About The Euclid Avenue Project
This novel was first release in paperback through a subsidy publisher
but achieved very poor circulation. It is now being offered at no cost to the
readers along with the music on download.com previously outlined with the hope
contributions will be sent, mentioning this project, to:
The military organization of your choice.
Previously, a specific organization was listed here
but that organization requested its name be removed from this site.
PLEASE DO NOT SEND A CONTRIBUTION TO THE EUCLID AVENUE PROJECT
The Story
A psychological novel set in wartime theatres from
World War I through Vietnam with a secondary plot love story.
The old house has been Blanche Wilson's home for all of her seventy years. It so vividly holds all those memories of her brother, Charles, laying there wasting away in the downstairs bedroom after receiving that dreadful wound in World War I. His son, Loren, so wanted to fly, even until the very day his bomber went down over Germany.
She often gazes at the other houses along the old street, many of which have their own memories that have waned away with the passing years. Carl Manning broke the hearts of all those women who thought they loved him, but he wasn't the same when he returned from Anzio. Everyone ridiculed Jamie Williamson but all that changed just before the fall of Bataan. Those two men who befriended Robert Mathis before they were killed in Korea changed him from such a wretched bastard. Randall Coleman had a brilliant career ahead of him but Vietnam and Agent Orange took it all away. Joan Warren was truly in love with Arnold Gray but when he began to think only of what he wanted for himself, it led to her ruin.
All their memories remain along the fading images along Euclid Avenue.
Behind The Story
The name John Williams Shadix has rarely appeared in bookstores and in
all likelihood, it will never appear there again. No doubt, he is the same as
many who will read this war novel – not formally educated but one who has been
educated by life. What the world makes of someone can lead to fulfillment,
sorrow, or even resenting hate but all of these emotions grant some measure of
determination. His determination was, therefore, to write this book as a loving
tribute to those who have served in all wars with the most earnest hope they
forever cherish the remembrance they deserve; and with all proceeds going to
military organizations, absolve the author of his plaguing
guilt from not having served in the Vietnam War.
In Loving Memory Of:
All of those who have fallen in battle and also those who lived but, seemingly forgotten, have wilted away – just as Euclid Avenue, as it once was, has also wilted away.
"Only the dead have seen the end of war."
Plato
"Conscience is the patron of a redeeming decision."
John Williams Shadix
The Chapters
Images
Heirs To The Spoils
The Wanting And The Resentful
Revelations Of The Heart
Dreams And Truth
Resignation
The Fulfilled And The Denied
Solitude
Infinity
Conscience Of The Reconciled
Innocence Long Forgotten
The Dominion Of Reason
A Pleading From The Ages
Encore For The Forsaken
Faces Along The Way
Requiem
Prologue
I want to tell you a story – a story that began a very long time ago but continues in many ways to this very day.
The story concerns history; that is, the events in these pages actually happened, but the characters are fictitious – or are they? Surely, in the trenches of the Great War, at Anzio, in the flack-filled skies over Europe in World War II, on the frozen mountainsides of Korea and in the sweltering jungles of Vietnam, there were hundreds, thousands of people just like them. All of them felt the same emotions as you and I do today - love, hate, fear, resent and regret.
Through these emotions, many of them reached the same conclusion about their lives that I have and perhaps you have, or will someday, reach about your own life. When one finally recognizes his mistakes, many times it is far too late in life to correct the wrong he has done. The pain and sentencing regret resulting from such a belated acknowledgement is tormenting.
I have reached that point in my life, because now I know that when those of my generation were serving in Vietnam, I should have been at their sides, but I was not. Donating what proceeds might result from this novel to military organizations seems hardly enough and is at best only a pitiful effort to escape my own profound regret.
____________________
Chapter 1
Images
Blanche
Just as they have done for so many years, the old oak and maple trees spread their branches to completely cover the street and sidewalk on either side. As a gentle wind rustles their leaves, the sunlight glimmers against the windows of the old Victorian houses along the timeworn street that now stand as fading images of what they once were. Their Gothic chimneys, rising into the clear autumn sky, cast their shadows upon the ground and in the streaking sunlight, seem ghostly apparitions of something that no longer exists. Like so many peoples' lives, Euclid Avenue bears the scars of time and permits only a momentary illusion of the old Atlanta that was so dear to the hearts of those of another time.
