Long Tale Press

-1-

THE MAUSOLEUM

Overnight, the snow had turned to sleet and back to snow again. Ryerson Hezekiah Moffit Goode had not gone out to join the others in their midnight frolic. He sat in his room alone, beneath the blue light, smoking up two packs of Winstons and sipping from the fifth of Vat 69 he had bought in Raleigh that afternoon in anticipation of the big snow, occasionally turning to look out at the stormy night or to jot down a fragment of verse on a notepad he kept within easy reach at the head of his bunk.

It was long after midnight when he lay down for good, hoping that his roommate Les Snoddy, the freckled-faced too-skinny sophomore who laughed too much and at all the wrong times, would not make it back to the house at all that night.

Snoddy had lobbied continuously all year long at the houses along Frat Row, hoping that one of them would finally take him in. So far he had been paid in the coin of his own imbecility. But he was still at it and, on a night like this, would almost certainly be trapped there in his folly, too drunk to find his way back across the campus, too drunk to find his way back out to anywhere.

Oh, Ryerson thought, if only it were so!

He lay there for quite some time listening to the others at their snow games: footsteps going out of the house and coming back, a door slamming, a caterwauling of laughter out in the street, more footsteps, shouts of merriment as a snowball found its target. The other roomers were having quite a wild time of it until their landlady, Mrs. Wishon, a real dish when she chose to fix herself up, came out and shouted them back inside:

"Hush, boys, hush and get back in this house! It's way too late for this kind of nonsense and, besides, I've been hearing from the neighbors.”

He heard them all trooping in downstairs and going to their rooms. No footsteps on the stair tread so far, which meant that Snoddy had not come back: voices, footsteps at the back of the house and then silence again—the snow left all to itself out in the cold and him lying by the window in the dark, listening as it struck the tin roof, snow giving way to a clatter of sleet, and then only the snow again, soft and secret and thick-falling, feeling very comfortable now and quite sure of itself on all the roofs and sidewalks of the town.

A road-scraper coming along the lane at dawn wakened him from the first good sleep he had known all night. He was wide awake in an instant and found it hard to believe he had slept no more than a bare three hours. Lying in bed, knowing he had to get up for class even though it was Saturday morning, tasting the rancid taste of Scotch in his mouth—ordinarily it could all have made for a very bad time.

Not today.

Not on a morning when he woke to find his roommate still missing. Not when he could think of the poor guy still out slogging around in the snow and looking for someone to take him in.

Ryerson had thought that the worst of the storm was over. Now, as he rose and dressed, he could see that it had started up again, harder than ever, thick flakes slanting down across the wind, lost in their own thick blur, billowing erratically upward before falling back on themselves in quick, wayward gusts.

A 1946 Studebaker with a Confederate flag hanging in shreds from the radio aerial had stalled in front of the house, a tall plume of exhaust smoke hovering behind it as the driver killed the motor and went trudging off toward town for help. A second car, newer, equipped with chains, a 1953 or 1954 Dodge sedan, eased scornfully past, shooting on over the rise and picking up good speed as the grade leveled out to join the campus road.

It was already late. Barely time enough for him to throw a dash of cold water on his face and to search among the jumble of shoes at the bottom of the wardrobe for the pair of rubber galoshes he hadn't worn in more than two winters. He had forgot that most the clamps were either broken or missing. He had also forgot about the tear in his heaviest jacket; he put it back and took the overcoat instead. And his hat? Where was it? He had bought it two months earlier at a dollar day sale and had battered it into something purposefully nondescript before putting it on.

Now it was gone.

Snoddy, damn him, had almost certainly worn it off to one of his frat parties and would have no idea now where he had lost it or why it would even matter.

Downstairs, on his way out, he caught a disconcerting glimpse of himself in the gilt-framed pier mirror that hung just opposite Mrs. Wishon's Victorian china cupboard. Though it was almost eight and time for class, he paused there for a moment, gazing at the specter-like image of himself, at the crazed blue glitter of his eyes, at his crazy toss of reddish hair, at the reflection of the ornate china cupboard, a huge armoire a glace, as his landlady called it. Crowded shelves sparkling with antique porcelain and crystal; flagons, decanters, flower vases, patterned table settings and tall wine glasses shimmery in the cold: amber, burgundy and pale green.

The discovery of himself there, amid all that clutter, so deep-fallen from what he once was, left him feeling vaguely ill at ease. He studied himself more closely, his face much too gaunt and ravaged for twenty, his thick, rumpled hair glowing savagely pink in the uncertain half-light of the front hall. All the old pain was there—hints of anguish coming down through the ages. Others might see it as well as he. Yes, certainly, the others would know. He felt the stinging rebuke of his eyes and momentarily averted his gaze.

It was past time for him to be in class, but for some reason he kept turning back to the mirror, hating the rebuke and yet savoring it too, fancying that he had just rejoined himself there after a long journey. No, better to say that this other part of himself, this shadowy specter-like image, had been lost for a time and now, by the rarest of accidents, rediscovered, as though fate itself had taken a hand.

