In the shop at Old Harbor, as when he had been a newspaper man in Chicago, the same thing always going on. Bruce had a technique of going along, doing the thing before him well enough while his mind went wool-gathering over the past and the present. Time ceased for him. In the shop, working beside Sponge, he had been thinking of Bernice, his wife, and now suddenly he began thinking of his father. What had happened to him? He had been a country schoolteacher near Old Harbor in Indiana and then he had married another school-teacher who had come down there from Indianapolis. Then he had got a job in the town schools, and when Bruce was a small boy had got a place working on a newspaper in Indianapolis. The little family had moved there and the mother had died. Bruce went then to live with his grandmother and his father went to Chicago. He was there still. Now he worked in an advertising agency and had got himself another wife and with her three children. In the city Bruce had seen him, perhaps twice a month, when father and son lunched together at some downtown restaurant. His father had married a young wife and she didn’t like Bernice and Bernice didn’t like her. They got on each other’s nerves.
Now Bruce was thinking old thoughts. His thoughts went around in a circle. Was that because he had wanted to be a man handling words, ideas, moods — and hadn’t made it? The thoughts he had as he worked in the factory at Old Harbor had been in his mind before. They had been in his mind on a certain evening as the chops sizzled in the pan in the kitchen at the back of the apartment in which he had lived for a long time with Bernice. It was not his apartment.
When she had fixed it up Bernice had kept herself and her own wants in mind and that was as it should be. She wrote her Sunday special stuff there and also worked on her stories. Bruce did not need a place to write as he did little or no writing. “I only need a place to sleep,” he had said to Bernice.
“The lonely man who fell in love with the dummy figure in the shop window, eh? Wonder how she will make it turn out. Why not have a sweet young girl, working in the store, step into the window some night? That would be the beginning of a romance. No, she will have to handle it in a more modern way. That would be too obvious.”
Bruce’s father was a funny chap. What a lot of enthusiasms he had gone through in his long life and now, although he was old and gray, when Bruce lunched with him he almost always had a new one. When the father and son went to lunch together they avoided speaking of their wives. Bruce suspected that because he had married a second wife who was almost as young as the son, his father always felt a little guilty in his presence. They never spoke of their wives. When they met in some Loop restaurant Bruce said, “Well, Dad, how’s the kids?” Then the father spoke of his latest enthusiasm. He was an advertising writer and was sent out to write advertisements of soap, safety razors, automobiles. “I’ve got a new steam car account,” he said. “The car is a whizz. It will run thirty miles on a gallon of kerosene oil. No gears to shift. As smooth and soft as riding in a boat on a calm sea. Lord, what power! They have to work out a few things yet but they’ll do it all right. The man who invented this car is a wonder. The greatest mechanical genius I’ve ever seen yet. I’ll tell you what, son, when this thing breaks it will smash the market for gasoline. You wait and see.”
Bruce shifting nervously about in his chair in the restaurant as his father talked — Bruce unable to say anything when he went out with his wife among the Chicago intellectual and artistic set. There was Mrs. Douglas, the rich woman who had a country home and one in town and who wrote poetry and plays. Her husband owned a lot of property and was a connoisseur of the arts. Then there was the crowd over on Bruce’s own paper. When the paper was down in the afternoon they sat about talking of Huysmans, Joyce, Ezra Pound and Lawrence. There was great pride in word-slinging. Such and such a man knew how to sling words. Little groups all over town talking of word men, sound men, color men and Bruce’s wife, Bernice, knew them all. What was it all about, this eternal fussing about painting, music, writing? There was something in it. People couldn’t let the subject alone. A man might write something, just knocking the props out from under all the artists Bruce had ever heard about — it wouldn’t be hard he thought — but after the job was done it wouldn’t prove anything either.
