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- I remember when my older brother Scott died of pneumonia.I was 8 years old. My aunt had charge of me and she took me for a walk behind the hospital. It was an interesting street. On one side were the power plant and blowers and incinerator of the hospital, all humming and blowing out a hot meaty smell. (3-4)
- It was evident somebody had miscalculated, for the suburb had quit growing and here was the theater, a pink stucco cube, sitting out in a field all by itself. A strong wind whipped the waves against the seawall; even inside you could hear the racket. (4)
- After the movie Linda and I stood under the marquee and talked to the manager, or rather listened to him tell his troubles: the theater was almost empty, which was pleasant for me but not for him. It was a fine night and I felt very good. Overhead was the blackest sky I ever saw; a black wind pushed the lake toward us. The waves jumped over the seawall and spattered the street. (5)
- (I have a car but I prefer to ride buses and streetcars.) (5)
- Her idea of happiness is to drive downtown and have supper at the Blue Room of the Roosevelt Hotel. This I am obliged to do from time to time. It is worth it, however. On these occasions Linda becomes as exalted as I am now. Her eyes glow, her lips become moist, and when we dance she brushes her fine long legs against mine. She actually loves me at these times--and not as a reward for being taken to the Blue Room. She loves me because she feels exalted in this romantic place and not in a movie out in the sticks. (5)
- I am a model tenant and a model citizen and take pleasure in doing all that is expected of me. My wallet is full of identity cards, library cards, credit cards. (...) It is a pleasure to carry out the duties of a citizen and to receive in return a receipt or a neat styrene card with one's name on it certifying, so to speak, one's right to exist. (...) I own a first-class television set, an all but silent air conditioner and a very long lasting deodorant. (6-7)
- I stroll around the schoolyard in the last golden light of day and admire the building. Everything is so spick and span: the aluminum sashes fitted into the brick wall and gilded in the sunset, the pretty terrazzo floors and the desks molded like wings. (10)
- I dreamed of the war, no, not quite dreamed but woke with the taste of it in my mouth, the queasy-quince taste of 1951 and the Orient. (10)
- What was unfamiliar about them was that I could see them. They might have belonged to someone else. A man can look at this little pile on his bureau for 30 years and never once see it. It is as invisible as his own hand. Once I saw it, however, the search became possible. (11)
- The truth is I dislike cars. Whenever I drive a car, I have the feeling I have become invisible. People on the street cannot see you; they only watch your rear fender until it is out of their way. (11)
- It is a gloomy March day. The swamps are still burning at Chef Menteur and the sky over Gentilly is the color of ashes. The bus is crowded with shoppers, nearly all women. The windows are steamed. (...) On the long back seat are five Negresses so black that the whole rear of the bus seems darkened. (12)
- The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island. And what does such a castaway do? Why, he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn't miss a trick. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair. The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up. The search always ends in despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange land--but what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two weeks time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead. (13)
- For, as everyone knows, the polls report that 98% of Americans believe in God and the remaining 2% are atheists and agnostics -- which leaves not a single percentage point for a seeker. (...) I cannot even answer this, the simplest and most basic of all questions: Am I, in my search, a hundred miles ahead of my fellow Americans or a hundred miles behind them? That is to say: Have 98% of Americans already found what I seek or are they so sunk in everydayness that not even the possibility of a search has occurred to them? (-) On my honor, I do not know the answer. (14)
- I alight at Esplanade in a smell of roasting coffee and creosote and walk up Royal Street. The lower Quarter is the best part. The ironwork on the balconies sags like rotten lace. Little French cottages hide behind high walls. Through deep sweating carriageways one catches glimpses of courtyards gone to jungle. (14-15)
- I am attracted to movie stars but not for the usual reasons. I have no desire to speak to Holden or get his autograph. It is their peculiar reality which astounds me. (17)
- A warm wind springs up from the south piling up the clouds and bearing with it a far-off rumble, the first thunderstorm of the year. The street looks tremendous. People on the far side seem tiny and archaic, dwarfed by the great sky and the windy clouds like pedestrians in old prints. Am I mistaken or has a fog of uneasiness, a thin gas of malaise, settled on the street? The business men hurry back to their offices, the shoppers to their cars, the tourists to their hotels. Ah, William Holden, we already need you again. Already the fabric is wearing thin without you. (17-18)
- Eddie has sunk mysteriously into himself, eyes twinkling from the depths. (19)
- The parade is gone. All that is left is the throb of a drum. (20)
- He is thought to be devoted to us and we to him. But the truth is that Mercer and I are not at all devoted to each other. My main emotion around Mercer is unease that in threading his way between servility and presumption, his foot might slip. I wait on Mercer, not he on me. (22)
- Despite the gray day outside, the living room is bright, but it is not snug. The windows are open to the ceiling and the gray sky comes pouring in. (22)
- My aunt likes to say she is an Episcopalian by emotion, a Greek by nature and a Buddhist by choice. (23)
- Mercer has dissolved somewhat in recent years. It is not so easy to say who he is anymore. (23)
- How does he see himself? When he succeeds in seeing himself, it is as a remarkable sort of fellow, a man who keeps himself well-informed in science and politics. This is why I am always uneasy when I talk to him. I hate it when his vision of himself dissolves and he sees himself as neither, neither old retainer nor expert in current events. Then his eyes get muddy and his face runs together behind his mustache. Last Christmas I went looking for him in his rooms over the garage. He wasn't there but on his bed lay a well-thumbed volume put out by the Rosicrucians called How to Harness Your Secret Powers. The poor bastard. (24)
- Everyone said that Kate was a lovely queen, but she wasn't. When Kate gets her hair waved and puts on an evening gown, she looks frumpy; the face in the picture is plain as pudding. (24)
- "What drivel." My aunt comes in smiling, head to one side, hands outstretched, and I whistle with relief and feel myself smiling with pleasure as I await one of her special kind of attacks, attacks which are both playful and partly true. She calls me an ingrate, a limb of Satan, the last and sorriest scion of a noble stock. What makes it funny is that this is true. In a split second I have forgotten everything, the years in Gentilly, even my search. As always we take up again where we left off. This is where I belong after all. (26)