As he plunged on out into the cold he felt the letter again, crumpled inside his overcoat pocket, unimportant, ready to be forgotten. How long had it been there? Almost two months now, since autumn's first cold spell. He would find a place to discard it soon. Unless he did so his mother would almost surely find it there one day and would know at once that it had come from his own half-sister and how in the hell would he ever talk his way out of that?

He rammed it more deeply still, walking faster, remembering almost every word:

Darling, you know I can't see you now, not now, probably not ever, certainly not as before You know I can't even be seen on your campus. There are simply too many people I know over there and the word would be certain to get back to Winston almost at once and besides that, darling, you know we both must forget the way things were before and that if we don't end it now after all the terrible things that have happened we could face very serious consequences even if you do keep saying that it is OK particularly for decadent Southerners anyway. I'm sure we both know that this just isn't the time for us to be seen together or even to be together. You know that we both simply have to forget what happened last summer and all those other summers and put it all behind us forever. C’etait la nuit de la mille terreurs, mon cher. Ne souviez pas? Yours faithfully Deni.

The snowed-on world was too cruelly seductive. He fought his way through the ridge of snow left by the road-scraper and out into the middle of the street past the stalled Studebaker, turning quickly up toward the campus and walking directly into the storm, head bent, hands rammed deep in his pockets. Just in front of him loomed the campus gate, dimly, with, beside it, a cornerstone bearing the same Latin inscription that appeared on the scroll of his class ring: Pro Humanitate

Now, with the snow gusting toward him again, the words drummed rhythmically way down inside him prohumanitate prohumanitate like the sound of a fast-moving freight bearing down on him, faster, faster, the signal light blinking madly and him with no time to get off the crossing prohumanitateprohumanitateprohumanitate

Journalism class was on the top floor of a tall mausoleum-like building that glowered out at him from beneath the snowy magnolias. He heaved himself up the two flights of oiled rickety stairs and into the room Dr. Folk had reserved for his writing seminars. He took his usual seat the far end of the long table and looked casually about, one of only half a dozen students to make it to class that morning.

The professor was already into his lecture; he sat there in calm disarray, a thin tweedy man chuckling at them from behind a faint twitch of mustache, his briarwood laid to the side. It was this same professor who had told him once, in Short Story, that a writer, like a scientist or philosopher who "takes all knowledge for his province" must learn to look upon the whole of human experience as his own. More than that: he above all men must learn the punishing reality of alienation and self-denial. He must learn to endure privation, loneliness, the scorn of the world, the better to write of life (ah, this most somber of ironies!) for having alienated himself from it.

Ryerson wondered how many of the others sitting around the table that morning would ever know the harsh reality of self-denial or willingly accept the scorn of the world. Certainly not Doris Wannamaker or Julia Fine: they were much too ebullient and too caught up in their campaign to force the college to permit the licensing of its first sorority.

Wake Forest had been an all-male school until shortly after the war, and co-eds were still bit of an exotic species. Sylvester Owen? Hardly. He was only a sportswriter who had taken the journalism sequence after he had heard that almost anybody could get a C in one of Dr. Folk's courses even if almost nobody ever got an A.

Ryerson thought about all that as the professor talked ramblingly of Lincoln Steffens and the Muckrakers. It was hard to decide sometimes whether he was being completely serious or merely ironical; often he was a little of both. For he, too, it would seem, had learned to laugh at folly while mourning the lost race of honest men.

Maybe that was because he had not always been a professor. He had got his start as a newspaperman and had once written editorials for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and the New York World.

"No," the professor had said, on that first night in Short Story. "It does not come easily even to the rarest and most disciplined of talents. We are not all of us—shall I say?—equipped?”-

-2-

GOTHIC TWILIGHT

The snow fell all day, giving way at sunset to a broken sky that cast an eerie glow of half-light across the frozen town. Ryerson had gone back to his room with new resolve and had spent the whole afternoon working at his latest short story, seeking a good Hemingway-like beginning (Dr. Folk's own words) that literary critics way off in the distant future would praise as “a work for the ages.”

Not as easy as he thought.

Not much to show for his time—more false starts, that was all, and a feeling of utter helplessness as the scraps of paper piled up around him, like the drifts of snow outside his window.

So he just couldn't think about it anymore. With the dark almost upon him he sat staring dejectedly across at Dr. Folk's shuttered two-story brick home, a fine old Georgian colonial that dominated the corner opposite the campus gate. Snow lay piled high against the professor's garden fence and smoke from his chimney sought a ragged upward path through snow-hung boughs that drooped forlornly over his steeply pitched roof.

A single light burned downstairs. The writer thought of him there, the aging professor, seated by the big rock-walled fireplace in his parlor, alone with his pipe or with some ponderous work from the hand of Thomas Mann, given over to somber thoughts well-suited to the mood of a snowy January afternoon.

Ryerson had gone there once, at the professor's kind invitation, to sit through an agonizing appraisal of one of his early short stories. Dr. Folk held the untitled and only partly finished work at arm’s length, gingerly, as though he feared contamination. Yet he was not, on the whole, unkind. He talked of it as a "fair first attempt" and had agreed to have a second look if the writer (for that is how he thought of himself now) could work out a "suitable ending."

