Now at Cambridge, in the house of the Murphys on Trowbridge Street, he found himself living with the Irish for the first time, and he discovered that the Murphys were utterly different from all the Irish he had known before, and all that he had felt and believed about them. He soon discovered that the Murphys were a typical family of the Boston Irish. It was a family of five: there were Mr. and Mrs. Murphy, two sons and a daughter. Mrs. Murphy ran the house on Trowbridge Street, which they owned, and rented the rooms to lodgers, Mr. Murphy was night watchman in a warehouse on the Boston water-front, the girl was a typist in an Irish business house in Boston, the older boy, Jimmy, had a clerical position in the Boston City Hall, and the youngest boy, Eddy, whom the youth knew best, was a student at Boston College. In addition there were two Irish lodgers who had lived with them for years: Mr. Feeney, a young man who worked at Raymond’s, a department store in Washington Street, Boston, and Mr. O’Doul, a middle-aged man, unmarried, who occupied the front room upstairs just over the boy’s own room. Mr. O’Doul was a civil engineer, he drank very heavily, and he would sometimes be confined to his bed for days at a time with terrible attacks of rheumatism which would bend, gnarl, and twist him, and render him incapable of movement.
But in the Murphys the boy discovered none of the richness, wildness, extravagance, and humour of such people as Mike Fogarty, Tim Donovan, or the MacReadys — the Irish he had known at home. The Murphys were hard, sterile, arid, meagre, and cruel: they were disfigured by a warped and infuriated puritanism, and yet they were terribly corrupt. There was nothing warm, rich, or generous about them or their lives: it seemed as if the living roots of nature had grown gnarled and barren among the walls and pavements of the city; it seemed that everything that is wild, sudden, capricious, whimsical, passionate, and mysterious in the spirit of the race had been dried and hardened out of them by their divorce from the magical earth their fathers came from, as if the snarl and jangle of the city streets, the barren and earthless angularity of steel and stone and brick had entered their souls. Even their speech had become hard, grey, and sterile: the people were almost inarticulate; it is doubtful if one of them had three hundred words in his vocabulary: the boy noticed that the men especially — Murphy, his two sons, Feeney, and O’Doul — made constant use of a few arid words and phrases, which, with the intonation of the voice and a slight convulsive movement of the arms and hands, filled in enormous vacancies in thought and feeling, and said all that they could say or wished to say. Chief among these words or phrases was “YOU know?” . . . or “YOU know what I mean?”— words which were uttered with a slight protesting emphasis on “You,” a slight and painful movement of the hands or shoulders, and an air that the listener must fill in for himself all that they wanted to imply. For epithets of rich resounding rage, for curses thick and opulent with fury, in which he had believed their tongues were apt and their spirits prodigal, he discovered that they had no more to offer than “Chee!” or “Jeez!” or “Ho-ly Jeez!” or “Christ!” or “HO-ly Christ!” or occasionally “HO-ly Mary!” Finally, they made a constant and stupefying use of that terrible grey abortion of a word “guy”: it studded their speech with the numberless monotony of paving brick; without it they would have been completely speechless and would have had to communicate by convulsions of their arms and hands and painful croakings from their tongueless throats — the word fell upon the spirit of the listener with the grey weariness of a cold incessant drizzle; it flowed across the spirit like a river of concrete; hope, joy; the power to feel and think were drowned out under the relentless and pitiless aridity of its flood.
