Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (84 page)

"If I can keep his
damn family out of the room, he may have some chance of getting
well."

They laughed
hysterically, gratefully, pleased with the woman's abuse.

"How is he this
morning?" said Eliza.  "Do you notice any
improvement?"

"His temperature is
lower, if that's what you mean."

They knew that a lower
temperature in the morning was a fact of no great significance, but
they took nourishment from it: their diseased emotion fed upon
it--they had soared in a moment to a peak of hopefulness.

"And he's got a good
heart," said Bessie Gant.  "If that holds out, and he
keeps fighting, he'll pull through."

"D-d-don't worry
about his f-f-fighting," said Luke, in a rush of eulogy. 
"That b-b-boy'll fight as long as he's g-g-got a breath left in
him."

"Why, yes,"
Eliza began, "I remember when he was a child of seven--I know I
was standing on the porch one day--the reason I remember is Old Mr.
Buckner had just come by with some butter and eggs your papa had--"

"O my God!"
groaned Helen, with a loose grin.  "Now we'll get it."

"Whah--whah!"
Luke chortled crazily, prodding Eliza in the ribs.

"I'll vow, boy!"
said Eliza angrily.  "You act like an idiot.  I'd be
ashamed!"

"Whah--whah--whah!"

Helen sniggered, nudging
Eugene.

"Isn't he crazy,
though?  Tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh."  Then, with wet eyes,
she drew Eugene roughly into her big bony embrace.

"Poor old 'Gene. 
You always got on together, didn't you?  You'll feel it more
than any of us."

"He's not b-b-buried
yet," Luke cried heartily.  "That boy may be here when
the rest of us are pushing d-d-daisies."

"Where's Mrs. Pert?"
said Eugene.  "Is she in the house?"

A strained and bitter
silence fell upon them.

"I ordered her out,"
said Eliza grimly, after a moment.  "I told her exactly
what she was--a whore."  She spoke with the old stern
judiciousness, but in a moment her face began to work and she burst
into tears.  "If it hadn't been for that woman I believe
he'd be well and strong to-day.  I'll vow I do!"

"Mama, in heaven's
name!" Helen burst out furiously.  "How dare you say a
thing like that?  She was the only friend he had: when he was
taken sick she nursed him hand and foot.  Why, the idea! 
The idea!" she panted in her indignation.  "If it
hadn't been for Mrs. Pert he'd have been dead by now.  Nobody
else did anything for him. You were willing enough, I notice, to keep
her here and take her money until he got sick.  No, sir!"
she declared with emphasis. "Personally, I like her.  I'm
not going to cut her now."

"It's a d-d-d-damn
shame!" said Luke, staunch to his goddess.  "If it
hadn't been for Mrs. P-P-P-Pert and you, Ben would be S. O. L. Nobody
else around here gave a damn.  If he d-d-d-dies, it's because he
didn't get the proper care when it would have done him some good. 
There's always been too d-d-damn much thought of saving a nickel, and
too d-d-damn little about flesh and blood!"

"Well, forget about
it!" said Helen wearily.  "There's one thing sure:
I've done everything I could.  I haven't been to bed for two
days.  Whatever happens, I'll have no regrets on that score." 
Her voice was filled with a brooding ugly satisfaction.

"I know you
haven't!  I know that!"  The sailor turned to Eugene
in his excitement, gesticulating.  "That g-g-girl's worked
her fingers to the bone.  If it hadn't been for her--" 
His eyes got wet; he turned his head away and blew his nose.

"Oh, for Christ's
sake!" Eugene yelled, springing up from the table.  "Stop
it, won't you!  Let's wait till later."

