There Was a Time
Page 21
She took the pathetic batch home with her that night. She intended to read for half an hour or so. At midnight she was still reading. Then she wrote a note to Maybelle.
Maybelle and Francis were thrown into consternation when they received this message, and they loudly and violently accused Frank of “being at it again,” and “saying something.” What it was that he was being “at” or what it was that he was “saying” Frank never understood. He only heard accusations, and his sense of guilt haunted him again.
The note had requested Maybelle to call at the school, at four o’clock the next day, if convenient. It asked that Frank should not be present, which heightened Maybelle’s dark suspicions. “He’s stolen something!” she screamed to Francis, while Frank, his back to the kitchen wall, turned white as death. “They’ll have the police there! They’ll put him in jail, and disgrace us! I wish to God he was dead!”
It was the first time she had delivered herself of such a wish, so fervently, so sincerely, and Frank felt a dreadful sinking in himself, a horror. He had vaguely believed that, in spite of the beatings and revilements, his parents loved him in their way. Now he knew that they hated him, that they wished the earth to close over him. Then, as he did thousands of times in the coming years, he asked himself: Why? In his manhood, the mystery baffled and enraged him. Had he truly been as vile and foul as the treatment his parents accorded him would indicate? The leaden pool of guilt in himself expanded so that it crept into every crevice and boundary of his soul, and he was never to free himself of it, not even to the end of his life.
He crept up to bed, and lay there, shuddering, awaiting the appearance of his father with the strap. But Francis did not come. He and Maybelle were now accusing each other of responsibility in the crimes of their son. They almost came to blows. In the midst of it, Frank went to the bathroom and vomited. Now, for the first time, he was aware of a murderously sharp pain in the region of his chest, so intense, so cutting and burning, that it took his breath. He crawled back to bed, and lay there, certain that he was dying, and glad of it.
The next day was a hell of anxiety and apprehension. He would look at Miss Bendy with a kind of terror. What was she about to say to his mother? She saw his glances, and a hard iron knot of anger formed in her chest. She had never seen Frank’s parents, but she knew in some mysterious way.
At three o’clock, she patted his shoulder and said soothingly: “Your mother is coming, dear? Well, I have such a nice surprise for her. You run along now, with your little friend, Paul.”
Frank and Paul went away together, and for the first time in his life Frank spoke fully and objectively about his parents to his friend. They sat on the stoop of Paul’s house, and Frank, unable to restrain himself, poured out his bitterness, his disgust, his new hatred, his contempt, and his anxiety. Paul listened without speaking.
“I’d run away, if I were old enough,” Frank said, knotting his fists and staring before him with an expression that a boy ought not to have worn. “I’d go away and never see them again—never. I’d pretend they were dead. They—they’ve made me feel dirty. I didn’t mind the beatings so much, but they made me feel dirty.” He looked at his hands, unknotted them, and stared at his palms. “I feel I’ll never get my hands clean again. I feel dirty, inside.”
Paul said gently, knowing horror in himself: “You’re almost fifteen. You’ve only got to stand it for a few more years. You’ve stood it all this time. Then you can go away and pretend they are dead.”
But Frank went on, as if he had not heard: “It never occurred to me that other parents weren’t just like them. I—I thought it was natural, that all kids were beaten and treated like that. But now I see they aren’t. I see how your father is, and other fathers. What have I done? I don’t know. It must be something terrible, what I’ve done. I must be a—a terrible kind of person.”
“You’re not.” Paul put his hand on his friend’s arm and pressed it strongly. “Oh, Frank, you’re not! You’re wonderful. In some way, you’re wonderful. Maybe that’s it. They think the wonderfulness is criminal, or something, because you’re not like them. You’re not like everybody else, and that’s why people, and your father and mother, hate you.”
Frank turned his suffused eyes to Paul. Paul smiled, and the smile was tender. Frank tried to speak. Then, to his despair, he burst into tears. He bowed his head upon his knees and wept.
