Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (23 page)

She liked Mary Thomas, a tall jolly young prostitute
who came from Kentucky: she was a manicurist in an Altamont Hotel.

"There are two things I want to see," said
Mary, "a rooster's you-know-what and a hen's what-is-it." 
She was full of loud compelling laughter.  She had a small room
with a sleeping porch, at the front of the house upstairs. 
Eugene brought her some cigarettes once: she stood before the window
in a thin petticoat, her feet wide apart, her long sensual legs
outlined against the light.

Helen wore her dresses, hats, and silk stockings. 
Sometimes they drank together.  And, with humorous
sentimentality, she defended her.

"Well, she's no hypocrite.  That's one
thing sure.  She doesn't care who knows it."  Or,

"She's no worse than a lot of your little
goody-goodies, if the truth's known.  She's only more open about
it."

Or again, irritated at some implied criticism of her
own friendliness with the girl, she would say angrily:

"What do you know about her?  You'd better
be careful how you talk about people.  You'll get into trouble
about it some day."

Nevertheless, she was scrupulous in her public
avoidance of the girl and, illogically, in a moment of unreasoning
annoyance she would attack Eliza:

"Why do you keep such people in your house,
mama?  Every one in town knows about her.  Your place is
getting the reputation of a regular chippyhouse all over town."

Eliza pursed her lips angrily:

"I don't pay any attention to them," she
said.  "I consider myself as good as any one.  I hold
my head up, and I expect every one else to do likewise.  You
don't catch me associating with them."

It was part of her protective mechanism.  She
pretended to be proudly oblivious to any disagreeable circumstance
which brought her in money.  As a result, by that curious
impalpable advertisement which exists among easy women, Dixieland
became known to them--they floated casually in--the semi-public,
clandestine prostitutes of a tourist town.

Helen had drifted apart from most of her friends of
high school days--the hard-working plain-faced Genevieve Pratt,
daughter of a schoolmaster, "Teeney" Duncan, Gertrude
Brown.  Her companions now were livelier, if somewhat more
vulgar, young women--Grace Deshaye, a plumber's daughter, an opulent
blonde; Pearl Hines, daughter of a Baptist saddlemaker: she was heavy
of body and face, but she had a powerful rag-time singing voice.

Her closest companion, however, was a girl whose name
was Nan Gudger: she was a brisk, slender, vital girl, with a waist so
tightly corsetted that a man's hands might go around it.  She
was the trusted, accurate, infallible bookkeeper of a grocery store.
She contributed largely to the support of her family--a mother whom
Eugene looked upon with sick flesh, because of the heavy goitre that
sagged from her loose neck; a crippled sister who moved about the
house by means of crutches and the propulsive strength of her
powerful shoulders; and two brothers, hulking young thugs of twenty
and eighteen years, who always bore upon their charmed bodies fresh
knife-wounds, blue lumps and swellings, and other marks of their
fights in poolroom and brothel.  They lived in a two-story shack
of rickety lumber on Clingman Street: the women worked
uncomplainingly in the support of the young men.  Eugene went
here with Helen often: she liked the vulgarity, the humor, the
excitement of their lives--and it amused her particularly to listen
to Mary's obscene earthy conversation.

Upon the first of every month, Nan and Mary gave to
the boys a portion of their earnings, for pocket money and for their
monthly visit to the women of Eagle Crescent.

"Oh, SURELY not, Mary?  Good heavens!"
said Helen with eager unbelief.

"Why, hell yes, honey," said Mary, grinning
her coarse drawl, taking her snuff-stick out of the brown corner of
her mouth, and holding it in her strong hand.  "We always
give the boys money fer a woman once a month."

"Oh, NO!  You're joking," Helen said,
laughing.

"Good God, child, don't you know THAT?"
said Mary, spitting inaccurately at the fire.  "Hit's good
for their health.  They'd git sick if we didn't."

Eugene began to slide helplessly toward the floor. 
He got an instant panorama of the whole astonishing picture of humor
and solemn superstition--the women contributing their money, in the
interests of sanitation and health, to the debauches of the two
grinning hairy nicotined young louts.

