Alexander’s intellectuals were several youngsters from Galloway who attended Boston College, three rather dour young Irishmen who read Aquinas and were proficient in mathematics. They were to meet in a bar on Rooney Street.
“Why did you park here!” Scotcho suddenly yelled again at Berlot, who turned and looked straight at him under the slump of his hat with grave surprise.
“Why,” said Berlot, “just for a little nip.”
“But we’re late! Not that it makes any difference to me!”
“We’re awfully late, Ernest!” put in Alexander emphatically from the back seat. “They’re very good kids and you really ought to meet them.”
“We’ll just have a little nip,” said Berlot, and he produced the bottle, uncorked it and drank several leisurely gulps. “I gotta catch up on that drunken D.J.! I’m about ten nips behind.”
So the three wags in the front seat silently gazed out the window at the people who went by on the street.
“Hey, there goes Beansy,” said Berlot quietly.
“Don’t let him see us, we’ll never get rid of him!”
“Good old Beansy,” chuckled Berlot. “Do you know what Blowjoe Gartside did to him once, Pete? You were at college then, last month. He took Beansy and hung him up on the fence outside Mulvaney’s bar, he was so drunk. No bull! Beansy was so stewed he couldn’t talk, he couldn’t walk, he couldn’t see. He had a bottle of some stuff that he gave me a drink of. You know what it was? Shellac! Shellac mixed with alcohol! I swear on the Bible on my mother’s name!”
“That’s Beansy.”
“Do you know his mother throws him down the stairs when he comes home drunk? You ought to see her—a big woman two hundred pounds, she works in the silk mills. When he comes home drunk, she goes out and when he gets to the head of the stairs, she just lets him have it, wham! Beansy has to go and sleep it off in the depot. And listen! Another time, last winter, I think, he was so drunk he let it snow all over him right outside the car. He fell right outa the car, out on the highway. That was the night I was dead drunk in the back seat. I woke up at six o’clock, and no Beansy! I got outa the car, all I could see was a big hump of snow on the ground. It was Beansy, dead to the world!” And Berlot leaned out to stare up the street. “There he goes …! To Rooney Street and Middle Street to hit the saloons and see what he can get. He never gets it. At midnight everybody’ll be smooching with his girl and Beansy’ll be alone.”
“Eleven-fifteen,” put in Scotcho wistfully. “Another forty-five minutes and it’ll be 1941. Imagine that!”
“Do you know that Beansy thinks he’s a matinee idol?” said Danny, turning to everybody. “I caught him once in the men’s room at the theater, admiring his profile with another mirror that he carries with him, getting a side view. New Year’s Eve and he won’t even come near a girl. He’s afraid of them. He told me once women carry hatpins in their stockings to stab a guy with—”
“Who is Beansy?” inquired Francis suavely. Alexander was sitting beside him, dark with weariness.
“That was him went by just now!”
“Hey, Francis,” cried Peter, “did you know that Berlot’s old man and Pa used to be big buddies in the old days?”
“They used to hell around together,” explained young Berlot eagerly, “they used to go to New Bedford on big fishing trips and get blotto right in the middle of the ocean. Huck huck huck!”
“Really!” cried Alexander, his patience having long been exhausted, “you’re keeping those three fellows waiting an awful long time. Why don’t we follow through with our plans for the night as we’re supposed to do.”
“Okay, we’ll go see the intellectuals,” said Berlot, and he started up the car and drove it slowly along the street.
“Look! The Greeks in front of the Y. You know what those guys think? Every woman that passes by falls in love forever with them.” Saying this, Danny leaned forward to stare with grotesque stupefaction at the clusters of young men lounging in front of the Y.M.C.A. building. “That’s why they stand there with that dreamy look in their eyes and smoke big pipes. Sure! That’s what they think! See them showing their profiles to the women? Look at ’em swinging their chains. Hey, Zoot!!”
“There’s that crazy Remo!” said Berlot, pulling the car to a sudden halt in the middle of the street. Another car swerved around crazily.
“He’s a good basketball player, that crazy Remo.”
