The Town and the City: A Novel

by Jack Kerouac

  And whether his family knew it or not, he was now about to set himself free.

  “There’s what was so exciting tonight walking home,” he agreed happily, “just the idea of freedom, of finally making a decisive step. A simple little job in Boston, maybe something much better later, and just leaving this town and this house and going off as myself—as old F. Martin himself—that’s a thought of freedom. It upset me wonderfully.” He sat up on the edge of the bed. “No more my father presiding at the supper table, with that provincial wedding picture of him and my mother hanging on the wall like a Damascus sword, like something out of Julian Green’s novels, a grim reminder for all the kiddies of their respective fates.”

  (Sudden silence as the wind ceased, and a shush, a hush, the squeak of a mouse …)

  Suddenly he felt terribly lonely. He lay on the bed and turned over on his side again. He heard the sound of car wheels crunching over the snow in the driveway below, and voices. It was his parents and Ruth and Rosey coming back from the party at the Cartier’s. He went to the window to look down solemnly at them from his dark perch.

  “A brilliant evening was had by all,” he whispered sardonically.

  (Downstairs the scattering of little feet in the bedrooms, and snickering shushes, as little forms burrowed under blankets and smothered with glee and waited all breathless and mad.)

  Francis sprawled back on the couch, and suddenly, a moment later, he was fast asleep with all his clothes on. He dreamed in the darkness of corridors alive with human forms, and suddenly again there were sounds outside. Francis raised his head and blinked at the gray light in the window. It struck him strange that he had been asleep for hours. He listened intently to the shouts and singing out on the road. He recognized Peter’s loud voice in the midst of all the others. He got up and went stealthily across the attic to the front gable of the house and looked down on the road. He saw Berlot’s car parked in front of the house, and Scotcho sitting disconsolately on the runningboard as though sick, and Berlot and Danny supporting Peter between them and walking him around and around in the snow, meanwhile keeping up their loud chorus of shouting and singing. The dawn wind swirled snow sweeping around them.

  Francis hated scenes and dreaded one even now in his sleepiness. He hurried back to his room and put on his coat and tiptoed downstairs. He closed the front door quietly behind him and walked across the snow to the car.

  “What’s the matter with my brother?” he asked sleepily.

  “Is he plastered!” yelled Berlot in the frosty stillness. “Huck huck huck! You know what he did a minute ago? He said, ‘Gentlemen, if you will be so kind as to allow me to beg your indulgence, I should like at this moment to give myself over to the lower … no, the baser instincts.’ How did he say it? ‘Allow me, gentlemen!’ Something like that! And he stuck his head out the window and … urp! Huck huck huck! That’s Zagg, that’s Zagg for you—!”

  “Geezus, boys,” Peter was moaning pitcously, “geezus, boys, geezus, boys—I don’t want my mother to see me, I’m shot, I’m shot …”

  “That’s all right, Zaggo!” sang out Danny, dragging Peter around once more and tousling his hair violently. “A little fresh air will revive you. Pull yourself together!” he shouted, slapping him several times on the face lightly, turning away to laugh savagely at the absurd comic drama of the situation. “Bring yourself to your senses, man!” he cried with a stupefied stare of bulging eyes.

  “Your brother Francis’ll get you safe in bed,” Berlot reassured Peter as he led him to the porch. “Damn old Zaggo, are you tanked!”

  Peter slipped and fell and sprawled over in the snow.

  “Awake the dawn!” yelled Danny now as he picked up a handful of snow and fluttered it down upon the sleepy disconsolate Scotcho, who did not even look up. “Ye gods, gentlemen, am I the only clear-headed man in this crisis? Must I bear the brunt of the catastrophic times? Hah? Our ship of state is foundering! The helm is spinning on its widget! Hey, Francis, what do you call the thing the helm spins on in all them big stories? Oh,” he howled, suddenly running down the road with his arms outspread, “the dawn cometh and spreadeth rosy-fingered Alexanders everywhere … everywhere!”