From where he had been sitting by the window of his apartment that evening in Chicago he could see men and women getting on and off street cars at the street intersection where the cross-town cars met the cars in and out of the Loop. God, what a world of people in Chicago! At his own job he had to do a lot of running about through Chicago streets. He phoned most of his stuff in and some fellow in the office dressed it up. There was a young Jew in the office who could fairly make the words dance over the page. He did a lot of Bruce’s stuff. What they liked about Bruce in the local room was that he was supposed to have a head. He had got a certain kind of reputation. His own wife didn’t think he was much of a newspaper man and the young Jew thought he wasn’t worth anything, but he got a lot of important assignments that the others wanted. He had a kind of knack. What he did was to get at the heart of the matter — something of that sort. Bruce smiled at the praise he was giving himself in his own thoughts. “I guess we’ve all got to keep telling ourselves we’re some good or we would all go and jump in the river,” he thought.
What a lot of people getting off one car and onto another. They had all been downtown working and now they were going to apartments much like the one in which he lived with his wife. What was his father like in his relations with his wife, the young wife he had got after Bruce’s mother had died. With her he had got three children, ready-made, while by Bruce’s mother he had never got but the one — Bruce himself. There had been plenty of time for more. Bruce was ten when his mother died. The grandmother with whom he had lived in Indianapolis was still alive. When she died she would no doubt leave Bruce her little fortune. She must be worth at least fifteen thousand. He hadn’t written to her for over three months.
The men and women in the streets, such men and women as were now getting off and on the cars in the street before the apartment. Why did they all look so tired? What was the matter with them? What he had in his mind at the moment was not physical tiredness. In Chicago and in other cities he had visited the people were all inclined to have that tired, bored look on their faces when you caught them off guard, when they were walking along through the streets or standing at a street corner waiting for a car and Bruce had a fear that he looked the same way. Sometimes at night when he went off by himself, when Bernice was going to some party he wanted to avoid, he saw people eating in some café or sitting together in the park who didn’t look bored. Downtown, in the Loop, during the day, people went along thinking of getting across the next street crossing. The crossing policeman was about to blow his whistle. They ran, little herds of them, like flocks of quails, escaping with their lives most of them. When they had got to the sidewalk on the other side a look of triumph.
Tom Wills, the man on the city desk down at the office, had a liking for Bruce. After the paper was down in the afternoon he and Bruce often went to a little German place where they could get drinks and had a pint of whisky between them. The German made Tom Wills a special rate on pretty good bootleg stuff because Tom steered a lot of people in there.
In a little back room they sat, Tom and Bruce, and when they had taken a few pulls out of the bottle Tom talked. He always said the same things. First he cursed the war and condemned America for getting into it and then cursed himself. “I’m no good,” he said. Tom was like all of the newspaper men Bruce had ever known. He really wanted to write a novel or a play and liked to talk about the matter to Bruce because he didn’t think Bruce had any such ambitions. “You’re a hard-boiled guy, ain’t you?” he said.
He told Bruce of his plan. “There’s a note I’d like to strike. It’s about impotence. Have you noticed, going along the streets, that all of the people you see are tired out, impotent?” he asked. “What is a newspaper — the most impotent thing in the world. What is the theater? Have you
gone much lately? They give you such a weariness that your back aches, and the movies, God, the movies are ten times worse, and if this war isn’t a sign of universal impotence, sweeping over the world like a disease, then I don’t know much. A fellow I know, Hargrave of the Eagle, was out there to that place called Hollywood. He was telling me about it. He says all the people out there are like fish with their fins cut off. They wriggle around trying to make effective movements and can’t do it. He says they all have an inferiority complex something awful — tired-out magazine writers gone out there to get rich in their old age, all that sort of thing. The women all trying to be ladies. Well, not trying to be ladies exactly. That isn’t the idea. They are trying to look like ladies and gentlemen, live in the kind of houses ladies and gentlemen are supposed to live in, walk and talk like ladies and gentlemen. It’s such a God-awful mess, he says, as you never dreamed of and you got to bear in mind the movie people are America’s pets. After you been there for a while, out in Los Angeles, Hargrave says, if you don’t go jump in the sea you’ll go crazy. He says the whole Pacific Coast is a lot like that — in that tone I mean — impotence crying out to God that it is beautiful, that it is big, that it is effective. Look at Chicago, too, ‘I will,’ that’s our motto as a city. Did you know that? They got one out in San Francisco, too, Hargrave says, ‘San Francisco knows how.’ Knows how what? How to get the tired fish out there from Iowa, Illinois and Indiana, eh? Hargrave says that in Los Angeles the people walk along the street by the thousands with no place to go. A lot of smart guys, he says, sell them lots — places out on the desert — because they are too tired out to know their own minds. They buy and then go back into town and walk up and down the streets. He says a dog smelling a street post out there will make ten thousand people stop and look as though it was the most exciting event in the world. I suppose he exaggerates a little.
