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

over, attached importance to plebian comforts and the opinion of her neighbors. His father had no savings, was dissatisfied with his work, and being vague of intellect but powerfully imaginative, dreamed a pitiful ending, as if his life were a poem. His brother-in-law was in financial straits. His married sister was still in love but sick. Her well-cut cheeks were sallow; and seeing the penalties of love, judging that existence would be vapid without it, her short-sighted sapphire eyes had grown insufferably humble. Her infant son, less than a year old, was the first of the third generation, the reason for the hardest work, the object of the most far-reaching anxieties, and for the other son (his uncle) the object of penetrating emotion. It happened that he had no child by those he loved, nor did he know how to plan to have one.
    The child seemed ideal: humanity and animality united, simplified almost to nothing, all the possible plays of mind with flesh— character in its first incarnation as a sort of worm. Now he lay, never still, with the motions of a sea-weed. Now disappointment possessed him, and his whole body turned red with sorrow. Now for lack of other intentions, holding on to something, he dropped his weight on his heels and sharply straightened, sprang and sprang up and down in one place. Naked and murmuring in someone’s clasped hands he slipped about, revolved inside his skin if he could not do more, as a fish or eel fresh from its element might. When he slept, the dimpled body (half-naked, the smallest pearls of sweat shining a little on it) seemed to grow heavier, with the fainted look of hot-weather flowers, the classic hands wide open. If under surveillance his will-power fixed upon some forbidden goal, softly, maniacally, he would maneuver and struggle—until wearier than he, one took him elsewhere, to other stimuli. The young man’s heart would be in his throat, for he knew it well, this pathos of obstinacy; it was not in his power to renounce, either.
    The work of the household—badly organized, for all were distracted by tenderness and worry—turned about this proud baby. It exhausted them every day; the washing and ironing, the cooking, the heating of water and the bathing, the cleaning. Often the young mother could only give advice and look on, shamefaced; now and then she herself needed attention. The child woke at five in the morning, was fed at short intervals upon steamed vegetables, fruit, porridge, and mutton juice, as well as milk, and had to be put to sleep three times in the twenty-four hours.
    The home-comer worked as best he could, chiefly as nursemaid. He fed the baby and endured his fits of temper, dressed and un dressed him, and undertook to teach him regularity in his lower functions—the muscles and the organs so powerful in miniature, insubordinate; the sounds of sensuousness and displeasure melting into each other lightly. He bathed and powdered him; the sweet-smelling hands struck his mouth, and screams of panic broke forth if the downy head was laid too low, too near the bathwater. By the small fenced bed he kept drawing away the bottle of milk from the inattentively palpitant mouth; and only the threat of deprivation made its appetite take precedence over sleep.
    If he had had a son this should and might well have been he. The questioning carriage of the long head, the mouth a little loosely pouted, the light hard eyes—they were to be seen in photographs of himself at that, indeed at any age. However, all his mother’s children had looked alike, and here was more than resemblance. His character recognized itself: its outline, the tendencies, the elements. The reactions to discipline, to sensation, to boredom, were his own. In himself, also, rude and selfish vigor was offset by sensibility as defenseless as if a layer of skin were lacking. He noted (it might have been by introspection) the pitiful fury, the sudden fatigues that were like falling ill, the gentle coma after