Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (18 page)

He bore encysted in him the evidence of their tragic
fault: he walked alone in the darkness, death and the dark angels
hovered, and no one saw him.  At three-thirty in the morning,
with his loaded bag beside him, he sat with other route boys in a
lunch room, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the
other, laughing softly, almost noiselessly, with his flickering
exquisitely sensitive mouth, his scowling gray eyes.

At home he spent hours quietly absorbed in his life
with Eugene, playing with him, cuffing him with his white hard hands
from time to time, establishing with him a secret communication to
which the life of the family had neither access nor understanding. 
From his small wages he gave the boy sums of spending-money, bought
him expensive presents on his birthdays, at Christmas, or some
special occasion, inwardly moved and pleased when he saw how like Mé
he seemed to Eugene, how deep and inexhaustible to the younger boy
were his meagre resources.  What he earned, all the history of
his  life away from home, he kept in jealous secrecy.

"It's nobody's business but my own.  By
God, I'm not asking any of you for anything," he said, sullenly
and irritably, when Eliza pressed him curiously.  He had a deep
scowling affection for them all: he never forgot their birthdays, he
always placed where they might find it, some gift, small,
inexpensive, selected with the most discriminating taste.  When,
with their fervent over-emphasis, they went through long ecstasies of
admiration, embroidering their thanks with florid decorations, he
would jerk his head sideways to some imaginary listener, laughing
softly and irritably, as he said:
"Oh
for God's sake!  Listen to this, won't you!"

Perhaps, as pigeon-toed, well creased, brushed,
white-collared, Ben loped through the streets, or prowled softly and
restlessly about the house, his dark angel wept, but no one else saw,
and no one knew.  He was a stranger, and as he sought through
the house, he was always aprowl to find some entrance into life, some
secret undiscovered door--a stone, a leaf,--that might admit him into
light and fellowship.  His passion for home was fundamental, in
that jangled and clamorous household his sullen and contained quiet
was like some soothing opiate on their nerves: with quiet authority,
white-handed skill, he sought about repairing old scars, joining with
delicate carpentry old broken things, prying quietly about a
short-circuited wire, a defective socket.

"That boy's a born electrical engineer,"
said Gant.  "I've a good notion to send him off to
school."  And he would paint a romantic picture of the
prosperity of Mr. Charles Liddell, the Major's worthy son, who earned
thousands by his electrical wizardry, and supported his father. 
And he would reproach them bitterly, as he dwelt on his own merit and
the worthlessness of his sons:

"Other men's sons support their fathers in their
old age--not mine! Not mine!  Ah Lord--it will be a bitter day
for me when I  have to depend on one of mine.  Tarkinton
told me the other day that Rafe   has given him five
dollars a week for his food ever since he was sixteen.  Do you
think I could look for such treatment from one of mine?  Do
you?  Not until Hell freezes over--and not then!"  And
he would refer to the hardships of his own youth, cast out, so he
said, to earn his living, at an age which varied, according to his
temper, at from six to eleven years, contrasting his poverty to the
luxury in which his own children wallowed.

"No one ever did anything for me," he
howled.  "But everything's been done for you.  And
what gratitude do I get from you?  Do you ever think of the old
man who slaves up there in his cold shop in order to give you food
and shelter?  Do you?  Ingratitude, more fierce than
brutish beasts!"  Remorseful food stuck vengefully in
Eugene's throat.

Eugene was initiated to the ethics of success. 
It was not enough that a man work, though work was fundamental; it
was even more important that he make money--a great deal if he was to
be a great success--but at least enough to "support himself." 
This was for both Gant and Eliza the base of worth.  Of so and
so, they might say:

"He's not worth powder enough to kill him. 
He's never been able to support himself," to which Eliza, but
not Gant, might add:

"He hasn't a stick of property to his name." 
This crowned him with infamy.