- Uncle Jules is the only man I know whose victory in the world is total and unqualified. (...) He is an exemplary Catholic, but it is hard to know why he takes the trouble. For the world he lives in, the City of Man, it is so pleasant that the City of God must hold little in store for him. I see his world plainly through his eyes and I see why he loves it and would keep it as it is: a friendly easy-going place of old-world charm and new-world business methods where kind white folks and carefree darkies have the good sense to behave pleasantly toward each other. No shadow ever crosses his face, except when someone raises the subject of last year's Tulane-L.S.U. game. (30-31)
- Kate frowns at her hands in her lap. Today Kate has her brown-eyed look. Sometimes her irises turn to discs. (31)
- Kate eats mechanically, gazing about the room vacantly like someone at an automat. (32)
- Walter is a sickly-looking fellow with a hollow temple but he is actually quite healthy. He has gray sharklike skin and lidded eyes and a lock of hair combed across his forehead in the MacArthur style. Originally from Clarksburg, West Virginia, he attended Tulane and settled in New Orleans after the war. Now at 33 he is already the senior partner of a new firm of lawyers, Wade & Molyeux, which specializes in oil-lease law. (33)
- But strangely, my aunt looks squarely at Kate and misses the storm warnings. Kate's head lowers until her brown shingled hair falls along her cheek. (32)
- Uncle Jules sits easy. He has the gift of believing that nothing can really go wrong in his household. There are household-ups and household-downs but he smiles through them without a flicker of unease. Even at the time of Kate's breakdown, it was possible for him to accept it as the sort of normal mishap which befalls sensitive girls. (34)
- I sit in the empty dining room thinking of nothing. (34)
- There is an exhilaration in his voice which carries over from his talk with Uncle Jules. "We've got a damn good bunch of guys now." 10 years ago he would have said "ace gents"; that was what we called good guys in the 1940s. (34)
- Walter would never say "rich"; and indeed the word "wealthy," as he says it, is redolent of a life spiced and sumptuous, a tapestry thick to the touch and shot through with the bright thread of freedom. (34-35)
- Walter still dresses as well as he did in college and still slouches with the same grace. He still wears thick socks summer and winter to hide his thin veined ankles and still crosses his legs to make his calf look fat. In college he was one of those upperclassmen freshmen spot as a model: he was Phi Beta Kappa without grinding for it and campus leader without intriguing for it. But most of all he was arbiter of taste. We pledges would see him in the fraternity house sitting with his hat on and one skinny knee cocked up, and so the style was set for sitting and wearing hats. (35)
- A pledge too felt the privilege of his company and felt the strain too. For one lived only to walk the tightrope with him, to be sour yet affable, careless but in a certain style of carelessness, sardonic yet likable, as popular with men as with women. (36)
- He stopped and we looked back at the twinkling campus as if the cities of the world had been spread out at our feet. "The main thing, Binx, is to be humble..." (36)
- ...Bass from Bastrop, and I sat together on a leather sofa, hands on our knees while the
brothers stood around courting us like virgins and at the same time eyeing us like heifers. (36)
- "They're all good boys, Binx. I've got friends in all of them. But when it comes to describing the fellows here, the caliber of the men, the bond between us, the meaning of this little symbol--" he turned back his lapel to show the pin and I wondered if it was true that Deltas held their pins in their mouths when they took a shower-- "there's not much I can say, Binx." (37)
- I managed to go to college four years without acquiring a single honor. When the annual came out, there was nothing under my picture but the letters [Greek fraternity symbols] -- which was appropriate since I had spent the four years propped on the front porch of the fraternity house, bemused and dreaming, watching the sun shine through the Spanish moss, lost in the mystery of finding myself alive at such a time and place -- and next to [Greek fraternity symbols] my character summary: "Quiet but with a sense of humor." Boylan Bass of Bastrop turned out to be no less of a disappointment. He was a tall farm boy with a long neck and an Adam's apple who took pharmacy and for four years said not a word and was not known even to his fraternity brothers. His character line was: "A good friend." (38)
- "No, you're right. What would we talk about," says Walter elegiacally. "Oh Lord. What's wrong with the world, Binx?" (-) "I am not sure. But something occurred to me this morning. I was sitting on the bus--" (39)
- And in some fashion, more extraordinary than a 6th sense, Jake would manage to oblige Walter without disobliging me. (40)
- To tell the absolute truth, I've always been slightly embarrassed in Walter's company. Whenever I'm with him, I feel the stretch of the old tightrope, the necessity of living up to the friendship of friendships, of cultivating an intimacy beyond words. The fact is we have little to say to each other. There is only this thick sympathetic silence between us. We are comrades, true, but somewhat embarrassed comrades. It is probably my fault. (40)
- We were all pretty good drinkers and talkers and we could spiel about women and poetry and Eastern religion in pretty good style. It seemed like a fine idea, sleeping in shelters or under the stars in the cool evergreens, and later hopping freights. In fact this was what I was sure I wanted to do. But in no time at all I became depressed. The times we did have fun, like sitting around a fire or having a time with some girls, I had the feeling they were saying to me: "How about this, Binx? This is really it, isn't it, boy?", that they were practically looking up from their girls to say this. For some reason I sank into a deep melancholy. What good fellows they were, I thought, and how much they deserved to be happy. If only I could make them happy. But the beauty of the smoky blue valleys, instead of giving us joy, became heartbreaking. (41)
- The white light from the sky pours into her upturned face. She opens her eyes and, seeing me, forms a soundless word with her lips. (42)
- As if to emphasize her sallowness and thinness, she has changed into shirt and jeans. She is as frail as a ten year old, except in her thighs. (42)
- "How do you make your way in the world?" (-) "Is that what you call it? I don't really know." (43)
- Pushing back her shingled hair, she blows out a plume of gray lung smoke and plucks a grain from her tongue. She reminds me of college girls before the war, how they would sit five and six in a convertible, seeming old to me and sullen-silent toward men and toward their own sex, how would they take refuge in their cigarettes: the stripping of cellophane, the clash of Zippos, the rushing plume of lung smoke expelled up in a long hissing sigh. (44)
