The telephone was ringing but he was thinking of something else now and almost didn’t hear it. He was thinking of the plays they had suddenly gone to on the spur of the moment and as suddenly got up and left, how he had talked all the way uptown from the Village about what a gifted actress the star was, hadn’t Helen seen her in Sandalwood and Spellbound, or Mariners hadn’t she seen Mariners, or God They Knew What They Wanted, lord what an artist, the greatest woman in the theater of our time; and then at the play, his wandering attention, his increasing restlessness, his feeling that he would suffocate if he didn’t get another drink at once, his suddenly having to get up and leave before the second act and Helen leaving too without a word, oh she’d leave all right, of course she would leave, wasn’t she afraid of his going out and getting started again, didn’t that come before all the artists in the world? And even as his anger rose (the two of them going up the dark aisle), his pity rose too, it was such a rotten shame that Helen couldn’t once, just once, enjoy a play with him.… He was thinking of those times when he felt the necessity of reading to her, when he read to her for her own good, read something she ought to know, something he himself was crazy about and damn it she had to know it and love it too! He would read on and on (the favorite short-story or the passage out of the great novel) and the words wouldn’t come right or at least not come out of his mouth right, he himself heard the unnatural elisions and the consonants slurred and blurred but went right on just the same, just as if he were articulating perfectly; and Helen, though she was a poor dissembler, ignored the stumbling thick speech the same as he and pretended to understand. And when he had finished and exclaimed “Isn’t it wunderbar” and accepted her nod, how he could curse himself then for having mutilated the beautiful passage, for not having been sober enough to take advantage of this opportunity to reveal the passage to Helen, for having ignored his own dreadful speech, for having pretended to accept Helen’s pretense, and for having used the word wunderbar.… He was thinking most and bitterly of those times when he had asked Helen to marry him, call up your father, let’s call him up right now, this very second, tell him we’re going to get married this weekend, or tonight! He felt like a hound, then, when he saw the tears in her eyes as she smiled and shook her head and refused to talk, and he wanted to marry her all the more, wanted to marry her at once, now more than ever (and the thing that hurt him as he said it was that he knew she wouldn’t take him and he didn’t blame her a bit, no not one single bit, though he loved her more than he ever did before, truly loved her now, right now at this moment, and ached for the day when they would somehow, someway, get together). And while she turned away to busy herself with something so that he couldn’t see her eyes, he would go on and on picturing the wedding (to cover her embarrassment as well as his own, yet knowing that he was wounding her more than ever and for Christ’s sake why couldn’t he stop!), the wedding that was to take place as soon as it could be arranged, they’d get his brother as bestman, Wick would be so happy, Wick would be so pleased (God was he marrying Wick!), they’d go to The Little Church Around the Corner, he’d always wanted to be married at the—oh Jesus didn’t he ever know when to stop!
No wonder she would kick him out as soon as he was able to be on his feet again, no wonder she wouldn’t have him around to mock with his silence the theme he couldn’t harp enough on the other night, the imperial theme that was always happy prologue, nothing more.…
But that was all long ago. Years. Two anyway. He never went near her house anymore; not when he was drinking. He knew better; thank God he knew enough to avoid people when he was drinking now, especially Helen. He was never going to let her see him like that again, give her a chance to take care of him only to throw him out. The times she had thrown him out! He wished he had a dollar for every time he had been kicked out of Helen’s house! He wished he had a bottle for every one of those times! or a glass! or a jigger!