At first, he thought these words and phrases were part of a meagre but sufficient pattern which they had learned in order to meet the contingencies of life and business with alien and Protestant spirits, as waiters in European café‘s, restaurants, and dining-cars will learn a few words of English in order to serve the needs of British and American tourists — he thought this because he saw something sly, closed, conspiratorial, mocking and full of hatred and mistrust, in their relations with people who were not members of their race and their religion; he thought they had a warm, secret and passionate life of their own which never could be known by a stranger. But he soon found that this belief was untrue: even in their conversations with one another, they were almost inarticulate — a race which thought, felt, and spoke with the wooden insensitivity of automatons or dummies on whose waxen souls a few banal formulas for speech and feeling had been recorded. He heard some amazing performances: every evening toward six o’clock the family would gather in their dingy living-room at the end of the hall, Mr. Feeney and Mr. O’Doul would join them, and then he could hear the voices of the men raised in argument, protest, agreement, denial, affirmation and belief, or scepticism, evoking a ghastly travesty of all of man’s living moments of faith, doubt, and passion, and yet speaking for hours at a time, with the idiotic repetitions of a gramophone held by its needle to a single groove, a blunted jargon of fifty meaningless words:
“What guy?”
“DAT guy!”
“Nah, nah, nah, not him — duh otheh guy!”
“Wich guy do yuh mean — duh big guy?”
“Nah, nah, nah — yuh got it all wrong! — Not HIM— duh little guy!”
“Guh-WAN!”— a derisive laugh —“Guh-wan!”
“Watcha tryin’ t’ do — KID me? Dat guy neveh saw de day he could take Grogan. Grogan ‘ud bat his brains out.”
“Guh-WAN! Yer full of prunes! . . . Watcha tryin’ t’ give me? Dat guy ‘ud neveh take Tommy Grogan in a million yeahs! He couldn’t take Tommy duh best day he eveh saw! Grogan ‘ud have him on de floeh in thirty seconds!”
“HO-ly Ghee!”
“Sure he would!”
“Guh-WAN, Guh-WAN! Yer CRAZY! GROGAN! HO-ly Ghee!”
And this, with laughter, denial, agreement — all the appurtenances of conversation among living men — could go on unweariedly for hours at a time.
Sometimes he would interrupt these conversations for a moment: he would go back to leave a message, to pay the rent, to ask if anyone had called.
As soon as he knocked, the voices would stop abruptly, the room would grow suddenly hushed, there would be whispers and a dry snickering laughter: in a moment someone would say “Come in,” and he would enter a room full of hushed and suddenly straightened faces. The men would sit quietly or say a word or two of greeting, friendly enough in appearance, but swift sly looks would pass between them, and around the corners of their thin, hard mouths there would be something loose, corrupt and mocking. Mrs. Murphy would rise and come to greet him, her voice filled with a false heartiness, an unclean courtesy, a horrible and insolent travesty of friendliness, and her face would also have the look of having been suddenly straightened out and solemnly compressed; she would listen with a kind of evil attention, but she would have the same loose, mocking look, and the quiet sly look would pass between her and the others. Then, when he had left them and the door had closed behind him, there would be the same sly silence for a moment, then a low muttering of words, a sudden violence of hard derisive laughter, and someone saying, “HO-ly Jeez!”
He despised them: he loathed them because they were dull, dirty, and dishonest, because their lives were stupid, barren, and ugly, for their deliberate and insolent unfriendliness and for the conspiratorial secrecy and closure of their petty and vicious lives, entrenched solidly behind a wall of violent and corrupt politics and religious fanaticism, and regarding the alien, the stranger, with the hostile and ignorant eyes of the peasant.
All of the men had a dry, meagre, and brutal quality: Mr. Murphy was a little man with a dry, corky figure; he had a grey face, a thin sunken mouth, around which the line of loose mockery was always playing, and a closely cropped grey moustache. The boy always found him in his shirt-sleeves, with his shoes off and his stockinged feet thrust out upon a chair. Feeney, O’Doul, Jimmy and Eddy Murphy, although of various sizes, shapes, and ages, all had thick tallowy-looking skins, hard dull eyes and a way of speaking meagrely out of the corners of their loose thin mouths. Mrs. Murphy was physically the biggest of the lot, with a certain quality of ripeness and fertility, however blighted, that none of the others had: she was a large slatternly woman, with silvery white hair which gave her somehow a look of sly and sinister haggishness; she had a high, flaming colour marked with patches of eczematous red, her voice was hearty and she had a big laugh, but her face also had the false, hostile and conspiratorial secrecy of the others.
