Part 2

She was the wife of Harry Howland Luve. Pretty clever astounding Fanny Dirk: here’s a riddle for your independence, which we ... your Town ... have had to swallow ever since you were a child bossing your schoolmates, snubbing the smart young men, running through the gray-mossed tangles of our thoughts and ways like an April wind through a sleepy August. You have shocked us, angered us, made us love and accept you. You caught the best match of Town ... here is a riddle for you, smartie Fanny Dirk!

He will come back: she was very quick to find her own way, her own words for it: yet who of us dare say she was not always the lady? Mrs. Harry Luve. He will come back. Nothing for her after all but to sit and wait him....

She had a dream. Her bed was a vast blackness.--It is white, I have no eyes so my bed is black. It was soft and rich, it was comfortable. She lay within it, folded, lost, and it was white vast comfort all about her. A Hand from a sharp wrist thrust down, clasped her throat ... pressed. She was pressed deeper within the bed: as the Hand pressed down her throat was deep beneath her body, deep beneath her head: her mind and her blood rushed down from her head and body to her swollen throat that a white Hand pressed. The bed unfolded lip within lip as had her body when Harry loved her: now her body cut deep into the bed ... enfolded it was lost in the bed’s blind comfort.... She saw the Hand that pressed her down by the throat. Upon one finger was the ring of Harry: upon another finger was the wedding ring she had worn secret for a year, and was the diamond ring set in platinum which he had given her later. The Hand was colorless like the shell of a departed locust. The wrist above it was long and red and moist. The Hand, pinning her throat, was dry, her throat was dry. She lay there cased in her hot bed ... frozen: under a Hand that pinned her.

She got up. She went to her child and held her in her arms. Edith slept. She held her close against her breast. She stiffened her arms in order to be still. Within, a voice shrieked: “Wake, wake!” It touched the air through her hardened nipples. It touched her child. Edith awoke. She placed her back in her crib.

“Sleep, daughter ... always sleep.”

Saying these words, she felt her gums were hard; it was her gums, it was her teeth that said them. Her lips were still! She kissed her daughter.

--Lips had better kiss.

The child, who had lain wide-eyed silent, fell asleep....

Fanny stood beside her bed. It loomed like a white sucking mouth--white lips. She pulled a quilt away, sank to the floor. With knees high huddled in her arms, near her chin, and the quilt lightly touching her bare toes, her knees, her mouth, she slept on the floor. The world’s blackness, the ghost-grained night of her sleep was not the world, not her sleep ... was the bed above her. Blackness was spun white threads come to rest: each thread beside the other, each thread of white not touching any other. She lay escaped from her Bed in undulant hardness, she flowed ... at last at rest ... like a red worm through water....

* * * * *

--At this Party too, they aren’t going to let me be gay!

All they would not let her. They smiled on her and carefully patterned their talk. They had eyes forever wiping against her thoughts. They must have hated her, had she been gay and forgetful of her loss. They did not want to hate her. They preserved her low and broken where they did not need to hate her. “Dear poor Fanny--so brave!” Their words and their ways announced: “We try to be gay with you, we try to make you gay.” They would not let her be gay. They hoisted their talk uphill against the evident pull of their sole interest in her, of their solemn compassion for her. They would not let her forget. “We are being gay, we are trying to cheer you up. We are talking with you of indifferent matters.” So....

Fanny waited ... here too. In these bright congestions of men and women was there not surely somewhere a color that went with her own, a tone that could make her vibrate? She waited in stiff rigor, not knowing she waited.... Gowns and shoes ... words put on like gowns and shoes over different flesh. She smelt at times under satin and starch warm flesh that needed air. She sat and let herself be talked to, be sympathized with, be gloated over.--If only you’d shout you are glad! Healthy that, naked.... O no. She was stiff as in death.

A tall man, dark....--Newcomer, strange ... moved up to her and spoke. Words not spawned or swerved by her own story: words she needed not to hear since they were fending away a world that would not let her be gay. In a new separateness Fanny felt herself....

Felt herself laughing.

Found her feet, after his quiet resolute own, pattering out to a seclusive alcove.