“He’s drinking and tailing around so much in about a year he’ll be in Shrewsboro with the nuts!” Berlot suddenly stuck his head out the window and yelled: “Hey, Remo the madman!!—”
The boys in front of the Y.M.C.A. looked around and waved derisively as the car went by. But a moment later Berlot stopped the car again at the curb and fumbled in the locker for the bottle.
“Whattaya stopping for again!” cried Scotcho.
“Do you want me to get out and push?” cried Alexander now.
“Ah, take it easy, Alexander,” said Danny in a soothing voice. “Man, don’t you realize it’s New Year’s Eve? Don’t you realize that this is a tough life, that there’s a whole lifetime of worry ahead of you? Why should we always be in a hurry in this world?”
“The Prince of Crete must never hustle!” put in Scotcho with emphasis.
“The Prince of Crete?” echoed Francis softly.
“Sure! Alexander is the Prince of Crete,” explained Danny, turning to stare at Panos, rolling his large yellowish eyes in mocking amazement. “What a good kid you are!” he suddenly cried with a shout of laughter, and under the sway of some powerful secret mirth he began to pitch over and choke with irrepressible laughter.
“Oh, what’s the use!” sighed Alexander. He howled, in all good humor, with a helpless wave of his arms, and at this the bottle was instantly thrust upon him by the boys in the front seat—it was the big chance they had been waiting for—and he was loudly adjured to drink and drink more, which he at once proceeded to do in prodigious wild gulps as everyone cheered.
“There you go! There you go!” yelled Danny, beside himself and leaning solicitously over Alexander from the front seat, even kneading his hair enthusiastically. “Drink! drink! For tomorrow you may kick the bucket! Do you know something, Al? It’s a tough life, I don’t have to tell you that. The world is full of sorrow, old ladies trudging to the mill for the dead man’s shift, or going to the Monarch to try to enjoy a movie, old men mopping floors. Oh, Al, if I were as smart as you I could express myself better. You know,” he went on, suddenly turning to Francis Martin with a sincere air, “you don’t know us very well and we don’t know you very well, all we know is that you’re Zagg’s brother and that’s good enough for us. What I’m trying to say is, we’re not a bunch of fools like we seem to be—you know? I work in a mill, Francis, from three in the afternoon to midnight, in the daytime I go to high school trying to acquire myself a little education. I work hard, so do these guys. So let’s all be friends, it’s New Year’s Eve, dammit. If I was only intelligent enough, like you or Alexander, I’d express my thoughts better, you know? But accept my fondest—gentlemen, all of you!—hand me that bottle, quick—to all ye merry goddam gentlemen, I bequeath the happiest of all new years on this crazy screwball earth! Hup!” And he drank a tremendous gulp of whiskey, and sputtered and coughed and choked, and tears came into his eyes, and Scotcho doubled up in hysterical laughter.
“Let’s go!” yelled Berlot, throwing the empty bottle out of the window and jamming in the clutch. The car hurled forward with a great jump, and they were off at last to the Rooney Street barrooms.
As they charged into an upstairs saloon, Scotcho and Berlot immediately broke up two girls who were dancing together and whirled them off in crazy jigs. Francis and Alexander took up the rear in a more or less decorous fashion. But the moment Francis saw what it was going to be like—the dancing rooms roaring and shaking with the stomp of feet, the French-Canadian millhands cavorting with their women in that stiff-necked, white-collared way workingme
n have on holidays, and the midnight hour approaching and things getting progressively noisier—he decided to go home and go to bed. Without a word to anyone, he went down the stairs, winding his scarf around his neck, and started up the narrow snowy street.
And as he walked home at a steady pace, everywhere around him, along Rooney Street, along the canals, the town was beginning to raise broad sounds of revelry that mounted as the midnight hour drew near. Meanwhile it had stopped snowing suddenly, a wind had come up and was blowing the fresh clean snow about the streets, and an occasional break in the clouds revealed sudden sparkling stars. It was colder now.
“What an unbelievable gallery of imbeciles that brother of mine parades around with!” he thought with a grimace. “Friends! Does he think the whole world will be friends with him? What chaos! Everywhere, nothing but chaos!”
