The Magnificent Ambersons

by Booth Tarkington

  “Oh, I don’t know: I shouldn’t say that. A little youthful teasing—I doubt if she’s minded so much. She felt your father’s death terrifically, of course, but it seems to me she’s had a fairly comfortable life-up to now—if she was disposed to take it that way.”

  “But ‘up to now’ is the important thing,” George said. “Now is now— and you see I can’t wait two years to be admitted to the bar and begin to practice. I’ve got to start in at something else that pays from the start, and that’s what I’ve come to you about. I have an idea, you see.”

  “Well, I’m glad of that!” said old Frank, smiling. “I can’t think of anything just at this minute that pays from the start.”

  “I only know of one thing, myself.”

  “What is it?”

  George flushed again, but managed to laugh at his own embarrassment. “I suppose I’m about as ignorant of business as anybody in the world,” he said. “But I’ve heard they pay very high wages to people in dangerous trades; I’ve always heard they did, and I’m sure it must be true. I mean people that handle touchy chemicals or high explosives— men in dynamite factories, or who take things of that sort about the country in wagons, and shoot oil wells. I thought I’d see if you couldn’t tell me something more about it, or else introduce me to someone who could, and then I thought I’d see if I couldn’t get something of the kind to do as soon as possible. My nerves are good; I’m muscular, and I’ve got a steady hand; it seemed to me that this was about the only line of work in the world that I’m fitted for. I wanted to get started to-day if I could.”

  Old Frank gave him a long stare. At first this scrutiny was sharply incredulous; then it was grave; finally it developed into a threat of overwhelming laughter; a forked vein in his forehead became more visible and his eyes seemed about to protrude.

  But he controlled his impulse; and, rising, took up his hat and overcoat. “All right,” he said. “If you’ll promise not to get blown up, I’ll go with you to see if we can find the job.” Then, meaning what he said, but amazed that he did mean it, he added: “You certainly are the most practical young man I ever met!”

  Chapter XXXIII

  They found the job. It needed an apprenticeship of only six weeks, during which period George was to receive fifteen dollars a week; after that he would get twenty-eight. This settled the apartment question, and Fanny was presently established in a greater contentment than she had known for a long time. Early every morning she made something she called (and believed to be) coffee for George, and he was gallant enough not to undeceive her. She lunched alone in her “kitchenette,” for George’s place of employment was ten miles out of town on an interurban trolley-line, and he seldom returned before seven. Fanny found partners for bridge by two o’clock almost every afternoon, and she played until about six. Then she got George’s “dinner clothes” out for him—he maintained this habit—and she changed her own dress. When he arrived he usually denied that he was tired, though he sometimes looked tired, particularly during the first few months; and he explained to her frequently—looking bored enough with her insistence—that his work was “fairly light, and fairly congenial, too.” Fanny had the foggiest idea of what it was, though she noticed that it roughened his hands and stained them. “Something in those new chemical works,” she explained to casual inquirers. It was not more definite in her own mind.

  Respect for George undoubtedly increased within her, however, and she told him she’d always had a feeling he might “turn out to be a mechanical genius, or something.” George assented with a nod, as the easiest course open to him. He did not take a hand at bridge after dinner: his provisions’ for Fanny’s happiness refused to extend that far, and at the table d’hote he was a rather discouraging boarder. He was considered “affected” and absurdly “up-stage” by the one or two young men, and the three or four young women, who enlivened the elderly retreat; and was possibly less popular there than he had been elsewhere during his life, though he was now nothing worse than a coldly polite young man who kept to himself. After dinner he would escort his aunt from the table in some state (not wholly unaccompanied by a leerish wink or two from the wags of the place) and he would leave her at the door of the communal parlours and card rooms, with a formality in his bow of farewell which afforded an amusing contrast to Fanny’s always voluble protests. (She never failed to urge loudly that he really must come and play, just this once, and not go hiding from everybody in his room every evening like this!) At least some of the other inhabitants found the contrast amusing, for sometimes, as he departed stiffly toward the elevator, leaving her still entreating in the doorway (though with one eye already on her table, to see that it was not seized) a titter would follow him which he was no doubt meant to hear. He did not care whether they laughed or not.

  And once, as he passed the one or two young men of the place entertaining the three or four young women, who were elbowing and jerking on a settee in the lobby, he heard a voice inquiring quickly, as he passed:

  “What makes people tired?”

  “Work?”

  “No.”

  “Well, what’s the answer?”

  Then, with an intentional outbreak of mirth, the answer was given by two loudly whispering voices together:

  “A stuck-up boarder!”

  George didn’t care.

  On Sunday mornings Fanny went to church and George took long walks. He explored the new city, and found it hideous, especially in the early spring, before the leaves of the shade trees were out. Then the town was fagged with the long winter and blacked with the heavier smoke that had been held close to the earth by the smoke-fog it bred. Every-thing was damply streaked with the soot: the walls of the houses, inside and out, the gray curtains at the windows, the windows themselves, the dirty cement and unswept asphalt underfoot, the very sky overhead. Throughout this murky season he continued his explorations, never seeing a face he knew—for, on Sunday, those whom he remembered, or who might remember him, were not apt to be found within the limits of the town, but were congenially occupied with the new outdoor life which had come to be the mode since his boyhood. He and Fanny were pretty thoroughly buried away within the bigness of the city.