In this way, the terrible
hours of the morning lengthened out, while they spent themselves
trying to escape from the tragic net of frustration and loss in which
they were caught.  Their spirits soared to brief moments of
insane joy and exultancy, and plunged into black pits of despair and
hysteria.  Eliza alone seemed consistently hopeful. 
Trembling with exacerbated nerves, the sailor and Eugene paced the
lower hall, smoking incessant cigarettes, bristling as they
approached each other, ironically polite when their bodies touched. 
Gant dozed in the parlor or in his own room, waking and sleeping by
starts, moaning petulantly, detached, vaguely aware only of the
meaning of events, and resentful because of the sudden indifference
to him.  Helen went in and out of the sick-room constantly,
dominating the dying boy by the power of her vitality, infusing him
with moments of hope and confidence.  But when she came out, her
hearty cheerfulness was supplanted by the strained blur of hysteria;
she wept, laughed, brooded, loved, and hated by turns.

Eliza went only once into
the room.  She intruded with a hotwater bag, timidly, awkwardly,
like a child, devouring Ben's face with her dull black eyes. 
But when above the loud labor of his breath his bright eyes rested on
her, his clawed white fingers tightened their grip in the sheets, and
he gasped strongly, as if in terror:

"Get out! 
Out!  Don't want you."

Eliza left the room. 
As she walked she stumbled a little, as if her feet were numb and
dead.  Her white face had an ashen tinge, and her dull eyes had
grown bright and staring.  As the door closed behind her, she
leaned against the wall and put one hand across her face.  Then,
in a moment, she went down to her pots again.

Frantically, angrily,
with twitching limbs they demanded calm and steady nerves from one
another; they insisted that they keep away from the sick-room--but,
as if drawn by some terrible magnet, they found themselves again and
again outside the door, listening, on tiptoe, with caught breath,
with an insatiate thirst for horror, to the hoarse noise of his
gasping as he strove to force air down into his strangled and
cemented lungs.  And eagerly, jealously, they sought entrance to
the room, waiting their turn for carrying water, towels, supplies.

Mrs. Pert, from her
refuge in the boarding-house across the street, called Helen on the
phone each half-hour, and the girl talked to her while Eliza came
from the kitchen into the hall, and stood, hands folded, lips pursed,
with eyes that sparkled with her hate.

The girl cried and
laughed as she talked.

"Well . . . that's
all right, Fatty. . . .  You know how I feel about it. . . . 
I've always said that if he had one true friend in the world, it's
you . . . and don't think we're ALL ungrateful for what you've done.
. . ."

During the pauses, Eugene
could hear the voice of the other woman across the wires, sobbing.

And Eliza said, grimly: 
"If she calls up again you let me talk to her.  I'll fix
her!"

"Good heavens,
mama!" Helen cried angrily.  "You've done enough
already.  You drove her out of the house when she'd done more
for him than all his family put together."  Her big
strained features worked convulsively.  "Why, it's
ridiculous!"

Within Eugene, as he
paced restlessly up and down the hall or prowled through the house
a-search for some entrance he had never found, a bright and stricken
thing kept twisting about like a trapped bird.  This bright
thing, the core of him, his Stranger, kept twisting its head about,
unable to look at horror, until at length it gazed steadfastly, as if
under a dreadful hypnosis, into the eyes of death and darkness. 
And his soul plunged downward, drowning in that deep pit: he felt
that he could never again escape from this smothering flood of pain
and ugliness, from the eclipsing horror and pity of it all.  And
as he walked, he twisted his own neck about, and beat the air with
his arm like a wing, as if he had received a blow in his kidneys. 
He felt that he might be clean and free if he could only escape into
a single burning passion?hard, and hot, and glittering--of love,
hatred, terror, or disgust.  But he was caught, he was
strangling, in the web of futility--there was no moment of hate that
was not touched by a dozen shafts of pity: impotently, he wanted to
seize them, cuff them, shake them, as one might a trying brat, and at
the same time to caress them, love them, comfort them.

As he thought of the
dying boy upstairs, the messy ugliness of it--as they stood
whimpering by while he strangled--choked him with fury and horror. 
The old fantasy of his childhood came back to him: he remembered his
hatred of the semi-private bathroom, his messy discomfort while he
sat at stool and stared at the tub filled with dirty wash, sloppily
puffed and ballooned by cold gray soapy water.  He thought of
this as Ben lay dying.

