The Magnificent Ambersons/Chapter XXXI

When the great Amberson Estate went into court for settlement, “there wasn’t any,” George Amberson said—that is, when the settlement was concluded there was no estate. “I guessed it,” Amberson went on. “As an expert on prosperity, my career is disreputable, but as a prophet of calamity I deserve a testimonial banquet.” He reproached himself bitterly for not having long ago discovered that his father had never given Isabel a deed to her house. “And those pigs, Sydney and Amelia!” he added, for this was another thing he was bitter about. “They won’t do anything. I’m sorry I gave them the opportunity of making a polished refusal. Amelia’s letter was about half in Italian; she couldn’t remember enough ways of saying no in English. One has to live quite a long while to realize there are people like that! The estate was badly crippled, even before they took out their ‘third,’ and the ‘third’ they took was the only good part of the rotten apple. Well, I didn’t ask them for restitution on my own account, and at least it will save you some trouble, young George. Never waste any time writing to them; you mustn’t count on them.”

“I don’t,” George said quietly. “I don’t count on anything.”

“Oh, we’ll not feel that things are quite desperate,” Amberson laughed, but not with great cheerfulness. “We’ll survive, Georgie—you will, especially. For my part I’m a little too old and too accustomed to fall back on somebody else for supplies to start a big fight with life: I’ll be content with just surviving, and I can do it on an eighteen-hundred-dollar-a-year consulship. An ex-congressman can always be pretty sure of getting some such job, and I hear from Washington the matter’s about settled. I’ll live pleasantly enough with a pitcher of ice under a palm tree, and black folks to wait on me—that part of it will be like home—and I’ll manage to send you fifty dollars every now and then, after I once get settled. So much for me! But you—of course you’ve had a poor training for making your own way, but you’re only a boy after all, and the stuff of the old stock is in you. It’ll come out and do something. I’ll never forgive myself about that deed: it would have given you something substantial to start with. Still, you have a little tiny bit, and you’ll have a little tiny salary, too; and of course your Aunt Fanny’s here, and she’s got something you can fall back on if you get too pinched, until I can begin to send you a dribble now and then.”

George’s “little tiny bit” was six hundred dollars which had come to him from the sale of his mother’s furniture; and the “little tiny salary” was eight dollars a week which old Frank Bronson was to pay him for services as a clerk and student-at-law. Old Frank would have offered more to the Major’s grandson, but since the death of that best of clients and his own experience with automobile headlights, he was not certain of being able to pay more and at the same time settle his own small bills for board and lodging. George had accepted haughtily, and thereby removed a burden from his uncle’s mind.

Amberson himself, however, had not even a “tiny bit”; though he got his consular appointment; and to take him to his post he found it necessary to borrow two hundred of his nephew’s six hundred dollars. “It makes me sick, George,” he said. “But I’d better get there and get that salary started. Of course Eugene would do anything in the world, and the fact is he wanted to, but I felt that—ah—under the circumstances”

“Never!” George exclaimed, growing red. “I can’t imagine one of the family” He paused, not finding it necessary to explain that “the family” shouldn’t turn a man from the door and then accept favours from him. “I wish you’d take more.”

Amberson declined. “One thing I’ll say for you, young George; you haven’t a stingy bone in your body. That’s the Amberson stock in you—and I like it!”

He added something to this praise of his nephew on the day he left for Washington. He was not to return, but to set forth from the capital on the long journey to his post. George went with him to the station, and their farewell was lengthened by the train’s being several minutes late.

