Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
"Sit down!" yelled John Dorsey, hurling him into a desk. Then, his boiling fury unappeased, and baffled by fear of inflicting some crippling punishment on the boy, he added illogically: "Stand up!" and jerked him to his feet again.
"You young upstart!" he panted. "You little two-by-two whippersnapper! We'll just see, my sonny, if I'm to be dictated to
by the like of you."
"Take your hands off me!" Edward screamed, in an agony of physical loathing. "I'll tell my father on you, old man Leonard, and he'll come down here and kick your big fat behind all over the lot. See if he don't."
Eugene closed his eyes, unable to witness the snuffing out of a young life. He was cold and sick about his heart. But when he opened his eyes again Edward, flushed and sobbing, was standing where he stood. Nothing had happened.
Eugene waited for God's visitation upon the unhappy blasphemer. He gathered, from the slightly open paralysis that had frozen John Dorsey's and Sister Amy's face, that they were waiting too.
Edward lived. There was nothing beyond this--nothing.
Eugene thought of this young Jew years later with the old piercing shame, with the riving pain by which a man recalls the irrevocable moment of some cowardly or dishonorable act. For not only did he join in the persecution of the boy--he was also glad at heart because of the existence of some one weaker than himself, some one at whom the flood of ridicule might be directed. Years later it came to him that on the narrow shoulders of that Jew lay a burden he might otherwise have borne, that that overladen heart was swollen with a misery that might have been his.
Mr. Leonard's "men of to-morrow" were doing nicely. The spirit of justice, of physical honor was almost unknown to them, but they were loud in proclaiming the letter. Each of them lived in a fear of discovery; each of them who was able built up his own defenses of swagger, pretense, and loud assertion--the great masculine flower of gentleness, courage, and honor died in a foul tangle. The great clan of go-getter was emergent in young boys--big in voice, violent in threat, withered and pale at heart--the "He-men" were on the rails.
And Eugene, encysted now completely behind the walls of his fantasy, hurled his physical body daily to defeat, imitated, as best he could, the speech, gesture, and bearing of his fellows, joined, by act or spirit, in the attack on those weaker than himself, and was compensated sometimes for his bruises when he heard Margaret say that he was "a boy with a fine spirit." She said it very often.
He was, fortunately, thanks to Gant and Eliza, a creature that was dominantly masculine in its sex, but in all his life, either at home or in school, he had seldom known victory. Fear he knew well. And so incessant, it seemed to him later, had been this tyranny of strength, that in his young wild twenties when his great boneframe was powerfully fleshed at last, and he heard about him the loud voices, the violent assertion, the empty threat, memory would waken in him a maniacal anger, and he would hurl the insolent intruding swaggerer from his path, thrust back the jostler, glare insanely into fearful surprised faces and curse them.
He never forgot the Jew; he always thought of him with shame. But it was many years before he could understand that that sensitive and feminine person, bound to him by the secret and terrible bonds of his own dishonor, had in him nothing perverse, nothing unnatural, nothing degenerate. He was as much like a woman as a man. That was all. There is no place among the Boy Scouts for the androgyne--it must go to Parnassus.
18
In the years that had followed Eliza's removal to Dixieland, by a slow inexorable chemistry of union and repellence, profound changes had occurred in the alignment of the Gants. Eugene had passed away from Helen's earlier guardianship into the keeping of Ben. This separation was inevitable. The great affection she had shown him when he was a young child was based not on any deep kinship of mind or body or spirit, but on her vast maternal feeling, something that poured from her in a cataract of tenderness and cruelty upon young, weak, plastic life.
The time had passed when she could tousle him on the bed in a smother of slaps and kisses, crushing him, stroking him, biting and kissing his young flesh. He was not so attractive physically?he had lost the round contours of infancy, he had grown up like a weed, his limbs were long and gangling, his feet large, his shoulders bony, and his head too big and heavy for the scrawny neck on which it sagged forward. Moreover, he sank deeper year by year into the secret life, a strange wild thing bloomed darkly in his face, and when she spoke to him his eyes were filled with the shadows of great ships and cities.
And this secret life, which she could never touch, and which she could never understand, choked her with fury. It was necessary for her to seize life in her big red-knuckled hands, to cuff and caress it, to fondle, love, and enslave it. Her boiling energy rushed outward on all things that lived in the touch of the sun. It was necessary for her to dominate and enslave, all her virtues?her strong lust to serve, to give, to nurse, to amuse--came from the imperative need for dominance over almost all she touched.
She was herself ungovernable; she disliked whatever did not yield to her governance. In his loneliness he would have yielded his spirit into bondage willingly if in exchange he might have had her love which so strangely he had forfeited, but he was unable to reveal to her the flowering ecstasies, the dark and incommunicable fantasies in which his life was bound. She hated secrecy; an air of mystery, a crafty but knowing reticence, or the unfathomable depths of other-wordliness goaded her to fury.
Convulsed by a momentary rush of hatred, she would caricature the pout of his lips, the droop of his head, his bounding kangaroo walk.
"You little freak. You nasty little freak. You don't even know who you are--you little bastard. You're not a Gant. Any one cansee that. You haven't a drop of papa's blood in you. Queer one! Queer one! You're Greeley Pentland all over again."
She always returned to this--she was fanatically partisan, her hysterical superstition had already lined the family in embattled groups of those who were Gant and those who were Pentland. On the Pentland side, she placed Steve, Daisy, and Eugene--they were, she thought, the "cold and selfish ones," and the implication of the older sister and the younger brother with the criminal member ofthe family gave her an added pleasure. Her union with Luke was now inseparable. It had been inevitable. They were the Gants?those who were generous, fine, and honorable.
The love of Luke and Helen was epic. They found in each other the constant effervescence, the boundless extraversion, the richness, the loudness, the desperate need to give and to serve that was life to them. They exacerbated the nerves of each other, but their lovewas beyond grievance, and their songs of praise were extravagant.
"I'll criticise him if I like," she said pugnaciously. "I've got the right to. But I won't hear any one else criticise him. He's a fine generous boy--the finest one in this family. That's one thing sure."
Ben alone seemed to be without the grouping. He moved among themlike a shadow--he was remote from their passionate fullbloodedpartisanship. But she thought of him as "generous"--he was, she concluded, a "Gant."
In spite of this violent dislike for the Pentlands, both Helen and Luke had inherited all Gant's social hypocrisy. They wanted aboveall else to put a good face on before the world, to be well likedand to have many friends. They were profuse in their thanks,extravagant in their praise, cloying in their flattery. They slathered it on. They kept their ill-temper, their nervousness, and their irritability for exhibition at home. And in the presence of any members of Jim or Will Pentland's family their manner was not only friendly, it was even touched slightly with servility. Money impressed them.
It was a period of incessant movement in the family. Steve had married a year or two before a woman from a small town in lowerIndiana. She was thirty-seven years old, twelve years his senior, a squat heavy German with a big nose and a patient and ugly face. She had come to Dixieland one summer with another woman, a spinster of lifelong acquaintance, and allowed him to seduce her before she left. The winter following, her fath
Early in Spring the woman, whose name was Margaret Lutz, returned to Dixieland. One drowsy afternoon Eugene found them at Gant's. The house was deserted save for them. They were sprawled out face downward, with their hands across each other's hips, on Gant's bed. They lay there silently, while he looked, in an ugly stupor. Steve's yellow odor filled the room. Eugene began to tremble with insane fury. The Spring was warm and lovely, the air brooded slightly in a flowering breeze, there was a smell of soft tar. He had come down to the empty house exultantly, tasting its delicious silence, the cool mustiness of indoors, and a solitary afternoon with great calf volumes. In a moment the world turned hag.
There was nothing that Steve touched that he did not taint.
Eugene hated him because he stunk, because all that he touched stunk, because he brought fear, shame, and loathing wherever he went; because his kisses were fouler than his curses, his whines nastier than his threats. He saw the woman's hair blown gently by the blubbered exhalations of his brother's foul breath.
