by Peter Straub
A fool may say this and be ridiculed. A madman may say it and be bedlamized. What befalls the ordinary-seeming mortal whose great gifts, not displayed by any outward show, he dares proclaim? He risks the disbelief and growing ire of his peers—in humbler words, spitballs, furtive kicks and knocks, whispered obscenities, and shoves into muddy ditches, that’s what. Yet—and this must be allowed—that the mortal in question is superior has already aroused ire and even hatred amongst those who have so perceived him. Why was I the focus of Boy Teuteburg’s psychopathic rage? And why did my fellow kidlings not defend me from our common enemy? What inflamed our enemy, Boy, chilled them. It would have been the same had I never generously taken pains to illuminate their little errors, had I never pressed home the point by adding, and I know this because I’m a lot smarter than you are. They already knew the deal. They had observed my struggle to suppress my smiles as I instructed our teachers in their numerous errors, and surely they had likewise noted the inner soul-light within the precocious classmate.
Now I know better than to speak of these matters (save in privileged conditions such as these). In my midtwenties I gave all of that up, recognizing that my life had become a catastrophe, and that the gifts which so elevated me above the run of mankind (as the protagonists of the great Poe know themselves raised up) had not as it were elevated my outward circumstances accordingly. The inward soul-light had dimmed and guttered, would no longer draw the attacks of the envious. Life had circled ’round and stolen what was most essentially mine.
Not all ghosts are dead, but only the dead can be counted on for twenty-twenty vision. You only get to see what’s in front of your nose when it’s too late to do you any good.
At that point, enter hunger.
My life had already lost its luster before I understood that the process of diminishment had begun. Grade school went by in the manner described. My high school career, which should have been a four-year span of ever-increasing glories culminating in a 4.0 average and a full scholarship to a Harvard or even a College of William and Mary, ground into a weary pattern of C’s and D’s hurled at me by fools incapable of distinguishing the creative spirit from the glib, mendacious copycat. In his freshman year, young Frank Wardwell submitted to the school literary magazine under the pen name Orion three meritorious poems, all of which were summarily rejected on the grounds that several of their nobler phrases had been copied down from poets of the Romantic movement. Did the poets own these phrases, then? And would then a young chap like Frank Wardwell be forbidden to so much as utter these phrases in the course of literary conversations such as he never had, due to the absence of like-minded souls? Yes, one gathers, to the editors of a high school literary magazine.
I turned to the creation of a private journal in which to inscribe my exalted thoughts and far-flung imaginings. But the poison had already begun its deadly work. Brutal surroundings and moral isolation had robbed my pen of freshness, and much of what I committed to the page was mere lamentation for my misunderstood and friendless state. In coming from the depths to reach expression, the gleaming heroes with cascading blond hair of my high-arching thoughts met the stultifying ignorance about me and promptly shriveled into gat-toothed dwarves. The tales with which I had vowed to storm this world’s castles and four-star hotels refused to take wing. I blush to remember how, when stalled in the midst of what was to be a furious vision of awe and terror, my talent turned not to Great Imagination for its forms but to popular serials broadcast at the time over the radio waves. The Green Hornet and Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, my personal favorites among these, supplied many of my plots and even, I grant, some of my less pungent dialogue.
A young person suffering the gradual erosion of his spirit cannot be fully aware of the ongoing damage to his being. Some vestige of the inborn wonder will beat its wings and hope for flight, and I saw with weary regularity the evidence that I was as far superior to my fellow students at Edna Ferber High as I had been at Daniel Webster State Graded School. As before, my well-intentioned exposures of intellectual errors earned me no gratitude. (Did you really imagine, Tubby Shanks, you of the quill-like red hair and carbuncled neck who sat before me in sophomore English, that Joyce Kilmer, immortal author of “Trees,” was necessarily of the female gender for the sole reason that your mother and sister shared his Christian name? My rapierlike witticism that Irish scribe James Joyce must then be a sideshow morphadite did not deserve the blow you addressed to my sternum, nor the wad of phlegm deposited atop my desk at close of day.) True, I had no more to fear the raids of Boy Teuteburg, who had metamorphosed into a sleek ratty fellow in a tight black overcoat and pearl gray snapbrim hat and who, by reason of constant appointments in pool halls, the back rooms of taverns, and the basements of garages, had no time for childish pursuits. Dare I say I almost missed the attentions of Boy Teuteburg? Almost longed for the old terror he had aroused in me? That his indifference, what might even have been his lack of recognition, awakened nameless but unhappy emotions on the few occasions when we ancient enemies caught sight of one another, me, sorry, I mean I dragging through our native byways at the end of another hopeless day at Edna Ferber, he emerging from an Erie Street establishment known as Jerry’s Hotcha! Lounge, his narrow still-red eye falling on mine but failing to blaze (though the old terror did leap within me, that time), then my immemorial foe sliding past without a word or gesture to mark the momentous event? At such times even the dull being I had become felt the passing of a never-to-be-recovered soul-state. Then, I had known of my preeminence and nurtured myself upon it; now, knowing of it still, I knew it did not make an ounce of difference. Boy Teuteburg had become a more consequential person than Francis T. Wardwell. I had seen the shades of the prison house lowered ’til nearly all the light was blocked.
Soon after the unmarked momentousness, two other such yanked them all the way down.
After an unfortunate incident at school, admittedly not the first of its kind, involving the loss of a petty sum on the order of six or seven dollars from a handbag left hanging on a lunchroom chair, the meaningless coincidence of my having been seated adjacent to the chair from which hung the forgotten reticule somehow led to the accusation that I was the culprit. It was supposed, quite falsely and with no verification whatsoever, that I had also been responsible for the earlier incidents. I defended myself as any innocent party does, by declining to respond to the offensive accusations. I did possess a small, secret store of money, and when ordered to repay the careless slattern who had been the real source of the crime, I withdrew the wretched seven dollars from this source.
Humiliated, I chose to avoid the hostile stares and cruel taunts surely to greet me in our school’s halls, so for some days I wandered the streets, squandering far too many quarters from my precious cache in diners and movie theaters when supposed to be in class, then reporting as ever to Dockweder’s Hardware, where, having passed down my broom to a shifty urchin of unclean habits, I was entrusted with the stocking of shelves, the fetching of merchandise to the counter, and, during the generally inactive hour between 4:30 P.M. and 5:30 P.M., the manipulation of the cash register. After the fifth day of my self-imposed suspension from academe, Mr. Dockweder kept me after work as he ostentatiously balanced the day’s receipts, the first time I had ever seen him do so, found the awesome, the majestic sum of $1.65 missing from the cash tray, and immediately charged me with the theft. Not the boyish mistake of returning a surplus of change to an impatient customer or hitting a wrong button when ringing up a sale, but the theft. I protested, I denied, alas in vain. Then look to the boy, I advised, I believe he steals from the stockroom, too, fire him and the pilfering will cease. As if he had forgotten my seven years of unstinting service, Mr. Dockweder informed me that sums of varying amounts had been missing from the register many nights during the period when I had been entrusted with its manipulation between the hours of 4:30 P.M. and 5:30 P.M. He demanded I turn out my pockets. When I did so, he smoothed out one of the three bi
lls in my possession and indicated on its face the check mark he had placed upon each bill in the register before entrusting it to my charge.
In all honesty, check marks are entered upon dollar bills hundreds of times a day, and for hundreds of reasons. I have seen every possible sort of symbol used to deface our nation’s currency. Mr. Dockweder, however, would accept none of my sensible explanations. He insisted on bringing me home, and gripped my shoulder in an iron clamp as we took to the streets. Within our shabby dwelling, he denounced me. My denials went unheard. In fact, I was trembling and sweating and undergoing a thousand torments, for once or twice I had dipped into the register and extracted a quarter, a dime, a penny or two, coins I assumed would never be missed and with which I could sustain myself through the long day. I even confessed these paltry lapses, thinking to improve the situation with a show of honest remorse, but this fearless candor did nothing of the kind. After remunerating Dockweder from his own skimpy reserve of cash, my father announced that I personally would make good the (inflated) sum and learn the ways of the real world. He was sick of my airs and highfalutin’ manners, sick of my books, sick of the way I talked—sick of me. From that day forth I should work. As a dumb beast works (my father, an alcoholic welder, being a prime example of the species), without hope, without education, without letup, without meaning, and with no reward save an inadequate weekly pay packet.
