The Town and the City: A Novel

by Jack Kerouac

  Big Rosey had begun to leave home also, attending a nurse’s school in a nearby Massachusetts town and coming home only when she had the time. Thus the mother was in solitary charge of household duties, but since the numbers in the household itself were depleted by one half, the work was not so strenuous as before.

  The kids, Charley and Mickey, went to school and lived their self-absorbed children’s lives. They came home at dusk out of the shadows of noisy scuffling and shouting and joy, they came home with flushed cheeks, ate prodigiously, slept greedily, and went to school in the mornings swinging strapped books and arguing loudly.

  A few times Mickey had picked up his glove and bat and started back to his old neighborhood on Galloway Road, where the gray turreted house still stood—empty and window-gaping on its hill now. He had started back there to go and play with his gang, but they didn’t seem to care whether he was around any more, new groups had formed, new conspiracies were in the furious air, and Mickey was the stranger, the lonesome unknown returning. How many times he had started back towards his new home in the tenement, stopping to look back at the old house longingly, with a strange feeling gnawing at him, as the long sun-slanting light glowed in that world all a-murmur with his departure, as the chimneys smoked, the children shouted and leaped, and none of it was his or for him.

  And Francis, now, when he came home on a weekend from Harvard the first time, suddenly saw with some misgivings how far down his family had had to go in order to maintain themselves and live. It seemed to him that the tenement flat was a scene of spiritual deprivation, and even horror. He had now grown used to sedate brownstone Cambridge and to a more cosmopolitan scene and existence. To see his own family living in what might well have been called the slums, though not on the order of the Rooney Street slums in Galloway, was a fact that served to remind him how very close he might have come to such a life himself. Fortunately, of course, that year marked the first completely independent circumstances of his young life: he had his scholarship, his job in the music store, and modest savings to tide him over. He saw that he was “lucky.”

  He looked silently into all the rooms. The bedrooms were all doubled up with two beds, clothes and belongings were hung and piled indiscriminately behind doors or in flimsy cardboard closet stands, in bureaus and boxes, all in confusion, and what furniture his mother had not sold to finance the moving bill was closely distributed everywhere so that there wasn’t much room to move about in—a family being always reluctant to part with too many of its belongings. But a lot of things were missing: the sewing machine, some living-room furniture and commodes, desks, the piano, old things that had had some charm.

  Then there were the musty hallways smelling of cooking, four flights up from the street-front with its drugstore and barber shop and lunch diner, and the suspended porches leaning into space by telephone wires, and the noises of the street. And there was no attic here where he might have sought out his solitary habits.

  “My father’s downfall, as you might call it,” he wrote in a letter to Wilfred Engels that night, “has certainly wreaked havoc with what little charm there was in my family’s surroundings. It’s quite sad and sometimes I wish I had money, I could help them. This year I feel for the first time a definite surge in myself towards some real energy. That remark in Goethe’s notebooks about the horses, the chariot, and the control over the reins, where he cries: ‘That’s mastery!’—this I might yet feel and with conscious materialization. It’s all connected with my plans for the winter, which are taking shape. There’s a man at Harvard—Wilson, you might have heard of him—who wants me to help him on research for an anthology of German Impressionistic poetry in the Twenties, some fine things there. All for pay under the N.Y.A. setup. Also, some of us are thinking of a little review, and I might be in line for an editorship. However, meanwhile I have a few odds and ends to clear up. Picking up the last of my things at home—(including the silver cord?)—and I suppose none of us will be the worse for it. I can’t rouse any feelings of a definitely filial type, only the most humane and objective. Nothing gained is nothing lost, though. I feel rather strange as I write this at my brother Joe’s desk all cluttered with dime magazines and sparkplugs and tools: I feel that something is over and done with. A little sentiment creeps in. I’m staying over tonight, and tomorrow: the lash, the horses, the mastery?—and off!”

  He retired early, sleeping in Mickey’s bed, his mother piling an extra blanket on him and his father coming around anxiously to the bedroom to say goodnight. All night long his parents had gone to great pains reminding him that he was more welcome than ever in this house, although they seemed to know, as he knew, that it was somehow all over, almost as though he did not seem like their son any more.

  “There’s nothing here for you that can compare with the old place, or with the places where you live in Boston, but just the same, if you ever need to come back and live at home, for any reason—well—” and the father trailed his words helplessly.

  “Sure, Pa,” replied Francis simply.

  “We don’t want you to go and think that there’s no room here, because there is! With Lizzy gone and Rosey and Pete too most of the time, why, we could always manage. And you know under the circumstances this was the best we could do—”

  “Well, naturally—”

  “—and humble as it is, as they say, well, it’s your home and it’s yours as well as ours. So if things were ever to take a turn with you, and, God knows, I’m not wishing you anything like that, well, you can always come home.”

  “There’s always room for one more!” cried the mother, laughing. “If you want a corner to do your reading in, we can find it!”

  “Like in the old days, Francis,” said the old man, grinning—“always room for one more, so we had the whole bunch of you, one after the other.—Ha, ha, ha! Look at the expression on his face, Marge!—What’s the matter, Francie? Think your old man went too far?”

  “Oh, no, no, no—”

  “Well, anyway, now we’re doing the best we can, all of us,” Martin added gravely, “and I guess that’s about the story right there.”

  Francis was strangely flushing: he was tucked in bed, his mother was covering his feet with another blanket, and both his parents were hovering solicitously, worriedly over him as he lay there flat on his back in the bed. He suddenly realized that he could not remember anything like this in a long time. And it seemed like an awkward, terribly embarrassing and even horrifying situation from which he had no means whatever of escape, there was nothing for him to do but lay there and look up at them. He felt naked with helplessness.

  “Well,” he said with an effort towards finality, “I hope—I sure wish I could—well, yes, if anything like that comes up I’ll certainly come home. It will be the sensible thing to do—”

  “You’ll come home for Thanksgiving?” his mother asked.

  “Well—no. I have to go someplace then, but Christmas, yes.”

  “Yes, yes; come home for Christmas,” said George Martin with a drawn expression. “Give us a chance to do a little for you, if you understand that. Your father feels pretty low about all this, boy.”

  Francis nodded and swallowed: he was just then incredibly embarrassed by his father’s sudden feeling.

  “But it was the work of some power higher than us, so we shouldn’t really complain.”

  “It’s comfortable here,” said Francis.

  “Oh, yes, we’ll make out, don’t worry. It’s just that we don’t want you to think this is not your home too—Well, what the hell, you know?”

  “Surely.”

  When his parents had bid him goodnight and left the room, Francis turned over quickly in the bed, quickly and with furtive sudden joy, and stared at the wall. He felt terrible somehow, yet relieved now, remembering what he had said in the letter to Engels about flying away in the morning, and remembering his room at Harvard and the things in it, and what he would do tomorrow when he got there. He stayed awake and stared wide-
eyed at the wall for a long time, and suddenly it began to occur to him that his eye was fixed all this time upon a little picture that Mickey had tacked on the wall by his bed, a little paper with a drawing that he had done on it with crayon, depicting a forest with a river and a little boat with someone in it. It was a pathetic little picture and Francis began looking at it, inadvertently snuffing a little, as though amused, although he could not imagine why, and then he tried to go to sleep.…

  The afternoon of that same night Mickey had gone straight from school to Joe’s gas station to watch Joe and Charley at work on the cars. But one thing had led to another and long after suppertime his two big brothers were still tinkering around, grease-smudged and absorbed, and Mickey was getting very hungry and tired and impatient.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Joe kept saying to him, “we’ll be going home in just a minute. Go play in back of the station—and hand me that wrench there,” he added musingly.

  And Mickey went behind the station and passed the time away throwing empty oil cans around and lighting small fires to burn the leaves. It got darker and colder and he was hungry and wanted to go home. The great harsh ragged skies of October were everywhere around with their huge tumultuous clouds and their premonitions of awful darkness, and the winds began to blow all demented with blown leaves and dust and dark fury, and Mickey, dressed only in his light school clothes, began to shiver, and feel gnawings of hunger in his stomach, and pangs of vague fear—as though again the world were closing in on him and suffering him to great terror. And more than that, the fact that he still had his schoolbooks with him and his school clothes made him feel foolish with his two brothers in their dirty coveralls, and with nothing to do while they absorbedly fixed cars and paid no attention to him.

  “When are we going home, Joe? I’m hungry! I’m cold!”

  “Here’s a dime, Shorty. Go get a sandwich in the diner across the street and warm your fanny in there. We gotta finish this job tonight.”

  He waited and waited, and then finally, long after dark, Joe and Charley closed up the station and they all started for home in the rattling old Ford. But they had to stop at a junkyard on the highway to pick up some old parts, and that took another half-hour while Mickey waited in the car cold and hungry and miserable. How the little ones are always kept waiting in a car—suffering and waiting it out in such mute silence while their elders pore absorbedly over some damnable gadget in the ragged wintry night! He sat there shivering and watching them at the other side of the junkyard bending in solemn concert by the glow of a flashlight over a rusty old heap, and he watched them mournfully, waiting and waiting.

  But lo and behold! here they came, they were all through, and it was time to go home for supper. “Time for some eats!” cried Joe, rubbing his hands together and starting up the car—and they drove off down old rutted roads, the old Ford rattling and jumping, the cold bitter wind blowing in through the windows, his brothers silent and meditative and gravely smoking their cigarettes.

  Now suddenly Mickey saw his family’s new house: they had come back from the junkyard by another route and quite taken by surprise he realized that they were in the neighborhood: with a shock he now saw the tall four-story tenement and the familiar windows and porches of it, and he even saw his mother moving briefly in the window of the kitchen. It was incredible.

  “Hey!” he cried. “That’s our house!”

  “That’s right, brilliant,” muttered Charley.

  “It’s nice and warm up there!” said Mickey suddenly, looking eagerly at the house and the windows all warm and glowing in the dark. “We got food up there too! Supper, huh!”

  The two older brothers looked at each other grinning.

  “Boy, I’m tired too!” cried Mickey with satisfied emphasis. “Yessir! And I got a nice bed up there and everything. Gee, I thought we’d never get home. That’s our house up there,” he said again, sticking his head out the window of the car and looking up as they parked in front of the house. And he ran out of the car and up the stairs with a wild glee. This was his home, his new home, and it was as good as any home he would ever have, and in there he had food, and warmth, and a nice dumpy bed, and his mother and father and family: that was all he could think about. He was ecstatically happy, he was grateful, grateful, more than he had ever been.

  In the house he looked at everything with profound satisfaction, even the chairs and tables, and he kept looking at his mother, as he sat waiting for supper at the table, with an expression of laughter and happiness on his face. Then he watched his brothers come back from the washroom all pink and clean and he watched them sit down to eat. And he went to his room just to look at his bed—and though Francis was sleeping in it that night—it still looked like the most wonderful, the warmest, coziest, finest bed in the world, and he went back to the kitchen filled with happy thoughts, noting how the frost was forming on the windows outside, how dark it was out there, and how warm and glowing it was inside his house.

  [6]

  Peter Martin was sitting in his room at college on a cold gray afternoon, bending absorbedly over a physics text, when suddenly he looked up with startled surprise and hurled the book over his shoulder against the wall. A wave of nausea had come over him. He got up and went to the dresser to look at himself in the mirror.

  “Cripes, what disgust!” he cried out loud, and then fell to walking up and down the room and rubbing his chin speculatively. He hadn’t shaved for several days, he felt the rough raggedness of his chin with pleasure, and he was even pleased with the dirty old corduroy jacket and the baggy pants he wore, but at the same time he had a distinct feeling that he was living like a tramp. Again he looked in the mirror. Just below his image he saw the half-empty whiskey bottle on top of the dresser.

  “Jerk!” he muttered, and put the bottle away under his shirts in the drawer, where it could no longer impress the maid who cleaned his room.

  He went to the window, which faced a stone archway, and looked down on the students scuffling by in strident talkative groups, and brooded watching them. “What’s this? What’s this? They’re all walking around as though they knew what they were doing, and exactly why.”

  He went over and picked up the book and arranged its pages and spread it out on his desk again, and sat down. Motionlessly he studied the text for about a half hour, making faces at the pages, sighing, doodling with a pencil as he went along. Finally he closed the volume with a decisive air.

  Now he was ready. It was three-thirty and he had to report to the physics laboratory at four for a makeup examination.

  He put on a battered coat and went out, trailing his steps casually along the hall, as though he might change his mind. Suddenly he stopped at one of the doors, knocked and went in. Inside it was half dark. Someone was lying on the bed, and there was a strong smell of beer in the room.

  “Hey, Jake Fitzpatrick!” yelled Peter. Not getting a reply, he pulled the other boy by the leg until he had him almost out of the bed. Fitzpatrick woke up with a violent start and looked around.

  “What are you doing?” demanded Peter, turning on the light curiously.

  “I was writing a story.… I must have fallen asleep right in the middle of the thing!”

  Fitzpatrick, a slender, nervous, curly-headed Irishman with a lopsided, grinning, strangely pathetic face, looked around with wonder and began to scratch his head. “A damn complex thing it was, too. All about a guy who meets a girl in a bar, but the girl—”

  “Tell me tonight. I’ve got to go to an exam.”

  “Well, yeah, be seeing you tonight.”

  “What are you going to do now?” demanded Peter enviously.

  “Finish the story I guess. I think it was good, damn good!” And Jake got up and lifted a glass of stale beer to the light, examined it gravely, swirled it around a little bit to make foam, and finally drank it. “Ain’t you going to football practice?”

  “After the exam,” sighed Peter, going out, “just in time for scrimmage
under the floodlights.” He closed the door and went back down the hall to his own room, where he sat down on the bed and put his head in his hands, and considered everything gloomily.

  Sitting where he was, and looking towards the window where everything was gray and cold-looking and yet somehow thrilling, he suddenly realized that he did not want to go to the laboratory to boil water and measure the pressure of gases. He wanted to go back to Jake Fitzpatrick, and talk and tell stories with him, drink and get drunk, go out in the gray streets, and walk around and look at all the people and think about them. He grinned happily.

  And just then his buzzer rang, the whining sound blasting through his ears sharply, and he threw his hands up in despair, clutching his head, and ran out in the hall crying: “I’m coming! I’m coming!” At the telephone he bellowed irritably: “Yes! yes! hallo!”

  “Hi!” cried a girl’s voice.

  “Judie?” he asked.

  “Fine, how are you? Are you thirsty?”

  “Yes,” answered Peter passionately in a hoarse whisper.

  “Okay,” sang the girl. “Come to my house—nobody’s home—I got wine.”

  Without another word Peter hung up the receiver, ran down the stairs, out to the street, across the campus, dashing through traffic like a halfback in flight, into an apartment house foyer, up the stairs. In the hallway a girl stood holding the door open for him.

  “How’s Hamlet today?” she said, hurrying after him down the long dark hall.

  “Thirsty.”

  She poured him a waterglass full of wine and he began to drink it, sprawled out on the couch with his feet against the wall, one hand dangling to the floor languidly.

  “Don’t call me Hamlet. Hamlet never studied like Faust in his dungeon with the skeleton heads.”