I have never been able to remember much about the three days in New Orleans. It is a town which has been designed for just such excursions as that on which Ernest, Tom, Dick, Harry, and myself were bound. They advertise it as a "convention city" and that means that they make everything easy in the way of drink and gambling and women for tired and bored middle-aged men who are trying to escape from something and purify themselves of boredom and despair by a thorough, good bath, of debauchery. Everything is made easy. The taxicab driver, the stray passer-by, even the bellhop, can "fix you up." You can have anything you want. The restaurants are supposed to be good and sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't. The joint are filled with a backwash of human beings who will provide you with any sort of goings-on you prefer, no matter what. There are plenty of other "convention cities" like New Orleans. It is more satisfactory perhaps than the others only because it seems more foreign and therefore farther away from all the things the conventioneers are trying to escape.
When I think back on that trip it always seems to me that the whole impression is like one of these surrealist pictures in which the whole place is a maze of narrow streets, dazzling with neon lights that spell out "The Oyster Girl" and "The Cat Girl" and hands and arms attached to nothing, mere phantoms, which reach out from narrow alleys and doorways to drag you in off the sidewalks. It certainly seems like that after youVe had plenty to drink.
I remember that we registered at the hotel for rooms which we never used except to store our luggage and we registered at the convention desk where we received badges with our names on which we put into our pockets and forgot and I remember some place where we had a pretty good meal and then everything dissolved into the phantasmagoria which resembled the surrealist picture. Most of all I remember my own state of mind. I didn't care what happened. I was ready for anything at all. I no longer had left the shallowest vestige of an inhibition. It was a wonderful, almost voluptuous feeling.
Late that first night after we had made a round of bars and joints we found ourselves toward morning in a big parlor with an enormous shiny jukebox. The furniture was expensive but bad a lot of overstuffed and ugly junk and the room was full of women. They were of all ages from perhaps eighteen or nineteen to one or two, highly recommended by the madam, who were probably over forty. Most of them were overweight and had rather stupid faces, although two or three of them were quite pretty and well dressed, and the madam told me that these were not regular girls but came in occasionally from the outside. Nearly all of them were in evening dress in an obvious attempt at elegance which misfired because there was too much of everything on the dresses they wore.
The madam was in appearance exactly what you did not expect a madam to be. She was tall and thin and dark and rather spinsterish in appearance with perhaps a strain of Oriental blood in her. She was "refined" but also tough. Tom had lost his hat somewhere during the long night and was wearing a paper cap he had picked up in one of tie joints. He was inclined to be noisy and now and then broke out into singing loudly "Mademoiselle from Annentieres." He had enjoyed the First World War, and when he got a little drunk he always went back to it the way another type of man goes back regularly to college reunions. The war had been a great event in his life. He had been decorated for heroism and nothing had ever happened to him since then.
The madam didn't like his noisiness and said that the place was a refined place and that if he didn't calm down she'd have him thrown out. She wanted everybody to have a good time but in a gentlemanly way.
The oddest of all of us perhaps was Ernest. With his thin distinguished face he looked out of place in such an establishment. Although he had drunk quite as much as the rest of us in the course of the evening, he did not seem drunk at all, or at least he gave no sign of it, but there had come into his blue eyes a look of singular intensity and into his manner an urgency and even an enthusiasm which seemed almost obscene. I had again the impression that he, the only one of us who might by any stretch of the imagination be considered an intellectual, had come here deliberately and with a purpose which he meant to carry out. The odd thing was that somehow the purpose and the passion behind it became translated as if by telepathy into the consciousness of the more sensual women in the room. He sat on a low sofa and there were always four or five women surrounding him. Most of them were broad-faced and stupid in appearance, but this fact seemed to please him, as if they were the kind of women he wanted the fatter, the more stupid, the more vicious, the better.
It was evident that the madam regarded me as the one most capable of keeping order and making the arrangements. Ernest, although sober, seemed obsessed, like a thirsty man coming upon an oasis, and the others were too drunk and too gay to make much sense.
She said, "Do you all want to spend the night?"
"Yes. You'd better arrange for them to stay until they get enough and sober up."
"That will be expensive," she said.
"It won't matter. They'll all pay you. I'll be responsible for that."
"Could you give me your name, and hotel?" she asked.
"Of course," I said and wrote out a false name and the name of a hotel where we were not registered. She took it without blinking an eye and said, "It's customary in the case of a high-class establishment like this."
"That's all right," I said. "I understand."
"What about some more drinks?"
"Yes, a round for everybody!"
It did not matter any more to me or to the others. Indeed, it did not matter at that moment whether any of us ever left the house at all. Certainly it did not matter now how much it cost.
