The Tongues of Angels

by Reynolds Price

  In any case I spent more than a week, in my rare hours of personal time, laying the design of that western horizon onto a stretched and primed canvas in meticulous pencil detail. And when the first session ended in mid-August, I was ready to start the stacking up of light and shade in hundreds of almost transparent glazes.

  Then with more regret than I’d planned, I helped my first set of boys pack to leave. It was my introduction to one of life’s sorrows. In the short but fierce proximities of life—summer camp, painting classes, ocean cruises, army platoons—we only begin seeing our companions in the final few days. And only in those fourth and fifth weeks of the first session at Juniper did I see what I might have had if I’d known how really to watch the boys a good while sooner. I’d have had rich lists of their unique brands of small daily heroism, their doggy personal quirks and their thirsty affections. Parting day was a Friday— the mamas and the papas again, beamish this time and with a few more tips, that I shamelessly took.

  The Saturday morning was cleanup time. Each counselor spread all his cabin’s mattress pads out to sun. And it was only then that I realized how successfully my threatened bedwetter had deceived me and his cabin mates. His mattress pad was a swamp of concentric circles of never-dried pee. I hauled it far up into the woods and abandoned it, with a real shudder for the boy who suffered five weeks of cold sodden nights rather than confess.

  Sunday was free. I haven’t mentioned previous such days. One day a week, once we’d seen our boys through breakfast, we were free till reveille the next morning. Kevin and I usually managed to take the same day off. Since neither one of us had a car, we’d catch a ride into Asheville with some older staff member or we’d hitch.

  Now the whole city has been leveled, homogenized and defaced. But back then the pocket-sized town had the irregular charm of a real place. It felt like one whole single thing that had grown in slow response to various needs of people and the land. And in the case of Asheville, the charm was all the greater because of the mountain terrain. A small busy downtown square was overwatched by a ring of still wild mountains, with only the tan stone hulk of the Grove Park Inn staring down. Even the streets were humped here and there by an uncertain grounding.

  Kev and I would get there a little after ten. We’d part and do personal errands. Then we’d meet at a particularly generous cafeteria and gorge on what we never got at camp. I remember craving fried eggplant and country-style steak. In the afternoon together we’d hunt through the several old bookstores, then the cafeteria again for supper, a movie, then the trip back to camp. Neither Kevin nor I was a night owl, but it was vital to the notion of a day off that we stay in town till our boys were asleep.

  Those few free days have a distinct sweetness in my memory. It comes partly from the fact that, since I’d never had a job before, I’d never known the joy of not working. Mostly though the pleasure comes from remembering the long hours of talk with Kevin. Americans in their early twenties then were still fairly wild to learn their way forward into the world. They’d talk a whole night just to learn some scrap of useful news that they could have found in an almanac in fourteen seconds—say, the manner of death of Catherine the Great, and did it involve her suffocation by an amorous donkey? Kevin and I were in that boat but mainly me. I knew he was further along than me in everything.

  Kev’s answers to me on a big range of subjects were wide, deep and well-seasoned with wit. They were also land-mined with unexpected questions that kept me constantly on guard. A thoroughly typical case was this. Over strawberry shortcake one day at lunch, I made the strategic error of owning up to a little less than half my ambition for greatness. Kevin heard it straight through with no trace of a smile, and then he asked “What will the world do if you die tonight?” No trace of an edge on his question either. He was just asking for the sake of the news, so he’d know if I croaked.

  If I meant then to lay out my wares for Kev, I had to be damned sure they were strong enough to handle and were laid down carefully. You couldn’t just tell him that, say, Picasso was greater than Gilbert Stuart. You had to prove it and mostly I couldn’t. So breakage was high in any such dialogue. Kev would hold back politely and let you choose the topic. But once you invited him in, he jumped. I’ve said that, because of the recent Depression and war, Americans hadn’t traveled much for twenty-five years; and the country was strictly divided into regions. If you’d grown up in Rockford, Illinois, you barely knew anybody from Chicago, much less Winston-Salem.

