Wenny folded the letter and put it back in his pocket. This was the
third time he had read it. He gulped the rest of his coffee and left the
lunchroom full of hurried breakfasters. Outside the east wind stung his
face, made his eyes water.
Then it was March. Now it's April. Last time I told myself I'd kill
myself if I stuck it another month. In September that was and in
February and now it's April. The music of the spheres makes the months
revolve... Think you fool, think. Bitter moments of profligacy and
despair. That's me all right, except he got the profligacy and I get the
despair. Go whoring and repent and yours is the kingdom of God. A fine
system all right but he repented so damn hard he spoiled my chances.
Like being a eunuch, funny that, a generation of eunuchs. Your sensible
and manly course in taking a job wasting breath coaching Mr. Lelan's
dubs, accounted quite a genius at it too. Inspiring and helpful. God!
Poor Auntie's education. That's what it's done to me; and next winter
teaching, helping to inoculate other poor devils with the same dry rot.
He was walking out along Massachusetts Avenue broad and dusty through
the little jigsawed houses of Somerville. In was a bitter slategrey day
of razorcold wind. In the irritation of his mood he took joy in the dust
smarting in his eyes and the ache of the cold in his forehead. Gradually
his thoughts faded under the regular beat of his steps. It was Sunday
and church bells had begun to ring. Gee, I must go home or I'll be
getting blue again, he said to himself; the biddy 'll have done the
room. He walked back towards Cambridge without thinking of anything,
shivering, his hands deep in his pockets. When he had slammed the door
behind him he threw himself on the bed, his cheeks throbbing from the
wind, and lay a long while staring blankly at the ceiling.
He looked at his watch. Ten-thirty. Now he's waiting while they sing the
first hymn, fiddling with his prayerbook, wondering if he's forgotten
any of the main headings of the sermon. And I'm just like him. Less
energy that's all. A chip of the old block. Listen to them settling back
flabbily into their pews in the mustard yellow, mudpurple, niggerpink
light from the imitation stained glass windows. Now they're on their
feet again, better than trained seals. His voice so suave so booming--my
voice will be like that--Let us pray.
Wenny sat up on the edge of the bed. God damn my father; I will live
him down if it kills me.
He started turning over the pages of the books on his table, seeking
escape in their familiar chattering type, in the accustomedness of their
smell from the eating acid of his thoughts.
* * * *
Outside of Herb Roscoe's door, Wenny was struck by the usual faint smell
of oiled leather and pipesmoke. A tall man in a grey flannel shirt with
face and neck and forearms lean and very tanned, opened the door slowly
to his knock.
"How's the armory?" said Wenny.
"Pretty good. How's yourself?" said Roscoe in a deep drawling voice.
"Sit down." As he spoke he swept a pile of books off the arms of the
morrischair. Then he stood in the fireplace, where a pair of high
leather moccasins were to soak in a pan of oil, polishing a rifle while
he talked. "Gee, you should have seen the scores we made at rifle
practice yesterday. Not a soul could hit a barn door. I think we'll have
the rottenest damn team... God, I hate this place."
"So do I," said Wenny, lying back in the chair with his eyes half
closed.
"Why don't you get out of it. I'm goin' the very minute I get my degree
like a flash o' lightnin'."
"Haven't got the energy."
"Hell, man, it don't take much energy to buy a railroad ticket."
"Doesn't it?"
"How's your soft job?"
"I'm going to chuck it soon. I think I'll go to Mexico with you Herb."
"All right, come along. Better learn to shoot though."
"I've had another letter from my father."
"How's he now?"
"Tickled to death."
"Well, that's damn good. I'm damn glad to hear it. You know you oughtn't
to be so highbrow about your father. I imagine he's a damn good scout."
Roscoe put the rifle up on the rack over the mantel and began to fill a
pipe slowly and methodically. "D'you know, I think all this father and
son agitation is foolishness, Wendell. You are like your father, we all
are, so why fuss about it? Nobody's forcin' you to live with him. But I
wouldn't stay on round here. It isn't healthy for you, seeing how you
feel about it. I wouldn't stay myself, except for the library."