"What are you doing there on papa's bed?" he screamed.
Steve rose stupidly and seized him by the arm. The woman sat up, dopily staring, her short legs widened.
"I suppose you're going to be a little Tattle-tale," said Steve, bludgeoning him with heavy contempt. "You're going to run right up and tell mama, aren't you?" he said. He fastened his yellow fingers on Eugene's arm.
"Get off papa's bed," said Eugene desperately. He jerked his arm away.
"You're not going to tell on us, buddy, are you?" Steve wheedled, breathing pollution in his face. He grew sick.
"Let me go," he muttered. "No."
Steve and Margaret were married soon after. With the old sense of physical shame Eugene watched them descend the stairs at Dixieland each morning for breakfast. Steve swaggered absurdly, smiled complacently, and hinted at great fortune about the town. There was rumor of a quarter-million.
"Put it there, Steve," said Harry Tugman, slapping him powerfully upon the shoulder. "By God, I always said you'd get there."
Eliza smiled at swagger and boast, her proud, pleased, tremulous sad smile. The first-born.
"Little Stevie doesn't have to worry any longer," said he. "He's on Easy Street. Where are all the Wise Guys now who said 'I told you so'? They're all mighty glad to give Little Stevie a Big Smile and the Glad Hand when he breezes down the street. Every Knocker is a Booster now all right, all right."
"I tell you what," said Eliza with proud smiles, "he's no fool. He's as bright as the next one when he wants to be." Brighter, she thought.
Steve bought new clothes, tan shoes, striped silk shirts, and a wide straw hat with a red, white and blue band. He swung his shoulders in a wide arc as he walked, snapped his fingers nonchalantly, and smiled with elaborate condescension on those who greeted him. Helen was vastly annoyed and amused; she had to laugh at his absurd strut, and she had a great rush of feeling for Margaret Lutz. She called her "honey," felt her eyes mist warmly with unaccountable tears as she looked into the patient, bewildered, and slightly frightened face of the German woman. She took her in her arms and fondled her.
"That's all right, honey," she said, "you let us know if he doesn't treat you right. We'll fix him."
"Steve's a good boy," said Margaret, "when he isn't drinking. I've nothing to say against him when he's sober." She burst into tears.
"That awful, that awful curse," said Eliza, shaking her head sadly, "the curse of licker. It's been responsible for the ruination of more homes than anything else."
"Well, she'll never win any beauty prizes, that's one thing sure," said Helen privately to Eliza.
"I'll vow!" said Eliza.
"What on earth did he mean by doing such a thing!" she continued. "She's ten years older than he if she's a day."
"I think he's done pretty well, if you ask me," said Helen, annoyed. "Good heavens, mama! You talk as if he's some sort of prize. Every one in town knows what Steve is." She laughed ironically and angrily. "No, indeed! He got the best of the bargain. Margaret's a decent girl."
"Well," said Eliza hopefully, "maybe he's going to brace up now and make a new start. He's promised that he'd try."
"Well, I should hope so," said Helen scathingly. "I should hope so. It's about time."
Her dislike for him was innate. She had placed him among the tribe of the Pentlands. But he was really more like Gant than any one else. He was like Gant in all his weakness, with none of his cleanliness, his lean fibre, his remorse. In her heart she knew this and it increased her dislike for him. She shared in the fierce antagonism Gant felt toward his son. But her feeling was broken, as was all her feeling, by moments of friendliness, charity, tolerance.
"What are you going to do, Steve?" she asked. "You've got a family now, you know."
"Little Stevie doesn't have to worry any longer," he said, smiling easily. "He lets the others do the worrying." He lifted his yellow fingers to his mouth, drawing deeply at a cigarette.
"Good heavens, Steve," she burst out angrily. "Pull yourself together and try to be a man for once. Margaret's a woman. You surely don't expect her to keep you up, do you?"
