Wilson bought their brownstone house in the country three years after the war ended, and though he did not live in it full time until years later, he secretly kept two dogs there, fed by Remington Hodge, and visited them often with their other dog. (Duke had taken a disease which caused him to go blind and be in such discomfort that Wilson killed him.) He explained to Della that the extra dogs were probably from neighboring farms. Sometimes they spent Sundays in their country home with the younger children, leaving John and Rebecca to open the store Monday morning and mind it until afternoon.
John, during those times when his naturally suppressed sensuality would erupt, could drink more, cause more destruction and be less decent, more depraved, make more noise, attract more secretly wanton women, keep going longer and be more penitently sorry afterward than seemed realistic, and while he was attending the small high school he was the never ending topic of conversation and amazement. It was said that he had on one occasion, on a bet, gone into Iowa City to a house of prostitution and in a state of intoxication and without a cent in his pocket had entered and remained for nearly two and a half hours before rejoining his friends seated impatiently across the street drinking from a bottle in a paper bag, where he resumed drinking and set off to find a place with more gaiety.
The speculations concerning the course of events beginning at the time he entered without any money and closed the door and ending two and a half hours later were as varied as an entire month of The Arabian Nights. Some (Merv Miller was one of them) believed he must have collapsed due to the effects of the improperly and dangerously prepared whiskey as soon as he shut the door, and out of the kindness of their hearts they had let him sleep until he woke up. But it was hard to believe in the kindness of a prostitute’s or a prostitute’s manager’s heart, as they were all personally terrified by the mere idea of the place. “Perhaps they were afraid to throw him out for fear of drawing the attention of the police.” But for the same reason that it was difficult to imagine Betty’s Place housing generosity, it was impossible to imagine the hardened people inside being afraid of anything. So the line of thinking, naturally, continued from then on to the assumption that he was busy during that time, and exactly how many women one could assume to be in there, and how much they did what they did for money, and how much they would do for pleasure, and what kind of pleasure it was to take up two and a half hours. And then just as these problems were beginning to press less and less heavily on the imagination of the small town, two women somewhere in their twenties arrived in a worn, unsightly carriage—having driven themselves—and stopped at the gas station and asked with “rough, wild voices, and one had frizzy hair,” the whereabouts of John Montgomery. They were directed across the street to the store, where they went, stayed not longer than ten minutes and headed back in the direction of Iowa City. Nothing conclusive could be drawn from the visit, but even to explain it coincidentally was exciting and problematic, and vicarious pleasure flowed like water long after the six men in the station had stepped out into the clear afternoon and watched until the bare heads sank side by side out of view over the hill.
It was not long after this, during the time when John was being condemned, floated and exalted as being bound up in whoredom, that there arose an unexpected concern for his mind, which was imagined to be in great danger of giving up the ghost and splitting clean in two—the two parts of him being so widely distant and hostile to each other. He was watched very carefully for signs of dissociation, or ordinary madness. These new, more serious thoughts never had the required idle time to be lifted off the ground. Wilson had a stroke. Everything else was forgotten. Della found herself surrounded by her thousands of friends, who seemed to be sure that if they never let her alone, they could keep her from slipping away until Wilson would return with his spiritual net. And by the time he was back from the University Hospital he seemed (from all the evidence) to be his old self.
The issue of John’s breaching personality was forgotten, the two wild-voiced women had become thought of as a queer phenomenon of experience, and if he was imagined to be too full of life at times, it was also remembered that, for the most part, looking him in the eyes would make him blush. The serious thoughts about his father had pushed all the other, more trivial, mean thoughts back into perspective.
He was very popular with the girls at the high school, and it was said that a well-brought-up girl could share a happy evening with him and never once have her ideals compromised. There was some fear, of course, that while out with one of them he would all of a sudden change over, and no telling what would happen after that. The girls were supposed to be able to sense this frightful desire for lust beneath the surface of his gray eyes. His bashfulness made him nearly impossible to talk to, but the lurking suspicion that he might at any time get it into his mind to drag them off into a cement corner and rip away their clothes and not take no for an answer made him attractive for a long time. But, like an unfulfilled promise, it wasn’t enough, and when the girls were older and foresaw their lives being taken out of the school and stranded in the barren, sun-bleached world of their parents, they were quick to give him up and settle for fulfillment of a more normal kind.
John Montgomery seemed to have no intention of marrying, and accepted it as quite normal that his friends and finally even his sister and younger brothers settled into homes of their own (Rebecca to Iowa City and Henry to Duluth) while he remained alone and unattached and showed no indication that he would ever plan to do otherwise, and even left off stopping in on Mrs. Saunders, a young widow nearing thirty.
Bachelors were not unheard of in the area—in fact, it was remembered that the two relatives who had been the reason for Della and Wilson coming to Sharon hadn’t ever married. Nothing uncommon about it. Nothing bitter or morose, only personal choice. Because of his shyness, John had never been on close, intimate terms with anyone (except, perhaps, his older sister), though no one who had gone to school with him would deny that he was a friend. It was noted that bachelors were invariably of that same sort, so everything fitted into place—terribly sad, but natural.
In a magazine John saw an advertisement for a training school in Detroit for automobile mechanics. He talked the matter over with his father, and within a month arrived in Detroit and enrolled as an automotive-engineer trainee. He worked nights as a dishwasher in a night restaurant to pay the tuition. Once a week he wrote a full-page, small-margined letter home to his parents from his one-lamp room, and after the nine weeks Della had nine letters that had been read out loud before dinner, safely inside a cupboard drawer. “He’s always been so conscientious,” she told Wilson. Then he came back with a certificate, and a well-detailed plan to build a garage and fill it with steel six and twelve-point sockets, breaker bars, drop-forged impact wrenches, lock washers, cotter pins, ring compressors, two and three-claw bearing pullers, mill bastard files, feeler gauges, bench vises, taps and dies, drums of oil and flat-nose pliers. The bank in Hills loaned him the money, and a wild bunch of unemployed construction workers built him an enormous one-room building big enough for an airplane on top of a cement foundation, diagonally across from the grocery.
“They’ve made it big enough,” remarked Joe Miller, “to contain him.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Della with the nasty implication that it better not mean anything.
As John grew older, he learned more about himself. From the very beginning he must have been aware of a frightening inconsistency in the way experiences came to him. He must have felt (especially in moments of remorse) that his life was insubstantial because he could have two completely unrelated ways of viewing it—two attitudes, neither of which could be said to be less valid or real. A feeling of disintegration—drowning, with nothing to grab hold of that could float. When he was young he must have wished to be rid of his self-consciousness while coveting the reckless abandonment. He must have thought