would do what she could, but that she (Della) was the only one who knew exactly where each of the children was and what kind of progress they could be expected to make, emotionally and intellectually. And whatever sacrifice they imagined Della was making, to have her there instead of anyone else was what they really wanted anyway.
One of the boys was named John, after Wilson’s great-grandfather. If Della could be said to have favorites—and of course she couldn’t, and didn’t, but still if someone were to have to say which one she liked the best, if she were forced to give an answer other than all of them—it would be him. There was a hidden fierceness in him, lacking in the others.
John Montgomery did not stand out as an unusual boy until he was almost ten—mostly because he had always been shy. Even in school where his own mother taught he would blush whenever he spoke. He looked pretty much like a direct cross between his older brother Alex and his sister Rebecca, though more withdrawn than either. At first, that was all there was to him. Then he began to stand out. It was noticed that at infrequent unpredictable times he would slip into moments of self-absorbing sensuality, as though he could not contain himself and was overpowered by pleasure, like being carried away by a joke—an image so dramatic it suggested a personality split. But then it was also noticed that the shyness returned immediately afterward and he would look very guilty. And this, though it explained in a minor way the shyness, presented a question of its own; because it was not natural that a boy of that young age would have learned what it is about emotions that he should be ashamed of. He would certainly not have learned it from Della and Wilson. It was just as though he had been born with the two coincidental characteristics: his tremendous capacity for feelings, and the accompanying guilt.
He was well liked, though not comfortable to be with during the few times when he would fall to enjoying his lunch to such an extent that everyone sitting across from him at the lunch table would be forced to admit that their own enjoyment of eating must be a very shallow thing in comparison. Also because of an icy chill in the room in which he greedily cut off contact with everything else but himself and his sandwiches—turning from the world of reason, communication and people to the world of his own swirling emotions and sensations. It was unpleasant to be so ruthlessly ignored; but the shyness, which he retained throughout his life, compensated and endeared him to people. It seemed he was always afraid someone would find out, and because those times were known to everyone, the knowledge was an intimacy, arising from knowing more of him than he might have wished.
As John grew up, automobiles began to replace horses, and the huckster wagon was abandoned after it became less time-consuming for families to get to the store themselves (the bigger stores in Iowa City as well). But cream still flowed through Wilson’s grocery store like water. The road to Hills was widened, and the fences were set back several feet on each side. A hardtop was set down and became Highway 1, crossing the road to Hills in the middle of Sharon Center. A garage was made out of Barns’ store, with two tall, thin pumps close to the highway. A high school was built across from the Masonic Lodge.
John’s older brother Alex was old enough to be accepted into the Army at the same time the United States decided to enter its first war with Germany, without the approval of his mother. Wilson had no opinions, either on the war or his son’s desire to be in it, and silently drove him to the recruiting station in Iowa City in the wagon. They shook hands, and as Wilson left he watched Alex being taken in by the other boys there, laughing nervously and talking about military weapons. At home Della told him, “I can feel that it was a mistake, Wilson.” Of course this was not a judgment of the war—only the way she chose to tell him that, as far as she was concerned, their son would never come home.
“You can’t know that,” said Wilson.
“Yes I can.”
John Montgomery had already decided that, and watching his brother ride away in the wagon with his bag of belongings, talking excitedly to his father, he said goodbye to him. He removed his brother from his active mind and put him into memory, where he remained forever. So the news of Alex’s patriotic death (he had died by personally carrying a very sensitive bomb into a house with thick walls, taking with him into small fragments seven German officers, four flunkies, three long-nose machine guns and a naked whore) had little effect on him, because the fact and story of Alex’s death had no connection with John’s own memories of him, which he had already decided would be all there would ever be. His lack of emotion was not noticed in the house at that time because of all the others.
Wilson bought their brownstone house in the country three years after the war ended, and though he did not live in it full time until years later, he secretly kept two dogs there, fed by Remington Hodge, and visited them often with their other dog. (Duke had taken a disease which caused him to go blind and be in such discomfort that Wilson killed him.) He explained to Della that the extra dogs were probably from neighboring farms. Sometimes they spent Sundays in their country home with the younger children, leaving John and Rebecca to open the store Monday morning and mind it until afternoon.
John, during those times when his naturally suppressed sensuality would erupt, could drink more, cause more destruction and be less decent, more depraved, make more noise, attract more secretly wanton women, keep going longer and be more penitently sorry afterward than seemed realistic, and while he was attending the small high school he was the never ending topic of conversation and amazement. It was said that he had on one occasion, on a bet, gone into Iowa City to a house of prostitution and in a state of intoxication and without a cent in his pocket had entered and remained for nearly two and a half hours before rejoining his friends seated impatiently across the street drinking from a bottle in a paper bag, where he resumed drinking and set off to find a place with more gaiety.
The speculations concerning the course of events beginning at the time he entered without any money and closed the door and ending two and a half hours later were as varied as an entire month of The Arabian Nights. Some (Merv Miller was one of them) believed he must have collapsed due to the effects of the improperly and dangerously prepared whiskey as soon as he shut the door, and out of the kindness of their hearts they had let him sleep until he woke up. But it was hard to believe in the kindness of a prostitute’s or a prostitute’s manager’s heart, as they were all personally terrified by the mere idea of the place. “Perhaps they were afraid to throw him out for fear of drawing the attention of the police.” But for the same reason that it was difficult to imagine Betty’s Place housing generosity, it was impossible to imagine the hardened people inside being afraid of anything. So the line of thinking, naturally, continued from then on to the assumption that he was busy during that time, and exactly how many women one could assume to be in there, and how much they did what they did for money, and how much they would do for pleasure, and what kind of pleasure it was to take up two and a half hours. And then just as these problems were beginning to press less and less heavily on the imagination of the small town, two women somewhere in their twenties arrived in a worn, unsightly carriage—having driven themselves—and stopped at the gas station and asked with “rough, wild voices, and one had frizzy hair,” the whereabouts of John Montgomery. They were directed across the street to the store, where they went, stayed not longer than ten minutes and headed back in the direction of Iowa City. Nothing conclusive could be drawn from the visit, but even to explain it coincidentally was exciting and problematic, and vicarious pleasure flowed like water long after the six men in the station had stepped out into the clear afternoon and watched until the bare heads sank side by side out of view over the hill.
It was not long after this, during the time when John was being condemned, floated and exalted as being bound up in whoredom, that there arose an unexpected concern for his mind, which was imagined to be in great danger of giving up the ghost and splitting clean in two—the two parts of him being so widely distant and hostile to each other. He was watched very carefully for signs of dissociation, or ordinary madness. These new, more serious thoughts never had the required idle time to be lifted off the ground. Wilson had a stroke. Everything else was forgotten. Della found herself surrounded by her thousands of friends,
