Of Time and the River (46 page)
And just as poet, prophet, priest and conqueror might each retain in death some living and fitting image of his whole life’s truth, so would the strength, the skill, all of the hope, hunger, fury, and unrest that had lashed and driven on through life the gaunt figure of a stone-cutter be marvellously preserved in the granite power and symmetry of those undying hands.
Now the corpse was stretched out on the splendid satin cushions of the expensive coffin. It had been barbered, powdered, disembowelled, and pumped full of embalming fluid. As it lay there with its waxen head set forward in its curious gaunt projectiveness, the pale lips firmly closed and with a little line of waxen mucus in the lips, the women came forward with their oily swollen faces, and a look of ravenous eagerness in their eyes, stared at it hard and long, lifted their sodden handkerchiefs slowly to their oily mouths, and were borne away, sobbing hysterically, by their equally oily, ravenous, sister orgiasts in sorrow.
Meanwhile his father’s friends, the stone-cutters, masons, building contractors, butchers, business men and male relatives were standing awkwardly about, dressed in their good, black clothes which they seemed not to wear so much as to inhabit with a kind of unrestful itchiness, lowering their eyes gravely and regretfully as the women put on their revolting show, talking together in low voices, and wondering when it would all be over.
These circumstances, together with the heavy unnatural languor of the funeral smells, the sweet-sick heaviness of the carnations, the funereal weepy blacks in which the women had arrayed themselves, the satiny sandalwood scent that came from the splendid coffin, and the fragrant faintly acrid odour of embalmed flesh, particularly when blended with the smell of cooking turnip greens, roast pork and apple sauce out in the kitchen, combined to create an atmosphere somewhat like a dinner in a comfortably furnished morgue.
In all this obscene pomp of burial there was something so grotesque, unnatural, disgusting, and remote from all he could remember of the dead man’s life and personality that everything about him—even the physical horror of his bloody death—now seemed so far away he could hardly believe it ever happened. Therefore, he stared at this waxen and eviscerated relic in the coffin with a sense of weird disbelief, unable to relate it to the living man who had bled great lakes of blood the night before.
Yet, even in his death, his father’s hands still seemed to live, and would not die. And this was the reason why the memory of those hands haunted him then and would haunt him for ever after. This was the reason why, when he would try to remember how he looked when dead, he could remember nothing clearly except the powerful sculptured weight and symmetry of his tremendous hands as they lay folded on his body in the coffin. The great hands had a stony, sculptured and yet living strength and vitality, as if Michelangelo had carved them. They seemed to rest there upon the groomed, bereft and vacant horror of the corpse with a kind of terrible reality as if there really is, in death, some energy of life that will not die, some element of man’s life that must persist and that resumes into a single feature of his life the core and essence of his character.
XXXV
Starwick had now become his best and closest friend. Suddenly, it occurred to him with a strange and bitter sense of loss and lack that Starwick was the only friend of his own age that he had ever known to whom he had fully and passionately revealed his own life, of whose fellowship and comradeship he had never grown weary. Friends he had had—friends in the casual and indifferent sense in which most friendship is understood—but until now he had never held a friend like Starwick in his heart’s core.
Why was it? What was this grievous lack or loss—if lack or loss it was—in his own life? Why was it that, with his fierce, bitter, and insatiate hunger for life, his quenchless thirst for warmth, joy, love, and fellowship, his constant image, which had blazed in his heart since childhood, of the enchanted city of the great comrades and the glorious women, that he grew weary of people almost as soon as he met them? Why was it that he seemed to squeeze their lives dry of any warmth and interest they might have for him as one might squeeze an orange, and then was immediately filled with boredom, disgust, dreary tedium, and an impatient weariness and desire to escape so agonizing that it turned his feeling almost into hatred?
Why was it that his spirit was now filled with this furious unrest and exasperation against people because none of them seemed as good as they should be? Where did it come from—this improvable and yet unshakable conviction that grew stronger with every rebuff and disappointment—that the enchanted world was here around us ready to our hand the moment that we chose to take it for our own, and that the impossible magic in life of which he dreamed, for which he thirsted, had been denied us not because it was a phantom of desire, but because men had been too base and weak to take what was their own?
