Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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up surprised. “What is it?”
“I want the angel out front.”
His face was shocked and unwilling. He gnawed the corner of his thin lip. No one knew how fond he was of the angel. Publicly he called it his White Elephant. He cursed it and said he had been a fool to order it. For six years it had stood on the porch, weathering, in all the wind and the rain. It was now brown and fly-specked. But it had come from Carrara in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one hand. The other hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised clumsily upon the ball of one phthisic foot, and its stupid white face wore a smile of soft stone idiocy.
In his rages, Gant sometimes directed vast climaxes of abuse at the angel. “Fiend out of Hell!” he roared. “You have impoverished me, you have ruined me, you have cursed my declining years, and now you will crush me to death, fearful, awful, and unnatural monster that you are.”
But sometimes when he was drunk he fell weeping on his knees before it, called it Cynthia, and entreated its love, forgiveness, and blessing for its sinful but repentant boy. There was laughter from the Square.
“What’s the matter?” said Elizabeth. “Don’t you want to sell it?”
“It will cost you a good deal, Elizabeth,” he said evasively.
“I don’t care,” she answered, positively. “I’ve got the money. How much do you want?”
He was silent, thinking for a moment of the place where the angel stood. He knew he had nothing to cover or obliterate that place — it left a barren crater in his heart.
“All right,” he said. “You can have it for what I paid for it — $420.”
She took a thick sheaf of banknotes from her purse and counted the money out for him. He pushed it back.
“No. Pay me when the job’s finished and it has been set up. You want some sort of inscription, don’t you?”
“Yes. There’s her full name, age, place of birth, and so on,” she said, giving him a scrawled envelope. “I want some poetry, too — something that suits a young girl taken off like this.”
He pulled his tattered little book of inscriptions from a pigeonhole, and thumbed its pages, reading her a quatrain here and there. To each she shook her head. Finally, he said:
“How’s this one, Elizabeth?” He read:
She went away in beauty’s flower,
Before her youth was spent;
Ere life and love had lived their hour
God called her, and she went.
Yet whispers Faith upon the wind:
No grief to her was given.
She left YOUR love and went to find
A greater one in heaven.
“Oh, that’s lovely — lovely,” she said. “I want that one.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “I think that’s the best one.”
In the musty cool smell of his little office they got up. Her gallant figure reached his shoulder. She buttoned her kid gloves over the small pink haunch of her palms and glanced about her. His battered sofa filled one wall, the line of his long body was printed in the leather. She looked up at him. His face was sad and grave. They remembered.
“It’s been a long time, Elizabeth,” he said.
They walked slowly to the front through aisled marbles. Sentinelled just beyond the wooden doors, the angel leered vacantly down. Jannadeau drew his great head turtlewise a little further into the protective hunch of his burly shoulders. They went out on to the porch.
The moon stood already, like its own phantom, in the clear washed skies of evening. A little boy with an empty paper-delivery bag swung lithely by, his freckled nostrils dilating pleasantly with hunger and the fancied smell of supper. He passed, and for a moment, as they stood at the porch edge, all life seemed frozen in a picture: the firemen and Fagg Sluder had seen Gant, whispered, and were now looking toward him; a policeman, at the high side-porch of the Police Court, leaned on the rail and stared; at the near edge of the central grass-plot below the fountain, a farmer bent for water at a bubbling jet, rose dripping, and stared; from the Tax Collector’s office, City Hall, upstairs, Yancey, huge, meaty, shirtsleeved, stared. And in that second the slow pulse of the fountain was suspended, life was held, like an arrested gesture, in photographic abeyance, and Gant felt himself alone move deathward in a world of seemings as, in 1910, a man might find himself again in a picture taken on the grounds of the Chicago Fair, when he was thirty and his mustache black, and, noting the bustled ladies and the derbied men fixed in the second’s pullulation, remember the dead instant, seek beyond the borders for what was there (he knew); or as a veteran who finds himself upon his elbow near Ulysses Grant, before the march, in pictures of the Civil War, and sees a dead man on a horse; or I should say, like some completed Don, who finds himself again before a tent in Scotland in his youth, and notes a cricket-bat long lost and long forgotten, the face of a poet who has died, and young men and the tutor as they looked that Long Vacation when they read nine hours a day for “Greats.”
Where now? Where after? Where then?
20
Gant, during these years in which Helen and Luke, the two for whom he felt the deepest affection, were absent a large part of the time, lived a splintered existence at home and at Eliza’s. He feared and hated a lonely life, but habit was deeply rooted in him, and he was unwilling to exchange the well-used comfort of his own home for the bald wintriness of Eliza’s. She did not want him. She fed him willingly enough, but his tirades and his nightly sojourns, both longer and more frequent now that his daughter was absent, annoyed her more than they ever had before.
“You have a place of your own,” she cried fretfully. “Why don’t you stay in it? I don’t want you around making trouble.”
“Send him on,” he moaned bitterly. “Send him on. Over the stones rattle his bones, he’s only a beggar that nobody owns. Ah, Lord! The old drayhorse has had its day. Its race is run. Kick him out: the old cripple can no longer provide them with victuals, and they will throw him on the junkheap, unnatural and degenerate monsters that they are.”
But he remained at Dixieland as long as there was any one to listen to him, and to the bleak little group of winter boarders he brought magic. They fed hungrily on all the dramatic gusto with which, lunging back and forth in the big rocker, before the blazing parlor fire, he told and retold the legends of his experience, taking, before their charmed eyes, an incident that had touched him romantically, and embellishing, weaving and building it up. A whole mythology grew up as, goggle-eyed, they listened:
General Fitzhugh Lee, who had reined up before the farmer boy and asked for a drink of water, now tossed off an oaken bucketful, questioned him closely concerning the best roads into Gettysburg, asked if he had seen detachments of the enemy, wrote his name down in a small book, and went off saying to his staff: “That boy will make his mark. It is impossible to defeat an enemy which breeds boys like that.”
The Indians, whom he had passed amicably as he rode out into the New Mexican desert on a burro, seeking the ancient fort, now spurred after him with fell intent and wild scalping whoops. He rode furiously through muttering redskin villages, and found the protection of two cattlemen in the nick of time. The thief who had entered his room at dead of night in New Orleans, and picked up his clothes, and whom he had fought desperately upon the floor, he now pursued naked for seventeen blocks (not five) down Canal Street.
He went several times a week to the moving-picture shows, taking Eugene, and sitting, bent forward in hunched absorption, through two full performances. They came out at ten-thirty or eleven o’clock, on cold ringing pavements, into a world frozen bare — a dead city of closed