Look Homeward, Angel Read Online

"She's ten years older than he if she's a day."

"I think he's done pretty well, if you ask me," said Helen, annoyed.  "Good heavens, mama!  You talk as if he's some sort of prize.  Every one in town knows what Steve is."  She laughed ironically and angrily.  "No, indeed!  He got the best of the bargain.  Margaret's a decent girl."

"Well," said Eliza hopefully, "maybe he's going to brace up now and make a new start.  He's promised that he'd try."

"Well, I should hope so," said Helen scathingly.  "I should hope so.  It's about time."

Her dislike for him was innate.  She had placed him among the tribe of the Pentlands.  But he was really more like Gant than any one else.  He was like Gant in all his weakness, with none of his cleanliness, his lean fibre, his remorse.  In her heart she knew this and it increased her dislike for him.  She shared in the fierce antagonism Gant felt toward his son.  But her feeling was broken, as was all her feeling, by moments of friendliness, charity, tolerance.

"What are you going to do, Steve?" she asked.  "You've got a family now, you know."

"Little Stevie doesn't have to worry any longer," he said, smiling easily.  "He lets the others do the worrying."  He lifted his yellow fingers to his mouth, drawing deeply at a cigarette.

"Good heavens, Steve," she burst out angrily.  "Pull yourself together and try to be a man for once.  Margaret's a woman.  You surely don't expect her to keep you up, do you?"

"What business is that of yours, for Christ's sake?" he said in a high ugly voice.  "Nobody's asked your advice, have they?  All of you are against me.  None of you had a good word for me when I was down and out, and now it gets your goat to see me make good."  He had believed for years that he was persecuted--his failure at home he attributed to the malice, envy, and disloyalty of his family, his failure abroad to the malice and envy of an opposing force that he called "the world."

"No," he said, taking another long puff at the moist cigarette, "don't worry about Stevie.  He doesn't need anything from any of you, and you don't hear him asking for anything.  You see that, don't you?" he said, pulling a roll of banknotes from his pocket and peeling off a few twenties.  "Well, there's lots more where that came from.  And I'll tell you something else: Little Stevie will be right up there among the Big Boys soon.  He's got a couple of deals coming off that'll show the pikers in this town where to get off.  You get that, don't you?" he said.

Ben, who had been sitting on the piano stool all this time, scowling savagely at the keys, and humming a little recurrent tune to himself while he picked it out with one finger, turned now to Helen, with a sharp flicker of his mouth, and jerked his head sideways.

"I hear Mr. Vanderbilt's getting jealous," he said.

Helen laughed ironically, huskily.

"You think you're a pretty wise guy, don't you?" said Steve heavily.  "But I don't notice it's getting you anywhere."

Ben turned his scowling eyes upon him, and sniffed sharply, unconsciously.

"Now, I hope you're not going to forget your old friends, Mr. Rockefeller," he said in his subdued, caressing ominous voice. "I'd like to be vice-president if the job's still open."  He turned back to the keyboard--and searched with a hooked finger.

"All right, all right," said Steve.  "Go ahead and laugh, both of you, if you think it's funny.  But you notice that Little Stevie isn't a fifteen-dollar clerk in a newspaper office, don't you?  And he doesn't have to sing in moving-picture shows, either," he added.

Helen's big-boned face reddened angrily.  She had begun to sing in public with the saddlemaker's daughter.

"You'd better not talk, Steve, until you get a job and quit bumming around," she said.  "You're a fine one to talk, hanging around pool-rooms and drug-stores all day on your wife's money.  Why, it's absurd!" she said furiously.

"Oh for God's sake!" Ben cried irritably, wheeling around.  "What do you want to listen to him for?  Can't you see he's crazy?"

As the summer lengthened, Steve began to drink heavily again.  His decayed teeth, neglected for years, began to ache simultaneously: he was wild with pain and cheap whisky.  He felt that Eliza and Margaret were in some way responsible for his woe--he sought them out day after day when they were alone, and screamed at them.  He called them foul names and said they had poisoned his system.

