For the first time I knew my mother was telling me stories and I was thinking. “Is Jesus real? Santa Claus and Jesus are close kin, I know.”
Mamma put down her knitting. “Santa Claus is toys and stores and Jesus is church.”
This mention of church brought to me thoughts of boredom, colored windows, organ music, restlessness. I hated church and Jesus if church was Jesus. I loved only Santa Claus and he was not real.
Mother tried again: “Jesus is as the holy infant—like Bonny. The Christ child.”
This was the worst of all. I squatted on the floor and bawled in the baby’s face, “Santa Claus is only parents! Jesus is—”
The baby began to cry and Mother picked her up and cuddled her in her lap. “Now you behave yourself, young lady; you’re making Bonny cry.”
“I hate that old ugly Bonny,” I wailed and went to the hall to cry.
Christmas Day was like a twice-done happening. I played with the monkey under the tree and helped Budge lay the tracks for the train. The baby had blocks and a rubber doll and she cried and didn’t play. Budge and I ate a whole layer of our box of Treasure Island chocolates and by afternoon we were jaded by play and candy.
Later I was sitting on the floor alone in the Christmasy room except for the baby in her play pen. The bright tree glowed in the winter light. Suddenly I thought of Rosa Henderson and the baby who was burned on Christmas Day. I looked at Bonny and glanced around the room. Mother and Daddy had gone to visit my Uncle Will, and Mary was in the kitchen. I was alone. Carefully I lifted the baby and put her on the hearth. In the unclear conscious of five years old I did not feel that I was doing wrong. I wondered if the fire would pop and went to the back room with my brother, sad and troubled.
It was our family custom to have fireworks on Christmas night. Daddy would light a bonfire after dark and we would shoot Roman candles and skyrockets. I remembered. The box of fireworks was on the mantelpiece of the back room and I opened it and selected two Roman candles. I asked Budge, “Do you want to do something fun?” I knew clearly this was wrong. But, angry and sad, I wanted to do wrong. I held the Roman candles to the fire and gave one to Budge. “Watch here.”
I thought I remembered the fireworks, but I had never seen anything like this. After a hiss and sputter the Roman candles, violent and alive, shot in streams of yellow and red. We stood on opposite sides of the room and the blazing fireworks ricocheted from wall to wall in an arc of splendor and terror. It lasted a long time and we stood transfixed in the radiant, fearful room. When finally it was finished, my hostile feelings had disappeared. I was quiet in the very silent room.
I thought I heard the baby cry, but when I ran to the living room I knew she was not crying nor had she been burned and gone up the chimney. She had turned over and was crawling toward the Christmas tree. Her little-fingered hands were on the floor, her nightgown was hiked over her diapers. I had never seen Bonny crawl before and I watched her with the first feelings of love and pride, the old hostility gone forever.
I played with Bonny with a heart cleansed of jealousy and joyful for the first time in many months. I was reconciled that Santa Claus was only family but with this new tranquility, I felt maybe my family and Jesus were somehow kin. Soon afterward, when we moved to a new house in the suburbs, I taught Bonny how to walk and even let her hold the monkey while I played the organ grinder.
A Hospital Christmas Eve
I MET CAROL a few days before the Christmas when we were both patients in the hospital for physical therapy. Carol was a very busy girl; she painted in watercolors, drew with crayons, and most of all she planned for her future. At that time, she was planning for a Christmas Eve party, for it was to be the first time in her life that she was going to walk with her new prosthetic legs to a party.
Carol was an amputee. She had been born with legs so twisted that when she was nineteen years old, she had them amputated.
On this Christmas Eve, there were loads of visitors in the ward, families and friends of the patients’ and parties organized by the hospital. But for Carol it was a catastrophe. The party she had yearned to go to was denied her because one of the legs was being repaired. It was going to ruin her Christmas Eve, and when I looked at her, I saw that silently, bitterly, she was weeping.
I asked her to come over to see me. She was very adept at her wheelchair and came over, still crying.
“Of all the times in the year this leg had to be fixed—just when I was so looking forward to walking to the party and showing my friends my new legs.”
We talked for a while, and I read to her the most living piece of literature, except for the Bible, that I know. James Joyce’s “The Dead.”
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
I read it as much to comfort myself as to comfort her, and the beauty of the language brought peace and loveliness to both of us on that Christmas Eve in that hospital ward.
She was a girl of magnificent courage, accepting the infirmities of her life with grace and equanimity. Still, I knew that she was troubled about the party, because she repeated, “Tonight of all nights, when I was going to walk in and show my friends.”
The doctors also were troubled, and suddenly, like a rising wind, there was a small commotion in the corridor. News was being passed around that Carol’s leg was going to be fixed in time and she could go to her party, after all. There was general rejoicing in the nine-bed ward, and Carol wept again, with excitement.