One of the "outside" girls had taken me over, and I did not object to this for she seemed quieter and nicer than most of the others. She was small and neat and dressed in a perfectly plain black dress and she wasn't noisy. Indeed, she looked singularly out of place. Quite simply she asked, "Do I please you?" and thrust her hand into mine. It was a small warm yielding hand.
"Yes," I said. "I like you very much."
"You won't be disappointed," she said. "I like you. Do you know why?"
"No. Tell me."
"You're very like someone I loved once... the way your hair grows, your mouth and eyes." She held up my hand and looked at it. "Even the back of your hands. Hands," she said, "can be very good-looking. They tell a lot."
"Yes. That's right."
I was beginning to reach that point where drink no longer brought any satisfaction and when even the taste or smell of it seemed repulsive. I had enjoyed drinking up until now, but now there wasn't any more release to be found in mere alcohol.
"Do you want to go to bed?" I whispered.
"Yes, honey, if you're tired."
"I'm not tired. I just want to get out of this room and away from all this noise."
"So do I."
She did not wait. She went over to the madam and spoke to her for a moment and then returned and said, "Come," and led me out of the room and up a stairway to a room furnished with a large double bed and some gilt chairs and tables. Clearly this was an "elegant" establishment. Oddly enough, it was Ernest who had known where it was and led us to it.
The next forty-eight hours passed quickly and in a kind of blur. I was very lucky in the girl who chose me. She was passionate and expert and yet quiet and rather gentle with it all. She told me that she was a widow and that she worked at times as a filing clerk but that she could not make enough money at it to take care of her child as well as she liked. The child was a boy about three years old. Sometimes she came to this place to pick up some extra money, but she also came because her life as a widow was insupportable and she had never found any man she liked or could endure permanently who was willing to keep or to marry her.
"Some day," she said simply, "I will find someone I want to marry and who wants to marry me and then things will be all right again."
Once she looked at me and said, "You've been very nice to me. You're a proper gentleman. You're very good too in other ways." She was a rather simple child, like Manon. I had heard such stories as she told me before now, but for once I had no reason to disbelieve what I was told. She showed me a picture of her boy. He was a nice-looking lad. The picture was a snapshot taken somewhere on the quay because there was a river boat in the background.
For two days I never left the room. We had our meals there, brought in by a very fat Negro woman and very good meals they were. Those two days were very peaceful ones. From the windows you could see up a narrow street with the high river levee at the end. The ships seemed to be floating in space, for you could not see the river at all but only the high banks with the ships moving slowly along at the top. There was no night or day, for I slept when I felt like it. In a way it was Like a long, curiously refreshing and voluptuous dream from which all the world was shut out. It was all very simple and direct and without barriers. There was in the whole experience a curious direct quality of children playing and it made me feel wonderfully relaxed and rested. And after the quarrel with Enid, it made me feel clean. There was a kind of peace which I had not known for a very long time.
It had to come to an end sometime, but it came to an end in a tragic brutal fashion when, just before noon on the third day, there was a knock at the door, and when I had put a towel round my middle and stepped outside I found the tall, dark, rather forbidding madam.
She said, in an almost elegant fashion, "I'm sorry to disturb you, sir, but something serious has happened. One of your friends died a few minutes ago."
"Died?" I repeated. "Are you sure?"
"I'm very sure."
"Which one?" I asked, although I already knew.
"The tall one with the blue eyes and the gray hair. He said his name was Barrett, but of course that wasn't his real name. Such a thing is very serious for a house like this. You understand it means inquests and investigations and all that kind of thing."
"Of course."
"And it might mean scandal for his family,"
"Yes, where is he?"
"In the room down the hall. The girl is downstairs. She's hysterical. You understand how it happened... a heart attack, I suppose."
"Yes. What shall we do?"
"I have a plan worked out which I think will be satisfactory," she said, "We have a small hotel half a block from here. It can be reached by a back alley. It takes in couples, but of course it's not a recognized house like this one. It's a hotel. If he could be found dead there in bed, everything would be all right and respectable."
She looked at me searchingly as if demanding that I volunteer as an accomplice rather than merely to accept her invitation.
"How can we manage that?"
"It's not too difficult," she said. "I've had it happen twice before in my experience before I came here. You understand... these middle-aged men sometimes..."
"Yes."
"I'll need your help and that of one of your friends. You understand the gentleman has been dead only a short while. We can still get him dressed. You and your friend can take him between you and walk him down the alley to the hotel. Everything will be ready. You can get him up the stairs to a bedroom and leave him on the bed. There will be someone to help you up the stairs. If you meet anyone who is curious you can pretend that he's dead drunk. But it isn't likely you'll meet anyone. After you've left the proprietor will knock on the door and when he gets no answer will go in and find the gentleman dead in bed of a heart attack. Hell notify the police and the doctor and everything will be in order. You can then come back to the hotel to meet him as if you didn't know anything and learn the news and make the arrangements quietly and legally."