She saw him.--I don’t size you up. I don’t care! You release my feet and my laughter. You are big strong ... black ... what are you?

* * * * *

He came to her home.

Her ears did not count, yet her ears did for they had given her a label to stick on him so he could pass through her door.... Leon Dannenberg--attorney from Washington--Government lawyer--on short business here. He passed through. More than her eyes saw that he was very strong with hands full of ease. She leaned back in her rocker: her toes jutted forward: they twinkled against his black strength.

They chatted, she had no ears, she had voice. She was gay.

When he left her: “You are unhappy, Mrs. Luve,” he said. “I think you are the unhappiest woman I have known. You must be strong, then ... too.”

She took his hand and liked how her hand was lost in his hand that was full of ease.

“You let me be gay.”

“I’m coming whenever this Case ... and these Conferences ... let me.”

* * * * *

“I have respect for you,” he said. He took her in his arms and kissed her....

He said: “We are strangers ... we are strangers who respect each other.”

“Help me,” he said.

“Help you?”

“Help me to bring you to yourself. You are stunned. Ill things come over you and you are stunned, you cannot make yourself clean.... I want you naked. Help me. Naked against me naked. You will be at last yourself ... inviolate. Help me!”

He undressed her. She helped him to undress her. She lay in his arms: lost sweetly like a tree in a warm wind.

* * * * *

“You make me feel that I have roots,” she told him.

She found that she had been buried in a corrodent silence. She was lifted forth. She had words.

“You are strong,” he said, “and you have been a fool.”

Holding her in his arms, he was to her a sunrise ... cool ... cutting mists and a dim sleep. She lay in him like a warm creature in a gentle sun, sucking sun ... all open.

* * * * *

“Soon I must go ... back to Washington ... my home.”

“You have a home?”

“Why do you doubt it?”

“You are so strong away from home.”

“You are a glory, Frances Luve. You are a spirit like a tree, standing alone on a single rock in a marshland.”

“That is what you think of my people?”

“That is what I think of your people.”

“But have you a home?”

“The Western World,” he smiled with a fine bitterness that hurt her. “I am a Jew, you know.”

“Yes ... I know,” she hushed.

“The first Jew you have ever known?”

“The first....”

“Do you know me, Fanny?”

“Will I ever know?... You are going away.”

“That is right, also.”

“Yes.” She looked at him. She sat high above his prone strong body; looked at him. “Yes, it is right. I look at you. You are beautiful. You are clean. You are wilful and straight. You have black curling hair like a savage dance all over the white tenderness of your body. You have eyes that look forever. Yet I do not love you. I love my husband. He is weak and dirty. Until you came I said: ‘He is weak and dirty, I hate him.’ You came with your clear strength. You took me naked. I took you naked. Because I have taken you clean and strong I know that it is he whom I love.”

He held her hand.

“There is God,” he said, “May he bless you.”

“What does that mean ... if He blesses?”

“The Jews in three thousand bloody years have not found out.”

“I tell you I do not love you: I tell you and you bless me.”

“I reverence you, Fanny. You are clear like water. Love is a word I have not won the use of.”

“What have you done to me!”

“You are water, Frances. You were muddied and thick. You can look down, now, through the clearness of yourself, to the dirt base of yourself....”

“ ...to Harry!”

“See him clear, through your own clean-ness.”

“You are strong. O how strong you are, you man who have won for yourself a power in the world that hates you. Your people have been beaten bloody: always, always. Beaten bloody by their God ... beaten bloody by the world to which they gave their God. They are a bent dark people. Yet you have won for yourself a body fair to see. Never shall I forget your lovely body. Yet I do not love you. I love a man who had all and who cast it away: who was fair as you were never and who has dirtied himself.”

“He only deserves your love.”

“Why that?”

“ ...if you care for him.” He took her hand again. “Since you care to care for him....”

“Good-by,” he said.

She said: “The word Love is never in your mouth.”

“Good-by,” he said.

She said: “I will do what you want.... I would do always what you want. I do not love you: but I bow to you. I kiss your feet. You are holy.... Why are you holy?”