In the fresh sweet mornings of Spring now, Eugene was
howled out of bed at six-thirty by his father, descended to the cool
garden, and there, assisted by Gant, filled small strawberry baskets
with great  crinkled lettuces, radishes, plums, and green
apples?somewhat later, with cherries.  With these packed in a
great hamper, he would peddle his wares through the neighborhood,
selling them easily and delightfully, in a world of fragrant morning
cookery, at five or ten cents a basket.  He would return home
gleefully with empty hamper in time for breakfast: he liked the work,
the smell of gardens, of fresh wet vegetables; he loved the romantic
structure of the earth which filled his pocket with chinking coins.

He was permitted to keep the money of his sales,
although Eliza was annoyingly insistent that he should not squander
it, but open a bank account with it with which, one day, he might
establish himself in business, or buy a good piece of property. 
And she bought him a little bank, into which his reluctant fingers
dropped a portion of his earnings, and from which he got a certain
dreary satisfaction from time to time by shaking it close to his ear
and dwelling hungrily on all the purchasable delight that was locked
away from him in the small heavy bullion-clinking vault.  There
was a key, but Eliza kept it.

But, as the months passed, and the sturdy child's
body of his infancy lengthened rapidly to some interior chemical
expansion, and he became fragile, thin, pallid, but remarkably tall
for his age, Eliza began to say:  "That boy's big enough to
do a little work."

Every Thursday afternoon now during the school
months, and thence until Saturday, he was sent out upon the streets
to sell The Saturday Evening Post, of which Luke held the local
agency.  Eugene hated the work with a deadly sweltering hatred;
he watched the approach of Thursday with sick horror.

Luke had been the agent since his twelfth year: his
reputation for salesmanship was sown through the town; he came with
wide grin, exuberant vitality, wagging and witty tongue, hurling all
his bursting energy into an insane extra version.  He lived
absolutely in event: there was in him no secret place, nothing
withheld and guarded--he had an instinctive horror of all
loneliness.  He wanted above all else to be esteemed and liked
by the world, and the need for the affection and esteem of his family
was desperately essential.  The fulsome praise, the heartiness
of hand and tongue, the liberal display of sentiment were as the
breath of life to him: he was overwhelmingly insistent in the payment
of drinks at the fountain, the bringer-home of packed ice-cream for
Eliza, and of cigars to Gant and, as Gant gave publication to his
generosity, the boy's need for it increased--he built up an image of
himself as the Good Fellow, witty, unselfish, laughed at but liked by
all--as Big-Hearted Unselfish Luke.  And this was the opinion
people had of him.

Many times in the years that followed, when Eugene's
pockets were empty, Luke thrust a coin roughly and impatiently in
them, but, hard as the younger boy's need might be, there was always
an awkward scene--painful, embarrassed protestations, a distressful
confusion because Eugene, having accurately and intuitively gauged
his brother's hunger for gratitude and esteem, felt sharply that he
was yielding up his independence to a bludgeoning desire.

He had never felt the slightest shame at Ben's
bounty: his enormously sensitized perception had told him long since
that he might get the curse of annoyance, the cuff of anger, from his
brother, but that past indulgences would not be brandished over him,
and that even the thought of having bestowed gifts would give Ben
inward shame.  In this, he was like Ben: the thought of a gift
he made, with its self-congratulatory implications, made him writhe.

Thus, before he was ten, Eugene's brooding spirit was
nettled in the complexity of truth and seeming.  He could find
no words, no answers to the puzzles that baffled and maddened him: he
found himself loathing that which bore the stamp of virtue, sick with
weariness and horror at what was considered noble.  He was
hurled, at eight years, against the torturing paradox of the
ungenerous-generous, the selfish-unselfish, the noble-base, and
unable to fathom or define those deep springs of desire in the human
spirit that seek public gratification by virtuous pretension, he was
made wretched by the conviction of his own sinfulness.

