Just what is it you expect to accomplish? One of your favorite and best-articulated beliefs is the futility of anything we may do to other people. The things that are done to us are the only ones that matter, especially the things we do to ourselves. Of course our own acts mostly have a rebound, but not this fatal act you are now considering, knowing all the while that it cannot be consummated.
All the futility of Jane’s thrusts at you, for instance, did not arise from your antagonism and parade of independence. The futility was inherent in the material she was trying to work with. The question of motive need not enter. What considerations moved her are entirely beside the point as far as you are concerned.
The fact is that she is the woman for you. This is true in spite of society’s traditional attitude, first brought to you the day that red-haired boy (whose name you have forgotten) taunted you with being tied to your sister’s apron strings. And later shouted at you incessantly from across the street until the shocked neighbors made an issue of it:
“He drinks his sister’s milk, he drinks his sister’s milk, he drinks his sister’s milk!”
Very well, tied to your sister’s apron strings. That is worse then than being tied to the ribbons of Erma’s rue de la Paix robe de nuit, or chained with steel to the black and impenetrable armor of the woman upstairs? Bah. The world of course is thinking of incest and hasn’t even the courage to say so. The concern is authentic, physiologically, but who is talking of physiology? Not you. You are not responsible for what you may or may not have dreamed as an infant and a boy, but you know what you think as a man, and when you say that Jane is the woman for you, you mean that all the security and peace you have ever known, all the gentle hours of content, all the exciting assurances that the world was made for you too, have come from the touch of her hand and the sound of her voice. Anyone who tries to translate that into that which may be bought at any street corner for two dollars has very little to do.
But you’ve never thanked her for it, and it has always been futile. The time you went home from Cleveland for your things, having definitely agreed with Dick, Jane listened quietly to your grandiose plans and exaggerated enthusiasm, along with the rest of the family. She gave you your father’s old place at table that evening, and you noticed that your mother accepted the arrangement calmly and even with a mild pleasure, because it was Jane’s.
The following morning Jane came into your room while you were packing.
“Bill, I’m afraid you’re being driven into this by your feeling that you’ve got to do something for the family. You shouldn’t, really you shouldn’t. The store’s doing better than ever and I’m honestly having a lot of fun with it. You must come down this afternoon and see all the new stuff I’ve got. The fountain is a peach. I’m only twenty-five, and you don’t need to think I’m going to get covered with moss. The way this town’s growing we can sell the store for a lot of money in a few years.”
You wouldn’t admit anything. Superficially you were offended.
“Gosh, you might think I was taking a job cleaning streets. This is the real thing, Jane. Five thousand a year for a man of my age isn’t to be sneezed at.”
“It’s not your line. I’m glad and proud you’ve got the offer; I suppose it would rush nearly any boy off his feet. But I’m even prouder of that second story you wrote. I think it’s pretty darned good.”
This made you glow, but you protested:
“It was about the twentieth, and most of them were terrible.”
“I mean the second one published. Oh, Bill, don’t let yourself be gobbled up. I expect you think that it’s just that I want to manage things, but it isn’t. If you were older than me it would probably be the other way around. The store can keep all of us nicely. What if you don’t make much for two or three years, or even five?”
Futile. In your pocket was the five hundred dollars Dick had advanced, more than you had ever seen before. Most of it went to pay off ancient personal debts around town of which even Jane knew nothing.
She tried again four years later, when the store was sold and you went down to help take the sucker off the hook as Jane put it in her letter. In reality there was nothing for you to do but sign papers; Jane had made an impeccable deal. She was now mature, in full flower, radiant and assured. Her own future was perfectly indefinite, but not with the mist of doubt or hesitation.
“I’m going to New York and take Rose and Margaret along. Mother wants to stay here with Aunt Cora. Thanks to your generosity Larry can go to college next month without anything to worry about.”