Eddy Murphy, the youngest boy, was also the best of the crowd. All decent and generous impulse had not yet been killed or deadened in him; he still possessed a warped and blunted friendliness, the rudiments of some youthful feeling for a better, warmer, bolder, and more liberal kind of life. As time went on, he made a few awkward, shamed, and inarticulate advances toward friendship; he began to come into the young man’s room from time to time, and presently to tell him a little of his life at college and his hopes for the future. He was a little fellow, with the same dry, febrile, alert, and corky figure that his father had: he was one of the dark Irish; he had black hair and black eyes, and one of his legs was badly bowed and bent outward, the result, he said, of having broken it in a high-school football game. The first time he came into the room he stood around shyly, awkwardly, and mistrustfully for a spell, blurting out a few words from time to time, and looking at the books and papers with a kind of dazed and stricken stupefaction.
“Watcha do wit all dese books? Huh?”
“I read them.”
“Guh-WAN! Watcha tryin’ t’ hand me? Y’ ain’t read all dem books! Dey ain’t no guy dat’s read dat much.”
As a matter of fact, there were only two or three hundred books in the place, but he could not have been more impressed if the entire contents of the Widener Library had been stored there.
“Well, I have read them all,” the other said. “Most of them, anyway, and a lot more besides.”
“Guh-WAN! No kiddin’!” he said, in a dazed tone and with an air of astounded disbelief. “Watcha want to read so much for?”
“I like to read. Don’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t know. YOU know,” he said painfully, with the slightest convulsive movement of his hands and shoulders. “ . . . ‘S’all right.”
“You have to read for your classes at Boston College, don’t you?”
“DO I?” he cried, with a sudden waking to life. “I’ll say I do! . . . HO-ly Chee! Duh way dose guys pile it on to you is a CRIME!”
There was another awkward silence; he continued to stare at the books and to fumble about in an embarrassed and tongue-tied manner, and suddenly he burst out explosively and triumphantly: “Shakespeare was de greatest poet dat evah lived. He wrote plays an’ sonnets. A sonnet is a pome of foihteen lines: it is composed of two pahts, de sextet an’ de octrave.”
“That’s pretty good. They must make you work out there?”
“DO they?” he cried. “I’ll tell duh cock-eyed world dey do! . . . Do you know who de greatest prose-writeh was?” he burst out with the same convulsive suddenness.
“No . . . who was it? Jonathan Swift?”
“Guh-WAN!”
“Addison? . . . Dryden? . . . Matthew Arnold?” the youth asked hopefully.
“Guh-WAN, Guh-WAN!” he shouted derisively. “Yuh’re way off!”
“Am I? . . . Who was it then?”
“James Henry Cardinal Nooman,” he crowed triumphantly. “Dat’s who it was! . . . Father Dolan said so. . . . Chee! . . . Dey ain’t nuttin’ dat guy don’t know! He’s duh greatest English scholeh livin’! . . . Nooman wrote de Apologia pro Vita Suo,” he said triumphantly. “Dat’s Latin.”
“Well, yes, he IS a good writer,” said the other boy. “But Thomas Carlyle is a good writer, too?” he proposed argumentatively.
“Guh-WAN!” shouted Eddy derisively. “Watcha givin’ me?” He was silent a moment; then he added with a grin, “Yuh know de reason why you say dat?”
“No, why?”
“It’s because yuh’re a Sout’paw,” and suddenly he laughed, naturally and good-naturedly.
“A Southpaw? How do you mean?”
“Oh, dat’s duh name de fellows call ’em out at school,” he said.
“Call who?”
“Why, guys like you,” he said. “Dat’s de name we call duh Protestants,” he said, laughing. “We call ’em Sout’paws.”
The word in its connotation of a life that was hostile, hard, fanatic, and suspicious of everything alien to itself was disgraceful and shameful, but there was something irresistibly funny about it too, and suddenly they both laughed loudly.
