Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (43 page)

He would occupy a new house every day, and sleep in a
different bed every night, selecting the most luxurious residence
ultimately for permanent occupancy, and bringing together in it the
richest treasures of every notable library in the city. 
Finally, when he wanted a woman from the small group that remained
and that spent its time in weaving new enticements for him, he would
summons her by ringing out the number he had given her on the Court
House bell.

He wanted opulent solitude.  His dark vision
burned on kingdoms under the sea, on windy castle crags, and on the
deep elf kingdoms at the earth's core.  He groped for the
doorless land of faery, that illimitable haunted country that opened
somewhere below a leaf or a stone.  And no birds sing.

More practically, he saw for himself great mansions
in the ground, grottoes buried in the deep heart of a hill, vast
chambers of brown earth, sumptuously appointed with his bee-like
plunder.  Cool hidden cisterns would bring him air; from a
peephole in the hillside he could look down on a winding road and see
armed men seeking for him, or hear their thwarted gropings overhead. 
He would pull fat fish from subterranean pools, his great earth
cellars would be stocked with old wine, he could loot the world of
its treasures, including the handsomest women, and never be caught.

King Solomon's mines.  She.  Proserpine. 
Ali Baba.  Orpheus and Eurydice.  Naked came I from my
mother's womb.  Naked shall I return.  Let the mothering
womb of earth engulf me.  Naked, avaliant wisp of man, in vast
brown limbs engulfed.
 
 

They neared the corner above Eliza's.  For the
first time the boy noted that their pace had quickened, and that he
had almost broken into a trot in order to keep up with Gant's awkward
plunging strides.

His father was moaning softly with long quivering
exhalations of breath, and he had one hand clasped over his pain. 
The boy spluttered idiotically with laughter.  Gant turned a
glance full of reproach and physical torture upon him.

"Oh-h-h-h-h!  Merciful God," he
whined, "it's hurting me."

Abruptly, Eugene was touched with pity.  For the
first time he saw plainly that great Gant had grown old.  The
sallow face had yellowed and lost its sinew.  The thin mouth was
petulant.  The chemistry of decay had left its mark.
 
No, there was no return after this.  Eugene saw
now that Gant was dying very slowly.  The vast resiliency, the
illimitable power of former times had vanished.  The big frame
was breaking up before him like a beached ship.  Gant was sick. 
He was old.

He had a disease that is very common among old men
who have lived carelessly and lustily--enlargement of the prostate
gland.  It was not often in itself a fatal disease--it was more
often one of the flags of age and death, but it was ugly and
uncomfortable.  It was generally treated successfully by
surgery--the operation was not desperate.  But Gant hated and
feared the knife: he listened eagerly to all persuasions against it.

He had no gift for philosophy.  He could not
view with amusement and detachment the death of the senses, the
waning of desire, the waxing of physical impotence.  He fed
hungrily, lewdly, on all news of seduction: his amusement had in it
the eyes of eagerness, the hot breath of desire.  He was
incapable of the pleasant irony by which the philosophic spirit mocks
that folly it is no longer able to enjoy.

Gant was incapable of resignation.  He had the
most burning of all lusts--the lust of memory, the ravenous hunger of
the will which tries to waken what is dead.  He had reached the
time of life when he read the papers greedily for news of death. 
As friends and acquaintances died he shook his head with the
melancholy hypocrisy of old men, saying:  "They're all
going, one by one.  Ah, Lord! The old man will be the next." 
But he did not believe it.  Death was still for the others, not
for himself.

He grew old very rapidly.  He began to die
before their eyes?a quick age, and a slow death, impotent,
disintegrating, horrible because his life had been so much identified
with physical excess--huge drinking, huge eating, huge rioting
debauchery.  It was fantastic and terrible to see the great body
waste.  They began to watch the progress of his disease with
something of the horror with which one watches the movements of a dog
with a broken leg, before he is destroyed--a horror greater than that
one feels when a man has a similar hurt, because a man may live
without legs.  A dog is all included in his hide.

