The Town and the City: A Novel

  “Well—what about that coffee.”

  “Huh?”

  They stood in the doorway staring at the rain, waiting. Francis was lonely, and bored, bored. Everything was like it had always been, like he had always known it, like he knew it would always be. God, but he was lonely and bored.

  [4]

  In the Martin house on the second floor facing north was Peter’s bedroom, a room that looked out on the old road, the pine forests, and the hills that were blue on gray days. Peter had shared this room with Joe as far back as he could remember but now, while Joe was away, it was all his with all the potent secrecy that a room can have when it is inherited and becomes a solitude. During that summer he therefore rearranged a few things, pushing his cubbyhole desk up by the window, converting Joe’s bed into a kind of couch against the wall—his “thinking” couch—hanging a few college banners on the wall along with some track medals and a framed newspaper picture of himself scoring the Lawton game touchdown, installing a battered bookcase that he had made with some old boards and stuffing it with old books,—and then he observed the whole effect with pleased admiration.

  Now he was “really collegiate” and all set to go to town. And he spent many days that summer just sitting at his desk over a book and staring dreamily out the window. On rainy days he saw his future in the distant hazy swell of the hills on the horizon, in the dim blue reaches there, and dreamed and dreamed of greatness. There was never anything else that could hold his dreamy attention: all was the fulfillment of himself, the future, greatness, a heroic struggle and overcoming of all obstacles.

  And in the next room, in the bedroom shared by little Mickey and young Charley, a room facing north also, Mickey was wrapped in the same kind of burning vision of life as triumph. Mickey had Erector sets, he built toy cranes and trucks and conducted great engineering experiments that seemed impossible at first but eventually succumbed to his grave cunning: and after reading Huckleberry Finn he deliberately wrote out a river adventure of his own in a nickel notebook, a carefully wrought-out epic called Mike Martin Explores the Merrimac.

  Moreover, Mickey conducted a whole, perfectly ordered, imaginary “world” of his own which was exhaustively set into motion and recorded each day in his own “newspaper,” printed by hand and illustrated in pencil. Sports predominated in this world: it was all horseracing, prizefighting, baseball, bowling, basketball, hockey, football and the financial successes thereto, and throughout its blazing legend and all its dusty files the name of “Mike” Martin predominated: Mike hit the most homeruns, batted .395, was the greatest money-winning jockey of the turf, the world’s unchallenged heavyweight champ, the best fullback a college ever had, the fleetest of all sprinters (he also ran the mile regularly in 4:04 flat), the most phenomenal of all duckpin bowlers and one of the richest adventurers in the United States with holdings and ranches and wives all over the world.

  Not that he had no competitors—he had many. The newspapers which he himself printed and published attested to all this in great eight-column headlines—and who could deny it when the greatest publisher and editor in the United States was also the selfsame, one-and-only, genial, robust “Mike” Martin? There was no sadness, and no madness, only stoutness of heart and vigor and strength. There were “soreheads,” the ungenial but still-as-yet fierce and mighty competitors in a world of lances and shields American style, but these “soreheads” always succumbed after terrific listings on the windswept field of the earth, and the cheerful, canny, beloved and powerful heroes prevailed.

  On the rainy summer days when the blue haze shrouded the hills and the landscape outside, Peter sat at his desk over elementary books on algebra, geometry, and French—credits he needed in prep school that year—and, smoking his very collegiate pipe, he considered exactly how he would set his destiny underway, where it would need a heroic push, where it would call for cheerful humble patience, and where it would approach its fruits and the time for ecstatic immortal immolation. He had visions of great achievement in the preliminary, almost unimportant stages, that is, impressing the women, amazing the men, scoring all the touchdowns, displaying brilliant scholarship, winning the awe of all: the humble beginnings exploding suddenly into triumph, all by virtue of his natural unalterable heroism, the great achievements piling up in pyramidical hugeness, approaching now the point of immolation in the vastness of all—he saw himself founding families and lines, organizing world events, pointing to necessities and hoisting them into place, arranging, disarranging, revising pitiable errors of others, getting everything fixed to his own satisfaction, standing there a grave, powerful, humble leader of men and things—and then suddenly disappearing in a mist of immolation, to the utter astonishment of the world around him, disappearing into the immense haze of the universe, in the Valhalla of himself and of everything.