Roscoe walked back and forth in front of the fireplace as he talked with
the soft, lithe steps of a man trying to walk noiselessly through woods.
"Say, Herb, will you lend me that little .22 revolver of yours for
a day or two?"
"What do you want with it? You aren't going to shoot up the dean of the
Graduate School with it, are you?"
"No, no," said Wenny laughing a little shrilly. "It's curious ... I'd
like to carry a gun for a day or two ... In the first place I've never
done it, and the thought of death in my back pocket makes me a little
nervous, and I'd like to try my nerve out, and then I just might need it
... I'll tell you why ... I'm going in for low life a little. Heavy
slumming ... I'll tell you about it in a day or two, honestly I will,
when things get under way a little. There's a woman in the case and
everything, and a bum and a Chinaman."
"Gee, I wish you'll let me in on it. I'm just pining away for
excitement in this dull hole."
"Honestly I'll tell you all about it in a day or two, but I'm such a
damn coward I want to test my nerve out alone first. Don't be uneasy if
I don't turn up for a day or two. I'll be all right."
Roscoe handed him a little blue steel revolver and a handful of
cartridges.
"Don't get pinched for concealed weapons."
"Never fear," said Wenny jumping tensely to his feet.
"Do be careful, Wendell; it's always the man scared of a gun who shoots
himself or the innocent bystanders instead of bagging his game. Get me?"
"O, I'll be careful. Anyway, there won't be any shooting. Just a
precaution like rubbers. But I must be off. I have an engagement. Thanks
a lot."
Wenny, going out the door, caught a contracted look of anxiety on
Roscoe's tanned face as, puffing at his pipe, he strode back and forth
in front of the fireplace. Wenny went down the dark brick corridor
towards his own room, the gun in his back pocket pressing hard and cold
on his thigh.
* * * *
Wenny walked among the muddy paths of the Fenway. Patches of snow among
the shrubberies were crumbling fast in the tingle of spring that flushed
the misty afternoon. The twigs of forsythias showed intensest yellow
against the sopping grey of turf. In the gravel paths there was a tiny
lisping sound of water as the frost came out of the ground. The rustle
of it in the ruddy light was maddening like the rustle of silk. This
womanish hysteria, he was saying to himself; to escape it tense and
collected the way the earth slithers out from between the tight fists of
winter. A man and a woman frowsy and middle-aged, a hat with mauve
pansies beside a dust-grained derby; as Wenny passed the woman was
tapping restlessly on the gravel with a narrow pointed toe. The thought
came to him: Perhaps Nan and I will be like that, afraid to look in each
other's eyes because we didn't dare when we were young and talk about if
we'd done this and if we'd done that... What a rotten thing to think
about the first day of spring.
In his back pocket a hard shape pressed against the fleshy part of
his thigh; from its focus his whole being was stiffening to hardness.
He turned and with a sudden spring in his step crossed the street from
the park, passed the livid tomblike oblong of the Dental Clinic, and
pulled open the glass door of the Swansea. A grindorgan was playing at
the curb. The glass door slammed behind him, cutting off the
Marseillaise on an upward note. He ran up the stairs and stood still a
moment in front of the reddish-stained door.
Through a bitter film of constraint he saw Nan in a pearlgrey dress
pulling open the door for him.
"I never saw that one before."
"This dress? Do you like it?"
Down the hall came the aviary sound of people at tea.
"They'll be gone in a minute; don't look so worried." Nan looked in his
face with a little mocking smile that faded out tremulously as she
spoke. "Do wait, Wenny, I want to talk to you."
He followed the swish of her dress down the corridor. Richly the curve
of her neck caught a glow of creamy rose from the pearlcolored silk.
"Have a cup of tea," she said in her hostess voice after introducing him
to a large woman with beaded tragedy eyes and a lean whiny-voiced man
who stood beside the teatable. Balancing a cup, Wenny settled himself
against the wall beside the mantel, tried to think of nothing.
"... Dreadful, isn't it, how Boston is being transformed?"
"No, really, you wouldn't know it any more."
