Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (36 page)

But the school had become the centre of his heart and
life--Margaret Leonard his spiritual mother.  He liked to be
there most in the afternoons when the crowd of boys had gone, and
when he was free to wander about the old house, under the singing
majesty of great trees, exultant in the proud solitude of that fine
hill, the clean windy rain of the acorns, the tang of burning
leaves.  He would read wolfishly until Margaret discovered him
and drove him out under the trees or toward the flat court behind
Bishop Raper's residence at the entrance, which was used for
basketball.  Here, while the western sky reddened, he raced down
toward the goal, passing the ball to a companion, exulting in his
growing swiftness, agility, and expertness in shooting the basket.

Margaret Leonard watched his health jealously, almost
morbidly, warning him constantly of the terrible consequences that
followed physical depletion, the years required to build back what
had once been thrown carelessly away.

"Look here, boy!" she would begin, stopping
him in a quiet boding voice.  "Come in here a minute. 
I want to talk to you."

Somewhat frightened, extremely nervous, he would sit
down beside her.

"How much sleep have you been getting?" she
asked.

Hopefully, he said nine hours a night.  That
should be about right.

"Well, make it ten," she commanded
sternly.  "See here, 'Gene, you simply can't afford to take
chances with your health.  Lordy, boy, I know what I'm talking
about.  I've had to pay the price, I tell you.  You can't
do anything in this world without your health, boy."

"But I'm all right," he protested
desperately, frightened. "There's nothing wrong with me."

"You're not strong, boy.  You've got to get
some meat on your bones.  I tell you what, I'm worried by those
circles under your eyes.  Do you keep regular hours?"

He did not: he hated regular hours.  The
excitement, the movement, the constant moments of crisis at Gant's
and Eliza's had him keyed to their stimulation.  The order and
convention of domestic life he had never known.  He was
desperately afraid of regularity.  It meant dullness and
inanition to him.  He loved the hour of midnight.

But obediently he promised her that he would be
regular--regular in eating, sleeping, studying, and exercising.

But he had not yet learned to play with the crowd. 
He still feared, disliked and distrusted them.

He shrank from the physical conflict of boy life, but
knowing her eye was upon him he plunged desperately into their games,
his frail strength buffeted in the rush of strong legs, the heavy jar
of strong bodies, picking himself up bruised and sore at heart to
follow and join again the mill of the burly pack.  Day after day
to the ache of his body was added the ache and shame of his spirit,
but he hung on with a pallid smile across his lips, and envy and fear
of their strength in his heart.  He parroted faithfully all that
John Dorsey had to say about the "spirit of fair play,"
"sportsmanship," "playing the game for the game's
sake," "accepting defeat or victory with a smile," and
so on, but he had no genuine belief or understanding.  These
phrases were current among all the boys at the school--they had been
made somewhat too conscious of them and, as he listened, at times the
old, inexplicable shame returned--he craned his neck and drew one
foot sharply off the ground.

And Eugene noted, with the old baffling shame again,
as this cheap tableau of self-conscious, robust, and raucously
aggressive boyhood  was posed, that, for all the mouthing of
phrases, the jargon about fair play and sportsmanship, the weaker, at
Leonard's, was the legitimate prey of the stronger.  Leonard,
beaten by a boy in a play of wits, or in an argument for justice,
would assert the righteousness of his cause by physical violence. 
These spectacles were ugly and revolting: Eugene watched them with
sick fascination.

