Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (83 page)

A moment later, the big
car sloped to a halt at the curb, in front of Dixieland.  A
light burned dimly in the hall, evoking for him chill memories of
damp and gloom.  A warmer light burned in the parlor, painting
the lowered shade of the tall window a warm and mellow orange.

"Ben's in that room
upstairs," Luke whispered, "where the light is."

Eugene looked up with
cold dry lips to the bleak front room upstairs, with its ugly
Victorian bay-window.  It was next to the sleeping-porch where,
but three weeks before, Ben had hurled into the darkness his savage
curse at life.  The light in the sickroom burned grayly,
bringing to him its grim vision of struggle and naked terror.

The three men went softly
up the walk and entered the house.  There was a faint clatter
from the kitchen, and voices.

"Papa's in here,"
said Luke.

Eugene entered the parlor
and found Gant seated alone before a bright coal-fire.  He
looked up dully and vaguely as his son entered.

"Hello, papa,"
said Eugene, going to him.

"Hello, son,"
said Gant.  He kissed the boy with his bristling cropped
mustache.  His thin lip began to tremble petulantly.

"Have you heard
about your brother?" he snuffled.  "To think that this
should be put upon me, old and sick as I am.  O Jesus, it's
fearful--"

Helen came in from the
kitchen.

"Hello, Slats,"
she said, heartily embracing him.  "How are you, honey? 
He's grown four inches more since he went away," she jeered,
sniggering.  "Well, 'Gene, cheer up!  Don't look so
blue. While there's life there's hope.  He's not gone yet, you
know." She burst into tears, hoarse, unstrung, hysterical.

"To think that this
must come upon me," Gant sniffled, responding mechanically to
her grief, as he rocked back and forth on his cane and stared into
the fire.  "O boo-hoo-hoo!  What have I done that God
should--"

"You shut up!"
she cried, turning upon him in a blaze of fury. "Shut your mouth
this minute.  I don't want to hear any more from you!  I've
given my life to you!  Everything's been done for you, and
you'll be here when we're all gone.  You're not the one who's
sick."  Her feeling toward him had, for the moment, gone
rancorous and bitter.

"Where's mama?"
Eugene asked.

"She's back in the
kitchen," Helen said.  "I'd go back and say hello
before you see Ben if I were you."  In a low brooding tone,
she continued:  "Well, forget about it.  It can't be
helped now."

He found Eliza busy over
several bright bubbling pots of water on the gas-stove.  She
bustled awkwardly about, and looked surprised and confused when she
saw him.

"Why, what on earth,
boy!  When'd you get in?"

He embraced her. 
But beneath her matter-of-factness, he saw the terror in her heart:
her dull black eyes glinted with bright knives of fear.

"How's Ben, mama?"
he asked quietly.

"Why-y," she
pursed her lips reflectively, "I was just saying to Doctor Coker
before you came in.  'Look here,' I said.  'I tell you
what, I don't believe he's half as bad off as he looks.  Now, if
only we can hold on till morning.  I believe there's going to be
a change for the better.'"

"Mama, in heaven's
name!" Helen burst out furiously.  "How can you bear
to talk like that?  Don't you know that Ben's condition is
critical?  Are you never going to wake up?"

Her voice had its old
cracked note of hysteria.

"Now, I tell you,
son," said Eliza, with a white tremulous smile, "when you
go in there to see him, don't make out as if you knew he was sick. 
If I were you, I'd make a big joke of it all.  I'd laugh just as
big as you please and say, 'See here, I thought I was coming to see a
sick man.  Why, pshaw!' (I'd say) 'there's nothing wrong with
you.  Half of it's only imagination!'"

"O mama! for
Christ's sake!" said Eugene frantically.  "For
Christ's sake!"

He turned away, sick at
heart, and caught at his throat with his fingers.

Then he went softly
upstairs with Luke and Helen, approaching the sick-room with a
shrivelled heart and limbs which had gone cold and bloodless. 
They paused for a moment, whispering, before he entered.  The
wretched conspiracy in the face of death filled him with horror.

"N-n-n-now, I
wouldn't stay but a m-m-m-minute," whispered Luke. "It
m-m-might make him nervous."