There was in him a savage honesty, which exercised an
uncontrollable domination over him when his heart or head were deeply
involved. Thus, at the funeral of some remote kinsman, or of some
acquaintance of the family, for whom he had never acquired any
considerable affection, he would grow bitterly shamefast if, while
listening to the solemn drone of the minister, or the sorrowful
chanting of the singers, he felt his face had assumed an expression
of unfelt and  counterfeited grief: as a consequence he would
shift about matter-of-factly, cross his legs, gaze indifferently at
the ceiling, or look out of the window with a smile, until he was
conscious his conduct had attracted the attention of people, and that
they were looking on him with disfavor.  Then, he felt a certain
grim satisfaction as if, although having lost esteem, he had recorded
his life.

But Luke flourished hardily in all the absurd mummery
of the village: he gave heaping weight to every simulation of
affection, grief, pity, good-will, and modesty--there was no excess
that he did not underscore heavily, and the world's dull eye read him
kindly.

He spun himself outward with ceaseless exuberance: he
was genuinely and whole-heartedly involved.  There was in him no
toilsome web that might have checked him, no balancing or restraining
weight?he had enormous energy, hungry gregariousness, the passion to
pool his life.

In the family, where a simple brutal tag was enough
for the appraisal of all fine consciences, Ben went simply as "the
quiet one," Luke as the generous and unselfish one, Eugene as
the "scholar."  It served.  The generous one, who
had never in all his life had the power to fasten his mind upon the
pages of a book, or the logic of number, for an hour together,
resented, as he see-sawed comically from one leg to another,
stammering quaintly, whistling for the word that stuck in his throat,
the brooding abstraction of the youngest.

"Come on, this is no time for day-dreaming,"
he would stammer ironically.  "The early bird catches the
worm--it's time we went out on the street."

And although his reference to day-dreams was only
part of the axiomatic mosaic of his speech, Eugene was startled and
confused, feeling that his secret world, so fearfully guarded, had
been revealed to ridicule.  And the older boy, too, smarting
from his own dismal performances at school, convinced himself that
the deep inward turning of the spirit, the brooding retreat into the
secret place, which he recognized in the mysterious hypnotic power of
language over Eugene, was not only a species of indolence, for the
only work he recognized was that which strained at weight or sweated
in the facile waggery of the tongue, but that it was moreover the
indulgence of a "selfish" family-forgetting spirit. He was
determined to occupy alone the throne of goodness.

Thus, Eugene gathered vaguely but poignantly, that
other boys of his age were not only self-supporting, but had for
years kept their decrepit parents in luxury by their earnings as
electrical engineers, presidents of banks, or members of Congress. 
There was, in fact, no excess of suggestion that Gant did not use
upon his youngest son--he had felt, long since, the vibration to
every tremor of feeling of the million-noted little instrument, and
it pleased him to see the child wince, gulp, tortured with remorse.
Thus, while he piled high with succulent meat the boy's platter, he
would say sentimentally:

"I tell you what: there are not many boys who
have what you have. What's going to become of you when your old
father's dead and gone?"  And he would paint a ghastly
picture of himself lying cold in death, lowered forever into the damp
rot of the earth, buried, forgotten--an event which, he hinted
sorrowfully, was not remote.

"You'll remember the old man, then," he
would say.  "Ah, Lord!  You never miss the water till
the well goes dry," noting with keen pleasure the inward
convulsion of the childish throat, the winking eyes, the tense
constricted face.

"I'll vow, Mr. Gant," Eliza bridled, also
pleased, "you oughtn't to do that to the child."

Or, he would speak sadly of "Little Jimmy,"
a legless little boy whom he had often pointed out to Eugene, who
lived across the river from Riverside, the amusement park, and around
whom he had woven a pathetic fable of poverty and orphanage which was
desperately real now to his son.  When Eugene was six, Gant had
promised him carelessly a pony for Christmas, without any intention
of fulfilling his promise.  As Christmas neared he had begun to
speak touchingly of "Little Jimmy," of the countless
advantages of Eugene's lot and, after a mighty struggle, the boy had
renounced the pony, in a scrawled message to Elfland, in favor of the
cripple.  Eugene never forgot: even when he had reached manhood
the deception of "Little Jimmy" returned to him, without
rancor, without ugliness, only with pain for all the blind waste, the
stupid perjury, the thoughtless dishonor, the crippling dull deceit.