When Frank crept silently into the house at dinner-time, Maybelle greeted him in a peculiar voice. Her eyes shifted; her mouth sagged in an odd fashion. She said: “Go and wash yourself, Frankie. Tea’s almost ready, and your father will be here soon.” She hesitated. She went to him and roughly smoothed his hair. For the first time, his flesh crawled at her touch, and he backed away and shivered. But he was relieved at her tone, and washed his hands at the kitchen sink.
He was deeply curious about the interview that day. But he only saw Maybelle wink elaborately at Francis when the latter entered the house. He could not eat, though Maybelle urged him with a surprising anxiety. “Leave him alone,” said Francis, with disgust. “If he wants to die, let him.”
Maybelle said, with spirit: “That’s a fine way to talk, I must say. He’s got to eat, to keep up his strength. Look how thin he is, and he’s so white. Almost green.”
Frank went out after dinner, to wander through the dusky spring streets. Then he noticed that as he walked, if too fast, the pain would appear in his heart, catching his breath, numbing his body, causing him to lean against a tree for support until the spasm passed. He wondered why there was such a beating in his chest afterwards, such a sickness.
In the meantime, Maybelle was telling Francis of the interview with Miss Bendy. “She says he’s a genius, Francis, a genius. She says he is a real poet, a real writer, and that he must have the best of education, and will make us proud.” She looked at her husband with her somewhat protruding brown eyes, and waited.
“Rot!” said Francis angrily, rustling his newspaper. “Just a scheme to get him in some college and waste our money. They’re always up to such schemes, these teachers. Genius! It’s work for him, and damn soon, as soon as the damn Yankees will let him go to work. We need the money. He can get six or seven dollars a week in some factory, or something, and that’s extra money in the bank. Don’t tell me,” he added, with choler, “that you’ve let that damned old maid come over you? He’s a dreamer, that’s what he is, a silly dreamer. He’s got to wake up, him and his poems!”
But Maybelle was strangely silent. She played with the tableware and stared down at it emptily.
“It’s not that he does well in school,” continued Francis irately. “You know what his record is. And the other teachers detested him. You know that. That old woman’s got some scheme up her sleeve, to make us spend money. D’ye know what college’d cost? Have you given it a thought? It would take all our savings! And I’m damned if I’m going to stay in this hole just so that young rotter can waste his time in college!” Now his meagre face flushed with rancor and fury. “College! That’s the Yankees for you!”
Maybelle played with the tableware. “I wonder if she’s right,” she said, almost inaudibly. “She said he ought to have a chance, or something will be lost to the world. That’s what she said, so help me.”
Francis laughed furiously. “I can tell you what’d be lost! A wastrel, a fool! I never heard such blasted rot. If he’s got anything in him, which I doubt, it’ll come out without college. Work. Work, for him. He’ll go to work next summer at anything he can get, and be damned to him.”
Maybelle was again silent. A pinched expression came over her flabby features. She licked her lips. Then she said, in a dull voice: “I don’t know, Francis. What if she’s right? Think of all the money he could bring in as a writer—”
But Francis could no longer endure this nonsense. “Look here, you’re the one who’s been mithering me about going back to England! D’you want us to spend the money, just as things’re in sight? You want to stay here
in Yankeeland the rest of your life?”
CHAPTER 25
The world changed, that August of 1914, and though its vast and terrible upheaval did not at first impinge upon the life of Frank Clair, it changed it nevertheless.
It was a warm and golden summer, full of sunshine and birds and peace, until that most appalling day in August. A neighbor of the Clairs, more affluent than most, had purchased an automobile, with a canvas top painted to resemble leather, and a lofty chassis of the purest, most vivid and most startling red. One understood that only the rich could possess such a wonder, and the appearance of an automobile in that neighborhood was an event that furnished envious, admiring or sneering conversation for many a day. Frank, incredibly, was once invited for a ride.
