Miss Florence would be likely to reply something to the effect that Mrs. Ebbs upstairs could go to hell, for all it mattered to her …
The last time I was in St. Louis, for a visit at Christmas, I had my brother Dakin drive me about all the old places where we had lived in my childhood. It was a melancholy tour. Westminster Place and Forest Park Boulevard had lost all semblance of their charm in the twenties. The big old residences had been converted into sleazy rooming-houses or torn down for nondescript duplexes and small apartment buildings.
The Kramer residence was gone: in fact, all of the family, including dear Hazel, were by then dead.
This can only serve as a preamble, in this “thing,” to the story of my great love for Hazel, and not at all an adequate one at that …
In my adolescence in St. Louis, at the age of sixteen, several important events in my life occurred. It was in the sixteenth year that I wrote “The Vengeance of Nitocris” and received my first publication in a magazine and the magazine was Weird Tales. The story wasn’t published till June of 1928. That same year my grandfather Dakin took me with him on a tour of Europe with a large party of Episcopalian ladies from the Mississippi Delta, and about that trip, more later. And, it was in my sixteenth year that my deep nervous problems approached what might well have been a crisis as shattering as that which broke my sister’s mind, lastingly, when she was in her twenties.
I was at sixteen a student at University City High School in St. Louis and the family was living in a cramped apartment at 6254 Enright Avenue.
University City was not a fashionable suburb of St. Louis and our neighborhood, while a cut better than that of the Wingfields in Menagerie, was only a little cut better: it was an ugly region of hive-like apartment buildings, for the most part, and fire escapes and pathetic little patches of green among concrete driveways.
My younger brother, Dakin, always an indomitable enthusiast at whatever he got into, had turned our little patch of green behind the apartment on Enright into quite an astonishing little vegetable garden. If there were flowers in it, they were, alas, obscured by the profuse growth of squash, pumpkins, and other edible flora.
I would, of course, have pre-empted all the space with rosebushes but I doubt they would have borne roses. The impracticalities, let’s say the fantastic impracticalities, of my adolescence were not at all inclined to successful ends: and I can recall no roses in all the years that I spent in St. Louis and its environs except the two living Roses in my life, my grandmother, Rose O. Dakin, and, of course, my sister, Rose Isabel.
My adolescent problems took their most violent form in a shyness of a pathological degree. Few people realize, now, that I have always been and even remain in my years as a crocodile an extremely shy creature—in my crocodile years I compensate for this shyness by the typical Williams heartiness and bluster and sometimes explosive fury of behavior. In my high school days I had no disguise, no façade. And it was at University City High School that I developed the habit of blushing whenever anyone looked me in the eyes, as if I harbored behind them some quite dreadful or abominable secret.
You will have no trouble in guessing what that secret was but I shall, in the course of this “thing,” provide you with some elaboration, all quite true.
I remember the occasion on which this constant blushing had its beginning. I believe it was in a class in plane geometry. I happened to look across the aisle and a dark and attractive girl was looking directly into my eyes and at once I felt my face burning. It burned more and more intensely after I had faced front again. My God, I thought, I’m blushing because she looked into my eyes or I into hers and suppose this happens whenever my eyes look into the eyes of another?
As soon as I had entertained that nightmarish speculation, it was immediately turned into a reality.
Literally, from that incident on, and almost without remission for the next four or five years, I would blush whenever a pair of human eyes, male or female (but mostly female since my life was spent mostly among members of that gender) would meet mine. I would feel my face burning with a blush.
I was a very slight youth. I don’t think I had effeminate mannerisms but somewhere deep in my nerves there was imprisoned a young girl, a sort of blushing school maiden much like the one described in a certain poem or song “she trembled at your frown.” Well, the school maiden imprisoned in my hidden self, I mean selves, did not need a frown to make her tremble, she needed only a glance.
This blushing made me avoid the eyes of my dear friend Hazel. This happened quite abruptly and both Hazel and her mother, Miss Florence, must have been shocked and puzzled by this new peculiarity of mine. Yet neither of them permitted me to observe their puzzlement.
Once Hazel said to me on a crowded streetcar, after a little period of tense silence on my part, “Tom, don’t you know I’d never say anything to hurt you?”
This was, indeed, the truth: Hazel never, never said a word to hurt me during the eleven years of our close companionship, which, on my part, ripened into that full emotional dependence which is popularly known as love. Miss Florence loved me as son, I believe, and she talked to me as to an adult about her own lonely and difficult life with her tyrannical parents in their big house on the residential street around the corner from the apartment and fire escapes.
I believe it was at puberty that I first knew that I had a sexual desire for Hazel and it was in the West End Lyric, the movie-house on Delmar Boulevard. Sitting beside her before the movie began, I was suddenly conscious of her bare shoulders and I wanted to touch them and I felt a genital stirring.
Another time, we were driving down a lovers’ lane in Forest Park one summer night, with Miss Florence and a bawdy lady friend of hers, when the headlights of Hazel’s green Packard limousine picked up a young couple exchanging a very long wet kiss, and the lady friend shrieked with laughter and said, “I’ll bet he’s got a yard of tongue down her throat!”