  “The Mouse is a big poet this morning,” said Berlot admiringly. “We been to every joint between here and Boston.…”

  Francis took Peter under the arm and helped him up the porch steps, whereupon, amid effusive farewells and singing and declamations, the gang got back in the car and roared off down the road.

  Francis led Peter stumblingly into the house—just as the grayness was spreading over the sky and the first winter birds were chirping in the high snowy hedges. He led him up the stairs slipping and falling to his knees and growling and creating sudden loud commotions against furniture. After interminable fumblings, he had him safely in the bedroom that Peter shared with Joe. Beneath a dumpy patchwork quilt that the mother had made with her own hands Joe lay snoring peacefully. Peter threw off his clothes helter-skelter all over the room and miserably crawled into bed. Joe turned over snorting on his side, and in a moment they were both deep in sleep.

  Francis stepped out in the hall and paused for a moment in the gray darkness. All around him, in all the bedrooms, there was the slow rhythmic deep breathing of the entire family asleep, like one single and mysterious slumber, the strange hush of silence that prevails in a sleeping house in the dawn hours, the moody human presence of silence and soft repose incomprehensible between the waking furiousness. He rubbed his eyes sleepily and leaned back against the wall, as though suddenly he had forgotten where he was and what he was doing. He was wrapped in a mood of uncomprehending lethargy, scarcely awake, and yet aware of a certain breathless suspenseful gloating in him as he lingered there in the dark hall, listening and looking around with a kind of wondering and crazy lonesomeness. The old worn carpet of the hall, the chest in the corner, the familiar doors leading to the bedrooms, all dim in the gray light, and the warm odors of drowsy sheets and pillows, the gentle breathing, and the silence—all of it brooded around him in profoundest absorption. He took a step forward and gloated in the loud creaking noise it made.

  “What am I doing here?” he suddenly thought. “Who am I?”

  Mechanically he opened the attic door and walked slowly up the narrow staircase. In his room he looked vaguely around as though he had never seen the room before, not this room, and he stared out the window at the gray snowy dawn, walked around for a moment, stopped before the mirror.

  “Francis Martin, Francis Martin, Francis Martin,” he kept thinking, and he ran his hand through his hair and gaped at himself in the mirror. A moment later he was back on the couch and fast asleep again.

  (And the little ones were sleeping too.)

  [12]

  George Martin was on the verge of losing his business. When he saw that bankruptcy was a distinct possibility, he suddenly didn’t want to do anything about it and stood back, watching with mingled horror and delight.

  At fifty he was experiencing that second restlessness of manhood which is just as intense as the first restlessness of youth, just as wild, and open to springtime lurings, and subject to lonely futile whims, as that first urge to burst out of the shell of sameness and loneliness which men always know, but never conquer in peace and patience as women somehow do in time. He suddenly wanted to see what it was like to consider losing his business, to consider ruin and humiliation and the somehow thrilling exile of it all, just to see “what would happen.”

  When it became evident to some people that he was hopelessly behind in debt and in payments for the mortgage on his expensive printing machinery, which he had slowly been paying up over the years, and that he was losing ground rapidly in volume of business due to neglect and much time spent gambling, he cried: “Ah, I don’t care what happens! Anyway don’t get all excited, nothing’ll come of it, I can build this business up again just like I built it up out of nothing twenty years ago. What kind of a fool do you think I am!”


  They told him that if he continued to spend all his time playing the horses and gambling and neglecting his business he certainly would not be able to build it up again.

  “And suppose the thing did fall down the hole!” cried Martin heatedly now. “I’m sick and tired of this place and everything in it. Do you realize that I’ve been working my head off in here for twenty years and I never hit higher than six thousand—and that was a big year! And what have I got to show for it? Sure, sure, I didn’t save my money like some people do, but I worked damn hard.”

  “Well, you’ve always made a good living,” they said.

  “A good living!” snorted Martin. “I’m just disgusted with the whole thing, I’ve had my fill of it! By God, I wish I were free to pack up and leave the whole shebang, go off and follow the ponies or something, that’s what I wish!”

