Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (56 page)

Her round young weight lay heavy against him, her
warm young face turned blindly up to his own.  His brain reeled
as if drunken, he dropped his mouth awkwardly upon her parted lips. 
She sank back heavily on the pillows.  He planted dry and clumsy
kisses upon her mouth, her eyes, in little circles round her throat
and face.  He fumbled at the throat-hook of her waist, but his
fingers shook so violently that he could not unfasten it.  She
lifted her smooth hands with a comatose gesture, and unfastened it
for him.

Then he lifted his beet-red face, and whispered
tremulously, not knowing well what he said:

"You're a nice girl, Louise.  A pretty
girl."

She thrust her pink fingers slowly through his hair,
drew back his face into her breasts again, moaned softly as he kissed
her, and clutched his hair in an aching grip.  He put his arms
around her and drew her to him.  They devoured each other with
young wet kisses, insatiate, unhappy, trying to grow together in
their embrace, draw out the last distillation of desire in a single
kiss.

He lay sprawled, scattered and witless with passion,
unable to collect and focus his heat.  He heard the wild
tongueless cries of desire, the inchoate ecstasy that knows no
gateway of release.  But he knew fear--not the social fear, but
the fear of ignorance, of discovery.  He feared his potency. 
He spoke to her thickly, wildly, not hearing himself speak.

"Do you want me to?  Do you want me to,
Louise?"

She drew his face down, murmuring:

"You won't hurt me, 'Gene?  You wouldn't do
anything to hurt me, honey?  If anything happens--" she
said drowsily.

He seized the straw of her suggestion.

"I won't be the first.  I won't be the one
to begin you.  I've never started a girl off," he babbled,
aware vaguely that he was voicing an approved doctrine of chivalry. 
"See here, Louise!" he shook her--she seemed drugged. 
"You've got to tell me before--.  I won't do THAT!  I
may be a bad fellow, but nobody can say I ever did that.  Do you
hear!"  His voice rose shrilly; his face worked wildly; he
was hardly able to speak.

"I say, do you hear?  Am I the first one,
or not?  You've got to answer!  Did you ever?before?"

She looked at him lazily.  She smiled.

"No," she said.

"I may be mad, but I won't do that." 
He had become inarticulate; his voice went off into a speechless
jargon.  Gasping, stammering, with contorted and writhing face,
he sought for speech.

She rose suddenly, and put her warm arms comfortingly
around him. Soothing and caressing him, she drew him down on her
breast.  She stroked his head, and talked quietly to him.

"I know you wouldn't, honey.  I know you
wouldn't.  Don't talk. Don't say anything.  Why, you're all
excited, dear.  There.  Why, you're shaking like a leaf. 
You're high-strung, honey.  That's what it is.  You're a
bundle of nerves."

He wept soundlessly into her arm.

He became quieter.  She smiled, and kissed him
softly.

"Put on your clothes," said Louise. 
"We ought to get started if we're going out there."

In his confusion he tried to draw on a pair of Mrs.
Bowden's cast-off pumps.  Louise laughed richly, and thrust her
fingers through his hair.
 
 

At the Navy Yard, they could not find the Bowdens nor
Max Isaacs. A young sailor took them over a destroyer.  Louise
went up a railed iron ladder with an emphatic rhythm of her shapely
thighs.  She showed her legs.  She stared impudently at a
picture of a chorus lady, cut from the Police Gazette.  The
young sailor rolled his eyes aloft with an expression of innocent
debauchery.  Then he winked heavily at Eugene.

The deck of the Oregon.

"What's that for?" said Louise, pointing to
the outline in nails of Admiral Dewey's foot.

"That's where he stood during the fight,"
said the sailor.

Louise put her small foot within the print of the
greater one.  The sailor winked at Eugene.  You may fire
when you are ready, Gridley.
 
 

"She's a nice girl," said Eugene.

"Yeah," said Max Isaacs.  "She's
a nice lady."  He craned his neck awkwardly, and squinted. 
"About how old is she?"