  He had gone to church on the raindark Good Friday afternoons, and so had Mickey, all silent and solemn, and he had seen Jesus suffering and heroic, dark, dark Jesus and his cross, dear great sacrificial Jesus the hero and the lamb, and he had wept at the spectacle of that heroic sorrow—and then he had gone to church, and Mickey too, on the bell-golden Easter mornings of sun and flowers and seen Jesus arisen triumphant, immortal, radiant and true—and all the occasional yawning mortals sitting beside him in the pews, the ones who coughed and fidgeted irritably and dozed and yum-yummed while the mighty drama of life’s meaning was marching all around them, these were the “soreheads” of the earth indifferently turning away from immortality and heroism, abysmal, empty, and unamazed. That was not for Peter, not for Mickey. They had to be heroes or nothing.

  The night before Peter left for prep school he lay in bed and felt that strange mingling feeling American boys have when they are about to leave home for the first time: that drowsy fear of leaving the bed, the room, the house that has always been the first comfortable basis of life before anything else, the house that is as familiar and plain as an old sweater, to which one always returns after excitements and fatigues to sweetly sleep: and yet at the same time he felt that similarly drowsy excitement of going off from the house—to railroad depots, coffee counters, new cities, smoke and furor and windsmells strange and new, to sudden unimagined vistas of river, highway, bridge and horizon all sensationally strange under unknown skies, and the smoke, the smoke!

  He stayed awake until four in the morning—after dark hours of writhing tormented excitement and lonely reveries where he babbled to himself whimsically (“Well, here goes Martin in the morning, here I go!”)—and at eight he got up all tense and feverish, snapped shut the suitcase all neatly packed with shirts and socks and coats and trousers, put on his new sports jacket, stared at himself in the mirror, and went downstairs.

  His mother was in the kitchen making his breakfast. And while she picked and plucked at him, told him what to wear on cold days and what to eat and how much to sleep, what to do about his laundry and what to say to the nice man who was going to be his Dean, he just sat brooding and nodding his head. Because it was a raw gray September day and the air was fraught with gloom and with a faint wild excitement too, and it was almost as though he could grab his mood right out of the air if he could only determine whether he felt sad or joyful leaving home for the first time. It was something appalling and heavy, like his suitcase, something that choked at his throat, like the starched shirt and the new tie, to be “going away”—although he would be back in six weeks for Thanksgiving—and yet too there was a tremendous furor waiting for him outside, somewhere, beckoning him to come on, come on.

  “And don’t forget to write me the moment you get there,” his mother kept saying. “Tell me if you need anything. Your money should last you the first week. And send home for anything you need.”

  “Yep.”

  “Be sure to be nice and polite and make a good impression on your teachers there—”

  “Yep, yep.”

  “I’m so proud of you, you look so nice and clean this morning!” she said gladly. r />
  “And stay that way!” cried Rose, picking a thread off the hero’s sleeve. “Don’t go getting all dirty on the way up and look like a bum when you get there!”

  “Yes, ladies, I will.”

  “And don’t forget to be the star of the team,” said his sister Ruth eagerly. “That’s the important thing!”

  “And don’t get hurt!” added the mother with a frown, and she plucked at his collar.

  And as Peter ate his breakfast and looked out the window broodingly and saw the hills and the mist far off, something stirred and thrilled in him, he gloated, he was on the verge of diving off a high place into the open air—yet when it actually came time to pick up his suitcase, move to the door, and kiss his mother and sisters, he felt sick at heart and almost wanted to cry. He couldn’t tell them that he felt this way, he “had to be a man.” But they saw the thin film of mist in his eyes and kissed him affectionately.