He walked along absorbed in his own thoughts, jostling through occasional crowds, passing saloons and restaurants and diners in which people had begun to blow on paper horns and shake rattlers in a frenzy of merrymaking.
He turned smartly into a narrow side street and strode along past huddled tenements. Lights were burning in some of the windows and Francis could hear all kinds of merry noises inside. “Happy New Year!” he smirked. “Ring out the old, you idiots. Ring in the new—ring in more stupidity, more brute misery, more nonsense, more chaos. But, in God’s name, don’t fall out of line or the next in rank’ll flog the living daylights out of you. Look out for that budget. Responsibilities to meet, you know. Love your wife and kiddies, forward the sub-human race. Learn to accept the whip of your next in rank. Don’t revolt, whatever you do! The whip and not death! As for me, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to desert the sinking ship.”
He stopped on the bridge above the Merrimac Falls which were crashing about in a frothy steam beneath the high windblown stars of midnight. Shivers went up his spine.
“God!” he shuddered. “How horrible it would be in that water now. Will you look at the way those damned ice floes get tossed around on the rocks!”
He lingered there at the railing and watched moodily below.
Suddenly a car raced wildly across the bridge and zoomed past Francis, and someone leaned out the window and waved and yelled: “Don’t jump, Bud, don’t jump!! Hap-py New Year-r-r-r!” And almost before Francis could look around the car was veering crazily around the corner intersection and racing off downtown.
He hurried along thinking and burning, and finally he was walking up Galloway Road towards the house, and the sounds of the celebrating town faded far behind.
“These ridiculously cold climates,” he sniffed. “The South is what I want—Mann’s South, or Gide’s, or Goethe’s, the Mediterranean South, the Venetian. Remember that poem you wrote about that? What a timid little fool I was! I wonder how many fellows like me have wasted away, fretted, written poetry in a thousand chaotic American towns like this one until they decided to get out! And how many girls too? I wonder where all the girls are who read Willa Cather and Edna Millay and Gertrude Stein. They’re the people I’m interested in, saved by their sensibility. What do the rest of them amount to, for God’s sake? Great hordes of them, like ants. They struggle to find the meaningless ant-hill.”
Francis stopped in the middle of the road and looked at the big shambling Martin house. He remembered his boyhood now as he stared at the house. This was the house he had been born and raised in, and yet what proof was there, in this wintry desolation of midnight, that anything had ever happened to him? “Looking at that house makes me feel absolutely certain that I never belonged there anyhow. Where’s my Venetian sun, my own future, my Riviera, my marble plaza? Where will I be when I’ve managed to extricate myself from all this forever?”
In the Martin house now, in the creaking secrecy and isolation of midnight, in the gleeful choking excitement of midnight when Mom and Pop are not home, in the dark spooky hallways of house, in the screaming glee of attics, dark corners, under-the-bed, behind-the-door, back-of-the-sofa, as winds moan and windowpanes knock, and something stalks creeping in the darkness, in all this the Martin kids were converged now, hiding, running down halls, screaming horrendously, crawling on hands and knees, giggling, snickering, choking, saying, “I see you!… peekaboo!”—for it was midnight, and the house was dark, isolate, thrilling, and it was theirs for the night.
“Where’s Joe? Where’s Joe?” the Martin kids were screaming now in the dark wind-demented house of midnight.
“He’s hiding up in the attic, I bet!”
“Let’s go catch him! He’s hiding up in the attic! Let’s go catch him!”
And they all scurried up to the attic looking for their crazy big brother Joe, the gleeful kids Mickey, Charley, even Lizzy tagging along—but when they got there, he wasn’t hiding, he was just sitting before an old chest pulling out a lot of old clothes.
“Look at all this stuff! D’jever see so much junk! Who’s gonna put on this old dress? Who wants this old straw hat?”
“Oooh, let me!”
“Let’s play some more hide-and-seek, Joey, please, Joey! hey, Joey! huh, Joey?”
“Wait a sec, I wanta see what else is in this big old trunk.”
“Hey, looka me! I’m Zouzou! I’m Zouzou the junkman! Giddap, giddap, horse!—”
And the wind beat around the attic gables, something creaked in a dark corner, and the house was spooky and rich with darkness and all fabulous.