In the early hours of morning, at two or three o'clock, he would waken, and walk through the house weeping and entreating release. Eliza would send him to Spaugh at the hotel or to McGuire, at his residence, in Eugene's charge.  The doctors, surly and half-awake, peeled back his shirtsleeve and drove a needle with morphine deep in his upper arm.  After that, he found relief and sleep again.

One night, at the supper hour, he returned to Dixieland, holding his tortured jaws between his hands.  He found Eliza bending over the spitting grease of the red-hot stove.  He cursed her for bearing him, he cursed her for allowing him to have teeth, he cursed her for lack of sympathy, motherly love, human kindliness.

Her white face worked silently above the heat.

"Get out of here," she said.  "You don't know what you're talking about.  It's that accursed licker that makes you so mean."  She began to weep, brushing at her broad red nose with her hand.

"I never thought I'd live to hear such talk from a son of mine," she said.  She held out her forefinger with the old powerful gesture.

"Now, I want to tell you," she said, "I'm not going to put up with you any longer.  If you don't get out of here at once I'm going to call 38 and let them take you."  This was the police station.  It awoke unpleasant memories.  He had spent the day in jail on two similar occasions.  He became more violent than before, screamed a vile name at her, and made a motion to strike her.  At this moment, Luke entered; he was on his way to Gant's.

The antagonism between the boy and his older brother was deep and deadly.  It had lasted for years.  Now, trembling with anger, Luke came to his mother's defense.

"You m-m-m-miserable d-d-degenerate," he stuttered, unconsciously falling into the swing of the Gantian rhetoric.  "You ought to b-b-b-be horsewhipped."

He was a well grown and muscular young fellow of nineteen years, but too sensitive to all the taboos of brotherhood to be prepared for the attack Steve made on him.  Steve drove at him viciously, smashing drunkenly at his face with both hands.  He was driven gasping and blinded across the kitchen.

Wrong forever on the throne.

Somewhere, through fear and fury, Eugene heard Ben's voice humming unconcernedly, and the slow picked tune on the piano.

"Ben!" he screamed, dancing about and grasping a hammer.

Ben entered like a cat.  Luke was bleeding warmly from the nose.

"Come on, come on, you big bastard," said Steve, exalted by his success, throwing himself into a fancy boxing posture.  "I'll take you on now.  You haven't got a chance, Ben," he continued, with elaborate pity.  "You haven't got a chance, boy.  I'll tear your head off with what I know."

Ben scowled quietly at him for a moment while he pranced softly about, proposing his fists in Police Gazette attitudes.  Then, exploding suddenly in maniacal anger, the quiet one sprang upon the amateur pugilist with one bound, and flattened him with a single blow of his fist.  Steve's head bounced upon the floor in a most comforting fashion.  Eugene gave a loud shriek of ecstasy and danced about, insane with joy, while Ben, making little snarling noises in his throat, leaped on his brother's prostrate body and thumped his bruised skull upon the boards.  There was a beautiful thoroughness about his wakened anger--it never made inquiries till later.

"Good old Ben," screamed Eugene, howling with insane laughter. "Good old Ben."

Eliza, who had been calling out loudly for help, the police, and the interference of the general public, now succeeded, with Luke's assistance, in checking Ben's assault, and pulling him up from his dazed victim.  She wept bitterly, her heart laden with pain and sadness, while Luke, forgetful of his bloody nose, sorrowful and full of shame only because brother had struck brother, assisted Steve to his feet and brushed him off.

A terrible shame started up in each of them--they were unable to meet one another's gaze.  Ben's thin face was very white; he trembled violently and, catching sight of Steve's bleared eyes for a moment, he made a retching noise in his throat, went over to the sink, and drank a glass of cold water.

"A house divided against itself cannot stand," Eliza wept.

Helen came in from town with a bag of warm bread and cakes.

"What's the matter?" she said, noting at once all that had happened.

