by Ward, Robert
“Don’t worry,” my father’s voice said, cutting like a switchblade through the bathroom door, “I don’t blame it all on Baltimore!”
That was the end. She started beating on the door with her fists, her red face a mask of pain, a huge blue vein throbbing in her forehead.
“Oh, I see, then. It’s all my fault is it? It’s all my fault that you’re so unhappy. Don’t you say that, you liar. Don’t you tell our only son that!”
“Mom,” I pleaded, “Mom, we were just having a conversation. About books.”
“Which she can’t stand,” my father boomed through the door. “Having never read any except those moronic romance novels!!”
“That’s it,” my mother said. “You bastard. You rotten liar. Let me in there. Let me in!”
Now she was beating and kicking and screaming, tears rolling down her cheeks, and I could hear my father’s voice jacked up as he screamed back, “You want in? You want in? ‘Cause if you come in here, if you come in here, you’re gonna get it, Ruth. Get the picture?”
“Fine,” my mother screamed, bashing and kicking the door until the wood splintered. “Beat me up in front of Tommy. Go ahead. I’d expect nothing less from you. Nothing at all! You cowardly bathroom-loving son of a bitch!!!”
And then I was holding onto her, pulling her from around the waist, saying, “Mom, Mom, you don’t want to go in there. You don’t.” And she was crying and scraping at the door, flailing about like a madwoman, and it went on like that for five minutes before she finally let me take her into the living room, sit her down on the couch, where she broke into deep, moaning sobs.
Needless to say, with such a cozy home life, my studies suffered. Those first few months of school I would spend all day hanging out in the student union or reading in the library. As long as I was lost in the world of books I was fine, but as soon as I started the walk home—our house was only seven blocks away from Calvert—I would feel my stomach tighten, and a kind of numbing sensation would roll through my arms and head. It was as though I’d been in some kind of car accident and I felt as though I were falling through a whirlpool, like a battered gumshoe in some old noir flick.
Only Dr. Spaulding was tangible, real. He was still giving me C’s, but he’d begun to speak to me outside of class—in the student union, in walks we took to his car. I wonder if he knew the importance of these little chats. Probably not. He was merely making small talk on the way to lunch, but as far as I was concerned, it was as though I was talking to God himself. Oh, how I lived for Dr. S.’s pearls of wisdom and hoped that he didn’t feel he was dropping them before swine. Indeed, as the year rolled on, I decided that more than anything, I wanted to become a gentleman, an academic, not a fiction writer, but a Man of Letters, like, say, Edmund Wilson or Dr. S. himself. I had even begun to fall into Dr. S.’s speech rhythms and tried to think as I imagined he thought. Yes, I wanted not only his intellectual muscle and his gentlemanly stature, I wanted to be him. I wanted his posture, his brains, his suits. I wanted to transcend all that sweat and screaming and pimple popping with high-mindedness, rare sherry, herringbone suits, and great novels. Ah, the naked sadness of it. I remember driving to Ameche’s (named after our Baltimore Colt hero, fullback Alan Ameche, of course) one day and saying to the pimple-faced boy who served out the swill: “One would like a malted, and one would like a bag of fries, and one would very much like a massive Powerhouse Double-Burger.”
The kid looked at me as though I was an escapee from Larson-Payne, but I didn’t mind in the slightest. Of course, I was aware of how ridiculous I sounded, but even though there was a large element of private parody in my speech, I felt a certain satisfaction, a certain frisson of aesthetic pleasure, in using such quaint, archaic phrases. Indeed, on one date I had later that year, while sitting through It’s a Mad,
Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World at the Passion Pit, I said to a fellow English major, a cute but chunky girl named Leslie Walker, that “one would love to partake of a blow job,” which she found so amusing, so truly Spauldingesque, that she complied with one’s request and for the next hour and a half licked one’s throbbing log until all the sacred juices had run dry.
But even though I used such language with a sense of irony, the truth was, I held out an almost unconscious hope that I would be able to somehow, someday, transcend. But transcend what? Everything, I suppose. Row-house Baltimore, my own crowded past. Transcend to some cool, well-lit place where cultured people talked in lush tones about the deeper things, the finer textures, art.
