Burning boy, p.42
Burning Boy, page 42
Hawker said to the girl: “I—I—I shall miss you dreadfully.”
She turned to look at him and smiled. “Shall you?” she said in a low voice.
“Yes,” he said. Thereafter he stood before her awkwardly and in silence. She scrutinized the boards of the floor. Suddenly she drew a violet from a cluster of them upon her gown and thrust it out at him as she turned toward the approaching Oglethorpe.
“Good-night, Mr. Hawker,” said the latter. “I am very glad to have met you, I’m sure. Hope to see you in town. Good-night.”
He stood near when the girl said to Hawker: “Good-by. You have given us such a charming summer. We shall be delighted to see you in town. You must come some time when the children can see you, too. Good-by.”
“Good-by,” replied Hawker, eagerly and feverishly trying to interpret the inscrutable feminine face before him. “I shall come at my first opportunity.”
The action then travels south to New York, where we meet Hawker’s impecunious artist friends and the courtship staggers along in a succession of three one-on-one conversations between Hawker and Grace at her family’s uptown mansion, described as an “endless building of brown stone about which there was the poetry of a prison.” Absorbing as the country passages have been, the story takes on added life in the city, for it is there that Crane gives us the book’s finest creation, the artists’ model Florinda O’Conner, known to her friends as Splutter, who is far and away the most touching, fully realized female character in all of Crane’s work.* Significantly, Oglethorpe has disappeared from sight, and instead of wondering which man the heiress will choose, we now wonder which woman the painter will choose—because we know, from the instant she turns up in chapter XIX, that Splutter is heels over head for him.
Hollanden is still there, but he no longer occupies center stage as he did in the first half of the book, appearing at several crucial moments to keep his plot spinning forward, as Wrinkles and Company take over the bulk of the scenes. They are an amusing, high-spirited gang of innocents, vivacious mopers battling through various forms of adversity (rejections, hunger, delayed payments for published work, monthly rent panics) in the dogged hope of establishing themselves as magazine illustrators and cartoonists. Their living conditions are directly drawn from Crane’s yearslong sojourn in the land of male cohabitation, and the room they share (referred to as the den) is identical to the one he shared with Greene, Carroll, and the others—even down to the coal bin masquerading as a piece of furniture. Every once in a while, a member of the gang will deliver an unforgettable remark, as Pennoyer does when he understands that they are all facing a weekend of empty stomachs (“Singular thing.… You get so frightfully hungry as soon as you learn that there are no more meals coming”) or as Grief does when he prances around the room delivering a comic monologue about the preference of successful American painters for foreign subjects over American ones, aping their scornful attitude by declaring, “How the devil can I paint America when nobody has done it before me?”—but mostly they banter among themselves, play cards, prepare their skimpy meals if and when they have food, and take an inordinate interest in Hawker’s affairs. Once Hawker returns to New York and Pennoyer accidentally catches him looking at the violets in “the palm of his hand,” that interest evolves into an obsessive preoccupation with his affair: the mystery of the two flowers and the name of the unknown woman those flowers represent. It matters to them because Hawker is their shining star, the friend who has made good, the brilliant painter who springs for their rent whenever they are squeezed, and because the god from across the hall no longer seems to be himself, they suspect that whatever is wrong with him can be answered by solving the riddle of the two violets. On top of that, they are just plain curious, dying to know simply for the sake of knowing, so they enter the story by becoming observers of the story, and once again, with a few additions and subtractions to and from the cast of characters, the story in the second half of the book continues to be the story of the story itself.