Eugene, bracing himself,
followed Helen blindly into the room.

"Look who's come to
see you," her voice came heartily.  "It's
Highpockets."

For a moment Eugene could
see nothing, for dizziness and fear. Then, in the gray shaded light
of the room, he descried Bessie Gant, the nurse, and the long yellow
skull's-head of Coker, smiling wearily at him, with big stained
teeth, over a long chewed cigar. Then, under the terrible light which
fell directly and brutally upon the bed alone, he saw Ben.  And
in that moment of searing recognition he saw, what they had all seen,
that Ben was dying.

Ben's long thin body lay
three-quarters covered by the bedding; its gaunt outline was bitterly
twisted below the covers, in an attitude of struggle and torture. 
It seemed not to belong to him, it was somehow distorted and detached
as if it belonged to a beheaded criminal.  And the sallow yellow
of his face had turned gray; out of this granite tint of death, lit
by two red flags of fever, the stiff black furze of a three-day beard
was growing.  The beard was somehow horrible; it recalled the
corrupt vitality of hair, which can grow from a rotting corpse. 
And Ben's thin lips were lifted, in a constant grimace of torture and
strangulation, about his white somehow dead-looking teeth, as inch by
inch he gasped a thread of air into his lungs.

And the sound of this
gasping--loud, hoarse, rapid, unbelievable, filling the room, and
orchestrating every moment in it--gave to the scene its final note of
horror.

Ben lay upon the bed
below them, drenched in light, like some enormous insect on a
naturalist's table, fighting, while they  looked at him, to save
with his poor wasted body the life that no one could save for him. 
It was monstrous, brutal.  As Eugene approached, Ben's
fear-bright eyes rested upon the younger brother for the first time
and bodilessly, without support, he lifted his tortured lungs from
the pillow, seizing the boy's wrists fiercely in the hot white circle
of his hands, and gasping in strong terror like a child:  "Why
have you come?  Why have you come home, 'Gene?"

The boy stood white and
dumb for a moment, while swarming pity and horror rose in him.

"They gave us a
vacation, Ben," he said presently.  "They had to close
down on account of the flu."

Then he turned away
suddenly into the black murk, sick with his poor lie, and unable to
face the fear in Ben's gray eyes.

"All right, 'Gene,"
said Bessie Gant, with an air of authority. "Get out of
here--you and Helen both.  I've got one crazy Gant to look after
already.  I don't want two more in here."  She spoke
harshly, with an unpleasant laugh.

She was a thin woman of
thirty-eight years, the wife of Gant's nephew, Gilbert.  She was
of mountain stock: she was coarse, hard, and vulgar, with little pity
in her, and a cold lust for the miseries of sickness and death. 
These inhumanities she cloaked with her professionalism, saying:

"If I gave way to my
feelings, where would the patient be?"

When they got out into
the hall again, Eugene said angrily to Helen:  "Why have
you got that death's-head here?  How can he get well with her
around?  I don't like her!"

"Say what you
like--she's a good nurse."  Then, in a low voice, she
said:  "What do you think?"

He turned away, with a
convulsive gesture.  She burst into tears, and seized his hand.

Luke was teetering about
restlessly, breathing stertorously and smoking a cigarette, and
Eliza, working her lips, stood with an attentive ear cocked to the
door of the sick-room.  She was holding a useless kettle of hot
water.

"Huh?  Hah? 
What say?" asked Eliza, before any one had said anything. 
"How is he?"  Her eyes darted about at them.

"Get away!  Get
away!  Get away!" Eugene muttered savagely.  His voice
rose.  "Can't you get away?"

He was infuriated by the
sailor's loud nervous breathing, his large awkward feet.  He was
angered still more by Eliza's useless kettle, her futile hovering,
her "huh?" and "hah?"

"Can't you see he's
fighting for his breath?  Do you want to strangle him? 
It's messy!  Messy!  Do you hear?"  His voice
rose again.

The ugliness and
discomfort of the death choked him; and the swarming family,
whispering outside the door, pottering uselessly around, feeding with
its terrible hunger for death on Ben's strangulation, made him mad
with alternate fits of rage and pity.

