all else to put a good face on before the world, to be well liked and to have many friends. They were profuse in their thanks, extravagant in their praise, cloying in their flattery. They slathered it on. They kept their ill-temper, their nervousness, and their irritability for exhibition at home. And in the presence of any members of Jim or Will Pentland’s family their manner was not only friendly, it was even touched slightly with servility. Money impressed them.
It was a period of incessant movement in the family. Steve had married a year or two before a woman from a small town in lower Indiana. She was thirty-seven years old, twelve years his senior, a squat heavy German with a big nose and a patient and ugly face. She had come to Dixieland one summer with another woman, a spinster of lifelong acquaintance, and allowed him to seduce her before she left. The winter following, her father, a small manufacturer of cigars, had died, leaving her $9, 000 in insurance, his home, a small sum of money in the bank, and a quarter share in his business, which was left to the management of his two sons.
Early in Spring the woman, whose name was Margaret Lutz, returned to Dixieland. One drowsy afternoon Eugene found them at Gant’s. The house was deserted save for them. They were sprawled out face downward, with their hands across each other’s hips, on Gant’s bed. They lay there silently, while he looked, in an ugly stupor. Steve’s yellow odor filled the room. Eugene began to tremble with insane fury. The Spring was warm and lovely, the air brooded slightly in a flowering breeze, there was a smell of soft tar. He had come down to the empty house exultantly, tasting its delicious silence, the cool mustiness of indoors, and a solitary afternoon with great calf volumes. In a moment the world turned hag.
There was nothing that Steve touched that he did not taint.
Eugene hated him because he stunk, because all that he touched stunk, because he brought fear, shame, and loathing wherever he went; because his kisses were fouler than his curses, his whines nastier than his threats. He saw the woman’s hair blown gently by the blubbered exhalations of his brother’s foul breath.
“What are you doing there on papa’s bed?” he screamed.