Leonard himself was not a bad man--he was a man of
considerable character, kindliness, and honest determination. 
He loved his family, he stood up with some courage against the
bigotry in the  Methodist church, where he was a deacon, and at
length had towithdraw because of his remarks on Darwin's theory. 
He was, thus, an example of that sad liberalism of the village--an
advanced thinker among the Methodists, a bearer of the torch at noon,
an apologist for the toleration of ideas that have been established
for fifty years.  He tried faithfully to do his duties as a
teacher.  But he was of the earth--even his heavy-handed
violence was of the earth, and had in it the unconscious brutality of
nature.  Although he asserted his interest in "the things
of the mind," his interest in the soil was much greater, and he
had added little to his stock of information since leaving college. 
He was slow-witted and quite lacking in the sensitive intuitions of
Margaret, who loved the man with such passionate fidelity, however,
that she seconded all his acts before the world.  Eugene had
even heard her cry out in a shrill, trembling voice against a student
who had answered her husband insolently:  "Why, I'd slap
his head off!  That's what I'd do!"  And the boy had
trembled, with fear and nausea, to see her so.  But thus, he
knew, could love change one. Leonard thought his actions wise and
good: he had grown up in a tradition that demanded strict obedience
to the master, and that would not brook opposition to his rulings. 
He had learned from his father, a Tennessee patriarch who ran a farm,
preached on Sundays, and put down rebellion in his family with a
horse-whip and pious prayers, the advantages of being God!  He
thought little boys who resisted him should be beaten.

Upon the sons of his wealthiest and most prominent
clients, as well as upon his own children, Leonard was careful to
inflict no chastisement, and these young men, arrogantly conscious of
their immunity, were studious in their insolence and disobedience. 
The son of the Bishop, Justin Raper, a tall thin boy of thirteen,
with black hair, a thin dark bumpy face, and absurdly petulant lips,
typed copies of a dirty ballad and sold them among the students at
five cents a copy.
 

    
"Madam, your daughter
looks very fine,
     
Slapoon!
     
Madam, your daughter
looks very fine,
     
Slapoon!"
 

Moreover, Leonard surprised this youth one afternoon
in Spring on the eastern flank of the hill, in the thick grass
beneath a flowering dogwood, united in sexual congress with Miss
Hazel Bradley, the daughter of a small grocer who lived below on
Biltburn Avenue, and whose lewdness was already advertised in the
town. Leonard, on second thought, did not go to the Bishop.  He
went to the Grocer.

"Well," said Mr. Bradley, brushing his long
mustache reflectively away from his mouth, "you ought to put up
a no-trespassin' sign."

The target of concentrated abuse, both for John
Dorsey and the boys, was the son of a Jew.  The boy's name was
Edward Michalove. His father was a jeweller, a man with a dark,
gentle floridity of  manner and complexion.  He had white
delicate fingers.  His counters were filled with old brooches,
gemmed buckles, ancient incrusted watches.  The boy had two
sisters--large handsome women. His mother was dead.  None of
them looked Jewish: they all had a soft dark fluescence of
appearance.

At twelve, he was a tall slender lad, with dark amber
features, and the mincing effeminacy of an old maid.  He was
terrified in the company of other boys, all that was sharp,
spinsterly, and venomous, would come protectively to the surface when
he was ridiculed or threatened, and he would burst into shrill
unpleasant laughter, or hysterical tears.  His mincing walk,
with the constant gesture of catching maidenly at the fringe of his
coat as he walked along, his high husky voice, with a voluptuous and
feminine current playing through it, drew upon him at once the
terrible battery of their dislike.

They called him "Miss" Michalove; they
badgered him into a state of constant hysteria, until he became an
unpleasant snarling little cat, holding up his small clawed hands to
scratch them with his long nails whenever they approached; they made
him detestable, master and boys alike, and they hated him for what
they made of him.

Sobbing one day when he had been kept in after school
hours, he leaped up and rushed suddenly for the doors.  Leonard,
breathing stertorously, pounded awkwardly after him, and returned in
a moment dragging the screaming boy along by the collar.

"Sit down!" yelled John Dorsey, hurling him
into a desk.  Then, his boiling fury unappeased, and baffled by
fear of inflicting some crippling punishment on the boy, he added
illogically:  "Stand up!" and jerked him to his feet
again.

"You young upstart!" he panted.  "You
little two-by-two whippersnapper!  We'll just see, my sonny, if
I'm to be dictated to
by the like of you."

