He paused a moment to savor it anew. His best days! Then suddenly he asked me if I had ever read Conrad, Joseph Conrad, who wrote about the sea.
I nodded my head.
There’s a writer I admire, Henry. If you could ever write a story like him, well … He didn’t know what to add to this. My favorite is The Nigger of the Narcissus. I must have read it at least ten times. Each time it seems better to me.
Yes, I know. I’ve read nearly all of Conrad. I agree with you, a wonderful writer … How about Dostoievsky, have you ever read him?
No, he hadn’t. Never heard the name before. What was he, a novelist? Sounded like a Polish name to him.
I’ll send you one of his books, I said. It’s called The House of the Dead. By the way, I added, I have loads of books. I could send you anything you like, as many as you like. Just tell me what you’d enjoy.
He said not to bother, he liked reading the same books over and over.
But wouldn’t you care to know something about other writers too?
He didn’t think he had the energy to get interested in new writers. But his son, the big lad, he liked to read. Maybe I could send him something. What sort of books does he read?
He likes the moderns.
Like whom?
Oh, Hall Caine, Rider Haggard, Henty…
I see. Sure, I said, I can send him something interesting.
Now the little fellow, said Gene, he hardly reads at all. He’s up on science. All he looks at are the scientific magazines. I think he’s cut out to be a doctor. You should see the laboratory he’s rigged up for himself. He’s got everything in there, all cut up and bottled. It stinks in there. But if it makes him happy…
Exactly, Gene. If it makes him happy. I stayed on until the last bus. Walking down the dark, mangy street we hardly exchanged a word. As I shook hands with them all I repeated that I would be back soon. We’ll have a feast next time, eh kids?
Don’t think of that, Henry, said Gene. Just come … and bring your wife along too.
The ride home seemed interminable. I not only felt sad, I felt morose, despondent, licked. I couldn’t wait to get home and switch on the lights. Once inside the Love Nest I would feel secure again. Never had it seemed more like a cosy womb, our wonderful little apartment. Truly, we lacked for nothing. If now and then we were hungry we knew it wouldn’t last forever. We had friends—and we had the gift of speech. We knew how to forage. As for the world, the real world was right inside our four walls. Everything we wanted of the world we managed to drag to our lair. It’s true, now and then I grew sensitive, or shy, when it came to making a touch of some one, but these moments were rare. In a pinch I could muster the courage to tackle an utter stranger. Certainly it was necessary to swallow one’s pride. But I preferred to swallow my pride rather than my own spittle.
Borough Hall never looked better to me than when I stepped out of the subway. I was already home. The passers-by wore a familiar air. They were not lost. Between the world I had just left and this one the difference was unthinkable. It was only the outskirts of the city, really, where Gene lived—but it was the wilderness to me. I shuddered to think that I might ever be condemned to such an existence.
An imperative desire to roam the streets for a while led me instinctively to Sackett Street. Filled with memories of my old friend, Al Burger, I walked past his house. It looked sadly dilapidated. The entire street, houses and all, seemed to have diminished since my last visit. Everything was shrunk and shriveled. Despite all, it was still a wonderful street to me. The Via Nostalgia.
As for the suburbs, so sinister and forlorn—every one I knew who had gone to live in the suburbs had given up the ghost. The current of life never bathed these purlieus. There could be only one purpose in retiring to these living catacombs: to breed and wither away. If it were an act of renunciation it would be comprehensible, but it was never that. It was always an admission of defeat. Life became routine, the dullest sort of routine. A humdrum job, a family with a big bosom to slink into, the barnyard pets and their diseases, the slick magazines, the comic sheet, the farmer’s almanac. Endless time in which to study oneself in the mirror. One after another, regular as the noon-day sun, the brats fell out of the womb. The rent came due regularly, too, or the interest on the mortgage.
How pleasant to watch the new sewer pipes being laid! How thrilling to see new streets opening up and finally covered with asphalt! Everything was new. New and shoddy. New and desolate. New and meaningless. With the new came added comforts. Everything was planned for the coming generation. One was mortgaged to the shining future. A trip to the city and one longed to be back in the neat little bungalow with the lawn-mower and the washing machine. The city was disturbing, confusing, oppressive. One acquired a different rhythm living in the suburbs. What matter if one was not au courant? There were compensations—such as warm house-slippers, the radio, the ironing board which sprang out of the wall. Even the plumbing was attractive.
Poor Gene, of course, had no such compensations. He had fresh air, and that was about all. True, his was not quite the suburbs. He was marooned in that in-between area, that no-man’s land where one kept body and soul together in some hapless way which defied all logic. The ever-expanding city was always threatening to gobble him up, land and all. Or, the tide might recede for some quixotic reason and leave them high and dry. Sometimes a city starts to move outward in a certain direction, then suddenly changes its mind. Any improvements begun are left unfinished. The little community begins slowly to die, for lack of oxygen. Everything deteriorates and depreciates. In this atmosphere one may just as well read the same books—or the same book—over and over again. Or play the same phonograph record. In a vacuum one has no need of new things, nor of excitement, nor of foreign stimuli. One has only to maintain a bare survival, to vegetate, like a foetus in a jar.
I couldn’t sleep that night for thinking of Gene. His plight was all the more disturbing to me for the reason that I had always regarded him as my twin brother. In him I always saw myself. We looked alike and we spoke alike. We had been born almost in the same house. His mother could well have been my mother: certainly I preferred her to my own. When he winced with pain, I winced. When he expressed a longing to do something, I felt the same longing. We were like a team in harness. I don’t remember ever disputing with him, ever crossing him, ever insisting on doing something he did not want to do. What he owned was mine, and vice versa. Between us there was never the least jealousy or rivalry. We were one, body and soul … I saw in him now not the caricature of myself but rather a premonition of what was to come. If Fate could treat him so unkindly—my own brother who had never done any one any harm—what might it not have in store for me? The good that was in me was the overflow of his own bottomless well of goodness; the bad was my very own. The bad had accumulated as the result of our separation. When we parted ways I had lost that echo which I depended on for self-orientation. I had lost my touchstone.
All this was slowly dawning on me as I lay awake in bed. Never before had I entertained such thought about our relationship. But how clear it seemed to me now! I had lost my true brother. I had gone astray. I had willed myself to be other than him. And why? Because I would not go down before the world. I had pride. I simply would not admit defeat. But what did I want to give? I doubt if I ever thought of that, that there was something to give the world as well as to take from it. Boasting to every one that I was now a writer, as if that were the end-all and the be-all of existence. What a farce! I regretted that I had not lied to Gene. I should have told him I was a clerk in an office, a bank teller, anything but that I was a writer. It was like giving him a slap in the face.
How strange that years later his son—the wild one, as he called him—should come to me with his manuscripts and ask my advice. Had I set off a spark that night which inflamed the son? As the father had predicted, the boy had gone West, had led the life of an adventurer, had become a hobo, in fact, and then, like the prodigal son, he had returned, had taken up this weird business of writing in order to earn a living. I had given him what help I could, had
