He saw his father first, sitting on the small front porch; already he had known exactly what the house would look like. His father was unchanged, static, affable, resigned; age did not show on him at all, as it never had, on his cunning cherubic face, his vigorous untidy thatch. Yet Elmer discerned something else, something his father had acquired during his absence: a kind of smug unemphatic cheeriness. And then (sitting also on the porch where his father had not risen, also in a yellow varnished chair such as may be bought almost anywhere for a dollar or two) without any feeling at all, he listened to his father’s cheery voice telling him that his mother, that passionate indomitable woman, was dead. While his father recited details with almost gustatory eulogism he looked about at the frame house, painted brown, set in a small dusty grassless treeless yard, recalling that long series of houses exactly like it, stretching behind him like an endless street into that time when he would wake in the dark beside Jo, with her hand sharp and fierce in his hair and her voice in the dark fierce too: “Elly, when you want to do anything, you do it, do you hear? Dont let nobody stop you.” and on into the cloudy time when he had existed but could not remember it. He sat in his yellow varnished chair, nursing his yellow varnished stick, while his father talked on and on and dusk came for two hundred unhindered miles and filled the house where his mother’s fretful presence seemed to linger yet like an odor, as though it had not even time for sleep, let alone for death.
He would not stay for supper, and his father told him how to find the cemetery with what Elmer believed was actual relief. “I’ll get along all right,” Elmer said.
“Yes,” his father agreed heartily, “you’ll get along all right. Folks are always glad to help soldiers. This aint no place for a young man, nohow. If I was young now, like you are—” The intimation of a world fecund, waiting to be conquered with a full rich patience, died away, and Elmer rose, thinking if his mother had been present now, who refused always to believe that any flesh and blood of hers could get along at all beyond the radius of her fretful kindness. Oh, I’ll get along, he repeated, now to that thin spirit of her which yet lingered about the house which had at last conquered her, and he could almost hear her rejoin quickly, with a kind of triumph: That’s what your sister thought, forgetting that they had never heard from Jo and that for all they knew she might be Gloria Swanson or J.P.Morgan’s wife.
He didn’t tell his father about Myrtle. His father would have said nothing at all, and that brisk spirit of his mother’s energy would have said that Myrtle wasn’t a bit too good for him. Perhaps she knows, he thought quietly, leaning on his stick beside the grave which even too seemed to partake of her wiry restless impermanence, as clothes assume the characteristics of the wearer. At the head was a small compact palpably marble headstone surmounted by a plump stone dove, natural size. And above it, above the untreed hill, stretched an immeasurable twilight in which huge stars hung with the impersonality of the mad and through which Adam and Eve, dead untimed out of Genesis, might still be seeking that heaven of which they had heard.
Elmer closed his eyes, savoring sorrow, bereavement, the sentimental loneliness of conscious time. But not for long: already he was seeing against his eyelids Myrtle’s longwaisted body in the lemoncolored dress, her wet red halfopen mouth, her eyes widening ineffably beneath the burnished molasses of her hair, thinking Money money money. Anyway, I can paint now he thought, striking his stick into the soft quiet earth A name. Fame perhaps. Hodge, the painter
5
Angelo is one of those young men, one of that great submerged mass, that vigorous yet heretofore suppressed and dominated class which we are told has been sickened by war. But Angelo has not been sickened by war. He had been able to perform in wartime actions which in peacetime the police, government, all those who by the accident of birth or station were able to override him, would have made impossible. Naturally war is bad, but so is traffic, and the fact that wine must be paid for and the fact that if all the women a man can imagine himself in bed with were to consent, there would not be time in the alotted three score and ten. As for getting hurt, no Austrian nor Turk nor even a carabiniere is going to shoot him with a gun, and over a matter of territory he has never seen and does not wish to see. Over a woman, now— He watches the seemingly endless stream of women and young girls in hushed childish delight, expressing pleasure and approbation by sucking his breath sharply between his pursed lips. Across the narrow table his companion and patron sits: the incomprehensible American with his predilection for a liquid which to Angelo is something like that which is pumped from the bowels of ships, whom he has watched for two months now living moving breathing in some static childlike furious brooding world beyond all fact and flesh; for a moment, unseen, Angelo looks at him with a speculation which is almost contempt. But soon he is immersed again in his own constant sound of approbation and pleasure while autumn, mounting Montparnasse, permeates the traffic of Montparnasse and Raspali, teasing the breasts and thighs of young girls moving musical in the lavender glittering dusk between old walls beneath a sky like a patient etherised and dying after an operation.