Splutter is one of the boys and not one of the boys, the sole female presence ever admitted into their squalid, one-room fraternity house. “A lithe and rather slight girl,” she comes around to the den often and shares meals with them, smokes with them, drinks with them, and once even cooks a spaghetti dinner for them (exposing her “wonderful arms” when she rolls up her sleeves), and those two shorthand comments about her appearance make her the only central character in the novel whose looks are referred to at all. In that enclosed male world of teases and insults, she holds her own with the young men by calling them “idiots” and “dubs” (losers), and they tease her back by calling her “a poor outspoken kid”: “Don’t you know that when you are so frank you defy every law of your sex, and wild eyes will take your trail?”—which in fact is a compliment and proof of how much they care for her. They have helped her out of “scrapes” several times in the past, and now that they are down on their luck and she is on her feet again because of her modeling work, she wants to return the favor by helping them through this rough patch, but they are too embarrassed to accept her help and turn it down by “acting like a set of dudes,” that is, by posing as chivalric gentlemen who would rather starve than accept help from a girl. What holds them together is their universal admiration of the god from across the hall. All of them agree that Billie Hawker is an extraordinary person, and because the boys know that Splutter is in love with him and Billie is not in love with her, their affection for her is also tinged with pity. The sad truth is that she knows it herself, which is what makes her such a poignant, shimmering character: not the star of the show but the one all eyes turn to whenever she appears, the one who steals the audience’s heart. Early on she says, “Billie Hawker doesn’t give a rap for me and never tried to make out that he did.” That seems to be a definitive pronouncement, but this is a romance, after all, and obstacles are the stuff that drives readers of love stories to go on turning the pages, and perhaps Crane is setting us up for the moment when the girl with the wonderful arms will manage to overcome the obstacles that stand between her and Billie.
She never does, but the ride to that impasse travels through the most engaging parts of the book, for the dense, chuckleheaded Hawker has no clue about her feelings for him and thoughtlessly degrades her again and again, too preoccupied with his own love drama to understand what he is doing. On his first day back in the city, when he walks into the den and doesn’t bother to say hello to her, she turns around and remarks, “Well, Billie Hawker.… You don’t seem very glad to see a fellow.” (Fellow: a sign of her wit, but also of her despair.) Hawker brusquely replies, “Heavens, did you think I was going to turn somersaults…?” Later that same day, with Hawker decked out in his best clothes and sporting an elegant pair of gray gloves (about to go uptown to call on the lady of the violets), he runs into Splutter charging up the darkened staircase carrying food and drink for a dinner with the boys. When they move toward the light seeping through a small window, she looks him over and says, “Oh, cracky.… How fine you are, Billie. Going to a coronation?” He mumbles something about having to visit “a friend,” and when she asks him to join them for dinner after he returns (“It’s fun when we all dine together. Won’t you, Billie?”), he hems and haws with a noncommittal “I’ll see … I can’t tell.” When he arrives uptown and comes to the door of “a certain austere house,” it turns out that Grace isn’t there. More than disappointed, he acts as if he has been betrayed, and “when he rounded the corner his lips were set strangely as if he were a man seeking revenge.”
Cut to the dinner preparations at the den. Splutter is chilling the wine on a window ledge as she cooks the spaghetti in her rolled-up sleeves, and Grief and Wrinkles are arguing about which one of them should go out to buy the potato salad. They hear someone approach, “whistling an air from ‘Traviata,’ which rang loud and clear and low and muffled as the whistler wound around the intricate hallways. This air was as much a part of Hawker as his coat.” Eventually, Hawker and Florinda volunteer to fetch more provisions (claret, cognac, cigarettes, among other things), and as they are going down the stairs, she bluntly asks him, “What—what makes you so ugly, Billie?” Is he really ugly? he asks. “Yes, you are ugly as anything.” Thrown back by her comments and the “grievance in her eyes,” he says that he doesn’t want to be ugly, speaking in a tone that is suddenly and unexpectedly “tender,” or at least “seems” to be tender, which prompts Florinda to place her hand on his arm as they continue down the “intensely dark” staircase, suggesting that they have arrived at a truce and the matter has been settled. When they stop in at the “illustrious purveyors of potato salad on Second Avenue,” however, Florinda offers to carry the package so Hawker’s gloves won’t get “soiled,” and without warning he explodes at her about “this blasted glove business,” accusing her of
“intimating that I’ve got the only pair of grey gloves in the universe, but you are wrong. There are several pairs, and these need not be preserved as unique in history.”