"I don't know," said Eliza, her face working, shaking her head for several moments before she spoke.  "It seems that the judgment of God is against us.  There's been nothing but misery all my life. All I want is a little peace."  She wept softly, wiping her weak bleared eyes with the back of her hand.

"Well, forget about it," said Helen quietly.  Her voice was casual, weary, sad.  "How do you feel, Steve?" she asked.

"I wouldn't make any trouble for any one, Helen," he said, with a maudlin whimper.  "No!  No!" he continued in a brooding voice. "They've never given Steve a chance.  They're all down on him. They jumped on me, Helen.  My own brothers jumped on me, sick as I am, and beat me up.  It's all right.  I'm going away somewhere and try to forget.  Stevie doesn't hold any grudge against any one. He's not built that way.  Give me your hand, buddy," he said,  turning to Ben with nauseous sentimentality and extending his yellow fingers, "I'm willing to shake your hand.  You hit me to-night, but Steve's willing to forget."

"Oh my God," said Ben, grasping his stomach.  He leaned weakly across the sink and drank another glass of water.

"No.  No."  Steve began again.  "Stevie isn't built--"

He would have continued indefinitely in this strain, but Helen checked him with weary finality.

"Well, forget about it," she said, "all of you.  Life's too short."

Life was.  At these moments, after battle, after all the confusion, antagonism, and disorder of their lives had exploded in a moment of strife, they gained an hour of repose in which they saw themselves with sad tranquillity.  They were like men who, driving forward desperately at some mirage, turn, for a moment, to see their footprints stretching interminably away across the waste land of the desert; or I should say, they were like those who have been mad, and who will be mad again, but who see themselves for a moment quietly, sanely, at morning, looking with sad untroubled eyes into a mirror.

Their faces were sad.  There was great age in them.  They felt suddenly the distance they had come and the amount they had lived. They had a moment of cohesion, a moment of tragic affection and union, which drew them together like small jets of flame against all the senseless nihilism of life.

Margaret came in fearfully.  Her eyes were red, her broad German face white and tearful.  A group of excited boarders whispered in the hall.

"I'll lose them all now," Eliza fretted.  "The last time three left.  Over twenty dollars a week and money so hard to get.  I don't know what's to become of us all."  She wept again.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," said Helen impatiently.  "Forget about the boarders once in a while."

Steve sank stupidly into a chair by the long table.  From time to time he muttered sentimentally to himself.  Luke, his face sensitive, hurt, ashamed around his mouth, stood by him attentively, spoke gently to him, and brought him a glass of water.

"Give him a cup of coffee, mama," Helen cried irritably.  "For heaven's sake, you might do a little for him."

"Why here, here," said Eliza, rushing awkwardly to the gas range and lighting a burner.  "I never thought--I'll have some in a minute."

Margaret sat in a chair on the other side of the disorderly table, leaning her face in her hand and weeping.  Her tears dredged little gulches through the thick compost of rouge and powder with which she coated her rough skin.

"Cheer up, honey," said Helen, beginning to laugh.  "Christmas is coming."  She patted the broad German back comfortingly.

Ben opened the torn screen door and stepped out on the back porch. It was a cool night in the rich month of August; the sky was deeply pricked with great stars.  He lighted a cigarette, holding the match with white trembling fingers.  There were faint sounds from summer porches, the laughter of women, a distant throb of music at a dance.  Eugene went and stood beside him: he looked up at him with wonder, exultancy, and with sadness.  He prodded him half with fear, half with joy.

Ben snarled softly at him, made a sudden motion to strike him, but stopped.  A swift light flickered across his mouth.  He smoked.
 
 

Steve went away with the German woman to Indiana, where, at first, came news of opulence, fatness, ease, and furs (with photographs),  later of brawls with her honest brothers, and talk of divorce, reunion and renascence.  He gravitated between the two poles of his support, Margaret and Eliza, returning to Altamont every summer for a period of drugs and drunkenness that ended in a family fight, jail, and a hospital cure.

