East of Eden

by John Steinbeck

  It would be flaxen-haired Mathilde in the kitchen, with Mother clucking over her like a hen.

  We charged in. "Is he up?"

  "Sh!" said Mother. "He got in late. You let him sleep."

  But the water was running in the basin of the back bedroom so we knew he was up. We crouched like cats at his door, waiting for him to emerge.

  There was always a little diffidence between us at first. I think Uncle Tom was as shy as we were. I think he wanted to come running out and toss us in the air, but instead we were all formal.

  "Thank you for the gum, Uncle Tom."

  "I'm glad you liked it."

  "Do you think we'll have an oyster loaf late at night while you're here?"

  "We'll certainly try, if your mother will let you."

  We drifted into the sitting room and sat down. Mother's voice called from the kitchen, "Children, you let him alone."

  "They're all right, Ollie," he called back.

  We sat in a triangle in the living room. Tom's face was so dark and his eyes so blue. He wore good clothes but he never seemed well dressed. In this he was very different from his father. His red mustache was never neat and his hair would not lie down and his hands were hard from work.

  Mary said, "Uncle Tom, how do you get to be a boy?"

  "How? Why, Mary, you're just born a boy."

  "No, that's not what I mean. How do I get to be a boy?"

  Tom studied her gravely. "You?" he asked.

  Her words poured out. "I don't want to be a girl, Uncle Tom. I want to be a boy. A girl's all kissing and dolls. I don't want to be a girl. I don't want to." Tears of anger welled up in Mary's eyes.

  Tom looked down at his hands and picked at a loose piece of callus with a broken nail. He wanted to say something beautiful, I think. He wished for words like his father's words, sweet winged words, cooing and lovely. "I wouldn't like you to be a boy," he said.

  "Why not?"

  "I like you as a girl."

  An idol was crashing in Mary's temple. "You mean you like girls?"

  "Yes, Mary, I like girls very much."

  A look of distaste crossed Mary's face. If it were true, Tom was a fool. She put on her don't-give-me-any-of-that-crap tone. "All right," she said, "but how do I go about being a boy?"

  Tom had a good ear. He knew he was reeling down in Mary's estimation and he wanted her to love him and to admire him. At the same time there was a fine steel wire of truthfulness in him that cut off the heads of fast-traveling lies. He looked at Mary's hair, so light that it was almost white, and braided tight to be out of the way, and dirty at the end of the braid, for Mary wiped her hands on her braid before she made a difficult marble shot. Tom studied her cold and hostile eyes.

  "I don't think you really want to change."

  "I do."

  Tom was wrong--she really did.

  "Well," he said, "you can't. And someday you'll be glad."

  "I won't be glad," said Mary, and she turned to me and said with frigid contempt, "He doesn't know!"

  Tom winced and I shivered at the immensity of her criminal charge. Mary was braver and more ruthless than most. That's why she won every marble in Salinas.

  Tom said uneasily, "If your mother says it's all right, I'll order the oyster loaf this morning and pick it up tonight."

  "I don't like oyster loaves," said Mary and stalked to our bedroom and slammed the door.

  Tom looked ruefully after her. "She's a girl all right," he said.

  Now we were alone together and I felt that I had to heal the wound Mary had made. "I love oyster loaves," I said.

  "Sure you do. So does Mary."

  "Uncle Tom, don't you think there's some way for her to be a boy?"

  "No, I don't," he said sadly. "I would have told her if I had known."

  "She's the best pitcher in the West End."

  Tom sighed and looked down at his hands again, and I could see his failure on him and I was sorry for him, aching sorry. I brought out my hollowed cork with pins stuck down to make bars. "Would you like to have my fly cage, Uncle Tom?"

  Oh, he was a great gentleman. "Do you want me to have it?"

  "Yes. You see, you pull up a pin to get the fly in and then he sits in there and buzzes."

  "I'd like to have it very much. Thank you, John."

