They found the job. It needed an apprenticeship of only six weeks,
during which period George was to receive fifteen dollars a week; after
that he would get twenty-eight. This settled the apartment question,
and Fanny was presently established in a greater contentment than she
had known for a long time. Early every morning she made something she
called (and believed to be) coffee for George, and he was gallant
enough not to undeceive her. She lunched alone in her “kitchenette,”
for George’s place of employment was ten miles out of town on an
interurban trolley-line, and he seldom returned before seven. Fanny
found partners for bridge by two o’clock almost every afternoon, and
she played until about six. Then she got George’s “dinner clothes” out
for him—he maintained this habit—and she changed her own dress. When he
arrived he usually denied that he was tired, though he sometimes looked
tired, particularly during the first few months; and he explained to
her frequently—looking bored enough with her insistence—that his work
was “fairly light, and fairly congenial, too.” Fanny had the foggiest
idea of what it was, though she noticed that it roughened his hands and
stained them. “Something in those new chemical works,” she explained to
casual inquirers. It was not more definite in her own mind.
Respect for George undoubtedly increased within her, however, and
she told him she’d always had a feeling he might “turn out to be a
mechanical genius, or something.” George assented with a nod, as the
easiest course open to him. He did not take a hand at bridge after
dinner: his provisions for Fanny’s happiness refused to extend that
far, and at the table d’hote he was a rather discouraging boarder. He
was considered “affected” and absurdly “up-stage” by the one or two
young men, and the three or four young women, who enlivened the elderly
retreat; and was possibly less popular there than he had been elsewhere
during his life, though he was now nothing worse than a coldly polite
young man who kept to himself. After dinner he would escort his aunt
from the table in some state (not wholly unaccompanied by a leerish
wink or two from the wags of the place) and he would leave her at the
door of the communal parlours and card rooms, with a formality in his
bow of farewell which afforded an amusing contrast to Fanny’s always
voluble protests. (She never failed to urge loudly that he really must
come and play, just this once, and not go hiding from everybody in his
room every evening like this!) At least some of the other inhabitants
found the contrast amusing, for sometimes, as he departed stiffly
toward the elevator, leaving her still entreating in the doorway
(though with one eye already on her table, to see that it was not
seized) a titter would follow him which he was no doubt meant to hear.
He did not care whether they laughed or not.
And once, as he passed the one or two young men of the place
entertaining the three or four young women, who were elbowing and
jerking on a settee in the lobby, he heard a voice inquiring quickly,
as he passed:
“What makes people tired?”
“Work?”
“No.”
“Well, what’s the answer?”
Then, with an intentional outbreak of mirth, the answer was given by
two loudly whispering voices together:
“A stuck-up boarder!”
George didn’t care.
On Sunday mornings Fanny went to church and George took long walks. He
explored the new city, and found it hideous, especially in the early
spring, before the leaves of the shade trees were out. Then the town
was fagged with the long winter and blacked with the heavier smoke that
had been held close to the earth by the smoke-fog it bred. Every-thing
was damply streaked with the soot: the walls of the houses, inside and
out, the gray curtains at the windows, the windows themselves, the
dirty cement and unswept asphalt underfoot, the very sky overhead.
Throughout this murky season he continued his explorations, never
seeing a face he knew—for, on Sunday, those whom he remembered, or who
might remember him, were not apt to be found within the limits of the
town, but were congenially occupied with the new outdoor life which
had come to be the mode since his boyhood. He and Fanny were pretty
thoroughly buried away within the bigness of the city.
One of his Sunday walks, that spring, he made into a sour pilgrimage.
It was a misty morning of belated snow slush, and suited him to a
perfection of miserableness, as he stood before the great dripping
department store which now occupied the big plot of ground where once
had stood both the Amberson Hotel and the Amberson Opera House. From
there he drifted to the old “Amberson Block,” but this was fallen into
a back-water; business had stagnated here. The old structure had not
been replaced, but a cavernous entryway for trucks had been torn in
its front, and upon the cornice, where the old separate metal letters
had spelt “Amberson Block,” there was a long billboard sign: “Doogan
Storage.”