I listened, I confess, with a certain fascination, impressed not only by the efficiency with which the operation was planned, but also by the calmness with which the madam related the details. Love and death, I thought, all in the day's work! Poor Ernest!
"I'll come at once," I said. "In which room is the dark heavy-set man?" I chose Tom quickly because he was the strongest and the least likely to talk when he got back home.
She considered for a moment and then said, "I know where he is."
Tie's the one to help us. Better tell him the story while I get dressed and tell him I expect him to help.
"I want to thank you, sir," she said. "You're being very helpful. The whole thing is very awkward, but I think this is the best way... especially for his own family."
"You're quite right," I said. "I won't be long. Where shall I find you?"
"I'll be waiting in the hallway."
As I dressed I told the girl her name, she said, was Ernestine that I had had a sudden emergency message and had to leave. She was to remain there in the room until the madam arranged heir account. But all the time I was thinking about the madam. She spoke extraordinarily good English arid made a nice choice of words. Obviously she had been well educated at some time and place. Why was she a madam? Thinking of her standing there in the hall waiting for me, she seemed an omen or a warning, of what I did not know. And I kept thinking, "Poor Ernest!" and asking myself, "Why do I say poor Ernest? He's probably very satisfied." In the first shock everything seemed clear and simple and real with no nonsense of any kind. In a way, this is what Ernest had come for. This was what he was seeking in his weariness and boredom.
The madam was standing just outside my door, and together we went down the hallway to find Tom who was putting on his coat. He looked at me with an odd frightened look in his eye. I don't think he had the resiliency which came to me out of the long hours when I thought about things. He didn't think at all. It struck him as the blow of a hammer might fell an ox. He was curiously excited.
At sight of me he said, "This is a hell of a note!"
"We have to do the best we can," I said "I think she has the proper idea." I called the madam "she" because I didn't know her name.
Very politely she said, "My name is Miss Del Campo."
Together the three of us got Ernest dressed. It wasn't easy. If you're not an undertaker or you've never tried to get clothes on a dead man, you can't imagine how difficult it is. And it was very difficult to make the clothes look right on him as if he had been wearing them instead of as if they had just been put on a dead man.
Have you ever tried to dress a man freshly dead who is a friend? The limbs have not yet stiffened and the body is still warm, but the heart no longer beats and if you scratched the eyeballs they would not respond. The eyes are dead. Yet you want him to speak, to respond to your request to get on his feet and walk. Only a little while, before you were talking to him and now he is gone as if a light bulb had flashed brilliantly for a moment and then died, burnt out and finished. It makes you think of many things, of why we should want so earnestly to go on living. If it was as easy as this, why do so many of us struggle to go on, why is there anything so teixible in death? Certainly nothing as terrible as the suffering which sometimes precedes it? Certainly nothing so sordid and wretched as the sordid unceasing material worries of daily existence?
To me it seemed, as I helped to pull the clothes onto the tired thin body, that Ernest had simply gone to sleep for good. Even the manner of his going was satisfactory if he found any pleasure in it. I remembered suddenly the bitter comment of someone that the body caused us so much anxiety and suffering that it in turn owed us a great debt in pleasure and sensuality. But from all of this was Ernest gone, escaped, perhaps to another life, perhaps not. He would not have to drink any more.
In the shock and awe which had come over me, all the business of morality, as preached by most Christian churches and by the more ignorant and backward Protestant most of all, seemed suddenly insignificant in comparison with birth and death and even life for that matter. What tripe! What rubbish! What mattered was that man should live to fulfillment of himself and his possibilities. All else was insignificant. The world in which Ernest lived had twisted and distorted his existence. In the end he had been killed by it as much as if it had put him against a wall and shot him, for he had died in reaction against it, fighting its mediocrity, its conformity., its ignorance, its total lack of all the splendor which God had put into this world for us to enjoy.
When at last he appeared presentable the madam helped us raise him from the bed and get him between us. His arms were put over our shoulders and we held him by the hands. We pulled the hat far down over the dead eyes. This way we carried him down the stairs and out into the alley as if he were dead drunk and we were helping him. Such a sight was not unusual in this part of New Orleans.
As the madam had promised, there was a man waiting for us at the back entrance of the little hotel. If I remember rightly, there was a sign over the door which read Hotel du Bayou. He helped us up the stairs and led us to a bedroom where we laid the body on the bed. Then we went back to the house to settle up everything. I said good-by to Ernestine and thanked her and she wrote her name and telephone number on a slip of paper in case I ever came back again.
"It's a bakery," she said. "As I live above it and I help the owner with his books. Hell always call me or take a message."