"We'd got used to the Irish, but now walking across the Common you
don't see a soul who's not a Jew or an Italian."
"But don't you think they bring us anything?" Nan's voice, indifferent,
from the teatable.
"What can they bring but fleas? The scum of south Europe...
"... O, Nancibel, you do have the most delightful teas."
"Why, Jane, I often wonder why on earth I do it. Doesn't it seem the
height of absurdity to collect a lot of indifferent people, a regular
zoo, in a room and pour a little tea down their throats and tell them:
Now, have a good time?"
"But one must have some sort of society ... And you know perfectly well
you are just fishing, Nancibel. Why, the cleverest people in Boston come
to your teas, and as for celebrities!"
"Mr. Preston, won't you let me give you a little more tea? Yours looks
cold and horrid...."
"... No, I wouldn't call 'The Way of All Flesh' a great novel.'"
"But, really, I'd like to know what is great then."
"A great satire, but not a great novel. . . . It's too embittered, not
Olympian and balanced enough to be truly great."
"But as a philosopher ..."
"Ah, as a philosopher ..."
Through rigid glassy layers Wenny watched the nodding of heads, lifting
of teacups, setting down of plates, brushing of fingertips. Occasionally
he saw himself going through wooden gestures of politeness, heard
himself speak. At last they had all gone; he was alone with Nan in the
room that smelt of tea and scalded lemon and cake. Outside the windows
the ruddy mist was purpling to twilight.
"O, Wenny, why on earth do I do it?"
"I guess because you like it, Nan."
"Probably you're right." She laughed happily. "I'd never thought of that
before.... No, I hate it, and all those people. Imagine what Fitzie told
me today. She said you always turned up as a sign that tea was over and
it was time to wait not on the order of her going but go at once...
Isn't she a fool? Then she added that it was rumored round Jordan that
my engagement to Fanshaw would be announced any day... O, Wenny, people
are a scream!"
"I probably do look rather grouchy when I come here and find a lot of
those young hens cackling about your technique and that wretched old
cadenza hound ..."
"It's pretty ridiculous, Wenny, that two people who know each other as
well as we do can't talk...." Nan interrupted suddenly, speaking slowly,
choosing her words: "Can't talk about our ... can't explain ourselves.
O, I wonder if we'll ever know each other."
"Perhaps the fact that we need to explain ourselves ..."
"You mean it proves that we can't?"
Wenny nodded.
"Or perhaps it's just cowardice," he went on after a long pause, feeling
everything within the cold bars of his ribs throb sickeningly. "Almost
everything is that."
"Why can't we be sensible?"
"It's not sensible, it's alive I'd want to be ... But this is
repeating," he said harshly with trembling lips, straightening himself
up. It was as if a rind had burst in him letting out warm, sweetish
floods; as if he were crying beside a grave where she had lain dead for
years and lifetimes, his memory full of an ivory body he had loved.
They were silent, not looking at each other.
There was a knock at the door. Nan drew her breath in sharply and went
to open. Wenny heard Fanshaw's voice in the hall.
"O I'm so glad to find you. I thought it'ld be just my luck to miss you
both and spend a dull evening all alone. I have had the most detestable
day."
"Let's walk in town to supper," said Nan in a hurried, throaty voice.
Walking down a broad street towards town, they had the dome of the
Christian Science Church ahead of them swelled with purple against a
tremendous scarletflaring sky across which grimy green clouds scudded on
gusts of rising wind. Sharp flaws of cold were clotting the mist and
chilling all reminiscence of thaw and spring out of the air. Footsteps
rang shrill and fast on the pavements and were lost in the clang of
streetcars and whirr of motors grinding slowly when they came out on
Massachusetts Avenue. Overhead, above the bright shine of shop windows
through which faces drifted steadily, outline drifting into outline,
like snowflakes past an arclight, the sky was a churning of dark green
clouds fast blotting the clear, fiery afterglow. Wenny could hear
himself talking to Fanshaw as they walked, but all the while he was
intent on the people he passed; smooth, velvety-warm masks of young men
and girls, wooden masks of men bleached by offices, crumpled masks of
old women; under them all seemed to tremble something jellylike and
eager, something half caught sight of in their eyes that had thrilled to
the warm afternoon, that this sudden cold searching through the dusty
concrete grooves of the city congealed to shuddering crystals of terror.