"What're you laughin' at, son?" said Mary,
gooching him roughly in the ribs, as he lay panting and prostrate. 
"You ain't hardly out of didies yet."

She had all the savage passion of a mountaineer:
crippled, she lived in the coarse heat of her brothers' lust. 
They were crude, kindly, ignorant, and murderous people.  Nan
was scrupulously respectable and well-mannered: she had thick negroid
lips that turned outward, and hearty tropical laughter.  She
replaced the disreputable furniture of the house by new shiny Grand
Rapids chairs and tables.  There was a varnished bookcase,
forever locked, stored with stiff sets of unread books--The Harvard
Classics, and a cheap encyclopé
 
 

When Mrs. Selborne first came to Dixieland from the
hot South she was only twenty-three but she looked older. 
Ripeness with her was all: she was a tall heavy-bodied blonde, well
kept and elegant. She moved leisurely with a luxurious sensual swing
of the body: her smile was tender and full of vague allurement, her
voice gentle, her sudden laughter, bubbling out of midnight secrecy,
rich and full.  She was one of several handsome and bacchic
daughters of a depleted South Carolinian of good family; she had
married at sixteen a red heavy man who came and went from her
incomparable table, eating rapidly and heartily, muttering, when
pressed, a few shy-sullen words, and departing to the closed
leather-and-horse smell of his little office in the livery-stable he
owned.  She had two children by him, both girls: she moved with
wasted stealth around all the quiet slander of a South Carolina
mill-town, committing adultery carefully with a mill owner, a banker,
and a lumber man, walking circumspectly with her tender blonde smile
by day past all the sly smiles of town and trade, knowing that the
earth was mined below her feet, and that her name, with clerk and
merchant, was a sign for secret laughter.  The natives, the men
in particular, treated her with even more elaborate respect than a
woman is usually given in a Southern town, but their eyes, behind the
courteous unctions of their masks, were shiny with invitation.

Eugene felt when he first saw her, and knew about
her, that she would never be caught and always known.  His love
for her was desperate.  She was the living symbol of his
desire--the dim vast figure of love and maternity, ageless and
autumal, waiting, corn-haired, deep-breasted, blonde of limb, in the
ripe fields of harvest--Demeter, Helen, the ripe exhaustless and
renewing energy, the cradling nurse of weariness and disenchantment. 
Below the thrust of Spring, the sharp knife, the voices of the young
girls in the darkness, the sharp inchoate expectancies of youth, his
deep desire burned inextinguishably: something turned him always to
the older women.

When Mrs. Selborne first came to Dixieland her oldest
child was seven years old, her youngest five.  She received a
small check from her husband every week, and a substantial one from
the lumber man.  She brought a negro girl with her: she was
lavish in her dispensations to the negress, and to her children: this
wastefulness, ease of living, and her rich seductive   
laughter fascinated Helen, drew her to the older woman.

And, at night, as Eugene listened to the low sweet
voice of the woman, heard the rich sensual burst of her laughter, as
she sat in the dark porch with a commercial traveller or some
merchant in the town, his blood grew bitter with the morality of
jealousy: he withered with his hurt, thought of her little sleeping
children, and, with a passionate sense of fraternity, of her gulled
husband. He dreamed of himself as the redemptive hero, saving her in
an hour of great danger, making her penitent with grave reproof,
accepting purely the love she offered.

In the morning, he breathed the seminal odor of her
fresh bathed body as she passed him, gazed desperately into the
tender sensuality of her face and, with a sense of unreality,
wondered what change darkness wrought in this untelling face.

Steve returned from New Orleans after a year of
vagabondage.  The old preposterous swagger, following the
ancient whine, reappeared as soon as he felt himself safely
established at home again.

"Stevie doesn't have to work," said he. 
"He's smart enough to make the others work for him." 
This was his defiance to his record of petty forgeries against Gant:
he saw himself as a clever swindler although he had never had courage
to swindle any one except his father.  People were reading the
Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford stories: there was an immense admiration
for this romantic criminal.