As neat as that. The talk you had with Jane that night was the closest you and she had ever got to each other. You admitted your regrets and she appealed to you with tears in her lovely eyes. You longed inexpressibly to say:
“Take me to New York with you. Let’s be together. There’s no one but you anywhere that’s worth a damn. I’ll write or I’ll get a job or I’ll do anything. Maybe some day you will be proud of me.”
Well why not? Tied to your sister’s apron strings. No not entirely that. Drawn as you were to her, you were at the same time repulsed. Surrounding that seductive haven were difficult and dangerous shoals. Perhaps underneath all her tact and competence and beautiful strength you felt an avidity of power which would at length leave you a naked and pendent slave of her compassion and her will. Or perhaps it was something much less elaborate; some feeling deeper than anything you have words or thoughts for.
At any rate it was again futile. When you departed for Cleveland the next day everyone but Larry was in tears; this was different from other departures; it was the beginning of the end of the roof and that family.
Even more to the point by way of futility have been your own efforts at Larry. They have affected him of course in superficialities such as his place of being, his momentary companions and his intellectual opinions; once he even willingly followed your advice regarding the choice of a suit and you can’t get closer to a man than his clothes. But in no essential have you left a mark on him.
How differently from you did he pass from the morning twilight of college into the bright day. He bounded out of the west into New York like a calf confidently and arrogantly bumping its mother for a meal. This was only a week or so after Erma had returned from Europe widowed of the unlikely Pierre, and you had just had lunch with her. Larry was pleasantly impressed but not at all overawed by your elaborate office. Almost at once he was telling you that he had never properly thanked you for putting him through college, that he was really tremendously grateful, that he would pay you back as soon as he could, and that he was glad it was over.
“It’s mostly horseplay. They don’t really know any of the stuff they tell you, except football. That’s the only thing they’ve found out for themselves. I’m glad it’s over. Have you decided where I’m to start blowing up the buildings?”
He was leaving it all to you, and you were thrilled by this, unaware that it was only because to his youthful eagerness and ardor details were unimportant Also it had already been decided. Dick had been extremely decent about it, regretting that he hadn’t a younger brother of his own to start along the line, and welcoming Larry as a substitute.
He spent six months in the plant in Ohio, six more in the Michigan ore mines, some few weeks in New York, and then was suddenly interrupted by the war.
Larry’s letters to you and Jane were your only intimate contact with the insane ultimate consumers of the steel and iron toys which were causing the stock in Erma’s vault to increase in value at the rate of six thousand dollars a day. Being treasurer of the corporation, you were in a position to contemplate that insolent accretion with fitting ironic admiration. But for the censor Larry’s narratives from the trenches would have served excellently as frontispieces for the imposing rows of journals and ledgers which were locked each evening behind those massive steel doors on lower Broadway.
Back as a decorated captain, Larry returned to his desk as if nothing had happened. It was easy to see in his eyes the questions that had not been there before, but he left you to guess at them. Was that true of Jane also? You wonder about Larry and Jane.
He proved himself, young as he was he rose in importance by his own ability and force, but during all those months that became years you felt a vague uneasiness about him. All the time you wondered what it was and why it disturbed you so, not aware of the deep significance which his presence and progress in that environment had come to hold for you, as vindication of your own acceptance of it.
The explosion came at a difficult moment, and unexpectedly. Only the previous week Larry had won new laurels by bringing to a successful close the Cumberland bridge negotiations, down in Maryland. You had heard Dick offer him praise of a different character from any you had ever earned. The difficulty though had come through Erma, whose pretty teeth had shown themselves for the first time the night before in a most inelegant snarl. You didn’t feel like lunching with anyone and were annoyed at Larry’s persistence. When, immediately after you and he had been seated at the usual corner table in the Manufacturers’ Club, he announced that he was going to leave the Carr Corporation, you were at first merely irritated, as if he had said he was going to put a fly in your soup.
“Of course you don’t mean it. What’s the joke?”
“There’s no joke. I’m going to chuck it.”
“But good heavens, you’re crazy. What’s the matter? What’s the idea?”