Now, with Starwick, and for the first time, he felt this magic constantly—this realization of a life for ever good, for ever warm and beautiful, for ever flashing with the fires of passion, poetry and joy, for ever filled with the swelling and triumphant confidence of youth, its belief in new lands, morning, and a shining city, its hope of voyages, its conviction of a fortunate, good and happy life—an imperishable happiness and joy—that was impending, that would be here at any moment.
For a moment he looked at the strange and delicate face of the young man beside him, reflecting, with a sense of wonder, at his communion with this other life, so different from his own in kind and temper. What was it? Was it the sharp mind, that original and penetrating instrument which picked up the old and weary problems of the spirit by new handles, displaying without labour planes and facets rarely seen? With what fierce joy he welcomed those long walks together in the night, along the quiet streets of Cambridge, or by the marvellous river that wound away small and magical in the blazing moonlight into the sweet, dark countryside! What other pleasure, what other appeasement of his mind and sense had been so complete and wonderful as that which came from this association as, oblivious of the world, they carried on their fierce debate about all things under heaven; his own voice, passionate, torrential, and wild, crying out against the earth, the moon, invoking all the gods of verse and magic while his mind played rivers of lightning across the vast fields of reading and experience!
And how eagerly he waited for the answers of that other voice, quiet, weary, drawling—how angrily he stormed against its objections, how hungrily and gratefully he fed upon its agreement! What other tongue had had the power to touch his pride and his senses as this one had—how cruelly had its disdain wounded him, how magnificently had its praise filled his heart with glory! On these nights when he and Starwick had walked along the river in these vehement, passionate, and yet affectionate debates, he would relive the scene for hours after it had ended, going over their discussion again and again, remembering every gesture, every intonation of the voice, every flash of life and passion in the face. Late in the night he would pace up and down his room, or pause dreaming by his window, still carrying on in his mind the debate with his friend, inventing and regretting splendid things he might have said, exulting in those he had said and in every word of approval or burst of laughter he had provoked. And he would think: Ah, but I was GOOD there! I could see how he admired me, how high a place I have in his affection. For when he says a thing he MEANS it: he called me a poet, his voice was quiet and full of passion; he said my like had never been, that my destiny was great and sure.
Was this, then, the answer?
Until this period of his life he had drunk very little: in spite of the desperate fear his mother had that each of her children inherited the whisky disease—“the curse of liquor,” as she called it—from their father, he felt no burning appetite for stimulant. Alone, he never sought it out, he never bought a bottle for himself: solitary as his life had become, the idea of solitary drinking, of stealthy alley potations from a flask, filled him with sodden horror.
Now, in the company of Starwick, he was drinking more frequently than he had ever done before. Alcohol, indeed, until his twentieth year had been only a casual and infrequent spirit—once, in his seventeenth year, when he had come home from college at the Christmas vacation, he had got very drunk on various liquors which his brother Luke had brought home to his father, and which he had mixed together in a tumbler and drunk without discretion. And there had been one or two casual sprees during his years at college, but until this time he had never known the experience of frequent intoxication.
But now, in the company of Frank Starwick, he went every week or so to a little restaurant which was situated in the Italian district of the eastern quarter of town, beyond Scollay Square and across Washington Street. The place was Starwick’s own discovery, he hoarded his knowledge of it with stern secrecy, yielding it up only to a few friends—a few rare and understanding spirits who would not coarsely abuse the old-world spirit of this priceless place, because, he said:
“It would be a pity if it ever got known about. It really would, you know. . . . I mean, the kind of people who would begin to go there would ruin it. . . . They really would. . . . I mean, it’s QUITE astonishing to find a place of that sort here in Boston.”
It was the beginning of that dark time of blood, and crime, and terror which the years of prohibition brought and which was to leave its hideous mutilation not only upon the soul and conscience of the nation, but upon the lives of millions of people— particularly the young everywhere. At this time, however, the ugly, jeering, open arrogance of the later period—the foul smell of privilege and corruption, the smirk of protection, and the gangster’s sneer, were not so evident as they became in the years that followed. At this time, it was by no means easy “to get a drink”: the speak-easy had already started on its historic career, but was still more or less what its name suggested—a place to be got at quietly and by stealth, a place of low voices, furtive and suspicious eyes, and elaborate precautions.