No matter how alluring one's hold on happiness in this life, nothing is ever lasting. Everything must eventually be claimed by time, leaving only memories, which are mercifully happy for some but only embittered for others. Some can accept change and indeed welcome it, thinking themselves fortunate to be removed from their pasts. Some remain oblivious to change. Still others can never accept change and desperately seek to hold on to their worlds as they would have them remain. It is they who are ultimately interned in a spellbinding realm somewhere between memory and reality and are disinclined to discern the difference between the two.
But what of those who once made their homes on this wearied street? What few of the old residents that remain simply refer to them as "gone," never really knowing if they have died or merely removed themselves to more contemporary environments.
Once, several generations of a family lived in the same house, but one by one, they began to disappear. A slow ruination began that, at last, yielded a succession of boarding houses and largely idle homes now containing only empty rooms and the empty lives of those who are left with only their memories. Once, the old houses had stood so proud and gracious, but that time has past.
Blanche Wilson bends down on her knees and carefully plants here last gladiola bulb – something she has done every fall for all those years. This year, she has done especially well with the zinnias, marigolds and the asters all along the front of her yard, which begins above a small stone wall and four steps leading down to the sidewalk. As she walks back across the yard, a guarded smile comes to her face when she looks at the white thrift plants on either side of the walkway. They blend so nicely with the purple, yellow and white of the other flowers and the blue hydrangeas along the front and each side of her house.
She wistfully glances over the house that has been her home for all of her seventy years and is always apprehensive of noticing some deficiency, but mercifully, it has escaped the demise that surrounds it and has been sustained by the income from her roomers and Railroad Retirement Pension. It has a high-pitched roof in several sections that was replaced three years ago. The slate gray siding and white trim has been recently painted. A large porch circles around the front to the left side and has hanging fern baskets that are neatly centered between each of the vertical columns, which have a lathed round shape at the tops and gently taper down to the banisters. At the right side of the porch, there is a three-sided extension with tall slender windows on two of its sides that extend the full two stories. It is crowned with a cone-shaped roof, which contrasts sharply with the several larger roof structures over the other sections of the building. The front door's top portion has an oblong leaded glass section and a clear transom above it that still bears the large black numbers "27" that her brother, Charles, stenciled when she was only a child.
The second story has a small balcony under a triangular roofline above the section of the porch that faces the street. The larger windows along the front of the house clearly reveal the bright white, sheer curtains with their valances at the tops and long, handing swag at each side. Two smaller oval windows at each side of the porch offer a resplendent accent to the setting that she has known and loved all her life, although the passing years have diminished much of its erstwhile eminence.
These last few years, it's always something of a strange feeling when she walks into her foyer. There on the wall where it has been for every day of her life is the wooden cross holding the ivory statue of Christ with his head gently turned to the side. He is a victim of this world, but the world has known many victims. Her brother, Charles, was a victim. How else could one describe someone who received such a terrible wound in The Great War and lay there in the downstairs bedroom wasting away for all those years? For a moment, her eyes remain fixed on the long narrow table at the back of the living room or "sitting room" as her mother called it. The white cloth with the blue embroidered flowers at each end gives the picture of Charles and his wife, Mary, such a delicate appearance. She remembers the day it was taken, just before Charles was shipped overseas. Mary was pregnant with Loren then but didn't even know it. Charles life was never the same after he received that dreadful wound. Later, he sometimes would speak of the trenches and the atmosphere of death all around him. He thought World War I was "the war to end all wars" and never imagined another such war was so soon to follow.
Loren, their son, was another victim, and the tender smile remains on her face as she looks at his picture at the other end of the table. It was taken soon after he received his wings, and he looked so proud and happy in his khaki uniform. He wanted so much to fly from the time he was only a little boy, and how much of his heart he put into his flying lessons at Chandler Field from the very first day he had the money to pay for them. Of course, then, no one knew where it would all lead. The day that picture was taken was the last time she saw him.
It's been decades since either of them was in this room, but everything around her recalls such precious memories of when her whole family was together in this house - the crochet doily her mother made so many years ago on the back of each chair and the circular tables holding their lamps with the large white, bell-shaped shades with the long tassels in front of the three windows.