He felt a sudden maudlin desire to climb on a hydrant and talk, to draw
people in circle after circle about him and explain all the joy and
agony he felt in words so simple that they would tear off their masks
and tell their lives too; it would be his face, his eyes, his mouth
moulding words all about him when the masks were off. The picture
brightened painfully in his mind.
"Look at all that yellow broom in the window," Fanshaw was saying. As
they passed a flowershop they caught a momentary sweet gust of
hothouses. "That's the real plantagenet, I think, that the Black Prince
wore on his helmet. Strange to think of it this cold night in a Boston
flowershop."
"Say it with flowers," Nan put in laughing.
"Exactly," said Fanshaw. "Yet why should there be that horrid rasp in
the advertising phrase and the unction in 'langage des fleurs'? Do
things seem beautiful only when they are unaccustomed?"
"Perhaps it's that not being customary and diurnal puts them in the
proper light ... so that we can really see them," said Nan.
"I think it's just that we like to kid ourselves along. This may be a
moment as important in the history of Boston as the time of lilies when
Pico della Mirandola first rode into Florence, as you and Mr. Pater are
so fond of telling us, Fanshaw," broke in Wenny. "But we don't know
anything about it. We'd probably have gone grumbling and growling into
town for dinner if we'd lived in Florence then, just like we do here,
and complained what a dull town it was."
"But can't you imagine people of another caliber altogether
from us?"
"Perhaps I can, Nan... out what I mean is it's our fault, not the
fault of the century."
"What's our fault, Wenny?" asked Fanshaw smiling indulgently.
"That we are so damn rotten."
"But we're not. What we've lost in color and picturesqueness, we've
made up in ..."
"In sheepishness and cowardice, I'll grant you that."
"Now Wenny."
Wenny saw himself in bitter distortion, standing on a hydrant confessing
idiocies to crowds who wore his face as a mask on their own and bleated
like sheep, baa, baa, at every pause. It all dissolved into an obscene
muddle of leering faces. If I could only stop thinking.
They were cutting diagonally across the Common, under a hurrying sky lit
by a last mustard-green flare from the west. The electric signs along
Tremont Street bit icily through the lacy pattern of the stirring twigs
of trees. The wind was getting steadier and colder, occasionally shot
with a fine lash of snow.
"No, but we couldn't live without the ideal that somewhere at some time
people had found life a sweeter, stronger draught than we find it,"
Fanshaw was saying. "That the flatness of our lives hasn't been the rule
... I don't think the fault's with us at all, Wenny. I think we're great
people ... It's just this fearful environment we have to live down, the
narrowness of our families, our bringing up, the moral code and all
that. The people of the Renaissance were great because they lived in a
great period...."
"Well, we haven't had much chance yet; give us time, Wenny," said Nan.
"Time means nothing. You can't make Narcissus into the Prelude from
Tristan by working on it. The germ would be here."
"But we are learning, Wenny. Taught by our ideal of the past, of the
Greeks and the people of the Renaissance, we are learning to surround
ourselves with beautiful things, to live less ugly, money-grabbing
lives."
"Culture, you mean. God, I'd rather rot in Childs' dairy lunches.
Culture's mummifying the corpse with scented preservatives. Better let
it honestly putrefy, I say."
"And while we argue about how we ought to live, things muddle along,"
said Nan.
"And the months go by ... Look at me, I'm twenty-three years old and
I've done nothing ever, never anything of any sort," cried Wenny
savagely.
"But you're not even hatched yet, Wenny. Give yourself time ... When
you've got your M. A."
"Won't be any different ten years from now. I know it won't. You know
it won't."