“I may not see you again, Georgie,” Amberson said; and his voice was a little husky as he set a kind hand on the young man’s shoulder. “It’s quite probable that from this time on we’ll only know each other by letter—until you’re notified as my next of kin that there’s an old valise to be forwarded to you, and perhaps some dusty curios from the consulate mantelpiece. Well, it’s an odd way for us to be saying good-bye: one wouldn’t have thought it, even a few years ago, but here we are, two gentlemen of elegant appearance in a state of bustitude. We can’t ever tell what will happen at all, can we? Once I stood where we’re standing now, to say good-bye to a pretty girl—only it was in the old station before this was built, and we called it the ‘dépôt.’ She’d been visiting your mother, before Isabel was married, and I was wild about her, and she admitted she didn’t mind that. In fact, we decided we couldn’t live without each other, and we were to be married. But she had to go abroad first with her father, and when we came to say good-bye we knew we wouldn’t see each other again for almost a year. I thought I couldn’t live through it—and she stood here crying. Well, I don’t even know where she lives now, or if she is living—and I only happen to think of her sometimes when I’m here at the station waiting for a train. If she ever thinks of me she probably imagines I’m still dancing in the ballroom at the Amberson Mansion, and she probably thinks of the Mansion as still beautiful—still the finest house in town. Life and money both behave like loose quicksilver in a nest of cracks. And when they’re gone we can’t tell where—or what the devil we did with ’em! But I believe I’ll say now—while there isn’t much time left for either of us to get embarrassed about it—I believe I’ll say that I’ve always been fond of you, Georgie, but I can’t say that I always liked you. Sometimes I’ve felt you were distinctly not an acquired taste. Until lately, one had to be fond of you just naturally—this isn’t very ‘tactful,’ of course—for if he didn’t, well, he wouldn’t! We all spoiled you terribly when you were a little boy and let you grow up en prince—and I must say you took to it! But you’ve received a pretty heavy jolt, and I had enough of your disposition, myself, at your age, to understand a little of what cocksure youth has to go through inside when it finds that it can make terrible mistakes. Poor old fellow! You get both kinds of jolts together, spiritual and material—and you’ve taken them pretty quietly and—well, with my train coming into the shed, you’ll forgive me for saying that there have been times when I thought you ought to be hanged—but I’ve always been fond of you, and now I like you! And just for a last word: there may be somebody else in this town who’s always felt about you like that—fond of you, I mean, no matter how much it seemed you ought to be hanged. You might try Hello, I must run. I’ll send back the money as fast as they pay me—so, good-bye and God bless you, Georgie!”

He passed through the gates, waved his hat cheerily from the other side of the iron screen, and was lost from sight in the hurrying crowd. And as he disappeared, an unexpected poignant loneliness fell upon his nephew so heavily and so suddenly that he had no energy to recoil from the shock. It seemed to him that the last fragment of his familiar world had disappeared, leaving him all alone forever.

He walked homeward slowly through what appeared to be the strange streets of a strange city; and, as a matter of fact, the city was strange to him. He had seen little of it during his years in college, and then had followed the long absence and his tragic return. Since that he had been “scarcely outdoors at all,” as Fanny complained, warning him that his health would suffer, and he had been downtown only in a closed carriage. He had not realized the great change.

The streets were thunderous; a vast energy heaved under the universal coating of dinginess. George walked through the begrimed crowds of hurrying strangers and saw no face that he remembered. Great numbers of the faces were even of a kind he did not remember ever to have seen; they were partly like the old type that his boyhood knew, and partly like types he knew abroad. He saw German eyes with American wrinkles at their corners; he saw Irish eyes and Neapolitan eyes, Roman eyes, Tuscan eyes, eyes of Lombardy, of Savoy, Hungarian eyes, Balkan eyes, Scandinavian eyes—all with a queer American look in them. He saw Jews who had been German Jews, Jews who had been Russian Jews, Jews who had been Polish Jews but were no longer German or Russian or Polish Jews. All the people were soiled by the smoke-mist through which they hurried, under the heavy sky that hung close upon the new skyscrapers; and nearly all seemed harried by something impending, though here and there a woman with bundles would be laughing to a companion about some adventure of the department stores, or perhaps an escape from the charging traffic of the streets—and not infrequently a girl, or a free-and-easy young matron, found time to throw an encouraging look to George.

