John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

Why not campaign again through the length and

breadth to set up again the tottering word for the plain

people who wanted the plain word of God?

(crown of thorns and cross of gold)

the plain prosperous comfortable word of God

for plain prosperous comfortable midamerican folks?

He was a big eater. It was hot. A stroke killed him.

Three days later down in Florida the company delivered

the electric horse he’d ordered to exercise on

when he’d seen the electric horse the president

exercised on in the White House.

it was hot as a bakeoven going through the canal from Delaware City and turtles sunning themselves tumbled off into the thick ocher ripple we made in passing and He was very gay and She was feeling well for once and He made us punch of tea and mint and a little Saint Croix rum but it was hot as the hinges of Delaware and we saw scarlet tanagers and redwing blackbirds and kingfishers cackled wrathfully as the yellow wave from the white bow rustled the reeds and the cattails and the sweetflag and He talked about lawreform and what politicians were like and where were the Good Men in this country and said Why thinking the way I think I couldn’t get elected to be notary public in any county in the state not with all the money in the world no not even dogcatcher

He was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on the Fourth of July. Poor Mrs. Moorehouse could hear the firecrackers popping and crackling outside the hospital all through her laborpains. And when she came to a little and they brought the baby to her she asked the nurse in a trembling husky whisper if she thought it could have a bad effect on the baby all that noise, prenatal influence you know. The nurse said the little boy ought to grow up to be very patriotic and probably president being born on the Glorious Fourth and went on to tell a long story about a woman who’d been frightened by having a beggar stick his hand out suddenly right under her nose just before the child was born and the child had been born with six fingers, but Mrs. Moorehouse was too weak to listen and went off to sleep. Later Mr. Moorehouse came by on his way home from the depot where he worked as stationagent and they decided to call the kid John Ward after Mrs. Moorehouse’s father who was a farmer in Iowa and pretty well off. Then Mr. Moorehouse went round to Healy’s to get tanked up because he was a father and because it was the Glorious Fourth and Mrs. Moorehouse went off to sleep again.

Johnny grew up in Wilmington. He had two brothers, Ben and Ed, and three sisters, Myrtle, Edith and Hazel, but everybody said he was the bright boy of the family as well as the eldest. Ben and Ed were stronger and bigger than he was, but he was the marbles champion of the public school, getting considerable fame one term by a corner in agates he maneuvered with the help of a little Jewish boy named Ike Goldberg; they managed to rent out agates to other boys for a cent a week for ten.

When the Spanish War came on everybody in Wilmington was filled with martial enthusiasm, all the boys bothered their parents to buy them Rough Rider suits and played filibusters and Pawnee Indian wars and Colonel Roosevelt and Remember the Maine and the White Fleet and the Oregon steaming through the Straits of Magellan. Johnny was down on the wharf one summer evening when Admiral Cervera’s squadron was sighted in battle formation passing through the Delaware Capes by a detachment of the state militia who immediately opened fire on an old colored man crabbing out in the river. Johnny ran home like Paul Revere and Mrs. Moorehouse gathered up her six children and pushing two of them in a babycarriage and dragging the other four after her, made for the railway station to find her husband. By the time they’d decided to hop on the next train to Philadelphia news went round that the Spanish squadron was just some boats fishing for menhaden and that the militiamen were being confined in barracks for drunkenness. When the old colored man had hauled in his last crabline he sculled back to shore and exhibited to his cronies several splintery bulletholes in the side of his skiff.

