He sometimes spoke about it with Francis who “knew everything.”
“Dammit, France, I wish I could have lived in those days when you rode on horseback and all you had ahead of you was this big unexplored space, the wide open spaces, and everybody had to pitch in together to put up a cabin or build a saloon or haul a wagon across a river.”
“You mean the frontier days.”
“When men were men,” whooped Joe, “and guys just practically owned everything they saw. You know …”
“No, I don’t know.”
He would tell his father about it and the old man would instantly fly into a political rage: “You’ve got something there, Joe! That was when America was America, when people pulled together and made no bones about it.”
“I know, but what I mean—”
“In those days,” thundered the father, “there was honesty and there was good living. Things were hard, the poor devils sometimes got snowed right under by tough breaks and big blizzards and Indians, anything at all, but by God it made better men! Those pioneers were the men who made this country great, before it started to fall apart in the last thirty years, they were the fellows who took it upon themselves to leave comfortable communities and strike out with their wives and kids to build a new country. And now! Now you can see what all their suffering and sweat is coming to—”
Which was not what Joe wanted to talk about. It had no name, he did not know what it was. It was just a boyish dream, his own secret sad dream. And so like any other man—and he was already a fine and true one at twenty—like any other man he brooded in his heart’s restless unknowable depths. While he worked and drank and laughed and knocked around.
[10]
The mother completes a chore in the kitchen, listens to the late evening news on the radio, has her cup of tea with crackers, and yawns, and tells Rosey to close the windows upstairs. To eat and to sleep, to have a house and to live in it, to have a family and to live with them—these are the things she knows. To bask in the days that keep coming and going, to keep the house warm and clean and enjoyable, to prepare food and eat it and store it, to conquer sickness, keep things together, preside over the sweet needs and plain satisfactions of life, and to order the furies of existence around all these things—this is what she knows, and she understands that there is nothing else to know.
The depth of a woman’s heart is as unknowable as that of man’s, but nothing like restlessness and feverish rue ever abides there. In the very deeps of this heart are contained all the secrets, and the one plain secret of life, which is something that is homely, coarse, sensual, and deep, something that is everlasting because it is serene and waits patiently. A man may spend the night tracing the course of the stars above the earth, but the woman never has to worry her head about the course of the stars above the earth, because she lives in the earth and the earth is her home. A man may yearn after a thousand shades and shapes that surround his fevered life, but to the woman there is only one shade and one shape to things, which she forever contemplates in the fullness of her profundity, and she never loses sight of it.
Some men dig into the earth to excavate whole lost cities and civilizations, they want to find otherworldly mysteries and strange things never known before. But if you dig into a woman’s heart, deeply beneath whatever surface it presents, the deeper you go, the more woman there is; and if you’re looking for mysteries there, you’ll find that they don’t matter.
The Martin mother was this kind of deep woman, who could look upon the lives and activities of the world around her with the judicious and patient eye of an eternity, knowing that all fuss and furor would end, all joy and all tremendous spiritual fret would end, and things would grow back into their proper ways. Thus, sometimes when her three eldest sons chanced to be eating at the same table on some occasional noon, she would feed their plates and hover about and watch them from her corner of the table with a blissful, ruminative, shrewd smile.
As they talked and ate and smoked, receiving coffee and dessert in that contented absentminded manner that men have at table, she would notice how each one of them burned and raged with a particular loneliness, a special desolate anger and longing that was written in each pair of eyes, and she knew that all men were the same.
What did it matter if Francis suffered from the rue of abandoned love, embarrassed and haughty and dark with hate, and pale with loneliness, all wrapped in his books and thoughts and in his solitary habits? His mother knew that he ought to eat more, and sleep more, and take care of himself for a long life that was ahead of him in spite of everything, including himself. Somehow she knew that whatever Francis did it would all amount to the same misuse and folly and waste that all men practiced—he would continue on his melancholy path, loving the sorrow and abandonment of his own heavy heart, staring into abysses, trickling himself away in black ennui, sitting by the ticking of a clock, with a book, a thought, a thinlipped morose idea. But to her it all seemed dignified and beautiful nonetheless, because he was a man, and the sorrowful misguided man is a beautiful and forsaken creature.
And Joe. What did it matter if Joe had a thousand raging enthusiasms, was always working and running around and spending his money, or if he was lonely in the company of many women and scores of men, or if he sometimes filled himself up with whiskey so that he could reel blindly across the night? What matter if he whooped with laughter and wet his lips in his brief boyish way and strided around town in his rough workboots and visored cap and yet at the same time felt lost, forgotten, deserted by something that he wanted and could never even imagine—it would all amount to the same thing. Joe would get married, have children, work, rage about in all his manliness, grow old and die, leaving more life behind him and die in dumb wonder with work-gnarled fingers and far-gazing wasted eyes. He could never know the immeasurable pricelessness of the present, the very moment of being his coarse, sensual, and beautiful self, and the women watched him and loved him because he was so blinded.