  One of his Sunday walks, that spring, he made into a sour pilgrimage. It was a misty morning of belated snow slush, and suited him to a perfection of miserableness, as he stood before the great dripping department store which now occupied the big plot of ground where once had stood both the Amberson Hotel and the Amberson Opera House. From there he drifted to the old “Amberson Block,” but this was fallen into a back-water; business had stagnated here. The old structure had not been replaced, but a cavernous entryway for trucks had been torn in its front, and upon the cornice, where the old separate metal letters had spelt “Amberson Block,” there was a long billboard sign: “Doogan Storage.”

  To spare himself nothing, he went out National Avenue and saw the piles of slush-covered wreckage where the Mansion and his mother’s house had been, and where the Major’s ill-fated five “new” houses had stood; for these were down, too, to make room for the great tenement already shaped in unending lines of foundation. But the Fountain of Neptune was gone at last—and George was glad that it was!

  He turned away from the devastated site, thinking bitterly that the only Amberson mark still left upon the town was the name of the boulevard—Amberson Boulevard. But he had reckoned without the city council of the new order, and by an unpleasant coincidence, while the thought was still in his mind, his eye fell upon a metal oblong sign upon the lamppost at the corner. There were two of these little signs upon the lamp-post, at an obtuse angle to each other, one to give passers-by the name of National Avenue, the other to acquaint them with Amberson Boulevard. But the one upon which should have been stenciled “Amberson Boulevard” exhibited the words “Tenth Street.”

  George stared at it hard. Then he walked quickly along the boulevard to the next corner and looked at the little sign there. “Tenth Street.”


  It had begun to rain, but George stood unheeding, staring at the little sign. “Damn them!” he said finally, and, turning up his coat- collar, plodded back through the soggy streets toward “home.”

  The utilitarian impudence of the city authorities put a thought into his mind. A week earlier he had happened to stroll into the large parlour of the apartment house, finding it empty, and on the center table he noticed a large, red-bound, gilt-edged book, newly printed, bearing the title: “A Civic History,” and beneath the title, the rubric, “Biographies of the 500 Most Prominent Citizens and Families in the History of the City.” He had glanced at it absently, merely noticing the title and sub-title, and wandered out of the room, thinking of other things and feeling no curiosity about the book. But he had thought of it several times since with a faint, vague uneasiness; and now when he entered the lobby he walked directly into the parlour where he had seen the book. The room was empty, as it always was on Sunday mornings, and the flamboyant volume was still upon the table—evidently a fixture as a sort of local Almanach de Gotha, or Burke, for the enlightenment of tenants and boarders.

  He opened it, finding a few painful steel engravings of placid, chin- bearded faces, some of which he remembered dimly; but much more numerous, and also more unfamiliar to him, were the pictures of neat, aggressive men, with clipped short hair and clipped short moustaches— almost all of them strangers to him. He delayed not long with these, but turned to the index where the names of the five hundred Most Prominent Citizens and Families in the History of the City were arranged in alphabetical order, and ran his finger down the column of A’s:

  Abbett Abbott Abrams Adam Adams Adler Akers Albertsmeyer Alexander Allen Ambrose Ambuhl Anderson Andrews Appenbasch Archer Arszman Ashcraft Austin Avey

  George’s eyes remained for some time fixed on the thin space between the names “Allen” and “Ambrose.” Then he closed the book quietly, and went up to his own room, agreeing with the elevator boy, on the way, that it was getting to be a mighty nasty wet and windy day outside.

  The elevator boy noticed nothing unusual about him and neither did Fanny, when she came in from church with her hat ruined, an hour later. And yet something had happened—a thing which, years ago, had been the eagerest hope of many, many good citizens of the town. They had thought of it, longed for it, hoping acutely that they might live to see the day when it would come to pass. And now it had happened at last: Georgie Minafer had got his come-upance.

  He had got it three times filled and running over. The city had rolled over his heart, burying it under, as it rolled over the Major’s and buried it under. The city had rolled over the Ambersons and buried them under to the last vestige; and it mattered little that George guessed easily enough that most of the five hundred Most Prominent had paid something substantial “to defray the cost of steel engraving, etc.”—the Five Hundred had heaved the final shovelful of soot upon that heap of obscurity wherein the Ambersons were lost forever from sight and history. “Quicksilver in a nest of cracks!”

  Georgie Minafer had got his come-upance, but the people who had so longed for it were not there to see it, and they never knew it. Those who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him.

  Chapter XXXIV

  * * *

  There was one border section of the city which George never explored in his Sunday morning excursions. This was far out to the north where lay the new Elysian Fields of the millionaires, though he once went as far in that direction as the white house which Lucy had so admired long ago—her “Beautiful House.” George looked at it briefly and turned back, rumbling with an interior laugh of some grimness. The house was white no longer; nothing could be white which the town had reached, and the town reached far beyond the beautiful white house now. The owners had given up and painted it a despairing chocolate, suitable to the freight-yard life it was called upon to endure.

