The Huge Season

by Wright Morris

  The year the banks closed Foley had a letter from Jesse Proctor, the first in several years, asking if he could visit Foley and spend a night or two in his room. Foley thought Proctor might be thinking of going back to school. Taking the degree, he would need to do a little teaching or get a better job. Foley said sure, and a week or so later Proctor appeared. He had spent the day hitch-hiking down from New York and arrived wearing army-store dungarees, Sears, Roebuck work-shoes that blistered his feet, and a soiled khaki shirt with a leather, gas-station-type bow tie. A paper bag of fig newtons bulged out the front of his shirt.

  Although he had only one suit of clothes himself, Foley felt tainted with capitalism, a white-collar serf living off the fat of the poor man’s land. During Proctor’s stay he hid his carton of cork-tipped cigarettes. He wore soiled white sneakers with loose crepe soles that flapped. Proctor did not attend any of Foley’s classes, nor had he come with the idea of going back to college. He came down to use, as he said, the facilities. The chairs in the mess hall, the bumpers of cars, the steps of any building where the students gathered, served Jesse Proctor as a suitable podium. He closed every discussion—as he termed his lectures—with an invitation to spend the evening, and the night too, going into matters further in Foley’s room. Seven to ten students, as a rule, put in the full night. Foley lay on the bed near the window, listening, night after night, to the theme and variations Proctor played on one word. Disinherited. Proctor was. Had been, literally, since Lawrence. So it made sense enough for Proctor. But why did it make sense for the others? Thousands of them. The word, in Proctor’s mouth, seemed to cast a spell. They had all wondered what they were, and now they saw. They were disinherited.

  Proctor’s work—for the time being—had been cut out for him. He slept in frat rooms, the back of campus cars, on porches, in parks, and sometimes in guest rooms where the change of linen he always needed was put out for him. He made, understandably, quite a name for himself. His educated feet learned to walk in his proletarian shoes. Foley saw snapshots of him, in his homespun beard, crouched on his haunches like a hillbilly, photogenically dangling or chewing on a spear of long-stemmed grass. The disinherited, it turned out, were everywhere. In Omaha, in Cedar Rapids, and in the shrubs of those penthouse gardens where, it would seem, they had inherited everything. In Walla Walla he recruited a corps of Seventh-Day Adventists. The Gospel according to Marx was his text but not, strictly speaking, his subject. His subject, for the time being, seemed to be himself.

  A year or two later, for the time being, Foley often saw Proctor’s name in the list of rally speakers, or his face in the choir surrounding Eleanor Roosevelt. A pale, secular monk, camera-conscious, his barbed-wire scar luminous in the flashbulbs, clearly destined to be one of the boys in the nation’s back room. And then—then came the bombing of Guernica. Before Foley knew that he had gone (Lou Baker, that year, had been convalescing), Proctor had entered the Spanish war—and made his exit from it. A grenade had gone off in his hand—one he had caught when it was thrown at him—and he had buried the two dangling fingers, like lovers, in Spanish soil. Weeks later, from Madrid, Foley received a postcard of a Spanish whore, her blouse unbuttoned on the hand-painted nipples of her breasts. On the back:

  For the time being, old man, I’m a casualty in your little allegorical war. We arranged to keep it in scale so you cool boys could study the pattern. Act One, as they say, in the Spanish theater. Spring here. How is the dogwood at Valley Forge?

  The dogwood, as a matter of fact, was beautiful. Foley drove out there to read the letter, the first one in months from Lou Baker, that brought him up to date on such things as Proctor and the Spanish war. Proctor a live hero—for the time being—but two fingers gone. And then, a year later, he stopped fellow-traveling—one of the rats, Lou Baker said—equipped with radar—long before the disciples, swooning and lovelorn, left the ship. Where did he go? For the time being no one knew. But on, it turned out, to another belief. The choir boy whose voice would not settle down. Pushing forty, but his voice still changing, a fresh, cocky, chamber-of-commerce note the summer Foley stumbled on him in the Sloane House john. Up to his ears—for the time being—in World’s Fair canes.

