He had tried, in those notebooks, for the perfection of the
sonnet. In fourteen lines, had begged the right to “walk the
untessellated grandeur of simplicity.” The boy who at seventeen had
appeared in Sunday rotogravure sections for the perfection of his
riding-accouterments, wrote in plaintive, if obviously Shelleyan mood
of that “brighter freedom,” and of “peace, cerulean-blue.” Sang in
whispered numbers among the ruled pages of the composition-books of
“the pain that lies under the heart and is canker there.” Rarick
followed these lines with the stub of his finger, and went back again
and again. “The pain that lies under the heart and is canker there....”
“Avery, was that your only heritage from me ... that hurting canker
there...?”
Dears, it was too much.... A.
What was too much? Jenny, you, up there, can you answer that? What had
been too much for him? What had?
His bewilderment had been too much. His frailty, his hunger, glimpsed
through darting, wing-swift beauties. His desire for some one to share
those moments when “pain broke like surf into starry ecstasy.” Page
after page of Avery, in treble, sophomoric mood, crying for a hand in
his, through the aisles that were tormentingly black....
Avery, boy, why not my hand? I would have given....
Life had been too much for him.
Pages and pages of saying it in treble iambic and slenderly lyric
sonneteering.
There was free verse too, waddling thinly down the white sheets. “My
heart is a grail of many-colored glass. It contains me--and yet--want
out--translucent whiteness----”
Not bathos to Rarick, nor mewling of a spirit in the throes of trying
to cast off its swaddlings. But Avery, whose heart had died wanting the
Pyrenees.
And this was the boy whom his father had not dared to approach on even
the matter of an experimental theater....
This was the boy....
There were pages of the journal that broke the heart, when it was
endurable to read them through.... “My dear mother, who is everything
to me and absolutely nothing....”
“When I look at my own mother and father, I realize that I have never
seen anything so beautiful as their marriage is dreadful ... there
are worse lonelinesses than mine ... whom I admire so much more
than I like.... Would like to go up to him and say.... Look here,
Father----Why--why--cannot even write it----”
Say it to me now, son. It may seem too late, but not for everything.
Say it to me now----
“... Mother, now, has nothing to fall back upon but the excitements
that take the place of imagination. What I cannot understand is
Jennifer, who is so much more than clever, and yet to whom cleverness
matters above everything--nice Jennifer who cares so terribly--about
the things that are not worth caring about ... if only father would ...
if only father would----”
That, too, was unfinished. If only father would what? Call it back to
me, Avery--if only father would what?----
There was a fragment of a letter that had apparently been crushed and
torn in three pieces. A third of it was left. It had been written to
his father on the subject of a year he wished to spend in Paris.
“... months of hesitation lie behind this request--feel the need of
getting my bearings--think we could understand each other if only--my
great admiration for you--hesitate to say--too much for me--time
to think--alone--hesitate--unable to say to you face to face--what
I--alone to think and work and dream--please don’t think--beauty of
ideals--please don’t think--young man must believe first and--hesitate
to say--Father please----”
Upstairs, Jenny lay on her bed, chill after chill of crushed heart,
crushed pride, crushed hope, racking her thin body. Rarick had tried
his part in comforting, but everyone who appeared in the room seemed
to stalk at her out of this catastrophe, so finally the doctor forbade
even Rarick, or Jennifer, who sat for the most part in her bedroom,
close to its pale walls, and huddled there.
Down in the library, which seemed to wrap itself grandly about this
occasion, was stretched the boy out of whose incredible act had sprung
the new-coined phrase, “Avery is dead,” lying straight and beautiful as
ivory in his casket.
“God! God! God!” cried Rarick from his clenched lips, through his
clenched eyelids, down into his clenched heart. “Teach me through my
failure! Avery, call back to me!...”
No way to turn....
Yet, out of all the deluge of mail and telegrams and cablegrams that
came pouring through the defeated silence of that house, was one for
Rarick, a Western Union message that he kept folded in his pocket and
took out to reread occasionally.
At first he had not recognized the signature: