The golden smoothness of the case warmed in his hand. He heard its loud ticking. It was his father’s heart, and he could feel the pulsations. Now the wild pain fanned out in him, and he clenched his teeth and bore down on it, despising himself.
The room faded from his sight. He was sitting beside his father’s bed, the day before Francis had died.
His father’s brief and spectacular illness had not impressed him very much. He was accustomed to his mother’s whining about her health. Now, he decided, his father for once had taken the spotlight, and was sedulously playing in it. So, while he was at work, he did not think of Francis at all. Besides, it had been so long since he had given much thought to his parents.
The October day had been a yellow hard loveliness. Everything shone in that strong yellowness, was one with it, sunlight, trees, the light on passing faces, the light on the edges of brick buildings, along the curbs of the street, on the dusty windows of streetcars—everything had been plated with that brassy and metallic light. Everything, except the sky, burning and flaming overhead like an arch of deep aquamarine. It had no depths, that sky; it was a fixed arch, cunningly cut out of one enormous rounded gem, so blue that it was unreal. Frank, in the early evening, had left the Curtiss plant, and had missed a car or two, in order to see that sky and that goldenness before it all faded. And as he walked, seeing, but not feeling, enjoying, yet not participating, delighting without rapture, he remembered that it was on such an evening, while he wandered along the railroad tracks at the foot of Ferry Street, that he had seen that accident.
He had been fourteen then, and he was playing truant from school. He had had a lovely day, wandering, seeing, absorbing, dreaming. He had almost reached Ferry Street when he saw the little boy, scarcely ten, throwing a ball into the air and catching it. The little boy was shabby, and even though the day was not warm, he was barefoot. A son of a squatter on the towpath, a boy with hair as yellow and metallic as the late afternoon sun, with a face so pink and so dirty and so happy that it touched the heart to see it.
A train was coming around a slight bend, moaning like a legion of the damned as it approached the crossing. The boy was completely unaware of it as he played with his ball, and tossed it high in the air. It was a red ball, obviously new and possibly stolen. As the ball soared towards the sky, the boy leapt upward with it, eagerly, strainingly, arms flung up, small fingers spread out, bare feet and legs lifted like those of a young, flying Hermes, golden hair blown back like sharp wings. Frank could see his profile, pure and exalted, and he could sense the passionate urge to fly, to soar, with the ball, that filled the boy. He could feel, in the sensitive flesh of himself, something else as he watched the boy and the ball; he could feel the upward surging of all humanity in the boy’s desire to ascend, to be weightless, to skim through the bright radiance of the air, to be done with flesh and death and ugliness and pain, to be lifted to the sun. He himself was only fourteen, yet he had felt a stab of anguish, of knowledge, and yet, of ecstasy, for that slender, impotent, but somehow glorious striving.
Again the ball was thrown up, again the boy leapt. But when the ball fell towards the earth again, a tiny globe of red, it missed the reaching hands. It fell to the ground, rolled foolishly down the slight incline to the tracks, fell between the glittering rails. The boy bounded after it. Frank, petrified, opened his mouth to cry out, but no sound came from a throat suddenly seized in iron hands. He had tried to take a running step towards the little boy, and then he was held there as if his whole body had turned to ice. He tried to close his eyes, but they were held open, inexorably, forced to see what they must see. It all happened in an instant or two. The engineer of the train put on the brakes desperately. There was a horrible squealing and groaning in the air, a grinding thunder, the scream of a whistle. But there was nothing that could be done. Like a giant monster sliding on its haunches in the dust, the engine by its very momentum was forced upon the stooping child. It was then that Frank could close his eyes.
He could never remember the next few minutes. He knew only that when he opened his swimming eyes a small crowd had gathered out of nowhere, shabby men in overalls and sweaters, crying women wringing their hands, curious, gaping children. There the train stood, beaded along the sides with the heads that craned from open windows. The engineer was standing on the tracks, sobbing loudly, harshly, while his fireman tried to console him. Male passengers were beginning to swing themselves off the train, and came running. The air was filled with exclamations, cries, calls, curses, so that it sounded like a jungle. And then a woman screamed, a fat, untidy little woman in a gingham dress, a woman who had run from a squatter’s hut nearby. Frank could see the spirals of her black hair, her gypsy hair, her blank white face, as she joined the engineer and the morbid crowd which had gathered at the steaming head of the engine. He heard her scream, over and over, mad, demented, breathless screams. But the thing over which she was screaming, that bright soaring thing, made no sound at all, would never make it again.