Automobiles were nothing new on the street. They had been churning and roaring and smoking through the city for years, and no one screamed “get a horse!” as once had been the custom. But Frank had never ridden in a motorcar, though he himself had often sung “In My Oldsmobile.” This, then, was actually an Oldsmobile, and he was actually being invited for a ride. Stunned, disbelieving, for he had never been intimate with any neighbor, he climbed into the vehicle’s high back seat, clutched the sides, and was borne, breathless, through the streets at all of twenty miles an hour. The car rolled smoothly, but not without some inner gruntings and uncertain squeals, and after a while Frank sat proudly, elated, full of excitement, and surveyed the houses that passed so rapidly.
That ride, more than the assassination of the Archduke of Austria and his wife, had pertinence for him. The world had writhed in a sudden and awful convulsion, and Frank dreamt for days of his ride in the motorcar. The news in the papers was less annoying to him than the new song, “On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine,” and he spent hours, not in brooding alarm over the fact that England had declared war on Germany, but nursing his irritated reactions to the maudlin melody.
The Germans invaded Belgium, and Frank, on the urgings of Paul Hodge, read Pollyanna and had another occasion for wrath.
But finally the agitation of his parents, their passionate devotion to the newspapers, reached his consciousness. England was threatened. Someone, “that dirty Kayser,” had dared to challenge her supremacy. Frank heard nothing else during the dinners at his grandmother’s house. Mr. Farley said nothing, but his eyes sparkled angrily. He hated Germans, for the Germans in Bison had been sedulously stirring up animosity, suspicion and dangerous dislike against the Catholics of the city. Indeed, so unremitting had been their activities that the Catholics had been seriously alarmed, for more than one child, emerging from his parochial school, had been set upon by gangs and severely beaten. More than one priest, walking in his yard at twilight, meditating, had been injured by stones thrown by hoodlums. But still, Mr. Farley, who fervently hated Germans, as only the Celt can hate the Teuton, was annoyed by the fanatical outpourings of the Clairs, mother, son and wife. “To hear ’em talk,” he would say, “you’d think nobody had a right to live but the English, and that anyone who didn’t like the English, and didn’t think they were God’s chosen people, was a criminal or a fool.”
Mr. Farley fervently prayed that the Germans would be defeated and destroyed, and fervently hoped that this would end the rising tide of hatred against Catholics in America. But he hoped, equally fervently, that England would first receive a good trouncing, enough to put the fear of God in her heart, and reduce some of her arrogance. He felt that England was quite strong enough to administer the coup de grace to “the Kayser,” and was annoyed by Francis Clair’s angry demand that America go to war with Germany immediately. “If she doesn’t, you’ll have the Heinies swarming all over the country,” said Francis earnestly.
Mr. Farley felt certain that Americans were brave enough and strong enough to prevent such a disaster, and he said so. His manner was so abrupt that Francis, frightened, decided not to discuss the war in his employer’s presence.
At home, the Clairs talked of nothing else but the war. When the first Zeppelin appeared over London, and dropped the first bomb, they flew about like chickens at the sight of a hawk.
Great excitement burst over America soon after the outbreak of the war. Teddy Roosevelt demanded “immediate action.” Mr. Wilson timidly counselled patience. Congress heatedly discussed the situation.
Then the war, in September, bore in upon Frank.
The Germans of Bison went into action. (They were to display German flags on the very day that America declared war on Germany, in April, 1917.) In Bison, at least, they stirred up hatred for England and sympathy for Germany. They found listeners among the Poles, and among many of the Irish, who feared Germany less than they hated England. But fortunately the families of British descent were as yet in the majority, and the sedulous fomenting of the alien Teuton did not appreciably lower the anxiety and concern and affection for England in the city. Then the Italians, always friendly to England, who they had discovered was their only champion in the world, began to engage in street fights with the sullen Germans, and, contrary to expectations, often emerged the victors.
School Number 18 had a large quota of German-American children, who, though born in America, would and could never be part of her. American-born, they still used English with a taint of German phraseology and a slight but perceptible accent. Frank’s life at school, never happy, never without persecution, soon became unbearable. He saw again, as once he had seen, that he must fight. As long as the German boys confined their activities to calling him “bloody, bloomin’ Englishman” he ignored them. But when these oral activities threatened to quicken into physical assault, he made himself ready.