  And Kevin Hawser was the first real Yankee I’d spent time with. I enjoyed the speed and fresh air of our talks, but I also knew what a heavy brake his urban cynicism put on me. I could never let him see the full gleam of my intentions or my plans for reaching them. My sort of dream, in those early days, melted in the presence of laughter. That midsummer Sunday though, Kev set the pace. He asked me the night before if I’d like to join him tomorrow for a “pilgrimage”—the quotation marks were his—to Thomas Wolfe’s home. I gladly agreed, though with reservations that will soon appear.

  * * *

  As a native North Carolinian, I knew that the state’s most famous artist of any sort was born in Asheville in 1900 and died from tuberculosis of the brain before he was forty. My father, exactly Wolfe’s age, had met him briefly in the early twenties. A lot of painters are big readers; so when I began consuming fiction in my teens, Father suggested that I notice his friend Tom Wolfe. In some brand of adolescent truculence, I didn’t. Then early in high school, several of my male friends began to echo Father—Thomas Wolfe had apparently solved the mysteries of human longing or had at least captured them in words forever. They confided also that Wolfe wrote a lot about sex, whores and body crabs.

  That knocked me off-center, and I rushed out to find him. But the book wasn’t in our school library, being thought unfit for innocent eyes. The old dragons at the Public downtown were sleeping for once, so I managed to check out Look Homeward, Angel. But even at age sixteen, pitching and tossing in the very flames Wolfe described—youthful sex and vaulting ambition—I thought I knew bad prose when I saw it. And I stopped for good at page fifty.

  That didn’t keep me from wanting to see his home. Now I hear it’s a manicured historical site operated by the state. But in the early fifties, with Wolfe not twenty years dead, it was still owned by members of the family. A rambling white barn of no architectural distinction, it had till fairly recently been a busy boardinghouse run by Wolfe’s feisty mother right through his childhood, youth, fame and death.

  The front door was open. We knocked on the screen and were met by a pretty young woman with a snotty baby on her hip. We asked if this really was the Wolfe house. She nodded yes, said it cost a quarter and took our money. Then she stepped aside and let us in. Her voice had the high blackboard-scraping harshness of the born mountaineer, but then her prematurely exhausted face broke into a quick smile that I’d still give a lot to paint. It was as good an emblem as I’ve ever seen for hanging on when the sky’s against you.

  But she didn’t look any the worse for wear. To me, she wore whatever pain she’d borne like an invitation to take one short step and save her life, hers and the smiling girl-baby’s she held.

  She said “I’m right busy, with the baby and whatnot. And since I ain’t been here but a week, I don’t know much nohow. So if y’all want to look around, make yourself at home. Just try not to touch things more than you have to. They’re precious and all.”

  We pretty much made ourselves at home. It hadn’t dawned on me to wonder what no-nonsense Kevin was seeking here at this font of wind. But it was soon clear that he’d come along in hopes of a postcard to send a professor friend and Wolfe fan. Kev had at least read Look Homeward, Angel; but he kept most of his knowledge to himself as always. Since I couldn’t say what had happened in the many rooms of the dim upper warrens, it was pretty much a musty old boardinghouse to me. But there were little hand-lettered cards, saying “Tom’s Boyhood Room,” ‘Tom’s Boyhood Shakespeare” by a th
ick black book or “Brother Ben’s Deathbed.” And even Kevin, an English major, seemed muffled so I stayed respectful. I had to admit to myself that it did have a certain pregnant air, as if a big artist hadn’t yet been born but was going to be, here and soon. I used the word artist a lot in those days. I thought it would help me grow. But my only clear memory of the house itself is of a huge black pay-phone by the door in a back hallway.

  It was the old kind that had so many different comforting odors—one for the metal of the chassis, one for the heavy Bakelite handset, one for the breathed-on mouthpiece, another for the thick stiff cord. And it had names and phone numbers still gouged in the plaster around it, old-timey numbers in pencil or scratched with a key, just three digits—Ethel 468 or Mamie 300. I stroked a finger down the cool plaster and thought I could see a crowd of faces, all waiting alone in rented rooms for the bell to ring, for life to strike.