Then Tom and I routed out the others and told them the news, and Tom and I went back to the Hotel du Bayou where we were told officially that our friend had been found dead in bed.
The other three went home the next day but Tom stayed loyally by me to help with all the tiresome details which were more troublesome than we had expected. Together we brought the body home, and Tom wished upon me the unwelcome task of calling on Ernest's wife.
She had been crying and her grief made her seem even more fragile and ascetic than usual. She gave me a drink of Ernest's whisky it was always the best in town and then said quietly, "Tell me what happened. The telegrams didn't seem very clear."
So I simply told a story that we tad had an excellent dinner and plenty of cocktails and wine and laid stayed out quite late seeing the sights of the Latin Quarter. About four an the morning we had all gone to bed and the next day about noon I was wakened by th proprietor who told me that Ernest had been found dead.
"He must have died in his sleep," I said. "If it had to be, it was a good way to go."
"It is," she said. "I suppose it was what he would have wanted. His heart was very tired. He never saved himself. Sometimes it seemed to me as if lie was driven by something which never gave him any peace. He was a good man. I was never good enough for him."
"You mustn't feel that way about it," I said. "Ernest loved you more than any man I know loves his wife."
She was thoughtful for a moment and then very quietly she said, "Yes, I think that's true. The only thing is..." She appeared to search for words and then said, "I wasn't enough for him. You understand what I mean. I should have been stronger and more violent and more... more fleshly."
The use of the word shocked me at first and then I understood that in her own shock and grief it was as if she were talking to herself. "Men are strange things," she said. "The stronger and greater they are, the stranger they are. I'm very grateful to have been Ernest's wife... no matter what he did. I couldnt have stuck it out with most of the men I ever knew." And it dawned upon me that very quietly she was letting me know the truth and that she had known the truth all along. She said, "I always liked Ernest to go away on trips like this. He didn't do it often enough. If he had, I think lie might still be alive. He never had much fun with me... except with things like books and music. He couldn't find much of those things anywhere else around here."
When I left her house I didn't go directly home. I drove around for a while thinking about the things she had said, not being quite sure whether I had read into them things which were not there. But after a time it became clear that she had, in her delicate, restrained fashion, told me the story of their lives, and I understood suddenly that what I had heard was a very beautiful story.
When at last I drove the car into the garage Enid called out the side door, "Supper has been ready for half an hour," and when I came in she kissed me as usual, as if nothing had happened. She had not "let the sun set on her anger." When later in the evening she said what she had been waiting all along to say, I decided the sun had set on mine, once and for all, and that I no longer owed her anything or even liked her. I did not care enough even to be angry at her. She said, "I hope what happened will be a lesson to you. You're not so young yourself any more. Some day you'll probably die the same way "as that dirty old man."
Somehow she had found out already.
About the time of the New Orleans episode I had begun again to drink steadily. I am sure of some of the reasons but not perhaps of all of them. At the root it was the old despair coming back. For a little time I had escaped in reading and in the exploration of worlds which were wholly new to me and of whose very existence I had been completely unaware. And then there arrived the time of confusion.
When the first excitement over the mere discovery of reading and the new worlds it opened up had abated a little, I began to see that perhaps I should never have opened a book at all. There was no one with whom I could discuss what I read or learned. Before Ernest's death we sometimes touched upon these things, but I always had the feeling that he found me naive, as if I was discovering things I should have discovered and learned at the age of twenty. I was also aware that on the occasions when we were together his mind was tired and he was unwilling to talk to me in words of one syllable about things which he had long ago discovered, absorbed, and made an integral part of his very mind and spirit. That knowledge made me increasingly shy. And now of course Ernest was dead and there was no one to talk to.
Because there was no outlet for the churned-up, congested ideas and thoughts I gradually acquired, I began to suffer from a kind of intellectual indigestion. It is difficult to describe this indigestion but it was as if my head ached from being so crammed with new and unabsorbed impressions. Added to this was the confusion of a mind which, however ambitious, however hungry, had never been taught either in school or in college to think, and thinking, I suppose, is merely the process of using the imagination and the mind in an orderly manner so that a creative process takes place and a subsequent process of growth. But with me there was no growth. There was no creation. In all my life there had never been, until I was near to middle age, either the necessity or the desire to think. Really to think is not a simple thing. It cannot easily be taught, and learning by experience requires time and a steadily growing maturity. I had already lost nearly twenty years which should have been employed in thinking, and because those years had been wasted I had never attained any degree of maturity. I had merely grown older, and like those men who constantly cling to their youth or return to it at college reunions and Legion conventions, I had merely withered.