He took no note of these, and, leaving the crowded sidewalks, turned north into National Avenue, and presently reached the quieter but no less begrimed region of smaller shops and old-fashioned houses. Those latter had been the homes of his boyhood playmates; old friends of his grandfather had lived here;—in this alley he had fought with two boys at the same time, and whipped them; in that front yard he had been successfully teased into temporary insanity by a Sunday-school class of pinky little girls. On that sagging porch a laughing woman had fed him and other boys with doughnuts and gingerbread; yonder he saw the staggered relics of the iron picket fence he had made his white pony jump, on a dare, and in the shabby, stone-faced house behind the fence he had gone to children’s parties, and, when he was a little older he had danced there often, and fallen in love with Mary Sharon, and kissed her, apparently by force, under the stairs in the hall. The double front doors, of meaninglessly carved walnut, once so glossily varnished, had been painted smoke gray, but the smoke grime showed repulsively, even on the smoke gray; and over the doors a smoked sign proclaimed the place to be a “Stag Hotel.”

Other houses had become boarding-houses too genteel for signs, but many were franker, some offering “board by the day, week or meal,” and some, more laconic, contenting themselves with the label: “Rooms.” One, having torn out part of an old stone-trimmed bay window for purposes of commercial display, showed forth two suspended petticoats and a pair of oyster-coloured flannel trousers to prove the claims of its black-and-gilt sign: “French Cleaning and Dye House.” Its next neighbour also sported a remodelled front and permitted no doubt that its mission in life was to attend cosily upon death: “J. M. Rolsener. Caskets. The Funeral Home.” And beyond that, a plain old honest four-square gray-painted brick house was flamboyantly decorated with a great gilt scroll on the railing of the old-fashioned veranda: “Mutual Benev’t Order Cavaliers and Dames of Purity.” This was the old Minafer house.

George passed it without perceptibly wincing; in fact, he held his head up, and except for his gravity of countenance and the prison pallor he had acquired by too constantly remaining indoors, there was little to warn an acquaintance that he was not precisely the same George Amberson Minafer known aforetime. He was still so magnificent, indeed, that there came to his ears a waft of comment from a passing automobile. This was a fearsome red car, glittering in brass, with half-a-dozen young people in it whose motorism had reached an extreme manifestation in dress. The ladies of this party were favourably affected at sight of the pedestrian upon the sidewalk, and, as the machine was moving slowly, and close to the curb, they had time to observe him in detail, which they did with a frankness not pleasing to the object of their attentions. “One sees so many nice-looking people one doesn’t know nowadays,” said the youngest of the young ladies. “This old town of ours is really getting enormous. I shouldn’t mind knowing who he is.”

“I don’t know,” the youth beside her said, loudly enough to be heard at a considerable distance. “I don’t know who he is, but from his looks I know who he thinks he is: he thinks he’s the Grand Duke Cuthbert!” There was a burst of tittering as the car gathered speed and rolled away, with the girl continuing to look back until her scandalized companions forced her to turn by pulling her hood over her face. She made an impression upon George, so deep a one, in fact, that he unconsciously put his emotion into a muttered word:

Riffraff!

This was the last “walk home” he was ever to take by the route he was now following: up National Avenue to Amberson Addition and the two big old houses at the foot of Amberson Boulevard; for to-night would be the last night that he and Fanny were to spend in the house which the Major had forgotten to deed to Isabel. To-morrow they were to “move out,” and George was to begin his work in Bronson’s office. He had not come to this collapse without a fierce struggle—but the struggle was inward, and the rolling world was not agitated by it, and rolled calmly on. For of all the “ideals of life” which the world, in its rolling, inconsiderately flattens out to nothingness, the least likely to retain a profile is that ideal which depends upon inheriting money. George Amberson, in spite of his record of failures in business, had spoken shrewdly when he realized at last that money, like life, was “like quicksilver in a nest of cracks.” And his nephew had the awakening experience of seeing the great Amberson Estate vanishing into such a nest—in a twinkling, it seemed, now that it was indeed so utterly vanished.

His uncle had suggested that he might write to college friends; perhaps they could help him to something better than the prospect offered by Bronson’s office; but George flushed and shook his head, without explaining. In that small and quietly superior “crowd” of his he had too emphatically supported the ideal of being rather than doing. He could not appeal to one of its members now to help him to a job. Besides, they were not precisely the warmest-hearted crew in the world, and he had long ago dropped the last affectation of a correspondence with any of them. He was as aloof from any survival of intimacy with his boyhood friends in the city, and, in truth, had lost track of most of them. “The Friends of the Ace,” once bound by oath to succour one another in peril or poverty, were long ago dispersed; one or two had died; one or two had gone to live elsewhere; the others were disappeared into the smoky bigness of the heavy city. Of the brethren, there remained within his present cognizance only his old enemy, the red-haired Kinney, now married to Janie Sharon, and Charlie Johnson, who, out of deference to his mother’s memory, had passed the Amberson Mansion one day, when George stood upon the front steps, and, looking in fiercely, had looked away with continued fierceness—his only token of recognition.

... On this last homeward walk of his, when George reached the entrance to Amberson Addition—that is, when he came to where the entrance had formerly been—he gave a little start, and halted for a moment to stare. This was the first time he had noticed that the stone pillars, marking the entrance, had been removed. Then he realized that for a long time he had been conscious of a queerness about this corner without being aware of what made the difference. National Avenue met Amberson Boulevard here at an obtuse angle, and the removal of the pillars made the Boulevard seem a cross-street of no overpowering importance—certainly it did not seem to be a boulevard!

At the next corner Neptune’s Fountain remained, and one could still determine with accuracy what its designer’s intentions had been. It stood in sore need of just one last kindness; and if the thing had possessed any friends they would have done that doleful shovelling after dark.

George did not let his eyes linger upon the relic; nor did he look steadfastly at the Amberson Mansion. Massive as the old house was, it managed to look gaunt: its windows stared with the skull emptiness of all windows in empty houses that are to be lived in no more. Of course the rowdy boys of the neighbourhood had been at work: many of these haggard windows were broken; the front door stood ajar, forced open; and idiot salacity, in white chalk, was smeared everywhere upon the pillars and stonework of the verandas.

George walked by the Mansion hurriedly, and came home to his mother’s house for the last time.

Emptiness was there, too, and the closing of the door resounded through bare rooms; for downstairs there was no furniture in the house except a kitchen table in the dining room, which Fanny had kept “for dinner,” she said, though as she was to cook and serve that meal herself George had his doubts about her name for it. Upstairs, she had retained her own furniture, and George had been living in his mother’s room, having sent everything from his own to the auction. Isabel’s room was still as it had been, but the furniture would be moved with Fanny’s to new quarters in the morning. Fanny had made plans for her nephew as well as herself; she had found a three-room “kitchenette apartment” in an apartment house where several old friends of hers had established themselves—elderly widows of citizens once “prominent” and other retired gentry. People used their own “kitchenettes” for breakfast and lunch, but there was a table-d’hôte arrangement for dinner on the ground floor; and after dinner bridge was played all evening, an attraction powerful with Fanny. She had “made all the arrangements,” she reported, and nervously appealed for approval, asking if she hadn’t shown herself “pretty practical” in such matters. George acquiesced absent-mindedly, not thinking of what she said and not realizing to what it committed him.

He began to realize it now, as he wandered about the dismantled house; he was far from sure that he was willing to go and live in a “three-room apartment” with Fanny and eat breakfast and lunch with her (prepared by herself in the “kitchenette”) and dinner at the table d’hôte in “such a pretty Colonial dining room” (so Fanny described it) at a little round table they would have all to themselves in the midst of a dozen little round tables which other relics of disrupted families would have all to themselves. For the first time, now that the change was imminent, George began to develop before his mind’s eye pictures of what he was in for; and they appalled him. He decided that such a life verged upon the sheerly unbearable, and that after all there were some things left that he just couldn’t stand. So he made up his mind to speak to his aunt about it at “dinner,” and tell her that he preferred to ask Bronson to let him put a sofa-bed, a trunk, and a folding rubber bathtub behind a screen in the dark rear room of the office. George felt that this would be infinitely more tolerable; and he could eat at restaurants, especially as about all he ever wanted nowadays was coffee.