"She's eighteen," said Eugene.

Malvin Bowden stared at him.

"You're crazy!" said he.  "She's
twenty-one."

"No," said Eugene, "she's eighteen. 
She told me so."

"I don't care," said Malvin Bowden, "she's
no such thing.  She's twenty-one.  I reckon I ought to
know.  My folks have known her for five years.  She had a
baby when she was eighteen."

"Aw!" said Max Isaacs.

"Yes," said Malvin Bowden, "a
travelling man got her in trouble. Then he ran away."

"Aw!" said Max Isaacs.  "Without
marryin' her or anything?"

"He didn't do nothing for her.  He ran
away," said Malvin Bowden. "Her people are raising the kid
now."

"Great Day!" said Max Isaacs slowly. 
Then, sternly, he added, "A man who'd do a thing like that ought
to be shot."

"You're right!" said Malvin Bowden.
 
 

They loafed along the Battery, along the borders of
ruined Camelot.

"Those are nice old places," said Max
Isaacs.  "They've been good houses in their day."

He looked greedily at wrought-iron gateways; the old
lust of his childhood for iron-scraps awoke.

"Those are old Southern mansions," said
Eugene, reverently.

The bay was still: there was a green stench of warm
standing water.

"They've let the place run down," said
Malvin.  "It's no bigger now than it was before the Civil
War."

No, sir, and, by heaven, so long as one true Southern
heart is left alive to remember Appomattox, Reconstruction, and the
Black parliaments, we will defend with our dearest blood our menaced,
but sacred, traditions.

"They need some Northern capital," said Max
Isaacs sagely.  They all did.

An old woman, wearing a tiny bonnet, was led out on a
high veranda from one of the houses, by an attentive negress. 
She seated herself in a porch rocker and stared blindly into the
sun.  Eugene looked at her sympathetically.  She had
probably not been informed by her loyal children of the unsuccessful
termination of the war. United in their brave deception, they stinted
themselves daily, reining in on their proud stomachs in order that
she might have all the luxury to which she had been accustomed. 
What did she eat? The wing of a chicken, no doubt, and a glass of dry
sherry. Meanwhile, all the valuable heirlooms had been pawned or
sold. Fortunately, she was almost blind, and could not see the
wastage of their fortune.  It was very sad.  But did she
not sometimes think of that old time of the wine and the roses? 
When knighthood was in flower?

"Look at that old lady," whispered Malvin
Bowden.

"You can TELL she's a lady," said Max
Isaacs.  "I bet she's never turned her hand over."

"An old family," said Eugene gently. 
"The Southern aristocracy."

An old negro came by, fringed benevolently by white
whiskers.  A good old man--an ante-bellum darkey.  Dear
Lord, their number was few in these unhappy days.

Eugene thought of the beautiful institution of human
slavery, which his slaveless maternal ancestry had fought so
valiantly to preserve.  Bress de Lawd, Marse!  Ole Mose
doan' wan' to be free niggah.  How he goan' lib widout marse? 
He doan' wan' stahve wid free niggahs.  Har, har, har!

Philanthropy.  Pure philanthropy.  He
brushed a tear from his een.
 
 

They were going across the harbor to the Isle of
Palms.  As the boat churned past the round brick cylinder of
Fort Sumter, Malvin Bowden said:

"They had the most men.  If things had been
even, we'd have beaten them."

"They didn't beat us," said Max Isaacs. 
"We wore ourselves out beating them."

"We were defeated," said Eugene, quietly,
"not beaten."

Max Isaacs stared at him dumbly.

"Aw!" he said.

They left the little boat, and ground away toward the
beach in a street-car.  The land had grown dry and yellow in the
enervation of the summer.  The foliage was coated with dust:
they rattled past cheap summer houses, baked and blistered, stogged
drearily in the sand.  They were small, flimsy, a multitudinous
vermin--all with their little wooden sign of lodging.  "The
Ishkabibble," "Seaview," "Rest Haven,"
"Atlantic Inn,"--Eugene looked at them, reading with
weariness the bleached and jaded humor of their names.