Walking down the hallway past here Sears-remodeled kitchen, her thoughts turn to the morning television news reports and yet other victims – those of the Vietnam War. So much has changed. What would Charles and Loren think if they could have seen those students lying in a ditch beside the road leading to that military post? How could the commentator dare imply the presumed conscience of the protesters was even the issue? What of the soldiers in Vietnam? What of those who love and worry for them? Their fates seem so cruel and undeserved.
The new refrigerator will hold several days' food for her and the roomers but she has always gone to the market everyday and getting the new kitchen has given her no inclination to change. As she changes into her dress with the gray printed flowers she has always liked so much, she is thinking how fortunate she is that although her roomers come from such different backgrounds, mercifully, they have the same taste in food, although nothing else.
How many times over all those many years has she walked down Euclid Avenue just as she is now, watching her steps very carefully where the roots from the large oak trees have pushed the pentagon-shaped slabs several inches out of the ground, making the sidewalk very uneven. Atlanta in the fall of 1969 is quite different from what she can recall from most of her life. During the past 15 to 20 years, the tendency has been to move away from the inner city to the suburban neighborhoods that gradually began to appear along the large expressway system that now encircles the city. Changing times and changing outlooks have made the city's older neighborhoods relics that have long lost their allure to the contemporary thinker, and the consequences are vividly distinct along this old street and many comparable to it within the city. Some of those rowdies she used to have as roomers used to say all sorts of things about suburbanites that spend so much time fooling around in the yard such as they were "yardmen with sex privileges." The vague and pensive images of the old houses do little to restore her memories of her neighborhood as it once was, and now only proclaim a state of weariness that is so unsettling as she searches back, back over all those years to remember the people long lost to time.
The old Williamson house is now only a shadow of what she remembers. Once it had been a lively, sky-blue color but now has faded to a pale and lifeless gray, as if to foretell is impending death. The yard is covered with leaves and the bare wood can be seen through the peeling paint along the banisters at the front and right sides. The second story has two square, slender sections reaching into the sky, as if to make some desperate appeal for clemency from its uncertain fate. Most of the windows have shades that are pulled all the way down. Her eyes search along the second story windows that were once embellished with bright, white gingerbread siding but now are but a dying reflection of the passing of time that has not been kind to the house or to those who have lived there. Several of the weathered pieces of siding lie on the ground along a gully made by the overflowing gutters and are but another reminder of the emptiness that has been contained within those walls for so many years.
Her thoughts turn back to the images of the little Williamson boy, Jamie, whose childhood had been so unhappy. He stuttered, could not learn as easily as his schoolmates and was described by the family doctor as "slightly mentally deprived."
The boys and girls at school put it another way in the manner they treated him; and all the time he was in school, which was a time of happiness for most of them, was unpleasant for Jamie and at times, even painful. Sometimes the other boys would wait for him after school and beat him up. Blanche recants those days when he would come home, crying with his shirt torn. His mother, Bertha, would always come out into the yard, pick him up in her arms and try to offer the solace only a mother can, but those unhappy times were equally trying for her. Mercifully, when Jamie got into high school, the other boys outgrew the need to constantly bully him but he never seemed to have any friends. No one needed the friendship of someone who was "not right" and never stopped to consider how desperately Jamie needed someone's friendship for himself.
On those long summer afternoons when Bertha would come over and sit on the front porch, Blanche could readily see that what Jamie's life had become was embittering his mother when she constantly found her son seeking to vindicate his very existence.
For Jamie, World War II was almost a benediction, as during his time in the service, he felt more equal to those around him than ever before. When he came home with all the ribbons he had won, for a while, people seemed to accept him, but that didn't last very long. Eventually, he was relegated back to the status of an outsider, desperately seeking to be admitted to the world he found around him and oh so terribly alone.
At last, he got a job he could hold at the Euclid Theatre taking tickets at the door, stocking the candy counter and cleaning up the auditorium in the mornings. His life seemed to stabilize. He was making a salary sufficient for his small needs and was beginning to think of himself as something other than a burden on his family. That must have been the happiest time of his life, because Bertha would often speak of how content he seemed with his job and how he would explain to her each morning some new concept he had envisioned as to how he would lay out the candy counter that day.