Reeling from the depth and swiftness of my fall, that evening after the welder and his weeping spouse had retired I let myself out of our hovel and staggered through the darkness. What I had been, I scarcely knew; what I now was, I could not bear to contemplate; what I was to become, I could not imagine. On all sides life’s prison house rose up about me. In that prison house lay a grave, and within that grave lay I. The streets took me, where I knew or cared not. At intervals I looked up to behold a dirty wall, a urine stain belt-high beneath a broken warehouse window, a mound of tires in a vacant lot. These things were emblems. Once I glimpsed a leering moon; once I heard the shuffle of feet close by and stopped in terror, sensing mortal danger, and looked all ’round at empty Erie Street.
Bitterly, childhood’s stillborn fantasies returned to me, their former glow now corpse gray. Never would I kneel in meadows and woods ’midst bird’s-foot trefoil, daisy fleabane, devil’s pulpit, Johnny-jump-up, jewelweed, the foxglove, and the small sundrop. Never would I bend an enchanted ear to the lowing of the kine, the tolling of bells in a country rectory, the distant call of the shepherd, the chant of the lark. Mountain lakes and mountain streams would never enfold me in their chill, breath-giving embrace. The things I was to know were but emblems of the death-in-life ranged ’round me now.
I lifted my all-but-unseeing eyes to the facade, six stories high, of the Oliphant Hotel, dark dark dark. Above the lobby, dimly visible through the great glass doors, the ranks of windows hung dark and empty in the darker brick. Behind those windows slept men and women endowed with college degrees and commercial or artistic skills, owners of property, sojourners in foreign lands, men and women on the inside of life. They would never know my name, nor would I ever be one of their Visible number. Radiantly Visible themselves, they would no more take note of me by daylight than at present—and if they happened to look my way, would see nothing!
A figure moved past an upper window, moved back and then reappeared behind the window. Dark dark dark. A guest, I imagined, wandering sleepless in the halls, and thought to turn away for my long journey home. Some small awareness held me, looking up. High above behind a casement window hovered a figure in black garb, that figure, I now observed, unmistakably a woman’s. What was she doing, why was she there? Some trouble had sent one of the gilded travelers roaming the Oliphant, and on that trouble she brooded now, pausing at the window. Recognizing a fellow being in misery akin to my own, I brazenly stepped forward and stared up, silently demanding this woman to acknowledge that, despite all that separated and divided us, we were essentially the same. White hands twisted within her black garment. We were the same, our world the same, being dark dark dark. Perhaps the woman would beckon to me, that we each could soothe the shame of the other. For streaming from her vague figure was shame—so I thought. An oval face emerged from shadow or from beneath a hood and neared the glass.
You shall see me, you shall, I vowed, and stepped forward once again. The alabaster face gazed at a point some five feet nearer the hotel than myself. I moved to meet her gaze, and just before doing so experienced a hopeless terror far worse than anything Boy Teuteburg had ever raised in me. Yet my body had begun to move and would not stop when the mind could not command it. Two mental events had birthed this sick dread: I had seen enough of the alabaster face to know that what I had sensed streaming out was something far, far worse than shame; and I had suddenly remembered what the first sight of this figure at this window of this hotel would have recalled had I been in my normal mind—the legend of the ghost in the Oliphant. Ethel Carroway’s eyes locked on mine and scorched my innards. I could not cry out, I could not weep, with throat constricted and eyes singed. For a tremendous moment I could not move at all, but stood where her infant had fallen to the pavement and met her ravishing, her self-ravishing gaze. When it was over—when she released me—I turned and ran like a dog whom wanton boys had set on fire.
The following day my father commanded me to go to McNair’s Fine Clothing and Draperies and inquire after a full-time position. He had recently done some work for Mr. Harold McNair, who had spoken of an opening available to an eager lad. Now that my circumstances had changed, I must try to claim this position and be grateful for the opportunity, if offered. I obeyed the paternal orders. Mr. Harold McNair indeed had a position available, the position that of assistant stock boy, hours 7:30 A.M.–6:00 P.M., Monday–Saturday, wages @ $0.45/hr., meals not supplied. He had thought the welder’s boy might be responsive to his magnanimity, and the welder’s boy, all that remained of me, was responsive, yes sir, Mr. McNair, sir. And so my endless drudgery began.