His legs were trembling; he could feel trickles of sweat dripping down them. He turned away, wanting to run, to run forever, his inner vision imprinted with the memory of the ascending child against a blazing blue sky. But now the child did not return to earth. He soared away, was lost in the sun.
Frank’s foot touched something, which rolled. In some inexplicable way, the ball had been tossed back onto the path, unhurt, red and untouched. He picked it up. It was as warm as flesh, as red as blood. It was innocent. It was printed all over with the small fingers of the boy who had held it, who would never toss it again. It palpitated in Frank’s hand, burned into his skin. He carried it down to the Canal; he threw it into the water. He watched it bob a moment or two, then, filling up with water through an unsuspected hole, it slowly sank.
He did not know then that it was pure and uncorrupted compassion which he had felt. But he knew it on this October day, as he walked home through the golden light of the autumn evening. What a silly damned kid he had been! What a crazy kid! Mooning like a maudlin idiot over the death of a towpath brat, who, if he had lived, would have been a drunken, thieving sort like his squatter father, would, most probably, have ended his days in a prison or on the gallows. But he had stood there, watching the ball sink, weeping his idiotic, sentimental tears. The vision of the ascending child, pure and clean and eager against the sky, was blurred, was dimmed, was all but forgotten.
He said to himself this evening in October as he waited on the next corner for a streetcar: I had such imbecile heroic thoughts in those days when I was a kid! I could puke when I think of them. I was going to save the world; I was going to write idiot stories of such as that towpath brat. I was going to bring pity and love and joy and poetry to all other men! The outrageous, the impudent effrontery of me!
The mirror of his mind became as blurred as the mirror over his mother’s sink, steamed over, marked, blotched, a hard sheet that reflected only a shadow in its depths.
He was remembering it all now, as he stood in his room on Linwood Avenue, with his dead father’s gold watch in his hand. That October day so long ago, and the day his father had died, were inextricably fusing together, becoming one. Just as he had held the boy’s ball, before throwing it into the Canal, he now held his father’s watch, and just as he had imagined that the ball had pulsed, so, for a brief moment only, he imagined that the watch was pulsing.
His fingers became warm under the metal. He made a gesture to thrust it back into his pocket. But something held his hand, and he could only stand there and look down at the watch. Why—and now he was amused—it was almost the ball again, the ball of a nameless child who had aspired, had tried to ascend, had been stricken down, and had died!
He was back again in that “front room” on Albany Street, the bedroom of his parents.
The night had turned cool. The little gas-heater, with its “doughnuts” of smoldering clay, was burning high, throwing out a pleasant heat over the polished but worn brown linoleum. Maybel
le’s patched and darned “lace” curtains were snowy ripples against the drawn green blinds, stiff as paper, and as white. A settee of convoluted mahogany with a poison-green plush back seat, and a chair to match, had been added to the original bare furniture. Maybelle had bought this “set” in a secondhand store, and vigorous applications of “wash-leather” and rubbing cloths kept the wood in a brilliant shine. The brass bed was polished, too, until its narrow columns and twisted top resembled pure gold. In this bed, with its honeycomb white spread, lay Francis, high on plump white pillows (Maybelle’s cherished pillows from England). The gaslight overhead had been turned low. Frank sat with his father while his mother slept. He was to awaken her at one o’clock in the morning, so that he might go to bed and she might resume her vigil until dawn. For now they knew that Francis could not live.
The light was too dim to furnish illumination for reading, so Frank was compelled to sit near the little gas-heater in a stiff rocking chair, from which point he faced the bed and could watch his father. He rocked restlessly, and the floor squeaked under the chair; the gaslight above hissed; the heater hissed and crackled. The October wind fumbled at the windows, and the curtains moved uneasily over the blinds. Francis seemed to be sleeping, though his breath was uneven and raucous, and occasionally he coughed dully.