I remember once having heard Ernest describe a common acquaintance as "a man who had passed from adolescence to senile decay with nothing in between." The description haunted me, for it seemed to fit not only myself but all the people in the world in which I lived. Some did not shrivel; they grew fat. But the effect and the result was the same. Nothing either ethical, moral, or intellectual had occurred to us since we left college, and very little of change or inspiration occurred during those days in college when we should have been learning to think and become mature. I am quite certain that much of the weariness which affected the body and spirit of Ernest arose from a feeling of frustration that whatever intellectual life he had was always confined to the interior pf his own head and the only sympathy which he received was from his fragile wife.
Even now I have no feeling of maturity, I am concerned with things which long ago should have been understood and put in order in the general pattern of my existence, and even as I write I am aware that I am putting many things on paper which should belong properly in a college theme. I began too late after too many wasted years, and I have attempted to grow in an ill-watered and sterile desert.
Something of all of this went into the renewal of my heavy drinking. When I try to find out why I came to drink more and more, I can, from this distance in time and space, see it all a little more clearly. My life with Enid was becoming steadily more insufferable for a million reasons, but worst of all I had begun to hate my own home, to dread returning to it, to sleep badly when I was in it. I had begun to feel indifferent even toward my own children, perhaps because they seemed merely to be growing into small copies of Enid, stamped and molded by her ideas and her ideals. In one sense they were the most normal of healthy children, but in another they were becoming mere monsters of "normality," performing on their level all the banalities of which she had become for me the symbol.
I wakened in the morning not only tired but, what was much worse, bored. I certainly had small interest in my business which ran itself and I had no real interests elsewhere save in the reading which had led me merely into confusion and frustration. I was reluctant about starting the day and could see no reason for doing so. A drink always helped. First it provided a physical reaction of warmth and stimulation which got me on my feet, and whenever during the day that sensation of false well-being began to waver, I took another drink to preserve and increase it, and presently I had enough to make everything seem blurred and endurable if not pleasant and happy. From then on until I fell asleep at last because my blood was filled with alcohol, the world seemed a fairly agreeable place.
For a time the drinking grew so bad that friends began to talk of it, as if I were one of those congenital drunkards whose systems cannot accept and absorb alcohol even in small quantities without intoxication. There are many of these indeed I think most drunkards fall into this category but I was not one of them. I was always what was called "a good drinker," I could absorb vast quantities of alcohol without becoming drunk, and never in all my life have I been able to attain the kind of drunkenness which becomes noisy and violent and offensive. As during the episode in New Orleans, I finally reach a point where alcohol no longer has any effect and becomes for the time being merely repulsive. I was never the violent sort of drunk. I drank not because of the weakness of the body but from a sickness of the mind, and I was aware that this kind of drinking can become the worst of all since it becomes an escape and a refuge and, as in the case of Tom, Dick, and Harry, it is closely related to what certain psychologists call the "death wish."
This "death wish" is a curious thing, and I am certain that many more people experience it than any psychologists can estimate. I am sure that there are ten thousand people who have contemplated suicide seriously to everyone who has carried the contemplation through into action. Drunkenness and drugs are all too often the expression of the death wish among those who lack the desperation or the courage to achieve the total and permanent oblivion. I know that this is why I drank. It was the desire to escape, wholly, entirely, without any reservation whatever.
Just as I planned on two occasions the murder of Enid but lacked the will to carry through the plans, so I planned suicide many times but always rejected the idea, each time because there arose at the last moment in my heart a desperate hope that if I stayed alive there might still lie before me experiences that were new and perhaps satisfying. It is hope which keeps many people alive. Sometimes too I thought that suicide might be messy for the children and that I had no right to embarrass or distress them. It would indeed be a horrible punishment for Enid, perhaps worse than if I killed her, for suicide was in her mind the greatest of all scandals. It would have humiliated and disgraced her and of course, I would have escaped her for good, for once and all with the finality of death itself. Drink, I shortly discovered, could provide the escape for a good part of each day, and in the end, if the process continued long enough and intensely enough, it would mean final and total escape, though the process might be slow and painful and degrading.
It was worth noting that among my friends I was regarded as a congenital physiological potential drunk, for there seemed to be no other reason. They always said, "Why should Wolly Ferris take to drink? He has everything!" and this, I must say, was reasonable enough, on the exterior. I doubt that any of them, with the exception of dead Ernest, ever had the faintest idea of the reasons for my drinking or had the power to understand those reasons. This is ironic, in view of the fact that many of them sought the same "short death" for reasons which were similar.
I know as I write that whoever reads this may inevitably ask, "But had you no faith in God? Could not the church have helped you?" And I answer, "Perhaps," but somehow the circumstances never made it possible either for God or for the church to help me.