To spare himself nothing, he went out National Avenue and saw the piles
of slush-covered wreckage where the Mansion and his mother’s house had
been, and where the Major’s ill-fated five “new” houses had stood;
for these were down, too, to make room for the great tenement already
shaped in unending lines of foundation. But the Fountain of Neptune was
gone at last—and George was glad that it was!
He turned away from the devastated site, thinking bitterly that the
only Amberson mark still left upon the town was the name of the
boulevard—Amberson Boulevard. But he had reckoned without the city
council of the new order, and by an unpleasant coincidence, while the
thought was still in his mind, his eye fell upon a metal oblong sign
upon the lamppost at the corner. There were two of these little signs
upon the lamp-post, at an obtuse angle to each other, one to give
passers-by the name of National Avenue, the other to acquaint them with
Amberson Boulevard. But the one upon which should have been stenciled
“Amberson Boulevard” exhibited the words “Tenth Street.”
George stared at it hard. Then he walked quickly along the boulevard to
the next corner and looked at the little sign there. “Tenth Street.”
It had begun to rain, but George stood unheeding, staring at the little
sign. “Damn them!” he said finally, and, turning up his coat-collar,
plodded back through the soggy streets toward “home.”
The utilitarian impudence of the city authorities put a thought into
his mind. A week earlier he had happened to stroll into the large
parlour of the apartment house, finding it empty, and on the center
table he noticed a large, red-bound, gilt-edged book, newly printed,
bearing the title: “A Civic History,” and beneath the title, the
rubric, “Biographies of the 500 Most Prominent Citizens and Families
in the History of the City.” He had glanced at it absently, merely
noticing the title and sub-title, and wandered out of the room,
thinking of other things and feeling no curiosity about the book.
But he had thought of it several times since with a faint, vague
uneasiness; and now when he entered the lobby he walked directly into
the parlour where he had seen the book. The room was empty, as it
always was on Sunday mornings, and the flamboyant volume was still upon
the table—evidently a fixture as a sort of local Almanach de Gotha, or
Burke, for the enlightenment of tenants and boarders.
He opened it, finding a few painful steel engravings of placid,
chin-bearded faces, some of which he remembered dimly; but much
more numerous, and also more unfamiliar to him, were the pictures
of neat, aggressive men, with clipped short hair and clipped short
moustaches—almost all of them strangers to him. He delayed not long
with these, but turned to the index where the names of the five hundred
Most Prominent Citizens and Families in the History of the City were
arranged in alphabetical order, and ran his finger down the column of
A’s:
Abbett Adams
Abbott Adams
Abrams Adler
Akers Andrews
Albertsmeyer Appenbasch
Alexander Archer
Allen Arszman
Ambrose Ashcraft
Ambuhl Austin
Anderson Avey
George’s eyes remained for some time fixed on the thin space between
the names “Allen” and “Ambrose.” Then he closed the book quietly, and
went up to his own room, agreeing with the elevator boy, on the way,
that it was getting to be a mighty nasty wet and windy day outside.
The elevator boy noticed nothing unusual about him and neither did
Fanny, when she came in from church with her hat ruined, an hour later.
And yet something had happened—a thing which, years ago, had been the
eagerest hope of many, many good citizens of the town. They had thought
of it, longed for it, hoping acutely that they might live to see the
day when it would come to pass. And now it had happened at last:
Georgie Minafer had got his come-upance.
He had got it three times filled and running over. The city had rolled
over his heart, burying it under, as it rolled over the Major’s and
buried it under. The city had rolled over the Ambersons and buried them
under to the last vestige; and it mattered little that George guessed
easily enough that most of the five hundred Most Prominent had paid
something substantial “to defray the cost of steel engraving, etc.”—the
Five Hundred had heaved the final shovelful of soot upon that heap
of obscurity wherein the Ambersons were lost forever from sight and
history. “Quicksilver in a nest of cracks!”
Georgie Minafer had got his come-upance, but the people who had so
longed for it were not there to see it, and they never knew it. Those
who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him.