John Passos - 1919

That night Dick couldn’t go down to the train to meet Edwin the way he usually did. He went back to the Bayview with his knees trembling, and threw himself on his bed in his stuffy little room under the roof. He thought of killing himself but he was afraid of going to hell; he tried to pray, at least to remember the Lord’s Prayer. He was terribly scared when he found he couldn’t even remember the Lord’s Prayer. Maybe that was the sin against the Holy Ghost they had committed.

The sky was grey and the birds were chirping outside before he got to sleep. All next day, as he sat holloweyed behind the desk, passing on the guests’ demands for icewater and towels, answering inquiries about rooms and traintimes, he was turning a poem over in his mind about the scarlet of my sin and the scarlet of thy sin and dark birds above the surging seawaves crying and damned souls passionately sighing. When it was finished he showed the poem to the Thurlows, Edwin wanted to know where he got such morbid ideas, but was glad that faith and the church triumphed in the end. Hilda laughed hysterically and said he was a funny boy but that maybe he’d be a writer someday.

When Skinny came down for a two weeks’ vacation to take the place of one of the new bellhops that was sick, Dick talked very big to him about women and sin and about how he was in love with a married woman. Skinny said that wasn’t right because there were plenty of easy women around who’d give a feller all the loving he wanted. But when Dick found out that he’d never been with a girl although he was two years older, he put on so many airs about experience and sin, that one night when they’d gone down to the drugstore for a soda, Skinny picked up a couple of girls and they walked down the beach with them. The girls were thirtyfive if they were a day and Dick didn’t do anything but tell his girl about his unhappy love affair and how he had to be faithful to his love even though she was being unfaithful to him at the very moment. She said he was too young to take things serious like that and that a girl ought to be ashamed of herself who made a nice boy like him unhappy. “Jez, I’d make a feller happy if I had the chance,” she said and burst out crying.

Walking back to the Bayview, Skinny was worried for fear he might have caught something, but Dick said physical things didn’t matter and that repentance was the key of redemption. It turned out that Skinny did get sick because later in the summer he wrote Dick that he was paying a doctor five dollars a week to cure him up and that he felt terrible about it. Dick and Hilda went on sinning Sunday evenings when Edwin was conducting services in Elberon and when Dick went back to school that fall he felt very much the man of the world.

In the Christmas vacation he went to stay with the Thurlows in East Orange where Edwin was the assistant to the rector of the church of St. John, Apostle. There, at tea at the rector’s he met Hiram Halsey Cooper, a Jersey City lawyer and politician who was interested in High Church and first editions of Huysmans and who asked Dick to come to see him. When Dick called Mr. Cooper gave him a glass of sherry, showed him first editions of Beardsley and Huysmans and Austin Dobson, sighed about his lost youth and offered him a job in his office as soon as school was over. It turned out that Mr. Cooper’s wife, who was dead, had been an Ellsworth and a cousin of Dick’s mother’s. Dick promised to send him copies of all his poems, and the articles he published in the school paper.

All the week he was with the Thurlows he was trying to get to see Hilda alone, but she managed to avoid him. He’d heard about French letters and wanted to tell her about them, but it wasn’t until the last day that Edwin had to go out and make parochial calls. This time it was Dick who was the lover and Hilda who tried to hold him off, but he made her take off her clothes and they laughed and giggled together while they were making love. This time they didn’t worry so much about sin and when Edwin came home to supper he asked them what the joke was, they seemed in such a good humor. Dick started telling a lot of cock and bull stories about his Aunt Beatrice and her boarders and they parted at the train in a gale of laughter.

That summer was the Baltimore convention. Mr. Cooper had rented a house there and entertained a great deal. Dick’s job was to stay in the outer office and be polite to everybody and take down people’s names. He wore a blue serge suit and made a fine impression on everybody with his wavy black hair that Hilda used to tell him was like a raven’s wing, his candid blue eyes and his pink and white complexion. What was going on was rather over his head, but he soon discovered what people Mr. Cooper really wanted to see and what people were merely to be kidded along. Then when he and Mr. Cooper found themselves alone, Mr. Copper would get out a bottle of Amontillado and pour them each a glass and sit in a big leather chair rubbing his forehead as if to rub the politics out of his mind and start talking about literature and the nineties and how he wished he was young again. It was understood that he was going to advance Dick the money to go through Harvard with.

Dick had hardly gotten back to school as a senior the next fall when he got a telegram from his mother: Come home at once darling your poor father is dead. He didn’t feel sorry but kind of ashamed, afraid of meeting any of the masters or fellows who might ask him questions. At the railway station it seemed as if the train would never come. It was Saturday and there were a couple of fellows in his class at the station. Until the train came he thought of nothing else but dodging them. He sat stiff on his seat in the empty daycoach looking out at the russet October hills, all keyed up for fear somebody would speak to him. It was a relief to hurry out of the Grand Central Station into the crowded New York streets where nobody knew him, where he knew nobody. Crossing on the ferry he felt happy and adventurous. He began to dread getting home and deliberately missed the first train to Trenton. He went into the old dining room of the Pennsylvania Station and ate fried oysters and sweet corn for lunch and ordered a glass of sherry, half afraid the colored waiter wouldn’t serve him. He sat there a long time reading The Smart Set and drinking the sherry feeling like a man of the world, a traveller on his own, but underneath it all was the memory of that man’s trembling white hurt face, the way he’d walked up the area steps that day. The restaurant gradually emptied. The waiter must be thinking it was funny his sitting there that long. He paid his check, and before he wanted to found himself on the train for Trenton.

At Aunt Beatrice’s house everything looked and smelt the same. His mother was lying on the bed with the shades down and a handkerchief soaked in eau de cologne on her forehead. She showed him a photograph that he’d sent from Havana, a withered man who looked too small for his palm beach suit and panama hat. He’d been working in the consulate as a clerk and had left a ten thousand dollar life insurance in her favor. While they were talking Henry came in looking worried and sore. The two of them went out in the back yard and smoked cigarettes together. Henry said he was going to take Mother to live with him in Philadelphia, get her away from Aunt Beatrice’s nagging and this damn boardinghouse. He wanted Dick to come too and go to the U. of P. Dick said no, he was going to Harvard. Henry asked him how he was going to get the money. Dick said he’d make out all right, he didn’t want any of the damned insurance. Henry said he wasn’t going to touch it, that was Mother’s, and they went back upstairs feeling about ready to sock each other in the jaw. Dick felt better though, he could tell the fellows at school that his father had been consul at Havana and had died of a tropical fever.