When it was time for the party to begin, Carol was dressed immaculately and wearing her finest clothes. Her legs were brought to her, and she used the skills for walking that she had been taught so very recently. A doctor looked in the doorway to see how she was getting on, and the therapist said, “Good girl, Carol.”
She checked the straps on her prosthetic legs, and then she struggled to get into a standing position, and with her head held high, she walked proudly down the corridor of the ward to where her friends were waiting for her.
I knew that the long months of suffering, heroism, hard work and courage had paid off and that Carol would really be all right.
The last time I heard from her, she was attending college, joining in all the student activities, and was planning to teach physio-therapy after graduation.
THE WAR YEARS
Look Homeward, Americans
FROM THE WINDOWS of my rooms in Brooklyn, there is a view of the Manhattan sky-line. The sky-scrapers, pastel mauve and yellow in colour, rise up sharp as stalagmites against the sky. My windows overlook the harbour, the grey East River, and the Brooklyn Bridge. In the night, there are the lonesome calls of the boats on the river and at sea. This water-front neighbourhood is the place where Thomas Wolfe used to live, and Hart Crane. Often when I am loafing by the window, looking out at the lights and the bright traffic crossing the Bridge, I think of them. And I am homesick in a way that they were often homesick.
It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or the country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as
not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers. Poe turned inward to discover an eerie and glowing world of his own. Whitman, that noblest of vagabonds, saw life as a broad open road. Henry James abandoned his own adolescent country for England and the airy decadence of nineteenth-century drawing-rooms. Melville sent out his Captain Ahab to self-destruction in the mad sailing for the great white whale. And Wolfe and Crane—they wandered for a lifetime, and I am not sure they knew themselves just what it was they sought.
But these writers, our spokesmen, are dead. And although the harbour and the Bridge instinctively make me think of them, I have these days remembered also a friend of mine from whom I got a card a couple of weeks ago.
My friend is named Lester, and he lives down in North Carolina. Lester is about twenty years old with a gangling body and a pleasant, sunburned face. He has some responsibility, as he is the eldest child in the family and his father is dead. He and his mother have a little store and filling-station on Highway U.S. 1. This road runs from New York down through to Miami. It cuts through the long coastal plain that lies between the Appalachian Hills and the Atlantic. There are thousands of stands and filling-stations on this highway.
Lester takes care of the gas-pump and waits behind the counter of the store. This filling-station is out in the country a few miles from the town where I used to live, so sometimes when I was out walking in the woods I would stop in and warm myself by the stove and drink a glass of beer. Coming out of the pine woods and crossing the grey winter fields, it was good to see the lights ahead.
In the afternoon, the store would be cosy and quiet, with the air smelling of sawdust and smoke, and with the sleepy ticking of a clock the only sound in the room. Sometimes Lester would be out hunting and would come in as I was drinking my beer. He would come in from the frosty twilight with his wet-nosed hound, and maybe in his sack there would be a couple of quail for his mother to fry at suppertime. Other days, if the weather were warm, I would watch Lester just sitting on a crate by the gas-pump, a peaceful halo of flies around his head, waiting for some tourist to pass along the road and stop for service.
Lester was a great traveller. He had hitch-hiked a good deal and seen much of the country. But mostly he had travelled in his mind. On the shelf behind the counter of the store there were stacks of old National Geographics and a collection of atlases. When I knew Lester first it was long before the war had started, and the maps were different then. “Paris, France,” Lester would say to me. “That’s where I mean to go someday. And Russia and India and down in the jungles of Africa—”
It was a passion with Lester—this hunger to know the world. As he talked of the cities of Europe, his grey eyes widened, and there was about them a quality of quiet craziness. Sometimes as we were sitting there, a car would pull up to the gas-pump, and the manner in which Lester treated the customer would depend on several things. If the driver were known to him, someone from those parts, Lester did not put himself to much trouble. But if the licence plate were from some distant place, such as New York or California, he polished the windshield lovingly, and his voice became gentle and slurred.
He had a deft way of extracting information as to the places the tourist had seen in his lifetime. Once a man stopped who had lived in Paris, and Lester made friends with him and got him drunk on white-lightning so that the customer had to stay overnight in the town.
Lester did not often talk about the places he had actually seen, but he knew much of America. A couple of years before he had gone into the C.C.C. and had been sent out to the forests of Oregon. He had passed over the prairies of the Middle West and seen the tawny wheat-fields under the summer sun. He had crossed the Rockies and looked out on the magnificence of the Pacific Ocean.
Then later, after a year in the Oregon camp, he had stayed for a while with an uncle in San Diego. On his way home again, he had hitch-hiked and taken a zigzagged course—through Arizona, Texas, the delta of the Mississippi. He had seen south Georgia in peach time and discovered the lazy grandeur of Charleston. He had come back to North Carolina in time for the tobacco harvest, after having been away from home two years.