  He worked all day with a sharp tiny pocketknife on a small block of wood, and when we came home from school he had carved a little face. The eyes and ears and lips were movable, and little perches connected them with the inside of the hollow head. At the bottom of the neck there was a hole closed by a cork. And this was very wonderful. You caught a fly and eased him through the hole and set the cork. And suddenly the head became alive. The eyes moved and the lips talked and the ears wiggled as the frantic fly crawled over the little perches. Even Mary forgave him a little, but she never really trusted him until after she was glad she was a girl, and then it was too late. He gave the head not to me but to us. We still have it put away somewhere, and it still works.

  Sometimes Tom took me fishing. We started before the sun came up and drove in the rig straight toward Fremont's Peak, and as we neared the mountains the stars would pale out and the light would rise to blacken the mountains. I can remember riding and pressing my ear and cheek against Tom's coat. And I can remember that his arm would rest lightly over my shoulders and his hand pat my arm occasionally. Finally we would pull up under an oak tree and take the horse out of the shafts, water him at the stream side, and halter him to the back of the rig.

  I don't remember that Tom talked. Now that I think of it, I can't remember the sound of his voice or the kind of words he used. I can remember both about my grandfather, but when I think of Tom it is a memory of a kind of warm silence. Maybe he didn't talk at all. Tom had beautiful tackle and made his own flies. But he didn't seem to care whether we caught trout or not. He needed not to triumph over animals.

  I remember the five-fingered ferns growing under the little waterfalls, bobbing their green fingers as the droplets struck them. And I remember the smells of the hills, wild azalea and a very distant skunk and the sweet cloy of lupin and horse sweat on harness. I remember the sweeping lovely dance of high buzzards against the sky and Tom looking long up at them, but I can't remember that he ever said anything about them. I remember holding the bight of a line while Tom drove pegs and braided a splice. I remember the smell of crushed ferns in the creel and the delicate sweet odor of fresh damp rainbow trout lying so prettily on the green bed. And finally I can remember coming back to the rig and pouring rolled barley into the leather feed-bag and buckling it over the horse's head behind the ears. And I have no sound of his voice or words in my ear; he is dark and silent and hugely warm in my memory.

  Tom felt his darkness. His father was beautiful and clever, his mother was short and mathematically sure. Each of his brothers and sisters had looks or gifts or fortune. Tom loved all of them passionately, but he felt heavy and earth-bound. He climbed ecstatic mountains and floundered in the rocky darkness between the peaks. He had spurts of bravery but they were bracketed in battens of cowardice.

  Samuel said that Tom was quavering over greatness, trying to decide whether he could take the cold responsibility. Samuel knew his son's quality and felt the potential of violence, and it frightened him, for Samuel had no violence--even when he hit Adam Trask with his fist he had no violence. And the books that came into the house, some of them secretly--well, Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.

  Violence and shyness--Tom's loins needed women and at the same time he did not think himself worthy of a woman. For long periods he would welter in a howling celibacy, and then he would take a train to San Francisco and roll and wallow in women, and then he would come silently back to the ranch, feeling weak and unfulfilled and
unworthy, and he would punish himself with work, would plow and plant unprofitable land, would cut tough oakwood until his back was breaking and his arms were weary rags.

  It is probable that his father stood between Tom and the sun, and Samuel's shadow fell on him. Tom wrote secret poetry, and in those days it was only sensible to keep it secret. The poets were pale emasculates, and Western men held them in contempt. Poetry was a symptom of weakness, of degeneracy and decay. To read it was to court catcalls. To write it was to be suspected and ostracized. Poetry was a secret vice, and properly so. No one knows whether Tom's poetry was any good or not, for he showed it to only one person, and before he died he burned every word. From the ashes in the stove there must have been a great deal of it.

  Of all his family Tom loved Dessie best. She was gay. Laughter lived on her doorstep.

