Thomas Wolfe - Thomas Wolfe - Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel

Ben, however, was not to be intimidated by their cant, or deceived by their twaddle. He saw them with bitter clarity, answered their pretensions with soft mocking laughter, and a brief nod upwards and to the side of the companion to whom he communicated all his contemptuous observation — his dark satiric angel: “Oh, my God! Listen to that, won’t you?”

There was behind his scowling quiet eyes, something strange and fierce and unequivocal that frightened them: besides, he had secured for himself the kind of freedom they valued most — the economic freedom — and he spoke as he felt, answering their virtuous reproof with fierce quiet scorn.

One day, he stood, smelling of nicotine, before the fire, scowling darkly at Eugene who, grubby and tousled, had slung his heavy bag over his shoulder, and was preparing to depart.

“Come here, you little bum,” he said. “When did you wash your hands last?” Scowling fiercely, he made a sudden motion as if to strike the boy, but he finished instead by retying, with his hard delicate hands, his tie.

“In God’s name, mama,” he burst out irritably to Eliza, “haven’t you got a clean shirt to give him? You know, he ought to have one every month or so.”

“What do you mean? What do you mean?” said Eliza with comic rapidity, looking up from a basket of socks she was darning. “I gave him that one last Tuesday.”

“You little thug!” he growled, looking at Eugene with a fierce pain in his eyes. “Mama, for heaven’s sake, why don’t you send him to the barber’s to get that lousy hair cut off? By God, I’ll pay for it, if you don’t want to spend the money.”

She pursed her lips angrily and continued to darn. Eugene looked at him dumbly, gratefully. After Eugene had gone, the quiet one smoked moodily for a time, drawing the fragrant smoke in long gulps down into his thin lungs. Eliza, recollective and hurt at what had been said, worked on.

“What are you trying to do with your kid, mama?” he said in a hard quiet voice, after a silence. “Do you want to make a tramp out of him?”

“What do you mean? What do you mean?”

“Do you think it’s right to send him out on the streets with every little thug in town?”

“Why, I don’t know what you’re talking about, boy,” she said impatiently. “It’s no disgrace for a boy to do a little honest work, and no one thinks so.”

“Oh, my God,” he said to the dark angel. “Listen to that!”

Eliza pursed her lips without speaking for a time.

“Pride goeth before a fall,” she said after a moment. “Pride goeth before a fall.”

“I can’t see that that makes much difference to us,” said he. “We’ve got no place to fall to.”

“I consider myself as good as any one,” she said, with dignity. “I hold my head up with any one I meet.”

“Oh, my God,” Ben said to his angel. “You don’t meet any one. I don’t notice any of your fine brothers or their wives coming to see you.”

This was true, and it hurt. She pursed her lips.

“No, mama,” he continued after a moment’s pause, “you and the Old Man have never given a damn what we’ve done so long as you thought you might save a nickel by it.”

“Why, I don’t know what you’re talking about, boy,” she answered. “You talk as if you thought we were Rich Folks. Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“Oh, my God,” he laughed bitterly. “You and the Old Man like to make out you’re paupers, but you’ve a sock full of money.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said angrily.

“No,” he said, with his frequent negative beginning, after a moody silence, “there are people in this town without a fifth what we’ve got who get twice as much out of it. The rest of us have never had anything, but I don’t want to see the kid made into a little tramp.”

There was a long silence. She darned bitterly, pursing her lips frequently, hovering between quiet and tears.

“I never thought,” she began after a long pause, her mouth tremulous with a bitter hurt smile, “that I should live to hear such talk from a son of mine. You had better watch out,” she hinted darkly, “a day of reckoning cometh. As sure as you live, as sure as you live. You will be repaid threefold for your unnatural,” her voice sank to a tearful whisper, “your UNNATURAL conduct!” She wept easily.

“Oh, my God,” answered Ben, turning his lean, gray, bitter, bumpy face up toward his listening angel. “Listen to that, won’t you?”

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Eliza saw Altamont not as so many hills, buildings, people: she saw it in the pattern of a gigantic blueprint. She knew the history of every piece of valuable property — who bought it, who sold it, who owned it in 1893, and what it was now worth. She watched the tides of traffic cannily; she knew by what corners the largest number of people passed in a day or an hour; she was sensitive to every growing-pain of the young town, gauging from year to year its growth in any direction, and deducing the probable direction of its future expansion. She judged distances critically, saw at once where the beaten route to an important centre was stupidly circuitous, and looking in a straight line through houses and lots, she said:

“There’ll be a street through here some day.”

Her vision of land and population was clear, crude, focal — there was nothing technical about it: it was extraordinary for its direct intensity. Her instinct was to buy cheaply where people would come; to keep out of pockets and culs de sac, to buy on a street that moved toward a centre, and that could be given extension.

Thus, she began to think of Dixieland. It was situated five minutes from the public square, on a pleasant sloping middle-class street of small homes and boarding-houses. Dixieland was a big cheaply constructed frame house of eighteen or twenty drafty high-ceilinged rooms: it had a rambling, unplanned, gabular appearance, and was painted a dirty yellow. It had a pleasant green front yard, not deep but wide, bordered by a row of young deep-bodied maples: there was a sloping depth of one hundred and ninety feet, a frontage of one hundred and twenty. And Eliza, looking toward the town, said: “They’ll put a street behind there some day.”

In winter, the wind blew howling blasts under the skirts of Dixieland: its back end was built high off the ground on wet columns of rotting brick. Its big rooms were heated by a small furnace which sent up, when charged with fire, a hot dry enervation to the rooms of the first floor, and a gaseous but chill radiation to those upstairs.

The place was for sale. Its owner was a middle-aged horse-faced gentleman whose name was the Reverend Wellington Hodge: he had begun life favorably in Altamont as a Methodist minister, but had run foul of trouble when he began to do double service to the Lord God of Hosts and John Barleycorn — his evangelical career came to an abrupt ending one winter’s night when the streets were dumb with falling snow. Wellington, clad only in his winter heavies, made a wild sortie from Dixieland at two in the morning, announcing the kingdom of God and the banishment of the devil, in a mad marathon through the streets that landed him panting but victorious in front of the Post Office. Since then, with the assistance of his wife, he had eked out a hard living at the boarding-house. Now, he was spent, disgraced, and weary of the town.

Besides, the sheltering walls of Dixieland inspired him with horror — he felt that the malign influence of the house had governed his own disintegration. He was a sensitive man, and his promenades about his estate were checked by inhibited places: the cornice of the long girdling porch where a lodger had hanged himself one day at dawn, the spot in the hall where the consumptive had collapsed in a hemorrhage, the room where the old man cut his throat. He wanted to return to his home, a land of fast horses, wind-bent grass, and good whisky — Kentucky. He was ready to sell Dixieland.