“They’re not grey. They’re—”
“They are grey. I suppose your distinguished ancestors in Ireland did not educate their families in the matter of gloves, and so you are not expected to—”
“Billie!”
“You are not expected to believe that people wear gloves excepting in cold weather, and then you expect to see mittens.”
He has stomped on her with his words, assaulted her family and her background, humiliated her. When they return to the building, he makes a small, wordless show of contrition by offering to guide her up the dark stairs, but when he reaches for her arm, she pulls it away. Understandably. After his cruel outburst, why would she want him to touch her?
We see them alone together for the last time in the next chapter. There has been another group dinner at the den, and as it is getting late (past eleven), and as the neighborhood is too dangerous for an unaccompanied woman to walk through it at night, the boys play a hand of poker to decide which one of them, as Grief puts it, “will have the distinguished honor of conveying Miss Splutter to her home and mother.” Hawker wins the hand with three sevens, and as the two of them go off into the night, heading toward her apartment building on Third Avenue (“a flat with fire escapes written all over the face of it”), Crane momentarily departs from his “‘quick’ style” to offer up a one-paragraph digression about the constant repair work inflicted on New York’s streets and the mountains of fresh paving stones that block the sidewalks, which have created the “tangled midnight” through which Hawker is conducting Florinda home and the air of “grim loneliness” that hangs over “the uncouth shapes in the street.” As they approach her apartment house, Florinda asks him a question similar to the one she asked in the previous chapter, and at last something begins to stir inside Hawker’s thick skull.
“Billie,” said the girl suddenly, “what makes you so mean to me?”
A peaceful citizen emerged from behind a pile of debris, but he might not have been a peaceful citizen, so the girl clung to Hawker.
“Why, I’m not mean to you, am I?”
“Yes,” she answered. As they stood on the steps of the flat of innumerable fire escapes, she slowly turned and looked up at him.…
He returned her glance. “Florinda,” he cried, as if enlightened, and gulping suddenly at something in his throat. The girl studied the steps and moved from side to side, as do the guilty ones in country schoolhouses. Then she went slowly into the flat. There was a little red lamp hanging on a pile of stones to warn people that the street was being repaired.
That’s it. Hawker has finally understood that she is in love with him, but other than call out her name, he says nothing, and other than swallow hard, as if choked up with a sudden rush of feeling, he does nothing. Then, as Florinda sways back and forth and looks down at the steps, no doubt waiting for Hawker to say something or do something, Crane follows with a curious, unexpected comparison—likening her to a guilty schoolgirl—which all at once infantilizes Florinda and seems to bar her from consideration as a sexual being, and because Crane’s imaginary schoolhouse is not in the city but the country, she has also been turned into an unsophisticated hick—hardly the sort of woman the social-climbing Hawker would be attracted to. And yet, in the last sentence, there is the mysterious red lamp, the universal sign of prostitution, in this case dangling from a pile of stones to warn pedestrians that there is a risk in walking down this street, and perhaps there is a risk, perhaps even a sexual risk, for at this point in the New York half of the novel Hawker has yet to see Grace again, and those rooting for the noble Splutter to turn his snob head toward her, and in the process reclaim his own inherent nobility, still have reason to hope. So ends chapter XXIV, with Crane managing to perform the impossible trick of having his cake and eating it, too, twisting his parody of love story conventions into such a merry, tangled knot that we can enjoy watching him poke fun at them even as we wait to see what will happen next. Two violets! “Gulping suddenly at something in his throat”! These are the ingredients of soaring Italian operas and steamy, pseudo-pornographic French novels—not unlike the one by Zola that Crane ridiculed in “Why Did the Young Clerk Swear?” back in the spring of ’93. But Splutter breaks through those hackneyed tropes to become something real, and however contrived the plot might be, we want to know how things will turn out for her.