Let me say that I believe in God as a force which somehow has brought an orderly universe out of chaos. Whether He is an impersonal, vague, and powerful set of laws still far beyond our understanding, whether He is the vengeful Jahveh of the Jew or the Santa Glaus God of the Italian peasant, who represents all that is good and nothing that is evil, I do not know, nor do I believe that anyone else knows any better than myself. God, to me, has always been, I suppose, the Great Mystery which I must accept without understanding, since I have no other choice. There is no very great comfort in this, nor can one blame one's own weaknesses or faults on something as vague as a Great Mystery nor go to it for help in distress.
The few times I have prayed I have always found myself in the final analysis praying to myself reminding myself that I was weak or stupid or lazy or tliat I had done an ungenerous or selfish thing and so violated rules which I knew and understood perfectly well and which were as rigid and exact as the laws of chemistry. After all, God is to a very great degree the Sermon on the Mount and the Ten Commandments, and these we can touch and understand and practice, and virtually all the evils in the world arise from the fact that too many of us ignore this conception of God and seek instead a bearded old man who will excuse us our derelictions if we merely pray to him and recognize him. That kind of God seems to me execrable and little more than a concoction in the minds of those who are either too weak or too cowardly or too unintelligent to live properly and decently... as you might say, on a level with God Himself.
Certainly I have never made any great pretensions in that direction. I have been as weak and as "sinful" as the next fellow, and usually I have recognized the fact and it has depressed me, which is probably a great handicap in the worldly sense, for it has withered all capacity for ruthlessness. It has reduced me to the level of those who only question without being able to find an answer or to believe in one. And that perhaps is the great sickness of my own small world and perhaps of all Christian civilization. Perhaps it would be far better to be ignorant and superstitious like my Sergeant, living only in the flesh and by the flesh whose sins are easily forgiven and comparatively unimportant. Then I could have accepted a God who was like a benevolent but sometimes angry father who bestowed favor and dealt out chastisements. Certainly it would have simplified my life and perhaps the lives of those nearest to me.
The trouble is that I, like so many of us, have been educated to the point where a belief in such a God is no longer possible yet we have not been educated to the point, either ethically or intellectually, where we have the force and the courage to stand upon our own, each as an integral part of God Himself. We are merely lost and at the same time somewhat pretentious without reason. In short, middle-class contemporary man is a mess of pottage and confusion, save in the realm of materialism out of which he has created the porcelain water closet, the automobile, and the atom bomb.
My hostility to churches and theology began when I was still a small boy. It began when I was forced each Sunday to dress myself in stiff clothes, polish my black Sunday shoes "my good shoes" and set off for the Presbyterian Sunday School to pass two hours and a half of misery until at last I could run down the steps of the church after the morning service and escape into my old clothes and the neighboring woods and fields. When I was very small the "infant class" meant little except marching about and seeing great colored posters of remarkably clean and sentimental and beautiful people entering the Promised Land or strewing palms before Christ on a donkey. But that was much better than when, as I grew up, I went on into an older class "led" by a local prosperous shoe merchant named Wesley Downes.
Elder Downes had a great reputation as a Sunday School teacher in Crescent City and throughout church circles in the state. He was a good enough fellow, plump, pink-faced, and gray-haired, who found great pleasure in expounding the stories of the Bible. This he did, I suppose, rather well, but even at the age of thirteen or fourteen I found it difficult to swallow either a great many of these stories or his special versions of them. He was, I suppose, what might be called a Fundamentalist. At least he professed to believe everything that was written in the sacred book and took all of it with complete literalness, even to such legends as that of Jonah and the Whale which I once attempted to dispute with him only to be humiliated by accusations of lack of faith in God because I did not believe that a whale could swallow Jonah, carry him around for a long time in his stomach, and finally disgorge him intact and in good health.
Elder Downes believed absolutely that God had sent angels to visit Sodom and Gomorrah and warn the bawdy inhabitants, and he believed that, when the angels had to flee from worse than death, God actually poured fire and brimstone upon the evil cities of the plain. It was apparently inconceivable to him that sucli a magnificent story could have been a legend based upon some actual disaster and worked into dramatic form by an Hebraic Old Testament Billy Sunday.
I doubt that he understood at all the full implications of the story or the peculiar forms of depravity involved which were perhaps common enough in those times and still are today among certain Semitic and Moslem peoples. If he did understand even faintly the implications, he never touched upon them for such wickedness was something you did not talk about. For Elder Downes the debauchery of Sodom and Gomorrah was, I am sure, something like the "orgies" depicted in the films of D. W. Griffith or C. B. DeMille vast expensively produced spectacles in which ladies waved bunches of grapes and bearded gentlemen reclining on couches responded by waving empty papier-mâché goblets to indicate drunkenness. As I see it now, the innocence of Elder Downes was colossal, but so was his vindictiveness. I do not think he was ever much troubled by fleshly temptations. He was the plump eunuch gland type. He took it all out in his performance as a minor prophet interpreting the Bible to less inspired boys and businessmen.