The telephone began again. It had been silent for a while, but now it rang as if for the only time that morning, as if this were the most important call of all. He shut his eyes and gritted his teeth. He thought of how Central at home (was that another world, another lifetime?) had sometimes given him a ring on Sunday afternoon and said he’d better hurry if he wanted to get Dorothy for a date, Harry Fox was trying to call her now and her line was busy.…
Reveries of home.… Sentimental tears slid out from under his closed lids as he saw himself standing, now, in the new Scout uniform, his first, with a crowd of other children of all ages on the wide front lawn of the vast old red-brick high-school. The Scoutmaster and principal and some of the teachers were handing out stiff cotton flags to each one and arranging the children into groups according to grade, in double-file. It was Decoration Day, a bright hot May morning, full summer already. How proud he was, then, when the Scouts were all taken out of their respective grade-groups and moved up front to head the procession. He did not even envy Harold Jenkins who carried the big flag of the Troop with the gold eagle on top and a white bathrobe-cord swaying around the fluttering folds. It was enough to be in uniform and up front with the rest—let somebody else lead or carry the flag; time enough for that when he was older. Down-street the band began to play. His heart nearly burst. They were to join the old soldiers and the band in front of the park and march from there to the cemetery. The Scoutmaster blew his whistle and they started out.… The stores were all closed, the long shades drawn, sunlight glared hot and white on the store-fronts. People lined the sidewalks, waving flags. Ahead of them, several open cars moved slowly off, carrying the mayor and the ministers and the superintendent of schools in their Sunday clothes. They each held a small flag and waved it to the crowd; they wore big badges on their lapels with forked satin ribbons; the cars were festooned with red-white-and-blue streamers and the wheels were wound with them. Behind marched the old soldiers, some thirty or forty wonderful white-haired old men, straight and proud. Their uniforms were dark blue, almost black; some of them had on funny little tilted caps that looked crushed-in at the front, one or two wore those long pointed hats like fancy-dress admirals, the curving top edged with a kind of white brush. All carried swords. Harold Jenkins’ grandfather was there, and Melvin Ostler’s, and a lot of the kids’.… At the cemetery, under the elm trees and willows sifting sunlight down on the flower-decked graves that were each like individual gardens, they grouped themselves about the uneven ground and the mayor said a speech from the bunting-draped platform and someone read a prayer and taps were sounded: old Mr. Bickerton came forward and raised his dented brightly-polished bugle and blew taps. Everybody took off their hats. He stood there listening, while chills ran down his spine. He looked at Mr. Peech the Scoutmaster standing a little apart with bowed head, and a wave of affection, of love, swept over him. What a wonderful and good man he was, what a fine father he would make! To have a father like that—The sound of the taps died away, and a group of eight old soldiers came forward and fired a salute. The bright morning was shattered by the crash; and a second later, in the stunning silence that followed, the sharp craack came again as the volley was given back by the railroad embankment beyond the graveyard. The faint blue-white smoke curled out of the rifles and rose in the sunshine, drifting among the trees and turning light and dark as it floated through sunbeam and shade. His nostrils tingled pleasantly with the wonderful pungent smell of the gun-power.…
His longing to be home, home at last, home for good, was so great it became despair, then desperation. The telephone rang. Christ he was going nuts with sentimentality! Self-pity like this would drive him to suicide! Or was it someone else he wished to destroy in destroying himself? His interest in this, his knowledge that it might be so, his consciousness of it at all, made him believe it would never come to pass—just as his belief that a drunk is capable of violence short of murder might prevent that violence and certainly that murder. But did this include murder of oneself?
If his mother knew that he sat here now thinking wanting needing death; if Wick knew, or Helen; if Mrs. Wertheim, Sam and Gloria, the Kappa U brothers, the ladies in the front apartment just beyond that wall, M. Mc., the teller at Juan-les-Pins, the foolish psychiatrist, any Mr. Rabinowitz—who would believe it? Every one! Not one had reason to doubt he would ever reach such a pass; not one but knew (if they were wise or knowing at all) that this was his logical end and what was he waiting for? Every one of them had seen or could have seen that he had had the seed of self-destruction in him; and given time— All who had known him surely knew; expected nothing less; waited merely for the word. All were ready with the “Too bad but he’s much better off” or “Only wonder is he didn’t do it sooner.”
All? Dorothy too? Anna? Miss Dawson? No, never Dorothy. Not Anna, really. Certainly not Miss Dawson. Dorothy he had deliberately not been in touch with since he was in his ’teens, Dorothy he had let believe what she would believe always. Anna had pushed him away from her before he got to be the mess he was now, while he still had a chance. Miss Dawson could go on building a rosy life for him (and probably had) beginning and ending with the charming childish promise he showed (oh lord it made you sick to think of it) at eight. Eight for Christ’s sake!