Larry took a drink of water and unfolded his napkin. He looked uncomfortable.
“This is the only hard part of it, Bill, trying to tell you why. You’ve been so damn good to me and from your standpoint this must seem insane. I’m afraid I can’t even be very definite about it. Only it’s not the life for me. It’s not what I want to do. I suppose I’ll get into a rut no matter what I do—everyone seems to nowadays—but this is the wrong kind of a rut.”
“You might have found that out seven years ago, before Dick and I took all the trouble we’ve taken, and made room for you—”
“I know it. I know all you’ve done. But my mind wasn’t made up till quite recently. At that I don’t think I owe the company anything. If I could only tell you exactly how I feel about it, Bill, I think you’d understand. You certainly have a knack of understanding people.”
He went on explaining with words that explained nothing while you scarcely heard. You were filled with anger and even with a sort of terror which you now comprehend much better than you did then. There was indeed nothing trivial about this; it was a major and almost a vital casualty for you; it meant that Larry was spewing out in disgust that which you found no great difficulty in swallowing and digesting. Essentially that was what it meant, and it threw you almost into a panic. You had often suspected yourself of a finer nature, too fine to be really comfortable in this den of hyenas, but not Larry. It was intolerable.
There he sat, for all his expressions of gratitude and regret and his embarrassed concern for your feelings really quite imperturbable. Unshakable. You asked him with a sneer:
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got a good deal saved, thanks to your and Dick’s generosity, and I may buy the Martin place out in Idaho where I went last summer. He’ll sell cheap.”
“Going to raise cattle?”
“Perhaps. Or get a job in the forest service. I don’t know.”
Evidently he had been considering it for some time.
That evening you went to see Jane, at the house on Tenth Street where you always felt incongruous, like a pig on a silk cushion, despite Jane’s presence. You were recurrently indignant at that feeling and tried to bully yourself out of it. What the deuce, you yourself were not precisely illiterate; you read Norman Douglas and Lytton Strachey and went to the concerts of the International Composers Guild. But in this Tenth Street intellectual sea you swam with difficulty, or more commonly stayed behind on the shore, for they were always beyond your depth almost before they started; you listened to their jargon with uneasy contempt, and loathed Jane when she undertook to explain to you who Pavlov was. Your visits had become more and more infrequent.
This evening you expected to find there the usual crowd, Jane’s husband (if he were not away lecturing on god knows what), a writer or two, at least one experimental actress and an assortment of parlor radicals. You intended to take Jane off somewhere and persuade her to bring Larry to his senses. But when you arrived the rooms on the ground floor were dark, and proceeding brusquely upstairs, past the faintly protesting maid who had let you in, you found Jane and Larry alone in Jane’s room.
Larry was as startled at your sudden appearance as though you had caught him rifling your desk. Jane seemed merely glad to see you.
“Bill! It’s almost a family reunion.”
In the six hours since lunch you had somewhat recovered your balance, and for that matter you did not yet suspect the depth of this wound; so you went to look at the baby with proper appreciation and waited till you had all gone downstairs before you remarked:
“I suppose Larry’s told you of his contemplated renascence.”
“Yes. Oh yes.”
“We’ve just been talking about it,” Larry said. “Jane thinks it’s all right.”
“So it’s a conspiracy.”
“Not actionable.” Jane came and sat on the arm of your chair and put her hand on yours. “Don’t cut up about it, Bill, there’s a dear.”
“It would make a lot of difference if I did. I think it’s crazy and I think it’s a pretty rotten way to act. After all I’ve done…”
“What have you done?” But instantly Larry’s voice changed. “I don’t mean that. I mean you might think I was letting you down. Good lord, I’m of no importance down there. You’ve got dozens as good as I am.”
“We’ve not got dozens who have your opportunities and your future. And who prepared it and made it easy? Oh, I know you’ve worked and you’ve made good. Quite probably you’ll prove to be a better man than me, but that isn’t what gave you the inside track.”