Neither my father nor mother was very religious, and I am certain that neither of them sent me to Sunday School or church for the good of my soul or in the belief that I should find there spiritual regeneration. They did it because sending one's children to Sunday School was the thing to do. My own children go regularly to Sunday School, and I doubt that they like it any better than I did, although today all kinds of inducements, including even movies, have been introduced to lure children to Sunday School classes. They would still rather be at home in their old clothes playing with the dog. But that, of course, would be heathen goings-on and Enid would permit no such thing.
The church in Oakdale to which they go has a wonderful new parish house equipped with the finest in modern plumbing. It has a basketball floor, and as soon as the war ends and building becomes possible once more they are constructing a swimming pool. There are three pool tables and three ping-pong tables and periodically there are dances for the young. I think this is all fine as a means of keeping the young distracted and the Devil from getting hold of idle hands, but I do not know how much it has to do with God or faith or an understanding of the universe.
With my father and mother it was their "duty" to send their children to the Presbyterian Sunday School. My father attended church regularly and dozed more often than not, and my mother went to church on the Sundays when she was not traveling and uplifting the world. She saw her friends and received a kind of homage at the church door as a woman well known in circles outside Crescent City, but I am in grave doubts as to any spiritual comfort she or my father received.
Indeed it was, I think, difficult for anyone to derive much spiritual comfort from the ugliness of the old downtown First Presbyterian Church which, even considering the peculiar hideousness of tie churches built in its period, was exceptionally ugly. It resembled neither the ornate beauties of an ancient Catholic church nor the austere beauties of the New England meeting house. Architecturally it was a mess which had cost a great deal of money and required nearly twenty-five years to pay for. The seats were placed like those in a theater beneath two monstrous brass chandeliers with a pipe organ and choir loft at one end. The windows were enormous and filled with what could only be described as monstrous concoctions of painted, not stained, glass which resembled something which had been spewed up or removed during an operation. If there was nothing beautiful in it, neither was there anything which inspired faith or religion. If it manifested anything it was the sound incomes of a middle-class world in a rich, partly civilized, and growing community.
Throughout most of my youth we had the same preacher. He remained for so long a time because he managed never to displease or alienate anyone in the congregation and managed somehow to please most of them. Probably he was popular because he never disturbed his congregation either collectively or individually. But this fact did not make for inspiration or good sermons or even faith. I think that he bought most of his sermons already written for him, and he never diverged from them even by a single gleam of originality. The only ritual concerned with the church was the fundamental ritual of attending services. After many years my only impression of it was one of fabulous aridity and boredom. I cannot imagine ever going to that particular preacher for solace, advice, or comfort.
And so as soon as I could escape I did escape, and I have never gone back, even to the handsome new church with its "modern" clergyman, its pool room and basketball court and its ping-pong tables. The old church had nothing to give me in a spiritual sense and I see no prospect of change in the new and modern version which has supplanted it. Of poetry, of mysticism, of beauty, even of faith there are few manifestations. It is as if the "new" church were concerned with the body and its functions and had no concern whatever for the spirit. The older church had concern neither for the body nor the spirit.
All of this is no special criticism of any Protestant sect or denomination. Many of them are worse than the churches I have described and some perhaps are better.
It is possible that the Roman Catholic church might have brought me something approaching strength and salvation, but I never came close enough to it to understand or appreciate it or to feel any special or irresistible attraction. Between me and the Roman church there were many obstacles, not the least of which was the long childhood indoctrination of Calvinist Protestantism. The Jesuits themselves, I believe, are credited with saying that they need train a child only during the first six years of his life to claim him for the church forever. Whether the Jesuits ever really said such a thing or not I do not know, but I believe there is much truth in the saying. During my childhood there was built up within me a profound and instinctive mistrust of the Roman church, indeed so profound that it came to seem a foreign and even a Godless institution in which all sorts of evil took place.
Certainly it played a small part in the world in which I lived. It was wholly a Protestant world with two or three Catholic families who, by the mere fact of being Catholics, always seemed a little strange and never quite an integral part of our society. Otherwise the Roman church in Crescent City was represented by the immigrant population or the first generation of immigrants, and between them and the world of Oakdale there was little contact or sympathy. Among the women of my world there was a feeling, subconscious at its mildest and aggressive at its strongest, that being a Roman Catholic was actually a social disadvantage. It was a tight world, a Protestant world, and consequently a materialist and middle-class world.