Nobody answered. Wenny walked along at Nan's side, his fists clenching
and unclenching nervously. They had reached the Park Street corner of
the Common where the steeple of the church stood up lithe and slender
out of the muddle of arclights into the tumultuous sky where the frayed
edges of clouds trailed along ruddy from the reflection of streets. In
the lee of the subway stations sailors loafed with the broad collars of
their jackets turned up watching the wind tussle with the skirts of a
couple of girls who strutted back and forth with jerky impatient steps.
A trail of Salvation Army lasses hobbled by following a fat redcheeked
man with a cornet. Through the narrow crowded street towards Scollay
Square the wind was less searching. In the floods of light in front of
the moving picture houses dapper young men in overcoats belted at the
waist waited for girls they had made dates with. A fat man threw away
his cigarette and advanced towards a blonde girl who had just crossed
the street; with one hand he was straightening his necktie. The smile on
his puffy, razorscraped face kindled in her straight lips. Up a side
street a man in a red sweater was preaching about something in a voice
like a sea lion's. In the middle of the Square a policeman had hold of a
holloweyed little man whiskered like a bottle cleaner whom he was
shaking by the shoulder and roaring at. Wenny jumped back to avoid a
truck lumbering up noisily out of Cornhill. Why didn't I let it run over
me? Then the shop windows of Hanover Street full of price-signs were
sliding past. Wenny felt vague interest in the streets and people he was
walking among, the sort of disconnected interest he had felt when a
child in the tableaux in the Old Mill at Revere, gliding along through
expressionless dark, occasionally peering out at incidents, random
gestures and faces. A year ago, he was thinking, I would have imagined
every man, woman and child I met part of some absurd romantic vortex I
was just on the point of being sucked into myself. I know better now. Do
I?
"Funny, the thought," he said aloud, "That I pass people on the street
and say to myself what wonderful lives they must be living, and they
look at me out of their own emptiness and say the same thing... We're
going to the Venice, aren't we?"
"Mind, no garlic," put in Fanshaw.
"We'll even let you have the eternal broiled lamb chop without hooting."
A flurry of snow fine as sand drove down the street.
"What do you think of this for the Boston climate?" said Nan.
"Here we are!"
The restaurant was nearly empty. They shook the snow off their
overcoats and settled themselves at the round table in the window.
"What's so nice about this place, in spite of the garlic and the stains
on the cloth and everything," Fanshaw was saying, "Is that it gives us a
breathing space from Boston, a quiet eminence where we can sit
undisturbed and look about us ... O, Wenny, do pull up your necktie."
"Now, Fanshaw, you shan't heckle Wenny," said Nan laughing.
The orchestra had struck up Funiculi, Funicula with great vigor. Wenny
was looking at the girl who played the violin. Something in the tilt of
the chin was painfully like Nan, only all the features were heavier, the
lips coarser and less intense; many men had kissed them perhaps. To kiss
Nan's lips. No, I mustn't think of all that. I will drive it out of me,
down into me. Tonight it's calm; cold I must be, to weigh everything. In
spite of him the tune filled his mind with streets full of carnival,
scampering, heavybreasted women pelting him with flowers.
"The ladies' three-piece band is doing itself proud tonight," he
shouted boisterously.
Like this always, these dreams. I must put an end to them. It's on
account of these dream women I've not made Nan love me; everything has
slipped by. What's the good of dreams? It's hard actuality I want, will
have.
Yama, yama, blare of brass bands, red flags waving against picture
postcard scenery, brown oarsmen with flashing teeth and roses behind
their ears, and Nan; both of us lolling on red cushions. Bay of Naples
and musical comedy moonlight and a phonograph in a flat in a smell of
baby carriages and cabbage grinding out love songs. O, the mockery of
it.
"Gee, what a horrible tune."
"Hacknied, I should say, Wenny, but it's rather jolly, and when they
play it on those boats on the Grand Canal it's almost thrilling..."
"To Cook's tourists and little schoolma'ams from Grand Rapids."
"Isn't it a little like sour grapes that we should be so scornful of
them?" put in Nan gently.
"I'm not scornful of them. I am them... We are just like them. Can't you
see what I mean, Nan? I can see that they are ridiculous and pitiful.
How much more ridiculous and pitiful we must be."