  Her shop was a unique institution in Salinas. It was a woman's world. Here all the rules, and the fears that created the iron rules, went down. The door was closed to men. It was a sanctuary where women could be themselves--smelly, wanton, mystic, conceited, truthful, and interested. The whalebone corsets came off at Dessie's, the sacred corsets that molded and warped woman-flesh into goddess-flesh. At Dessie's they were women who went to the toilet and overate and scratched and farted. And from this freedom came laughter, roars of laughter.

  Men could hear the laughter through the closed door and were properly frightened at what was going on, feeling, perhaps, that they were the butt of the laughter which to a large extent was true.

  I can see Dessie now, her gold pince-nez wobbling on a nose not properly bridged for pince-nez, her eyes streaming with hilarious tears, and her whole front constricted with muscular spasms of laughter. Her hair would come down and drift between her glasses and her eyes, and the glasses would fall off her wet nose and spin and swing at the end of their black ribbon.

  You had to order a dress from Dessie months in advance, and you made twenty visits to her shop before you chose material and pattern. Nothing so healthy as Dessie had ever happened to Salinas. The men had their lodges, their clubs, their whorehouses; the women nothing but the Altar Guild and the mincing coquetry of the minister until Dessie came along.

  And then Dessie fell in love. I do not know any details of her love affair--who the man was or what the circumstances, whether it was religion or a living wife, a disease or a selfishness. I guess my mother knew, but it was one of those things put away in the family closet and never brought out. And if other people in Salinas knew, they must have kept it a loyal town secret. All I do know is that it was a hopeless thing, gray and terrible. After a year of it the joy was all drained out of Dessie and the laughter had ceased.

  Tom raged crazily through the hills like a lion in horrible pain. In the middle of a night he saddled and rode away, not waiting for the morning train, to Salinas. Samuel followed him and sent a telegram from King City to Salinas.

  And when in the morning Tom, his face black, spurred his spent horse up John Street in Salinas, the sheriff was waiting for him. He disarmed Tom and put him in a cell and fed him black coffee and brandy until Samuel came for him.

  Samuel did not lecture Tom. He took him home and never mentioned the incident. And a stillness fell on the Hamilton place.

  2

  On Thanksgiving of 1911 the family gathered at the ranch--all the children except Joe, who was in New York, and Lizzie, who had left the family and joined another, and Una, who was dead. They arrived with presents and more food than even this clan could eat. They were all married save Dessie and Tom. Their children filled the Hamilton place with riot. The home place flared up--noisier than it had ever been. The children cried and screamed and fought. The men made many trips to the forge and came back self-consciously wiping their mustaches.

  Liza's little round face grew redder and redder. She organized and ordered. The kitchen stove never went out. The beds were full, and comforters laid on pillows on the floor were for children.

  Samuel dug up his old gaiety. His sardonic mind glowed and his speech took on its old singing rhythm. He hung on with the talk and the singing and the memories, and then suddenly, and it not midnight, he tired. Weariness came down on him, and he went to his bed where Liza had been for two hours. He was puzzled at himself, not that he had to go to bed but that he wanted to.

  When the mother and father were gone, Will brought the whisky in from the forge and the clan had a meeting in the kitchen with whisky passed around in round-bottomed jelly glasses. The mothers crept to the bedrooms to see that the children were covered and then came back. They all spoke softly, not to disturb the children and the old people. There were Tom and Dessie, George and his pretty Mamie, who had been a Dempsey, Mollie and William J. Martin, Olive and Ernest Steinbeck, Will and his Deila.

  They all wanted to say the same thing--all ten of them. Samuel was ah old man. It was as startling a discovery as the sudden seeing of a ghost. Somehow they had not believed it could happen. They drank their whisky and talked softly of the new thought.

  His shoulders--did you see how they slump? And there's no spring in his step.

  His toes drag a little, but it's not that--it's in his eyes. His eyes are old.

  He never would go to bed until last.