"Hell commences," howled Gant, "as soon as he comes home.  He's a curse and a care, the lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile. Woman, you have given birth to a monster who will not rest until he has done me to death, fearful, cruel, and accursed reprobate that he is!"

But Eliza wrote her oldest son regularly, enclosed sums of money from time to time, and revived her hopes incessantly, against nature, against reason, against the structure of life.  She did not dare to come openly to his defense, to reveal frankly the place he held in her heart's core, but she would produce each letter in which he spoke boastfully of his successes, or announced his monthly resurrection, and read them to an unmoved family.  They were florid, foolish letters, full of quotation marks and written in a large fancy hand.  She was proud and pleased at all their extravagances; his flowery illiteracy was another proof to her of his superior intelligence.
 

Dear Mama:

Yours of the 11th to hand and must say I was glad to know you were in "the land of the living" again as I had begun to feel it was a  "long time between drinks" since your last.  ("I tell you what," said Eliza, looking up and sniggering with pleasure, "he's no fool."  Helen, with a smile that was half ribald, half annoyed, about her big mouth, made a face at Luke, and lifted her eyes patiently upward to God as Eliza continued.  Gant leaned forward tensely with his head craned upward, listening carefully with a faint grin of pleasure.)  Well, mama, since I last wrote you things have been coming my way and it now looks as if the "Prodigal Son" will come home some day in his own private car.  ("Hey, what's that?" said Gant, and she read it again for him.  He wet his thumb and looked about with a pleased grin.  "Wh-wh-what's the matter?" asked Luke.  "Has he b-b-bought the railroad?"  Helen laughed hoarsely.  "I'm from Missouri," she said.)  It took me a long time to get started, mama, but things were breaking against me and all that little Stevie has ever asked from any one in this "vale of tears" is a fair chance.  (Helen laughed her ironical husky falsetto.  "All that little S-S-Stevie has ever asked," said Luke, reddening with annoyance, "is the whole g-g-g-goddam world with a few gold mines thrown in.")  But now that I'm on my feet at last, mama, I'm going to show the world that I haven't forgotten those who stood by me in my "hour of need," and that the best friend a man ever had is his mother.  ("Where's the shovel?" said Ben, snickering quietly.)

'That boy writes a good letter," said Gant appreciatively.  "I'm damned if he's not the smartest one of the lot when he wants to be."

"Yes," said Luke angrily, "he's so smart that you'll b-b-believe any fairy tale he wants to tell you.  B-b-b-but the one who's stuck by you through thick and thin gets no c-c-credit at all."  He glanced meaningly at Helen.  "It's a d-d-damn shame."

"Forget about it," she said wearily.

"Well," said Eliza thoughtfully, holding the letter in her folded hands and gazing away, "perhaps he's going to turn over a new leaf now.  You never know."  Lost in pleased revery she looked into vacancy, pursing her lips.

"I hope so!" said Helen wearily.  "You've got to show me."

Privately:  "You see how it is, don't you?" she said to Luke, mounting to hysteria.  "Do I get any credit?  Do I?  I can work my fingers to the bone for them, but do I get so much as Go to Hell for my trouble?  Do I?"
 
 

In these years Helen went off into the South with Pearl Hines, the saddlemaker's daughter.  They sang together at moving-picture theatres in country towns.  They were booked from a theatrical office in Atlanta.

Pearl Hines was a heavily built girl with a meaty face and negroid lips.  She was jolly and vital.  She sang ragtime and nigger songs with a natural passion, swinging her hips and shaking her breasts erotically.
 

     "Here comes my da-dad-dy now
      O pop, O pop, O-o pop."
 

They earned as much as $100 a week sometimes.  They played in towns like Waycross, Georgia; Greenville, South Carolina; Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

They brought with them the great armor of innocency.  They were eager and decent girls.  Occasionally the village men made cautious explorative insults, relying on the superstition that lives in small towns concerning "show girls."  But generally they were well treated.