  “But you’ve got a wife and kids,” they grinned. “That you can’t do.”

  “I know some people who would, but not me, not me!” cried Martin sadly. “I’ll just have to stick it out and drum up new business, that’s all—just stick it out as usual.”

  But he wished he could leap right out of his life as George Martin. The wildness and desperation of a moody middle-aged despair was clutching at his brain and making him dizzy with terror and suspense, he felt like a little boy hanging by his arms from a high tree just to see what it would be like to “risk everything.” He felt a tremendous desire to become even more sorrowful and lonely than he had ever been, he knew that this was goading him on more than anything else and it was a terrifying unspeakable thing.

  Even when a man he knew as a mortgage speculator came sniffing around the shop under some flimsy pretense, he continued to talk about chucking up the whole works with a savage and irrepressible glee.

  The loyal young Edmund warned him: “Didn’t Jimmy Bannon put you wise to that guy that was snooping around this morning? You shouldn’t have talked to him about those things!”

  “I know, I know,” said Martin sadly, “and I also know who sent him here, you know the bunch.” And he suddenly laughed savagely—because it delighted him to think that while toying with the idea of giving up his business and walking off free of its cares and burdens, he could also toy with the bated greedy emotions of a small clique of men who were anxious to snatch the ground from under him, for purposes of personal profit and also of spite. He knew them all and he didn’t like any of them. He knew the shady dealings some of them had pulled in the past, but they would not get the satisfaction of spite from his side. All this made him giddy.

  But a moment later he couldn’t understand the overpowering folly that was coming over him, he looked at Edmund working silently at the press and realized that he was also toying with his hard-working loyalty, he thought of his unsuspecting wife and the family, he thought of what his favorite little Mickey would think of him, he thought of everything that had gone into his business, his youth and the talent and diligence of a whole lifetime. He thought of the big Fridays when he had some of the children like Ruth and Lizzy and Charley and Mickey come up to help fold the weekly papers, and the “picnics” they had in the shop, and he even began to look around the place and think about each object and the scenes of the mysterious past which they occasioned in his memory. He felt strange.

  He realized how funny it would seem to get up in the morning and not drive down and park the car by the canal and the railroad tracks, have breakfast in Al’s lunchcart, and then come in the shop to his cluttered desk and his galleries of type, and say good morning to Edmund and old John, and then watch Jimmy Bannon come in at eleven all weaving, twitch-drunken and tortured, and then to work there all four of them in grinning joy. He thought of his little shop with a thick weeping feeling of consolation, he nodded his head saying, “Ah, yes, ah, yes, by golly!”—and he was logically and firmly convinced that his whole life’s work was right here in the familiar dumpy little warehouse floor by the canal. Yet he was making up his mind to chuck up the whole thing even as he was walking around the plant looking at it. Even as he was smiling at the sight of a new steel filing cabinet which he had bought only three months before, his smile suddenly turned inward, and he thought of “what it would be like” in an immediate dark future of proud bitter sorrow.

  Somehow that was what he wanted—that sorrow, that freedom to be haughty with failure and loneliness. Somehow he felt he would find out things that he had never known before this way. At fifty that was what he wanted, his new self engaged in strange new things. He exulted in these crazy thoughts even as he was firmly convinced that it was all mad. He thought favorably about all the joy and confidence and struggle that he had brought to it, through hard times and easier times, he thought of these heartening aspects of his business—and then he simply decided he was sick and tired of joy and confidence somehow, he wished to feel bitterness and rage again, and dark loneliness again, as in his youth.

  “You damn fool,” he thought scornfully, “you want to be young again and go around enjoying your misery? Is that all?” And he laughed at himself sarcastically.

  Ten times a day he thought of a new aspect of his desire to quit, and each time it was crazier than the other, and he knew that he just wanted to quit, that was all.

  “By God, I just don’t want to be bothered any more!” he suddenly cried out loud in the shop, but neither Edmund nor old John heard him in the noise of the machinery.