At first I worked to purchase, at the employee rate, the shirts and trousers with which an assistant stock boy must be outfitted; and for the next twenty-nine years I spun long hours into dress shirts and cravats and worsted suits, as Rumpelstiltskin spun straw into gold, for a McNair’s representative must advertise by wearing the very same articles of clothing offered its beloved customers. I had no friends. The only company I knew was that of my fellow employees, a half-brained lot devoted to sexual innuendo, sporting events, and the moving pictures featuring Miss Jean Harlow. Later on, Wallace Beery and James Cagney were a big hit. Even later, one heard entirely too much of John Wayne. This, not forgetting the pages of our Sunday newspaper wasted upon the “funnies,” was their culture, and it formed the whole of their conversation. Of course I held myself apart. It was the old story repeated once again, as all stories are repeated again and again, eternally, just look around you. You are myself, and I myself am you. What we did last week, last year, what we did in our infancy, shall we do again tomorrow. I could take no delight in the gulf dividing my intellect from theirs, nor could my fellow workers. Doubtless all of them, male and female alike, secretly shared the opinion expressed during our Christmas party in 1955 by Austin Hartlepoole, an accounting junior who had imbibed too freely of the fish-house punch: “Mr. Wardwell, have you always been a stuck-up jerk?”
“No,” I might have said, “once I was a Shining Boy.” (What I did say is of no consequence.)
By then I was Mr. Wardwell, note. The superior qualities that condemned me to social and intellectual isolation had seen me through a series of promotions from assistant stock boy to stock boy, then head stock boy, thence laterally to the shipping department, then upward again to counter staff, Shirts and Neckwear, followed by a promotion literally upstairs to second floor, counter staff, Better Shirts and Neckwear, then assistant manager, Menswear, in time manager, Menswear, and ultimately, in 1955, the year soon-to-be-sacked Hartlepoole called me a stuck-up jerk, vice president and buye
r, Clothing Divisions. The welder’s boy had triumphed. Just outside of town, I maintained a large residence, never seen by my coworkers, for myself and a companion who shall remain nameless. I dressed in excellent clothing, as was to be expected. A gray Bentley, which I pretended to have obtained at a “price,” represented my single visible indulgence. Accompanied by Nameless Companion, I regularly visited the Caribbean on my annual two-week vacation to occupy comfortable quarters in the same luxurious “resort” hotel. By the middle of the nineteen fifties, my salary had risen to thirty thousand dollars a year, and in my regular banking and savings accounts I had accumulated the respectable sum of forty-two thousand dollars. In another, secret account, I had amassed the even more respectable sum of three hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars, every cent of it winkled away a little at a time from one of the worst people, in fact by a considerable margin actually the worst person, it has ever been my misfortune to know, my employer, Mr. Harold McNair.
All was well until my transfer to Better Shirts and Neckwear, my “ascension,” we called it, into the vaulted splendors of the second floor, where affluent customers were spared contamination by the commoners examining cheaper goods below, and where Mr. McNair, my jailer-benefactor of years ago, was wont to appear from the depths of his walnut-paneled office, wandering between the counters, adjusting the displays, remarking upon the quality of a freshly purchased tweed jacket or fox stole (Ladies’ was sited across the floor), taking in the state of his minions’ fingernails and shoes. Mr. McNair, a smallish, weaselish, darkish, baldish figure in a navy suit, his solid red tie anchored to his white shirt with a visible metal bar, demanded courteous smiles, upright postures, hygenic habits. Scuffed shoes earned an errant clerk a sharply worded rebuke, unclean nails an immediate trip to the employee washroom. The dead thing I was did not object to these simple, well-intentioned codes. Neither did I object to my employer—he was but a fixed point in the universe, like his own God enthroned in His heavens. I did not take him personally. Not until my “ascension,” when we each fell under the other’s gaze.