But then, his newfound confidence led him too far. Since grammar school, he had always had a place in his heart for that little Simmons girl over there on Blue Ridge Court, but Jamie never stopped to realize she was no longer the little girl he remembered. Quite the contrary – she was then a quite lovely young woman and with that evolved a certain narrow-mindedness towards people like Jamie. One day, there in the lobby of the theatre, Jamie asked her for a date; and although she responded with a somewhat genteel refusal, when her boyfriend found out about it, he was obsessed with the conviction that Jamie must be put back into his place. He found Jamie in his front yard with his mother; and after shouting something about Jamie being "a damn freak that needs to be shown where you belong" gave him an unmerciful beating while Bertha pleaded with him to stop. Finally, some men from across the street stopped the one-sided confrontation, but not before Jamie's face was a bloody pulp and he had fallen to his knees, gasping for breath. What a terrible thing for a mother to witness. It was Jamie's childhood all over again, except much more unkind. Like the Simmons girl, Jamie was no longer a child. His mother took him inside, washed his face and tried to console him, just as she had done after all those times he had been beaten up after school but for such a thing to have happened in his own front yard was to dispossess him of what little self-confidence he had gained during and after the war.
After that, he was never the same. He became more withdrawn, and the repercussions of his dejection began to show in the faces of his mother and father. It wasn't a question of their enduring love for him. The very fact that they did love him was drawing them both into a vacuum in which Jamie had long found himself and seemed forever to remain. Finally, one morning when Bertha went to his room to call him for breakfast, he was not there. He had taken his military decorations and one change of clothes. God, that was nearly 25 years ago, and no one on Euclid Avenue has seen him since.
Seeing the pain the world had so unkindly chosen to thrust upon her son had quite predictably made Bertha a resentful person and when he left, that part of her that been so guardedly understanding ceased to exist. She had nothing left but a heart full of bitterness that disregarded all other emotions. When her husband died, she simply chose to retreat from the world and now, each time she's seen away from that dying old house, she's always wearing that wide-brimmed, black straw hat pulled down over her eyes, which are always looking downward. She speaks to no one and appears the image of someone whose purpose for living passed long ago.
Directly across the street is the Mathis house. Blanche never liked it, as it is completely square and has an ungainly porch only on one side that gives the impression it is put together improperly. Mildred Mathis is in the back yard and the instant she sees Blanche, she stops hanging her wash on the line and comes running across the street calling out, "Miss Blanche, Miss Blanche, I've got something to tell you!" There is a broad smile on her face as she stops at the curb beaming, "Robert just called from the plant. They've made him line foreman."
As Mildred steps onto the sidewalk, Blanche extends her hands to her and says, "I know you must be proud of him." She hopes it doesn't show in her face as her thoughts reach back to when Robert first began working at the Chevrolet Assembly Plant. The typical assembly- line worker tended to be rather a rather boisterous type of individual, and that certainly was the case with Robert as a younger man. Some would describe him as having shallow values and no clear direction in life, as he lived from paycheck to paycheck; and if he and Mildred had not lived with his parents, they could have never had made it on their own. Blanche is touched with the expression on Mildred's face, because it is one of complete happiness and so different from the first years of their marriage. "I'm trying to remember when he first started," Blanche says.
"He's been there since 1947, except for the time he spent in Korea," Mildred replies, clasping her hands under her chin. "I think he might have been crying when he called. That's so unlike him. I don't know if you remember when he first started and how he used to always say how he hated working on the assembly line."
Blanche remembers well, although Robert did not always explain it in those exact words.
Mildred seems in something of a daze as she walks back across the street, saying, "Oh Miss Blanche, I can't wait until he gets home tonight."
Blanche continues down the street and recalls there were times when Mildred and Robert's parents actually dreaded the times Robert would come home. Through the years, she's observed quite a few marriages. Some of them started happy enough but in a lot of cases, something seemed to happen, or perhaps, ceased to happen. They fell into a state of trite and daily routine that eventually overpowered what once was romance until finally, just ending them was the only charitable alternative.
Mildred couldn't have been happy. Always on paydays, Robert would meet a group of fellow workers at a bar close to the assembly plant to play shuffleboard and drink. The shape he was usually in when he finally decided to come home could hardly be described as that of a loving and understanding husband. Sometimes, Blanche could hear him screaming all the way across the street, but that that wouldn't last very long, as he would usually go to bed without supper and sleep it off. In those days, he was so very deceitful and seemed never to have anything good or positive to say about anyone or anything. Mildred, as well as his mother and father, were never sure what to expect from him next.