“I have moved you only as a wind that passes.”

“You are putting me aside,” she said.

“No. I touch your branches. I spread them. I take seed of you with me to the fallow meadows. I do not stir your roots.”

“They feel sunshine for you have spread me open.”

“I do not stir your roots--because I have respect for the word Love.”

“Good-bye, then, Leon. I shall find out what this great truth is ... this truth I know, the first truth I have ever known ... that you are holy.”

“Good-by,” he said. Then he went.

* * * * *

Mrs. Luve looked through the golden flame of an old table, of two candles, burning within the blackness of her room. There ... not of the mellow flame, not of the dark ... a young man speaking of small matters. Where the flame touched him he glowed; where the night touched him his body withdrew harsh into shadow. What is this encaverned boy, talking of small matters?

--He is plump: he is a boy: he has no strength of his own. He is very strong and he is very old. Blond hair curls from bland brow. They are Jews ... _he_ was straight like steel, hard, sure. So gentle. Sureness alone is gentle in a fumbling world.... _Are you hard also?_”

--You do not know, but I have seen your parents. If I said so would you flush? would your heart rush back in panic, hide in your flesh I have touched by seeing your parents? She counted me change so soberly ... correct, correct ... ‘If I make a mistake against you I will lose by and by: if I make a mistake against me I lose now.’ The greed of justice in your mother counting me change. That time when the clerks were all busy and I in a hurry, your father came out smiling, sold me--what was it?--sausage and cheese? So simple, so condescending he was. You are the child of such parents. They have saved: they have saved in justice of greed, in justice of condescension: and of this saving of their greed and arrogance, you buy your College books, you buy your poetry books, you buy your hours here. Aren’t you ashamed? No he is not ashamed. He is right. Sausages and dollars saved are slime, are lies. You are true, Samson Brenner. You are older than your stinking parents.

She filled his glass with wine.

He sipped. His eyes were hot amber in an iron vat. He asked no question, he sipped.

“Do you want to hear the poem?” he said.

--I hear it already. “Repeat it.”

He did not question her words, he did not question her wine. He took them. His head bent forward. He held his face in his hands ... soft hands. He spoke his poem through soft hands. The poem was a stiff, an alien thing: but her words she had not spoken in the glow of his face were his and came back to her, a poem.

--I become myself. I become untouched. Speak on, Boy. Make me untouched!... He has young eyes--the shadows that rim them are marked by thousand years....

* * * * *

The world was a sunny field and the young mother walked in it and was herself. Each thing was itself, stood clear up in the sunny field of the world. Black ant over a tuft of grass held the sun in its blackness. Grass threw sparkle of sun against a blue sky dazed with sunniness.--I too walking and carrying the sun. I am very sharply myself, like an ant, like a leaf, throwing with them the sun in a vast gold shower upward into the sky....

Leon was gone: there would be no word of any sort further between them.

Fanny had a way of sitting on her porch and pinching the flesh of her bared arm. Solid! She loved her solidness--I am real! She was sunny with feeling her flesh and her soul real.

--Harry is coming back. O I know! I must be ready, I must be _real_.

She was real. Her thoughts, her feelings, her pain were petal and stamen and pistil of the full flower of her realness. Sitting now, different, in her little house where she had been abandoned ... above the pry and the impudent concern of those about her, above the hurt and the insult of Harry’s going ... facing the sacrament of his return--how? beaten, broken?--fully as she had faced no truth in all her life.

... With her child in arms she could pinch bravely and find real....

--I can kiss you now--Baby! little sister!--we wait together for him who is coming back.

--Coming at last. For the first time coming. There was a holy man. He released us, stripped us naked to ourselves. And because of a holy man, we can wait real now, sure, intact, so gently wait and so long, for a man who is coming.

--We need not ask who he is. He is ours. He will find us and love us, won’t he, little sister?... and leave us no more.

--Like you! O my blessed baby--like you whom I was strong enough to bear, not strong enough till now to look upon--like you he is ours.

--O the black night into which you were born, my child. O the long pain you stood upon: it rose like a flame from my womb you stood upon ... up, up throughout you, to your eyes and fingers. O the black night of fiery pain you were, with your sucking mouth upon my naked flesh....

