[IV]
Wenny walked alone down a long street of arclights, memories throbbing to the rhythm of his swift, nervous steps. Every instant he seemed to walk from end to end the whole street of his life. Back in his childhood it had been unaccountable and dark, overhung; where was it he had walked down a narrow alley between towering blind brick walls that trembled with a roar of hidden engines? The terror of it had been like that. Then breaks of lollipop-colored sunlight, little redroofed houses set back among lawns of green baize, set about with toy evergreens, at doors varnished farmers' wives in Dutch caps, tiny, like through the wrong end of the telescope, shepherding Noah's animals out of the cardboard ark; and the smell of the varnish scaling off toys, grain of wood grimed by the fingers, black gleam of the floor under the bay window. Then streets to go out in alone, runnings to the corner drugstore, vast, glittering, reeking with dangerous smells, to buy aspirin for Auntie. Terror of faces looking out through grated area windows. And now all that's over. I am going to live. The uneven frozen slush on the pavement crunched underfoot.
And the little funny store where they had candy canes striped like barberpoles and toy trumpets; tin shiny through green and red bright paint; and the feel of rough brown paper twisted funnel-shape, cornucopias, horns of plenty, Auntie said they were. And the smell of schoolrooms and ink on his fingers, and himself walking home fast to get away from Pug Williams, who said he'd smash his dirty mug in. Fire engines and bare, proud arms of firemen loafing in the enginehouse. Muckers, bad-smelling in brown black clothes, who threw snowballs at you and wrote dirty words on the pavement, reckless, who had no aunts to scold them. And tonight I walk fast to get away from all these memories, because tomorrow I am going to live.
And there had been the time he had first discovered memories, when he had held his life out at arms' length and looked at it. And the streets had been full of girls then, the tilt of heels, ankles, calves swelling under wind-yanked skirts; the hot blush and the sudden trembling heartbeat when his eyes met a girl's eyes; the girls giggling over sodas in corner drugstores. The smell of hot asphalt and oil from a steam-roller puffing and clanking in front of the house, the wonderfulness of engines and boats, whistles and the churned harbor-water as the liner left the wharf. Ballantyne read with smarting eyes after bedtime, black faces against blue sea and chattering paraquets greener than an emerald and himself brownly naked in the surf of lonely beaches. Now for all that. No more dreams, I'm going live tomorrow.
The funny excited anticipation when he first saw the sign in the subway: Out to Mass. Avenue and the College Yard; then the intonations of arguing voices, hands knocking the ashes out of pipes, card catalogues in the library, the dazzle of unimagined horizons with phrases of all the philosophers going by like the transparencies in a political parade. His aunt in a coffin, her grey face brittle under glass like the imitation flowers in showcases in Peabody. His father and mother bustling about. During the service he had run away and locked himself in the bathroom and cried like when he had been in a temper when he was very little. And now here I am, and what am I going to do to live without dreams? Tomorrow and tomorrow ... how silly that's Shakespeare.
He was walking down a straight deserted street through Cambridgeport. A few trees cut the cold glint of light against windows and scrawled shadows over the uneven snowpiles along the gutters. He walked fast, staring at the arclights that were violet in the center and gave off green and orange rays through the thin mist. At a corner in front of a red A. P. store a group of boys followed him with their eyes. Muckers.
"O, Algy!... It's late, Algernon," they taunted him in falsetto voices as he passed. A snowball whizzed past his ear.
"How in hell do they know I'm in college? Must be the smell," he muttered amusedly. A sudden tingle of curiosity went through him to know about those boys on the corner. How he'd lain awake at night thinking of muckers when he was a kid, making himself stories of fights, things with girls, adventures he'd do if he were a mucker, if he were to run away from Aunt Susan and be a mucker. He thought of himself scuttling over roofs from the cops, shots twanging hard in the zero-green night, dancing belly to belly with a painted girl in a cellar. But enough of dreams. Tomorrow I'm going to live.
Busy his mind had been all the evening, urging his tired legs on to its throb, clanking out memories raspingly, the way a press turns out papers; all at once he knew why. He had to keep from thinking of Nan.