“I honestly think you’re going to amount to something rather wonderful,” Dorothy had said when he left home; and then added, but as if to herself: “even though I’m not sure of my own place in the picture.” And he? What had he answered. To his shame he spoke as if in bashful protest (hearing only the first half of what she had said, not hearing at all the rest of it, the little rueful thought of self): “Dorothy!”—as much as to say “Oh go way with you” or “Flatterer.” To his shame. But everything about Dorothy was to his shame; not because he had allowed her to love him as he had not loved her, so long that she had never been able to love anybody else again, but because he had allowed her to believe in him. Would she believe in him now? Believe that he was finally about to put into effect the one real accomplishment that had been delayed too long? …
Or Anna—would she? Anna who had said “I am not good for you, go back and find that Helen you talk about so much till I am bored,” meaning it of course and thinking thereby to do him the final good she hadn’t been able to do him in any other way. But how much more good had she done him (without knowing it) when she uttered that pronouncement on the boat, the question and indictment she couldn’t have begun to appreciate the full meaning of herself, though the answer and sentence if honest would affect her as much as it did him.… The week before they sailed they had played around for five days in Paris, played with Kees all over town, here and there all night and most of the day; and one evening, dancing with Anna at Armenonville, she had said, suddenly serious, “There is a question I will ask you when we are on the boat.” His heart sank, but he smiled and said “Tell me now.” She shook her head. “No, I want to wait till we are away from here, by ourselves. On the boat I will ask you.” He wanted to hear it then, he asked her again when they got back to their table, because it was bound to be serious and he wanted her to bring it out with Kees there, Kees to whom he could turn and laugh and kid with about the whole thing, kidding Anna out of it whatever it was. But no, she would wait till after they had sailed; and then, the first night out, in her cabin, while his heart thumped because of what it might turn out to be, she said it: “Why do you only come to bed with me when you are drunk?” He roared with delight. He knew damned well she had reason to ask; but in his relief that it had been no worse he was able to laugh as if it were terribly funny and he almost shouted “Because I’m always drunk!” She wasn’t convinced, he knew that, not the way she looked at him; but at the end, because of the way he neglected her in New York, Anna had seen that he was finally in Helen’s hands again and probably safe, his European education over at last. Certainly he was headed for no such fulfillment as this.…
No such thing had ever entered the dreamy head of Miss Dawson either, who took such a fancy to him in the 2nd Grade that he hadn’t been able to live it down for the rest of his life but would today for good and all. “My dear Mrs. Birnam,” she wrote in her lovely Palmer-method hand, “I would just like to say something which no doubt you already know and that is that you have a boy whom you can well be proud of on his eighth birthday. He is the most perfect child in the schoolroom I have ever known and the most winning and sweet besides being so bright. I sincerely hope that Dame Fortune will smile on him and Good Luck attend him through a long and happy life. Most sincerely, Ruth Dawson.”
Eight! Fool that she was, idiot, maudlin old maid to write such a letter! the letter that hung over his head ever since, preserved and shown to him every time he went home. Let her see him sitting here panting sweating shaking now, let Anna see him! Good creatures, do you love your lives? Here is a knife like other knives.… You people who build fond hopes for the promising, who look on the well-favored young and know—know—that here is one that will go far (oh far indeed)—let it be a lesson to you all! What right had they to take such advantage of him at eight? What right at eighteen? Sickening words that actually had pleased him. Miss Dawson and Dorothy (and how manymore?)—I need but stick it in my heart.… And all you folk will die.…
Eight. It was scarcely the age of reason, much less the beginning of wisdom. That had come at ten, when his father left. Wisdom of a sort. And not when he left, either; but months after, when he began to realize he was never coming back. Okay for him to realize it, he could take it; but nobody else must know—nobody. People did, though. They stopped him on the street to ask, neighbors called him in their back doors to give him a cookie and ask, “Is your papa coming home for Thanksgiving?” “Oh yes, Papa’s coming home, he always comes home on holidays.” “He wasn’t home for Labor Day.” “That isn’t a holiday! Not like Thanksgiving.” “The 4th of July is.” “Yes, but Papa couldn’t get a—I think they call it a reservation. But he’s coming home Thanksgiving, all right.” He kept it up, right up to the very day, knowing all the while—And then, Thanksgiving over, people began again. “Is your papa coming home for Christmas?” After a while, they stopped asking; and then his shame began in earnest, because then they knew.
