The Lost Weekend Page 20

  Or Anna—would she? Anna who had said “I am not good for you, go back and find that Helen you talk about so much till I am bored,” meaning it of course and thinking thereby to do him the final good she hadn’t been able to do him in any other way. But how much more good had she done him (without knowing it) when she uttered that pronouncement on the boat, the question and indictment she couldn’t have begun to appreciate the full meaning of herself, though the answer and sentence if honest would affect her as much as it did him.… The week before they sailed they had played around for five days in Paris, played with Kees all over town, here and there all night and most of the day; and one evening, dancing with Anna at Armenonville, she had said, suddenly serious, “There is a question I will ask you when we are on the boat.” His heart sank, but he smiled and said “Tell me now.” She shook her head. “No, I want to wait till we are away from here, by ourselves. On the boat I will ask you.” He wanted to hear it then, he asked her again when they got back to their table, because it was bound to be serious and he wanted her to bring it out with Kees there, Kees to whom he could turn and laugh and kid with about the whole thing, kidding Anna out of it whatever it was. But no, she would wait till after they had sailed; and then, the first night out, in her cabin, while his heart thumped because of what it might turn out to be, she said it: “Why do you only come to bed with me when you are drunk?” He roared with delight. He knew damned well she had reason to ask; but in his relief that it had been no worse he was able to laugh as if it were terribly funny and he almost shouted “Because I’m always drunk!” She wasn’t convinced, he knew that, not the way she looked at him; but at the end, because of the way he neglected her in New York, Anna had seen that he was finally in Helen’s hands again and probably safe, his European education over at last. Certainly he was headed for no such fulfillment as this.…

  No such thing had ever entered the dreamy head of Miss Dawson either, who took such a fancy to him in the 2nd Grade that he hadn’t been able to live it down for the rest of his life but would today for good and all. “My dear Mrs. Birnam,” she wrote in her lovely Palmer-method hand, “I would just like to say something which no doubt you already know and that is that you have a boy whom you can well be proud of on his eighth birthday. He is the most perfect child in the schoolroom I have ever known and the most winning and sweet besides being so bright. I sincerely hope that Dame Fortune will smile on him and Good Luck attend him through a long and happy life. Most sincerely, Ruth Dawson.”

  Eight! Fool that she was, idiot, maudlin old maid to write such a letter! the letter that hung over his head ever since, preserved and shown to him every time he went home. Let her see him sitting here panting sweating shaking now, let Anna see him! Good creatures, do you love your lives? Here is a knife like other knives.… You people who build fond hopes for the promising, who look on the well-favored young and know—know—that here is one that will go far (oh far indeed)—let it be a lesson to you all! What right had they to take such advantage of him at eight? What right at eighteen? Sickening words that actually had pleased him. Miss Dawson and Dorothy (and how many more?)—I need but stick it in my heart.… And all you folk will die.…

  Eight. It was scarcely the age of reason, much less the beginning of wisdom. That had come at ten, when his father left. Wisdom of a sort. And not when he left, either; but months after, when he began to realize he was never coming back. Okay for him to realize it, he could take it; but nobody else must know—nobody. People did, though. They stopped him on the street to ask, neighbors called him in their back doors to give him a cookie and ask, “Is your papa coming home for Thanksgiving?” “Oh yes, Papa’s coming home, he always comes home on holidays.” “He wasn’t home for Labor Day.” “That isn’t a holiday! Not like Thanksgiving.” “The 4th of July is.” “Yes, but Papa couldn’t get a—I think they call it a reservation. But he’s coming home Thanksgiving, all right.” He kept it up, right up to the very day, knowing all the while—And then, Thanksgiving over, people began again. “Is your papa coming home for Christmas?” After a while, they stopped asking; and then his shame began in earnest, because then they knew.

  At noon the doorbell began to ring. The sound froze him in his chair. What was the foul-fiend up to now? The buzzer that released the lock on the street-door was in the kitchen, but he could not have made it if his life depended literally upon it. And what of it? He would not have pressed the buzzer even if it had been at his elbow. He listened to the long insistent drone of the bell. What had he done yesterday, what recklessness or tampering or damage had he been up to, what outright crime? Was it someone come to question him, accuse him, take him away perhaps? Finally the bell ceased, but it left a void of silence that was heavy with threat. Now what, now what.… He was soon to find out.

  There were footsteps in the hall, ascending the last flight. Someone rapped on the apartment door.

  He looked wildly about him. It was broad daylight, the room was filled with sun, there was no question this was real. He knew it was true, was happening, even as he thought—almost longingly, now—of the whisperers of the early morning. He crouched back in his chair and stared across the room and through the foyer at the doorknob of the outer locked door—fixed it with his eye, in panic. The rapping came again; to his horror he saw the doorknob turn back and forth; and Helen’s voice called softly: “Don. Don. Are you in there, Don?”

  If he coughed now, if his heart thumped any louder, if he so much as let go his breath—

  “Don. Won’t you let me in?”

  Oh, it was her voice all right!

  “You are there, aren’t you Don?”

  The doorknob rattled.

  “It’s Helen, Don. Please open the door.”

