A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories by Glenway Wescott Read Free Book Online Page A

snakes. The heat smelled like wine. Flowerbeds, green fruit, and pools, shone in abundance in the landscape—false jewels upon plaques of wind-engraved light. None of it, alas, was worth as much as it looked. Never were penury and extravagance so softly fused.
    Sometimes the people had drunken hopes, sometimes their faces fell. Nature let them hunger and thirst but drenched their bodies instead with its overflow; through the spray they could not see clearly. Most of them led spendthrift lives now but worked heart-breakingly as in the past. Wistful, continually seduced by amusements, they were educated beyond their station and lived beyond their means, buying at a premium what their comfort-bound and debt-driven effort produced, and in the errors of love begetting children they could ill afford. Most of the children were beautiful and over-ambitious.
    Along the cement highways, the buildings of the small town were draped with knitted boughs. Each one was half villa, half cabin; all in ephemeral woodwork. The porches were linked by gossiping friendliness, which ought to have encouraged moral uniformity, self-satisfaction, prudence. But the wild atmospheres of the farming country all around (the promising dawns, reptile-colored, the storms, and undulations of the sunsets) showing themselves to the young and to young couples and retired farmers, affected their emotions otherwise and excited them to every extravagance. Very clearly against all the white clapboards, in a language of flowers, a great deal about them seemed to be expressed: hollyhocks stood for their powerful hands and red faces, hydrangeas turning brown on pruned stems for anxious innocence, for optimism gradually discolored by reality.
    Within one particular house, by each piece of furniture, a genteel aspiration was inexpensively represented; and since each piece had a thousand duplicates elsewhere, there was a general effect of bareness. There were two small living rooms thrown into one; three bedrooms which the beds almost filled; a bathroom (but water had to be heated on the stove and carried up); a small kitchen without a servant. Of course there were also a phonograph, a radio cabinet, a piano, a furnace, installations of gas and electricity, an automobile. There were so many doors and windows and the walls were so thin that a sigh under the roof could be heard at the front door. Here one summer long lived a mother, a father, a young daughter, another in ill health with her husband and a baby, a grown son.
    The son had returned from a great distance for a holiday. He felt poor; luxury went with his way of living—by his wits—but there was nothing left over. His relatives were genuinely poor, and childlike about it. Their frugality seemed to him sordid, their impracticality spellbound. Their unwise luxuries shocked him; important depravations they had to suffer made him ashamed of his own far-away habits. The landscape and the jeweled weather, the family’s physical beauty, their unstinted affections, contrasted intolerably with their worries. He kept imagining pleas for help which no one would have uttered in any event. Perhaps the trouble was native to the place: as a boy he also had been always in trouble, grasping and ineffectual— he might be drawn into it again. In spite of himself he dreamed of running away, once more. Gallantly, the wistful women reassured him. “Do not exaggerate,” they said. “Your imagination goes too far. We are in the habit of experiencing all this, and we suffer less than you think. We have the necessary.” What they had was food, lodging, love, and pathetic distractions, from day to day, from hand to mouth.
    There had been some changes. The younger sister, grown tall as a goddess, blunt and sensitive—she was working now between terms of college at a humiliating job in the town. Parents suddenly seem older when they have need of one. His mother, now that the childbearing epoch with its self-denial and solitude was