That first year I was a saint in the library. Nearly every day I sat in my carrel and attempted to write papers in the manner of my new heroes (and Spaulding’s), Wilson, F. R. Leavis, or Lionel Trilling. I remember these papers now as endearingly ludicrous attempts of an eighteen-year-old Baltimore boy to talk about “high culture” and “political reality” and “levels of irony” as though he were some fifty-five-year-old sophisticate who had been to the Finland Station; who had stood in breadlines in the 1930s; who had read every word of Freud, Jung, Marx, when, in fact, I had just barely scratched the surface. Indeed, only a few years earlier my favorite author had been John R. Tunis, author of boy’s sports novels like The Kid from Tomkinsville and World Series. Not that I was completely blind to my pretensions. It occurred to me that I was becoming faintly ludicrous, that I had taken on near foppish airs, and yet, there seemed no other course. After all, I did truly love reading Henry James. The Ambassadors seemed to me an altogether brilliant book, wonderfully alive. I saw my own reflection in the American businessman Strether as he attempted to cultivate his sensibility in Europe. Both he and I were undergoing our real education, the education of our hearts and souls, and when he faltered, made a fool of himself, I ached for him just the same as if it were I myself who had committed the boobish, American faux pas.
Needless to say, with my own spotty education and completely derivative prose style (not to mention that all my “critical judgments” merely aped Spaulding’s own), my papers were at best earnest, lifeless bores. I still remember my first paper for which I received the mighty grade of C –. The grade was so pathetic, given the endless amount of hours I’d put in that I felt physically ill.
That afternoon, screwing up my courage, I went to see Spaulding during his office hours. Lord, what a sullen and uncommunicative sack of a person I was. I felt that I was barely fit to sit at his English pebble-grained feet.
“You see, Mr. Fallon,” he said, as I slumped in my chair, “you have much to learn about using the English language. For one, you use the first person, but in a formal essay, one never does that.”
I looked at him and shook my head.
“Why not, sir?” I said, “I mean, I’m doing the writing …”
“True,” he said, “but it’s a matter of literary convention. By saying ‘one’ you are able to achieve a more felicitous style. As I’ve told you before in matters of literature, style is all.”
“Really?” I asked innocently. “I would think there is more to it than that.”
“Well, of course, there is,” Dr. Spaulding said as he tapped his glasses on his palm. “I was speaking ironically, elliptically. You’ve been taught many bad habits, Tom. You think that by blurting things out directly, by just saying what’s on your mind, you’re being bluntly honest. But what is unsaid, what is left out, what is said cleverly or cloaked in brilliant bursts of language, is where real art lies. That is what separates art from mere confession. Though, of course, there are some misguided souls, the so-called beat writers who think that by spilling their guts, they create a more vibrant art.”
“Yes,” I said quickly, “but I don’t consider them artists at all.”
“Good,” Dr. S. said. “That shows there’s some hope for you.”
“Thanks,” I said, feeling as though bugs were creeping under my skin. “I’ll try and do better, sir. I really will.”
“The thing is, Thomas,” he went on after a considered pause. “You are not without
talent. Occasionally, you are even capable of subtlety.”
These words, so casually stated, sent a shock wave through me, nearly great enough to knock me off the chair.
“But, sir?” I said. “How can you tell? I mean I get lousy grades, and I obviously don’t understand the first thing about art.”
Dr. Spaulding got out of his chair and walked to the tall window that looked out on the southeast side of the campus. Outside, an oak tree’s branches brushed lightly across the glass.
“One has a feeling for these things,” he said with his back turned to me. “There is something in your work—wit, intelligence, a feel for language—that is trying to burst forth from beneath all your crudeness.”
I felt a light sweat break out on my head. Oh, God, I thought, let it be true.
“You need to apply yourself strictly,” Dr. Spaulding said. “You see, what we are all of us hoping for is to perfect a kind of inner vision, what James calls our sensibility. It is that sensibility that is the wellspring of any real, lasting art.”