Larry opened his mouth and closed it again. Jane, whose hand had remained on yours, rose suddenly and went to him.
“You run away, Larry, and let Bill and me talk. Please. Go on.”
He went, observing that he would see you in the morning at the office. Jane came back to your chair.
“Meaning that you’ll smooth out my childish irritation,” you observed.
“Yes,” she agreed unexpectedly, putting her hand again on yours. “Only I don’t know how childish it is. It’s a darned shame.”
“That I’m so unreasonable, I suppose.”
“Oh don’t do that, Bill. It’s not a question of anyone’s being unreasonable. This was bound to hurt you. I told Larry so the first time he spoke to me about it, and at the same time I told him I approved.”
“So it’s been cooking for a long while. I like the picture of you and Larry calculating the chances of my eventual recovery.”
There was no reply. You looked up, and for the second time in your life you saw tears in Jane’s eyes, as lovely as ever. You moved your hand restlessly.
“You’re the only person I’ve ever cried about,” she said finally. “I don’t know whether it means anything in particular. I seem to feel more touched by what things mean for you than by what they mean even for myself, let alone anybody else. With Victor for instance I can discuss at length what Larry should or shouldn’t do, and get quite heated about it. With you it’s impossible because nothing matters except that Larry is going to go and it makes you unhappy. I think I know every single thing you feel.”
There was nothing left to say to that. You suddenly forgot all about Larry and had to choke an impulse to tell Jane about the night before with Erma, the humiliation of your position at the office, even your inner humiliations which you never discussed with yourself. You were silent; the crust had become too thick. A moment later Victor’s voice was heard in the hall, with Rose and Margaret and other people.
A month later Larry was on his way west. If Jane had been futile with you, how much more futile had you been with him!
You could dance around in that cage forever. There was the first man you ever fired, out in Cleveland many years ago, the fellow with the big bony white hands who always smelled faintly of mingled perfume and himself. When you learned a week later that he had committed suicide you were so stricken with remorse that you couldn’t sleep for two nights. That was the conceit of your youth. A man who will kill himself merely because he gets fired is bound to lose his job, for that reason if for no other. There was the manicure girl downtown who was so intelligent and sympathetic that you paid her way through business college, gave her a job in the office, and promoted her out of order. She married your assistant office manager, and within a year he was arrested and convicted of embezzlement of the company’s funds. Thirty thousand dollars of the money had disappeared and could not be accounted for, but the intelligent manicure girl played the role of deceived and disillusioned wife with complete success. The futility begins when? Hardly in the cradle. There is probably a gradual progress toward immunity from the time of the first breath until that day when the ego makes its curt announcement, I have room for no more scars. There will be a universal variation. With some it will come almost with the first syllables, with others it will be delayed to full bodily maturity. These would be the extremes. With you it had almost certainly arrived, for instance, by the time you went to the home of Mrs. Davis that first afternoon. You were fifteen, seventeen, no matter.
You went to Sunday School willingly for the sake of the intellectual excitement. Mr. Snyder, the teacher, detested you because you insisted on questioning the feasibility of water having been turned into wine, a thing which you said could not be done even in the best equipped modern laboratory. You voiced many other skepticisms, but this was the best fortified, on account of your father, who as a practicing druggist and chemist resented that miracle with an unwonted violence. Into the Sunday School discussion you would bring technical terms direct from your father’s lips, reducing Mr. Snyder to a cold and speechless fury. You always flattered yourself that you drove him from the class; it is undeniable that he left and that Mrs. Davis took his place.
Her advent ended the free play of the intellect. You tried once or twice to start an argument, but she merely turned her soft blue eyes on you and said that after all the Bible is true, isn’t it? But you didn’t stay away, though your father would have been more than willing and your mother indifferent. You continued to go, and for the most part sat silently watching Mrs. Davis’s face and hands. As time went on, she would ask the boys to run errands for her, and when the choice fell on one of the others you were conscious of a painful and disagreeable sensation unlike any you had ever known before. More and more often it was you who were chosen.