For them, these ventures into new lands were eager with promise. The vacant idiot laughter, the ribald enthusiasm with which South Carolina or Georgia countrymen, filling a theatre with the strong smell of clay and sweat, greeted Pearl's songs, left them unwounded, pleased, eager.  They were excited to know that they were members of the profession; they bought Variety regularly, they saw themselves finally a celebrated high-salaried team on "big time" in great cities.  Pearl was to "put over" the popular songs, to introduce the rag melodies with the vital rhythm of her dynamic meatiness, Helen was to give operatic dignity to the programme.  In a respectful hush, bathed in a pink spot, she sang ditties of higher quality--Tosti's "Goodbye," "The End of a Perfect Day," and "The Rosary."  She had a big, full, somewhat metallic voice: she had received training from her Aunt Louise, the splendid blonde who had lived in Altamont for several years after her separation from Elmer Pentland.  Louise gave music lessons and enjoyed her waning youth with handsome young men.  She was one of the ripe, rich, dangerous women that Helen liked.  She had a little girl and went away to New York with the child when tongues grew fanged.

But she said:  "Helen, that voice ought to be trained for grand opera."

Helen had not forgotten.  She fantasied of France and Italy: the big crude glare of what she called "a career in opera," the florid music, the tiered galleries winking with gems, the torrential applause directed toward the full-blooded, dominant all-shadowing songsters struck up great anthems in her.  It was a scene, she thought, in which she was meant to shine.  And as the team of Gant  and Hines (The Dixie Melody Twins) moved on their jagged circuit through the South, this desire, bright, fierce, and formless, seemed, in some way, to be nearer realization.

She wrote home frequently, usually to Gant.  Her letters beat like great pulses; they were filled with the excitement of new cities, presentiments of abundant life.  In every town they met "lovely people"--everywhere, in fact, good wives and mothers, and nice young men, were attracted hospitably to these two decent, happy, exciting girls.  There was a vast decency, an enormous clean vitality about Helen that subjugated good people and defeated bad ones.  She held under her dominion a score of young men?masculine, red-faced, hard-drinking and shy.  Her relation to them was maternal and magistral, they came to listen and to be ruled; they adored her, but few of them tried to kiss her.

Eugene was puzzled and frightened by these lamb-like lions.  Among men, they were fierce, bold, and combative; with her, awkward and timorous.  One of them, a city surveyor, lean, highboned, alcoholic, was constantly involved in police-court brawls; another, a railroad detective, a large fair young man, split the skulls of negroes when he was drunk, shot several men, and was himself finally killed in a Tennessee gun-fight.

She never lacked for friends and protectors wherever she went. Occasionally, Pearl's happy and vital sensuality, the innocent
gusto with which she implored
 

     "Some sweet old daddy
      Come make a fuss over me."
 

drew on village rakedom to false conjectures.  Unpleasant men with wet cigars would ask them to have a convivial drink of corn whisky, call them "girley," and suggest a hotel room or a motorcar as a meeting-place.  When this happened, Pearl was stricken into silence; helpless and abashed, she appealed to Helen.

And she, her large loose mouth tense and wounded at the corners, her eyes a little brighter, would answer:

"I don't know what you mean by that remark.  I guess you've made a mistake about us."  This did not fail to exact stammering apologies and excuses.

She was painfully innocent, temperamentally incapable of wholly believing the worst about any one.  She lived in the excitement of rumor and suggestion: it never seemed to her actually possible that the fast young women who excited her had, in the phrase she used, "gone the limit."  She was skilled in gossip, and greedily attentive to it, but of the complex nastiness of village life she had little actual knowledge.  Thus, with Pearl Hines, she walked confidently and joyously over volcanic crust, scenting only the odor of freedom, change, and adventure.

But this partnership came to an end.  The intention of Pearl Hines' life was direct and certain.  She wanted to get married, she had always wanted to get married before she was twenty-five.  For Helen, the singing partnership, the exploration of new lands, had been a gesture toward freedom, an instinctive groping toward a centre of life and purpose to which she could fasten her energy, a blind hunger for variety, beauty, and independence.  She did not know what she wanted to do with her life; it was probable that she would never control even partially her destiny: she would be controlled, when the time came, by the great necessity that lived in her.  That necessity was to enslave and to serve.