Robert was drafted a short while before the Korean War began, and during the time he was away, Mildred became very close to his parents. Sometimes a shared unhappiness can bring people together. It was almost as though they had received a reprieve to restore the shambles he had made of all their lives. They each loved him but everything has its limitations, and the torment that existed in that house then would have soon destroyed them all in one way or another.
It wasn't the same man who returned to Euclid Avenue when he was discharged. From the very first day he was back, very quickly, their apprehension transposed itself into a thankfulness that he had come through the war and a happiness that something had happened to him to unlock the emotions that before he had so desperately lacked. It all had something to do with a few men who had befriended him before they were killed. When someone finds his place in this life, or at last decides to accept and make the best of the place in which he finds himself, the reconciliation that ensues is often a greater benediction to those around him when they find it within themselves to be forgiving, finally knowing what they feel is indeed true love.
She stops for a moment in front of the old Manning house. The black wrought-iron fence is rusted, the glass panels in the light post are all broken and discolored and the depressing, leaf-covered lot does little to recall those years for which she searches her mind. Large blue jays dart between the branches of the old oak trees, and their sharp cries echo against the lumbering sections of the house. A gray squirrel sits erect on his back feet and intently watches her as she passes. Most everything along the street has changed so much, but she remembers the jays and squirrels, just as they are now.
Often, when she passes that old house there at Sinclair and Euclid Avenue, her thoughts turn to Elizabeth and Earl Manning and how proud they were when their son, Carl, was born. But as he grew older, he became such a disappointment, although they never would refer to him by that exact term. He never did very well in school, and it seemed he was always in some sort of trouble, but he was quite a lady's man. His mother was so hurt that time she overheard him on the telephone, bragging about how he had, as he so boastfully put it, "just drilled that girl from up there on Edgewood Avenue who had everyone, including herself, convinced she was saving herself for marriage. That was right after he finished high school. Things only became worse but it wasn't because he was a failure. Strangely enough, everything he tried seemed to bloom into an amazing success. For a few years, he moved from job to job, but this wasn't because he couldn't apply himself. He had the ability to adapt and even change the circumstances in which he found himself to conditions more favorable to him. He always seemed to be moving up in the various jobs he had – especially when he was a salesman at that car dealership down there on Whitehall Street. They said he was the most productive salesman they ever had, or at least that's the way Carl related it.
Carl always placed what he wanted for himself above everything else. Blanche remembers a few of those young women who were so bewitched by his striking good looks and overpowering self-confidence, but in one way or another (usually after he had "eaten their virginity" as he would put it), he hurt them all. His mother's love was slowly turning into a manner of regret because her son had developed into something quite the opposite of everything she had hoped for him when he was born. She was almost relieved when he was drafted soon after Pearl Harbor, but she never imagined the war would produce the man who returned to Euclid Avenue soon after VJ Day or that he would chose the career he eventually did. The years passed and Elizabeth finally attained the peace of mind and fulfillment of knowing she had brought into the world a son whose life's achievements were to reach far beyond what she had ever hoped for him. The last time Blanche saw her, she was so happy and speaking only of her son.
Just before reaching the Little Five Points business district, she passes the old Moreland Grammar School, which has been closed for quite a few years now. There's no longer a need for a school in the neighborhood, as children made their disappearance from Euclid Avenue quite some time ago. Most of the windows still have their faded, green window shades, all hanging at different lengths along the front and right side of the building, but the windows still reveal the little primary grade tables and chairs sitting in no certain order in the rooms.
This image, impaired as it may be, brings her a composing reminiscence of those years after the First War when she, Charles and Mary would bring little Loren down to the schoolyard on Sunday afternoons. Charles would always be in his wheelchair but would intently watch Loren as he played in the sandbox and his mother pushed him on the swing set. Loren especially liked the sliding board and to ride his tricycle along the back of the yard. What remained of Charles' health was soon to leave him. The life his wartime wounds had left him, plus the loss of most of what he had during the Depression would make this time of happiness so very short, but it was a time Blanche treasures to this very day.