We dawn together, Love, into a sleep where with eyes open Cooly we walk toward Day.

Fanny held her child and again she looked unwilted into sun. It was to her as if she gazed on a bright field, and there above flowers, under a sky, stood a woman sheer with a child in her arms. Her feet in grass were cool. Her hair in sky was cool. She was sheer, cool ... unburned by the fires of birth. She was born ... washed clean of the bloods of birth and born. Very cool, very sheer. So Fanny saw herself.

... Saw certain things making her sunny field of the world--as the light of her vision lay clarified in context of green thrusts running, forms sprayed and ashift over earth.

She had long talks holding her child in her arms....

“I must be more to him when he comes back than I was ever! I can be more!

“I accept you, Harry. I have no pride, I am humble. I challenge drink, gaming, women. I am ashamed no longer. I shall beat them. I shall crowd them out. I shall be for you what they lied seeming they could be for you. You will find me everywhere, meet me nowhere. No obstruction. You will find me risen in a great pride, in a great strength, now that my pride is gone and I have lain, prostrate naked, sucking the strength of a stranger.”

--O stranger! not a thought more for you. Not a thought. That is as you will. Harry, he made me love you.

She went into her room, stripped her clothes from her shoulders. She looked in a glass at her nakedness, feeling under her eyes her shoulders gleam like cool flames upward.

It was strange: her shoulders were untouched, her breasts had not fallen.--I am whole! Come, Harry, take me.

There had been a wind, there had been a bath for her naked shoulders. She was naked, flushed by a swift wind ... gone ... cleansed by a running water ... run away.--I am whole, I am born. Will you come, Harry, so you can see the woman who has been born?

She stood long, looking at her naked self. She was clad in a bloom. She was a hard young world in its first Spring. She found that she was laughing. She pressed her laughing fingers into her firm breasts.

“I am good,” she said, very sober. She caught up her child. Cheek upon hers she swayed, very still, very sober. “O we are good. Good, we two! Won’t you hurry, Man?” ...

“Now I see you. Clear! Never has any woman seen her love as I see you. I am a woman born. Edith dear, look at your Mother. You are a child born.... I am a woman born. I am rarer than you! I am very rare. I see you clear, you little sucking flesh. Sweet, sweet! I see him clear; wistful yearnful boy, with a soul all wrinkled and athrob like your forehead, Sweet, when you were born ... a soul open and empty and greedy like your mouth, when you were born.

“ ...Come, suck me, you two dear ones!”

--Do I see my love clear? If I do, I see a fading.... “I abdicate that sight, my dear Beloved. My hands must not shake, when you come back to me shaking.”

--What is love? what is a field?... a running of sweet grass over earth, grass leaping away from the earth in which it lives.... My love is you and you ... that is seeing enough!

--Love is the field and woodlands of the world.

She was a little woman waiting for her husband....

* * * * *

Strange news came to her world of Harry Howland Luve ... thrilled it, made it talk.... “Blood will tell.” ... “After the wild oats the sturdier planting....” “God has his way....” “From one drunkenness to another.” Fanny took to herself the news and felt it true. The path of her man came clear in her white mind.

--I feel him, all the way he has crawled livid red from my hands. He turns, full flow, to my breast! She saw his path like a writing.

The Reverend Doctor Poole brought her his gift of comfort wrapped in complacence.

She made him sit down, he chose the stiffest chair.--I must subdue myself, she felt. He was brittle, little. She held back the flood of herself. But it was easy since his sharp small eyes not knowing she was a flood, brought her help.

“Your husband, my Dear, has found Christ.