Young Peter, with his brooding ambition, a trifle slyer than the other brothers, but blinder by far, a pouting, disgruntled, lunging youngster with a thousand confused desires, who could look about him with profound wonder and glee and gravity, and at the same time never see himself there or anywhere, who chased the future with maniacal desperation and ran smackdab through all his days and nights with wild eager amazement, who would one day hurl himself against all stone walls available and get up sorrowfully to find some more, and be loved by women because he was so saddened—the mother knew him well also. He would catapult himself in loneliness towards more meaningless goals, like all men, and he was all so rueful, rough, noble and sensual in the eyes of this silent mother.
She knew that, though women are sometimes lonesome, men are always lonely. She knew all these things and yet there was no wonder in her heart, but peace, blissful contemplative womanly peace, knowing plainly the purpose of knowledge.
It is amazing how women are women, even in childhood. Little Elizabeth stands in the middle of the field watching her little brother Mickey make a fool of himself rushing around madly for more fuel for the fire, which rages at the mouth of a discarded sewage pipe, making the smoke spout from the other end of the pipe and dancing in the smoke like an Indian. Little Liz knows that this will add nothing to the natural peace of life. It’s supper-time, time to go home and eat and grow stronger, but Mickey wants to dance in the smoke, and make more smoke to dance longer, and he won’t go home to eat until he’s exhausted and bored with the smoking sewer-pipe.
“Come home! It’s time to come home!” she cries.
Mickey dances in the smoke. “Wheeeooo!”
He burns a finger in the course of the fire-dance, and when they get home Lizzy rubs butter on it to relieve the pain, and pushes him away saying: “You’re cra-zy! Go away!”
She watches him broodingly as he rummages around for cookies, she is silent as she watches him with his dirty face and hands, his burned finger, his snuffling nose, and
the way he scratches his head violently and walks off with the cookies to munch on them idiotically. “Cra-zy!” she says. But she follows him into the other room to watch some more.
The old man comes home from work and lights up a cigar and sits down with the evening paper, and when Ruthey asks him what he will have to drink with his supper he looks up with a dumb and startled look, stares at her with disbelief, rattles the paper, puffs on the cigar, and says: “Why, I don’t know, anything, I guess, anything at all.”
“But you got mad yesterday because there wasn’t any coffee.”
“Coffee?” he grunts, as though he had never heard of the stuff. “Well, that’s fine, coffee’ll be fine,” and he goes on reading the paper. And she stands for just a moment watching him, with a faint, helpless, skeptical shake of her head, a sudden faint grin that always says, “Isn’t that just like a man!” Then she goes back to the kitchen to make the coffee just the same.
And big Rosey knows them. She stands arms akimbo, a great warder of the keys to peace and comfort. She makes no bones about them: they are no more coarse, sensual, and beautiful than she is. (But yet she knows they really are.)
When by some chance the Martin house is empty of its men for a short while, the women in it—woman and child—are smitten with their own kind of lonesome understanding, and look at each other with feminine knowledge, in that smart and swift understanding glance that communicates all the depthless womanish comprehension there is in the world, and sometimes too they look at each other with feminine glee.
And the men rage on in loneliness.
[11]
In his senior year of high school Peter was sixteen. His shyness, his shrewd and dogged ways, his blue eyes gazing from underneath a shock of dark hair, his boyish pensive determination, were not in the least offset by his having grown a brawny, powerful physique. He was built like a rock: broad of shoulder and chest and girth and thigh, weighing close to a hundred and seventy pounds while standing only five feet eight. But still he was like a child. And no one noticed him in his school until the day of the first football game, when he scored three long-running touchdowns, and went back to the bench to rest until next week’s game while managers threw hooded jackets over him and patted him on the back, and the crowds roared.
He was publicized as a great “climax runner” in the newspapers. Instantly he had hundreds of friends, students and teachers alike, and he scarcely knew what to do about it all. In the company of his fellow teammates he soon learned the knack of limping and swaggering through the halls of the school in all the glory of a famous school hero. Yet when he was alone he continued to pursue a bashful and unobtrusive path through his world, always wrapped in deep thoughts of the future, and of future glory and triumph. Now he had begun to think of college, of being a great scholar and college football star, of being a great man eventually.