It was a death’s-head, there on the pillow, gray, hollow, splashed with heavy shadow, wizened and ghastly. The bald head, the tight, bulging forehead, were enormous over the dwindled features; they were whitish stone over a tiny countenance, which, as it sank towards dissolution, bore a ghostly resemblance to primordial and simian ancestry. Now, as humanity drained from it, preparing to depart forever, the remote and lost spectre of man’s ancient beginnings manifested itself more and more clearly. Frank thought: Death is an ugly thing, but it is somehow mysterious. He was intrigued by the triumph of the forehead and the dome of the skull—the forehead and skull of man’s ascent, which were not to be vanquished and dissolved, but remained inviolate and enduring long after the simian features below them were melted into clay. Like a monument, like a victorious tomb, the dome of the skull, full, polished, invulnerable, persisted through the ages, mute witness to the strange creature who had inhabited it, and it had grown steadily from the small ape head turned incuriously to the trees of the jungle, to that of a man dreaming of cities and conquered plains.
The gaslight flickered, the gas-heater hissed. Frank sat still in his chair, and for a few exultant moments he felt the flame and the passion of his boyhood, the exaltation, the ecstasy, the wonderment and awe. And he thought to himself, with what joy he did not realize: “I can still feel!”
And then he bore down on this imbecility, and thought of his school, and his ambitions, and of money, and flight forever from this room and all it implied. He looked about him and hated and rejected, and the vision passed.
Francis coughed heavily, devastatingly, and opened his sinking eyes. He saw his son on his chair, staring grimly into space. He saw his son’s eyes, narrowed, hard, seeing nothing of the room or of his father, but something in himself. And Francis saw something beyond this, too. He saw his son, this young man sitting there, his long legs crossed, his white collar stiff and shining, his tie knotted fastidiously, his strong slender hands gripping the arms of the chair. Something made Francis cry out: “Sonny!”
That nickname, so long abandoned, gave Frank something of a shock. He stared at his father, and he heard that nickname echoing to him from an earlier and kindlier childhood, from the green, daisy-embroidered fields of England, from the petrol-smelling whirl of the “dobby-horses,” from the pantomime and the Christmas hearth of home. He heard that word and caught the freshness of hawthorn and water-cress, tasted peppermint sticks and Shrove Tuesday pancakes and heard the laughter of children eating potato chips while rain streamed outside. He heard it, and saw a young Francis holding his hand, as they walked through sunny Reddish Vale, while he listened to the story of Cinderella as his father related it.
“Sonny!” cried Francis, and Frank felt the warm kiss of his young mother, and heard his father’s stiff awkward playing on the “fiddle.” He saw his father’s pathetic high boots on the deck of the “Baltic,” saw the absurd cap and the thick black mustaches, the cane and the flash of alert blue eyes. And in that one instant Frank knew a passionate bitterness and bewilderment, and he tried to remember when his father had stopped calling him by that nickname. He could not remember, but the dolorousness of his boyhood had begun then, and the drab ugliness and despair of the life in America.
Trembling, he got up and went to his father’s bed. His polished shoes clacked on the linoleum. He stood by the bed and looked down at Francis. Francis was gazing up at him urgently, his sunken mouth working under the gray mustaches. What was he trying to say? Frank bent over the bed. The mouth worked, but nothing came from it but a choked mumble, infinitely terrible in its incoherence.
Francis moved his right hand blindly on the counterpane. Something in Frank made him want to take that hand; he knew his father wished it. But he could not do it. He could not do it because something like a hard iron paralysis held him back voluntarily. Francis’ hand became still. He looked at his son, and all his departing soul stared brilliantly from his eyes, as if he knew.
He whimpered. He whispered: “My fiddle.”
“Yes, Pa.” Frank’s voice was cold and quiet. “It’s in the cellar. Do you want it?” He wants his fiddle, and he is dying! Something maudlin like this was to be expected, I suppose. He can’t even die without making a gesture to attract sympathy!
There is no sympathy in me, he thought bitterly. There is no compassion for this ignoble life. There is only bitterness in remembering all those years. I can’t forget.
And Francis lay there, watching, very still, silent, understanding. Desolation stood in his mute eyes, and terror, and hopelessness. The gaslight lay on a face of acute awareness never revealed in earlier and healthier life. It was the flaring up of the flame of a soul, expanding, shaking its damp wings in preparation for flight from this outworn chrysalis.