She walks up the sidewalk in front of the grocery store and looks across the black tile top of the building, which still shows the outline of the Colonial store sign that was once there. Years ago, the store was taken over by an anonymous independent and now the selection isn't as good, the employees' aprons aren't as bright, and they don't seem overly enterprising in their work. She began to notice it a few years ago, probably for the first time when she walked up behind that grocery clerk with the long wavy hair and said something like, "Excuse me, young lady, but I can't find the broccoli," only to be shocked when the clerk turned around, revealing a full beard and mustache which almost fully covered his mouth, in the center of which of an unlighted cigarette. She was very embarrassed until it struck her he hadn't been at all offended by her mistake, so she simply added the experience to the accruing number of items she was beginning to see in the neighborhood and could not understand.
She finishes her shopping and as she is walking back towards her house, she notices the persistent aging of the buildings along the way. The Euclid Pharmacy is one of the few old businesses that remain. It still has the old metal tables and chairs beside the lunch counter, and the comic book rack is still there but it now contains magazines with women in rather revealing costumes on the covers. Earnest's Men's Shop has long been vacant. Bradford's Five and Ten is now a used furniture store. There are several liquor stores along the street, but the barbershop is gone. Most roomers in the area don't seem to get haircuts any longer but exhibit a distinct requirement for the liquor stores.
Each time she passes the Euclid Theatre, she always remembers seeing Gone With The Wind there. It must have been about 1939. Now, the panels of the marquee are cracked, the windows in the box office are taped in several places and the withered old building weeps in the resignation that objects and people must all eventually face. From time to time, the theatre is used by a sort of novel entertainment group offering a curious kind of program that seems even to immoderate for the neighborhood's present residents and indeed depicts a different persuasion of demise than the faded images along the bygone street and those with wrinkled faces such as Blanche Wilson.
________________
Blanche always serves the evening meal at 7:00 pm and on this night, as she is placing the vegetable bowls on the dining room table, all of her roomers are sitting around the television in the living room watching the evening news. She can only hear some of what the reported is saying but picks up his saying in a rather joyous inflection that in June, the United States withdrew 25,000 troops from Vietnam, 35,000 in September and plans to withdraw still another 50,000 in December. All this information is inter-mingled with pictures of student protesters and advertisements making all sorts of claims for various products even the most dim-witted observer would recognize as hardly likely. Her thoughts rebound from present to past as she remembers eagerly picking up The Atlanta Journal each night when Charles was overseas. It would always be there in the yard when she and Mary came home from work. They would sit there just where the roomers are now and read all the reports about The Great War, wondering where Charles was and hoping no harm had come to him.
Her old console radio is still in the corner. It hasn't worked for years and like so many of her other possessions, is a remnant of the past. During the Second War, she and Mary would listen to the news reports every night on that old radio. She especially remembers the times when Loren's bomber group was specifically mentioned as to what target had been hit that day but they never mentioned how many planes went down. On those nights, they would be in tears when they heard those words leaving them unknowing if Loren was dead or alive. What they feared most of all was that he had been hurt and was somewhere alone, suffering and afraid.
The reports of the Vietnam War are so different. It's almost as if the reporter somehow has evolved into some order of divine judge and is fulfilling his destiny with nightly installments of wisdom that ultimately will propel public opinion in the right direction, or what the reporter feels is the right direction. Unfortunately for those in Vietnam, public opinion hasn't been propelled in any resolute direction and is splintered in as many directions imaginable.
The roomers take their seats at the table and are unusually quiet. Sometimes, the conversation is lighthearted and other times it is serious or argumentative, but on this evening, each person seems detached with his or her own thoughts. The only sound is the silverware as it touches the plates.
Blanche looks around the table at the faces of her roomers. Margaret Taylor is a widow of some 70 years and is thin and drawn. Over these past months, she has become progressively more detached from her son who is now successful in his career, married and has three children. Sometimes when Blanche is sitting on the porch with her, Margaret will speak of him, but mostly, she prefers to remember him as a child. The son she has today, regrettable, isn't the same one her memory so desperately seeks to recreate, as her place in his life has been systematically replaced by career and other items that seem, at least for the moment, more significant. Her son pays her rent, and that is about the only time he visits her.