- There is nothing new in her tack against her step-mother. Nor do I object, to tell the truth. It seems to serve her well enough, this discovery of the possibilities of hatred. She warms under its influence. It serves to make the basement a friendlier place. Her hatred is a swing of her dialectic. (45)
- It is, as I say, all the same to me which parent she presently likes or dislikes. But I am uneasy over the meagerness of her resources. Where will her dialectic carry her now? After Uncle Junes what? Not back to her stepmother, I fear, but into some kind of dead-end where she must become aware of the dialectic. (46)
- She transfigures everyone. Mercer she still sees as the old retainer. Uncle Jules she sees as the Creole Cato, the last of the heroes--whereas the truth is that Uncle Jules is a canny Cajun straight from Bayou Lafourche, as canny as a Marseilles merchant and a very good fellow, but no Cato. All the stray bits and pieces of the past, all that is feckless and gray about people, she pulls together into an unmistakable visage of the heroic or the craven, the noble or the ignoble. So strong is she that sometimes the person and the past are in fact transfigured by her. They become what she sees them to be. (49)
- A rushing Gulf wind slashes the banana leaves into ribbons and blows dead camellia blooms across the yard. Veils of rain, parted for a second by the house, rush back together again. Trash from the camphor trees rattles on the roof. We stroll arm and arm up and down the lee gallery like ship passengers on a promenade. (50)
- My neck begins to prickle with a dreadful-but-not-unpleasant eschatological prickling. (...) My neck prickles like a bull terrier. (50-51)
- My mother and my aunt think I am smart because I am quiet and absent-minded -- and because my father and grandfather were smart. They think I was meant to do research because I am not fit to do anything else -- I am a genius whom ordinary professions can't satisfy. (51)
- But then an peculiar thing happened. I became extraordinarily affected by the summer afternoons in the laboratory. The August sunlight came streaming in the great dusty fanlights and lay in yellow bars across the room. The old building ticked and creaked in the heat. Outside we could hear the cries of summer students playing touch football. In the course of an afternoon the yellow sunlight moved across old group pictures of the biology faculty. I became bewitched by the presence of the building; for minutes at a stretch I sat on the floor and watched the motes rise and fall in the sunlight. I called Harry's attention to the presence but he shrugged and went on with his work. He was absolutely unaffected by the singularities of time and place. His abode was anywhere. It was all the same to him whether he catheterized a pig at four o'clock in the afternoon in New Orleans or at midnight in Transylvania. He was actually like one of those scientists in the movies who don't care about anything but the problem in their heads -- now here is a fellow who does have a "flair for research" and will be heard from. Yet I do not envy him. I would not change places with him if he discovered the cause and cure of cancer. For he is no more aware of the mystery which surrounds him than a fish is aware of the water it swims in. He could do research for a thousand years and never have an inkling of it. By the middle of August I could not see what difference it made whether pigs got kidney stones or not (they didn't, incidentally), compared to the mystery of those summer afternoons. I asked Harry if he would excuse me. He was glad enough to, since I was not much use to him sitting on the floor. (51-52)
- For her too the fabric is dissolving, but for her even the dissolving makes sense. She understands the chaos to come. It seems so plain when I see it through her eyes. (54)
- "--I don't quite know what we're doing on this insignificant cinder spinning away in a dark corner of the universe. That is a secret which the high gods have not confided in me. Yet one thing I believe and I believe it with every fibre of my being. A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best as he can. In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man." (54)
- My heart sinks. We do not understand each other after all. (55)
- All at once I am sleepy. It requires an effort to put one foot in front of the other. (55)
- I can tell from her eyes when she has a headache. (56)
- "Did you expect me to tell her otherwise?" - "That it did not bother you?" - "That it gave me my life. That's my secret, just as the war is your secret." - "I did not like the war." - "Because afterwards everyone said: what a frightful experience she went through and doesn't she do remarkably well. So then I did very well indeed. I would have made a good solider." - "Why do you want to be a soldier?" - "How simply it would be to fight. What a pleasant thing it must be to be among people who are afraid for the first time when you yourself for the first time in your life have a proper flesh-and-blood enemy to be afraid of. What a lark! Isn't that the secret of heroes?" - "I couldn't say. I wasn't a hero." (58)
- "...I went over and looked at Lyell and everybody thought I was an onlooker. He had gravel driven into his cheek. There were 20 or 30 cars stopped on the road and then a bus came along. I got on the bus and went into Natchez. There was some blood on my blouse, so when I got to a hotel, I sent it out to be cleaned, took a bath and ordered a big breakfast, ate every crumb and read the Sunday paper. (I can still remember what good coffee it was.)" (59)
- "When was the happiest moment?" - "It was on the bus. I just stood there until the door opened, then I got on and we went sailing along from bright sunshine down through deep clefts as cool and dark as a springhouse." (59-60)
- "Tell me," she says, abstracted. A stranger, seeing her, would notice nothing wrong. (61)
- It is quite dark now. The street lights make golden spaces inside the wet leaves of the live oaks. A south wind carries the smell of coffee from the Tchoupitoulas docks. (61)
- Kate watches, lips parted and dry. She understands my moviegoing but in her own antic fashion. (63)
- She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere. (63)
- She sounds better but she is not. She is trapping herself, this time by being my buddy, best of all buddies and most privy to my little researches. In spite of everything she finds herself, even now, playing out the role. In her long nightmare, this our old friendship now itself falls victim to the grisly transmogrification by which she unfailingly turns everything she touches to horror. (63)
- Again this morning the dream of war, not quite a dream but the simulacrum of a dream, and again there visits the office the queasy-quince smell of 1951 and the Orient. It is not fear but the smell of fear and so it is peevish-pleasant, like a sore tooth which offers itself to the tongue. (64)