Three chapters go by before she is mentioned again, but the outcome is still far from certain at that point, and it helps Florinda’s case that the person who speaks up for her is a disinterested party, a walk-on character who has been referred to just once, ten chapters earlier. He is a successful painter with the delicious name of Lucian Pontiac (no more Smiths and Johnsons in this book) who has employed Florinda as a model and thinks the world of her. Hawker is out one evening with Hollanden at a crowded restaurant-café when Pontiac comes over to their table and is asked to sit down, and thus the two painters meet for the first time. After a few complimentary words to Hawker about his “abilities,” Pontiac tells him that he occasionally uses one of his models. “Must say she has the best arm and wrist in the universe. Stunning figure—stunning.” When Hawker asks if he is talking about Florinda, Pontiac replies, “Yes. That’s the name. Very fine girl.… And honest, too. Honest as the devil.… I’ve been much attracted to your girl, Florinda.” “My girl?” Hawker says. Pontiac goes on to explain that last week, when he wanted to use her on Friday, she turned him down because Billie Hawker was back in the city and might need her then, and he was impressed by what he calls her “obedience and allegiance and devotion.” When he asks if Hawker did in fact use her on Friday, Hawker says no, and a moment after that, as if expressing the thoughts of the reader, Hollanden says, “Poor little beggar.”
“Who?” said Pontiac.
“Florinda,” answered Hollanden. “I suppose—”
Pontiac interrupted. “Oh, of course, it is too bad. Everything is too bad. My dear sir, nothing is so much to be regretted as the universe. But this Florinda is such a sturdy young soul. The world is against her, but, bless her heart, she is equal to the battle. She is strong in the manner of a little child. Why, you don’t know her. She—”
“I know her very well.”
“Well, perhaps you do, but for my part I think you don’t appreciate her formidable character. And stunning figure—stunning.”
“Damn it,” said Hawker to his coffee cup, which he had accidentally overturned.
“Well,” resumed Pontiac, “she is a stunning model and I think, Mr. Hawker, you are to be envied.”
Is that enough to turn Hawker in Florinda’s direction? Perhaps Crane wants us to think it is, at least for a little while, but no, it is not enough, and just days after that conversation in the restaurant, when Florinda gets her first look at Miss Fanhall through an upstairs window, she understands she hasn’t a prayer of competing against such beauty. That leads to the heartbreaking thirty-first chapter, the one passage in the book that attains a genuine emotional power, a short, quiet scene as Pennoyer walks Florinda back home following her devastating glimpse of Hawker’s beloved, and the exquisite thing about this chapter is that we know by now that Pennoyer is secretly in love with her, that he has been pining for Florinda from the moment the two of them entered the book, which turns their walk through the streets into a back-and-forth exchange of two equals, two battered souls talking at cross-purposes in a conversation that evolves into a small piece of music through repetition, rhythm, and the “one string” that goes on playing throughout: Crane’s modern, down-to-the-ground version of a classic opera duet—La Traviata without the orchestra, The Third Violet without the violets. Crane never would have been capable of writing such a passage earlier, and he never tried to do anything like it again. Just two pages long, the chapter demands to be quoted in full.
In the evening Pennoyer conducted Florinda to the flat of many fire escapes. After a period of silent tramping through the great golden avenue and the street that was being repaired, she said: “Penny, you are very good to me.”
“Why?” said Pennoyer.
“Oh, because you are. You—you are very good to me, Penny.”
“Well, I guess I’m not killing myself.”
“There isn’t many fellows like you.”
“No?”
“No. There isn’t many fellows like you, Penny. I tell you most everything and you just listen and don’t argue with me and tell me I’m a fool because you know that it—because you know that it can’t be helped anyhow.”
“Oh, nonsense, you kid. Almost anybody would be glad to—”
“Penny, do you think she is very beautiful?” Florinda’s voice had a singular quality of awe in it.