“It happened in New York. Never mind, my child, where ... and who shall ever say How? He has found Christ and like Him he has risen. More, my daughter. Like Him, he is walking the ways of men bringing God’s word. Who has found Christ _truly_, in every respect must act like Him. I am very gratified ... very grateful. I have come to you, my daughter, ... you have neglected our Church, never mind, Dear, the strayed sheep is the dearest to the Lord and to the humblest Pastor ... to pray with you Thanksgiving and rejoicing. Your husband will be here soon. You know from his dear father what he’s doing?... He goes from College to College telling young men how he slipped down the pleasant path to Hell--and at its gate found Christ.... I have had word from colleagues in Princeton, Yale, Williams ... elsewhere. His effect on the student bodies is amazing, electrifying. A true evangel. He is eloquent, simple ... rather his message is, that speaks through his lips. The students learn how he ... as they do ... played a little, drank a little, smoked--all the little innocent indulgences ... and what horror happened. They flock up, after his visit, and sign the pledge of Purity, join fellowship in Christ. He has received invitations from dozens of Christian institutions to come with his message, to help save our Christian youth. He has found a true work, indeed.... And you, daughter, have been worthy of him ... waiting. Prepare yourself now for the return of your Bridegroom.”

* * * * *

Face clawed close by myriad tiny fears and horrors. Hot eyes. Feet stumbling. As Harry’s body lurched forward, his feet stumbled faster to support it. Hands dead white leaves, dry, crackling at his sides.... A saloon swings open, his head bowed above thin shoulders twitches in, away from the crash of an impending train above on its swinging iron rail. Wave of acrid beer, soiled flesh, wet clothes. Above it, his head a moment is still.... Sober. Harry steps up to the bar, with sharp feet and hands marshalling sudden to his head against the lazy swing of his body within the fetid wave. He grasps a glass of whiskey, carries it untouched before him to a corner. Bodies huddled like hulks of beef or pork, covered with rags. He floats above them, finds a seat, bowing to a naked wooden table. Invitation. Glass elbows on the naked table. Head on the table? No!--One gulp to swing my body free with my sharp head ... to soberness.... So....--_What am I?_ ...

Harry Howland Luve gazed on his world. A man snoring near him blew a spray of blood from his mashed nose. A man, beside a barrel, let his fingers trail like grey worms through the sawdust ... a red tongue broke through the muck of his mouth, licked the grey worms of his hands, he slept again. At the bar, careening like ships on a wave of the world, heads dipped into huge glasses, swung against mirrors, broke thudding upon a window upon a wall that was a grin of hardness.--What am I? Harry Howland Luve laboriously counted his fingers....--One two three four ... one two three four ... one two: my God! where is my fifth finger? “I lack a finger! I lack a finger!” Body with head feet hands was one ... a toss, a catapult from the stinking Harp House into a darkness clear, biting, without, beneath the surge of the “L.” He flew. “I lack a finger.” He stopped. “What else do I lack?” Again a train. He was caught. He could not move.--It is coming over! He was clamped; the train’s murmur rose to a beat, a roar, a crash. Iron and wood and steam shrieked and stampeded, mountained on his head. He was clamped. He was a silence of horror under a mountain of noise, crushing against the eggshell of his skull.... It passed....--I am alive. He walked quiet now, looking on the pavement tracks for his lost finger.

“You have lost something?” A black form rose from the street like smoke on a clear night. “Yes ... I have lost ... have lost....” “Perhaps,” said the smokey man, “I can help you to find. Come along, Brother.” He clasped his arm. The smokey man of God, the white seeker of color moved down the cavern of Chatham Square where the high houses dimmed away like stalactytes and the “L” thrust its lance into the belly of a world too weary to cry, too worn to bleed. Before him Harry Luve held his white dry hand. “My finger,” he muttered. “Yes,” said the man of God. “I see ... your pointing finger....”

He sat in a quiet room. Coffee and a sandwich rolled in his raw stomach. “That tastes good, eh?” said the man of smoke. “Hot, eh? Whiskey makes you shiver, I’ll bet.” Luve held his hands together and began to cry. “Heat is the best thing in the world. Good heat is God. False heat is the Devil ... and makes you shiver,” he said. “Another cup of coffee?”

“My finger ... my finger!” “Brace up, man. You’re a gentleman. You were. I can see that. See clear, and you’re whole....” “How can I see clear when I lack ... I lack--” ... “Hush--listen.”

There was a sound like a soft white quiet on a red wound. Music.

“Bow your head, Brother.... Listen.”