"But from that point of view everything must be ... well, just ashes;
everybody ridiculous and pitiful," said Nan slowly with a flash in her
eyes. "I'm willing to admit that in a sense, I suppose, yet certain
things are dreadfully important to me--my friends, my music, my career,
my sense of fitness. I don't see that those things are ridiculous... Of
course, one can make oneself sound clever by making fun of anything, but
that doesn't change it any way."
The hot light in her eyes, flushing her cheeks, her parted lips, were
a stab of pain for him.
"O I can't say what I mean?" muttered Wenny.
"Do you know what you mean?" said Fanshaw.
"Perhaps not."
"And you forget what you're so fond of talking about Wenny."
"What?"
"The gorgeousness of matter. That's your pet phrase."
Taste of veal with tomato and peppers, savor of frizzled olive oil,
little seeds mashed between the front teeth into a prickly faint aroma,
and wine, the cool curve of the glass against my lips, the tang of it
like rainy sunsets. I could sit here imagining it and never drink,
imagining Nan's lips... He picked up the glass and drank off the
goldcolored wine at a gulp so that it choked him. He coughed and
spluttered into his napkin.
"I follow you there, if you include the idea of material pleasures being
purged of their grossness, by reason, fitness, as Nan says. So made the
raw material of beauty," Fanshaw was saying. Wenny coughed and
spluttered into his napkin.
"Drink a little water," Fanshaw added.
"More Orvieto, you mean," said Wenny hoarsely. "By the way, is
Orvieto in Tuscany?"
"No, in Umbria, I think; that's where the great Signorelli frescos of
the last judgment are, that strange dry hideously violent piece of
macabre."
"Gee, I'd like to see them."
"You will some day."
"If I don't see the actual subject first ... No Burton Holmes is as
far as I'll ever get towards Umbria."
"Why, lots of people work their way over."
"You haven't seen me do it yet, have you? That's what I was saying. The
world is full of people doing every conceivable sort of thing. The
streets are full of them. You can see the things in their eyes."
"Well, why not you?" said Nan breathlessly.
"Before I came to college I spent my time dreaming, and now I spend it
gabbling about my dreams that have died and begun to stink. Why the only
genuine thing I ever did in my life was get drunk, and I haven't done
that often."
Wenny drank down his wine again. His hair was wet. His heart pounded
with exultation in the look of wincing pain on Nan's face.
"Suppose we start home," Nan said. "I have a little headache tonight."
Out in the streets the snowflakes danced dazzlingly, ruddy and green,
and shivered gold through flaws and cones and crystals of light from
windows and arclights. Faces bloomed and faded through a jumbled
luminous mist, white as plaster casts, red as raw steak, yellow and
warted like summer squashes, smooth and expressionless like cantaloupes.
Occasionally a door yawned black and real in the spinning flicker of the
snow and the lights, or a wall seemed to bulge to splitting with its
denseness. In the shelter of the subway entrance they stood hesitating a
moment.
"Why don't you both come out to my place?" said Nan in a pleading voice.
"We'll make some chocolate or something."
"No, I want to think."
"But you can think there all you want... And it's such a miserable
night."
"I'm going to Brookline to Mother's, anyway; I'll go as far as your
door," said Fanshaw.
"You can amuse yourselves picking my character to pieces all the
way out," said Wenny boisterously.
They none of them laughed.
"Well, then, good night."
Wenny watched them go down the steps, Nan in her long buff coat, Fanshaw
with his wet hat pulled over his eyes. Nan half turned and waved with a
little thwarted gesture of the hand. For a second she paused, then with
the slightest shrug of the shoulders followed Fanshaw's tall figure out
of sight past the change booth. Wenny took two steps to follow, but the
impulse died sickeningly like a spoiled skyrocket falling. He thought he
was going to cry, and turned about and walked recklessly into the
blinding bright dance of the snow.
