Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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he think he’s hell, though? Eugene thought. He could not fashion words, but he could make sounds, ironically, in the rhythm of his brother’s moralizing. “Tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh! Tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh! Tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh!” he said, with accurate mimicry. Helen, loosening his collar, bent over him laughing. Ben grinned swiftly under a cleft scowl.
Have you no this? Have you no that? Have you no this? Have you no that? — he was cradled in their rhythm. No, ma’am. We’ve run out of honor today, but we have a nice fresh lot of self-respect.
“Ah, be quiet,” Ben muttered. “No one’s dead, you know.”
“Go heat some water,” said Gant professionally, “he’s got to get it off his stomach.” He no longer seemed old. His life in a marvellous instant came from its wasting shadow; it took on a hale sinew of health and action.
“Save the fireworks,” said Helen to Luke, as she left the room. “Close the door. For heaven’s sake, try to keep it from mama, if you can.”
This is a great moral issue, thought Eugene. He began to feel sick.
Helen returned in a very few minutes with a kettle of hot water, a glass, and a box of soda. Gant fed him the solution mercilessly until he began to vomit. At the summit of his convulsion Eliza appeared. He lifted his sick head dumbly from the bowl, and saw her white face at the door, and her weak brown eyes, that could take on so much sharpness and sparkle when her suspicion was awakened.
“Hah? Huh? What is it?” said Eliza.
But she knew, of course, instantly, what it was.
“What say?” she asked sharply. No one had said anything. He grinned feebly at her, tickled, above his nausea and grief, at the palpable assumption of blind innocence which always heralded her discoveries. Seeing her thus, they all laughed.
“Oh, my Lord!” said Helen. “Here she is. We were hoping you wouldn’t get here till it was over. Come and look at your Baby,” she said, with a good-humored snicker, keeping his head comfortably supported on the palm of her hand.
“How do you feel now, son?” Gant asked kindly.
“Better,” he mumbled, discovering, with some elation, that his vocal paralysis was not permanent.
“Well, you see!” Helen began, kindly enough, but with a brooding satisfaction. “It only goes to show we’re all alike. We all like it. It’s in our blood.”
“That awful curse!” Eliza said. “I had hoped that I might have one son who might escape it. It seems,” she said, bursting into tears, “as if a Judgment were on us. The sins of the fathers —”
“Oh! for heaven’s sake!” Helen cried angrily. “Stop it! It’s not going to kill him: he’ll learn a lesson from it.”
Gant gnawed his thin lip, and wetted his great thumb in the old manner.
“You might know,” he said, “that I’d get the blame for it. Yes — if one of them broke a leg it would be the same.”
“There’s one thing sure!” said Eliza. “None of them ever got it from my side of the house. Say what you will, his grandfather, Major Pentland, never in his life allowed a drop in his house.”
“Major Pentland be damned!” said Gant. “If you’d depended on him for anything you’d have gone hungry.”
Certainly, thought Eugene, you’d have gone thirsty.
“Forget it!” said Helen. “It’s Christmas. Let’s try to have a little peace and quiet once a year.”
When they had left him, the boy tried to picture them lulled in the dulcet tranquillity they so often invoked. Its effects, he thought, would be more disastrous than any amount of warfare.
In the darkness, everything around and within him swam hideously. But presently he slid down into a pit of distressed sleep.
Every one had agreed on a studious forgiveness. They stepped with obtrusive care around his fault, filled pleasantly with Christmas and mercy. Ben scowled at him quite naturally, Helen grinned and prodded him, Eliza and Luke surrendered themselves to sweetness, sorrow, and silence. Their forgiveness made a loud noise in his ears.
During the morning his father asked him to come for a walk. Gant was embarrassed and hang-dog; a duty of gentle admonishment devolved upon him — he had been counselled to it by Helen and Eliza. Now, no man in his time could carry on in the big, Bow-wow style better than Gant, but none was less fitted to scatter the blossoms of sweetness and light. His wrath was sudden, his invective sprang from the moment, but he had for this occasion no thunder-bolts in his quiver, and no relish for the business before him. He had a feeling of personal guilt; he felt like a magistrate fining for intoxication a culprit with whom he has been on a spree the night before. Besides — what if the Bacchic strain in him had been passed on to his son?
They walked on in silence across the Square, by the rimmed fountain. Gant cleared his throat nervously several times.
“Son,” said he presently, “I hope you’ll take last night as a warning. It would be a terrible thing if you let whiskey get the best of you. I’m not going to speak harshly to you about it: I hope you’ll learn a lesson by it. You had better be dead than become a drunkard.”
There! He was glad it was over.
“I will!” Eugene said. He was filled with gratitude and relief. How good every one was. He wanted to make passionate avowals, great promises. He tried to speak. But he couldn’t. There was too much to be said.
But they had their Christmas, beginning thus with parental advice and continuing through all the acts of contrition, love, and decorum. They put on, over their savage lives, the raiment of society, going diligently through the forms and conventions, and thinking, “now, we are like all other families”; but they were timid and shy and stiff, like rustics dressed in evening-clothes.
But they could not keep silence. They were not ungenerous or mean: they were simply not bred to any restraint. Helen veered in the wind of hysteria, the strong uncertain tides of her temperament. At times when, before her own fire, her vitality sank, and she heard the long howl of the wind outside, she almost hated Eugene.
“It’s ridiculous!” she said to Luke. “His behaving like this. He’s only a kid — he’s had everything, we’ve had nothing! You see what it’s come to, don’t you?”
“His college education has ruined him,” said the sailor, not unhappy that his candle might burn more brightly in a naughty world.
“Why don’t you speak to her?” she said irritably. “She may listen to you — she won’t to me! Tell her so! You’ve seen how she’s rubbed it in to poor old papa, haven’t you? Do you think that old man — sick as he is — is to blame? ‘Gene’s not a Gant, anyway. He takes after her side of the house. He’s queer — like all of them! WE’RE Gants!” she said with a bitter emphasis.
“There was always some excuse for papa,” said the sailor. “He’s had a lot to put up with.” All his convictions in family affairs had been previously signed with her approval.
“I wish you’d tell her that. With all his moping into books, he’s no better than we are. If he thinks he’s going to lord it over me, he’s mistaken.”
“I’d like to see him try it when I’m around,” said Luke grimly.
The boy was doing a multiple penance — he had committed his first great wrong in being at once so remote from them and so near to them. His present trouble was aggravated by the cross-complication of Eliza’s thrusts at his father, and the latent but constantly awakening antagonism of mother and daughter. In addition, he bore directly Eliza’s nagging and carping attack. All this he was prepared for — it was the weather of his mother’s nature (she was as fond of him as of any of them, he thought), and the hostility of Helen and Luke was something implacable, unconscious, fundamental, that grew out of the structure of their lives. He was of them, he was recognizably