- She seems quite indifferent so far; and she is not really beautiful. She is a good-sized girl, at least 5'6" and 135 lbs -- as big as a majorette -- and her face is a little too short and pert, like one of those Renoir girls, and her eyes a little too yellow. Yet she has the most fearful soap-clean good looks. (...) She is one of those village beauties of which the South is so prodigal. From the sleaziest house in the sleaziest town, from the loins of redneck pa and rockface ma spring these lovelies, these rosy-cheeked Anglo-Saxon lovelies, by the million. They are commoner than sparrows, and like sparrows they are at home in the streets, in the parks, on doorsteps. No one marvels at them; no one holds them dear. They flush out of their nests first thing and alight in the cities to stay, and no one misses them. Even their men pay no attention to them, anyhow far less attention than they pay to money. But I marvel at them; I miss them; I hold them dear. (65)
- To tell the truth, I am somewhat worried about her, more so than her stepmother is. Kate is trapping herself too often: hitting upon a way out, then slamming the door upon herself. (66)
- Her back is turned to me, but obliquely, so that I can see the line of her cheek with its whorl of down and the Slavic prominence under the notch of her eye and the quick tender incurve, shortening her face like a little mignon. There is on her desk a snapshot of her father and it is this very crowding of the cheekbone into the eye socket, narrowing the eye into a squint-eyed almost Chinese treacherousness, which is so ugly in him and so beautiful in her. (67)
- Yet when she came in this morning unshouldering her Guatemalan bag and clearing her hair from her short collar, I heard a soughing sound in my ears like a desert wind. The Guatemalan bag contains Peyton Place, I happen to know. She had it when she applied for the job, a drug-store-library copy which she held under her purse. Ever since, the bag has been heavy with it -- I can tell by the swing of it. She reads it at her lunch in the A & G cafeteria. Her choice in literature I took to be a good omen at the time, but I have changed my mind. My Sharon should not read this kind of stuff. (67)
- Until recent years, I read only "fundamental" books, that is, key books on key subjects, such as War and Peace, the novel of novels; A Study of History, the solution of the problem of time; Schroedinger's What is Life?, Einstein's The Universe as I See It, and such. During those years I stood outside the universe and sought to understand it. I lived in my room as an Anyone living Anywhere and read fundamental books and only for diversion took walks around the neighborhood and saw an occasional movie. (69)
- The greatest success of this enterprise, which I call my vertical search, came one night when I sat in a hotel room in Birmingham and read a book called The Chemistry of Life. When I finished it, it seemed to me that the main goals of my search were reached or were in principle reachable, whereupon I went out and saw a movie called It Happened One Night which was itself very good. A memorable night. The only difficulty was that though the universe had been disposed of, I myself was left over. There I lay in my hotel room with my search over yet still obliged to draw one breath and then the next. But now I have undertaken a different kind of search, a horizontal search. As a consequence, what takes place in my room is less important. What is important is what I shall find when I leave my room and wander in the neighborhood. Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion. (70)
- Evening is the best time in Gentilly. There are not so many trees and the buildings are low and the world is all sky. The sky is a deep bright ocean full of light and life. A mare's tail of cirrus cloud stands in high from the Gulf. (73)
- Station wagons and Greyhounds and diesel rigs rumble toward the Gulf Coast, their fabulous tail-lights glowing like rubies in the darkening east. (73)
- The doorman, the cop on the corner, the taxi driver, each sunk in his own private misery, smile and begin to tap their feet. I am hardly ever depressed by a movie and Jane Powell is a very nice-looking girl, but the despair of it is enough to leave you gone in the stomach. I look around the theater. Mr. Kinsella has his troubles too. There are only a few solitary moviegoers scattered through the gloom, the afternoon sort and the most ghostly of all, each sunk in his own misery. (73-74)
- That is the way I got to know Mr. Kinsella: engaging him in conversation about the theater business. I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see. Do not misunderstand me. I am no do-gooding Jane Ferrer going around with a little whistle to make people happy. Such do-gooders do not really want to listen, are not really selfish like me; they are being nice fellows and boring themselves to death, and their listeners are not really cheered up. Show me a nice Jose cheering up an old lady and I'll show you two people existing in despair. (...) No, I do it for my own selfish reasons. If I did not talk to the theater owner or the ticket seller, I should be lost, cut loose metaphysically speaking. I should be seeing one copy of a film which might be shown anywhere and at any time. There is a danger of slipping clean out of space and time. It is possible to become a ghost and not know whether one is in downtown Loews or suburban Bijou in Jacksonville. So it was with me.__ (74-75)
- Often when we have had one of our serious talks, she has second thoughts which she is anxious to communicate. (76)
- Mrs. Schexnaydre is a vigorous pony-size blond who wears sneakers summer and winter. She is very good to me and sees to it that everything is kept spick-and-span. The poor woman is quite lonely; she knows no one except the painters and carpenters and electricians who are forever working on her house. She has lived in New Orleans all her life and knows no one. Sometimes I watch television with her and share a bottle of Jax and talk about her years at MacDonough No. 6 school, the happiest period of her life. It is possible to do this because her television will bring in channel 12 and mine won't. She watches the quiz programs faithfully and actually feels she knows the contestants. (76)
- "I marked a real cute article for you," she says briskly and makes a point of leaving immediately to show she is not one of those landladies who intrude upon their tenants. (77)
- Yes, it is a memo. There is no salutation or signature, only a single fat paragraph in a bold backslanted hand. (78)
- My apartment is as impersonal as a motel room. I have been careful not to accumulate possessions. My library is a single book, Arabia Deserta. The television set looks as if it took coins. On the wall over the bed hang two Currier and Ives prints of ice-skaters in Central Park. How sad the little figures seem, skimming along in step! How sad the city seems! (78)
- The movie was The Oxbow Incident and it was quite good. It was about this time of year I saw it, for I remember the smell of privet when I came out and the camphor berries popping underfoot. (All movies smell of a neighborhood and a season; I saw All Quiet on the Western Front, one of my first, in Arcola, Mississippi in August of 1941, and the noble deeds were done, not merely fittingly but inevitably, in the thick singing darkness of Delta summer and in the fragrance of cottonseed meal.) (79)
- Nothing had changed. There we sat, I in the same seat I think, and afterwards came out into the smell of privet. Camphor berries popped underfoot on the same section of broken pavement. (-) A successful repetition. (-) What is a repetition? A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle. (79-80)
