? It’s all written down there as plain as the nose on your face: you are a divorced man and you never told me a thing about it. You let me marry you believin’ you were a widower, that Lydia was the only woman you were ever married to. I understand that much all right!”
“Well,” he said, “that first marriage was a great mistake. I was led into it against my better judgment,” he said. “I didn’t want to worry you by tellin’ you about it,” he said. “Now,” I said, “I’m going to ask you: I want to know. What was the trouble? Why were you divorced?” “Why,” he said, “the decree was granted on grounds of incompatibility. She refused to live with me as my wife. She was in love with another man,” he said, “and married me just to spite him. But from the moment we were married she never had anything to do with me. We never lived together for a moment as man and wife.” “Who got the divorce?” I said, “You or her?” He spoke right up quick as a flash, “I did,” he said. “The decree was granted in my favor.”
Well, I didn’t let-on, I didn’t say a word, but I knew, I knew, that he was lying. I had read that paper from beginning to end and the divorce had been given to her. Maggie Efird got the divorce, all right: I saw that much with my own eyes! But I didn’t say anything, I just let him go on, “And you mean to say that she never lived with you as your wife?” I said.
“Not for a minute,” he said, “I swear it.”
Well, it was too much; that story was too fishy—here they told it on her, you know, old Mrs. Mason told me, that she was a good-lookin’ girl, a high-stepper with lots of beaux before she married him, and, of course, they said that was the trouble—he had to marry her. I looked at him, you know, and shook my head: “No, sir,” I said, “I don’t believe you. There’s something mighty queer about this somewhere. That story just won’t work. Now, you can’t tell me that you lived with that woman eighteen months and never had anything to do with her. Now, I know you,” I said—you know I looked him straight in the eye—“I know you, and I know you couldn’t have kept away from her. You’d a got at her somehow,” I said, “if you had to bore a hole through the wall!” Well, it was too much for him: he couldn’t face me, he had to look away, you know, with a sort of sheepish grin.
“Well, now,” I said, “what are you going to do with these old papers? Now, surely you don’t want them any more,” I said. “They’re no use to you that I can see.” “No,” he said, “I hate the sight of them. They’re a curse and a care and I never want to look at them again. I’m going to burn them up.”
“Yes,” I said, “that’s what I think, all they do is bring up memories you ought to try to forget. You ought to destroy them.”
“That’s what I’ll do,” he said. “By God, I will!”
—
“But still” (I said)—as I was goin’ on to say, you know, I said to the old woman, Mrs. Mason—“but still, you must have known all about him when he came there to your house to live. Now, Mrs. Mason, you must have known he’d been married to Maggie Efird and divorced from her. Surely, you must have known that,” I said.
“Well, yes,” she said, “I guess we did”—admitted it, you know.
“Well now, I’m going to tell you how it was,” she said—and then, of course, she told the story: it all came out. Now, boy, I want to tell you: I want to show you that it wasn’t all your daddy’s fault.
Now, I’m not sayin’ a word against Lydia—of course, I knew her before I did him, when they first came there to live and she opened up a little millinery shop there on that corner of Academy street where the Greenwood hotel now stands. I reckon the first real “store” hat I ever owned I bought from her out of my savin’s as a schoolteacher that time I taught all winter way back there in Yancey county, I got paid twenty dollars a month and my board and room and let me tell you something: I considered myself rich. Why, Lord, yes! didn’t I save up enough out of it to make the first payment on the first piece of property I ever owned, that corner lot there on the south side of the square where your daddy built his shop after we got married, that’s exactly where it was, sir, why yes, wasn’t I only twenty-two years old at that time I bought it, and Lord! I thought I’d done something big, you know! Here I was a property-owner and a tax-payer like Cap’n Bob Patton and old General Alexander, and all the rest of ’em (child, child! we were so poor, we’d gone through so much hardship since the war that I reckon that’s what led me on, I reckon that’s what got me into it: I was determined to own something of my own); why, yes: Don’t I remember how I ran all the way to town the day I got my first tax-statement, $1.83, that’s all in the world it was then, and the money just a-burning a hole in my pocket! Lord! what a goose I must have been! afraid they’d try to take it away from me and sell me out under the sheriff’s hammer before I got there.
Well, then, as I say, I got to know Lydia before I got to know your daddy. Here she was, you know, runnin’ this little millinery store there on that northeast corner, and, as I say, the first “store” hat I ever owned I got from her. That’s where it was, all right. Now, boy, I’m not saying a word against Lydia: for all I know she was a good, honest, hard-working woman and till she met your daddy she was all right. Of course, she was more than ten years older than he was, and that’s exactly what the trouble was, that’s where the shoe pinched, all right, that was the rub. Now your daddy was not all the way to blame: when he came there to their house to live he was only a young man in his early twenties and Lydia was thirty-six years old. Now, if it had been some young girl he led astray you could blame him more, but you can say what you please, Lydia was old enough to know better. Of course, he was a strong fine-lookin’ man and all the women were right out after him, but she should have known, a woman that age should have had too much pride and self-respect—why I’d a died before I did a thing like that!—to have follered and thrown herself at him the way she did! Why, of course! Didn’t old Mrs. Mason admit it? Didn’t she tell me? “Oh, Lydia!” she said, “Lydia!” shakin’ her head, you know. “She went clean out of her head about him.”
