and others before it, but all staring down at me. “Sold him a needle for a cent,” he told them. “I want you to hear him talk about it.” Then his unbearably cold and protuberant eyes refixed themselves upon me. “Say it again,” he said. “Say it again.”
The accursed words Grandmother had put into my mouth were by this time loathsome to me; yet I saw no option but to utter them once more. I did, miserably, with my head down and speaking to the floor. “I—I believe this is the very—the very smallest purchase I ever made in my—in my life.”
Here my memory blurs. Of the immediately following moments I recall only the perception that something monstrous was happening to me and that I was presently outdoors upon the hot brick sidewalk again, filled with a horror of life and of myself. I felt that I was a shoddy little fellow exposed; my soul had been shown naked to the world and consisted of weaknesses, falsities, and deformity. I’d been forced to strip before an audience that derisively saw me as I was, a wretched insectile impostor trying to pose as a person of large affairs familiar with important currency—five and ten dollar bills and suchlike!
Our memories acquire dreadful but useful habits. As I walked back to my grandmother’s, millions of locusts seemed to fill the scorching air of all Terre Haute with sizzling, unending proclamations of my shame, hideously letting the world know that I was a cheap snob who’d been showing off—and had got caught at it! Somewhere on that walk I passed a row of catalpa trees. To this hour, sixty-five years later, catalpa trees and the racketing of locusts on a hot day bring back to me Terre Haute at ninety-eight in the shade—and the cure I had of being one special kind of snob.
Our recollections of mortifying scenes in our lives seem to be of ourselves as we were just after those scenes took place. We recall the actual drama itself with a blurring horror; but our sensations immediately afterward often reproduce themselves later with such vividness that we wonder how we could have endured them and gone on living. What burns itself deepest is not the exposure but the crawl home afterward.
The Bridge of Boyhood
In Indianapolis, far downtown in the smoky old and decayed “best residence section,” still stands the house in which I began to discover, at a children’s party, that I was a nonentity. On days when I drive down into the city’s smoke I never pass the place without a painful glance at the window from which I leaped rather than risk having to kiss a beautiful little girl. Nevertheless, my walk home after the party—meditating upon the fact that nobody’d noticed my jump or missed me—remains the sharpest item of that memory too. It was then, at the age of about eight and a half, that I realized something of my cosmic unimportance: I had no weight whatever with anybody, anywhere, except at home.
Transition periods in government or in the life of an individual are the hard ones, and few are more upsetting than the change between being a little child and being a growing boy. I not only had to resign myself to be a nobody among my kind, but, mystified, baffled, and sometimes sore from unpredictable snubbing, I was made to face the fact that I was no longer thought fascinating—or even interesting—by adults, except those of the close family circle. No more at sight of me did every visitor to the house, and every mere caller, set up a caressive powwow and try to coax me nearer. All their previous adulation was gone. The grown-up people I knew had lost the sweet indulgence from their eyes; those eyes didn’t beam at sight of me. Not by wickedness but by the simple process of growing, I had forfeited their love and admiration. For the most part, when their gaze guardedly fell upon me, it expressed a consciousness of being in the presence of something chancy and likely to be objectionable.
A barrier had arisen; I began to feel that almost all grown people were of the opposition; therefore everything had to be concealed from them. Some of them inspired in me a strong uneasiness whenever I saw them.
The General’s Shadow
The one of whom I was most afraid was General Chapman. A principal advantage in the location of the new house we’d built was that it made us closer neighbors of the Chapman family—the general, his lovely wife, whom I’d always called “Auntie Chapman,” and their five small sons, the oldest of whom was no more than a year my senior. The Chapman boys were my most constant playmates. Their mother had a heart that won all children, but the five brothers were somewhat in awe of their father, and I was more so. He’d been an officer of cavalry in the Civil War, and afterward a judge; his eyes, behind the ice of nose glasses, seemed to me disciplinarian and never encouraging. The noisy Chapman house quieted instantly when the general arrived from his law office in the late afternoons; and we of the neighborhood, extraneous noisemakers, went home in a subdued manner. Even in my own front yard, if I was playing there, perhaps with my little gentle old dog, and General Chapman passed by on the sidewalk, I ceased to gambol, felt reproved, and retired with Fritzie to the rear of the house—sometimes slunk into our protective stable to stand brooding there, feeling that I had little right to live.
General Chapman, a kindly man, an old “friend of the family” who’d been one of my father and mother’s wedding party, would have been surprised if he’d known how much I thought about him—“and how”! Grown people, unless they study the matter, have little understanding of the effect they have upon some children. What this patriot, good neighbor, good friend, and able citizen made me feel, merely by the reservedness of his facial expression, was that I ought to be banished from the world. I dreamed about him, dreams of terror, and over and over I planned to make up to myself, someday, for the oppression he put upon me.
This was my plan. The general’s oldest son, George, was, as we say, the image of him; and everyone saw at a glance that when Georgie Chapman grew up he would be exactly like his father in looks and in manner. I wasn’t afraid of Georgie—far from it! I was familiar with him, liked him; I’d several times seen him weep and had even assisted to make him do so. Over and over in my mind I planned a scene that should take place when Georgie became adult, full-grown—forty or fifty, maybe. Georgie would then present to the world precisely the austere appearance that General Chapman did now; but to me he would still be, inside himself, just Georgie Chapman. Inconsistently, in this scene of recompense, I imagined Georgie in the full-sized shell or facsimile of General Chapman; but myself I saw as I still actually was, a boy of nine. I would walk right up to the adult generalesque Georgie, look him full in his nose glasses, give him a push, laugh in loud scorn of his pretensions, and say, “Pooh, you old thing, you! I know you all right! You’re nothing but little old Georgie Chapman. Pooh!”
Thus concretely had I perceived that the child is father to the man, and, meditating upon other boys I knew, saw them in my mind’s eye as they would be when they should be full-grown and changed into members of the adult opposition. I would still know them then and be as intimately familiar with the details of their real characters as I was now; and in this prediction I now seem to have been substantially justified. Boys are likely to comprehend one another’s fundamental characters with a simple clarity—character being more naïvely exposed at that period than later—and adult men who have been “boys together” have a basic knowledge of one another, no matter how they change. After I had grown to manhood, myself, I found that whenever I met a stranger I had an inclination to seek beneath his adult lineaments for the face he’d had when he was a boy. When I can see the boy’s face beneath the man’s I’m fairly sure that I know what sort of person he really is. Meeting General Chapman now for the first time, I’d look for Georgie.
Georgie’s next brother, Launce, also caused me, when I was nine, to make plans for the future. Launce was a carefree strong little boy of whom older people sometimes benevolently said that it was a pleasure to see his animal spirits in action. Usually when they were in action his brothers and I were unhappy. Outdoors he could do everything better than we could, and he could also throw us all down in a heap and jump on us, not caring upon whose face his stout-shod feet landed. He could run, leap, jocosely pull hair, fight, and hurl missiles better than we could; and, laughing heartily, he proved all of this to us whenever he began to feel bored.
Ignominy