- ...I picked up a German-language weekly in the library. In it I noticed an advertisement for Nivea Creme, showing a woman with a grainy face turned up to the sun. Then I remembered that 20 years ago I saw the same advertisement on my father's desk, the same woman, the same grainy face, the same Nivea Creme. The events of the intervening 20 years were neutralized, the 30 million deaths, the countless torturings, uprootings and wanderings to and fro. Nothing of consequence could have happened because Nivea Creme was exactly as it was before. There remained only time itself, like a yard of smooth peanut brittle. (80)
- Most important, she no longer feels she is coming near the brink of an abyss. "But the trouble is," she said gloomily as we sat in the theater waiting for the lights to go out, "I am always at my best with doctors. They are charmed with me. I feel fine when I'm sick. It is only when I'm well that--" Now in the shadow of the camphor tree she stops suddenly, takes my arm in both hands. "Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of the wreck -- people were so kind and helpful and solid. Everyone pretended that our lives until that moment had been every bit as real as the moment itself and that the future must be real too, when the truth was that our reality had been purchased only by Lyell's death. In another hour or so we had all faded out again and gone our dim ways." (81)
- I sit on the concrete step and think of nothing. (81)
- She can only believe I am serious in her own fashion of being serious: as an antic sort of seriousness, which is not seriousness at all but despair masquerading as seriousness. I would as soon not speak to her of such things, since she is bound to understand it as a cultivated eccentricity, like the eccentricity of the roommate she used to talk about. "A curious girl, BoBo. Do you know what she liked to do? Collect iron deer. She located every iron deer in Westchester County and once a month she'd religiously make her rounds and pay them a visit -- just park and look at them. She had names for each one: Tertullian, Archibald MacLeish, Alf Landon -- she was quite serious about it." I have no use at all for girls like BoBo nor for such antic doings as collecting iron deer in Westchester County. (82)
- "And the danger is of becoming no one nowhere." (83)
- Kate parses it out with the keen male bent of her mind and yet with her woman's despair. (83)
- She will not tell me. Instead, in the streetcar, she becomes gay and affectionate toward me. She locks her arms around my waist and gives me a kiss on the mouth and watches me with brown eyes gone to discs. (83)
- I have not slept soundly for many years. Not since the war when I was knocked out for two days have I really lost consciousness as a child loses consciousness in sleep and wakes to a new world not even remembering when he went to bed. I always know where I am and what time it is. Whenever I feel myself sinking toward a deep sleep, something always recalls me: "Not so fast now. Suppose you should go to sleep and it should happen. What then?" Yet there I lie, wakeful and watchful as a sentry, ears tuned to the slightest noise. I can even hear old Rosebud turning round and round in the azalea bushes before settling down. (83-84)
- At dawn I dress and slip out so quietly that the dogs do not stir. I walk toward the lake. It is almost a summer night. Heavy warm air has pushed up from the Gulf, but the earth has memories of winter and lies cold and sopping wet from dew. (-) It is good to walk in the suburbs at this hour. No one ever uses the sidewalks anyhow and now there are not even children on tricycles and miniature tractors. The concrete is virginal, as grainy as the day it was poured; weeds sprout in the cracks. (84)
- The swimming pools steam like sleeping geysers. These houses look handsome in the sunlight; they please me with their pretty colors, their perfect lawns and their clean airy garages. But I have noticed that at this hour of dawn they are forlorn. A sadness settles over them like a fog from the lake. (84)
- My father used to suffer from insomnia. One of my few recollections of him is his nighttime prowling. (85)
- ...his eyes crisscrossed by fatigue and by the sadness of these glittering dawns. (85)
- To her it was better to make a joke of it than be defeated by these chilly dawns. (85)
- As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair. I muse along as quietly as a ghost. Instead of trying to sleep I try to fathom the mystery of this suburb at dawn. Why do these splendid houses looks so defeated at this hour of the day? Other houses, say a 'dobe house in New Mexico or an old frame house in Feliciana, look much the same day or night. But these new houses look haunted. Even the churches out here look haunted. What spirit takes possession of them? (86)
- ...the sun is warm on my back. (86)
- The morning sunlight winks on the polished metal of ocean wave and the jungle gym. How shiny and strong and well-set are the steel pipes, polished to silver by thousands of little blue-skirted and khaki-clad butts. (87)
- Japan is lovely this time of year. How strange to think of going into combat! Not so much fear--since my chances are very good--as wonder, wonder that everything should be so full of expectancy, every tick of the watch, every rhododendron blossom. Tolstoy and St Exupery were right about war, etc. (87)
- That's what killed my father, English romanticism, that and 1930 science. (88)
- Anyhow it is true that I am Jewish by instinct. We share the same exile. The fact is, however, I am more Jewish than the Jews I know. They are more at home than I am. I accept my exile. (89)
- When a man comes a scientist or artist, he is open to a different kind of despair. (89)
- "This sure beats typing. Mhm-M!" -- as singsongy and shut off to herself as her mammy in Eufala. Southern girls learn a lot from their nurses. (90)
- Every inch of open ground sprouts new green shoots and from the black earth there seems to arise a green darkness. It is already like summer here. Cicadas drone in the weeds and the day seems long. (90)
- (Sharon) stands blinking and inviolate, a little rared back and entrenched within herself. Not for her the thronging spirit-presence of the place and the green darkness of sumer come back again and the sadness of it. She went to Eufala High School and it is all the same to her where she is (so she might have stood in the Rotunda during her school trip to Washington) and she is right, for she is herself sweet life and where is the sadness of that? (91)
- His fingernails are large and almost filled with white moons. (91-92)
- Mr Sartalamaccia has become possessed by a secret hilarity. He gives me a poke in the ribs. (94)
- Mr Sartalamaccia is hopping in a sort of goat dance and Sharon stands dreaming in the green darkness of the glade. (94)
- In the Shell station and in a drift of honeysuckle sprouting through the oil cans and standing above Sharon with a coke balanced on her golden knee, I think of flattening my hummock with bulldozers and it comes back to me how the old Gable used to work at such jobs: he knew how to seem to work and how to seem to forget about women and still move in such a way as to please women: stand asweat with his hands in his back pockets. (95)