One night when she and Blanche were alone in the living room, Margaret told her she didn't know what she had to live for. Her life is empty and wanting, and even her memories are becoming fainter as she fades deeper and deeper into a consuming solitude. She is a woman purged from all that was once dear to her and now seems so undeserving of what her life has become.
Cindy Jenkins is a waitress in a small restaurant over on Highland Avenue. One with even the most accommodating outlook could only describe her as a totally unattractive woman. He is rather short, slightly overweight, has no feminine contour to her body and has short brown hair that is matted together and always looks as though it needs combing. If that were not enough, the gaps in her front teeth give her a rather illiterate appearance. Charles had an expression for such people. He would say that their lives simply could be described as "no runs, no hits and no errors." She is drifting through her life with no clear destination, and her understandably resentful sentiment can readily be seen simply by looking at her.
Harold Akers celebrated his 69th birthday last month and has lived in the rooming house since his retirement from one of those storage companies over by the railroad. He has dark skin and the appearance of someone who worked hard for all his life. His hair is thinning but is not completely gray, and he has a very large frame with hands that dwarf the fork he is holding. Although he worked at the storage company for many years, the firm had no retirement program; and he only has his Social Security, but he seems a man altogether at peace with himself. Sometimes, he will speak of his late wife, of how much he loved her and how happy his marriage was even though he never made a very large income. He often mentions his son, Mark, who always visits him at least once a week. Most of the time, Mark brings his own son and wife and other times, Harold will spend the weekend with them.
Blanche is always touched when she sees them together, although her feelings are often divided. They remind her so much of her brother and his family but also of the life she never had for herself. Harold has the blessing of never doubting he still has his son's love and knowing that he genuinely esteems the thoughtfulness he always gave his son as a child and while he was becoming a man. As a consequence, Harold's life is now sustained by gratifying memories but more importantly, he knows his meaningful life has not ended. He seems to look forward to every day and most especially those visits from his family.
And then, there is Randy Coleman. How different he is from the others. Actually, his name is Randall but the investment firm where he is employed feels anyone in the sales field needs a folksy name and thus, "Randall" Coleman became "Randy" Coleman. Once, he interpreted the idea for Blanche. As he explained it, the conception is to create a positive and lasting image in the client's mind. Some of the more experienced brokers at the firm feel a more lasting impression can be created with a full beard but Randall, or Randy, hasn't yet accepted that position.
On this night, Randy is reading The Wall Street Journal and occasionally marking certain sections of the financial pages. He is a handsome young man of some twenty-three years who has a medium build with smooth, dark skin and thick, black hair that is combed straight back, giving him a very strong and masculine image. Though not the typical financial advisor, he seems so eager and aspiring.
Blanche looks around the table and studies the expression on each person's face. Margaret's look is very distant. Her eyes are fixed on the table in front of her and manifest a nature of emptiness and need. Simply, it is a wanting that cannot be escaped, or even hidden, as long as she is so conveniently removed from the sight of those who no longer have room for her in their lives.
Blanche examines her own mind as to which is the greater loneliness - living a life as an old maid, as she has done, or to have been happy at one time but then gradually see your happiness ebb away until at last it is gone, leaving only the harsh realization it is forever lost.
Harold's eyes make a much different statement. They move about the room and suggest a mood of acquiescence and firmness, and she can see that age has absolved him from the resent and resignation in witness on so many of the tired faces along Euclid Avenue. What she feels is not envy in its truest meaning but only a longing that her life could have given her the fulfilling happiness that his has obviously given him.
Cindy almost always pays her rent in the change she gets from tips and is just trying to make it from one day to the next. At this moment, her eyes are fixed on Randy – not because she is interested in the Dow Jones Average. She is looking at him as a woman looks at a man. Remembering some of the people she has known through the years, Blanche has felt so many times that much of the pain in life could be escaped if only a person's drives and aspirations were more in unity with that person's faculty to attain them. Surely, Cindy must know that there can never be anything resembling an affectionate relationship or even a mutual attraction between her and anyone like Randy Coleman. It seems so cruel that such a realization can't keep her from wanting because in a sense, such denial can be even more hurting than having an affection and losing it. Even loss allows some treasured memories that Cindy will most likely never have.
