The will was dated two days after Harry’s birth in 1910, and his father died two years later of toxemia gotten from sucking a snake bite on the hand of a child in a country cabin and his half sister took him. She had children of her own and was married to a man who died still a clerk in a grocery store in a small Oklahoma town, so by the time Harry was ready to enter medical school that two thousand dollars to be stretched over four years, even in the modest though well-rated school which he chose, was not much more than his father’s two hundred had been. It was less, because there was steam heat in the dormitories now and the college was served by a cafeteria requiring no waiters and the only way a young man could earn money in school now was by carrying a football or stopping the man who did carry it.
His sister helped him—an occasional money order for one or two dollars or even a few stamps folded carefully into a letter. This bought his cigarettes and by stopping tobacco for a year he saved enough to pay his fee into his medical fraternity. There was nothing left over for squiring girls (the school was coeducational) but then he had no time for that; beneath the apparent serenity of his monastic life he waged a constant battle as ruthless as any in a Wall Street skyscraper as he balanced his dwindling bank account against the turned pages of his text books.
But he did it, he came in under the wire with enough of the two thousand dollars left either to return to the Oklahoma town and present his sheepskin to his sister, or to go straight to New Orleans and assume his internship, but not enough to do both. He chose New Orleans. Or rather, there was no choice; he wrote his sister and her husband a letter of gratitude and thanks, inclosing a signed note for the full amount of the postage stamps and the money orders, with interest (he also sent the diploma with its Latin and its spidery embossed salutation and its cramped faculty signatures, of which his sister and brother-in-law could decipher only his name) and mailed it to them and bought his ticket and rode fourteen hours in a day coach. He reached New Orleans with one bag and a dollar and thirty-six cents.
He had been in the hospital almost two years now. He lived in the intern’s quarters with the others who, like him, had no private means; he smoked once a week now: a package of cigarettes over the week-end and he was paying the note which he had executed to his half sister, the one- and two-dollar money orders in reverse now, returning to source; the one bag would still hold all he owned, including his hospital whites—the twenty-six years, the two thousand dollars, the railroad ticket to New Orleans, the one dollar and thirty-six cents, the one bag in a corner of a barracks-like room furnished with steel army cots; on the morning of his twenty-seventh birthday he waked and looked down his body toward his foreshortened feet and it seemed to him that he saw the twenty-seven irrevocable years diminished and foreshortened beyond them in turn, as if his life were to lie passively on his back as though he floated effortless and without volition upon an unreturning stream.
He seemed to see them: the empty years in which his youth had vanished—the years for wild oats and for daring, for the passionate tragic ephemeral loves of adolescence, the girl- and boy-white, the wild importunate fumbling flesh, which had not been for him; lying, so he thought, not exactly with pride and certainly not with the resignation which he believed, but rather with that peace with which a middle-aged eunuch might look back upon the dead time before his alteration, at the fading and (at last) edgeless shapes which now inhabited only the memory and not the flesh: I have repudiated money and hence love. Not abjured it, repudiated. I do not need it; by next year or two years or five years I will know to be true what I now believe to be true: I will not even need to want it.
That evening he was a little late in going off duty; when he passed the dining room he heard already the clash of cutlery and the voices, and the interns’ quarters were empty save for a man named Flint who in evening trousers and shirt was tying a black tie before the mirror and who turned as Wilbourne entered and pointed to a telegram on Wilbourne’s pillow. It had been opened. “It was lying on my cot,” Flint said. “I was in a hurry to dress so I didn’t take time to look at the name good. I just picked it up and opened it. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right,” Wilbourne said. “Too many people have already seen a telegram for it to be very private.” He removed the folded yellow sheet from the envelope. It was decorated with symbols—garlands and scrolls; it was from his sister: one of those stereotyped birthday greetings which the telegraph company sends to any distance within the boundaries of the United States for twenty-five cents. He found that Flint was still watching him.
“So this is your birthday,” Flint said. “Celebrating?”
“No,” Wilbourne said. “I guess not.”
“What? Listen. I’m going to a party down in French Town. Why not come along?”
“No,” Wilbourne said. “Thanks, though.” He did not yet begin to think, Why not? “I’m not invited.”
“That dont matter. It’s not that kind of a party. It’s at a studio. Painting guy. Just a mob sitting around on the floor in each other’s laps, drinking. Come on. You dont want to stick here on your birthday.” Now he did begin to think, Why not? Why really not? and now he could almost see the guardian of the old trained peace and resignation rise to arms, the grim Moses, not alarmed, impervious to alarm, just gauntly and fanatically interdicting: No. You will not go. Let well enough alone. You have peace now; you want no more.
“Besides, I haven’t any dress clothes.”
“You wont need them. Your host will probably be wearing a bathrobe. You’ve got a dark suit, haven’t you?”
“But I dont—”
“All right,” Flint said. “De Montigny has a tux. He’s about your size. I’ll get it.” He went to the closet which they used in common.
“But I dont—” Wilbourne said.
“All right,” Flint said. He laid the second dinner suit on the cot and slipped his braces and began to remove his own trousers. “I’ll wear de Montigny’s and you can wear mine. We’re all three about standard.”
An hour later, in a borrowed costume such as he had never worn before, he and Flint halted in one of the narrow, dim, balcony-hung one-way streets between Jackson Square and Royal Street in the Vieux Carre—a wall of soft muted brick above which the crest of a cabbage palm exploded raggedly and from beyond which came a heavy smell of jasmine which seemed to lie visible upon the rich stagnant air already impregnated with the smell of sugar and bananas and hemp from the docks, like inert wisps of fog or even paint.
A wooden gate hung slightly awry, beside it a wire bell pull which under Flint’s hand produced a remote mellow jangling. They could hear a piano, it was something of Gershwin’s. “There,” Flint said. “You dont need to worry about this party. You can already hear the home-made gin. Gershwin might have painted his pictures for him too. Only I bet Gershwin could paint what Crowe calls his pictures better than Crowe plays what Gershwin calls his music.”
Flint jerked the bell again, again nothing came of it. “It’s not locked, anyway,” Wilbourne said. It was not, they entered: a court paved with the same soft, quietly rotting brick. There was a stagnant pool with a terra-cotta figure, a mass of lantana, the single palm, the thick rich leaves and the heavy white stars of the jasmine bush where light fell upon it through open French doors, the court balcony—overhung too on three sides, the walls of that same annealing brick lifting a rampart broken and nowhere level against the glare of the city on the low eternally overcast sky, and over all, brittle, dissonant and ephemeral, the spurious sophistication of the piano like symbols scrawled by adolescent boys upon an ancient decayed rodent-scavengered tomb.
They crossed the court and entered the French windows and the noise—the piano, the voices—a longish room, uneven of floor, the walls completely covered with unframed paintings which at the moment impacted upon Wilbourne with that inextricable and detailless effect of an enormous circus poster seen suddenly at close range, from which vision the very eyeballs seem to start violently back in consternation. It contained no furniture except a piano at which a man sat in a Basque cap and a bathrobe. Perhaps a dozen other people sat or stood about on the floor with glasses; a woman in a sleeveless linen frock shrieked, “My God, where was the funeral?” and came and kissed Flint, still carrying her glass.
“This is Doctor Wilbourne, boys and girls,” Flint said. “Watch him. He’s got a pad of blank checks in his pocket and a scalpel in his sleeve.” His host did not even turn his head, though a woman brought him a drink