* * * *
The wind had dropped. Great sloppy flakes were spinning slowly down
between the houses, filling with glitter the tents of light cast by the
street lamps. Wenny had been walking fast with long irregular steps
muffled by the crunching carpet of the snow. His feet and legs were wet
and very cold. At a corner he stopped and leaned a moment against a
wall. The shadows in the windows of the house opposite seemed concrete
and the walls built heavily out of reddish darkness. People were grey
ghosts with faces of unnatural bright pink that flitted past him through
the leisurely chaos of the snow. In their eyes, at the edges of hats,
from the ledges of shop windows glittered little globules of moist
brightness. From gutters came a continual drip of melted snow. Now, what
bar haven't I been to? he kept asking himself, as he stood listening to
the little hiss of the snow and the slushy padding of footsteps.
I'd forgotten Frank Locke's; and he walked on with lurching strides.
After the velvety blur of the snow the bar room assailed him with
needles and facets of glitter on brass and crystal that shivered in the
mirrors into sharp angular grottoes. He shook the snow off his coat and
let himself fall heavily into a chair. The hard shape in his back pocket
rapped against his hip. His spine went cold at the touch of it.
"A Martini cocktail, please," he said to the thin, large-eyed man with
a scrawny neck who came for his order.
The little mirrors in the ceiling and the glinty knobs and bottle ends
of the partitions all radiated endlessly in dusty looking-glasses on the
walls, so that Wenny felt himself drunkenly spinning through air heavy
with beersmells and whisky and old tobacco smoke in the middle of a
crazy merrygoround. The men at tables round him were tiny and
gesticulating. The cocktail stung his mouth, sent writhing gold haze all
through him. The glass was the center of a vortex into which were sucked
the cutting edges of light, flickering cones of green and red
brightness, the voices and the throbbing rubber faces of the men in the
bar. In his mind Fanshaw's voice and his father's voice droning like
antiphonal choirs: Leanfaced people of the Renaissance carried away
helpless in their vermilion barge through snarling streets shaken with
the roar of engines: Stand therefore having your loins girt about with
the breastplate of righteousness ... Of course that's what it reminds me
of here, looking through the globes in the drugstore window where I used
to go to get aspirin for Auntie.
"Waiter, another cocktail, please."
This cocktail, smooth, smooth, hot tropic beaches, and the leanfaced men
in their great barge deepchanting sliding through lagoons of islands of
the South Seas (first love, first South Sea island, the great things of
life); brown girls girdled with red hybiscus pulling nets full of
writhing silver through parrotgreen water.... God! I must pull myself
together. I must think, not dream... In the beginning was the word,...
And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth... Poor little me,
with holes in my stockings, sitting in my bedroom that had the cracked
looking glass learning Genesis for Dad: The earth also was corrupt
before God, the earth was filled with violence ... And God looked upon
the earth and behold it was corrupt ... corrupt... I must think, not
dream putrid dreams. Dreams, the corruption of misery, soggy, thwarted.
If I had a clean, sharp knife to cut away dreams. Herb's little gun will
do as well.
"Hey, another Martini, please."
He had no sense of being drunk any more. Things were still, icehard,
iceclear all about him. The little neatly painted world of his childhood
had been like that, breaks of lollipop-colored sunlight, little
redroofed houses back among lawns of green baize, set about with toy
evergreens, at doors varnished farmers' wives in Dutch caps shepherding
Noah's animals out of a cardboard ark, all cute and tiny, like through
the wrong end of a telescope; and the smell of the enamel scaling off
toys, the grain of wood grimed by the fingers, the dark gleam on the
floor under the bay window.
"Another Martini, please."