Elmer has a bastard son in Houston. It happened quickly. He was eighteen, big blond awkward, with curling hair. They would go to the movies, say twice a week, since (her name is Ethel) she was popular, with several men friends of whom she would talk to him. So he accepted his secondary part before it was offered him, as if that was the position he desired, holding her hands in the warm purring twilight while she told him how the present actor on the screen was like or unlike men she knew. “You are not like other men,” she told him. “With you, it’s different: I dont need to be always.…” in the sleazy black satin which she liked staring at him with something fixed and speculative and completely dissimulant about her eyes. “Because you are so much younger than I am, you see; almost two years. Like a brother. Do you see what I mean?”
“Yes,” Elmer said, statically awash in the secret intimacy of their clasped faintly sweating hands. He liked it. He liked sitting in the discreet darkness, watching the inevitable exigencies of human conduct as established and decreed by expatriate Brooklyn button- and pants-manufacturers, transposing her into each celluloid kiss and embrace, yet not aware that she was doing the same thing even though he could feel her hand lax and bloom barometrically in his own. He liked kissing her too, in what he believed to be snatched intervals between mounting the veranda and opening the door and again when noises upstairs had ceased and the tablelamp would begin to make her nervous.
Then they went to four movies in succession, and then on the fifth evening they did not go out at all. Her family was going out and she did not like to leave the house completely untenanted. He was for starting the kissing then, but she made him take a chair across the table while she took one opposite and told him what type of man she would some day marry; of how she would marry only because her parents expected it of her and that she would never give herself to a man save as a matter of duty to the husband which they would choose for her, who would doubtless be old and wealthy: that therefore she would never lose love because she would never have had it. That Elmer was the sort of man she, having no brothers, had always wanted to know because she could tell him things she couldn’t even bring herself to discuss with her mother.
And so for the following weeks Elmer existed in a cloying jungle of young female flesh damply eager and apparently unappeasable (ballooning earnestly at him, Elmer with that visual detachment of man suffering temporary or permanent annihilation thought of an inferiorly inflated toy balloon with a finger thrust into it) though at first nothing happened. But later too much happened. “Too much,” she told him from the extent of her arms, her hands locked behind his head, watching his face with dark dissimulant intentness.
“Let’s get married then,” Elmer said, out of his mesmerism of enveloping surreptitious breasts and thighs.
“Yes,” she said. Her voice was detached, untroubled, a little resigned; Elmer thought She’s not even loo
king at me “I’m going to marry Grover.” This was the first he had heard of Grover.
I’m not running away, Elmer told himself, sitting in the inkblack boxcar while the springless trucks clucked and banged beneath him; It’s because I just didn’t think I could feel this bad. The car was going north, because there was more north to go in than south. And there was also in his mind something beyond even the surprise and the hurt and which he refused to even think was relief; what he told himself was, Maybe in the north where things are different, I can get started painting. Maybe in painting I can forget I didn’t think that I could feel this bad. And again maybe he had but belatedly reached that point at which his sister and brothers had one by one broken the spell of progression which their mother had wound about them like the string around a top.
Oklahoma knew him; he worked in Missouri wheatfields; he begged bread for two days in Kansas City. At Christmas he was in Chicago, spending day after day erect and sound asleep before pictures in galleries where there was no entrance fee; night after night sitting in railroad stations until the officials waked them all and the ones who had no tickets would walk the bitter galeridden streets to another station and so repeat. Now and then he ate.