  “I’ll be back in two months, it’ll only be two months,” he kept saying.

  “That’s right, the time’ll fly like anything! Before you know it, you’ll be back home!”

  “Sure!” cried Peter, reassuring them desperately.

  “Poor baby!” said Rose. “He’s just a baby! Be sure and write to your big dumb sister now! And when you come back a big sleek college man don’t be holding up your nose at me!”

  “What are you talking about!” cried Peter angrily.

  “Don’t miss your train, Petey!”

  “Holy cow! Is it already half-past?” And suddenly there was another wild flurry of kissing and good-byes, Peter hurried to the door almost stumbling, his mother plucked at his coat collar, someone opened the door for him, he rushed out saying, “Here I go now! Here I go!”

  He hurried down the road swinging his suitcase, he turned and waved to his mother and sisters once more, he strode determinedly now down to the bottom of the hill, and they saw him bustling off into the “world” with a jaunty, scowling, absorbed air.

  There was only sadness for him now in the gray morning mists, and a dull pang of regret in his heart, and dread. On the highway the cars and trucks went by in all their busy, self-absorbed unconcern, it was a morning world of bustle and business, everything seemed to be mocking his solitary little sorrows, there was no room here for him and for the hesitations of a boy walking down the road with his suitcase. He felt very glum and the day was gray.

  His chum Danny met him at the bus stop by the bridge, as prearranged. They looked at each other with a hearty, congenial, yet bewildered cheerfulness. This had all been talked over before: Peter was going off to make good, Danny was staying behind to work in the mills, but somehow, someday, both of them would be rich and successful, and they would always be friends.

  “Well, Zagg”—Danny had always called Peter by this name, ever since they were kids—“so you’re off at last—and it’s like I always said, you’re on your way.”

  “Aw, I hate like hell to leave Galloway, honest, that’s the way I feel!” confessed Peter.

  “A little lonesomeness for your hometown won’t do you any harm, Zagg, it’ll make a better man of you.” And Danny pronounced these words in his dour and gloomy way.

  “I know, Dan, but—Gee, if you only knew how I felt when I left the house. I dunno—but there’s something so damn sad about leaving home, you know?”

  “It’s gotta be that way!”

  “I know—but it makes a lump in my throat, you know? I guess I’m crazy but that’s the way I felt. And now—I feel a lot better now, I guess I feel like hitting that old road! Ha, ha!”

  “That’s the spirit, Zagg. That’s the only way to be!”

  “You’ve always been my best friend, Danny!” said Peter, suddenly mortified. “And someday you’re gonna be a great man, I know it! You’re too much of a good guy!” He squeezed Danny’s shoulder impulsively. “Someday I’ll be saying the same thing to you, wishing you luck on your way, and we’ll always be friends!”

  “You bet, Zagg, we’ll always be friends!”

  And sorrowfully Peter watched his unhappy buddy go off to work, he felt worse than ever—but suddenly it came in the gray air: a truck roared blasting by, someone shouted, there was a thronging of sounds everywhere as though his eardrums had just popped, everything was noisy and lyrical, the Falls thundered at his feet, smoke passed in the sky overhead, he was blinded and deafened for joy.

  He was leaving home but now he was striding off into the smoky center of things, for the first time “on his own.” He was a man with a suitcase and a walletful of money and each of his gloating hungry wits, and there stretched the future dizzily before him in dimness! and roads and bridges and cities! and smoke, smoke, smoke!

  When he got on the train and sat in the coach among the men with their morning newspapers and cigars, and the conductor made a gruff joke when he collected his ticket, and the man sitting next to him politely opened a conversation about the weather and the international situation, Peter realized with glee that he had a new status as a man of the world. He even smoked a cigarette and expressed the opinion that the international situation was pretty bad at that, and the man vehemently agreed with him all the way to Boston, as smoke flashed past the windows and swooped upwards into the gray air of morning.