“And, anyway, I’m not bragging. When it comes to impotence if you can beat me you’re a darby. What do I do? I sit at a desk and give out little slips. And what do you do? You take the slips, read them and run around town getting little items to be played up in the paper and you’re so impotent you don’t even write your own stuff. What’s it all about? One day they murder someone in this town and get six lines out of it and on the next day if they do the same murder they get played up all over every paper in town. It all depends what we got on just then. You know how it is. And I ought to be writing my novel, or a play, if I’m ever going to do it. If I write one about the only thing I know anything about, do you think anyone in the world would read it? Only thing I could possibly write about would be just about this stuff I’m always giving you — about impotence, what a lot of it there is. Do you think anyone wants that kind of stuff?”
CHAPTER SIX
ON THAT EVENING in the Chicago apartment Bruce sat having these thoughts and smiling softly to himself. For some reason Tom Wills, swearing at the impotence of American life, had always amused him. He, himself, did not think Tom was impotent. He thought the proof of the man’s potence could have been found just in the fact that he got so mad when he talked. It took something in a man to be mad about anything. He had to have some juice in him to do that.
He had got up from the window to walk across the long studio room to where his wife Bernice had set the table, still wearing the smile, and it was just the kind of a smile that disconcerted Bernice. When he wore it he never talked because he was living outside himself and the people immediately about. They did not exist. For the time being nothing very real had any existence. Odd that at such times, when nothing in the world was very definite, he was himself the most likely to do some definite thing. At such a moment he could have lighted a fuse connected with a building filled with dynamite and could have blown up himself, all of the city of Chicago, all America, as calmly as he could have lighted a cigarette. Perhaps he was himself, at such times, a building filled with dynamite.
When he was that way Bernice was afraid of him and was ashamed of being afraid. Being afraid of anything made her seem less important to herself. Sometimes she grew sullenly silent and sometimes she tried to laugh it off. At such times she said Bruce had the air of an old Chinaman poking around in an alleyway.
The place in which Bruce then lived with his wife was one of the sort of places that are being fixed up nowadays in American cities to house just such childless couples as himself and Bernice. “Married couples who have no children and do not intend having any — people whose aspirations are above that,” Tom Wills in one of his angry moods would have said. There were a lot of such places in New York City and in Chicago and they were fast coming into vogue in smaller cities like Detroit, Cleveland and Des Moines. They were called studio apartments.
The one Bernice had found and had fixed up for herself and Bruce had a long room at the front with a fireplace, a piano, a couch on which Bruce slept at night — when he did not go to Bernice, which he didn’t very often — and back of that was a bedroom and a tiny kitchen. Bernice slept in the bedroom and wrote in the studio, and the bathroom was stuck in between the studio and Bernice’s bedroom. When the couple ate at home they brought in something, usually from a delicatessen store, for the occasion, and Bernice served it on a folding table that could afterwards be put away in a closet. In what was called Bernice’s bedroom there was a chest of drawers where Bruce kept his shirts and underwear, and his clothes had to be hung up in Bernice’s closet. “You should see me diving about the joint in the morning in my shift,” he had once said to Tom Wills. “It’s a shame Bernice isn’t an illustrator. She might get some good stuff on modern city life from me in my B.V.D.’s. ‘The lady novelist’s husband getting all set for the day.’ Some of that stuff the fellows put in the Sunday papers and call ‘among us mortals.’