Here she’d been a decent respectable woman all her life, runnin’ a little millinery shop down there, you know, and well thought of by every one in town—and, of course, I reckon, considered sort of an old maid, and to think she’d go and behave herself like that. “Oh, it was awful,” the old woman said; says, “She never gave him a moment’s peace, she kept after him all the time,” and, of course, that’s just what happened. You know your daddy; as the sayin’ goes, he didn’t stop to say his prayers when there was a woman around. It was the same old story: within a year’s time he’d gone and got himself all mixed up again, that woman was goin’ to have a child and sayin’ he’d ruined her and would have to marry her.
Well, he didn’t know what to do. Told me himself, you know, admitted it, said: “I didn’t want to marry her. I wasn’t in love with her,” he said. Well, he studied it all over and at last he decided to send her to Washington to see a doctor. So he wrote to Gil: of course Gil and your Aunt Mary were livin’ there at the time—that was before Gil had follered him down South. Gil was workin’ there in Washington as a plasterer, and they were brothers and he knew he could depend on him.
She went, he sent her, and I don’t know just what happened, Gil never said and I didn’t like to ask, but I guess it came before its time: they were riding in the day coach of a train comin’ South again, some little town down there in the eastern part of the State, the conductor stopped the train and helped Gil carry her out into the station, and the next day she got up again and went on home. Now, give her her due, that woman had lots of grit: I reckon that’s the way it was, all right.
—
Well, of course, the whole thing got found out. The story got known and your daddy had to marry her. And, I reckon, the feeling against him in the town was pretty bitter: here he was, you see, a Yankee, as the sayin’ went, a dam Yankee, who’d come down there and ruined two of their women; of course, if there’d only been one it might have been different, but I reckon two of them was more than they could stomach. It got too hot for him; he had to leave. That was the time he decided to come to Altamont: of course Lydia had consumption and he thought the mountain air might do her good and I reckon he was afraid he had it, too—he’d been livin’ with her and I guess he thought he had contracted it from her. When I first saw him he looked like a dead man, oh! as thin as a rail and that sailer complection, you know, from all the trouble and the worry he’d been through, I reckon. Well, then, Lydia sold out her stock—what little that she had—and closed her shop, and he sent her on ahead with old Mrs. Mason. Your daddy stayed behind down there a little bit, tryin’ to close out what stock he had left in his marble yard, and to get what money he could, and then he came on, too, and that’s how I came to know them first: when she was running that millinery shop on the corner there and he’d set up business in an old shack on the east side of the square. That’s when it was, all right.
Now, boy, I was going on to tell you about that woman, Eller Beals. Up to this time, mind you, up to the time he moved up there from Sidney, she’d never had a thing to do with him. Of course, she had known him down there—she was the wife, you know, of Lydia’s brother, John—but law! they were too fine, you know, too fine, to have anything to do with your daddy, a common stone cutter who’d gone and disgraced the family like he had. Oh, they stormed and carried on about it, you know, when he got Lydia into this trouble. They wouldn’t speak to him or have anything to do with him: he told me they hated the sight of him and that he hated them. And here within six months she had no more pride than to foller them all up there. Of course, she came because she had to come, I reckon: this John Beals was a shiftless good-for-nothin’ sort of feller, and he couldn’t support her, so she wrote Lydia and old Mrs. Mason and they told her to come on. Your daddy didn’t know she was coming: they were afraid to tell him, and they thought they’d let her come and win him over afterwards. And that’s just what happened: he came home one day to dinner and there she was—oh! the fine lady, if you please, all primped and powdered up and dressed to kill—that was the first he knew about it. Well, I guess it brought back bitter memories: he hated her so much he wouldn’t speak to her, he picked up his hat and started to leave the house again, but she came up to him—oh, with her fine bonnet and the Langtry bang, and all: that was the way she fixed her hair, and put her arms around him, saying in that sugary voice: “Aren’t you going to kiss me, Will?”—Oh! (as I said later) to think of it! the villain! he should have wrung her neck for her then and there, it’d been a good riddance! Says, “Can’t we be friends, Will?”—after the way she’d acted, if you please—honeying up to him and takin’ him in right there before his own wife and his wife’s mother. “Can’t we let bygones be bygones?” she says, getting him to kiss her, and all—“Why it served you right,” I said, “for being such a fool! A man with no better sense than that deserves anything that happens to him!” And he agreed, admitted it, you know: “You’re right,” he said. So that’s the way she came to be there with him.