  And then? One day Foley spied him on Fifth Avenue—and avoided him. With him, there on the corner, a boy in a low-crowned, wide-brimmed hat, holding a bundle of clothes tied with a string. Dark ringlets of hair, braided, framed his solemn, flour-white face. Foley thought he was Amish—but no. A ghetto Jew. He held fast, like a child, to Proctor’s three-fingered hand. They stood there together till a uniformed chauffeur picked them up.

  Foley called Lou Baker, and from her he learned that Proctor was in the import business. The importation of Jews, for the time being, a specialty. Flown in from Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and South America—in his own planes. And in New York they were conditioned, as in an air chamber, to a different climate of existence, then flown on to relatives, friends, spas, or out of the country again. And the ghetto boys? Proctor called them his dividends. With every five that could pay, one such boy was thrown in free. That was the story, as Lou Baker told it, but the imports dwindled with the rise of Zion, and Proctor, for the time being, took up something else. The Voice, now unmasked, of America.

  “Christ!” Foley said again, folded the paper, and walked through the train to the smoker at the front, where one of the trainmen sat in a seat across the aisle. He was carefully smoothing out the pages of a Washington paper he had found in the car. Foley watched him, remained standing until the trainman had worked through the paper to the front and passed a heavy hand over the smiling face of Proctor, now unmasked. Expression of a man given up for lost, miraculously found alive.

  Foley took a seat, wiped from the window the hair oil of the man who had been leaning on it, and saw that the world was more or less as he remembered it. Wide, sluggish bend of the Schuylkill, spire of an unnamed church, acropolis hulk of the Art Museum, and the trees along the river lush and dark green under the pale English water-color sky. Opening the paper, he read:

  WITNESS CITED FOR CONTEMPT

  When Asked. What He Was Doing,

  Says He Was Eroding

  “I was eroding,” the witness had said, and that was how he looked. All the soft gentile topsoil, the non-furrowed regular guy, the comical Jewish clown, had eroded away. Leaving bedrock. A flood-scored Jewish bedrock showing beneath. Foley remembered the first joke Proctor had told them—might have been the first thing he said—about the house full of Semitic baroque in the Jewish Alps. That was gone. That had eroded, leaving no trace. A white scar across the jowl indicating where the anchor might have dragged.

  Foley took a penknife from his pocket and with the hail scissors attached snipped out the picture of Proctor on the front page of the Times. Lou Baker might like to see it. Just the picture. Not the interview. She had prophesied—in one of her recurrent Delphic traumas she had prophesied—that Jesse Proctor, self-styled Jewish clown, would return to the faith of his people. Had he? There was just a suggestion that he might have gone back farther than that. Not so much a prophet now as a martyr. Showing his wounds. Throwing open his shirt front to show the public his wounds.

  The clipping safe in his pocket, Foley trimmed his nails. The blades of the shears were not what they used to be. Like everything else. He had had the knife for twenty-three years. On the blade he examined the fading trademark, the pair of Henckels twins, Solingen. The best. None too good for the Lawrences. The knife had turned up in the fine tweed jacket that hung in one of the Lawrence guest rooms, and Mrs. Lawrence had suggested that Foley should take both the jacket and the knife. Some Lawrence—she didn’t know which one—had left them there. There had been dozens of well-groomed, wealthy young men in and out of that room.