What words were there for this understanding, this awareness? They were not recorded in the language of any race. They were beyond words.
His fiddle, thought Frank. What would he want with his fiddle? He said: “Do you want me to bring your fiddle to you?”
Francis, not removing his urgent eyes from his son’s face, moved his head faintly on the pillow in negation. He is trying to tell me something, thought Frank. Then he smiled contemptuously to himself at this sentimentality. What could this small mean creature tell him? What could he say?
He could not remember that Francis’ eyes had ever been so brilliant, so blue, as this. Fever, of course. Fever and fear. Fear had always been his father’s familiar. Frank drew a deep, slow breath, in his disgust.
He said, aloud, coldly: “Do you feel all right, Pa?”
Francis appeared not to have heard. How his eyes, dilated, enormous, stared from their caves of shadow! His lips were moving silently with what they could not say. Again his hand twitched, hopelessly, tragically. Frank saw this and averted his head.
“Do you want Ma?” he asked. He glanced at the alarm clock, which was ticking loudly on the square oak table near the window. It was almost one o’clock. It was time for him to awaken his mother and go to bed.
He watched his father. Then, after a long moment, Francis nodded. Frank went to the door. Francis watched him go. The blue burning of his eyes followed his son. The door opened, closed, behind the youth. But Francis’ eyes continued to burn at its imperviousness, as if something in him had passed through it, following.
Maybelle, swollen, blotched and disheveled, lifted herself from Frank’s bed, groaning. She had covered herself neatly with his counterpane. Sighing, half-sobbing with exhaustion, she pushed back her graying mass of hair, and blinked in the sudden gaslight which her son had turned on. Her brown eyes were dead, lusterless. She asked: “How is he?”
“Awake. Be
tter than last night.”
Frank took off his coat and vest, hung them up on the nails on the wall, which served as his wardrobe. His mother began to cry. “That this should come to us!” she wept, wiping her nose and face on her rumpled apron. “Why did it happen?”
Frank removed his tie. He examined his collar critically, holding it to the light. He said indifferently: “Why shouldn’t it happen to us? It happens every day.”
Maybelle blew her nose. “No sympathy,” she moaned. “You haven’t any feelings, Frank. How can you be so calm when your pa is dying?”
He looked at her with a swift curiosity. All during his illness, Francis had bewailed the shrinking of his savings. Maybelle had not spoken, not once, of money. In a softer voice, Frank said: “Maybe he isn’t dying. He seems much better tonight.”
Holding her aching back, Maybelle went out of the room. Frank closed the door. He yawned. He went to bed. He lay there, then, not falling into his usual quick sleep. His father’s eyes continued to stare at him, burning blue and unwinking in the darkness.
The October dawn was shattered by Maybelle’s screams and cries, and even before Frank ran out into the front room he knew his father was dead.
He could put the watch back into his pocket now. It lay there like a weight. He had not remembered that it was so heavy. Suddenly he wanted to be rid of it. I’ll sell it Saturday afternoon, he thought. I’ll buy another one with the money.
He went briskly downstairs. He must hurry before the tavern closed. There were rumors of Prohibition. That was nonsense of course. Not to have a glass of beer when one wanted it! His father had been wrong: the Yankees weren’t that damned stupid. He thought a moment, then added to himself: We aren’t that stupid.
Linwood Avenue was infinitely quiet, dark and deserted, as Frank closed the door behind him. Scabs of black ice lingered on the shovelled sidewalks and blinked in the infrequent light of scattered electric lamps. Huge mounds of snow on the lawns and at the curbs were dirtily pitted and pock-marked. The great melancholy houses on each side of the street appeared to have retreated even farther back on their snowy grounds; piazzas, jutting forward from the red-brick fronts, were like caves of shadow. An automobile went by with a melancholy sounding of a horn. A great white moon, hung over one roof, silvered the slates. The bare trees cracked in the silence, for the cold had strengthened during the last hours. Frank heard the rumbling of a streetcar as it swayed along on Main Street. He went up North Street to the tavern on Main.
There Was a Time Page 30