After that, they got along together much better: Eddy came in to see the other youth quite often, he talked more freely and naturally, and sometimes he would bring his English themes and ask for help with them.
Such were the Boston Irish as he first saw them; and often as he thought of the wild, extravagant and liberal creatures of his childhood — of Mr. Fogarty, Tim Donovan, and the MacReadys — it seemed to him that they belonged to a grander and completely different race; or perhaps, he thought, the glory of earth and air and sky there had kept them ripe and sweet as they always were, while their brothers here had withered upon the rootless pavements, soured and sickened in the savage tumult of the streets, grown hard and dead and ugly in the barren land.
The only person near him in the house, and the only person there the boy saw with any regularity was a Chinese student named Wang: he had the room next to him — in fact, he had the two next rooms, for he was immensely rich, the son of a man in the mandarin class who governed one of the Chinese provinces.
But his habits and conduct were in marked contrast to those of the average Oriental who attends an American university. These others, studious seekers after knowledge, had come to work. Mr. Wang, a lazy and good-humoured wastrel with more money than he could spend, had come to play. And play he did, with a whole-hearted devotion to pleasure that was worthy of a better purpose. His pleasures were for the most part simple, but they were also costly, running to flowered-silk dressing gowns, expensively tailored clothes cut in a rakish Broadway style, silk shirts, five-pound boxes of chocolate creams, of which he was inordinately fond, week-end trips to New York, stupendous banquets at an expensive Chinese restaurant in Boston, phonograph records, of which he had a great many, and the companionship of “nice flat girls”— by this he meant to say his women should be “fat,” which apparently was the primary requisite for voluptuous pulchritude.
Mr. Wang himself was just a fat, stupid, indolent, and good-hearted child: his two big rooms in the rear of the Murphy establishment were lavishly furnished with carved teak-wood, magnificent screens, fat divans, couches, and chests. The rooms were always lighted with the glow of dim and sensual lamps, there was always an odour of sandalwood and incense, and from time to time one heard Mr. Wang’s shrill sudden scream of childish laughter. He had two cronies, young Chinese who seemed as idle, wealthy, and pleasure-loving as himself; they came to his rooms every night, and then one could hear them jabbering and chattering away in their strange speech, and sometimes silence, low eager whisperings, and then screams of laughter.
The boy had grown to know the Chinese very well; Mr. Wang had come to him to seek help on his English composition themes — he was not only stupid but thoroughly idle, and would not work at anything — and the boy had written several for him. And Mr. Wang, in grateful recompense, had taken him several times to magnificent dinners of strange delicious foods in the Chinese restaurant, and was for ever urging on him chocolates and expensive cigarettes. And no matter where the Chinaman saw him now, whether in his room, or on the street, or in the Harvard Yard, he would always greet him with one joke — a joke he repeated over and over with the unwearied delight of a child or an idiot. And the joke was this: Mr. Wang would come up slyly, his fat yellow face already beginning to work, his fat throat beginning to tremble with hysterical laughter. Then, wagging his finger at the young American, the Chinaman would say:
“Lest night I see you with big flat girl. . . . Yis, yis, yis,” he would scream with laughter as the young man started to protest, shaping voluptuous curves meanwhile with his fat yellow hands —“Big flat girl — like this — yis, yis, yis!” he would scream again, and bend double, choking, stamping at the ground, “nice flat girl — like this — yis, yis, yis, yis, yis.”
He had perpetrated this “joke” so often, and at such unseasonable places, that it had now become embarrassing. He seemed, in fact, to delight in coming upon his victim while he was in serious conversation with some dignified-looking person, and he had already caught the boy three times in this way while he was talking to Dodd, to Professor Hatcher, and finally to a professor with a starched prim face, who had taught American Literature for thirty years, and whose name was Fust. Nothing could be done to stop him; protests at the impropriety of the proceeding only served to set him off again; he was delighted at the embarrassment he caused and he would shout down every protest rapturously, screaming, “Yis, yis, yis — nice flat girl — like this, eh,” and would shape fat suggestion with his fat hands.