This Eller Beals was a little dark black and white sort of a woman: she had this white skin, and hair as black as a raven’s and coal-black eyes. She had this easy sugary sleepy way of talkin’, all soft and drawly—like she’d just waked up out of a good long sleep. I could a-told him the first time I laid eyes on her that she was no good: she was a bad egg if ever I saw one, a charmer out to get the men and lead them on, you know, and bleed them out of everything they owned. Of course, she was a good-looking woman, there’s no denying that, she had a good figger and this creamy-white complection without a blemish on it. “Why, yes,” I said to him later when he’d begin to brag about how pretty she was to look at. “Why, yes, I reckon so, that’s true, but then,” I said, “a whole lot of us could be pretty if we never lifted a finger to do a lick of work. Some of the rest of us could look real nice,” I said, “if we didn’t have to cook and wash and bring up childern.” Well, he admitted it then, of course, said, “Yes, you’re right.”
And, here, to think of it! this villain misbehaving herself with him right under his wife’s nose, sitting there primping herself and fixin’ herself up pretty to entice him day after day, just livin’ for him to come home and Lydia dying in that room upstairs, coughing her lungs out with every breath she took, and knowing about it all. Why, didn’t he admit it! didn’t he tell himself how Lydia said to him—of course, the poor thing knew that she was dying, says, “Will, I’m sick. I know I’m no good for you any more. I know I haven’t got long to live and, Will,” she said, “you can go where you like. You can do as you please,” says, “I don’t care, I’m dying, but Will,” and then he told it how she looked him in the eye, “there’s one thing I can’t stand. In my own house! My own house!” Says, “Will, you’ve got to leave my brother’s wife alone!”—Oh! he told it, admitted it, you know, says: “Ah, Lord! It’s a crime upon my soul. I reckon if there’s a just God in heaven I’ll be punished for it.”—And that poor old woman doing all the work, cooking and drudging for them all, with this little powdered-up trollop, that’s all in the world she was, laying up waitin’ for him and never liftin’ a hand to help, why, they should have tarred and feathered her.
—
Well, as I say, when Lydia died, Eller kept right on livin’ there: she wouldn’t budge. And, of course, by that time he had lost his head about her, he was infatuated, you know, and he wanted her to stay. And that was the time John Beals came up to visit her, and I reckon he sized the situation up, he saw the way things were, and I suppose it went against the grain, it was a little more than he could stomach. Now, I always considered him a pretty poor sort of man: a man who would wink at a thing like that and let his wife run wild—but, give him his due, I reckon he had some spunk left in him, after all: he was out of work but he went down to Johnson City, Tennessee, and got him a job there as a hotel clerk. And then he wrote back for her, telling her to come on.
Well, she wouldn’t go. She wrote him and told him she didn’t love him and would never live with him again, said she was going to stay right where she was. Oh! she had it all fixed up in her mind, sir, she was going to get a divorce and marry your daddy—and him agreeing to it, if you please, like a moonstruck fool, just a-lavishin’ gifts and money on her, with that poor old woman working like a nigger and weepin’ and beggin’ her to go on back to her husband where she belonged. But you couldn’t reason with her, you couldn’t budge her, oh! crazy in love with him, mind you, determined to have him.
Well, sir, John Beals wrote to her again, and this time he meant business, he’d reached the end of the rope. “Now you can make up your mind in a hurry what you’re going to do,” he said, “for I’m not going to put up with you any longer. You can decide now whether you’re coming by yourself or whether I’m going to have to come and take you, but I want you to understand right now that if I have to come and take you from him, I’ll come prepared, and I’m going to leave a damned dead Yankee behind me in the house when I do.”
Well, she didn’t answer him, and let me tell you, sir, he came: he got on a train and came to get her. And oh! old Mrs. Mason said when she told me about it, shakin’ and tremblin’, you know. “Oh, I tell you, Delia, it was awful. Here she’d locked herself in upstairs and wouldn’t move, and here was John with a loaded pistol in his pocket, walkin’ up and down the dining-room floor and saying, ‘If she’s not ready to go in half an hour I’ll blow his brains out if it’s the last thing I ever do,’ and Will, pale as a ghost,” the old woman said, “walkin’ back and forth across the front porch, wringin’ his hands, and her up there refusin’ to go with John.”
Well, they persuaded her somehow: I reckon she saw she’d have to go or there’d be bloodshed, and so she went along with him to Tennessee—but child! child! she hated it, she didn’t want to go, she was bitter about it, she cursed them all. Well, that’s the way it was, all right, before I married him.
And then, after we were married she kept on writing to him: the letters kept a-coming to him until finally I considered it my duty to write John Beals and inform him that his wife was misconductin’ herself by writing letters to a married man, and that it was his business as her husband to stop her. Well, then, the letter came: she wrote him, you know, and I’ve never seen the like of it. She told him that I had written to her husband, she cursed him with every name she could think of, and she said: “If I had known you were going to marry her I’d have told her all I know about you, and you can be certain, no woman would have you if I told her all I know. Now she can have you and welcome to you; for no matter how much I may have hated her, her punishment will be greater than anything I ever wished for her.”