“Ooh! look at this!” cried Lizzy, pulling out an old 1910 dress, and she began putting it on, the floppy hat, the floppy shoes too, and strutted around clomping, so solemn, and the kids rolled on the floor and choked, and Joe scratched his chin, and the wind beat against the attic, the timbers creaked.
A child, a child, hiding in a corner, peeking, infolded in veils, in swirling shrouds and mystery, all tee-hee, all earnest, all innocent with shiny love, sweeter than a bird, pure with pretty gleaming eyes and rosy lips and the crazy little grin shining out, all writhing and quivering with phantasy and understanding, and the possibility of tears, unaware of duskish birds with disillusioned eyes flying nearer, but not now, oh, not now—the child, unknowing, yet best knowing, Godly all-knowing, the child crieth—“I see you.…”
Francis came in the house and went upstairs to his attic room, and lay down on his bed, in his dark nook, to meditate. And all around the house, upstairs, downstairs, everywhere—strange noises, unexplained titterings and tappings, creakings and scamperings, whoops and gasps and something hiding and playing in the dark, and commotions and conniptions all over.
What was it all about? Good God, what was it all about and what were they doing? He had not been that kind of child. Were they peeking at him now?
No, he had not been the same kind of child, he had been sickly and inactive (Francis reflected this now, darkly)—a child given to long profound solitudes and lone reveries during which he had imagined himself a hero, a prince, a great prizefighter, a warrior and a god. Owing to his delicate health, of course, he had not been able to take part vigorously in the ordinary activities around him: but even afterwards when in normal health, none of the things that children did had particularly interested him.
“The mother seems to think that it was a tough break for me to be sickly,” he mused now as he stared at the dark ceiling, “but, heavens, the more I think about it I realize it was actually a boon to me someway. How else could I have been vouchsafed boyhood moments of contemplation while all the other kids were out in the fields and streets competing in their silly games? It was good for me. I learned what was rare, beautiful, fine, higher. It’s the same story with a lot of great men. If I want to be great, I know the secrets—”
And nothing was further away from his mind than the naive and absurd hopes, the sentimental belief in the eventual wonderful fruition of his life, that his family placed in him—in moments when they considered him the “queer one” of the family who had “something on his mind” and who would one day pop up and surprise them all
by some fantastic feat of brilliance that would make them all proud of little Francis—nothing was further away from his mind than these things.
“I feel like someone lost in a strange, hostile foreign country,” he mused. “Like the other night when the old man raised his glass to me—what was it, Christmas night?—‘Here’s to you, Francis,’ he said, ‘here’s hoping for the best.’ That sentimental sad look in his eyes: he hates me and he’s ashamed of himself for hating me, and he knows that I know it, too. Because I didn’t get a job the moment I got out of high school, like all the other poor simple jerks around here, because I don’t listen to his stupid stories, because I keep to myself. Oh, that gets him mad! What was it Gide said about the bourgeois father? But it really gets him mad. Anyway how I would have loved to return his toast that night, by executing a low formal bow.… Ah, well, it just isn’t done in this neck of the woods.” He smiled in the dark.
(Someone said “Wooo!” far below and a little foot tapped slowly, and there were laments as if solemnly meant to spoof all sorrow.)
Francis turned over on the bed and stared at the wall. “Oh, that stupid bunch tonight! That gang of Pete’s! That awful Greek of his and that awful Danny with his sentimental little speech to me. My silence disturbed him also. That’s what the old man principally hates about me—that silence.… And all those people with paper hats. New Year’s Eve indeed—what a horrible thought that there’s going to be another full year of it! And what makes a man keep on going?” he thought with a frown. “I wonder when the next depression’ll hit me. Baudelaire was depressed all his life. There are so many things to make one sick nowadays, enough to make Baudelaire pale in comparison.…”
(A door creaked open slowly below, little feet ran bumbling, there was a pause, a hush, a smothered peep, a watchful waiting, another pause, another hush, and rattle-bang-slam the chair turned over, and whoops, and gallopings, and crazy laughter … all in the house, all in the house.)