But about this odyssey Lester did not talk much. His longing was never for home, or for the places he had seen and known and made a part of himself. He hungered always for the alien, the country far away and unattainable. And in the meantime he was wretched in his own countryside, and waited by the gas-pump thinking always of distant things.
When the war started, Lester did not concern himself as much with the happenings in Europe as I had expected. He was convinced that the war could not last longer than a few months because Hitler would run out of gasoline. Then in the late spring I went away and did not hear from him until his card reached me this autumn. He mentioned the tobacco crop and told me his hound had got mange. At the end he wrote: “Look at what happened to the places I meant to go. There is certainly one thing about this war. It leaves you no place to be homesick for.”
A lonely little store and gas-pump down on Highway U.S. 1 seems far away from the harbour of Manhattan. And Lester, a foot-loose adolescent, does not appear to have very much in common with our poets of the time before the war—with Wolfe and Hart Crane. But their longing, their restlessness, their turning to the unknown is the same.
There are thousands of Lesters, but poets come rarely and are the spiritual syntheses of their time and place. And the world of these poets, and of all of us who lived before this debacle, has been ruthlessly amputated from the world of today. Frontiers, both of the earth and of the spirit, were open to them and have since been closed to us. America is now isolated in a way that we never before could have foreseen.
The Manhattan harbour is quiet this year. Wolfe and Hart Crane no longer wander in these water-front streets—Wolfe maddened by unfocused longing. Hart Crane sick for a nameless place and broken and inflamed by drink. The harbour, yes, is quieter now, and the great ships from abroad do not come to port so often any more. Most of the boats I see from my windows are the small sort that did not go out far from shore. In the late autumn afternoons, a soft fog veils the sky-line of Manhattan. There is a sadness about this scene. And no wonder—a sky-line facing outward toward the Atlantic and the grim convulsions of the world beyond. Not only sad, but somehow hopeless.
So we must turn inward. This singular emotion, the nostalgia that has been so much a part of our national character, must be converted to good use. What our seekers have sought for we must find. And this is a great, a creative task. America is youthful, but it can not always be young. Like an adolescent who must part with his broken family, America feels now the shock of transition. But a new and serene maturity will come if it is worked for. We must make a new declaration of independence, a spiritual rather than a political one this time. No place to be homesick for. We must now be homesick for our own familiar land, this land that is worthy of our nostalgia.
Night Watch Over Freedom
ON THIS NIGHT—the last dark evening of the old year and the first morning of the new—there will be listeners over all the earth. Big Ben will sound at midnight. It may be that in the last hour the Clock Tower itself will be damaged or destroyed. But even so the bells of Big Ben will be heard. For there is a tense listening independent of the ear, a listening that causes the blood to wait and the heart itself for a moment to be hushed.
England will hear Big Ben in darkness. Perhaps as the hour is tolled, there will be the roar of explosives and the deathly murmur of bombing planes—or the night may be a quiet one over there. In any case the bell will sound in our mind’s ear. And these will be among the listeners: the sentries keeping watch over the dark channel; the city people in the air-raid shelters; and the homeless
who huddle together on the platforms of the tubes; old farmers in wayside pubs. In the wards of hospitals the hurt and restless they also will hear. And somewhere a frightened child with an upturned face. A rough, rosy soldier on duty at an airport will blow warm breath into his cupped hands, stamp on the frosty ground, and stand silent for a moment at midnight. These, then, will hear—for the sound will echo through the cities and all the countryside of the dark island.
Nor will the echoes stop there. The time will not actually be midnight everywhere. But the twelve slow strokes will for a moment seem to effect a synthesis of time throughout the world. In the defeated lands Big Ben will bring hope and, to the souls of many, a fevered quiver of rebellion. And if the people of the Axis countries were allowed to hear this bell who knows what their feelings and their doubts might be?
We in America will be listeners on this New Year. In all the states the tones of Big Ben will be broadcast. From Oregon to Georgia, in the homes of the comfortable who taste egg-nog from silver cups and in the grim tenements of the poor, the English New Year will be heard. Down in the South it will be early evening. Quiet, orange firelight will flicker on kitchen walls, and in the cupboards there will be the hog-jowl and the black-eyed peas to bring good fortune in the coming year. On the Pacific coast the sun will still be shining. In the Northern homes, with the cold blue glow of snow outside, the gathered families will wait for the hour.
On this night, London may be grey with fog, or the clean moonlight may make of the Clock Tower a silhouette against the winter sky. But when the bells sound it will be the heartbeat of warring Britain—somber, resonant, and deeply sure. Yes, Big Ben will ring again this New Year, and over all the earth there will be listeners.
We Carried Our Banners—We Were Pacifists, Too