  Foley had been neither well groomed nor wealthy that summer, but he had come back from France with the body of Lawrence, who had died, it was said, of a lovely cornada, a horn wound. That was almost true, and might have been true if it had
been anybody but Lawrence, for he had been badly homed in an amateur bullfight in Pamplona. Peter Foley had been asked to bring the body back to Troy, Indiana, Lawrence’s home town. He had been put in the guest room at the end of the hall, in a house that was like an empty dormitory, and in the closet of that room he had come upon the jacket and the knife. His own clothes were soiled, so he had worn the jacket while he was there. It fit him well—as Proctor would have said, it did something for him. They were closing up the house, and Mrs. Lawrence had insisted that he take it along. Foley had worn the jacket back to Chicago, where his mother saw the chamois leather patches on the elbows and said that he could wear a patched coat in the house but not out on the street. His mother did not know that was what the boys were wearing at Princeton and Yale. She didn’t know that leather patches were a sign of class, just like very dirty white buckskin shoes or the old Pierce-Arrow that Mrs. Lawrence preferred to all the new cars. His mother didn’t know that life had taken a turn and that Mrs. Lawrence, in her old clothes and cars, was already anticipating the age of the vulgar nouveau riche. People who could buy anything, that is, but the class that went along with an old Pierce-Arrow or the feet that went into a pair of Lawrence’s shoes. Proctor had known it, however, and he had been the first to pick it up. But his position, from the start, had been ambivalent. There was a point in Abercrombie Fitch, as there was in sex and the Ten Commandments, which he could see beyond but beyond which he could not go.“ The rich are different from us” was said by one who really knew. Peter Foley had known it the day he put that coat on. They had more money, but having more money was not at all the same as being rich; only the truly rich knew how to enjoy the money they had. Which was why Peter Foley had put that jacket away for nearly ten years. He had not worn it once at Chicago, where he took his degree; nor at Columbia, where he did some graduate work. When the moths had eaten it so badly that the patches on the pockets made it look real, he began to wear it, as a sort of smoking jacket, around his own room.

  The Lawrence family, so far as Foley knew, still had their home place in Indiana, but the family had dispersed, and he had heard them mentioned all over the world. Troy had been a sort of park, a memorial almost, to the legendary head of the family, the old man who had invented barbed wire and stretched it around the world. Back in the twenties the members of the family, far flung as a rule, and trained professional gadders, would come back to Troy for a few weeks every summer, some of them with new children, old guests, or new brides, to drink the fountain of youth as it was dispensed by Grandfather Gans. The man who had invented, so long ago it seemed childish, a way of twisting two straight wires together so that a few barbs, headless nails, were held fast in it. Other men had thought of it too, dozens of them, but the man whose barbed wire took the field was Colonel Clayton Gans, founder of the barbed-wire empire.

  Out in back of the mansion, in a sort of arbor, was a stretch of barbed wire about fifty feet long, with the wires at one end fastened to the hub of an old grindstone. Using that grindstone, pedaling the treadwheel, Colonel Gans had twisted his first piece of wire, and between the wires, every foot or so, he had inserted a nail. Later he had gone along and snipped off the heads. That piece of wire and the nails were still there: still well enough preserved to illustrate the idea. The strength and twist of that wire showed in old Colonel Gans, in the sinews of certain members of the family, but it had come through clean, without a flaw, in Charles Lawrence, the old man’s favorite grandson. The one who had made up his mind to be a tennis player.

  Lawrence had been called home from school that year to see the old man die. Since it had been at Christmas he had asked Foley to come along. And Foley had gone because he liked Lawrence. That is, he admired him.

  The big thing Foley admired in Lawrence was the thing that didn’t show much. His money. Foley thought it was very nice to have it but ill advised to work for it. Part of Lawrence’s charm was that he already had what most people thought they wanted, without the ill effects that came from having to work for it. Foley’s charm, for Lawrence, was that he openly admitted it.

  They went back on the train because blizzards were reported in the Middle West. Foley put in his time on his outside reading, and Lawrence played a game of solitaire at which he cheated in the morning, but in the afternoon he played it straight.

  “Well, I’m cheating now, Foley,” he would say and ask Foley to watch him. Not that he cared about the game so much, but he didn’t want to cheat himself covertly.

  They came into the town of Troy from the northwest. There had evidently been two railroads in the town at one time, for they crossed a railbed buried in the snow and passed a signal tower with the lights shot out of the semaphores. A narrow country road without a track of any kind ran along beside the train. The whistle scared up a rabbit, and he raced along in the ditch that bordered the tracks. The coach shadows were on that side, and the rabbit paced the train, staying within the shadow, running up to the bright edge, then darting back, the way a big jack would stay within the lanes of the car lights till the road made a turn.

