330: The years . . .
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 12 continues
THE YEARS that followed were difficult ones. The Studebaker Motor Company began clawing its way back. The Babbington dealership reopened, for three days a week, with a staff of two: Herb and Old Randolph. Herb was working on straight commission. Garth Castle did not come back. He lived at the beach, avoiding the company of anyone who made him feel that he ought to shake off this setback, pick himself up, dust himself off, get a grip on himself, pull himself together, get back to work — especially May. Whenever Garth looked at her, he saw in her face, in her eyes, the admiration she still had for him, and that look of trust and confidence made him feel like a fake and a failure. In fact, he had been something of a fake, but May had never objected to that quality in him; she’d considered it part of his charm.
The truth was that Garth was afraid to go back to work. He was afraid of failing again. The world, the nation, and Studebaker had pulled a dirty trick on him, letting him get his hopes up and then letting him fall, like some wiseacre who pulls a chair out from under a guy. Garth wasn’t going to fall for the same nasty gag twice; he wasn’t even going to risk falling for it.
At the beach, Garth hung around with the clammies. He preferred the ones who were living “over south” because they weren’t comfortable on the mainland, especially the failures, and among the failures he preferred those who had managed to make failures of themselves despite innate ability, good fortune, helping hands, and powerful friends, the ones who had failed because they were too lazy to succeed, those of whom he could say to himself, “I may be next to nothing, but at least I’m here through no fault of my own. This guy — why, this guy is nothing but a lazy bum.” He acquired the manner of a failed clammy as quickly and thoroughly as he had the manner of a New York gentleman, with this difference: he’d had to invent his New York gentleman, since he hadn’t had the opportunity to observe any very closely, but he had opportunities galore to observe failed clammies, and so his emulation was in this case a far better one than before. He spent more and more time at Nosy’s; the drinking that in the past had made him seem charming and witty now only made him sullen and dismal.
May tried again and again to win him back from the beach. At first, she visited him often. She brought Herb and Lorna and other friends, and she tried to re-create the happy times they’d enjoyed in the cottage. Garth hid from these attempts to resuscitate the old gaiety. Most often it was Herb who tracked him down, dragged, pushed, and tugged him out of Nosy’s, and delivered him to May. As Garth grew worse, fewer of May’s friends were willing to make themselves available for these embarrassing excursions to the beach, and as the Depression grew worse, fewer could afford to maintain their cottages. The places fell into disrepair. They began to look like their former selves: the shacks they had grown from. Garth got the isolation he had sought, and in Nosy’s he advanced a twisted Emersonianism: the notion that a bum was born to be a bum and would be a bum forever, “just like those shacks — those old shacks that we tried to fancy up! Shacks again! They were always shacks under the skin.”
[to be continued on Friday, September 2, 2022]
In Topical Guide 330, Mark Dorset considers Personality Traits: Persistence Thereof; and Self-Presentation: Façade and Substance from this episode.
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