One winter Monday afternoon, as soon as you could make it after the close of school, found you on her porch with an umbrella which she had left on some previous day at old Mrs. Poole’s on the other side of town. She herself opened the door.
“How do you do, William. Thank you so much.” Then, as you flushed and twirled your cap, “Won’t you come in a little while? Please do, and cheer me up. Mother is spending the week in Chicago and my husband won’t be home for hours and I’m feeling lonely and not at all in a good Christian humor.”
You had several times previously crossed the moat of the lawn and advanced as far as the pure white portal, but never before inside the castle itself. You felt admirably adventurous and keen, though you did stumble a little on the rug in the dimly lighted sitting-room, where the curtains were drawn and a fire was glowing. You were grateful to Mrs. Davis for not noticing; your mother would have scolded your clumsiness and Jane would have asked if you had hurt yourself. But you were a little taken aback when she observed:
“We can sit here on the couch and go over next Sunday’s lesson.” She was probably watching your face, for she added almost at once, “Or would you rather just talk?”
You blurted out, “Just talk,” and sat down on the edge of the couch beside her.
She began to ask you questions, and though your tongue gradually loosened enough to form sentences you could not look at her face. You wanted to and dared not. You could see her small soft white hands lying in her lap and you thought of her face, also soft and white with its lips that were never still, even when silent, and its blue eyes with long dark lashes. Sam Boley had said once that she had a double chin, and nearly got killed for it, though not by you.
She had asked you what you thought about when you were not in school or playing games with the boys, and you were struggling for courage to tell her of the poem you had written about her, when suddenly she put her hand under your chin and turned your face squarely toward hers.
“Goodness, can’t we look at each other? I like your face so much. It’s so sensitive and strong, for a boy. There, we have looked at each other.” She took her hand away. “Now go on and tell me.”
But you had been made dumb again. At the touch of her hand you had almost fainted with pleasure. You hoped she hadn’t noticed it, for you wanted her to think that you were far from being a puppy to play with. To mention the poem now was impossible. She gave it up and got an album of snapshots which she and her husband had taken on their honeymoon trip to England, nearly ten years ago, she said. You turned the leaves together, your hands touching and your warmth mingling. You were feeling rather gone and miserably inadequate by the time she arose and said it was time to get her husband’s dinner.
On your way home you thought, so that’s what experience is, is it? You felt ineffectual and at the same time expectant and unashamed. You wondered how old she was and finally settled on twenty-seven.
The second time you went, invited without the excuse of an errand, she told you all about her husband. It seemed that although he was a fine man, he had more or less deceived her into marriage by concealing from her girlish ignorance some of its more difficult and profound aspects. He was now doing his best to atone for that early betrayal, but try as she would she could not abandon herself to a complete and true union with such a man—not that there was really anything to be said against him. There was a great deal of this, of which you understood perhaps a third. It seemed however to be leading to something when the doorbell rang and Mrs. Davis went to open it with a Bible in her hand. Especially apropos, for it proved to be the pastor making a call.
The next time, only a few days later, you took the poem. She discussed it only as literature, and at her suggestion you changed a word here and there. Then she asked you to read it again and you did so, seated on the chair by the little desk while she was on the couch. When you had finished and folded the paper and put it in your pocket she said quietly:
“Come here.”
You went across to her.
“Do you like me?”
You nodded, trembling; no word would come.
“Sit down by me. Here, put your head in my lap, like that. Don’t you like to be near me and put your head in my lap? You are a very dear boy, only you are nearly a man. Nearly a man, aren’t you? Why not pretend you are a man, and kiss me? Do you mind if I kiss you? Will you kiss me?”