- It is a great joy to be with Sharon and to make money at it and to seem to pay no attention to her. As for Sharon: she finds nothing amiss in the little bucket seat with her knees doubled up in the sunshine, dress tucked under. An amber droplet of Coca-Cola meanders along her thigh, touches a blond hair, distributes itself around the tiny fossa. (95)
- "Listen!" she cries, as far away as Eufala itself. "I had a wonderful time!" (96)
- Today he seems particularly glad to see me. Uncle Jules has a nice way of making you feel at home. Although he has a big office with an antique desk and a huge portrait of Aunt Emily, and although he is a busy man, he makes you feel as if you and he had come upon this place in your wanderings; he is no more at home than you. He sits everywhere but in his own chair and does business everywhere but at his own desk. Now he takes me into a corner and stands feeling the bones of my shoulder like a surgeon. (97)
- Not in a million years could I explain it to Uncle Jules, but it is no small thing for me to make a trip, travel hundreds of miles across the country by night to a strange place and come out where there is a different smell in the air and people have a different way of sticking themselves into the world. It is a small thing to him but not to me. It is nothing to him to close his eyes in New Orleans and wake up in San Francisco and think the same thoughts on Telegraph Hill that he thought on Carondelet Street. Me, it is my fortune and misfortune to know how the spirit-presence of a strange place can enrich a man or rob a man but never leave him alone, how, if a man travels lightly to a hundred strange cities and cares nothing for the risk he takes, he may find himself No one and Nowhere. Great day in the morning. What will it mean to go mosying down Michigan Avenue in the neighborhood of five million strangers, each shooting out his own personal ray? How can I deal with five million personal rays? (98-99)
- For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. (-) It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. (99-100)
- Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read the periodicals. (100)
- This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive. (100)
- Nell goes on talking and there is nothing to do but shift around as best one can(...) and watch her in a general sort of way: a 40-year-old woman with a good open American face and another 40 years left in her; and eager, above all, eager, with that plaintive lost eagerness American college women get at a certain age. I get to thinking about her and old Eddie re-examining their values. Yes, true. Values. Very good. And then I can't help wondering to myself: why does she talk as if she were dead? Another 40 years to go and dead, dead, dead. (101-102)
- We part laughing and dead. (102)
- Everything depends upon a close cooperation between business and love. (102)
- The trick, the joy of it, is to prosper on all fronts, enlist money in the service of love and love in the service of money. (102)
- He is much to my liking -- I could throw my arms around him. A sharp character -- no youth as I feared -- a Fauborg Marigny type, Mediterranean, big-nosed, lumpy-jawed, a single stitched-in wrinkle over his eyebrows from just above which there springs up a great pompadour if wiry bronze hair. His face aches with it. He has no use for me at all. I nod at him with the warmest feelings, and he appears to nod at me but keeps on nodding, nods past me and at the office as if he were appraising it. Now and then his lip draws back along his teeth admitting a suck of air as sharp as a steam blast. (104)
- A line of squalls is due from Texas and we drive down to Esplanade in a flicker of summer lightning. The air presses heavily over Elysian Fields; earlier in the evening lake swallows took alarm and went veering away to the swamps. The Quarter is teeming. It is good to put behind us the green fields and the wide sky of Gentilly and to come into a narrow place pressed in upon by decrepit buildings and filled by man-smells and man-sounds. (106-107)
- The air is heavy and still. It is a time to be on guard. At such times there is the temptation to behave without prudence(...) Then at last the storm breaks, a real Texas rattler. Gradually the malaise lets up and it becomes possible to sit without perturbation and at heart's ease, hands on knees in my ladderback chair and watch television. (107)
- "Tight rope" is an expression Kate used when she was sick the first time. When she was a child and her mother was alive, she said, it used to seem to her that people laughed and talked in an easy and familiar way and stood on solid ground, but now it seemed that they (and not just she but everybody) had become aware of the abyss that yawned at their feet even on the most ordinary occasions -- especially on the most ordinary occasions. Thus, she would a thousand times rather find herself in the middle of no man's land than at a family party or luncheon club. (110-111)
- The squall line has passed over. Elysian Fields is dripping and still, but there is a commotion of winds high in the air where the cool heavy front has shouldered up the last of the fretful ocean air. The wind veers around to the north and blows away the storm until the moon swims high, moored like a kite and darting against the fleeing shreds and ragtags of cloud. (112)
- The streetlight casts a blueblack shadow. (112)
- A taxi pulls up under the streetlight. Kate gets out and strides past the shelter, hands thrust deep in her pockets. Her eyes are pools of darkness. There is about her face the rapt almost ugly look of solitary people. When I call out to her, she comes directly over with a lack of surprise, with a dizzy dutiful obedience, which is disquieting. Then I see that she is full of it, one of her great ideas, the sort that occur to people on long walks. (112-113)
- I wait gloomily. Long ago I learned to be wary of Kate's revelation's. These exalted moments, when she is absolutely certain what course to take for the rest of her life, are often followed by spells of the blackest depression. (113-114)
- She would not feel wonderful long. Already the sky over the Chef is fading and soon the dawn will glimmer about us like the bottom of the sea. I know very well that when the night falls away into gray distances, she will sink into herself. Even now she is overtaking herself: already she is laboring ever so slightly at her exaltation. (115)
- It is a fine day outside, freakishly warm. Tropical air has seeped into the earth and the little squares of St Augustine grass are springy and turgid. Camphor berries pop underfoot; azaleas and Judas trees are blooming on Elysian Fields. There is a sketch of cloud in the mild blue sky and the high thin piping of waxwings comes from everywhere. (117)
- "I'd rather swim than eat. I really would." (120)
- On these terms we set forth: she the girl whose heart's desire is to swim; I, her generous employer, who is nice enough to provide transportation. (120)
- Early afternoon finds us spinning along the Gulf Coast. Things have not gone too badly. (120)
- Because it provides a means of winning out over the malaise, if one has the sense to take advantage of it. What is the malaise? you ask. The malaise is the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo's ghost. (120)