These ladies, on summer eves, often diverted themselves by driving down lovers’ lane in the park and by parking on top of Art Hill where young couples also engaged in pretty heavy “necking.”
We had fun, and it was fun for me to be shocked.
One evening I took Hazel on the river steamer “J.S.”—and she wore a pale green chiffon party dress with no sleeves and we went up on the dark upper deck and I put my arm about those delicious shoulders and I “came” in my white flannels.
How embarrassed I was! No mention was made between us of the tattletale wet spot on my pants front but Hazel said, “Let’s stay up here and walk around the deck, I don’t think we ought to dance now …”
Going out on excursion steamers at night was a popular diversion during the thirties in St. Louis and once I had a date with a beautiful young lady of the distinguished family of Choteau, a family that dated back to the time when St. Louis belonged to the French territory in the States. I believe it was a double date including Miss Rose.
I was quite enchanted with the beautiful Miss Choteau and the following weekend—I was in the shoe business, then—I called her to make another date and got this put-down: “Oh, thank you, Tom, but you know I’m afflicted with a very bad case of Rose fever.”
I don’t think she was alluding to my sister but to the actual flower but I never called her for a date again. She was a debutante and I figured that I just wasn’t a socially acceptable date for this girl in her debutante season.
Somehow I cannot adhere as I should to chronology.
Now I find myself jumping back to the age of sixteen when Grandfather took me to Europe—where an amazing episode occurred.
Grandfather provided my expenses for this trip to Europe. But Dad gave me a hundred dollars for spending money.
(It was stolen from me by a pickpocket in Paris, specifically at the Eiffel Tower.)
Grandfather’s party set sail on the Homeric, which had once been the flagship of Kaiser Wilhelm’s fleet of passenger vessels. We sailed at midnight and it was a gala departure w
ith a brass band playing, or several of them, and with a great deal of colored paper ribbons tossed between vessel and dockside. I believe there were also many balloons and of course much shouting and drinking and laughing. It was all very Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
I particularly remember Pinkie Sikes with her dyed red bob and her spike-heeled slippers and her incredible animation (on the deck with Grandfather and me) as the ship blew “all ashore.” Pinkie, an unattached flower of the South, was, I would guess, nearing fifty. Surely she must have been unattached due to legal process because in her earlier years she must have been a stunning creature. In fact, she was still stunning, though rather grotesque in her make-up and the valiant minimization of her real age that she showed in her very high heels and short skirts and her girlish outfits.
I was very fond of Miss Pinkie. In spite of my painful shyness, I was almost not afraid of her.
It was on our first day out at sea that I took my first alcoholic beverage. It was a green crème de menthe, served me at the bar on deck.
Half an hour later I became violently seasick and remained in that condition for about five days of the voyage, in a cabin which had little ventilation and no portholes—our party was not sailing first-class.
Among the passengers was a dancing teacher and the happiest times I recall on this first crossing to Europe, summer of 1928, was dancing with this young lady, especially the waltzes. I was, in those days, an excellent dancer and we “just swept around the floor: and swept and swept” as Zelda would put it.
The dancing teacher was a young lady of about twenty-seven and she was enjoying a conspicuous flirtation with a certain Captain De Voe in the party. I recall a mysterious conversation one night. I mean it was mysterious to me, then, and also disturbing and I recall it with singular clarity.
Captain De Voe did not like my spending so much time with the dancing teacher. The three of us were at a small table in the ship’s bar one night, toward the end of the voyage, when Captain De Voe looked at me and said to the dancing teacher, “You know his future, don’t you?”
She said, “I don’t think you can be sure about that at the age of seventeen.”
Well, of course you know what they were talking about, but at the time I was mystified—at least it seems to me now that I was mystified by it.
We are now approaching the onset of the most dreadful, the most nearly psychotic, crisis that occurred in my early life. I’m afraid it will be hard to comprehend.
It began when I was walking alone down a boulevard in Paris. I will try to describe it a little, for it has significance in my psychological make-up. Abruptly, it occurred to me that the process of thought was a terrifyingly complex mystery of human life.
I felt myself walking faster and faster as if trying to outpace this idea. It was already turning into a phobia. As I walked faster I began to sweat and my heart began to accelerate, and by the time I reached the Hôtel Rochambeau, where our party was staying, I was a trembling, sweat-drenched wreck of a boy.
At least a month of the tour was enveloped for me by this phobia about the processes of thought, and the phobia grew and grew till I think I was within a hairsbreadth of going quite mad from it.
We took a beautiful trip down the winding river Rhine, from a city in Northern Prussia to the city of Cologne.
On either side of our open-decked river boat were densely forested hills of deep green and on many of them were medieval castles with towers.
I noticed all this, even though I was going mad.
The principal tourist attraction of Cologne was its ancient cathedral, the most beautiful cathedral I have seen in my life. It was Gothic, of course, and for a cathedral in Prussia, it was remarkably delicate and lyrical in design.
My phobia about thought processes had reached its climax.
We entered the cathedral, the interior of which was flooded with beautifully colored light coming through the great stained-glass windows.