“And you think I might possess such a sensibility?” I said in a choked Victorian whisper.
“I think you have potential,” Dr. Spaulding said. “But before you let your spirits soar, Thomas, you must understand that as rare as potential is, realized potential is many times rarer. In my many years of teaching I have seen quite a few people with a potential, but sadly only once or twice have I seen such potential result in palpable achievement.”
God, I wanted to say something, something that would convince him, assure him, that I would not be a case of wasted potential (even if I had no idea what palpable meant). I started to speak. I intended to swear to him that I’d do anything necessary, drain the blood out of my veins, if it would help me achieve this rarified sensibility.
Then I farted.
Oh, the shame of it, the pain, and horror. I let rip a long, near pants-tearing fart, which sounded like my old bicycle wheel with my baseball cards stuck in it. The smell was violently sulfuric, like five cartons of ancient rotting eggs left in some weed-filled refrigerator on an abandoned Waverly lot. This was a majestic, jazz-scatting, gaseous, bilious fart.
Tears nearly sprang to my eyes, as the hideous smell engulfed the room. Dr. Spaulding gasped, held his throat, and then, when he was able to speak at all, said: “That will be all, Thomas. You must study harder and try to eat a more balanced diet. Good day.”
Oh, Lord, the humiliation of it. I nodded like a zombie, got stiffly up, walked slowly out of his room, and staggered to the stairwell.
And as I walked down the English Department steps, my face burning with embarrassment, it occurred to me that the Terrible Fart itself was symbolic. Yes, the young literary scholar who saw Freudian signs and symbols in every coffee spoon now saw the Hideous, Horrific Fart as the intrusion of his home life into his perfectly ordered artistic world at Calvert, the world in which he had True Potential. And the source of the Fart Most Foul was home. Yes, home where his mad father and his beaten hysterical mother were locked in their melodramatic death grip.
At that moment, I knew I could no longer wait, even if my leaving somehow meant they would drown together in the great toilet that had become their lives. One had to get out of there, one had to find a retreat, a room of one’s own, to borrow parlance from V. Woolf. One had to escape, race away in the lifeboat of high art. And never look back.
It seemed to me, at the moment I walked down the steps, that it was a very simple thing. I had saved enough money from last summer’s job—working on the old Port Welcome boat, carrying tourists up and down the Chesapeake Bay from Pier 1 to Tolchester. So I could at last move out from the fart-filled bathroom of a home to my own clean, modest place, a place where I could cultivate my sensibility and begin the long, arduous, and serious pilgrimage to find the one and only Holy Grail, my true artistic sensibility.
I squinted at the torn piece of paper in my hand and looked up through the branches of the huge evergreen tree at the tilted, warped house on Chateau Avenue. The number on the paper was 1529; therefore, this battered monstrosity of a house should be the place, but it was impossible to say for sure because there was only one deformed white numeral hanging off the brown shingles on the wide, shady front porch. The number was either a nine or a seven, and if indeed it was a nine, it looked as though wild animals (in this neighborhood, rats probably) had chewed through the loop.
There was an old patched tire for swinging hanging from a branch on a bent oak tree in the front yard, and when I walked farther down the sidewalk, where I could get a better look at the house, I noticed there were two large rolls of clear plastic sitting a few feet from the front door. One of them had become unfastened and had rolled down the rotting steps like a long white tongue.
I shook my head and laughed a little. Though I’d never met the person who owned the house, Jeremy Raines—we had talked only briefly on the telephone—I’d gotten the distinct impression that there was a certain playful, witty quality to his character, and the ramshackle outward appearance of the house did nothing to dispel this notion. The thought of living with such a person was unsettling, and yet, I had to confess that almost against my will I had been somewhat charmed by our brief conversation. Now, as I stood in front of the place, I reminded myself that the greatest writers often began their artistic lives in nothing more than humble rooming houses, and in fact, it was just such a place that might offer me the kind of privacy and solitude that real art required. As I walked up the front steps, I tried to imagine Dr. S.’s reaction to the place. I was sure he’d agree.