  When we’d used up the space, we could hear the young woman knocking around in the kitchen. We found our way there and thanked her. She said shoot, she hadn’t done nothing but rob us to see a dirty old house. She rushed on to add that she had a husband in the Army who was maybe coming home in two weeks, but I still doubt it. She had on the kind of cheap left-hand ring that girls have been known to buy from the dime store.

  By then she was very much a girl to my eyes. And she had too lost a look in her eyes. This girl had been abandoned. When she told us that she’d have give us some dinner if she’d knowed we was coming, I felt like we ought to get out fast and neat. But Kevin kept asking her questions till it was clear she’d told the truth in one respect anyhow. She knew very little about the place—just that one of the Wolfes was famous and all, mostly up north as far as she could tell from the people that came, maybe ten on a weekday.

  In fact as we finally turned to go, she asked me “Who was this fellow you’re aiming at?” Though the visit was Kev’s idea and he’d done most of the talking, she aimed her question straight at my eyes. And she seemed to be referring to Tom, as most native Tar Heels still call him, like a family member. I’d mentioned him at the start; and thinking she must admire him, I’d also said I was hoping to be as good at painting as Wolfe was at fiction. In fact I was hoping to be a lot better. So now I told her “He was one Asheville boy that wrote a famous book and died too soon.”

  She nodded as if she’d put that aside for further thought. Then she said “You find what you’re looking for?”

  I said “Well, it proves famous men can be born anywhere.”

  She said “Even stables.” But then she laughed and apologized for the dust. “Seems like dust just dogs my tracks, every house I’m in. You could eat off’n my mama’s floor, no plate. But look at all this.” On its own, her hand indicated the floor—dust curled at our feet. Then she managed a smile, thanked us for coming and followed us to the door. The baby was no longer in sight. And when we were on the outside of the screen door, she stayed behind the rusty mesh. But she made a last try. She laughed again, harder and covering her teeth. Then she said “You must not of gone to church either.”

  I confessed and said “Ain’t it awful?” Back then in the South, if you missed Sunday church, you had you a good alibi before sunrise.

  She stood there and genuinely fought with herself. It tortured her eyes. Then she said “They throwed me out, down there at Hog Elk—fine Christian souls!” Her last word flung on past us, towards the road.

  Kev was plainly at a loss. This was a deeply Southern transaction, even though she was mountaineer and I was piedmont. Many Americans would die naked in the road before they’d tell you what’s hurt them the worst. But born Southerners will show you the cell in their heart that burns the hardest. They’ll hold it right towards you, in their bare right hand. This girl had done that for me, Lord God. So what could I say but “That’s all they know. You’re far better off”?

  Her thanks were deep and they welled in her eyes. But right away she said “Look, if you want to come back next week— both of you—and eat a good dinner I cook and all, you could read me some from that book he wrote. Then I’d know better what to tell folks. I feel real ignorant now.” She dredged up her smile again, and this time it lasted so long I was ready to go back and better her lot by whatever means. With Father’s death so raw in my heart, how could I leave a needy magnetic soul that pretty and lonesome?

  Kevin was Yankee-polite about it—you know, you tell somebody the hard truth; but you tell it a little to the right of their eyes. Still he told her it just couldn’t be. We were both tied up from here on out till summer ended. Then he took my elbow and steered me around.

  Once I’d turned my back on her face, I couldn’t look again. I might cave in and do something wild. Kev had seen that and done the right thing by me, mean as it seemed.

  I can hear her voice though, clear as my own, right to this minute. “I hope people want to see your house someday.”

  We spent the rest of Sunday eating and seeing two movies. I said before that Kev was a true Yankee, from Rhode Island. He could no more ask you a personal question than flap his arms and fly unaided. Southerners ask intimate questions in the way monkeys groom each other for lice, not to pry but to make you feel cared for. Kev though could sit and stare, just past your ear for maybe five minutes, and not say a word. I could have robbed a bank vault and be wearing the Hope diamond in plain view, and he would have died before asking me about it. Since all my campers were children, and since their self-entrapment ruled out curiosity into lives older than their own, I was running a good two quarts low on close attention. So over the breaded veal cutlet at lunch, I said “I would have married that girl on the spot.”