"Take your hands off me!" Edward screamed,
in an agony of physical loathing.  "I'll tell my father on
you, old man Leonard, and he'll come down here and kick your big fat
behind all over the lot.  See if he don't."

Eugene closed his eyes, unable to witness the
snuffing out of a young life.  He was cold and sick about his
heart.  But when he opened his eyes again Edward, flushed and
sobbing, was standing where he stood.  Nothing had happened.

Eugene waited for God's visitation upon the unhappy
blasphemer.  He gathered, from the slightly open paralysis that
had frozen John Dorsey's and Sister Amy's face, that they were
waiting too.

Edward lived.  There was nothing beyond
this--nothing.
 
 

Eugene thought of this young Jew years later with the
old piercing shame, with the riving pain by which a man recalls the
irrevocable moment of some cowardly or dishonorable act.  For
not only did he join in the persecution of the boy--he was also glad
at heart because of the existence of some one weaker than himself,
some one at whom the flood of ridicule might be directed.  Years
later it came to him that on the narrow shoulders of that Jew lay a
burden he might otherwise have borne, that that overladen heart was
swollen with a misery that might have been his.

Mr. Leonard's "men of to-morrow" were doing
nicely.  The spirit of justice, of physical honor was almost
unknown to them, but they were loud in proclaiming the letter. 
Each of them lived in a fear of discovery; each of them who was able
built up his own defenses of swagger, pretense, and loud
assertion--the great masculine flower of gentleness, courage, and
honor died in a foul tangle. The great clan of go-getter was emergent
in young boys--big in voice, violent in threat, withered and pale at
heart--the "He-men" were on the rails.

And Eugene, encysted now completely behind the walls
of his fantasy, hurled his physical body daily to defeat, imitated,
as best he could, the speech, gesture, and bearing of his fellows,
joined, by act or spirit, in the attack on those weaker than himself,
and was compensated sometimes for his bruises when he heard Margaret
say that he was "a boy with a fine spirit."  She said
it very often.

He was, fortunately, thanks to Gant and Eliza, a
creature that was dominantly masculine in its sex, but in all his
life, either at home or in school, he had seldom known victory. 
Fear he knew well. And so incessant, it seemed to him later, had been
this tyranny of strength, that in his young wild twenties when his
great boneframe was powerfully fleshed at last, and he heard about
him the loud voices, the violent assertion, the empty threat, memory
would waken in him a maniacal anger, and he would hurl the insolent
intruding swaggerer from his path, thrust back the jostler, glare
insanely into fearful surprised faces and curse them.

He never forgot the Jew; he always thought of him
with shame.  But it was many years before he could understand
that that sensitive and feminine person, bound to him by the secret
and terrible bonds of his own dishonor, had in him nothing perverse,
nothing unnatural, nothing degenerate.  He was as much like a
woman as a man.  That was all.  There is no place among the
Boy Scouts for the androgyne--it must go to Parnassus.
 
 

18
 

In the years that had followed Eliza's removal to
Dixieland, by a slow inexorable chemistry of union and repellence,
profound changes had occurred in the alignment of the Gants. 
Eugene had passed away from Helen's earlier guardianship into the
keeping of Ben.  This separation was inevitable.  The great
affection she had shown him when he was a young child was based not
on any deep kinship of mind or body or spirit, but on her vast
maternal feeling, something that poured from her in a cataract of
tenderness and cruelty upon young, weak, plastic life.

The time had passed when she could tousle him on the
bed in a smother of slaps and kisses, crushing him, stroking him,
biting and kissing his young flesh.  He was not so attractive
physically?he had lost the round contours of infancy, he had grown up
like a weed, his limbs were long and gangling, his feet large, his
shoulders bony, and his head too big and heavy for the scrawny neck
on which it sagged forward.  Moreover, he sank deeper year by
year into the secret life, a strange wild thing bloomed darkly in his
face, and when she spoke to him his eyes were filled with the shadows
of great ships and cities.