Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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was conspicuous. He had a good mind — bright, attentive, studious, unmarked by originality or inventiveness. He had a time for everything: he apportioned a certain time for the preparation of each lesson, and went over it three times, mumbling rapidly to himself. He sent his laundry out every Monday. When in merry company he laughed heartily and enjoyed himself, but he always kept track of the time. Presently, he would look at his watch, saying: “Well, this is all very nice, but it’s getting no work done,” and he would go.
Every one said he had a bright future. He remonstrated with Eugene, with good-natured seriousness, about his habits. He ought not to throw his clothes around. He ought not to let his shirts and drawers accumulate in a dirty pile. He ought to have a regular time for doing each lesson; he ought to live by regular hours.
They lived in a private dwelling on the edge of the campus, in a large bright room decorated with a great number of college pennants, all of which belonged to Bob Sterling.
Bob Sterling had heart-disease. He stood on the landing, gasping, when he had climbed the stairs. Eugene opened the door for him. Bob Sterling’s pleasant face was dead white, spotted by pale freckles. His lips chattered and turned blue.
“What is it, Bob? How do you feel?” said Eugene.
“Come here,” said Bob Sterling with a grin. “Put your head down here.” He took Eugene’s head and placed it against his heart. The great pump beat slowly and irregularly, with a hissing respiration.
“Good God!” cried Eugene.
“Do you hear it?” said Bob Sterling, beginning to laugh. Then he went into the room, chafing his dry hands briskly.
But he fell sick and could not attend classes. He was taken to the College Infirmary, where he lay for several weeks, apparently not very ill, but with lips constantly blue, a slow pulse, and a sub-normal temperature. Nothing could be done about it.
His mother came and took him home. Eugene wrote him regularly twice a week, getting in return short but cheerful messages. Then one day he died.
Two weeks later the widow returned to gather together the boy’s belongings. Silently she collected the clothing that no one would ever wear. She was a stout woman in her forties. Eugene took all the pennants from the wall and folded them. She packed them in a valise and turned to go.
“Here’s another,” said Eugene.
She burst suddenly into tears and seized his hand.
“He was so brave,” she said, “so brave. Those last days — I had not meant to — Your letters made him so happy.”
She’s alone now, Eugene thought.
I cannot stay here, he thought, where he has been. We were here together. Always I should see him on the landing, with the hissing valve and the blue lips, or hear him mumbling his lessons. Then, at night, the other cot would be empty. I think I shall room alone hereafter.
But he roomed the remainder of the term in one of the dormitories. He had two room-mates — one, an Altamont young man who answered to the name of L. K. Duncan (the “L” stood for Lawrence, but every one called him “Elk”) and the other, the son of an Episcopal minister, Harold Gay. Both were several years older than Eugene: Elk Duncan was twenty-four, and Harold Gay, twenty-two. But it is doubtful whether a more precious congress of freaks had ever before gathered in two small rooms, one of which they used as a “study.”
Elk Duncan was the son of an Altamont attorney, a small Democratic politician, mighty in county affairs. Elk Duncan was tall — an inch or two over six feet — and incredibly thin, or rather narrow. He was already a little bald, he had a high prominent forehead, and large pale bulging eyes: from that point his long pale face sloped backward to his chin. His shoulders were a trifle bowed and very narrow; the rest of his body had the symmetry of a lead pencil. He always dressed very foppishly, in tight suits of blue flannel, with high stiff collars, fat silken cravats, and colored silk handkerchiefs. He was a student in the Law School, but he spent a large part of his time, industriously, in avoiding study.
The younger students — particularly the Freshmen — gathered around him after meals with mouths slightly ajar, feeding upon his words like manna, and hungrily demanding more, the wilder his fable became. His posture toward life was very much that of the barker of a carnival sideshow: loquacious, patronizing, and cynical.
The other room-mate, Harold Gay, was a good soul, no older than a child. He wore spectacles, which gave the only glister to the dull grayness of his face; he was plain and ugly without any distinction: he had been puzzled so long by at least four-fifths of the phenomena of existence that he no longer made any effort to comprehend them. Instead, he concealed his shyness and bewilderment under a braying laugh that echoed at all the wrong places, and a silly grin full of an absurd and devilish knowingness. His association with Elk Duncan was one of the proud summits of his life: he weltered in the purple calcium which bathed that worthy, he smoked cigarettes with a debauched leer, and cursed loudly and uneasily with the accent of a depraved clergyman.
“Harold! Harold!” said Elk Duncan reprovingly. “Damn, son! You’re getting hard! If you go on like this, you’ll begin to chew gum, and fritter away your Sunday-school money at the movies. Think of the rest of us, please. ‘Gene here’s only a young boy, as pure as a barnyard privy, and, as for me, I’ve always moved in the best circles, and associated with only the highest class of bartenders and ladylike streetwalkers. What would your father say if he could hear you? Don’t you know he’d be shocked? He’d cut off your cigarette money, son.”
“I don’t give a damn what he’d do, Elk, nor you either!” said Harold toughly, grinning. “So, what the hell!” he roared as loudly as he could. There was an answering howl from the windows of the whole dormitory — cries of “Go to hell!” “Cut it out!” and ironical cheers, at which he was pleased.
The scattered family drew together again at Christmas. A sense of impending dissolution, of loss and death, brought them back. The surgeon at Baltimore had given no hope. He had, rather, confirmed Gant’s death-warrant.
“Then how long can he live?” asked Helen.
He shrugged his shoulders. “My dear girl!” he said. “I have no idea. The man’s a miracle. Do you know that he’s Exhibit A here? Every surgeon in the place has had a look. How long can he last? I’ll swear to nothing — I no longer have any idea. When your father left here, the first time, after his operation, I never expected to see him again. I doubted if he would last the winter through. But he’s back again. He may be back many times.”
“Can you help him at all? Do you think the radium does any good?”
“I can give him relief for a time. I can even check the growth of the disease for a time. Beyond that, I can do nothing. But his vitality is enormous. He is a creaking gate which hangs by one hinge — but which hangs, nevertheless.”
Thus, she had brought him home, the shadow of his death suspended over them like a Damocles sword. Fear prowled softly through their brains on leopard feet. The girl lived in a condition of repressed hysteria: it had its outburst daily at Eliza’s or in her own home. Hugh Barton had purchased a house to which he had taken her.
“You’ll get no peace,” he said, “as long as you’re near them. That’s what’s wrong with you now.”
She had frequent periods of sickness. She went constantly to the doctors for treatment and advice. Sometimes she went to the hospital for several days. Her illness manifested itself in various ways — sometimes in a terrible mastoid pain, sometimes in nervous exhaustion, sometimes in an hysterical collapse in which she laughed and wept by turns, and which was governed partly by Gant’s illness and a morbid despair over her failure to bear a child. She drank stealthily at all times — she drank in nibbling draughts for stimulants, never enough for drunkenness. She drank vile liquids — seeking only the effect of alcohol and getting at it in strange ways through a dozen abominations called “tonics” and “extracts.” Almost deliberately she ruined her taste for the better sort of potable liquors, concealing from