  The prep school was up in Maine, not far from Augusta, in the heart of the rolling woods and fields of some of the finest country in New England, and it was called Pine Hall. It was relatively unknown but it was just the place to get his credits and prepare for college—and, of course, also, it was a hideaway breeding-ground for college football stars. He had his choice of almost any college after that year. And among other things it was also an exclusive sort of school for rowdy young socialites expelled from the Andovers and Exeters for their prematurely dissolute ways.

  Pine Hall had a charming little campus of old redbrick Georgian buildings covered with ivy, with peaceful walks running around the halls, all of it in the shade of noble pines and spruce. There was a village a mile away, soft farmlands to the south, forested hills sweeping north with their wild hint of moose and mountain brooks, and a fresh, greendark, northern atmosphere to the whole surrounding country that immediately delighted Peter’s fancy for rustic solitudes. Now he pictured himself studying diligently in the school library and then going off on long meditative walks in the woods and fields with a copy of Horace in his back pocket.

  But before he could really look around and enjoy things he found himself on the football field with some twenty husky youngsters from all over the East. He was faced with another grueling effort to make the varsity and hold his own—and here he discovered to his dismay that the players in this school were all high school stars like himself, much bigger and better than the average high school regular, and each convinced of making the team. Yet, of all the high school “phenoms” gathered there, at least half of them would have to succumb to the competition and play a secondary part in the team’s destiny. Peter was crushed with the thought that he might wind up among the unlucky ten, the others looked too big and too good for him, and they looked fierce.

  That first night he suffered dreads and a feeling of defeat, he brooded in his room and wrote a despairing letter to Danny back in Galloway, and then he went out for a melancholy walk to the sleepy little village, and noted gloomily that everything closed up at ten o’clock.

  And he was going to spend eight months in this place—eight months of gloom and defeat and shame! For the first time in his life he felt completely abandoned and helpless and thoroughly frightened: what was he to do? He remembered all the loving care of his mother when she packed him off, the proud excitement in the house the night before he left, his sister reminding him to be the “star” of the team—and God! now it was questionable if he could even make the team! He remembered his father telling the men that his kid was going to “knock ’em out” this year, he remembered his kid brothers and their chums cheering him when he walked up the street, and above all he remembered the Lawton gam
e and the Thanksgiving dinner afterwards at home and all the innocent joy and delight and glory of that day. What a fool!—to plan his life around glorious deeds, to thrive on that and nothing else, and finally to bring himself foolishly to things that were beyond his power and then stop there in full humiliation for all the world to see! And all the horror crept up in him, he wanted to go away from everything and never come back, he wanted to bury himself, drown himself, die—do anything but live and admit this final humiliating impotence and defeat.

  And what was most horrible to him that first night was the final terrible realization that he was only Peter Martin, only Peter Martin—and who was that in the world? Who was he, if not some sort of impostor and stranger and scoundrel, who somehow managed to fool people and even his own family into believing that he was Peter Martin. Who was he?

  He was no one—he felt his arms and legs, looked at himself in the mirror, looked out the window in the dark Maine night, and he was no one. He was a ghostly stranger, he was a dreaming forgotten thing, and he was an anguish-stricken humility, and nothing else. He felt like rushing into the next room, where he heard the voices of his new teammates. He wanted to go in there and confess to them that he was a fake, an impostor, a stranger to them, he felt like going in there and shouting for their forgiveness.…

  But he fell asleep exhausted; and the next day out on the field he put on his helmet, gritted his teeth, and suddenly found himself breaking through the line of scrimmage and running off on a giddy succession of touchdowns that had the coaches looking at each other in grim wonder. And the other boys to whom he would have confessed the night before were now looking at him with grins and blinks of respect, in silent manly admiration—and Peter was shocked and angered at himself. Somehow more than ever now he wanted to take them all by the shoulder, look at them, tell them that they did not understand, they did not understand—