His wild bombast was tempered now by senile
petulance.  He cursedand whined by intervals.  At the dead
of night he would rise, full of pain and terror, blaspheming vilely
against his God at one moment, and frantically entreating forgiveness
at the next. Through all this tirade ran the high quivering
exhalation of physical pain--actual and undeniable.

"Oh-h-h-h!  I curse the day I was born! . .
.  I curse the day I was given life by that bloodthirsty Monster
up above . . .  Oh-h-h-h-h! Jesus!  I beg of you.  I
know I've been bad.  Forgive me. Have mercy and pity upon me! 
Give me another chance, in Jesus' name . . .  Oh-h-h-h-h!"

Eugene had moments of furious anger because of these
demonstrations.  He was angry that Gant, having eaten his cake,
now howled because he had stomach-ache and at the same time begged
formore.  Bitterly he reflected that his father's life had
devoured whatever had served it, and that few men had had more
sensuous enjoyment, or had been more ruthless in their demands on
others. He found these exhibitions, these wild denunciations and
cowardly grovellings in propitiation of a God none of them paid any
attention to in health, ugly and abominable.  The constant
meditation of both Gant and Eliza on the death of others, their
morbid raking of the news for items announcing the death of some
person known to them, their weird absorption with the death of some
toothless hag who, galled by bedsores, at length found release after
her eightieth year, while fire, famine, and slaughter in other parts
of the world passed unnoticed by them, their extravagant superstition
over what was local and unimportant, seeing the intervention of God
in the death of a peasant, and the suspension of divine law and
natural order in their own, filled him with choking fury.

But Eliza was in splendid condition now to ponder
upon the death of others.  Her health was perfect.  She was
in her middle-fifties: she had grown triumphantly stronger after the
diseases of the middle years.  White, compact, a great deal
heavier now than she had ever been, she performed daily tasks of
drudgery in the maintenance of Dixieland, that would have floored a
strong negro. She hardly ever got to bed before two o'clock in the
morning, and was up again before seven.

She admitted her health grudgingly.  She made
the most of every ache, and she infuriated Gant by meeting every
complaint with a corresponding account of her own disorders. 
When badgered by Helen because of her supposed neglect of the sick
man or when the concentration of attention upon the invalid piqued
her jealousy, she smiled with white tremulous bitterness, hinting
darkly:

"He may not be the first to go.  I had a
premonition--I don't know what else you'd call it--the other day. 
I tell you what--it may not be long now--"  Her eyes
bleared with pity--shaking her puckered mouth, she wept at her own
funeral.

"Good heavens, mama!" Helen burst out
furiously.  "There's nothing wrong with you.  Papa's a
sick man!  Don't you realize that?"

She didn't.

"Pshaw!" she said.  "There's
nothing much wrong with him.  McGuire told me two men out of
three have it after they're fifty."

His body as it sickened distilled a green bile of
hatred against her crescent health.  It made him mad to see her
stand so strong. Murderous impotent, baffled--a maniacal anger
against her groped for an outlet in him, sometimes exploding in a
wild inchoate scream.

He yielded weakly to invalidism, he became tyrannous
of attention, jealous of service.  Her indifference to his
health maddened him, created a morbid hunger for pity and tears. 
At times he got insanely drunk and tried to frighten her by feigning
death, one time so successfully that Ben, bending over his rigid form
in the hallway, was whitened with conviction.

"I can't feel his heart, mama," he said,
with a nervous whicker of his lips.

"Well," she said, picking her language with
deliberate choosiness, "the pitcher went to the well once too
often.  I knew it would happen sooner or later."

Through a slotted eye he glared murderously at her. 
Judicially, with placid folded hands, she studied him.  Her calm
eye caught the slow movement of a stealthy inhalation.

