The Mortgaged Heart (19 page)

"I seen him down to your Daddy's store many a time. He a puny little white man, ain't he? You know this here is a funny thing—nearly bout all little puny peoples is biggety. The littler they is the larger they thinks they is. Just watch the way they rares up they heads when they walk. Great big mens—like Sylvester and like you ghy be—they ain't that way at all. When they be about six foots tall they liable to act soft and shamed like chilluns. Once I knowed a little biggety dwarf man name Hunch. I wish you could have seed the way on a Sunday he would commence to walk around. He carried a great big umbrella and he would priss down them streets by hisself like he was God—"

Then there was a morning when he came into the kitchen after playing a new Beethoven record he had gotten. The music had been in his head half the night and he had waked up early so as to play it awhile before school time. When he came into the kitchen Vitalis was changing her shoes. "Honey," she said. "You ought to been here a minute ago. I come in the kitchen and you was playing that there gramaphone in your room. Sound like band music folks march by. Then I done looked down at the floor and you know what I seen? A whole fambly of little mices the size of your finger, setting up on their hind legs and dancing. That the truth. Them rats really does like such music."

Maybe it was for words like this that he was always going in to Vitalis and saying, "I'm so hungry." It wasn't only for warmed up food and coffee she would give him.

Sometimes they would talk about Sara. All the eighteen months that she was away she hardly ever wrote. And then the letter would just be about Aunt Esther and her music lessons and what they were going to have for dinner that night. He knew she was changed. And he had a feeling she was in trouble or something important was happening to her. But it got so that Sara was very vague to him—and it was terrible but when he tried to remember her face he couldn't see it clearly. She got to be almost like their dead mother to him.

So it was Harry Minowitz and Vitalis who were nearest to him during that time. Vitalis and Harry. When he tried to think of them together he would have to laugh. It was like putting red with lavender—or a Bach fugue with a sad nigger whistling. Everything he knew seemed that way. Nothing fitted.

Sara came back but that didn't change things much. They weren't close like they had been before. Their Dad had thought it was time for her to come home but she didn't seem glad to be back with her own family. And all the next year she would often get very quiet and just stare ahead like she was homesick. They didn't go with the same crowd of boys and girls anymore and often they didn't even wait for each other to walk to school in the mornings. Sara had learned a lot of music in Detroit and her piano playing was different and very careful. He could tell that she had loved their Aunt Esther a lot but for some reason she didn't talk about her much.

The trouble was that he saw Sara in a hazy way at that time. That was the way everything looked to him then. Crazy and upsidedown. And he was getting to be a man and he did not know what was going to come. And always he was hungry and always he felt that something was just about to happen. And that happening he felt would be terrible and would destroy him. But he would not mold that prescience into thought. Even the time—the two long years after Sara returned—seemed to have passed through his body and not his mind. It was just long months of either floundering or quiet vacantness. And when he thought back over it there was little that he could realize.

He was getting to be a man and he was seventeen years old.

It was then that the thing happened that he had expected without knowing in his mind. This thing he had never imagined and afterward it seemed to have leapt up out of nowhere—to his mind it seemed that way but there was another part of him where this was not so.

The time was late summer and in a few weeks he was planning to leave for Atlanta to enter Tech. He did not want to go to Tech—but it was cheap because he could take the co-op course and his Dad wanted him to graduate from there and be an engineer. There didn't seem to be anything else that he could do and in a way he was eager to leave home so that he could live in a new place by himself. That late summer afternoon he was walking in the woods behind Sherman's Quarter, thinking of this and of a hundred vague things. Remembering all the other times when he had walked through those woods made him restless and he felt lost and alone.

It was almost sundown when he left the woods and started through the street where Vitalis lived. Although it was Sunday afternoon the houses were very quiet and everyone seemed to be gone. The air was sultry and there was the smell of sun-baked pine straw. On the edges of the little street were trampled weeds and a few early goldenrods. As he was walking past the houses, his ankles grey with the lazy swirls of dust that his footsteps made and his eyes tired from the sun, he suddenly heard Vitalis speak to him.

"What you doing round this way, Andrew?"

She was sitting on her front steps and seemed to be alone in the empty Quarter. "Nothing," he said. "Just wandering around."

"They having a big funeral down at our church. It the preacher dead this time. Everybody done gone but me. I just now got away from your house. Even Sylvester done gone."

He didn't know what to say but just the sight of her made him mumble, "Gosh I'm so hungry. All this walking around. And thirsty—"

"I'll get you some."

She got up slowly and he noticed for the first time that she was barefooted and her green shoes and stockings were on the porch. She stooped to put them on. "I done taken these off cause ever body done gone except a sick lady in one of them end houses. These here green shoes has always scrunched my toes—and sometimes the ground sure do feel good to my feets."

On the little stoop behind the house he drank the cool water and dashed some of it into his burning face. Again he felt as though he were hearing that strange sound he had heard late at night along this street. When he went back through the house where Vitalis had been waiting for him he felt his body tremble. He did not know why they both paused a moment in the dim little room. It was very quiet and a clock ticked slowly. There was a kewpie doll with a gauze sash on the mantlepiece and the air was close and musty.

"What ails you, Andrew? Why you shaking so? What is it ails you, Honey?"

It wasn't him and it wasn't her. It was the thing in both of them. It was the strange sound he had heard there late at night. It was the dim room and the quietness. And all the afternoons he had spent with her in the kitchen. And all his hunger and the times when he had been alone. After it happened that was what he thought.

Later she went out of the house with him and they stood by a pine
tree on the edge of the woods. "Andrew, quit your looking at me like that," she kept saying. "Everthing is all right. Don't you worry none about that."