Indecisively, after a
moment, they went downstairs, still listening for sounds in the
sick-room.

"Well, I tell you,"
Eliza began hopefully.  "I have a feeling, I don't know
what you'd call it--"  She looked about awkwardly and found
herself deserted.  Then she went back to her boiling pots and
pans.

Helen, with contorted
face, drew him aside, and spoke to him in whispered hysteria, in the
front hall.

"Did you see that
sweater she's wearing?  Did you see it?  It's filthy!" 
Her voice sank to a brooding whisper.  "Did you know that
he can't bear to look at her?  She came into the room yesterday,
and he grew perfectly sick.  He turned his head away and said 'O
Helen, for God's sake, take her out of here.'  You hear that,
don't you.  Do you hear?  He can't stand to have her come
near him.  He doesn't want her in the room."

"Stop!  Stop! 
For God's sake, stop!" Eugene said, clawing at his throat.

The girl was for the
moment insane with hatred and hysteria.

"It may be a
terrible thing to say, but if he dies I shall hate her.  Do you
think I can forget the way she's acted?  Do you?"  Her
voice rose almost to a scream.  "She's let him die here
before her very eyes.  Why, only day before yesterday, when his
temperature was 104, she was talking to Old Doctor Doak about a lot. 
Did you know that?"

"Forget about it!"
he said frantically.  "She'll always be like that! 
It's not her fault.  Can't you see that?  O God, how
horrible!  How horrible!"

"Poor old mama!"
said Helen, beginning to weep.  "She'll never get over
this.  She's scared to death!  Did you see her eyes? 
She knows, of course she knows!"

Then suddenly, with mad
brooding face, she said:  "Sometimes I think I hate her! 
I really think I hate her."  She plucked at her large chin,
absently.  "Well, we mustn't talk like this," she
said. "It's not right.  Cheer up.  We're all tired and
nervous.  I believe he's going to get all right yet."

Day came gray and chill,
with a drear reek of murk and fog.  Eliza bustled about eagerly,
pathetically busy, preparing breakfast. Once she hurried awkwardly
upstairs with a kettle of water, and stood for a second at the door
as Bessie Gant opened it, peering in at the terrible bed, with her
white puckered face.  Bessie Gant blocked her further entrance,
and closed the door rudely.  Eliza went away making flustered
apologies.

For, what the girl had
said was true, and Eliza knew it.  She was not wanted in the
sick-room; the dying boy did not want to see her. She had seen him
turn his head wearily away when she had gone in. Behind her white
face dwelt this horror, but she made no confession, no complaint. 
She bustled around doing useless things with an eager
matter-of-factness.  And Eugene, choked with exasperation at one
moment, because of her heavy optimism, was blind with pity the next
when he saw the terrible fear and pain in her dull black eyes. 
He rushed toward her suddenly, as she stood above the hot stove, and
seized her rough worn hand, kissing it and babbling helplessly.

"O mama! 
Mama!  It's all right!  It's all right!  It's all
right."

And Eliza, stripped
suddenly of her pretenses, clung to him, burying her white face in
his coat sleeve, weeping bitterly, helplessly, grievously, for the
sad waste of the irrevocable years--the immortal hours of love that
might never be relived, the great evil of forgetfulness and
indifference that could never be righted now.  Like a child she
was grateful for his caress, and his heart twisted in him like a wild
and broken thing, and he kept mumbling:

"It's all right! 
It's all right!  It's all right!"--knowing that it was not,
could never be, all right.

"If I had known. 
Child, if I had known," she wept, as she had wept long before at
Grover's death.

"Brace up!" he
said.  "He'll pull through yet.  The worst is over."

"Well, I tell you,"
said Eliza, drying her eyes at once, "I believe it is.  I
believe he passed the turning-point last night.  I was saying to
Bessie--"

The light grew.  Day
came, bringing hope.  They sat down to breakfast in the kitchen,
drawing encouragement from every scrap of cheer doctor or nurse would
give them.  Coker departed, non-committally optimistic. 
Bessie Gant came down to breakfast and was professionally
encouraging.