"You get his purse, son, and any papers he may
have," she directed. "I'll call the undertaker."

With an infuriate scream the dead awakened.

"I thought that would bring you to," she
said complacently.

He scrambled to his feet.

"You hell-hound!" he yelled.  "You
would drink my heart's blood. You are without mercy and without
pity--inhuman and bloody monster that you are."

"Some day," Eliza observed, "you'll
cry wolf-wolf once too often."
 
 

He went three times a week to Cardiac's office for
treatment.  The dry doctor had grown old; behind his dusty
restraint, the prim authority of his manner, there was a deepening
well of senile bawdry.  He had a comfortable fortune, he cared
little for his dwindling practice.  He was still a brilliant
bacteriologist: he spent hours over slides etched in flowering
patterns of bacilli, and he was sought after by diseased prostitutes,
to whom he rendered competent service.

He dissuaded the Gants from surgery.  He was
jealously absorbed in the treatment of Gant's disease, scoffed at
operations, and insisted he could give adequate relief by
manipulation of the affected parts and the use of the catheter.

The two men became devoted friends.  The doctor
gave up entire mornings to the treatment of Gant's disease.  The
consulting-room was filled with their sly laughter while scrofulous
mountaineers glared dully at the pages of Life in the antechamber. 
As Gant sprawled out voluptuously on the table after his masseur had
finished his work, he listened appreciatively to the secrets of light
women, or to tidbits from books of pseudoscientific pornography, of
which the doctor had a large number.

"You say," he demanded eagerly, "that
the monks petitioned the archbishop?"

"Yes," said the doctor.  "They
suffered during the hot weather.  He wrote 'granted' across the
petition.  Here's a photograph of the document."  He
held the book open in his clean parched fingers.

"Merciful God!" said Gant, staring. 
"I suppose it's pretty bad in those hot countries."

He licked his thumb, smiling lewdly to himself. 
The late Oscar Wilde, for instance.
 
 

21
 

During the first years of this illness Gant showed a
diminished, but not a seriously impaired, energy.  At first he
had, under the doctor's treatment, periods of tranquillity when he
almost believed himself well.  There were also times when he
became a whining dotard over night, lay indolently abed for days, and
was flabbilyacquiescent to his disorder.  These climaxes usually
came on the heels of a roaring spree.  The saloons had been
closed for years: the town had been one of the first to vote on
"local option."

Gant had piously contributed his vote for purity. 
Eugene remembered the day, years before, when he went proudly with
his father to the polls.  The militant "drys" had
agreed to advertise their vote by wearing a scrap of white silk in
their lapels.  That was for purity.  The defiant wets wore
"red."
 
Announced by
violent trumpetings in the Protestant churches, the day of atonement
dawned on a seasoned army of well drilled teetotalers.  Those
wets who had victoriously withstood the pressure of hearth and pulp
it--their number (aié aié was small--went to their death with the
gallant swagger, and with the gleam of purloined honor, of men who
are to die fighting most desperately against the engulfing mob.

They did not know how gallant was their cause: they
knew only that they had stood against the will of a priest-ridden
community?the most annihilating force in the village.  They had
never been told they stood for liberty; they stood rubily,
stubbornly, with the strong brown smell of shame in their nostrils,
for the bloodshot, malt-mouthed, red-nosed, loose-pursed Demon Rum. 
So, they came down with vine leaves in their hair, and a good fog of
rye upon their breaths, and with brave set smiles around their
determined mouths.

As they approached the polls, glancing, like
surrounded knights, for an embattled brother, the church women of the
town, bent like huntresses above the straining leash, gave the word
to the eager children of the Sunday schools.  Dressed all in
white, and clutching firmly in their small hands the tiny stems of
American flags, the pigmies, monstrous as only children can be when
they become the witless mouths of slogans and crusades, charged
hungrily, uttering their shrill cries, upon their Gulliver.

"There he is, children.  Go get him."