Breathless with panic, I knelt down to pray.
I stayed kneeling and praying after the party had left.
Then a truly phenomenal thing happened.
Let me say that I am not predisposed to believe in miracles or in superstitions. But what happened was a miracle and one of a religious nature and I assure you that I am not bucking for sainthood when I tell you about it. It was as if an impalpable hand were placed upon my head, and at the instant of that touch, the phobia was lifted away as lightly as a snowflake though it had weighed on my head like a skull-breaking block of iron.
At seventeen, I had no doubt at all that the hand of our Lord Jesus had touched my head with mercy and had exorcised from it the phobia that was driving me into madness.
Grandfather was always terribly frightened for me when I escaped from his sight and from the party of ladies. He was not a scolder, he was never severe, but he said, when I got back, “My goodness, Tom, what a scare you gave us when we returned to the bus and you were missing. A lady said you’d run out of the cathedral and we’d find you at the hotel.”
For about a week after that I was marvelously well and for the first time I began to enjoy my first trip to Europe. I still found the endless walking about art galleries to be interesting for only a few moments now and then, and dreadfully tiring, physically, for the rest.
But the phobia about “thought process” was completely exorcised for about a week and the physical fatigue began to disappear with it.
The final high-point of the tour was Amsterdam, or, more specifically, the Olympic games, which were being performed in Amsterdam that year. It was the equestrian competition that our party attended and it was at this equestrian event that my phobia had a brief and minor reprise.
Having thought it permanently exorcised by the “miracle” in the cathedral of Cologne, I was terribly troubled by its fresh, though relatively minor recurrence.
That night I went out alone on the streets of Amsterdam and this time a second “miracle” occurred to lift the terror away. It occurred through my composition of a little poem. It was not a good poem, except perhaps for the last two lines, but allow me to quote it, since it comes back easily to mind.
Strangers pass me on the street
in endless throngs: their marching feet,
sound with a sameness in my ears
that dulls my senses, soothes my fears,
I hear their laughter and their sighs,
I look into their myriad eyes:
then all at once my hot woe
cools like a cinder dropped on snow.
That little bit of verse with its recognition of being one among many of my kind—a most important recognition, perhaps the most important of all, at least in the quest for balance of mind—that recognition of being a member of multiple humanity with its multiple needs, problems and emotions, not a unique creature but one, only one among the multitude of its fellows, yes, I suspect it’s the most important recognition for us all to reach now, under all circumstances but especially those of the present. The moment of recognition that my existence and my fate could dissolve as lightly as the cinder dropped in a great fall of snow restored to me, in quite a different fashion, the experience in the cathedral of Cologne. And I wonder if it was not a sequel to that experience, an advancement of it: first, the touch of the mystic hand upon the solitary anguished head, and then the gentle lesson or demonstration that the head, despite the climactic crisis which it contained, was still a single head on a street thronged with many.
When I returned from Europe, I still had a year to go at University City High School in St. Louis. Things were just a bit easier than they had been. For one thing, the high-school paper, at the suggestion of my English teacher, invited me to narrate my European travels, which I did in a series of sketches, none containing a reference to the miracles of Cologne and Amsterdam nor the crisis, but nevertheless giving me a certain position among the student body, not only as the most bashful boy in school but as the only one who had traveled abroad.
&nbs
p; It was still almost entirely impossible for me to speak aloud in classroom. And, teachers stopped asking me questions because when they did, I would produce a voice that was hardly intelligible, my throat would be so tight with panic.
Well, that particular phobia, the one about the terrifying nature of cerebration, has never come to me again.
Let me give you this sworn truth. I have never doubted the existence of God nor have I ever neglected to kneel in prayer when a situation in which I found myself (and there have been many) seemed critical enough in my opinion to merit the Lord’s attention and, I trust, intervention.
Now some cynics among you will think that I am competing with Mary Pickford, who was the authoress of a work called Why Not Try God?
Never mind. I am old enough to have been in love with Miss Pickford, if that’s a relevant point.
3
When I was about to set off for college in the early fall of 1929 suddenly there wasn’t any money for the tuition; if it hadn’t been for Grand coming through with a thousand dollars right in the nick of time, I couldn’t have gone. This was just one of many times in my life when Grand and Grandfather Dakin brought calm and order to my usually chaotic state, or were responsible for my accomplishing something, in part because of the happy atmosphere they were able to create, in part because of their almost magical power to dispense financial aid from their own small resources.
Off I went, to the University of Missouri, in the charming town of Columbia.
I did not go for “rush week” as I could not imagine myself being accepted by a fraternity or wanting to be a fraternity member.
This was a disappointment to Dad, who had been a Pi Kappa Alpha during his years at the University of Tennessee and he was determined to do something about this in short order.
Miss Edwina accompanied me to Columbia; it did not concern her at all that I had not gone up for rush week. We spent our first night in a hotel room and the next day she selected for me what she regarded as a suitable boardinghouse. The boardinghouse was segregated, sexually, there were two buildings under the proprietorship of a very lively middle-age landlady, a widow with a bright red Buick convertible.
Memoirs Page 4