"What business is that of yours, for Christ's sake?" he said in a high ugly voice. "Nobody's asked your advice, have they? All of you are against me. None of you had a good word for me when I was down and out, and now it gets your goat to see me make good." He had believed for years that he was persecuted--his failure at home he attributed to the malice, envy, and disloyalty of his family, his failure abroad to the malice and envy of an opposing force that he called "the world."
"No," he said, taking another long puff at the moist cigarette, "don't worry about Stevie. He doesn't need anything from any of you, and you don't hear him asking for anything. You see that, don't you?" he said, pulling a roll of banknotes from his pocket and peeling off a few twenties. "Well, there's lots more where that came from. And I'll tell you something else: Little Stevie will be right up there among the Big Boys soon. He's got a couple of deals coming off that'll show the pikers in this town where to get off. You get that, don't you?" he said.
Ben, who had been sitting on the piano stool all this time, scowling savagely at the keys, and humming a little recurrent tune to himself while he picked it out with one finger, turned now to Helen, with a sharp flicker of his mouth, and jerked his head sideways.
"I hear Mr. Vanderbilt's getting jealous," he said.
Helen laughed ironically, huskily.
"You think you're a pretty wise guy, don't you?" said Steve heavily. "But I don't notice it's getting you anywhere."
Ben turned his scowling eyes upon him, and sniffed sharply, unconsciously.
"Now, I hope you're not going to forget your old friends, Mr. Rockefeller," he said in his subdued, caressing ominous voice. "I'd like to be vice-president if the job's still open." He turned back to the keyboard--and searched with a hooked finger.
"All right, all right," said Steve. "Go ahead and laugh, both of you, if you think it's funny. But you notice that Little Stevie isn't a fifteen-dollar clerk in a newspaper office, don't you? And he doesn't have to sing in moving-picture shows, either," he added.
Helen's big-boned face reddened angrily. She had begun to sing in public with the saddlemaker's daughter.
"You'd better not talk, Steve, until you get a job and quit bumming around," she said. "You're a fine one to talk, hanging around pool-rooms and drug-stores all day on your wife's money. Why, it's absurd!" she said furiously.
"Oh for God's sake!" Ben cried irritably, wheeling around. "What do you want to listen to him for? Can't you see he's crazy?"
As the summer lengthened, Steve began to drink heavily again. His decayed teeth, neglected for years, began to ache simultaneously: he was wild with pain and cheap whisky. He felt that Eliza and Margaret
In the early hours of morning, at two or three o'clock, he would waken, and walk through the house weeping and entreating release. Eliza would send him to Spaugh at the hotel or to McGuire, at his residence, in Eugene's charge. The doctors, surly and half-awake, peeled back his shirtsleeve and drove a needle with morphine deep in his upper arm. After that, he found relief and sleep again.
One night, at the supper hour, he returned to Dixieland, holding his tortured jaws between his hands. He found Eliza bending over the spitting grease of the red-hot stove. He cursed her for bearing him, he cursed her for allowing him to have teeth, he cursed her for lack of sympathy, motherly love, human kindliness.
Her white face worked silently above the heat.
"Get out of here," she said. "You don't know what you're talking about. It's that accursed licker that makes you so mean." She began to weep, brushing at her broad red nose with her hand.
"I never thought I'd live to hear such talk from a son of mine," she said. She held out her forefinger with the old powerful gesture.
"Now, I want to tell you," she said, "I'm not going to put up with you any longer. If you don't get out of here at once I'm going to call 38 and let them take you." This was the police station. It awoke unpleasant memories. He had spent the day in jail on two similar occasions. He became more violent than before, screamed a vile name at her, and made a motion to strike her. At this moment, Luke entered; he was on his way to Gant's.
The antagonism between the boy and his older brother was deep and deadly. It had lasted for years. Now, trembling with anger, Luke came to his mother's defense.
"You m-m-m-miserable d-d-degenerate," he stuttered, unconsciously falling into the swing of the Gantian rhetoric. "You ought to b-b-b-be horsewhipped."