It was like he was staring at her from the bottom of a well and that was all he could think.

"That ain't nothing real wrong. It ain't the first time with me and you a grown man. Quit your looking at me like that, Andrew."

This had never been in his mind. But it had been there waiting and had crept up and smothered his other thoughts—And this was not the only thing that would do him that way. Always. Always.

"Us didn't mean nothing. Sylvester ain't ghy ever know—or your Daddy. Us haven't arranged this. Us haven't done no real sin."

He had imagined how it would be when he was twenty. And she had a pale face like a flower and that was all he knew of her.

"Peoples can't plan on everthing."

He left her. Harry's chessmen, those precise and shrunken little dolls, neat problems in geometry, music that spun itself out immense and symmetrical. He was lost lost and it seemed to him that the end had surely come. He wanted to put his hands on all that had happened to him in his life, to grasp it to him and shape it whole. He was lost lost. He was alone and naked. And along with the chessmen and the music he suddenly remembered an aerial map of New York that he had seen—with the sharp skyscrapers and the blocks neatly plotted. He wanted to go far away and Atlanta was too near his home. He remembered the map of New York, frozen and delicate it was and he knew that was where he was going. That was all that he knew.

In the restaurant of the town where he had gotten off of the bus Andrew Leander finished the last of his beers. The place was closing and there would not be a bus to Georgia until morning. He could not get Vitalis and Sara and Harry and his Dad from his mind. And there were others beside them. He realized suddenly that he had hardly remembered Chandler. Chandler West who lived across the street—whom he had been with so often and who was at the same time so obscure. And the girl who wore red fingernail polish at high school. And the little rat of a boy named Peeper whom he had once talked with at South Highlands.

He got up from the table and picked up his bags. He was the last one in the restaurant and the waiter was ready to lock up. For a moment he hung around near the door that opened into the dark quiet street.

When he had first sat down at the table everything had seemed for the first time so clear. And now he was more lost than ever. But somehow it didn't matter. He felt strong. In that dark sleepy place he was a stranger—but after three years he was going home. Not just to Georgia but to a nearer home than that. He was drunk and there was power in him to shape things. He thought of all of them at home whom he had loved. And it would not be himself but through all of them that he would find this pattern. He felt drunk and sick for home. He wanted to go out and lift up his voice and search in the night for all that he wanted. He was drunk drunk. He was Andrew Leander.

"Say," he said to the boy who was waiting to lock the door. "Can you give me the name of some place around here where I can get a room for the night?"

The boy gave him some directions and in the surface of his mind he noted them. The street was dark and silent and he stood a moment longer in the open doorway. "Say," he said again. "I got off the bus half drunk. Will you tell me the name of this place?"

General Remarks

T
HE BROAD PRINCIPAL THEME
of this book is indicated in the first dozen pages. This is the theme of man's revolt against his own inner isolation and his urge to express himself as fully as is possible. Surrounding this general idea there are several counter themes and some of these may be stated briefly as follows: (i) There is a deep need in man to express himself by creating some unifying principle or God. A personal God created by a man is a reflection of himself and in substance this God is most often inferior to his creator. (2 ) In a disorganized society these individual Gods or principles are likely to be chimerical and fantastic. (3) Each man must express himself in his own way—but this is often denied to him by a wasteful, short-sighted society. (4) Human beings are innately cooperative, but an unnatural social tradition makes them behave in ways that are not in accord with their deepest nature. (5) Some men are heroes by nature in that they will give all that is in them without regard to the effort or to the personal returns.

Of course these themes are never stated nakedly in the book. Their overtones are felt through the characters and situations. Much will depend upon the insight of the reader and the care with which the book is read. In some parts the underlying ideas will be concealed far down below the surface of a scene and at other times these ideas will be shown with a certain emphasis. In the last few pages the various motifs which have been recurring from time to time throughout the book are drawn sharply together and the work ends with a sense of cohesive finality.

The general outline of this work can be expressed very simply. It is the story of five isolated, lonely people in their search for expression and spiritual integration with something greater than themselves. One of these five persons is a deaf mute, John Singer—and it is around him that the whole book pivots. Because of their loneliness these other four people see in the mute a certain mystic superiority and he becomes in a sense their ideal. Because of Singer's infirmity his outward character is vague and unlimited. His friends are able to impute to him all the qualities which they would wish for him to have. Each one of these four people creates his understanding of the mute from his own desires. Singer can read lips and understand what is said to him. In his eternal silence there is something compelling. Each one of these persons makes the mute the repository for his most personal feelings and ideas.

This situation between the four people and the mute has an almost exact parallel in the relation between Singer and his deaf-mute friend, Antonapoulos Singer is the only person who could attribute to Antonapoulos dignity and a certain wisdom. Singer's love for Antonapoulos threads through the whole book from the first page until the very end. No part of Singer is left untouched by this love and when they are separated his life is meaningless and he is only marking time until he can be with his friend again. Yet the four people who count themselves as Singet's friends know nothing about Antonapoulos at all until the book is nearly ended. The irony of this situation grows slowly and steadily more apparent as the story progresses.

When Antonapoulos dies finally of Bright's disease Singer, overwhelmed by loneliness and despondency, turns on the gas and kills himself. Only then do these other four characters begin to understand the real Singer at all.

About this central idea there is much of the quality and tone of a legend. All the parts dealing directly with Singer are written in the simple style of a parable.

Before the reasons why this situation came about can be fully understood it is necessary to know each of the principal characters in some detail. But the characters cannot be described adequately without the events which happen to them being involved. Nearly all of the happenings in the book spring directly from the characters. During the space of this book each person is shown in his strongest and most typical actions.