At noon the doorbell began to ring. The sound froze him in his chair. What was the foul-fiend up to now? The buzzer that released the lock on the street-door was in the kitchen, but he could not have made it if his life depended literally upon it. And what of it? He would not have pressed the buzzer even if it had been at his elbow. He listened to the long insistent drone of the bell. What had he done yesterday, what recklessness or tampering or damage had he been up to, what outright crime? Was it someone come to question him, accuse him, take him away perhaps? Finally the bell ceased, but it left a void of silence that was heavy with threat. Now what, now what.… He was soon to find out.
There were footsteps in the hall, ascending the last flight. Someone rapped on the apartment door.
He looked wildly about him. It was broad daylight, the room was filled with sun, there was no question this was real. He knew it was true, was happening, even as he thought—almost longingly, now—of the whisperers of the early morning. He crouched back in his chair and stared across the room and through the foyer at the doorknob of the outer locked door—fixed it with his eye, in panic. The rapping came again; to his horror he saw the doorknob turn back and forth; and Helen’s voice called softly: “Don. Don. Are you in there, Don?”
If he coughed now, if his heart thumped any louder, if he so much as let go his breath—
“Don. Won’t you let me in?”
Oh, it was her voice all right!
“You are there, aren’t you Don?”
The doorknob rattled.
“It’s Helen, Don. Please open the door.”
The voice was low and pleading; not loud, not demanding, not even reproachful.
“I’ve only got a little while, Don, I wish you’d please let me in. Please.”
There was an uncertain note in the voice now, he was winning, he was fooling her, she had begun to believe he wasn’t there. If he could hang on another moment—
“Don, are you there, won’t you answer? I want to help you.” A pause. “I only want—”
She didn’t finish that one. He waited in agonized suspense; and after a moment, only a moment more, the doorknob stopped turning, the footsteps moved off.
He was almost faint with relief. But as he heard her going down the stairs and away—taking with her the help he needed so badly—he wanted to cry out “Come back! come back!” The Helen he knew so well and for so long, who loved him and whom he loved and would always love, she who had been through so much with him that they could never grow apart, no, no matter how much he shut her out and shut himself out too— He wanted her now, wanted to call out “Come back, don’t leave me! Come back!” Wanted to but never would, never in this world, never never, not if he were sitting here bleeding to death from twenty wounds. He would gladly have died at this moment rather than face Helen, or anyone. But Helen above all.
He understood it, now; saw what had been going on. It was Helen who had been ringing him all morning. From the office; from work. Perhaps she had been in touch with Wick, by ’phone from the farm; Wick had asked her to find out about him; she would have done it in any case, on her own, knowing he was on the loose. She must have been convinced he was there in the apartment and would eventually answer, or was out and would soon return, the way she had called so often. During her lunch-hour she came over to see for herself. When he didn’t answer the doorbell, she had gained admittance by ringing some other apartment, perhaps, or seeing Dave the janitor. Then she had come upstairs and rapped on the door and tried the knob and called to him, thinking her words—thinking the sound of her voice—might—
How little people knew! How little they ever knew or understood! (His fists closed in anger.) How could they know what he was suffering! How could they know he would never be able to answer the door or the telephone! How could he explain it to them even! Would telling them tell them why! (He poured the words out in anguished angry whispers.) How could they ever understand! How could people—anyone!—those walking by on the street outside—the two ladies cooking their lunch in the front apartment—the ignorant innocent riders on the L train half a block away—how could they know the hell that was going on in this room! His friends here, his brother at the farm, his mother at home, how could they sense or know of the gathering panic that was any moment about to burst the walls out! How could Helen if she came into this room and saw him with her very eyes, how could she see the breaking-point that had been reached here or the taut brain that was ready to snap! The telephone rang.