Their hopes revived
strongly in the forenoon when word came to them that the patient's
temperature was lower, his pulse stronger, the congestion of the
lungs slightly relieved.  But at one o'clock, after a fit of
coughing, he grew delirious, his temperature mounted, he had
increasing difficulty in getting his breath. Eugene and Luke raced to
Wood's pharmacy in Hugh Barton's car, for an oxygen tank.  When
they returned, Ben had almost choked to death.  Quickly they
carried the tank into the room, and placed it near his head. 
Bessie Gant seized the cone, and started to put it over Ben's mouth,
commanding him to breathe it in.  He fought it away tigerishly:
curtly the nurse commanded Eugene to seize his hands.

Eugene gripped Ben's hot
wrists: his heart turned rotten.  Ben rose wildly from his
pillows, wrenching like a child to get his hands free, gasping
horribly, his eyes wild with terror:

"No!  No! 
'Gene!  'Gene!  No!  No!"

Eugene caved in,
releasing him and turning way, white-faced, from the accusing fear of
the bright dying eyes.  Others held him.  He was given
temporary relief.  Then he became delirious again.

By four o'clock it was
apparent that death was near.  Ben had brief periods of
consciousness, unconsciousness, and delirium--but most of the time he
was delirious.  His breathing was easier, he hummed snatches of
popular songs, some old and forgotten, called up now from the lost
and secret adyts of his childhood; but always he returned, in his
quiet humming voice, to a popular song of war-time--cheap,
sentimental, but now tragically moving:  "Just a Baby's
Prayer at Twilight,"
 

    
".
. . when lights are low.
     
Poor baby's years"
 

Helen entered the
darkening room.
 

    
"Are
filled with tears."
 

The fear had gone out of
his eyes: above his gasping he looked gravely at her, scowling, with
the old puzzled child's stare. Then, in a moment of fluttering
consciousness, he recognized her. He grinned beautifully, with the
thin swift flicker of his mouth.

"Hello, Helen! 
It's Helen!" he cried eagerly.

She came from the room
with a writhen and contorted face, holding the sobs that shook her
until she was half-way down the stairs.
 
 

As darkness came upon the
gray wet day, the family gathered in the parlor, in the last terrible
congress before death, silent, waiting.  Gant rocked petulantly,
spitting into the fire, making a weak whining moan from time to
time.  One by one, at intervals, they left the room, mounting
the stairs softly, and listening outside the door of the sick-room. 
And they heard Ben, as, with incessant humming repetition, like a
child, he sang his song,
 

    
"There's
a mother there at twilight
     
Who's glad to know--"
 

Eliza sat stolidly, hands
folded, before the parlor fire.  Her dead white face had a
curious carven look; the inflexible solidity of madness.

"Well," she
said at length, slowly, "you never know.  Perhaps this is
the crisis.  Perhaps--" her face hardened into granite
again. She said no more.

Coker came in and went at
once, without speaking, to the sick-room. Shortly before nine o'clock
Bessie Gant came down.

"All right,"
she said quietly.  "You had all better come up now. This is
the end."

Eliza got up and marched
out of the room with a stolid face.  Helen followed her: she was
panting with hysteria, and had begun to wring her big hands.

"Now, get hold of
yourself, Helen," said Bessie Gant warningly. "This is no
time to let yourself go."

Eliza went steadily
upstairs, making no noise.  But, as she neared the room, she
paused, as if listening for sounds within.  Faintly, in the
silence, they heard Ben's song.  And suddenly, casting away all
pretense, Eliza staggered, and fell against the wall, turning her
face into her hand, with a terrible wrenched cry:

"O God!  If I
had known!  If I had known!"

Then, weeping with bitter
unrestraint, with the contorted and ugly grimace of sorrow, mother
and daughter embraced each other.  In a moment they composed
themselves, and quietly entered the room.

Eugene and Luke pulled
Gant to his feet and supported him up the stairs.  He sprawled
upon them, moaning in long quivering exhalations.

"Mer-ci-ful God! 
That I should have to bear this in my old age. That I should--"

"Papa!  For
God's sake!" Eugene cried sharply.  "Pull yourself
together!  It's Ben who's dying--not us!  Let's try to
behave decently to him for once."