  Kev said “So I noticed—girl and baby. Hope you didn’t mind the rescue.”

  “Not a bit.” But I did. I just slightly did.

  Kevin said “I figured old Chief might be a little flummoxed if we got back tonight with a wife and baby.” On other days off I’d told Kev a little about my presence at Father’s death and, as I said, my ambitions. He’d heard me patiently and with what seemed genuine interest. He was hoping for a diplomatic career and would need a working knowledge of all brands of human folly. But as usual he asked no further questions.

  So now I asked if he thought I was crazy.

  He looked out the street window, in fact at the blinding sunlight, and said “Yes.”

  When I finished laughing I told him not to worry, that I was a little dizzy still from my hospital duties with Father, plus five weeks of boys, and would pipe down soon.

  Kev waited and said “Don’t get me wrong. You’re beyond me now. You’ve seen a man die. And with no brothers or sisters, you’re the last person in line in your family. That makes you the hitter and backstop and pitcher and all. You’re rightly scared stiff.”

  It still seems a real piece of understanding. That it came from a twenty-one-year-old unmarried man, as protected as me, is hard to believe. I’ve never heard the same from anyone since, but I’ve noticed its accuracy in dozens of lives. Once you’re the next member of your family in line for death, you become a new person. And for quite a while, you can easily fly off the handle and make entangling commitments or else you can run. We didn’t say more on the subject that day, but I thought through it many times in the remainder of the summer. And I think it guided my subsequent actions. Which is not the same thing as blaming Kevin for my ignorant error.

  When we got back to camp past midnight, the air was actually cold. I walked into Cabin 16 thinking I’d be asleep in two minutes. But when I stripped and lay down, my mind was howling ahead. It mainly told me that the whole experience of the tawdry Wolfe house and the lost madonna and child and Kevin’s insight was a single shaft aimed at my heart. I’d got both a big new wound and a gift—a broad leap of knowledge that would show in my life, beginning tomorrow. I had a fairly decent heart and a worthy aim. But oh, I was loose in the world and must work.

  My canvas was locked downhill in the crafts cabin, safe. But at one in the mornin
g, I halfway dressed and went down there in the near freezing dark to study the drawing. At night you tried to remember never to walk without a flashlight and to step high to avoid rattlers. So far this year nobody had been bit. The week before though, the hardy boys from Tsali brought a full and squirming gunnysack down the mountain. They said it was a dozen live rattlers they’d trapped. They wanted undamaged skins to make hatbands and belts, so they’d come up with the idea of gassing the snakes by cranking the camp station wagon and tying the mouth of the sack over the tailpipe. Without Chief’s permission somehow they got the key, and the project very nearly worked.

  When the sack stopped moving, they turned off the engine, untied the sack and dumped the contents out on the ground. I was there to see it. Sure enough, eleven dead snakes. But the boys were sure there’d been twelve to start with. They tried to recrank the engine and force the stray out but the engine was dead. It turned out that the twelfth snake had climbed up the tailpipe and got himself far forward in the exhaust system before dying in place. Chief made the boys pool their spending money to get the station wagon towed to Asheville where some brave fool located the snake and fished it out. Of course all us city-slicker counselors rejoiced at the downfall of the hardscrabble Tsali boys. But the gunnysack reminded me anyhow what kind of world was underfoot here, by day and night.

  I got all the way to the crafts cabin safely and found the door unlocked. To rest his bowed legs, Uncle Mike kept a cot in the Indian lore room next door. I took the flashlight and went in to Mike’s cot, propped my canvas on a chair and lay on my belly to study it. Even in black and white pencil line, I thought I could almost read the meaning of so much rock against so much sky. It was yearning to speak, the way a good dog—a setter or retriever—will meet your eyes and grieve, pure grieve, not to know your language.