Steve was now a young man in the first twenties. 
He was somewhat above the middle height, bumpy of face and sallow of
skin, with a light pleasing tenor voice.  Eugene had a feeling
of disgust and horror whenever his oldest brother returned: he knew
that those who were physically least able to defend themselves, which
included Eliza and himself, would bear the brunt of his whining,
petty bullying, and drunken obscenity.  He did not mind the
physical abuse so much as he did its cowardly stealth, weakness, and
slobbering reconciliations.

Once, Gant, making one of his sporadic efforts to get
his son fixed in employment, had sent him out to a country graveyard
to put up a small monument.  Eugene was sent along.  Steve
worked steadily in the hot sun for an hour, growing more and more
irritable because of the heat, the rank weedy stench of the
graveyard, and his own deep antipathy to work.  Eugene waited
intensely for the attack he knew was coming.

"What are you standing there for?" screamed
Big Brother at length, looking up in an agony of petulance.  He
struck sharply at the boy's shin with a heavy wrench he held in his
hand, knocking him to the ground, and crippling him for the moment. 
Immediately, he was palsied, not with remorse, but with fear that he
had injured him badly and would be discovered.

"You're not hurt, are you, buddy?  You're
not hurt?" he began in a quivering voice, putting his unclean
yellow hands upon Eugene.  And he made the effort at
reconciliation Eugene so dreaded, whimpering, blowing his foul breath
upon his brother's cringing flesh, and entreating him to say nothing
of the occurrence when he went home. Eugene became violently
nauseated: the stale odor of Steve's body, the clammy and unhealthy
sweat that stank with nicotine, the touch of his tainted flesh filled
him with horror.

There still remained, however, in the cast and
carriage of his head, in his swagger walk, the ghost of his ruined
boyishness: women were sometimes attracted to him.  It was his
fortune, therefore, to secure Mrs. Selborne for his mistress the
first summer she came to Dixieland.  At night her rich laughter
welled up from the dark porch, they walked through the quiet leafy
streets, they went to Riverside together, walking beyond the lights
of the carnival into the dark sandy paths by the river.

But, as her friendship with Helen ripened, as she saw
the revulsion of the Gants against their brother, and as she began to
see what damage she had already done to herself by her union with
this braggart who had brandished her name through every poolroom in
town as a tribute to his own power, she cast him off, quietly,
implacably, tenderly.  When she returned now, summer by summer,
she met with her innocent and unwitting smile all of his obscene
innuendoes, his heavily suggestive threats, his bitter revelations
behind her back.  Her affection for Helen was genuine, but it
was also, she felt, strategic and useful.  The girl introduced
her to handsome young men, gave parties and dances at Gant's and
Eliza's for her, was really a partner in her intrigues, assuring her
of privacy, silence, and darkness, and defending her angrily when the
evil whispering began.

"What do you know about her?  You don't
know what she does.  You'd better be careful how you talk about
her.  She's got a husband to defend her, you know.  You'll
get your head shot off some day." Or, more doubtfully:

"Well, I don't care what they say, I like her. 
She's mighty sweet. After all, what can we say about her for sure? 
No one can PROVE anything on her."

And in the winters now she made short visits to the
South Carolina town where Mrs. Selborne lived, returning with an
enthusiastic description of her reception, the parties "in her
honor," the food, the lavish entertainment.  Mrs. Selborne
lived in the same town as Joe Gambell, the young clerk to whom Daisy
was engaged.  He was full of sly hints about the woman, but
before her his manner was obsequious, confused, reverential, and he
accepted without complaint the presents of food and clothing which
she sent him after their marriage.

Daisy had been married in the month of June following
Eliza's purchase of Dixieland: the wedding was arranged on a lavish
scale, and took place in the big dining-room of the house.  Gant
and his two older sons grinned sheepishly in unaccustomed evening
dress, the Pentlands, faithful in their attendance at weddings and
funerals, sent gifts and came.  Will and Pett gave a heavy set
of carving steels.