  “Now I know, now I know,” Martin kept thinking in disgust. “All the dirty business in the world and it’s me, too! I’m no better than the others and I never was. The same crazy stubborn streak that makes people do such awful things—and there I was telling myself I couldn’t figure out all the killing and the wars and the robbing and the cheap chiseling. What a laugh! I’m just as bad as the rest.”

  “And why should I stick it out?” he thought in swelling anger. “I don’t have to! By golly, I’ve made up my mind, bad streak or no bad streak, that’s what I’m going to do and God can hate me all he wants.”

  Now the moody urge towards unhappiness and the bitterness and rage which it would sanction was begun. What a powerful, stubborn, magnificent stupidness Martin felt as he thought of opening his hands in dramatic stiffness and letting his business go crashing down! What a thrill it gave him to surprise himself and do the unexpected thing, the thing that would brand him a fool and stand him humiliated! To feel that he could experiment with his own life’s blood and undergo that dark thrill of promising himself some good and mysterious effort later on in the strange humiliated future!

  The moment his wife learned about the situation and they talked about what to do, he deeply realized that he had been indulging himself in whims and fancies like a schoolboy. He saw clearly that there was no other course but to rescue his affairs as best as he could and go on with his business as before. In her presence, life became as simple as bread and drink, as profound as night and day, and all the wild moods and whims that he had a day before now appeared as mere unnecessary morbidities in the sunlight of the earth, her earth.

  “No, no, you can’t do that, George,” she protested firmly, quietly, with grave sorrowful tears, “it just wouldn’t do.”

  “Don’t you think I know that, Marge?” he cried, anguished. “But, good God, I’m so tired, so tired of the whole thing, I just can’t stand any more of it!”

  “It’s your nerves,” she said quietly, “that’s all that’s wrong with you. All you need is a rest. Then you’d realize that you mustn’t do this. George, you don’t want to finish your days working for somebody else and not being certain of anything. You can’t be sure of what can happen later on, in case you get sick or something—and after all the work you put into it, George!”

  “I know, I know, I think of the children too!” he cried. “You’re absolutely right. I agree with you a hundred per cent. But if you only knew, if you only knew!”

  “I know, I know,” she said slowly, “you’re nervous and you’re lonesome and maybe you’re having
your own kind of change of life. Don’t laugh, that isn’t so crazy as it sounds, George!” she protested sadly.

  “Ah, Marge,” he chuckled, coming over and kissing her, “you have the damnedest ideas sometimes—but I give you credit for one thing, though you may say some pretty silly things sometimes, I give you credit for having more brains than I have, in the end.” He looked at her with delight, and then turned away again brooding and fidgeting and full of chagrin.

  “It’s your nerves, George, you need a rest!” she stated firmly. “I’m as sure of that as I can be sure of anything. What you need is a good long rest and time to think—and maybe you shouldn’t even think at all, just rest.”

  “Yeah, relax, relax! like old Joe Cartier tells me to do!” he cried bitterly. “Well, I just can’t, that’s all! I don’t know what’s the matter with me but I just can’t take things as they come. You’re all perfectly right, I am crazy! Sometimes I wonder how you ever did stand me!”

  “Oh, you’re no bargain, all right—”

  “So I’m not such a bargain, hey?” He grinned foolishly. “Well, by golly, for once I agree with you. I’m not! This time I almost proved it.” He hugged his wife and looked at her sadly. “Look, Marge, go put on your best bonnet and let’s get the car and go out some place, huh?”

  So he remembered her then as the pretty French girl at the picnic grounds long ago, with her yearning, quiet, courageous little look, the great friend and companion of his life. The thought of how he had almost forgotten her and everything she meant to him in a foolish reverie so far from the core of his real life’s desire, was enough to shrivel up his heart in shame.

  She went and put on her “best bonnet” all flushed with the delight of the occasion, and the kids were amazed to see Ma and Pa starting out of the house together arm in arm, all dressed up and going no place in particular, just for a “few glasses of beer” and to talk and be together, no movies or parties or anything like that, just going out by themselves to be together. And Martin that night was like a man who realizes, in the presence of a woman, that the earth is not mad—it smiles.