- ...yet on my first trip to the Gulf Coast with Marcia, I discovered to my dismay that my fine new Dodge was a regular incubator of malaise. Though it was comfortable enough, though it ran like a clock, though we went spinning along in perfect comfort and with a perfect view of the scenery like the American couple in the Dodge ad, the malaise quickly became suffocating. We sat frozen in a gelid amiability. Our cheeks ached from smiling. Either would have died for the other. In despair I put my hand under her dress, but even such a homely little gesture as that was received with the same fretful politeness. I longed to stop the car and bang my head against the curb. We were free, moreover, to do that or anything else, but instead on we rushed, a little vortex of despair moving through the world like the still eye of a hurricane. As it turned out, I should have stopped and banged my head, for Marcia and I returned to New Orleans defeated by the malaise. It was weeks before we ventured out again. (121)
- This is the reason I have no use for cars and prefer buses and streetcars. If I were a Christian I would make a pilgrimage by foot, for this is the best way to travel. (122)
- What if the malaise was different with every girl and needed a different cure? One thing was certain. Here was the acid test. For the stakes were very high. Either very great happiness lay in store for us, or malaise past all conceiving. Marcia and Linda were nothing to this elfin creature, this sumptuous elf from Eufala who moved like a ballerina, hard-working and docile, dreaming in her work, head to the side, cheek downy and spare as a boy's. With her in the bucket seat beside me I spin along the precipice with the blackest malaise below and the greenest of valleys ahead. (122)
- Sharon sits smiling and silent, her eyes all but closed against the wind, her big golden knees doubled up against the dashboard. (123)
- Her roommate watched us from an upper window. "Wave to Joyce," Sharon commands me. Joyce is leaning on the sill, a brown-haired girl in a leather jacket. She has the voluptuous look of roommates left alone. (123)
- A sadness overtakes me. (123)
- Yes, she is on to the magic of the little car: we are earthbound as a worm, yet we rush along at a tremendous clip between earth and sky. The heavy fragrant air pushes against us, a square hedge of pyrocantha looms dead ahead, we flash past and all of a sudden there is the Gulf, flat and sparkling away to the south. (124)
- It is an old couple. Ohio plates. I swear I almost recognize them. I've seen them in the motels by the hundreds. He is old and lean and fit, with a turkey throat and a baseball cap; she is featureless. They are on their way to Florida. (125)
- The boat ride is not what I expected. I had hoped for an empty boat this time of year, a deserted deck where we might stretch out in the sun. Instead we are packed in like sardines. (128)
- We sit drenched in the smell of upcountry Mississippi, the smell of warm white skins under boiled cotton underwear. How white they are, these farm children, milk white. No sign of sun here, no red necks; not pale are they but white, the rich damp white of skin under clothes. (129)
- Though they sit holding hands, they could be strangers. Each stares about the cabin as if he were alone. One knows that they would dance and make love in the same way, not really mindful of each other but gazing with a mild abiding astonishment at the world around. Surely I have seen them before too, at the zoo or Marineland, him gazing at the animals or fishes noting every creature with the same slow slack wonderment, her gazing at nothing in particular but not bored either, enduring rather and secure in his engrossment. (129)
- My throat catches with the sadness of her beauty. (130)
- I hold springtime in my arms, the fullness of it and the rinsing sadness of it. (133)
- But at least there is no malaise and we lie drowsing in the sun, hands clasped in the other's back, until the boat whistle blows. (135)
- Yet love revives as we spin homewards along the coast through the early evening. Joy and sadness come by turns, I know now. Beauty and bravery make you sad, Sharon's beauty and my aunt's bravery, and victory breaks your heart. But life goes on and on we go, spinning along the coast in a violet light, past Howard Johnson's and the motels and the children's carnival. We pull into a bay and have a drink under the stars. It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh. (135-136)
- A lopsided yellow moon sheds a feeble light over the savannah. Faraway hummocks loom as darkly as a flortilla of ships. Awkwardly we walk over and into the marsh and along the boardwalk. Sharon cleaves to me as if, in staying close, she might not see me. (136)
- My half brothers and sisters are eating crabs at a sawbuck table on the screened porch. The carcasses mount toward a naked light bulb. (136)
- My half brother Jean-Paul, the son of my mother, is a big fat yellow baby piled up like a buddha in his baby chair, smeared with crab paste and brandishing a scarlet claw. (137)
- (Lonnie) is 14 and small for his age, smaller than Clare and Donice, the 10 year old twins. But since last summer when Duval, the oldest son, was drowned, he has been the "big boy." His dark red hair is nearly always combed wet and his face is handsome and pure when it is not contorted. His is my favorite, to tell the truth. Like me, he is a moviegoer. He will go see anything. But we are good friends because he knows I do not feel sorry for him. (137)
- His life is a serene business. (137)
- "Well now!" cries Mother, turning away and inserting herself among the children, not because she has anything against Sharon but because she feels threatened by the role of hostess. "There is nobody here but us children," she is saying. (138)
- Linda, I remember, was nervous and shifted one foot to the other and looked over their heads, her face gone heavy as a pudding. (138)
- After a while her domesticity will begin to get on my nerves. (138)
- Five minutes in that narrow old house and the dreariness sets into the marrow of my bones. The gas logs strike against the eyeballs, the smell of two thousand Sunday dinners clings to the curtains, voices echo round and round the bare stairwell, a dismal Sacred Heart forever points to itself above the enamel mantelpiece. Everything is white and chipped. The floors, worn powdery, tickle the nostrils like a schoolroom. But here on the Bayou des Allemands everybody feels the difference. Water laps against the piling. The splintered boards have memories of winter, the long dreaming nights and days when no one came and the fish jumped out of the black water and not a soul in sight in the whole savannah; secrets the children must find out and so after supper they are back at their exploring, running in a gang from one corner to another. (139)
- If our arrival had caused any confusion, we are carried quickly past by the strong current of family life. (140)
- Outside is the special close blackness of night over water. Bugs dive into the tight new screen and bounce off with a guitar thrum. The children stand in close, feeling the mystery of the swamp and the secrecy of our cone of light. (140)