  The voice was low and pleading; not loud, not demanding, not even reproachful.

  “I’ve only got a little while, Don, I wish you’d please let me in. Please.”

  There was an uncertain note in the voice now, he was winning, he was fooling her, she had begun to believe he wasn’t there. If he could hang on another moment—

  “Don, are you there, won’t you answer? I want to help you.” A pause. “I only want—”

  She didn’t finish that one. He waited in agonized suspense; and after a moment, only a moment more, the doorknob stopped turning, the footsteps moved off.

  He was almost faint with relief. But as he heard her going down the stairs and away—taking with her the help he needed so badly—he wanted to cry out “Come back! come back!” The Helen he knew so well and for so long, who loved him and whom he loved and would always love, she who had been through so much with him that they could never grow apart, no, no matter how much he shut her out and shut himself out too— He wanted her now, wanted to call out “Come back, don’t leave me! Come back!” Wanted to but never would, never in this world, never never, not if he were sitting here bleeding to death from twenty wounds. He would gladly have died at this moment rather than face Helen, or anyone. But Helen above all.

  He understood it, now; saw what had been going on. It was Helen who had been ringing him all morning. From the office; from work. Perhaps she had been in touch with Wick, by ’phone from the farm; Wick had asked her to find out about him; she would have done it in any case, on her own, knowing he was on the loose. She must have been convinced he was there in the apartment and would eventually answer, or was out and would soon return, the way she had called so often. During her lunch-hour she came over to see for herself. When he didn’t answer the doorbell, she had gained admittance by ringing some other apartment, perhaps, or seeing Dave the janitor. Then she had come upstairs and rapped on the door and tried the knob and called to him, thinking her words—thinking the sound of her voice—might—

  How little people knew! How little they ever knew or understood! (His fists closed in anger.) How could they know what he was suffering! How could they know he would never be able to answer the door or the telephone! How could he explain it to them even! Would telling th
em tell them why! (He poured the words out in anguished angry whispers.) How could they ever understand! How could people—anyone!—those walking by on the street outside—the two ladies cooking their lunch in the front apartment—the ignorant innocent riders on the L train half a block away—how could they know the hell that was going on in this room! His friends here, his brother at the farm, his mother at home, how could they sense or know of the gathering panic that was any moment about to burst the walls out! How could Helen if she came into this room and saw him with her very eyes, how could she see the breaking-point that had been reached here or the taut brain that was ready to snap! The telephone rang.

  She was back. Back at the office, back at work, back at it, back at him. Or she had stopped in a drugstore—what difference does it make? She would ’phone and ’phone and ’phone, the bell would ring him into the next world, that was the way she was helping him—could she possibly know that? Or know it even if told? His mind recoiled and plunged again into the past, as into a cooling stream.…

  Holidays, Sundays, days of no school.… He was coming down over Wylie’s Hill, coming home, after a hike into the country to his favorite haunt. He had lingered there half the morning, reluctant as always to leave the lovely spot, his own discovery and place. It was a little glen. There was a willow grew aslant the brook, that showed its hoar leaves in the glassy stream. He could daydream here forever, imagining that beautiful and muddy death—realer to him by far than anything that took place in life. The fantastic garlands had floated off and were now wedged at the rim of the tiny dam, the coronet of weeds still hung from the drooping bough, and here was the reed-like broken limb that had dropped her to the brook. He saw the thin clothes spread wide, ballooning with air; he heard the tunes, so innocent, so ribald; and then the garments, growing heavy with water, lowered the frail figure to the gentle mud beneath. But still the pretty dress billowed around her, the hands moved restless and fitful, the lovely zany face still showed in the stream, quivering and blurred, but smiling still.… He had lingered there too long, as usual; past noon. It was Thanksgiving, a freakishly perfect day, balmy and dry as early fall. From Wylie’s Hill he could see the town spread out below, the familiar loved town where everybody in the world knew him and had always known him, where he had so many uncles and aunts who were no relation to him whatever that the neighborhood, indeed the village, was one great family. As he came down the hill and crossed the railroad tracks, he began to smell the dinners cooking, the dinners that today would all be alike, yet none so good as the dinner cooked by his mother. She would be working at it now, as she had been since early morning. When he got home he would go to the kitchen and help himself to celery and radishes and take them up to his room while he read and waited for dinner.…