After she clears the table, Blanche moves into her most prized dominion, which is her remodeled kitchen. Due to the limitations of age, she could no longer cook for four roomers in the old kitchen, so she gave the new one to herself as a present on her 68th birthday. Notwithstanding the redecorating counselor's recommendations, she insisted the new refrigerator and stove be white but readily saw the need for the dishwasher the councilor kept persisting. To the counselor's astonishment, however, she could not be swayed from retaining the old black and white square pattern on the new floor tiles and sanding and repainting the old cabinets instead of getting new ones.
The solitary mood of her roomers this night has left her with that same persistent feeling of loneliness. It is a feeling she has known for so very long, but she has never become conditioned to it. When someone is lonely, the hope that someday it will pass can be sustaining for awhile but in time, when the unfeeling reality of solitude ultimately prevails, all that remains is ruling resent.
After she starts the dishwasher, she walks back into the living room, sits down in her platform rocker and lays her head back on the lace doily at the top. She is tired and shuts her eyes to rest for a moment before beginning to look about the empty room that conveys so many images of those times that have long passed. She can picture her mother and father sitting there on the floor with she and Charles on those Christmas mornings when they would be so happy with what Santa Claus had brought them. She remembers when Charles wife, Mary, first came into the house and how happy they were together. There are lingering images of her mother and father's coffins beside the large front window during the wakes on the nights before their funeral masses. Fondly, she can recall Loren playing with playing with his little toy cars and sitting out on the front steps waiting for his mother to come home from work in the years after World War I.
A tear comes to her eye as she sees the haunting image of Charles on the day he came home from that war. There was such a pathetic expression on his face when he couldn't climb the steps and was just standing there, looking up at Mary and Loren, whom he was seeing for the first time. It was almost as though he were in some dismal manner trying to apologize for the terrible wound he had suffered that was to change all their lives. For all these many years, she has borne the image of Charles sitting in the gray chair across the room with both hands on the top of his walking cane, quietly weeping on that day during the Depression when he lost his job. He would never recover from that, as while he had learned to live with the limitations his wound had inflicted on his life, losing his job left him helpless in the fullest application of the word. She remembers the pain in Mary's face as the love she felt for him, of necessity, took on an altogether different dimension in the last years of his life when he was just lying there in the downstairs bedroom. And then, he was gone – not precisely a prey of circumstances but one who seemingly did not deserve the fate life had administered to him.
She is haunted by the memories of her tormented disposition on the day when she returned from Mary's funeral mass and sat in the very same chair she is now in a house that was so totally empty when at last, everyone was gone. She weeps now as she did then. Wiping her eyes with her handkerchief, she remembers she hasn't brought in the evening paper and is surprised Mrs. Taylor has not already registered a complaint. As she walks down her front walk, a chilling wind brushes the dry leaves across the ground and she pulls her sweater around her neck and crosses her arms in front of her body. She picks up the paper and stops for a moment to gaze down Euclid Avenue. Lost images rush through her thoughts. The cars rolling over the manhole cover at the end of the street strangely make the same clanking sound she can recall from the first time a car made its appearance on Euclid Avenue. The street light in front of her house, shining beneath a canopy of bright yellow and red autumn leaves, resigns an eerie image against a display of bare windows and fading memories decrying a time such a long while ago it is beginning to seem unreal, even in her most treasured reminiscences.
Her thoughts are broken as boisterous laughter erupts from one of the other rooming houses down the street. Looking towards Edgewood Avenue, she notices most of the houses are dark except for one dim light in a single room. Pathetically, those images seem to pronounce what is left of those who live in them are now like candles that are almost burned down – flickering and soon to expire.
She turns back facing her house, and her mind is filled with the reflections of the past. The outline of the roof, the banisters along the front porch and the lights shining through the second story windows all recall images of those whom she loved and indeed continues to love, even though they have passed from this world. She recalls her youth, the happy times of her life and the feeling of loss conveyed by the passing of time. Over all that time, she has come to realize when one's life has followed an order such as her own, a certain correlation with humility results but tonight, there is a diminishing necessity for humility, which sometimes results not as a matter of choice and not necessarily as a result of Christian belief. Nothing that leaves one with resent could possibly be that.
As the chilling wind whispers through the old trees, she walks back towards her house, besieged by the fading images of her lifetime – a lifetime she is beginning to fear surely must be nearing its end.