You discovered then that the girls at school knew very little about kissing, and you yourself, as a matter of fact, knew less. Nor had particularly cared about it. Mrs. Davis’s arms were around you, and you held her tight, your lips on hers; she kissed your neck and your eyes; you kissed her eyes, her nose, her chin, her throat, through inexpertness and excitement not always hitting the precise spot, but aim is unimportant when it’s shrapnel. Easy enough now to smile at that sprawling urchin, uncouth, drinking with noisy gulps at the unknown pool, but then your blood was a true torrent of fire.
Granting all your neat formula of futility, it is strange that you have never been curious as to the nature and depth of Mrs. Davis’s attachment to you. Was it for her an episode among a hundred, or was it all that her avowals in transport declared? You have never bothered to guess. Under her you served a sexual apprenticeship conventionally complete; it lasted over two years; there were many moments when the bodily fusion was utterly sweet and terrifying; and yet, except for those moments your attitude was essentially as if she were merely one more school-teacher and it was all a part of the course in physical culture.
How clever she was at arranging meetings, with what admirable sangfroid could she dispose of an inopportune caller, and above all with what fine gallantry did she carry herself when the explosion came and the whole pack yapped and howled at her heels!
For months you had felt sure that Jane suspected something, nevertheless you were startled when she suddenly said to you one afternoon:
“Bill, you’d better be careful about Mrs. Davis. There isn’t a woman in town that doesn’t know all about it, and now the men are beginning to talk. Dad heard someone say something at the store yesterday that he didn’t understand, and he asked Mother, and he’s going for you as soon as he can get his courage up. I heard him talking with Mother last night.”
You thought the thing to do was to appear innocent and ignorant. Jane snorted:
“Don’t be a fool. It might as well be in the paper.”
It might indeed. Or among the public notices on the doors of the courthouse. It finally reached even Mr. Davis, in his law office across the square from the drug store. You were requested to call upon Mr. Davis, and your father instructed you not to go. Your father, of course, questioned you with what was for him unexampled severity, but in the meantime you had seen Mrs. Davis and you did exactly what she told you to, even perhaps a little more. In effect you denied all facts of your physical existence, save that you had been born and that you were of the male sex. The dramatic climax was a conference arranged to take place at the Davis home among Mrs. Davis, Mr. Davis, your father and yourself. You went with your father, who you suspected was at heart enjoying the whole affair as a colorful adventure in an otherwise dull life. There was a great deal of talk between your father and Mr. Davis. Though rather hard-pressed by the lawyer’s cross-examination, you maintained your general denials and refused to go into details. Mrs. Davis was no longer present, for she had said:
“William, I am sorry that people are so determined to make life ugly. Mr. Sidney, I regret that you are having all this trouble, and I know you regret that I am. Jim, when you finish with this silly business I want to talk with you.”
And had left the room.
Whether it was she or her husband who finally found the pressure too great you never knew. Off they went to Cleveland with nothing but a trunk; their furniture followed later by freight, with suggestive and insulting notices pasted on the bedstead. The whole town learned of this kindly godspeed to its departed citizens, and the authorship was hotly disputed, especially of the placard on the foot of the bed which read: Handle With Care Willie May Be Under It.
Its echoes were heard as long afterward as the elections the following autumn, when old Doctor Culp, who had stoutly defended Mrs. Davis throughout, was a candidate for the Board of Education and in spite of his popularity squeezed through by the narrowest of margins.
Superficially the affair seemed to place you in a difficult and ridiculous position, but in the circles which bore most closely on your daily concerns the effect was far from deplorable. Among the fellows you were regarded as a man with a past, and the attitude of the mothers whose daughters you escorted to parties merely accentuated your evil eminence and fed your vanity. There were certain jibes which you resented acutely, but altogether the experience did you no harm and was not unpleasant.
As regards that kernel, that ego, that stubborn infinitesimal entity which resists all definition and all seizure and which alone is you if you exist at all, what did Mrs. Davis do? Nothing. What would her husband have done if, differently constituted, he had shot you dead, as the most vociferous townsfolk said he should have done? Nothing. What do you do to her upstairs if you achieve all that your despair contemplates and she lies before you bloody and annihilated? Nothing.