Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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“I don’t like those skimpy trousers,” she told the salesman. “I want something that makes him look more of a man.”
When he was newly dressed, she puckered her lips, smiling, and said:
“Spruce up, boy! Throw your shoulders back! That’s one thing about your father — he carries himself straight as an arrow. If you go all humped over like that, you’ll have lung trouble before you’re twenty-five.”
“I want you to meet my mother,” he said awkwardly to Mr. Joseph Ballantyne, a smooth pink young man who had been elected president of the Freshman class.
“You’re a good smart-looking fellow,” said Eliza smiling, “I’ll make a trade with you. If you drum up some boarders for me among your friends here in this part of the State, I’ll throw in your board free. Here are some of my cards,” she added, opening her purse. “You might hand a few of them out, if you get a chance, and say a good word for Dixieland in the Land of the Sky.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Mr. Ballantyne, in a slow surprised voice, “I certainly will.”
Eugene turned a hot distressed face toward Helen. She laughed huskily, ironically, then turning to the boy, said:
“You’re welcome at any time, Mr. Ballantyne, boarders or not. We’ll always find a place for you.”
When they were alone, in answer to his stammering and confused protests, she said with an annoyed grin:
“Yes, I know. It’s pretty bad. But you’re away from it most of the time. You’re the lucky one. You see what I’ve had to listen to, the last week, don’t you? You see, don’t you?”
When he went home at the end of the year, late in May, he found that Helen and Hugh Barton had preceded him. They were living with Gant, at Woodson Street. Hugh Barton had secured the Altamont agency.
The town and the nation boiled with patriotic frenzy — violent, in a chaotic sprawl, to little purpose. The spawn of Attila must be crushed (“exterminated,” said the Reverend Mr. Smallwood) by the sons of freedom. There were loans, bond issues, speech-making, a talk of drafts, and a thin trickle of Yankees into France. Pershing arrived in Paris, and said, “Lafayette, we are here!”, but the French were still looking. Ben went up before the enlistment board and was rejected. “Lungs — weak!” they said quite definitely. “No — not tubercular. A tendency. Underweight.” He cursed. His face was a little more like a blade — thinner, grayer. The cleft of his scowl was deeper. He seemed more alone.
Eugene came up into the hills again and found them in their rich young summer glory. Dixieland was partly filled by paying guests. More arrived.
Eugene was sixteen years old. He was a College Man. He walked among the gay crowd of afternoon with a sense of elation, answering the hearty greetings with joy, warming to its thoughtless bombast.
“They tell me you’re batting a thousand down there, son,” yelled Mr. Wood, the plump young pharmacist, who had been told nothing at all. “That’s right, boy! Go get ’em.” The man passed forward cheerfully, up the prosperous glade of his store. Fans droned.
After all, Eugene thought, he had not done so badly. He had felt his first wounds. He had not been broken. He had seen love’s bitter mystery. He had lived alone.
30
There was at Dixieland a girl named Laura James. She was twenty-one years old. She looked younger. She was there when he came back.
Laura was a slender girl, of medium height, but looking taller than she was. She was very firmly moulded: she seemed fresh and washed and clean. She had thick hair, very straight and blonde, combed in a flat bracelet around her small head. Her face was white, with small freckles. Her eyes were soft, candid, cat-green. He nose was a little too large for her face: it was tilted. She was not pretty. She dressed very simply and elegantly in short plaid skirts and waists of knitted silk.
She was the only young person at Dixieland. Eugene spoke to her with timid hauteur. He thought her plain and dull. But he began to sit with her on the porch at night. Somehow, he began to love her.
He did not know that he loved her. He talked to her arrogantly and boastfully as they sat in the wooden porch-swing. But he breathed the clean perfume of her marvellous young body. He was trapped in the tender cruelty of her clear green eyes, caught in the subtle net of her smile.
Laura James lived in the eastern part of the State, far east even of Pulpit Hill, in a little town built on a salt river of the great coastal plain. Her father was a wealthy merchant — a wholesale provisioner. The girl was an only child: she spent extravagantly.
Eugene sat on the porch rail one evening and talked to her. Before, he had only nodded, or spoken stiffly a word or two. They began haltingly, aware painfully of gaps in their conversation.
“You’re from Little Richmond, aren’t you?” he said.
“Yes,” said Laura James, “do you know any one from there?”
“Yes,” said he, “I know John Bynum and a boy named Ficklen. They’re from Little Richmond, aren’t they?”
“Oh, Dave Ficklen! Do you know him? Yes. They both go to Pulpit Hill. Do you go there?”
“Yes,” he said, “that’s where I knew them.”
“Do you know the two Barlow boys? They’re Sigma Nus,” said Laura James.
He had seen them. They were great swells, football men.
“Yes, I know them,” he said, “Roy Barlow and Jack Barlow.”
“Do you know ‘Snooks’ Warren? He’s a Kappa Sig.”
“Yes. They call them Keg Squeezers,” said Eugene.
“What fraternity are you?” said Laura James.
“I’m not any,” he said painfully. “I was just a Freshman this year.”
“Some of the best friends I have never joined fraternities,” said Laura James.
They met more and more frequently, without arrangement, until by silent consent they met every night upon the porch. Sometimes they walked along the cool dark streets. Sometimes he squired her clumsily through the town, to the movies, and later, with the uneasy pugnacity of youth, past the loafing cluster at Wood’s. Often he took her to Woodson Street, where Helen secured for him the cool privacy of the veranda. She was very fond of Laura James.
“She’s a nice girl. A lovely girl. I like her. She’s not going to take any beauty prizes, is she?” She laughed with a trace of good-natured ridicule.
He was displeased.
“She looks all right,” he said. “She’s not as ugly as you make out.”
But she WAS ugly — with a clean lovely ugliness. Her face was freckled lightly, over her nose and mouth: her features were eager, unconscious, turned upward in irregular pertness. But she was exquisitely made and exquisitely kept: she had the firm young line of Spring, budding, slender, virginal. She was like something swift, with wings, which hovers in a wood — among the feathery trees suspected, but uncaught, unseen.
He tried to live before her in armor. He showed off before her. Perhaps, he thought, if he were splendid enough, she would not see the ugly disorder and meanness of the world he dwelt in.
Across the street, on the wide lawn of the Brunswick — the big brick gabled house that Eliza once had coveted — Mr. Pratt, who crawled in that mean world in which only a boarding-house husband can exist, was watering wide green spaces of lawn with a hose. The flashing water motes gleamed in the red glare of sunset. The red light fell across the shaven pinched face. It glittered