  They came into the town like a wagon train, on a level with the road. They came in easy, the bell clanging, through the empty backyards of the big houses, the coach windows flashing when they passed close to the sheds and the barns. The dark smoke fanned out through the trees of the park, and they came up and went by several crossing bells, but the roads were empty, and nobody’s children had made tracks in the park. Nobody else got on or off the train when it stopped. Down the street snow was banked on a no longer revolving barberpole.

  They stood in the clean snow on the platform till the train pulled out. As the last coach passed they looked into the park at the snow-covered cannons, the swings and teeter-totters, and the bandstand where the shingles were black on the slope facing the sun. On the far side of the street an old air-cooled Franklin was parked at the curb. The motor was running, and the chauffeur sat erect, gripping the wheel. Lawrence raised his hand, waving it at him, but the old man held the wheel like the reins of a team that might, at any strange sound, bolt away from him.

  “This is Peter Foley, Hawley!” Lawrence yelled, but the old man didn’t seem to catch it. He wore a cane hat, like a train conductor, with a hackdriver’s license fastened to the front, and as he eased out the clutch he sucked in his cheeks, then puffed them out. “Hawley came out with Grandfather, old man,” Lawrence said, then they went back in the tracks the chauffeur had made coming down, the straps that held the top on snapping like wires in the cold air.

  They went around the park, then turned into a drive that was lined with snow-covered cars: out-of-state cars, with a wide assortment of license plates—Connecticut, New York, Wisconsin, Illinois, and a car from Florida without a top. The snow lay thick on the lap robes that had been left in the seat. The house sat in a grove of big trees, at the back, and as the car moved around behind it Foley saw that the blinds were drawn at the windows on the second floor.

  They entered through a door near the kitchen, where the smell of coffee was strong in the hall. Foley caught the smell of ether and burning logs that came through the double doors they passed, and the sound of a spoon rocking in a glass. An elephant’s foot, like a huge leather bucket, served as a post for the railing on the stairs, and someone had drawn faces, with red lipstick, on the toenails. They had started up the stairs when a voice cried out, “Where the hell is everybody?”

  It came from the room where the log fire was crackling. A woman’s voice said, “Now is that the way to talk?”

  “Where the hell is everybody?” the voice replied, and a glass rattled on the table beside the bed.

  “They’re asleep,” the woman answered, “but they won’t be if you make a noise like that,” and Foley heard her hand slap the pillow and then smooth down the sheet.

  “This way, old man,” Lawrence said and led Foley to the second floor. Rows of stuffed animal heads, some of them with antlers, all of them wearing hats, woolen scarfs, and driving gogg
les, lined both sides of the long hall. They seemed to lean out of the transoms above the doors and roll their glass eyes at Foley as he walked by. “Hope you don’t mind a little bullshit, old man,” Lawrence said and led Foley to the last room on the left, where a giant teddy bear, with eyes that bugged, sat up in bed. He was wearing horn-rimmed glasses, a Princeton dink, and a brown-derby button that said “I’m for Al.”

  Foley took a shower, using a bar of soap that was wound up tightly in long strands of blond hair, and wiped himself with a towel that had lipstick on one corner of it. Then he stood at the window, looking down the driveway at the row of parked cars. Where the hell was everybody? Asleep, the woman had replied. Under the new fall of snow that also seemed to be true of the town. Nothing moved anywhere. Time seemed to have stopped. Foley did not hear the steps in the hall, but he knew, before he turned, that he would find somebody standing in the door. She carried a tray with two steaming cups of coffee, the steam rising from the cups clouding her glasses.

  “Dickie!” she cried. “Dickie!” And the tray she was holding tipped toward Foley. The spoons, then the cups and saucers, began to slide. He lunged toward her, but too late. One of the cups bounced on the rug, but the other fell against a chair leg, caromed against the baseboard, and rolled under the bed.

  “Mother!” Lawrence cried, coming up behind her, and took the empty tray out of her hands.

  “It’s not Dickie?” she said.

  “It’s Peter Foley, Mother.”

  “I wondered what had come over him,” she said, then dropped down on her knees, like a girl, and felt around for the cup under the bed. She was a very small, slender woman, the type Foley’s mother described as. mousy, meaning they were quick and nimble, not slow and easygoing, as she was herself.