Ryerson had finally found an ending and, thanks to Dr. Folk's treatment of the story as an object of uncleanliness, a title: Confessions of an Impenitent Leper.

The work had got him only a C for his first nine weeks of work. After his first disappointment he began to understand that his masterpiece was not to be the work of a day. He had come late to the craft. His smoldering and illicit love affair with his half-sister, daughter of his father’s first marriage, had knocked all other passions right out of him.

As a senior in high school he had lost all taste for sports even before he had torn up his knee in the last football game of the season. Recovery was a long time in coming, though he was well enough by spring to renew his career as a Golden Glover. He had stuck with boxing for another two years, shedding his anger in the ring every time his sister began to have doubts about their affair.

He had won the city’s middleweight championship during his second year out of high school and could have gone a lot further, perhaps winning the state title, but even that was denied him by the constant nagging of his hysterical, half-mad mother, who had spent most of her middle years seeking to recover her senses at a state asylum for the insane.

He had drifted on through the first two years of college, developing only a gradual interest in the bookish life, though even when he began to read, it was mostly works of his own choosing rather than those dictated by his professors. A rough going in his first months there, but toward the end of his sophomore year, even before his feelings for Deni had reduced him to little more than a withered husk of his former self, something changed inside his head and got him to thinking that he could be a famous journalist and travel the world as a foreign correspondent, turning out books and prize-winning magazine articles as fancy struck him.

Had he waited too long already? He had come a long way as a junior and had even got a couple of poems printed in the campus magazine. He had begun to read more intensely, though he still found it difficult going and had yet to look into the classics. Only Hemingway and Steinbeck and others of that stripe. He had worked hard all summer, copying Eliot's poetry and Steinbeck's prose, trying to create a style that would captivate his campus audience and soon the world at large.

He had worked even more furiously after his first story got him only a C. Deni's last letter still haunted him.

Darling you must forget me. We both must forget everything that has happened even if you do keep reminding me that it can't possibly matter that we are such close kin.

Only his half-sister. He had seen little of her in their early years and she had only come into his life as a teenager, a lovely dark-haired girl whose taunting and flirtatious ways had doomed him to a half-mad pursuit of her—at first only in nocturnal thoughts and then more openly—throughout his high-school years and beyond.

A dark and mysterious fate had been at work in both their lives. He thought about that often and tried to write about it; it was almost the only thing that kept him going. Incest had been a very fine thing in biblical times. Why had it won no credit in a society that was rapidly falling into every other sort of wanton decay? Why did preachers never talk about biblical texts that were really interesting and instructive?

Yet he knew that the truth of their affair, if it ever got out, would have barred them forever from polite society. She began to grow nervous and much more wary of their being seen together, worrying that she had accomplished so little in her work at Meredith College and beginning to fear that certain members of the family had begun to grow a bit too suspicious.

Then, during the summer prior to his junior year, events had taken a truly disastrous turn. First her pregnancy. Then the botched abortion. Then all of her letters reminding him that they could not go on as before—that, above all, they must learn to be “sensible” and please darling let us thank Providence no one has discovered the true nature of my illness.

He’d left school early in his junior year intending never to return. Weeks of brooding on the porch of his home had only thrown him into a deeper despair. At length he found himself in the hands of one of his mother’s psychiatrists, who sent him back to school with two kinds of pills. He found little relief in the pills until he learned to overdose himself properly. In time he began to find his way back into life again, though only by writing of his illicit romance and of other still-to-be-forgotten traumas that had plagued his last years in high school.

It was about that time, and a lucky break it was, that he met Cleta Brownlow, the rich girl from Pamlico, a striking if often daunting redheaded temptress, with hair much more deeply hued than his own and a slightly freckled complexion that was somehow a great part of her charm. She was the only person who had helped him recover ever so slightly from a love “that dare not call its name.”

She walked ceremoniously in and out of his life, as befitted a true plantation heiress, sometimes getting tantalizingly close, yet always discreet, never for a moment losing her remarkable self-control even while allowing him to believe that his pursuit of her would not forever go unrewarded.

She was widely read in philosophy and literature, apparently in line for a fellowship to Princeton or Yale or Columbia, and was associate editor of the campus literary magazine. She was the first to find promise in his writing, the first to print his work, and was ever at pains to persuade him that, with a bit more dedication, he might have the makings of a first-rate journalist.

Now, as a senior, he was writing steadily for both The Student, a literary magazine of occasional merit, and The Old Gold and Black, the campus weekly. He was certain that his latest story—though it, too, lacked a title, theme, cohesiveness and, so far, an acceptable beginning, climax or dénouement—would eventually emerge as one of the masterworks of the age: the faintly disguised tale of his affair with Deni, full of all the dark terrors of true Southern Gothic, or what he thought must be Southern Gothic even though he hadn't read much of Faulkner yet.

Yes, he absolutely must do so at the first opportunity!

He kept looking out the snow and realized he was hungry: nothing to eat all day except a cold ham sandwich he’d got at the college canteen on his way back from class.

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