One day the boy telephoned the girl of whom his Uncle Bascom had spoken. She was coy and cautious, but sounded hopeful: he liked her voice. When, after some subtle circumlocutions, he asked her for an early meeting, she countered swiftly by asking him to meet her the following evening at the North Station: she was coming in to town to perform at a dinner. She played the violin. He understood very well that she was really anxious to see him before admitting him to the secure licence of a suburban parlour; so he bathed himself, threw powder under his arm-pits, and put on a new shirt, which he bought for the occasion.
It was November: rain fell coldly and drearily. He buttoned himself in his long raincoat and went to meet her. She had promised to wear a red carnation; the suggestion was her own, and tickled him hugely. As the pink-faced suburbanites poured, in an icy stream, into the hot waiting-room, he looked for her. Presently he saw her: she came toward him immediately, since his height was unmistakable. They talked excitedly flustered, but gradually getting some preliminary sense of each other.
She was a rather tall, slender girl, dressed in garments that seemed to have been left over, in good condition, from the early part of the century. She wore a flat but somehow towering hat: it seemed to perch upon her head as do those worn by the Queen of England. She was covered with a long blue coat, which flared and bustled at the hips, and had screws and curls of black corded ornament; she looked respectable and antiquated, but her costume, and a na?ve stupidity in her manner, gave her a quaintness that he liked. He took her to the subway, having arranged a meeting at her home for the following night.
The girl, whose name was Genevieve Simpson, lived with her mother and her brother, a heavy young lout of nineteen years, in a two-family house at Melrose. The mother, a small, full, dumpling-face woman, whose ordinary expression in repose, in common with that of so many women of the middle class in America who have desired one life and followed another and found perhaps that its few indispensable benefits, as security, gregariousness, decorum, have not been as all-sufficient as they had hoped, was one of sullen, white, paunch-eyed discontent.
It was this inner petulance, the small carping disparagement of everyone and everything that entered the mean light of her world, that made absurdly palpable the burlesque mechanism of social heartiness. Looking at her while she laughed with shrill falsity at all the wrong places, he would rock with huge guffaws, to which she would answer with eager renewal, believing that both were united in their laughter over something of which she was, it is true, a little vague.
It was, she felt, her business to make commercially attractive to every young man the beauty and comfort of the life she had made for her family, and although the secret niggling discontent of their lives was plainly described on both her own and her daughter’s face, steeped behind their transparent masks in all the small poisons of irritability and bitterness, they united in their pretty tableau before the world — a tableau, he felt, something like those final exhibitions of grace and strength with which acrobats finish the act, the strained smile of ease and comfort, as if one could go on hanging by his toes for ever, the grieving limbs, the whole wrought torture which will collapse in exhausted relief the second the curtain hides it.
“We want you to feel absolutely at home here,” she said brightly. “Make this your headquarters. You will find us simple folk here, without any frills,” she continued, with a glance around the living-room, letting her eye rest with brief satisfaction upon the striped tiles of the hearth, the flowered vases of the mantel, the naked doll, tied with a pink sash, on the piano, and the pictures of “The Horse Fair,” the lovers flying before the storm, Maxfield Parrish’s “Dawn,” and Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” which broke the spaces of the wall, “but if you like a quiet family life, a welcome is always waiting for you here. Oh, yes — everyone is for each other here: we keep no secrets from each other in our little family.”
Eugene thought that this was monstrous if it was true; a swift look at Genevieve and Mama convinced him, however, that not everything was being told. A mad exultancy arose in him: the old desire returned again to throw a bomb into the camp, in order to watch its effect; to express murderous opinions in a gentle Christian voice, further entrenched by an engaging matter-of-factness, as if he were but expressing the commonplace thought of all sensible people; bawdily, lewdly, shockingly with a fine assumption of boyish earnestness, sincerity, and na?veté. So, in a voice heavily coated with burlesque feeling, he said: “Thank you, thank you, Mrs. Simpson. You have no idea what it means to me to be able to come to a place like this.”
“I know,” said Genevieve with fine sympathy, “when you’re a thousand miles from home —”
“A thousand!” he cried, with a bitter laugh, “a thousand! Say rather a million.” And he waited, almost squealing in his throat, until they should bite.
“But — but your home is in the South, isn’t it?” Mrs. Simpson inquired doubtfully.
“Home! Home!” cried he, with raucous laugh. “I have no home!”
“Oh, you poor boy!” said Genevieve.
“But your parents — are they BOTH dead?”
“No!” he answered, with a sad smile. “They are both living.”
There was a pregnant silence.
“They do not live together,” he added after a moment, feeling he could not rely on their deductive powers.
“O-o-oh,” said Mrs. Simpson significantly, running the vowel up and down the vocal scale. “O-o-oh!”
“Nasty weather, isn’t it?” he remarked, deliberately drawing a loose cigarette from his pocket. “I wish it would snow: I like your cold Northern winters as only a Southerner can like them; I like the world at night when it is muffled, enclosed with snow; I like a warm secluded house, sheltered under heavy fir trees, with the curtains drawn across a mellow light, and books, and a beautiful woman within. These are some of the things I like.”
“Gee!” said the boy, his heavy blond head leaned forward intently. “What was the trouble?”
“Jimmy! Hush!” cried Genevieve, and yet they all looked toward Eugene with eager intensity.
“The trouble?” said he, vacantly. “What trouble?”
“Between your father and mother?”
“Oh,” he said carelessly, “he beat her.”
“Aw-w! He hit her with his fist?”
“Oh, no. He generally used a walnut walking-stick. It got too much for her finally. My mother, even then, was not a young woman — she was almost fifty, and she could not stand the gaff so well as she could in her young days. I’ll never forget that last night,” he said, gazing thoughtfully into the coals with a smile. “I was only seven, but I remember it all very well. Papa had been brought home drunk by the mayor.”
“The MAYOR?”
“Oh, yes,” said Eugene casually. “They were............