It was only after I came to know Mary Raeburn again that I began to understand a little that I might have found some of the things I was seeking within the Roman world. It was only then that I began to understand how closely that world was rooted in the whole history of Western civilization and culture. It was only then that I began to understand the profundity of the meaning lying beneath the outward symbols and rites which until then had seemed meaningless and to a Calvinist mind so much claptrap. Until then I did not understand that in those very symbols and rites there lay an appeal to the intelligent and cultivated mind and the roots of mysticism and beauty which many of us were seeking hungrily without ever finding.
Yet even all of this was confused in my mind for it seemed to me that there were in Crescent City, at least, only two kinds of Catholics the immigrant element which, through ignorance and fear, was bound to the church without reason and by no more than a vague instinctive realization of the beauty and the roots, and, on the other hand, those with intelligent and logical but formal minds which accepted certain things which I could not accept or laid them at one side for the sake of consolations more profound.
But in all of this there was largely only a confusion of mind and a groping for something in which there was a form and a faith as there might be form in a beautiful sculpture or picture, and faith of the sort which I sometimes felt as a child in the country at sunrise when my heart cried out, "This is a wonderful and beautiful world and I am grateful for being alive!"
I know that I was not alone in my confusion and my groping in tibte darkness. There was the same sensation of being lost among many of those about me, even among the four men who went with me on the tragic trip to New Orleans. Three of us on that trip did not know or suspect the sources of that doubt and dissatisfaction bordering upon despair which drove them toward the Tittle death" of drinking. But Ernest knew and I knew, although with his trained and superior mind he understood the aridity of his life better than I, and perhaps that very knowledge and understanding drove him toward the grotesque ending of that life.
When I am writing of these men I am not writing of Babbitts. There are no more Babbitts. They belonged to a certain phase of American life and that phase has passed. Babbitt, with his bumptiousness, his good nature, his extreme extroversion, his noisiness which covered up his ignorance, is today a curiosity and in many ways an outcast. All his qualities, his very problem, have been supplanted by a kind of sickness and confusion unrecognized by the victims who seek escape in materialism, in a supercharged activity, and in drinking. Babbitt in his way was crude but healthy. The sickness of which I write and which spreads and grows constantly is quite different. I know of what I am speaking; and I am frightened for a whole nation and a whole people.
This then was my state of mind on the return from New Orleans. All this is why I was drinking again. I knew on my return that, while I should probably go on living with Enid for the sake of the children, it would be a kind of life in death in which we both hated each other, although hatred would not end her passion for possession and "sharing" but only intensify it because she was one of those who could not accept defeat. She would not even admit to herself that hatred had supplanted whatever love there had been. It would only be worse than before and more ugly. Perhaps it would have been better if I had run away or smashed things altogether, but there something intervened. Call it decency or conservatism or habit or Calvinist ethics and morality or what you will, I do not know. Perhaps it was a mixture of. all of these things. Something still held me fast in the pattern in which I had lived for nearly half my life. I do not know whether it was for better or for worse. I cannot, honestly, either praise or blame myself. I do sometimes think that both Enid and I were victims of all the combined forces which made each of us what we were the forces I have tried so hard to trace back to the very beginning. I find myself as I write coming back again and again to that apparently unanswerable question of why as a free and healthy individual I did not simply walk out on the whole thing. Even now I do not know.
And then one Saturday afternoon I came upon Mary Raeburn standing beside her car on the road from the country club. A tire on the front wheel had burst and thrown the car off the road into the ditch and she was waiting for someone to come along. At a distance I did not recognize her, perhaps because it had been a long time since I had seen her and the image I kept in my mind was that of the rather plumpish young woman I had known in my early twenties. If I had never seen her before I would have been attracted. Meeting her under other circumstances, perhaps only in passing her on the street, I would have turned for a second look, not because she was beautiful or even very young, but because there was something about her which I as a man would have found appealing.
It is not easy to say what that something was since it was compounded of many things, of the look of quiet serenity that was in her face, the way she moved, not tottering along on overhigh heels, her buttocks shaking as she walked, but moving surely and with a certain swift grace. Perhaps it was the way she dressed, quietly but with a sudden flash of color at the throat or on her hat, or perhaps it was the cut of her clothes, simple yet perfect, and the way she wore them. There are some women whom you could dress in the most expensive and beautifully cut clothes who would still look dowdy and others who would make a Mother Hubbard appear beautiful and smart. After we came to be intimate there were a hundred little things I noticed about her, perhaps most of all a certain fastidiousness. There was never lipstick on her teeth. Her hands and nails were always perfectly done. There was a land of art in the way she fastened a scarf with a pin. Her hair seemed always perfectly in control. And she never wore too much of anything. The fastidiousness and perfection gave her an air of coolness which I discovered later was wholly deceptive, but it also gave her an air of calm and of order as if she had everything under control which at that moment perhaps was the thing I desired most in all the world.