‘Life as it is’ — something of that sort. I don’t look at the Sundays once a month, but you know what I mean. Why should I look at the things? I don’t look at anything in any paper except my own stuff and I only do that to see what that smart Jew has managed to get out of it. If I had his brain I’d write something myself.”
Bruce had walked slowly across the room toward the table where Bernice had already seated herself. On the wall back of her was a portrait of herself done by a young man who had been in Germany for a year or two after the Armistice and had come back filled with enthusiasm about the reawakening of German art. He had done Bernice in broad lines of color and had twisted her mouth a little to one side. One ear had been made twice the size of the other. That was for distortion’s sake. Distortion often got effects you couldn’t get at all by straight painting. The young man had been at a party in Bernice’s apartment one evening when Bruce was there and had talked a lot, and a few days later, one afternoon when Bruce came from the office there the fellow was, sitting with Bernice. Bruce had had a feeling of having butted in where he wasn’t wanted and had been embarrassed. It had been an awkward moment and Bruce had wanted to back out after putting his head in at the studio door, but had not known how to do it without embarrassing them.
He had been compelled to do some fast thinking. “You’ll excuse me,” he said; “I have to go right out again. I’ve got an assignment on which I may have to work all night.” He had said that and then had gone hurriedly through the studio and into Bernice’s bedroom to change his shirt. He had felt it was up to him to change something. Was there something on between Bernice and the young chap? He hadn’t cared much.
Afterwards he wondered about the portrait. He had wanted to ask Bernice about it but hadn’t dared. What he had wanted to ask was why she had stood for it to be made to look as the portrait had made her look.
“It’s for the sake of art, I guess,” he thought, still smiling on the evening when he sat down with Bernice to the chops. Thoughts of Tom Wills talking, thoughts of the look on Bernice’s face and on the young painter’s face — that time he came suddenly in on them, thoughts of himself and the absurdities of his own mind and his own life. How could he help smiling although he
knew the smile always upset Bernice? How could he explain that the smile had no more to do with her absurdities than with his own?
“For the sake of art,” he thought, putting one of the chops on a plate and handing it to Bernice. His mind liked to play with phrases like that, silently and maliciously taunting her and himself too. Now she was sore at him because of the smile and the meal would be eaten in silence. After the meal he would go to sit by the window and Bernice would hurry out of the apartment to spend the evening with some of her friends. She couldn’t very well order him out and he would sit tight — smiling.
Perhaps she would go back into her bedroom and work on that story. How would she make it come out? Suppose a policeman to come along and seeing the man enamored of the wax woman in the store window and thinking him crazy or a thief planning to break into the store — suppose the policeman should arrest the man. Bruce kept on smiling at his own thoughts. He imagined a conversation between the policeman and the young man, the young man trying to explain his loneliness and his love. In a bookstore downtown there was a young man Bruce had once seen at an artists’ party to which he had once gone with Bernice and who had now, for some unexplainable reason to Bruce, become the hero of the tale Bernice was writing. The man in the bookstore was short, pale and wan and had a small neat black mustache and she had made her hero like that. Also he had extraordinarily thick lips and shining black eyes and Bruce remembered to have heard that he wrote poetry. It might be that he actually had fallen in love with a dummy figure in a store window and had told Bernice about it. Bruce thought that might be what a poet was like. Surely only a poet could fall in love with a dummy figure in a shop window.
“For the sake of art.” The phrase kept running through his head like a refrain. He kept smiling and now Bernice was furious. He had at any rate succeeded in spoiling her dinner and her evening. That at any rate he had not intended. The poet and the wax woman would be left, hanging in air as it were, unfulfilled.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 103