She was back. Back at the office, back at work, back at it, back at him. Or she had stopped in a drugstore—what difference does it make? She would ’phone and ’phone and ’phone, the bell would ring him into the next world, that was the way she was helping him—could she possibly know that? Or know it even if told? His mind recoiled and plunged again into the past, as into a cooling stream.…
Holidays, Sundays, days of no school.… He was coming down over Wylie’s Hill, coming home, after a hike into the country to his favorite haunt. He had lingered there half the morning, reluctant as always to leave the lovely spot, his own discovery and place. It was a little glen. There was a willow grew aslant the brook, that showed its hoar leaves in the glassy stream. He could daydream here forever, imagining that beautiful and muddy death—realer to him by far than anything that took place in life. The fantastic garlands had floated off and were now wedged at the rim of the tiny dam, the coronet of weeds still hung from the drooping bough, and here was the reed-like broken limb that had dropped her to the brook. He saw the thin clothes spread wide, ballooning with air; he heard the tunes, so innocent, so ribald; and then the garments, growing heavy with water, lowered the frail figure to the gentle mud beneath. But still the pretty dress billowed around her, the hands moved restless and fitful, the lovely zany face still showed in the stream, quivering and blurred, but smiling still.… He had lingered there too long, as usual; past noon. It was Thanksgiving, a freakishly perfect day, balmy and dry as early fall. From Wylie’s Hill he could see the town spread out below, the familiar loved town where everybody in the world knew him and had always known him, where he had so many uncles and aunts who were no relation to him whatever that the neighborhood, indeed the village, was one great family. As he came down the hill and crossed the railroad tracks, he began to smell the dinners cooking, the dinners that today would all be alike, yet none so good as the dinner cooked by his mother. She would be working at it now, as she had been since early morning. When he got home he would go to the kitchen and help himself to celery and radishes and take them up to his room while he read and waited for dinner.…
The defaulters, the renegers, the backward-lookers, the adolescents, the ungrownups.… He was a life-term member of that motley and ludicrous crew: uncles cousins fathers husbands brothers sons dear friends promising friends—always promising. Not so damned motley either, since they were all crossed the same, following so consistently the same pattern and history from oh way back. They were the loved ones (usually); oddly, too, the well-favored. As children they were loved of their parents, their mothers especially; and if they were one of several, they were the ones most loved. (“I’ve wept over you more than any of the others”—but all they felt was a guilty pride and pleasure at their power to damage.) They were the brightest in school (usually), the intelligent, the quick to learn, never the studious. They tried their hands at many talents; and though they didn’t get anywhere, their friends cover this up for them now by speaking of them as “clever,” they say they have “personality,” they say “So-&-so would go far if only he’d apply himself,” or “So-&-so is a queer duck, what he needs is a good wife,” and often “Sure he’s got brains but what good does it do him?” Brains indeed and indeed what good does it do them? Dreamy tosspots, they stand all afternoon in a 2nd Avenue bar looking at the sun-patterns under the L or their own faces in the mirror; they do good but not good enough work on the paper and dream of the novel they’re certainly going to get around to someday; they stand behind a desk on the lecture-platform lecturing with loving and fruitless persuasion to students watching the clock; throughout whole evenings with sinking heart they sit watching their wives over the edge of a book and wondering how, how, how had it ever come about; they live in and search the past not to discover where and at what point they missed the boat but only to revel in the fancied and fanciful pleasures of a better happier and easier day; they see not wisely but too well and what they see isn’t worth it; they eat of and are eaten by ennui, with no relief from boredom even in their periodic plunges from euphoria to despair or their rapid rise back to the top again. They wake up on mornings such as this, all but out of their minds with remorse, enduring what others call and can call a hangover—that funny word Americans will joke about forever, even when the morning-after is their own.
The humor of the hangover: the hilarious vocabulary: the things other drinkers call what they suffer then—the things they can call it who endure the normal reaction, merely, of a few hours of headache, butterfly-stomach, and (crowning irony!) nausea at the thought of another drink. The jitters, the ginters, the booze-blues, the hooch-humps, the katzenjammers; the beezy-weezies, screaming meemies, snozzle-wobbles, bottle-ache, ork-orks, woefits, the moaning after. It was ghastly funny, oh hilarious!—