But at “dinner” he decided to put off telling Fanny of his plan until later: she was so nervous, and so distressed about the failure of her efforts with sweetbreads and macaroni; and she was so eager in her talk of how comfortable they would be “by this time to-morrow night.” She fluttered on, her nervousness increasing, saying how “nice” it would be for him, when he came from work in the evenings, to be among “nice people—people who know who we are,” and to have a pleasant game of bridge with “people who are really old friends of the family?”

When they stopped probing among the scorched fragments she had set forth, George lingered downstairs, waiting for a better opportunity to introduce his own subject, but when he heard dismaying sounds from the kitchen he gave up. There was a crash, then a shower of crashes; falling tin clamoured to be heard above the shattering of porcelain; and over all rose Fanny’s wail of lamentation for the treasures saved from the sale, but now lost forever to the “kitchenette.” Fanny was nervous indeed; so nervous that she could not trust her hands.

For a moment George thought she might have been injured, but, before he reached the kitchen, he heard her sweeping at the fragments, and turned back. He put off speaking to Fanny until morning.

Things more insistent than his vague plans for a sofa-bed in Bronson’s office had possession of his mind as he went upstairs, moving his hand slowly along the smooth walnut railing of the balustrade. Half way to the landing he stopped, turned, and stood looking down at the heavy doors masking the black emptiness that had been the library. Here he had stood on what he now knew was the worst day of his life; here he had stood when his mother passed through that doorway, hand-in-hand with her brother, to learn what her son had done.

He went on more heavily, more slowly; and, more heavily and slowly still, entered Isabel’s room and shut the door. He did not come forth again, and bade Fanny good-night through the closed door when she stopped outside it later.

“I’ve put all the lights out, George,” she said. “Everything’s all right.”

“Very well,” he called. “Good-night.”

She did not go. “I’m sure we’re going to enjoy the new little home, George,” she said timidly. “I’ll try hard to make things nice for you, and the people really are lovely. You mustn’t feel as if things are altogether gloomy, George. I know everything’s going to turn out all right. You’re young and strong and you have a good mind and I’m sure—” she hesitated—“I’m sure your mother’s watching over you, Georgie. Good-night, dear.”

“Good-night, Aunt Fanny.”

His voice had a strangled sound in spite of him; but she seemed not to notice it, and he heard her go to her own room and lock herself in with bolt and key against burglars. She had said the one thing she should not have said just then: “I’m sure your mother’s watching over you, Georgie.” She had meant to be kind, but it destroyed his last chance for sleep that night. He would have slept little if she had not said it, but since she had said it, he could not sleep at all. For he knew that it was true—if it could be true—and that his mother, if she still lived in spirit, would be weeping on the other side of the wall of silence, weeping and seeking for some gate to let her through so that she could come and “watch over him.”

He felt that if there were such gates they were surely barred: they were like those awful library doors downstairs, which had shut her in to begin the suffering to which he had consigned her.

The room was still Isabel’s. Nothing had been changed: even the photographs of George, of the Major, and of “brother George” still stood on her dressing-table, and in a drawer of her desk was an old picture of Eugene and Lucy, taken together, which George had found, but had slowly closed away again from sight, not touching it. To-morrow everything would be gone; and he had heard there was not long to wait before the house itself would be demolished. The very space which to-night was still Isabel’s room would be cut into new shapes by new walls and floors and ceilings; yet the room would always live, for it could not die out of George’s memory. It would live as long as he did, and it would always be murmurous with a tragic, wistful whispering.

And if space itself can be haunted, as memory is haunted, then some time, when the space that was Isabel’s room came to be made into the small bedrooms and “kitchenettes” already designed as its destiny, that space might well be haunted and the new occupants come to feel that some seemingly causeless depression hung about it—a wraith of the passion that filled it throughout the last night that George Minafer spent there.

Whatever remnants of the old high-handed arrogance were still within him, he did penance for his deepest sin that night—and it may be that to this day some impressionable, overworked woman in a “kitchenette,” after turning out the light will seem to see a young man kneeling in the darkness, shaking convulsively, and, with arms outstretched through the wall, clutching at the covers of a shadowy bed. It may seem to her that she hears the faint cry, over and over:

“Mother, forgive me! God, forgive me!”