Of Time and the River & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
Eliza was in splendid condition now to ponder upon the death of others. Her health was perfect. She was in her middle-fifties: she had grown triumphantly stronger after the diseases of the middle years. White, compact, a great deal heavier now than she had ever been, she performed daily tasks of drudgery in the maintenance of Dixieland, that would have floored a strong negro. She hardly ever got to bed before two o’clock in the morning, and was up again before seven.
She admitted her health grudgingly. She made the most of every ache, and she infuriated Gant by meeting every complaint with a corresponding account of her own disorders. When badgered by Helen because of her supposed neglect of the sick man or when the concentration of attention upon the invalid piqued her jealousy, she smiled with white tremulous bitterness, hinting darkly:
“He may not be the first to go. I had a premonition — I don’t know what else you’d call it — the other day. I tell you what — it may not be long now —” Her eyes bleared with pity — shaking her puckered mouth, she wept at her own funeral.
“Good heavens, mama!” Helen burst out furiously. “There’s nothing wrong with you. Papa’s a sick man! Don’t you realize that?”
She didn’t.
“Pshaw!” she said. “There’s nothing much wrong with him. McGuire told me two men out of three have it after they’re fifty.”
His body as it sickened distilled a green bile of hatred against her crescent health. It made him mad to see her stand so strong. Murderous impotent, baffled — a maniacal anger against her groped for an outlet in him, sometimes exploding in a wild inchoate scream.
He yielded weakly to invalidism, he became tyrannous of attention, jealous of service. Her indifference to his health maddened him, created a morbid hunger for pity and tears. At times he got insanely drunk and tried to frighten her by feigning death, one time so successfully that Ben, bending over his rigid form in the hallway, was whitened with conviction.
“I can’t feel his heart, mama,” he said, with a nervous whicker of his lips.
“Well,” she said, picking her language with deliberate choosiness, “the pitcher went to the well once too often. I knew it would happen sooner or later.”
Through a slotted eye he glared murderously at her. Judicially, with placid folded hands, she studied him. Her calm eye caught the slow movement of a stealthy inhalation.
“You get his purse, son, and any papers he may have,” she directed. “I’ll call the undertaker.”
With an infuriate scream the dead awakened.
“I thought that would bring you to,” she said complacently.
He scrambled to his feet.
“You hell-hound!” he yelled. “You would drink my heart’s blood. You are without mercy and without pity — inhuman and bloody monster that you are.”
“Some day,” Eliza observed, “you’ll cry wolf-wolf once too often.”
He went three times a week to Cardiac’s office for treatment. The dry doctor had grown old; behind his dusty restraint, the prim authority of his manner, there was a deepening well of senile bawdry. He had a comfortable fortune, he cared little for his dwindling practice. He was still a brilliant bacteriologist: he spent hours over slides etched in flowering patterns of bacilli, and he was sought after by diseased prostitutes, to whom he rendered competent service.
He dissuaded the Gants from surgery. He was jealously absorbed in the treatment of Gant’s disease, scoffed at operations, and insisted he could give adequate relief by manipulation of the affected parts and the use of the catheter.
The two men became devoted friends. The doctor gave up entire mornings to the treatment of Gant’s disease. The consulting-room was filled with their sly laughter while scrofulous mountaineers glared dully at the pages of Life in the antechamber. As Gant sprawled out voluptuously on the table after his masseur had finished his work, he listened appreciatively to the secrets of light women, or to tidbits from books of pseudoscientific pornography, of which the doctor had a large number.
“You say,” he demanded eagerly, “that the monks petitioned the archbishop?”
“Yes,” said the doctor. “They suffered during the hot weather. He wrote ‘granted’ across the petition. Here’s a photograph of the document.” He held the book open in his clean parched fingers.
“Merciful God!” said Gant, staring. “I suppose it’s pretty bad in those hot countries.”
He licked his thumb, smiling lewdly to himself. The late Oscar Wilde, for instance.
21
During the first years of this illness Gant showed a diminished, but not a seriously impaired, energy. At first he had, under the doctor’s treatment, periods of tranquillity when he almost believed himself well. There were also times when he became a whining dotard over night, lay indolently abed for days, and was flabbily acquiescent to his disorder. These climaxes usually came on the heels of a roaring spree. The saloons had been closed for years: the town had been one of the first to vote on “local option.”
Gant had piously contributed his vote for purity. Eugene remembered the day, years before, when he went proudly with his father to the polls. The militant “drys” had agreed to advertise their vote by wearing a scrap of white silk in their lapels. That was for purity. The defiant wets wore “red.”
Announced by violent trumpetings in the Protestant churches, the day of atonement dawned on a seasoned army of well drilled teetotalers. Those wets who had victoriously withstood the pressure of hearth and pulpit — their number (aië, aië,) was small — went to their death with the gallant swagger, and with the gleam of purloined honor, of men who are to die fighting most desperately against the engulfing mob.
They did not know how gallant was their cause: they knew only that they had stood against the will of a priest-ridden community — the most annihilating force in the village. They had never been told they stood for liberty; they stood rubily, stubbornly, with the strong brown smell of shame in their nostrils, for the bloodshot, malt-mouthed, red-nosed, loose-pursed Demon Rum. So, they came down with vine leaves in their hair, and a good fog of rye upon their breaths, and with brave set smiles around their determined mouths.
As they approached the polls, glancing, like surrounded knights, for an embattled brother, the church women of the town, bent like huntresses above the straining leash, gave the word to the eager children of the Sunday schools. Dressed all in white, and clutching firmly in their small hands the tiny stems of American flags, the pigmies, monstrous as only children can be when they become the witless mouths of slogans and crusades, charged hungrily, uttering their shrill cries, upon their Gulliver.
“There he is, children. Go get him.”
Swirling around the marked man in wild elves’ dance, they sang with piping empty violence:
“We are some fond mother’s treasure,
Men and women of tomorrow,
For a moment’s empty pleasure
Would you give us lifelong sorrow?
Think of sisters, wives, and mothers,
Of helpless babes in some low slum,
Think not of yourself, but others,
Vote against the Demon Rum.”
Eugene shuddered, and looked up at Gant’s white emblem with coy pride. They walked happily by unhappy alcoholics, deltaed in foaming eddies of innocence, and smiling murderously down at some fond mother’s treasure.
If they were mine I’d warm their little tails, they thought — privately.
Outside