Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (37 page)

And this secret life, which she could never touch,
and which she could never understand, choked her with fury.  It
was necessary for her to seize life in her big red-knuckled hands, to
cuff and caress it, to fondle, love, and enslave it.  Her
boiling energy rushed outward on all things that lived in the touch
of the sun.  It was necessary for her to dominate and enslave,
all her virtues?her strong lust to serve, to give, to nurse, to
amuse--came from the imperative need for dominance over almost all
she touched.

She was herself ungovernable; she disliked whatever
did not yield to her governance.  In his loneliness he would
have yielded his spirit into bondage willingly if in exchange he
might have had her love which so strangely he had forfeited, but he
was unable to reveal to her the flowering ecstasies, the dark and
incommunicable fantasies in which his life was bound.  She hated
secrecy; an air of mystery, a crafty but knowing reticence, or the
unfathomable depths of other-wordliness goaded her to fury.

Convulsed by a momentary rush of hatred, she would
caricature the pout of his lips, the droop of his head, his bounding
kangaroo walk.

"You little freak.  You nasty little
freak.  You don't even know who you are--you little bastard. 
You're not a Gant.  Any one cansee that.  You haven't a
drop of papa's blood in you.  Queer one! Queer one!  You're
Greeley Pentland all over again."

She always returned to this--she was fanatically
partisan, her hysterical superstition had already lined the family in
embattled groups of those who were Gant and those who were Pentland. 
On the Pentland side, she placed Steve, Daisy, and Eugene--they were,
she thought, the "cold and selfish ones," and the
implication of the older sister and the younger brother with the
criminal member ofthe family gave her an added pleasure.  Her
union with Luke was now inseparable.  It had been inevitable. 
They were the Gants?those who were generous, fine, and honorable.

The love of Luke and Helen was epic.  They found
in each other the constant effervescence, the boundless extraversion,
the richness, the loudness, the desperate need to give and to serve
that was life to them.  They exacerbated the nerves of each
other, but their lovewas beyond grievance, and their songs of praise
were extravagant.

"I'll criticise him if I like," she said
pugnaciously.  "I've got the right to.  But I won't
hear any one else criticise him.  He's a fine generous boy--the
finest one in this family.  That's one thing sure."

Ben alone seemed to be without the grouping.  He
moved among themlike a shadow--he was remote from their passionate
fullbloodedpartisanship.  But she thought of him as
"generous"--he was, she concluded, a "Gant."

In spite of this violent dislike for the Pentlands,
both Helen and Luke had inherited all Gant's social hypocrisy. 
They wanted aboveall else to put a good face on before the world, to
be well likedand to have many friends.  They were profuse in
their thanks,extravagant in their praise, cloying in their flattery. 
They slathered it on.  They kept their ill-temper, their
nervousness, and their irritability for exhibition at home.  And
in the presence of any members of Jim or Will Pentland's family their
manner was not only friendly, it was even touched slightly with
servility. Money impressed them.

It was a period of incessant movement in the family. 
Steve had married a year or two before a woman from a small town in
lowerIndiana.  She was thirty-seven years old, twelve years his
senior, a squat heavy German with a big nose and a patient and ugly
face. She had come to Dixieland one summer with another woman, a
spinster of lifelong acquaintance, and allowed him to seduce her
before she left.  The winter following, her father, a small
manufacturer of cigars, had died, leaving her $9,000 in insurance,
his home, a small sum of money in the bank, and a quarter share in
his business, which was left to the management of his two sons.

Early in Spring the woman, whose name was Margaret
Lutz, returned to Dixieland.  One drowsy afternoon Eugene found
them at Gant's. The house was deserted save for them.  They were
sprawled out face downward, with their hands across each other's
hips, on Gant's bed. They lay there silently, while he looked, in an
ugly stupor. Steve's yellow odor filled the room.  Eugene began
to tremble with insane fury.  The Spring was warm and lovely,
the air brooded slightly in a flowering breeze, there was a smell of
soft tar.  He had come down to the empty house exultantly,
tasting its delicious silence, the cool mustiness of indoors, and a
solitary afternoon with great calf volumes.  In a moment the
world turned hag.

