Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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had gone away to the training-school at Newport. Ben went to Baltimore with Helen and Gant, who, before entering the hospital again for radium treatment, had gone on a violent and unruly spree which had compelled their rapid transference from one hotel to another and had finally brought Gant moaning to his bed, hurling against God the anathemas that should have been saved for huge riotings in raw oysters washed down chaotically with beer and whisky. They all drank a great deal: Gant’s excesses, however, reduced the girl to a state of angry frenzy, and Ben to one of scowling and cursing disgust.
“You damned old man!” cried Helen, seizing and shaking his passive shoulders as he lay reeking and sodden on an untidy bed. “I could wear you out! You’re not sick; I’ve wasted my life nursing you, and you’re not as sick as I am! You’ll be here long after I’m gone, you selfish old man! It makes me furious!”
“Why, baby!” he roared, with a vast gesture of his arms, “God bless you, I couldn’t do without you.”
“Don’t ‘baby’ me!” she cried.
But she held his hand next day as they rode out to the hospital, held it as, quaking, he turned for an instant and looked sadly at the city stretched behind and below him.
“I was a boy here,” he muttered.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “we’re going to make you well again. Why! You’ll be a boy again!”
Hand in hand they entered the lobby where, flanked with death and terror and the busy matter-of-factness of the nurses and the hundred flitting shapes of the quiet men with the gray faces and gimlet eyes who walk so surely in among the broken lives — with arms proposed in an attitude of enormous mercy — many times bigger than Gant’s largest angel — is an image of gentle Jesus.
Eugene went to see the Leonards several times. Margaret looked thin and ill, but the great light in her seemed on this account to burn more brightly. Never before had he been so aware of her enormous tranquil patience, the great health of her spirit. All of his sin, all of his pain, all the vexed weariness of his soul were washed away in that deep radiance: the tumult and evil of life dropped from him its foul and ragged cloak. He seemed to be clothed anew in garments of seamless light.
But he could confess little that lay on his heart: he talked freely of his work at the university, he talked of little else. His heart was packed with its burden for confessional, but he knew he could not speak, that she would not understand. She was too wise for anything but faith. Once, desperately, he tried to tell her of Laura: he blurted out a confession awkwardly in a few words. Before he had finished she began to laugh.
“Mr. Leonard!” she called. “Imagine this rascal with a girl! Pshaw, boy! You don’t know what love is. Get along with you. There’ll be time enough to think of that ten years from now.” She laughed tenderly to herself, with absent misty gaze.
“Old ‘Gene with a girl! Pity the poor girl! Ah, Lord, Boy! That’s a long way off for you. Thank your stars!”
He bent his head sharply, and closed his eyes. O My lovely Saint! he thought. How close you have been to me, if any one. How I have cut my brain open for you to see, and would my heart, if I had dared, and how alone I am, and always have been.
He walked through the streets at night with Irene Mallard; the town was thinned and saddened by departures. A few people hurried past, as if driven along by the brief pouncing gusts of wind. He was held in the lure of her subtle weariness: she gave him comfort and he never touched her. But he unpacked the burden of his heart, trembling and passionate. She sat beside him and stroked his hand. It seemed to him that he never knew her until he remembered her years later.
The house was almost empty. At night Eliza packed his trunk carefully, counting the ironed shirts and mended socks with satisfaction.
“Now, you have plenty of good warm clothes, son. Try to take care of them.” She put Gant’s check in his inner pocket and fastened it with a safety-pin.
“Keep a sharp eye on your money, boy. You never know who you’ll run up with on a train.”
He dawdled nervously toward the door, wishing to melt away, not end in leave-taking.
“It does seem you might spend one night at home with your mother,” she said querulously. Her eyes grew misty at once, her lips began to work tremulously in a bitter self-pitying smile. “I tell you what! It looks mighty funny, doesn’t it? You can’t stay with me five minutes any more without wanting to be up and off with the first woman that comes along. It’s all right! It’s all right. I’m not complaining. It seems as if all I was fit for is to cook and sew and get you ready to go off.” She burst volubly into tears. “It seems that that’s the only use you have for me. I’ve hardly laid eyes on you all summer.”
“No,” he said bitterly, “you’ve been too busy looking after the boarders. Don’t think, mama, that you can work on my feelings here at the last minute,” he cried, already deeply worked-on. “It’s easy to cry. But I was here all the time if you had had time for me. Oh, for God’s sake! Let’s make an end to this! Aren’t things bad enough without it? Why must you act this way whenever I go off? Do you want to make me as miserable as you can?”
“Well, I tell you,” said Eliza hopefully, becoming dry-eyed at once, “if I make a couple of deals and everything goes well, you may find me waiting for you in a big fine house when you come back next Spring. I’ve got the lot picked out. I was thinking about it the other day,” she went on, giving him a bright and knowing nod.
“Ah-h!” he made a strangling noise in his throat and tore at his collar. “In God’s name! Please!” There was a silence.
“Well,” said Eliza gravely, plucking at her chin, “I want you to be a good boy and study hard, son. Take care of your money — I want you to have plenty of good food and warm clothes — but you mustn’t be extravagant, boy. This sickness of your papa’s has cost a lot of money. Everything is going out and nothing’s coming in. Nobody knows where the next dollar’s coming from. So you’ve got to watch out.”
Again silence fell. She had said her say; she had come as close as she could, but suddenly she felt speechless, shut out, barred from the bitter and lonely secrecy of his life.
“I hate to see you go, son,” she said quietly, with a deep and indefinable sadness.
He cast his arms up suddenly in a tortured incomplete gesture.
“What does it matter! Oh God, what does it matter!”
Eliza’s eyes filled with tears of real pain. She grasped his hand and held it.
“Try to be happy, son,” she wept, “try to be a little more happy. Poor child! Poor child! Nobody ever knew you. Before you were born,” she shook her head slowly, speaking in a voice that was drowned and husky with her tears. Then, huskily, clearing her throat, she repeated, “Before you were born —”
32
When he returned to the university for his second year, he found the place adjusted soberly to war. It seemed quieter, sadder — the number of students was smaller and they were younger. The older ones had gone to war. The others were in a state of wild, but subdued, restlessness. They were careless of colleges, careers, successes — the war had thrilled them with its triumphing Now. Of what use To-morrow! Of what use all labor for To-morrow! The big guns had blown all spun schemes to fragments: they hailed the end of all planned work with a fierce, a secret joy. The business of education went on half-heartedly, with an abstracted look: in the classroom, their eyes were vague upon the book, but their ears cocked attentively for alarums and excursions without.
Eugene began the year earnestly as room-mate of a young man who had been the best student in the Altamont High School. His name was Bob Sterling. Bob Sterling was nineteen years old, the son