  The defaulters, the renegers, the backward-lookers, the adolescents, the ungrownups.… He was a life-term member of that motley and ludicrous crew: uncles cousins fathers husbands brothers sons dear friends promising friends—always promising. Not so damned motley either, since they were all crossed the same, following so consistently the same pattern and history from oh way back. They were the loved ones (usually); oddly, too, the well-favored. As children they were loved of their parents, their mothers especially; and if they were one of several, they were the ones most loved. (“I’ve wept over you more than any of the others”—but all they felt was a guilty pride and pleasure at their power to damage.) They were the brightest in school (usually), the intelligent, the quick to learn, never the studious. They tried their hands at many talents; and though they didn’t get anywhere, their friends cover this up for them now by speaking of them as “clever,” they say they have “personality,” they say “So-&-so would go far if only he’d apply himself,” or “So-&-so is a queer duck, what he needs is a good wife,” and often “Sure he’s got brains but what good does it do him?” Brains indeed and indeed what good does it do them? Dreamy tosspots, they stand all afternoon in a 2nd Avenue bar looking at the sun-patterns under the L or their own faces in the mirror; they do good but not good enough work on the paper and dream of the novel they’re certainly going to get around to someday; they stand behind a desk on the lecture-platform lecturing with loving and fruitless persuasion to students watching the clock; throughout whole evenings with sinking heart they sit watching their wives over the edge of a book and wondering how, how, how had it ever come about; they live in and search the past not to discover where and at what point they missed the boat but only to revel in the fancied and fanciful pleasures of a better happier and easier day; they see not wisely but too well and what they see isn’t worth it; they eat of and are eaten by ennui, with no relief from boredom even in their periodic plunges from euphoria to despair or their rapid rise back to the top again. They wake up on mornings such as this, all but out of their minds with remorse, enduring what others call and can call a hangover—that funny word Americans will joke about forever, even when the morning-after is their own.

  The humor of the hangover: the hilarious vocabulary: the things other drinkers call what they suffer then—the things they can call it who endure the normal reaction, merely, of a few hours of headache, butterfly-stomach, and (crowning irony!) nausea at the thought of another drink. The jitters, the ginters, the booze-blues, the hooch-humps, the katzenjammers; the beezy-weezies, screaming meemies, snozzle-wobbles, bottle-ache, ork-orks, woefits, the moaning after. It was ghastly funny, oh hilarious!—He looked about the room as if he had not seen it before, as if he had just come awake. On the floor by the fireplace where he had flung it was the James Joyce that had started the whole thing, if start he had needed: the spell that was ending in anything but riot. Riot, God, it was lethargy, torpor, stupor! Atrophy; except for the violent heart, gradual petrification; slow death. And there on the table were the souvenirs of the spree (spree!), the trophies of the toot (bat, bout, binge, bender, bust, tear, souse, lark, pub-crawl, wingding, randan), the empty sticky bottles, the dead soldiers. Dead soldiers—Christ how could they joke or make light of such a taunting crazing thing as an empty bottle, the bottle so lately filled with that which was his hell to have but his life all the same, empty now before his eyes, mocking him with its shouting emptiness, degrading him, reducing him to a shattered broken wreck which could only be restored by the very stuff that destroyed him again. But to be thus destroyed! What would he not give for such destruction now! A jigger of it, two fingers, no more!

  And yet was there one soul, among all the people he knew, who would give him that drink, if they could? Would Wick, would Helen? Even knowing, as they did know, how he needed it, what it would do for him? There was not one.

  In a kind of self-abuse that was almost ease to his torment, he allowed himself to dwell, for as long as he could stand it, on the dream of drink.

  Suppose a bottle should materialize before him full and unopened. Once assured of its reality, how calmly then, all excitement gone, he would open it and pour, almost not needing it in the security the sight of it gave him. But he would drink it, of course. He wouldn’t care how bad it tasted—un-iced, without water or soda, lukewarm, stinking, throttling. He would drink a good half-glass at once—and at once the pricking nerves would die down, the thumping heart quiet, the fatigue and ease come warmly over him at last. That’s what liquor and only liquor could do for him on the mornings after, that’s why he had to go on and on, it was necessity. Half a glass and he would be at peace, as calm as if he had not been drinking for weeks. With a drink under his belt again, he would see differently, hear right, feel normal and relaxed. His mind would begin to work and notice and take stock. He would be aware of hunger, and wish to do something about it. He would get up and bathe and dress. He would certainly answer that ringing telephone, walk right up to it and pick up the receiver and answer it, saying (his voice composed and friendly, showing no trace of tension or guile): “Have you really been calling all this time, I’m so sorry, I’ve only just come in, fact is I was about to ring you up myself, how are you, Helen,
what is it?” He knew how it would be. He knew he could get away with it, fool her, fool anybody, it didn’t make any difference what he said, it cost so little and made her feel better, might as well reassure her now, he was safe with all that distance between them, safe while they were at two ends of a telephone wire, she wasn’t going to be around to check up on him or reproach him; for he knew he was bound to miss or avoid the appointment they would make to meet later, the appointment he himself would propose, to reassure her—just as he had missed being here when Wick came back to take him to the farm. He knew all that; and he knew, too, that that one drink would not be his last, nor that bottle, now that he was on his feet again.

  So much for the beginning. Then he would have another, because he knew that the effects would shortly wear off and he’d be right back where he started, raw and shaking in this chair. He would pour a larger drink, this time, and maybe take more time with it, while his mind began to pick up alertly, alarmingly (he knew that), and suggest a hundred different things to do. He would feel great, then, and ready for anything. He’d have another drink before he started out, his hunger would vanish and all thought of food would vanish too, he’d grab his hat and give a last look in the mirror and run lightheartedly down the stairs, bound for who knows what pleasure or danger? That, he did not know. From then on, only one thing was certain. Tomorrow morning (provided he got home safe) would find him in this chair again, more desperate, if possible, than now; on the borderline itself.