There was nothing that Steve touched that he did not
taint.

Eugene hated him because he stunk, because all that
he touched stunk, because he brought fear, shame, and loathing
wherever he went; because his kisses were fouler than his curses, his
whines nastier than his threats.  He saw the woman's hair blown
gently by the blubbered exhalations of his brother's foul breath.

"What are you doing there on papa's bed?"
he screamed.

Steve rose stupidly and seized him by the arm. 
The woman sat up, dopily staring, her short legs widened.

"I suppose you're going to be a little
Tattle-tale," said Steve, bludgeoning him with heavy contempt. 
"You're going to run right up and tell mama, aren't you?"
he said.  He fastened his yellow fingers on Eugene's arm.

"Get off papa's bed," said Eugene
desperately.  He jerked his arm away.

"You're not going to tell on us, buddy, are
you?" Steve wheedled, breathing pollution in his face. He grew
sick.

"Let me go," he muttered.  "No."

Steve and Margaret were married soon after. 
With the old sense of physical shame Eugene watched them descend the
stairs at Dixieland each morning for breakfast.  Steve swaggered
absurdly, smiled complacently, and hinted at great fortune about the
town.  There was rumor of a quarter-million.

"Put it there, Steve," said Harry Tugman,
slapping him powerfully upon the shoulder.  "By God, I
always said you'd get there."

Eliza smiled at swagger and boast, her proud,
pleased, tremulous sad smile.  The first-born.

"Little Stevie doesn't have to worry any
longer," said he.  "He's on Easy Street.  Where
are all the Wise Guys now who said 'I told you so'?  They're all
mighty glad to give Little Stevie a Big Smile and the Glad Hand when
he breezes down the street.  Every Knocker is a Booster now all
right, all right."

"I tell you what," said Eliza with proud
smiles, "he's no fool.  He's as bright as the next one when
he wants to be."  Brighter, she thought.

Steve bought new clothes, tan shoes, striped silk
shirts, and a wide straw hat with a red, white and blue band. 
He swung his shoulders in a wide arc as he walked, snapped his
fingers nonchalantly, and smiled with elaborate condescension on
those who greeted him.  Helen was vastly annoyed and amused; she
had to laugh at his absurd strut, and she had a great rush of feeling
for Margaret Lutz.  She called her "honey," felt her
eyes mist warmly with unaccountable tears as she looked into the
patient, bewildered, and slightly frightened face of the German
woman.  She took her in her arms and fondled her.

"That's all right, honey," she said, "you
let us know if he doesn't treat you right.  We'll fix him."

"Steve's a good boy," said Margaret, "when
he isn't drinking.  I've nothing to say against him when he's
sober."  She burst into tears.

"That awful, that awful curse," said Eliza,
shaking her head sadly, "the curse of licker.  It's been
responsible for the ruination of more homes than anything else."

"Well, she'll never win any beauty prizes,
that's one thing sure," said Helen privately to Eliza.

"I'll vow!" said Eliza.

"What on earth did he mean by doing such a
thing!" she continued. "She's ten years older than he if
she's a day."

"I think he's done pretty well, if you ask me,"
said Helen, annoyed.  "Good heavens, mama!  You talk
as if he's some sort of prize.  Every one in town knows what
Steve is."  She laughed ironically and angrily.  "No,
indeed!  He got the best of the bargain.  Margaret's a
decent girl."

"Well," said Eliza hopefully, "maybe
he's going to brace up now and make a new start.  He's promised
that he'd try."

"Well, I should hope so," said Helen
scathingly.  "I should hope so.  It's about time."

Her dislike for him was innate.  She had placed
him among the tribe of the Pentlands.  But he was really more
like Gant than any one else.  He was like Gant in all his
weakness, with none of his cleanliness, his lean fibre, his remorse. 
In her heart she knew this and it increased her dislike for him. 
She shared in the fierce antagonism Gant felt toward his son. 
But her feeling was broken, as was all her feeling, by moments of
friendliness, charity, tolerance.