"There are a lot of boarding-houses in the
world," said he.

A hot wind of beginning autumn rustled dryly through
the long parched leaves of stunted palms.  Before them rose the
huge rusted spokes of a Ferris Wheel.  St. Louis.  They had
reached the beach.

Malvin Bowden leaped joyously from the car.

"Last one in's a rotten egg!" he cried, and
streaked for the bathhouse.

"Kings!  I've got kings, son," yelled
Max Isaacs.  He held up his crossed fingers.  The beach was
bare: two or three concessions stood idly open for business. 
The sky curved over them, a cloudless blue burnished bowl.  The
sea offshore was glazed emerald: the waves rode heavily in,
thickening murkily as they turned with sunlight and sediment to a
beachy yellow.

They walked slowly down the beach toward the
bathhouse.  The tranquil, incessant thunder of the sea made in
them a lonely music. Seawards, their eyes probed through the seething
glare.

"I'm going to join the navy, 'Gene," said
Max Isaacs.  "Come on and go with me."

"I'm not old enough," said Eugene. 
"You're not, either."

"I'll be sixteen in November," said Max
Isaacs defensively.

'That's not old enough."

"I'm going to lie to get in," said Max
Isaacs.  "They won't bother you.  You can get in. 
Come on."

"No," said Eugene.  "I can't."

"Why not?" said Max Isaacs.  "What
are you going to do?"

"I'm going to college," said Eugene. 
"I'm going to get an education and study law."

"You'll have lots of time," said Max
Isaacs.  "You can go to college when you come out. 
They teach you a lot in the navy.  They give you a good
training.  You go everywhere."

"No," said Eugene.  "I can't."

But his pulse throbbed as he listened to the lonely
thunder of the sea.  He saw strange dusky faces, palm frondage,
and heard the little tinkling sounds of Asia.  He believed in
harbors at the end.

Mrs. Bowden's niece and the waitress came out on the
next car. After his immersion he lay, trembling slightly under the
gusty wind, upon the beach.  A fine tang of salt was on his
lips.  He licked his clean young flesh.

Louise came from the bathhouse and walked slowly
toward him.  She came proudly, her warm curves moulded into her
bathing-suit: her legs were covered with stockings of green silk.

Far out, beyond the ropes, Max Isaacs lifted his
white heavy arms, and slid swiftly through a surging wall of green
water.  His body glimmered greenly for a moment; he stood erect
wiping his eyes and shaking water from his ears.

Eugene took the waitress by the hand and led her into
the water. She advanced slowly, with little twittering cries. 
An undulant surge rolled in deceptively, and rose suddenly to her
chin, drinking her breath.  She gasped and clung to him. 
Initiated, they bucked deliciously through a roaring wall of water,
and, while her eyes were still closed, he caught her to him with
young salty kisses.

Presently they came out, and walked over the wet
strip of beach into the warm loose sand, bedding their dripping
bodies gratefully in its warmth.  The waitress shivered: he
moulded sand over her legs and hips, until she was half buried. 
He kissed her, stilling his trembling lips upon her mouth.

"I like you!  I like you a lot!" he
said.

"What did they tell you about me?" she
said.  "Did they talk about me?"

"I don't care," he said.  "I
don't care about that.  I like you."

"You won't remember me, honey, when you start
going with the girls. You'll forget about me.  Some day you'll
see me, and you won't even know me.  You won't recognize me. 
You'll pass without speaking."

"No," he said.  "I'll never
forget you, Louise.  So long as I live."

Their hearts were filled with the lonely thunder of
the sea.  She kissed him.  They were hill-born.
 
 

He returned in late September.

In October, Gant, with Ben and Helen, departed for
Baltimore.  The operation, too long deferred, was now
inevitable.  His disease had grown steadily worse.  He had
gone through a period of incessant pain.  He was enfeebled. 
He was frightened.

Rising at night, he would rouse the sleeping house
with his cries, commanding terror with his old magnificence.