  George did not again risk going even so far as that, in the direction of the millionaires, although their settlement began at least two miles farther out. His thought of Lucy and her father was more a sensation than a thought, and may be compared to that of a convicted cashier beset by recollections of the bank he had pillaged—there are some thoughts to which one closes the mind. George had seen Eugene only once since their calamitous encounter. They had passed on opposite sides of the street, downtown; each had been aware of the other, and each had been aware that the other was aware of him, and yet each kept his eyes straight forward, and neither had shown a perceptible alteration of countenance. It seemed to George that he felt emanating from the outwardly imperturbable person of his mother’s old friend a hate that was like a hot wind.

  At his mother’s funeral and at the Major’s he had been conscious that Eugene was there: though he had afterward no recollection of seeing him, and, while certain of his presence, was uncertain how he knew of it. Fanny had not told him, for she understood George well enough not to speak to him of Eugene or Lucy. Nowadays Fanny almost never saw either of them and seldom thought of them—so sly is the way of time with life. She was passing middle age, when old intensities and longings grow thin and flatten out, as Fanny herself was thinning and flattening out; and she was settling down contentedly to her apartment house intimacies. She was precisely suited by the table-d’hote life, with its bridge, its variable alliances and shifting feuds, and the long whisperings of elderly ladies at corridor corners—those eager but suppressed conversations, all sibilance, of which the elevator boy declared he heard the words “she said” a million times and the word “she,” five million. The apartment house suited Fanny and swallowed her.

  The city was so big, now, that people disappeared into it unnoticed, and the disappearance of Fanny and her nephew was not exceptional. People no longer knew their neighbours as a matter of course; one lived for years next door to strangers—that sharpest of all the changes since the old days—and a friend would lose sight of a friend for a year, and not know it.

  One May day George thought he had a glimpse of Lucy. He was not certain, but he was sufficiently disturbed, in spite of his uncertainty. A promotion in his work now frequently took him out of town for a week, or longer, and it was upon his return from one of these absences that he had the strange experience. He had walked home from the station, and as he turned the corner which brought him in sight of the apartment house entrance, though two blocks distant from it, he saw a charming little figure come out, get into a shiny landaulet automobile, and drive away. Even at that distance no one could have any doubt that the little figure was charming; and the height, the quickness and decision of motion, even the swift gesture of a white glove toward the chauffeur—all were characteristic of Lucy. George was instantly subjected to a shock of indefinable nature, yet definitely a shock: he did not know what he felt—but he knew that he felt. Heat surged over him: probably he would not have come face to face with her if the restoration of all the ancient Amberson magnificence could have been his reward. He went on slowly, his knees shaky.

  But he found Fanny not at home; she had been out all afternoon; and there was no record of any caller—and he began to wonder, then to doubt if the small lady he had seen in the distance was Lucy. It might as well have been, he said to himself—since any one who looked like her could give him “a jolt like that!”

  Lucy had not left a card. She never left one when she called on Fanny; though she did not give her reasons a quite definite form in her own mind. She came seldom; this was but the third time that year, and, when she did come, George was not mentioned either by her hostess or by herself—an oddity contrived between the two ladies without either of them realizing how odd it was. For, naturally, while Fanny was with Lucy, Fanny thought of George, and what time Lucy had George’s aunt before her eyes she could not well avoid the thought of him. Consequently, both looked absent-minded as they talked, and each often gave a wrong answer which the other consistently failed to notice.

  At other times Lucy’s thoughts of George w
ere anything but continuous, and weeks went by when he was not consciously in her mind at all. Her life was a busy one: she had the big house “to keep up”; she had a garden to keep up, too, a large and beautiful garden; she represented her father as a director for half a dozen public charity organizations, and did private charity work of her own, being a proxy mother of several large families; and she had “danced down,” as she said, groups from eight or nine classes of new graduates returned from the universities, without marrying any of them, but she still danced— and still did not marry.

  Her father, observing this circumstance happily, yet with some hypocritical concern, spoke of it to her one day as they stood in her garden. “I suppose I’d want to shoot him,” he said, with attempted lightness. “But I mustn’t be an old pig. I’d build you a beautiful house close by—just over yonder.”

  “No, no! That would be like—” she began impulsively; then checked herself. George Amberson’s comparison of the Georgian house to the Amberson Mansion had come into her mind, and she thought that another new house, built close by for her, would be like the house the Major built for Isabel.

  “Like what?”

  “Nothing.” She looked serious, and when he reverted to his idea of “some day” grudgingly surrendering her up to a suitor, she invented a legend. “Did you ever hear the Indian name for that little grove of beech trees on the other side of the house?” she asked him.

  “No—and you never did either!” he laughed.

  “Don’t be so sure! I read a great deal more than I used to—getting ready for my bookish days when I’ll have to do something solid in the evenings and won’t be asked to dance any more, even by the very youngest boys who think it’s a sporting event to dance with the oldest of the ‘older girls’. The name of the grove was ‘Loma-Nashah’ and it means ‘They-Couldn’t-Help-It’.”