The place which Starwick had “discovered,” and which he hoarded with such precious secrecy, was a small Italian restaurant known as Posillippo’s, which occupied the second floor of an old brick building in an obscure street of the Italian quarter. Frank pronounced the name strongly and lovingly—“Pothillippo’s”—in the mannered voice, and with the affected accent which all foreign and exotic names—particularly those that had a Latin flavouring— inspired in him.
Arrived at “Pothillippo’s,” Frank, who even at this time did all things with the most lavish and lordly extravagance, and who tipped generously at every opportunity, would be welcomed obsequiously by the proprietor and the waiters, and then would order with an air of the most refined and sensual discrimination from his favourite waiter, a suave and fawning servitor named Nino. There were other waiters just as good as Nino, but Frank expressed an overwhelming preference for him above all others because, he said, Nino had the same face as one of the saints in a painting by Giotto, and because he professed to find all of the ancient, grave and exquisite rhythm of the ancient Tuscan nobility composed in the one figure of this waiter.
“But have you noticed the way he uses his hands while talking?” Frank would say in a tone of high impassioned earnestness.—“Did you notice that last gesture? It is the same gesture that you find in the figure of the disciple Thomas in Leonardo’s painting of ‘The Last Supper.’ It really is, you know. . . . Christ!” he would cry, in his high, strange, and rather womanish tone. “The centuries of art, of living, of culture—the terrific knowledge ALL these people have—the kind of thing you’ll never find in people in this country, the kind of thing that no amount of college education or books can give you—all expressed in a single gesture of the hands of this Italian waiter. . . . The whole thing’s QUITE astonishing, it really is, you know.”
The real reason, however, that Frank preferred Nino to all the other waiters in “Pothillippo’s” establishment was that he liked the sound of the word “Nino” and pronounced it beautifully.
“Nino!” Frank would cry, in a high, strange, and rather womanish voice—“Nino!”
“Sě, signor,” Nino would breathe unctuously, and would then stand in an attitude of heavy and prayerful adoration, awaiting the young lord’s next commands.
“Nino,” Frank would then go on in the tone and manner of a sensuous and weary old-world sophisticate. “Quel vin avez-vous? . . . Quel vin—rouge—du—trčs—bon. Vous—comprenez?” said Frank, using up in one speech most of his French words, but giving a wonderful sense of linguistic mastery and complete eloquence in two languages.
“Mais si, signer!” Nino would answer immediately, skilfully buttering Frank on both sides—the French and the Italian—with three masterly words.
“Le Chianti est TRČS, TRČS bon! . . . C’est parfait, monsieur,” he whispered, with a little ecstatic movement of his fingers. “Admirable!”
“Bon,” said Frank with an air of quiet decision. “Alors, Nino,” he continued, raising his voice as he pronounced these two words, which were among his favourites. “Alors, une bouteille du Chianti— n’est-ce pas—”
“Mais si, signor!” said Nino, nodding enthusiastically. “Si—et pour manger?” he went on coaxingly.
“Pour manger?” Frank began—“Ecoute, Nino—vous pouvez recommander quelque chose—quelque chose D’EXTRAORDINAIRE!” Frank cried in a high impassioned tone. “Quelque chose de la MAISON!” he concluded triumphantly.
“Mais si!” Nino cried enthusiastically. “Sě, signor. . . . Permettez-moi! . . . Le spaghetti,” he whispered seductively, rolling his dark eyes rapturously aloft, and making a little mincing movement, indicative of speechless ecstasy, of his thumb and forefinger. “Le spaghetti . . . de la . . . maison . . . ah, signor,” Nino breathed—“le spaghetti avec la sauce de la maison est merveilleux . . . merveilleux!” he whispered.
“Bon,” said Starwick nodding. “Alors, Nino—le spaghetti pour deux—vous comprenez?”