For two or three years Helen and Pearl supported themselves by these tours, leaving Altamont during its dull winter lassitude, and returning to it in Spring, or in Summer, with money enough to suffice them until their next season.

Pearl juggled carefully with the proposals of several young men during this period.  She had the warmest affection for a ball-player, the second baseman and manager of the Altamont team.  He was a tough handsome young animal, forever hurling his glove down in a frenzy of despair during the course of a game, and rushing belligerently at the umpire.  She liked his hard assurance, his rapid twang, his tanned lean body.

But she was in love with no one--she would never be--and caution told her that the life-risk on bush-league ball-players was very great.  She married finally a young man from Jersey City, heavy of hand, hoof, and voice, who owned a young but flourishing truck and livery business.
 
 

Thus, the partnership of the Dixie Melody Twins was dissolved. Helen, left alone, turned away from the drear monotony of the small towns to the gaiety, the variety, and the slaking fulfilment of her desires, which she hoped somehow to find in the cities.

She missed Luke terribly.  Without him she felt incomplete, unarmored.  He had been enrolled in the Georgia School of Technology in Atlanta for two years.  He was taking the course in electrical engineering, the whole direction of his life had been thus shaped by Gant's eulogies, years before, of the young electrical expert, Liddell.  He was failing in his work--his mind had never been forced to the discipline of study.  All purpose with him was broken by a thousand impulses: his brain stammered as did his tongue, and as he turned impatiently and irritably to the logarithm tables, he muttered the number of the page in idiot repetition, keeping up a constant wild vibration of his leg upon the ball of his foot.

His great commercial talent was salesmanship; he had superlatively that quality that American actors and men of business call "personality"--a wild energy, a Rabelaisian vulgarity, a sensory instinct for rapid and swinging repartee, and a hypnotic power of speech, torrential, meaningless, mad, and evangelical.  He could sell anything because, in the jargon of salesmen, he could sell himself; and there was a fortune in him in the fantastic elasticity of American business, the club of all the queer trades, of wild promotions, where, amok with zealot rage, he could have chanted the yokels into delirium, and cut the buttons from their coats, doing every one, everything, and finally himself.  He was not an electrical engineer--he was electrical energy.  He had no gift for study--he gathered his unriveted mind together and bridged with it desperately, but crumpled under the stress and strain of calculus and the mechanical sciences.

Enormous humor flowed from him like crude light.  Men who had never known him seethed with strange internal laughter when they saw him, and roared helplessly when he began to speak.  Yet, his physical beauty was astonishing.  His head was like that of a wild angel--coils and whorls of living golden hair flashed from his head, his features were regular, generous, and masculine, illuminated by the strange inner smile of idiot ecstasy.

His broad mouth, even when stammering irritably or when nervousness clouded his face, was always cocked for laughter?unearthly, exultant, idiot laughter.  There was in him demonic exuberance, a wild intelligence that did not come from the brain.  Eager for praise, for public esteem, and expert in ingratiation, this demon  possessed him utterly at the most unexpected moments, in the most decorous surroundings, when he was himself doing all in his power to preserve the good opinion in which he was held.

Thus, listening to an old lady of the church, who with all her power of persuasion and earnestness was unfolding the dogmas of Presbyterianism to him, he would lean forward in an attitude of exaggerated respectfulness and attention, one broad hand clinched about his knee, while he murmured gentle agreement to what she said:

"Yes? . . .  Ye-e-es? . . .  Ye-e-e-es? . . .  Ye-e-es? . . .  Is that right? . . .  Ye-e-es?"

Suddenly the demonic force would burst in him.  Insanely tickled at the cadences of his agreement, the earnest placidity and oblivion of the old woman, and the extravagant pretense of the whole situation, his face flooded with wild exultancy, he would croon in a fat luscious bawdily suggestive voice:

"Y-ah-s? . . .  Y-a-h-s? . . .  Y-a-h-s? .