He drank it slowly in little sips, watching himself in the looking-glass
beside him. His hair was very curly with sweat, his dark eyebrows
jauntily arched, his lips moist and red. He drank and the man in the
looking-glass drank. He stared into the black wells of his dilated
pupils. Panic terror swooped on him all of a sudden; it was not his
face. The face was thinner, the upper lip tight over the teeth, the hair
smooth and steel grey, the jowls pinkish, close-shaved, constricted by a
collar round backwards. My face, my father's face, and Dad's voice:
David, my boy, taking a job has pleased me more than I can say, sensible
and manly course ... I am sure that earning your living you will find
inspiring and helpful and regret callousness and restlessness ... I,
myself, bitter moments in my youth inexpressibly painful for me to
recall of profligacy and despair ... A thin voice shrieking,
interrupting in his head: My God, I'm going mad, mad, mad. The pulpit
voice boomed louder in his ears: It was like this, David, I was not
content with my lot and told myself in my boyish pride that life was
short and the world wide, and wanted to run away to sea. I was one of
those filthy dreamers mentioned in the Gospels who defile the flesh,
despise dominion and speak evil of dignities. And I fell so low that
inexpressibly painful to recall I took up in a low dive with a scarlet
woman and arranged with her that she should give herself to me for five
dollars, and I followed her to her room and she divested herself of her
clothes and I stood before her trembling with lust, and all at once a
sword cleaving me, a light searing me, I felt my flesh corrupt before
God, and I felt the mercy of God in a great white light about me, and I
rushed out sobbing and calling upon God. And that is how, dearly beloved
brethren, I was called to the ministry... Let us pray...
Rustle of Sunday dresses, a couple of coughs from the back, Wenny in
short pants kneeling trembling in the full booming blast of his father's
prayer, watching the patches of pink and purple and mustard yellow light
cast on the pew ahead by the sun shining through the colored glass of
the windows, then caught away in a dream of red Indians running through
a birch wood, and roused by the long droning infections: To do good and
communicate forget not for with such sacrifice God is well pleased.
Women's voices shrilling high:
How firm a foundation ye say-aints of the Lord ...
Everything was spinning again and he was saying over and over: must pull
myself together, pull myself together, for that face is my face and my
father's voice is my voice. I am my father.
"All right, mister, closing time." There was a heavy hand on his
shoulder.
He reeled out into the street, his hand over his face to wipe away the
memory of the dilated pupils of his eyes in the looking-glass. The air
was cold and harsh in his nostrils, against his temples. He walked
slowly through streets neatly carpeted with snow that made tiny
whirlwinds at corners in the clear gusts of wind. His thoughts clicked
with mechanical precision. I'm sober now, I've got to decide. Up towards
Beacon Hill. Something always goes mad in me when I go to Frank Locke's.
Mustn't go again. Again! How silly, as if there were going to be any
agains. Now in me my father'll be dead. Mustn't hurry. Pleasant to
stroll about a town the last night before going away; bought your ticket
and everything. Where? Want ad: Respectable house offers agreeably
furnished room suitable for suicide... How fine; to be cool like this.
This is the secret at last. Never been happier in my life. Or am I just
hideously drunk?
Slippery down this hill. The bridge the subway goes over, that's it. He
felt for his watch. Gone, of course; pawned a thousand years ago to
sleep with Ellen of Troy.
It was very quiet over the river. The snow lay straight on the ledges of
the bridge. The lights of the esplanade flickered like stars through the
clear, bleak night and cast little tremulous sparks over the lacquered
surface of the water.
The wind had blown all tracks out of the snow. Wenny cleared off the
rail behind one of the turrets and sat looking at the water.
Perhaps lovers have met here. No, the cops'ld be after them. No place
for love in the city of Boston; place for death though.
He pulled the little revolver out of his back pocket and held it at
arms' length.
I have nerve for this, why not for the rest; for shipping on a
windjammer, for walking with Nan down streets unaccountable and dark
between blind brick walls that tremble with the roar of engines, for her
seagrey eyes in my eyes, her lips, the sweetish fatty smell of Ellen's
lips. Maybe death's all that, sinking into the body of a dark woman,
with proud cold thighs, hair black, black. I wonder if it shoots.
The trigger was well-oiled. The shot rang out over the water. The
rebound jerked his hand up.
Shoot? sure it does. Quick, now, there'll be somebody coming. Spread out
your bed for me, Nan Ellen death.
He climbed to his feet on the parapet and pressed the muzzle of the gun
under his chin. Warm it was. Black terror shrieked through him. He was
breathing hard. With cold, firm hands he made sure the barrel pointed
straight through his throat to his brain. He pulled the trigger.
His body pitched from the parapet of the bridge, struck the snowcovered
slant of the pier, and slid into the river.