- Sometimes when she mentions God, it strikes me that my mother uses him as but one of the devices that come to hand in an outrageous man's world, to be put to work like all the rest in the one enterprise she has any use for: the canny management of the shocks of life. It is a bargain struck at the very beginning in which she settled for a general belittlement of everything, the good and the bad. She is as wary of good fortune as she is immured against the bad, and sometimes I seem to catch sight of it in her eyes, this radical mistrust: an old knowledgeable gleam, as old and sly as Eve herself. Losing Duval, her favorite, confirmed her in her election of the ordinary. No more heart's desire for her, thank you. After Duval's death she has wanted everything colloquial and easy, even God. (142)
- Gnats swim in the projection light and the screen shimmers in the sweet heavy air. (143)
- ...this ghost of a theater, a warm Southern night, the Western Desert and this fine big sweet piece, Sharon. (144)
- My heart sings like Octavian and there is great happiness between me and Lonnie and this noble girl and they both know it and have the sense to say nothing. (144)
- Three o'clock and suddenly awake amid the smell of dreams and of the years come back and peopled and blown away again like smoke. A young man am I, 29, but I am as full of dreams as an ancient. At night the years come back and perch around my bed like ghosts. (144)
- But, good as it is, my old place is used up (places get used up by rotatory and repetitive use) and when I awake, I awake in the grip of everydayness. Everydayness is the enemy. No search is possible. Perhaps there was a time when everydayness was not too strong and one could break its grip by brute strength. Now nothing breaks it--but disaster. Only once in my life was the grip of everydayness broken: when I lay bleeding in a ditch. (...) Nevertheless I vow: I'm a son of a bitch if I'll be defeated by the everydayness. (-) The everydayness is everywhere now, having begun in the cities and seeking out the remotest nooks and corners of the countryside, even the swamps.) (145)
- In fact, I have only to hear the word God and a curtain comes down in my head. (145)
- The boat drifts into a miniature dock, knocks. The world is milk: sky, water, savannah. The thin etherlike water vaporizes; tendrils of fog gather like smoke; a white shaft lies straight as a ruler over the marsh. (147)
- The water of the bayou boils up like tea and disgorges bubbles of smoke. The hull disappears into a white middle distance and the sound goes suddenly small as if the boat had run into cotton. (147)
- "Hinh-honh," she says in a yawn-sigh as wan and white as the morning. Her blouse is one of Roy's army shirts and not much too big for her large breasts. She wears blue Keds and ladies' denims with a flyless front pulled high over her bulky hips. With her baseball cap she looks like the women you see fishing from highway bridges. (148)
- Our voices go ringing around the empty room of the morning. (149)
- She veers away from intimacy. (...) But perhaps she knows what she is doing. (149)
- My mother's recollection of my father is storied and of a piece. It is not him she remembers but an old emblem of him. (152)
- "What has happened! Why, Germany has invaded Poland, and England and France have declared war! I'm here to tell you that in 30 minutes he had eaten his breakfast, packed a suitcase and gone to New Orleans." (156)
- Sure he was cute. He had found a way to do both: to please them and please himself. To leave. To do what he wanted to do and save old England doing it. And perhaps even carry off the grandest coup of all: to die. To win the big prize for them and for himself (but not even he dreamed he would succeed not only in dying but in dying in Crete in the wine dark sea). (157)
- But I have heard them argue 45 minutes about the mechanices of going to Mass and with all the ardor of relief, as if in debating the merits of the 9 o'clock Mass in Biloxi as against the 10:30 in Bay St Louis they were indeed discussing religion and who can say they weren't? But perhaps they are right: certainly if they spoke to me of God, I would jump into the Bayou. (159)
- All I can see of Lonnie is a weaving tuft of red hair. (160)
- The blue boat rides up and down the bayou, opening the black water like a knife. (161)
- The clouds roll up from Chandeleur Island. They hardly seem to move, but their shadows come racing across the grass like a dark wind. Lonnie has trouble looking at me. (162)
- A smile plays at the corner of (Lonnie's) mouth. Lonnie's monotonous speech gives him an advantage, the same advantage foreigners have: his words are not worn out. It is like a code tapped through a wall. Sometimes he asks me straight out: do you love me? and it is possible to tap back: yes, I love you. (162)
- "Yes. But envy is not merely sorrow at another's good fortune: it is also joy at another's misfortune." (163)
- On its way home the MG becomes infested with malaise. It is not unexpected, since Sunday afternoon is always the worst time fr malaise. Thousands of cars are strung out along the Gulf Coast, whole families, and all with the same vacant headachy look. There is exhaust fume in the air and the sun strikes the water with a malignant glint. A fine Sunday afternoon, though. A beautiful boulevard, ten thousand handsome cars, fifty thousand handsome, well-fed and kind-hearted people, and the malaise settles on us like a fall-out. (166)
- ...I liked hearing her say bawd in that big caramel voice. (168-169)
- I notice that Kate has begun peeling plaster from the wall of the basement, exposing more plantation brick. (170)
- "Certainly there was nothing wrong when Kate went to bed at 2 o'clock this morning. On the contrary. She was exalted. We had had, she and I and Em, four hours of the best talk I ever had anywhere. She was the most fascinating woman in New Orleans and she damn well knew it." (-) (Aye, sweet Kate, and I know too. I know your old upside-down trick: when all is lost, when they despair of you, then it is, at this darkest hour, that you emerge as the gorgeous one.) (171-172)
- Aunt Edna is a handsome stoutish woman with snapping black eyes and a near-mustache. Though she is at least 65, her hair is still black and loops back over her ears in a way that makes me think of "raven tresses." (174)
- "What did he tell you?" (-) "That you had a bad night and that Merle had been here." I tell her the truth because I have not the wit to tell her anything else. Kate knows it: I am the not-quite-bright one whom grown-ups take aside to question. (176)
- As is his custom, he speaks down the table to my aunt but with a consciousness of the others as listeners-in. (176)
- Aunt Edna is as nice as can be, but she is one of our kinfolks I avoid. Her soul is in her eyes and when we meet, she shoots me deep thesosophical soul-glances, and though I shoot them back and am quite sympathetic on the whole, it is an uneasy business. (177)
- "Whatever goes up must come down and I was ten miles high." (178)
- "The house was dark and still and once in a while a boat whistle blew on the river. I saw how my life could be -- living as a neat little person like Della Street, doing my stockings every night. But then I remembered what happened in Memphis. Did you know I lived in Memphis once?" (179)
may 30 2015 ∞
jan 5 2024 +
jan 5 2024 +