At the high school dances he suddenly found himself pursued by the young ladies, though he did not know how to dance, and on top of that could not have carried on a conversation with a girl for a minute without blushing and stammering like a rapturous idiot. Instead he hurried home and studied, and when his schoolwork had begun to seem trivial and too limited, he began to read Dr. Eliot’s “Harvard Classics” from shelf to shelf, thinking that in this way he would soon become conversant with all the knowledge in the world. He half understood what he tried to read and plunged on, trying to master everything in sight.
Towards the end of the season the Galloway team began to meet stiffer competition from teams all over New England and in time Peter found himself working like an ox on the gridiron. In some games when there were many injuries, he carried the ball all afternoon and plunged and dove and smashed his way on play after play, with fatigue, a bloody snarling mouth, a bruised and knotted body, and something that was like powerful disgust in his soul.
In the shower rooms after the big games, he and the other gladiators were watched broodingly by coaches and newspapermen and rabid followers as they undressed wearily, showered, dressed again and then sat in melancholy fatigue. There were banquets and testimonials and a thousand slaps on the back, and they were always weary and full of premonition of another week’s smashing brutality. But when they limped and swaggered around the streets of Galloway, or in the halls of the school, it was always glory, and they knew that was all they wanted.
In one game it rained in torrents upon a muddy field, the stands were filled with people who huddled under umbrellas and raincoats and newspapers, and Peter crashed and splashed his way through the misty, mud-splattered chaos, and exulted. And in the morning he saw his picture in the newspaper, a dark misty print covered with blotches and grotesque muddy figures, he saw himself driving forward in a fabulous world of darkness and rain and heroism: just as he had once seen the pictures of Bobby Stedman and Lou White long ago. This then was the completion of his first ambitions—but it wasn’t enough, there had to be more, there had to be much more.
The final game of the season, the big Thanksgiving Day contest in a concrete stadium that always drew enormous crowds, was the game of games, towards which all the enthusiasm and energy of the team, the school, and the followers were directed each year. The newspapers gave the game a front page spread in special editions, the two local radio stations carried a play-by-play account of the game over the air. Terrific rivalry was thus generated between the two opposing teams and between the two towns themselves, Galloway and Lawton.
Thanksgiving morning was the occasion for great migrations by auto and bus up the river to the great stadium, people bet on the outcome of the game on streetcorners, little children leaped about and screamed with delight hurling stuffed socks and stayed close to their radios when the game was on. The game could be heard over radios in poolrooms, fire stations, and police stations all over town. The streets of the towns on that morning were practically deserted; passers-by were in the habit of shouting to one another: “What’s the score now?”
That year both teams had rolled up powerful records in New England and were meeting for what promised to be a championship clash of “herculean proportions,” as the papers put it. Among the record crowd assembled in the big stadium that year were a good many of the Martin family who came to see their own kin represented in a great event, the Martin father himself at the vanguard of their grand entry into the stands. Men called to him and he waved back his cigar. He was tickled pink and he didn’t care who knew it.
With him were his wife, Joe, Mickey, Ruth and Elizabeth, all bundled up in warm clothing and flushed from the cold wind and the excitement. Flags whipped atop the rim of the stadium, brass bands blared and paraded on the white-striped field, great raw November clouds marched across the skies, everything was gray and windy and thrilling, and their own Peter was donning the attire of battle underneath the very stands where crowds roared.
It was the first football game in the Martin mother’s experience, and when she saw the parading bands down on the field, she cried: “I don’t see Petey? Is that him there?”
The old man laughed, and just then the Galloway football team appeared trotting out on the dark field, the crowds thundered in ovation, the drums sounded, and the old man cried. “There he is now! Marge, there’s your boy down there now!” And there were tears streaming down his cheeks. He didn’t care who knew it—he was proud enough to cry.
“Where? Where is he?” the mother cried.
“That’s him, Ma!” shrieked Mickey. “Number five. See him? In the back there! Hey! Hooray, Pete Martin!”
“Wheee! that’s my brother!” cried Ruthey.
“Does he see us?” asked the mother anxiously.
“Of course not!”
“My, but everyone’s cheering for him!” said the mother proudly. “Has he scored a touchball yet?”
Joe grinned. “Ma, the game ain’t even started, and it’s not touchball, it’s touchdown.”
“It’s so cold today, I hope he doesn’t fall down on that hard ground!” the mother said.
“My, everyone’s yelling their heads off!”
“Come on, Petey! Earn your turkey today, my boy!” howled the old man. “Score a touchdown and by God you can have both drumsticks!”
“Hey, Martin!” yelled a man several rows away. “After this game maybe he’ll be so hungry he’ll want to eat the whole turkey!”
“That’s all right with me!” howled Martin. “By God, that’s all right with me! He’s my kid and he can do what he likes!”