In January he was in a Michigan lumbercamp. For all his big body, he worked in the roaring steamopaque cookshack which smelled always soporific of food and damp wool, scrubbing the bellies of aluminum pots which in the monotonous drowse of the long mornings reminded him of the empty wood dish of blue in the paint box of his childhood.
At night there was plenty of rough paper. He used charcoal until he found a box of blue washing powder. With that and with coffee-dregs and with a bottle of red ink belonging to the cook, he began to work in color. Soon the teamsters, axmen and sawyers discovered that he could put faces on paper. One by one he drew them, by commission, each describing the kind of clothing, dresssuit, racecourse check, or mackinaw, in which he wished to be portrayed, sitting patiently until the work was finished, then holding with his mates gravely profane aesthetic debate.
When February broke, he had grown two inches and filled out; his body was now the racehorse body of nineteen; sitting about the steaming bunkhouse the men discussed him with the impersonality of surgeons or horseracers. Soon now the rigid muscles of snow would laxen, though reluctant yet. Gluts of snow would slip heavily soundless from the boughs of spruce and hemlock and the boughs would spring darkly free against the slipping snow; from the high blue soon now the cries of geese would drift like falling leaves, wild, fantastical, and sad. In the talk of sex nightly growing more and more frequent about the bunkhouse stove, Elmer’s body in relation to women was discussed; one night, through some vague desire to establish himself and formally end his apprenticeship to manhood, he told them about Ethel in Houston. They listened, spitting gravely on the hissing orange stove. When he had finished they looked at one another with weary tolerance. Then one said kindly: “Dont you worry, bub. It’s harder to get one than you think.”
Then it was March. The log drive was in the river, and over the last meal in the bunkhouse they looked quietly about at one another, who perhaps would never see the other faces again, while between stove and table Elmer and the cook moved. The cook was Elmer’s immediate superior and czar of the camp. He reminded Elmer of someone; he coddled him and harried him and cursed him with savage kindness: Elmer came at last to dread him with a kind of static hypnosis, letting the cook direct his actions, not joyously but with resignation. He was wiry and hightempered; when men came in late to meals he flew into an almost homicidal rage. They treated him with bluff caution, shouting him down by sheer volume while he cursed them, but not offering to touch him. But he kept the kitchen clean and fed them well and mended their clothes for them; when a man was injured he tended the invalid in a frenzy of skillful gentleness, cursing him and his forbears and posterity for generations.
When the meal was over, he asked Elmer what he intended to do now. Elmer had not thought of that; suddenly he seemed to see his destiny thrust back into his arms like a strange baby in a railroad waitingroom. The cook kicked the stove door to savagely. “Let’s go to that goddam war. What do you say?”
He certainly reminded Elmer of someone, especially when he came to see Elmer the night before Elmer’s battalion entrained for Halifax. He sat on Elmer’s bunk and cursed the war, the Canadian government, the C.E.F. corps brigade battalion and platoon, himself and Elmer past present and to come, for they had made him a corporal and a cook. “So I aint going,” he said. “I guess I wont never get over. So you’ll just have to do the best you can by yourself. You can do it. By God, dont you take nothing off of them, these Canucks or them Limey bastards neither. You’re good as any of them, even if you dont have no stripes on your sleeve or no goddam brass acorns on your shoulders. You’re good as any of them and a dam sight better than most, and dont you forget it. Here. Take this. And dont lose it.” It was a tobacco tin. It contained needles of all sizes, thread, a pair of short scissors, a pack of adhesive tape and a dozen of those objects which the English wittily call French letters and the French call wittily English letters. He departed, still cursing. Elmer never saw him again.