  Did you notice he forgot what he was saying right in the middle of a story?

  It's his skin told me. It's gone wrinkled, and the backs of his hands have turned transparent.

  He favors his right leg.

  Yes, but that's the one the horse broke.

  I know, but he never favored it before.

  They said these things in outrage. This can't happen, they were saying. Father can't be an old man. Samuel is young as the dawn--the perpetual dawn.

  He might get old as midday maybe, but sweet God! the evening cannot come, and the night--? Sweet God, no!

  It was natural that their minds leaped on and recoiled, and they would not speak of that, but their minds said, There can't be any world without Samuel.

  How could we think about anything without knowing what he thought about it?

  What would the spring be like, or Christmas, or rain? There couldn't be a Christmas.

  Their minds shrank away from such thinking and they looked for a victim--someone to hurt because they were hurt. They turned on Tom.

  You were here. You've been here all along!

  How did this happen? When did it happen?

  Who did this to him?

  Have you by any chance done this with your craziness?

  And Tom could stand it because he had been with it. "It was Una," he said hoarsely. "He couldn't get over Una. He told me how a man, a real man, had no right to let sorrow destroy him. He told me again and again how I must believe that time would take care of it. He said it so often that I knew he was losing."

  "Why didn't you tell us? Maybe we could have done something."

  Tom leaped up, violent and cringing. "Goddam it! What was there to tell? That he was dying of sorrow? That the marrow had melted out of his bones? What was there to tell? You weren't here. I had to look at it and see his eyes die down--goddam it." Tom went out of the room and they heard his clodhopper feet knocking on the flinty ground outside.

  They were ashamed. Will Martin said, "I'll go out and bring him back."

  "Don't do it," George said quickly, and the blood kin nodded. "Don't do it. Let him alone. We know him from the insides of ourselves."

  In a little while Tom came back. "I want to apologize," he said. "I'm very sorry. Maybe I'm a little drunk. Father calls it 'jolly' when I do it. One night I rode home"--it was a confession--"and I came staggering across the yard and I fell into the rosebush and crawled up the stairs on my hands and knees and I was sick on the floor beside my bed. In the morning I tried to tell him I was sorry, and do you know what he said? 'Why, Tom, you were just jolly.' 'Jolly,' if I did it. A drunken man didn't crawl home. Just jolly."

  George stopped the crazy flow of talk. "We want to apologize to you, Tom," he said. "W
hy, we sounded as though we were blaming you and we didn't mean to. Or maybe we did mean to. And we're sorry."

  Will Martin said realistically, "It's too hard a life here. Why don't we get him to sell out and move to town? He could have a long and happy life. Mollie and I would like them to come and live with us."

  "I don't think he'd do it," said Will. "He's stubborn as a mule and proud as a horse. He's got a pride like brass."

  Olive's husband, Ernest, said, "Well, there'd be no harm in asking him. We would like to have him--or both of them--with us."

  Then they were silent again, for the idea of not having the ranch, the dry, stony desert of heartbreaking hillside and unprofitable hollow, was shocking to them.

  Will Hamilton from instinct and training in business had become a fine reader of the less profound impulses of men and women. He said, "If we ask him to close up shop it will be like asking him to close his life, and he won't do it."

  "You're right, Will," George agreed. "He would think it was like quitting. He'd feel it was a cowardice. No, he will never sell out, and if he did I don't think he would live a week."

  Will said, "There's another way. Maybe he could come for a visit. Tom can run the ranch. It's time Father and Mother saw something of the world. All kinds of things are happening. It would freshen him, and then he could come back and go to work again. And after a while maybe he wouldn't have to. He says himself that thing about time doing the job dynamite can't touch."

  Dessie brushed the hair out of her eyes. "I wonder if you really think he's that stupid," she said.

  And Will said out of his experience, "Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids. We can try it anyway. What do you all think?"

  There was a nodding of heads in the kitchen, and only Tom sat rocklike and brooding.