"What are you going to do, Steve?" she
asked.  "You've got a family now, you know."

"Little Stevie doesn't have to worry any
longer," he said, smiling easily.  "He lets the others
do the worrying."  He lifted his yellow fingers to his
mouth, drawing deeply at a cigarette.

"Good heavens, Steve," she burst out
angrily.  "Pull yourself together and try to be a man for
once.  Margaret's a woman.  You surely don't expect her to
keep you up, do you?"

"What business is that of yours, for Christ's
sake?" he said in a high ugly voice.  "Nobody's asked
your advice, have they?  All of you are against me.  None
of you had a good word for me when I was down and out, and now it
gets your goat to see me make good."  He had believed for
years that he was persecuted--his failure at home he attributed to
the malice, envy, and disloyalty of his family, his failure abroad to
the malice and envy of an opposing force that he called "the
world."

"No," he said, taking another long puff at
the moist cigarette, "don't worry about Stevie.  He doesn't
need anything from any of you, and you don't hear him asking for
anything.  You see that, don't you?" he said, pulling a
roll of banknotes from his pocket and peeling off a few twenties. 
"Well, there's lots more where that came from.  And I'll
tell you something else: Little Stevie will be right up there among
the Big Boys soon.  He's got a couple of deals coming off
that'll show the pikers in this town where to get off.  You get
that, don't you?" he said.

Ben, who had been sitting on the piano stool all this
time, scowling savagely at the keys, and humming a little recurrent
tune to himself while he picked it out with one finger, turned now to
Helen, with a sharp flicker of his mouth, and jerked his head
sideways.

"I hear Mr. Vanderbilt's getting jealous,"
he said.

Helen laughed ironically, huskily.

"You think you're a pretty wise guy, don't you?"
said Steve heavily.  "But I don't notice it's getting you
anywhere."

Ben turned his scowling eyes upon him, and sniffed
sharply, unconsciously.

"Now, I hope you're not going to forget your old
friends, Mr. Rockefeller," he said in his subdued, caressing
ominous voice. "I'd like to be vice-president if the job's still
open."  He turned back to the keyboard--and searched with a
hooked finger.

"All right, all right," said Steve. 
"Go ahead and laugh, both of you, if you think it's funny. 
But you notice that Little Stevie isn't a fifteen-dollar clerk in a
newspaper office, don't you?  And he doesn't have to sing in
moving-picture shows, either," he added.

Helen's big-boned face reddened angrily.  She
had begun to sing in public with the saddlemaker's daughter.

"You'd better not talk, Steve, until you get a
job and quit bumming around," she said.  "You're a
fine one to talk, hanging around pool-rooms and drug-stores all day
on your wife's money.  Why, it's absurd!" she said
furiously.

"Oh for God's sake!" Ben cried irritably,
wheeling around.  "What do you want to listen to him for? 
Can't you see he's crazy?"

As the summer lengthened, Steve began to drink
heavily again.  His decayed teeth, neglected for years, began to
ache simultaneously: he was wild with pain and cheap whisky.  He
felt that Eliza and Margaret were in some way responsible for his
woe--he sought them out day after day when they were alone, and
screamed at them.  He called them foul names and said they had
poisoned his system.

In the early hours of morning, at two or three
o'clock, he would waken, and walk through the house weeping and
entreating release. Eliza would send him to Spaugh at the hotel or to
McGuire, at his residence, in Eugene's charge.  The doctors,
surly and half-awake, peeled back his shirtsleeve and drove a needle
with morphine deep in his upper arm.  After that, he found
relief and sleep again.

One night, at the supper hour, he returned to
Dixieland, holding his tortured jaws between his hands.  He
found Eliza bending over the spitting grease of the red-hot stove. 
He cursed her for bearing him, he cursed her for allowing him to have
teeth, he cursed her for lack of sympathy, motherly love, human
kindliness.

Her white face worked silently above the heat.