Soldiering on land had been a mere matter of marching here and there in company and keeping his capbadge and tunic buttons and rifle clean and remembering whom to salute. But aboard ship, where space was restricted, they were learning about combat. It was with hand grenades and Elmer was afraid of them. He had become reconciled to the rifle, which a man aimed and pulled trigger with immediate results, but not this object, to which a man did something infinitesimal and then held it in his hand, counting three in the waiting silence before throwing it. He told himself that when he had to, he would pull the pin and throw it at once, until the stocky sergeant-major with eyes like glass marbles and a ribbon on his breast told them how the Hun had a habit of catching the bomb and tossing it back like a baseball.
“Nah,” the sergeant-major said, roving his dead eyes about their grave faces, “count three, like this.” He did something infinitesimal to the bomb while they watched him in quiet horrified fascination. Then he pushed the pin back and tossed the bomb lightly in his hand. “Like that, see?”
Then someone nudged Elmer. He quit swallowing his hot salt and took the bomb and examined it in a quiet horror of curiosity. It was oval, its smug surface broken like a pineapple, dull and solid: a comfortable feel, a compact solidity almost sensuous to the palm. The sergeant-major’s voice said sharply from distance: “Come on. Like I showed you.”
“Yes, sir,” Elmer’s voice said while he watched his hands, those familiar hands which he could no longer control, toying with the bomb, nursing it. Then his apish hands did something infinitesimal and became immobile in bland satisfaction and Elmer stared in an utterly blank and utterly timeless interval at the object in his palm.
“Throw it, you bloody bastard!” the man beside him shouted before he died. Elmer stared at his hand, waiting; then the hand decided to obey him and swung backward. But the hand struck a stanchion before it reached the top of the arc and he saw the face of the man next to him like a suspended mask at his shoulder, utterly expressionless, and the dull oval object in the air between them growing to monstrous size like an obscene coconut. Then his body told him to turn his back and lie down.
How green it looks, he thought sickly. Later, while he lay for months on his face while his back healed and young women and old looked upon his naked body with a surprising lack of interest, he remembered the amazing greenness of the Mersey shores. That was about all he had to think of. These people didn’t even know where Texas was, taking it to be a town in British Columbia apparently as they talked to him kindly in their clipped jerky way. On a neighboring cot and usually delirious was a youth of his own age, an aviator with a broken back and both feet burned off. It’s as hard to kill folks as it is to get them, Elmer thought, thinking So this is war: white rows of beds in a white tunnel of a room, grayclad nurses kind but uninterested, then
a wheel chair among other wheelchairs and now and then lady lieutenants in blue cloaks with brass insigne; thinking But how green it looked since it was quiet now, since the aviator was gone. Whether he died or not Elmer neither knew nor cared.
It seemed greener than ever when he saw it again from shipdeck as they dropped down with the tide. And with England at last behind, in retrospect it seemed greener still, with an immaculate peace which no war could ever disturb. While they felt through the Zone and into the gray Atlantic again he slept and waked, touching at times his head where endless pillows had worn his hair away, wondering if it would grow out again.
It was March again. For eleven months he had not thought of painting. Before they reached midocean it was April; one day off Newfoundland they learned by wireless that America had entered the war. His back did not hurt so much as it itched.
He spent some of his backpay in New York. He not only visited public and semipublic galleries, but through the kindness of a preserved fat woman he spent afternoons in private galleries and homes. His sponsor, a canteen worker, had once been soft pink and curved, but now she was long since the wife of a dollarayear man in Washington, with an income of fifty thousand. She had met Elmer in the station canteen and was quite kind to him, commiserating the mothy remnant of his once curling hair. Then he went south. With his limp and his yellow stick he remained in New Orleans in an aimless hiatus. Nowhere he had to go, nowhere he wanted to go, he existed not lived in a voluptuous inertia mocking all briskness and haste: grave vitiating twilights soft and oppressive as smoke upon the city, hanging above the hushed eternal river and the docks where he walked smelling rich earth in overquick fecundity—sugar and fruit, resin and dusk and heat, like the sigh of a dark and passionate woman no longer young.