America Moved - Booth Tarkington

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On July 29, 1869.

      II. Beaten Boy

      As I now examine the flowering of my childhood’s vanity—my natural-born egoism cultivated daily by the flatteries of my parents and my sister—I find that in contact with the similar blossoms of contemporaries my own began to wilt rather early. Sometimes, however, grown people helped on the withering, and at the age of six I’d had a hot afternoon in Terre Haute when adults made the cherished rose of my self-conceit shed petals copiously. That afternoon, in semipublic, so to say, I told a lie of the kind typically used by unimportant human beings for the purpose of presenting an impressive appearance. It’s true, though, that I didn’t myself invent the lie; my Grandmother Booth made me a present of it. She didn’t realize that it was a lie; she thought of it as a convenience and gave it to me because that was the only way to get me to do what she wished.

      I was visiting her in Terre Haute and she’d asked me to go forth and buy a needle for her at the largest dry-goods store on the principal business street of the town. I had never been in that store; and to my mind it was a vast emporium, formidable and likely to be contemptuous of a customer of my size and age. When she gave me a copper cent and told me that was the price of a needle I was to buy, I made a great to-do, loudly declining to enter so awesome a bazaar for the purpose of spending a mere penny. I might be held up to ridicule, I protested.

      A Penny Tragedy

      “Not at all,” my grandmother said. “When the clerk hands you the needle and you give him the penny, just laugh and say, ‘I believe this is the very smallest purchase I ever made in my life!’ That’ll make it all right.”

      I thought it would. The ladylike laugh and the little lie seemed plausible. I left the house cheerfully, practicing my contemplated airy laugh as I went. All the way to Main Street I rehearsed, amusedly saying over and over, as I trudged along the hot brick sidewalk, “I believe this is the very smallest purchase I ever made in my life!”

      Inside the big store I found my confidence at once enfeebled. The noon hour had just passed; the hotness of the day was that of an Indiana town in a midsummer heat wave, ninety-eight in the shade. I was the only customer in that whole cavern; an interminable avenue stretched before me, bordered by polished wooden counters behind which drooped male and female clerks, languidly waving palm-leaf fans in a daunting silence. I went to the nearest counter, spoke to the whiskered, pallid young man behind it, and faintly told him what I wanted. He stopped fanning himself, yawned, sighed, found the described needle, wrapped it in a wisp of paper, silently handed it to me, and I gave him my copper.

      Then, already with a sinking feeling and a voice perhaps somewhat tremulous, I did my practiced laugh for him and said bravely, “I believe this is the very smallest purchase I ever made in my life!”

      He leaned across the counter and looked down at me, spoke in a startling voice. “What did you say?”

      I was sorry I’d said it and wished not to repeat it, but felt that I had to do so. I omitted the society laugh because I wasn’t able to produce it. “I—I believe this is the very smallest purchase I ever made in my life.”

      I desired to leave the place, but couldn’t. This man had a powerful air of not having closed the episode. He looked at the clerks behind the other counters, beckoned, and called their names. “Come here,” he said. “Come listen to this. I want you to hear something.” They came, some gathering about him, behind his counter, and others before it, but all staring down at me. “Sold him a needle for a cent,” he told them. “I want you to hear him talk about it.” Then his unbearably cold and protuberant eyes refixed themselves upon me. “Say it again,” he said. “Say it again.”

      The accursed words Grandmother had put into my mouth were by this time loathsome to me; yet I saw no option but to utter them once more. I did, miserably, with my head down and speaking to the floor. “I—I believe this is the very—the very smallest purchase I ever made in my—in my life.”

      Here my memory blurs. Of the immediately following moments I recall only the perception that something monstrous was happening to me and that I was presently outdoors upon the hot brick sidewalk again, filled with a horror of life and of myself. I felt that I was a shoddy little fellow exposed; my soul had been shown naked to the world and consisted of weaknesses, falsities, and deformity. I’d been forced to strip before an audience that derisively saw me as I was, a wretched insectile impostor trying to pose as a person of large affairs familiar with important currency—five and ten dollar bills and suchlike!

      Our memories acquire dreadful but useful habits. As I walked back to my grandmother’s, millions of locusts seemed to fill the scorching air of all Terre Haute with sizzling, unending proclamations of my shame, hideously letting the world know that I was a cheap snob who’d been showing off—and had got caught at it! Somewhere on that walk I passed a row of catalpa trees. To this hour, sixty-five years later, catalpa trees and the racketing of locusts on a hot day bring back to me Terre Haute at ninety-eight in the shade—and the cure I had of being one special kind of snob.

      Our recollections of mortifying scenes in our lives seem to be of ourselves as we were just after those scenes took place. We recall the actual drama itself with a blurring horror; but our sensations immediately afterward often reproduce themselves later with such vividness that we wonder how we could have endured them and gone on living. What burns itself deepest is not the exposure but the crawl home afterward.

      The Bridge of Boyhood

      In Indianapolis, far downtown in the smoky old and decayed “best residence section,” still stands the house in which I began to discover, at a children’s party, that I was a nonentity. On days when I drive down into the city’s smoke I never pass the place without a painful glance at the window from which I leaped rather than risk having to kiss a beautiful little girl. Nevertheless, my walk home after the party—meditating upon the fact that nobody’d noticed my jump or missed me—remains the sharpest item of that memory too. It was then, at the age of about eight and a half, that I realized something of my cosmic unimportance: I had no weight whatever with anybody, anywhere, except at home.

      Transition periods in government or in the life of an individual are the hard ones, and few are more upsetting than the change between being a little child and being a growing boy. I not only had to resign myself to be a nobody among my kind, but, mystified, baffled, and sometimes sore from unpredictable snubbing, I was made to face the fact that I was no longer thought fascinating—or even interesting—by adults, except those of the close family circle. No more at sight of me did every visitor to the house, and every mere caller, set up a caressive powwow and try to coax me nearer. All their previous adulation was gone. The grown-up people I knew had lost the sweet indulgence from their eyes; those eyes didn’t beam at sight

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