I walked to the collapsing screen door and looked inside. There was a long, old-fashioned, and dusty hallway that led out back to what looked like a big, comfortable-looking kitchen. A spiral oak staircase, battered but still somehow elegant, led up to the second floor, where I could hear music playing. The sound was that of a tenor saxophone wailing in some wild arpeggio of pain and desire. I listened for a second and realized I recognized the song, “My Favorite Things” by John Coltrane. In those days I was just beginning to listen to jazz and had only a small appetite for it. Of course, I had never spoken to Dr. Spaulding about my newly found enthusiasm; he was strictly a classical music lover, but I felt that he might possibly find it of artistic worth. As for myself, like everything else I encountered, I didn’t know quite how to feel. Since I had come under Spaulding’s tutelage, I was obsessed with the idea of authenticity. How was one to tell if something was truly artistic or not? After all, I certainly couldn’t depend on my own inner feelings, crude and undeveloped as they were, for in spite of both my father and Spaulding’s ravings I had always loved the Baltimore Colts. Indeed, in 1956 when they lost their last two games and with them the championship of the Western Division, I had been so inflamed that I had nearly kicked in our television set. And though I was not the kind of boy who idolized rock ‘n’ roll performers, I did have a nearly complete collection of Elvis Presley’s records, the early ones anyway. I shuddered to think what my cultural hero, Dr. S., would say if he knew that at one time I had collected the Elvis oeuvre as seriously as some bibliophile might collect Proust. So that left me in a serious quandary. Was the music I was hearing now, so filled with longing and pain, really art or just some unshaped mass of musical glut by some undisciplined, half-talented Negro?
As absurd as such arguments seem now, they were the kinds of absurd thoughts I had even as I stood there on the front porch, deeply moved by Coltrane’s genius. Moved actually so deeply that the very notes he played seemed to probe into my own acute loneliness and desire.
“Hello,” I said unsteadily. “Hello in there …”
There was no answer. Whomever was upstairs probably had their bedroom door closed, so I tried the screen door and found it unlatched. Cautiously, I walked inside and turned right into the big, high-ceilinged living room.
The furniture was old, comfortable, and utterly mismatched. There was a huge red velvet couch, which looked like it had been purchased fr
om a house of ill-repute (that is, it was formerly velvet, the surface had been worn down to a frazzle, and there were weird amoebalike stains all over it), a couple of overstuffed 1940s’ chairs, and an Indian rug of a deep reddish hue, with some strange-looking Vishnu god dancing in a ring of fire. In the corner was a battered end table with a black-and-white television set with a crack that ran diagonally from one corner to the other and an ancient mahogany magazine rack with a copy of Time magazine that had a picture of President Lyndon Johnson looking nobly toward the horizon on the cover. If that wasn’t seedy enough, lying next to the rack were three old balled-up formerly white shirts. They were covered with what looked like mustard, lettuce, ketchup, onions. It was as though some cosmic slob had made a sandwich using the shirts for bread. Yet, they had a curious effect on me; rather than being put off by such sloppiness I began to laugh. There was something liberating about the anarchic mess, though I doubt if my father or Dr. S. would have thought so. Finally, in the corner, was the pièce de résistance of the room, an elaborate old barber chair, with leather headrest, cracked leather armrests, and a great black steel footrest. The last shocked me, made me laugh out loud, a laugh I cut short lest someone overhear me. What kind of people would have such an idiotic-looking piece of furniture in their living room?
I shook my head, trying to imagine how Dr. Spaulding would react to all this. I could hear his words in my mind, “No, Tom, this looks like an extremely disordered universe. Perhaps you had better move on. Not the place for a serious student of literature. Not the place at all.” I was about to turn and leave, when I again remembered Jeremy Raines’s voice on the telephone.
“Tom Fallon?” the crisp voice had said. “Name’s Jeremy Raines. Read your ad on the student union bulletin board. Listen, I have the room you are looking for. Yes, sir, know you’re going to love the place, my boy.”