When Johnny graduated from highschool as head of the debating team, class orator and winner of the prize essay contest with an essay entitled “Roosevelt, the Man of the Hour,” everybody felt he ought to go to college. But the financial situation of the family was none too good, his father said, shaking his head. Poor Mrs. Moorehouse who had been sickly since the birth of her last child had taken to the hospital to have an operation and would stay there for some time to come. The younger children had had measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever and mumps all year. The amortization on the house was due and Mr. Moorehouse had not gotten the expected raise that New Year’s. So instead of getting a job as assistant freight agent or picking peaches down near Dover the way he had other summers Johnny went round Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania as agent for a bookdistributing firm. In September he received a congratulatory note from them saying that he was the first agent they had ever had who sold a hundred consecutive sets of Bryant’s History of the United States. On the strength of it he went out to West Philadelphia and applied for a scholarship at the U of P. He got the scholarship, passed the exams and enrolled himself as a freshman, indicating BS as the degree he was working for. The first term he commuted from Wilmington to save the expense of a room. Saturdays and Sundays he picked up a little money taking subscriptions for Stoddard’s Lectures. Everything would have gone right if his father hadn’t slipped on the ice on the station steps one January morning in Johnny’s sophomore year and broken his hip. He was taken to the hospital and one complication after another ensued. A little shyster lawyer, Ike Goldberg’s father, in fact, went to see Moorehouse, who lay with his leg in the air in a Balkan frame, and induced him to sue the railroad for a hundred thousand dollars under the employers’ liability law. The railroad lawyers got up witnesses to prove that Moorehouse had been drinking heavily and the doctor who had examined him testified that he showed traces of having used liquor the morning of the fall, so by midsummer he hobbled out of hospital on crutches, without a job and without any compensation. That was the end of Johnny’s college education. The incident left in his mind a lasting bitterness against drink and against his father.

Mrs. Moorehouse had to write for help from her father to save the house, but his answer took so long that the bank foreclosed before it came and it wouldn’t have done much good anyway because it was only a hundred dollars in ten dollar bills in a registered envelope and just about paid the cost of moving to a floor in a fourfamily frame house down by the Pennsylvania freightyards. Ben left highschool and got a job as assistant freightagent and Johnny went into the office of Hillyard and Miller, Real Estate. Myrtle and her mother baked pies evenings and made angelcake to send to the Woman’s Exchange and Mr. Moorehouse sat in an invalid chair in the front parlor cursing shyster lawyers and the lawcourts and the Pennsylvania Railroad.

This was a bad year for Johnny Moorehouse. He was twenty and didn’t drink or smoke and was keeping himself clean for the lovely girl he was going to marry, a girl in pink organdy with golden curls and a sunshade. He’d sit in the musty little office of Hillyard and Miller, listing tenements for rent, furnished rooms, apartments, desirable lots for sale, and think of the Boer war and the Strenuous Life and prospecting for gold. From his desk he could see a section of a street of frame houses and a couple of elmtrees through a grimy windowpane. In front of the window was in summer a conical wiremesh flytrap where caught flies buzzed and sizzled, and in winter a little openface gas-stove that had a peculiar feeble whistle all its own. Behind him, back of a groundglass screen that went part way to the ceiling Mr. Hillyard and Mr. Miller sat facing each other at a big double desk, smoking cigars and fiddling with papers. Mr. Hillyard was a sallowfaced man with black hair a little too long who had been on the way to making a reputation for himself as a criminal lawyer when, through some scandal that nobody ever mentioned as it was generally agreed in Wilmington that he had lived it down, he had been disbarred. Mr. Miller was a little roundfaced man who lived with his elderly mother. He had been forced into the realestate business by the fact that his father had died leaving him building lots scattered over Wilmington and the outskirts of Philadelphia and nothing else to make a living from. Johnny’s job was to sit in the outer office and be polite to prospective buyers, to list the properties, attend to advertising, type the firm’s letters, empty the wastebaskets and the dead flies out of the flytrap, take customers to visit apartments, houses and buildinglots and generally make himself useful and agreeable. It was on this job that he found out that he had a pair of bright blue eyes and that he could put on an engaging boyish look that people liked. Old ladies looking for houses used to ask specially to have that nice young man show them round, and business men who dropped in for a chat with Mr. Hillyard or Mr. Miller would nod their heads and look wise and say, “Bright boy, that.” He made eight dollars a week.