He did not have long to wait.
One gold and blue October day the hatred that followed him flared into violence. He and Paul Hodge had emerged from the school at quarter after three, confident that the streets would be empty of their persecutors, and discovered that a gang of five German-American boys was awaiting them. The boys were all hulking, surly-faced and porcine, their cropped heads thrust far forward on their necks, their clenched hands in their pockets. As always, the Teuton had resolved on an unfair fight. The five, it was arranged, were to attack the two boys en masse.
Frank and Paul halted, their way blocked by the others. All at once, though nothing had as yet been said and no overt act taken place, Frank’s flesh prickled, the hair on the back of his head rose, and he turned cold. Paul, as always, was impassive. He eyed the German youths with aversion, unaware of the tension in the air.
Then one of the Germans spoke: “You dirty—! You dirty bloody, bloomin’ Englishman!”
Frank said nothing. Paul shrugged. “Get out of our way,” he said clearly, in his musical voice.
The Germans burst into a piggish roar of laughter. One of them imitated Paul’s voice with startling accuracy. Paul flushed a dark unhealthy red. His fists clenched. But he made no move.
“We’re gonna kick the—out of you,” announced one of the Germans.
Frank stirred. He said, quietly: “One at a time, and I’ll show you.”
But the Germans naturally had no such intention. One at a time might possibly be beaten. Their hope lay in their weight, their numbers. They crouched forward, fists doubled, and moved towards Frank, who still made no move, either to advance or retreat.
Frank did not see Paul swiftly bend over, pull off his shoe, and hold it by the toe, behind him, as a weapon. The others did not see it either. As far as they were concerned, Paul was not in the fight. They detested him, but they ignored him. Their attention was all concentrated on the one boy they intended to injure as severely as possible. If Paul interfered, as they believed he would not, he would be eliminated at once. Nothing in his manner had ever indicated that he would display any belligerence.
There was one boy in the lead. Frank suddenly shot out his leg and caught him in the shins. With a howl, he doubled up and began to circle about the sidewalk, squealing with pain. He was now eliminated, at least temporarily, as an attacker.
He stuck out with his feet and his fists, bending his head, using it as a battering-ram. He used every means at his disposal in this unfair and vicious fight. He utilized his sharp elbows, the weight of his shoulder. But he was not overly strong, and now, in the desperate struggle, he felt again the paralyzing paroxysm in his chest. His arms, numbed, fell momentarily to his side, and he gasped aloud. One German used that moment to strike him full in the belly.
His nose had been punched, and the blood was running down his chin. His head was throbbing blindingly from the impact of the stone upon it. He could not see; there were sparks and blazes before his eyes. The pain in his heart had increased to an ominous agony.
Then he heard a sharp cry. Shaking his head free of the mists, he discovered that his attackers had fallen back. Paul was raging among them, wielding his shoe, a formidable weapon. He had stunned two of the boys, who had backed away holding their heads. Another, whimpering, moved to the edge of the curb, rubbing his wrist. Paul had fallen upon the oldest and strongest, and was beating his head with the heel of his shoe with a kind of wild and obscene joy. Then, with something that sounded like an eldritch scream, with talon-like hands he grasped the boy and sank his teeth into the side of his neck;
A kind of horror seized the German. For a long moment he stood there, his mouth agape, his eyes popping. Then, desperately, he tried to free himself. His hands plucked helplessly at Paul’s shoulders and arms. He began to scream, shaking his body from side to side, unavailingly.
Frank came to himself. The pain in his heart had subsided. He saw the shoe in Paul’s hand, and he seized it. Paul relinquished it unconsciously. Frank went after the whimpering Germans who were holding their heads. He struck them again and again, as they retreated, and even when they turned and fled in disorder, he pursued them for half a block. He returned to the one on the curb, who held his arms over his head and sobbed: “Don’t do it, please. Don’t do it. I didn’t mean anything—it was only fun.”