But by Saturday morning the water had receded. Jack and Nin went downtown as usual, passing the movie house where they had gone together before either could read properly, “—now we are grown up, we read books.” Kerouac’s record of this day and night is one of his most brilliant acts of remembrance. The events no doubt were selected from many weeks or months of real experience, but it was this particular Saturday that Jack chose to regard as marking the end of his boyhood and the beginning of his young manhood. (This thresh-hold had nothing to do with sexual discovery. That was another occasion, the night when he idly invented masturbation while pondering the death of a pet dog.) It was, instead, a subtle and profound change in the way that he looked at the world.
Jacky spends the day alone, climbing “Snake Hill” and exploring the grounds of the empty mansion that shelters the forces of evil. After dinner, standing on the sandbank, he is joined by Doctor Sax, who speaks to the boy for the first time: “ ‘The Flood,’ said Doctor Sax, ‘has brought matters to a head.’ ” Sheltered by Sax’s cloak of invisibility, Jacky joins the phantom on a tour of the neighborhood, unobserved by his friends and family. Gabrielle hurries home from a late shopping trip for cold cuts; Leo is planning a party. Nin catches up with her mother, to tell her about a dress she has seen downtown. A dance band on the radio plays a Gershwin tune. A shed-door slams. A woman laughs raucously at a dirty joke.
LOWELL LOWLANDS in the Rosemont section saw 2000 flee their homes as the Merrimack rose about their houses. Boston Globe photo by Callahan.
The boy and the phantom vault fences to spy on neighbors: Scotty pensively eating a candy bar, G.J. surveying the dusk, Gene Plouffe in bed with the covers up to his chin, reading a Street and Smith pulp western. An older boy strides confidently home. Jacky knows, without knowing how, that the story that the youth will tell his parents about working late will be a lie, that he is returning from an episode of furtive love-making with his girl in a barn in the Dracut woods. Lowell goes about its night business, but Jacky is no real part of it. With his Shadow by his side he is, this night for the first time, quite self-consciously the bystanding recorder. He watches. He listens. He files it all away. Sax’s running commentary provides an infuriatingly muddled obbligato, and then, this sentence, pronounced upon Gene Plouffe, abed with his thriller:
Bye and bye you’ll rise to the sun and propel your mean bones hard and sure to huge labors, and great steaming dinners, and spit your pits out, aching cocklove nights in cobweb moons, the mist of tired dust at evening, the corn, the silk, the moon, the rail—that is known as Maturity—but you’ll never be as happy as you are now in your quiltish, innocent book-devouring boyhood immortal night.
Rainclouds obscure the moon, and presently Sax and the boy are at the castle, where the satanic world-snake stirs from its sleep to stage a direct assault. During the titanic struggle that follows, an amalgam of all the scenes in all the B-movies in which the peasantry destroy the mad scholar’s laboratory, Sax whips off his cape and hat, revealing himself to the terrified boy as a bit-player wholly inadequate to deal with the forces he has helped to unleash. It doesn’t matter. As the storm gathers the snake is subdued in a manner Kerouac borrows from the mythology of Mexico, where he was living when Doctor Sax was written, and it is for Sax himself to deliver the moral: “I’ll be damned. . . . The Universe disposes of its own evil.”
To regard the mature writer’s vision of this watershed Saturday is not to conclude that its lessons were clear or even available to the fourteen-year-old Jacky, but it does seem that behind many of Kerouac’s later choices and actions, some of which could be regarded as impulsive and destructive, there lay an essential reliance on the universe as a self-regulating mechanism. The wealthy Presbyterians up Varnum Road could comfort themselves with their doctrine of predestination, but that doctrine wasn’t available to the Kerouacs of St. Jean-Baptiste parish. Much later the Buddhist notion of dharma would supply Kerouac with a name for this attitude.
Jacky was Jack now, that season and each season for three more years, a little sturdier, a little more certain of his skill as an athlete. He was good at all sports, but football was his game. For all his life Kerouac regarded October as the kindest month—“Everybody goes home in October,” he wrote—and in those years of the late 1930s, each October promised four or five Saturdays when the boys and a gallery of their fathers and brothers would troop up Snake Hill to the Dracut Tigers’ Field, conducting their games in at least three languages, sometimes four. Some of the boys were taller, but Jack was heavily muscled—and quick. His thick legs belied the speed and the startling changes of direction that he could command whenever he got the ball.
There were girls now, too, but not a great many. Some of them read Jack’s shyness as conceit. He was quick in class, he was a skilled athlete, and he was becoming a classically handsome young man. The boy-girl gap then was probably no wider than now, but Jack appears to have had less ease in bridging it than his friends. The resulting distances and silences were enough to ratify his image as stuck on himself.
However, one girl, Mary Carney, captured his heart. She was a year ahead of Jack in school, a girl from the Irish neighborhood across the river. Her little brother was enlisted as a matchmaker, and Jack became a familiar fixture on the Carneys’ front porch. Mary’s father was a railroad man, an occupation that fascinated Jack, and it may be that the Carneys supplied a warmth and closeness that Jack found difficult to demand or accept from Leo and Gabrielle. Jack and Mary had long, soul-baring talks. G.J., Scotty, and Roland had listened to Jack talk about his complicated perceptions and ambitions, but Mary Carney appeared to understand them. Like those three, Mary Carney never left Lowell, either.
Mary Carney:
There was something deep between Jack and me, something nobody else understood or knew about. After that book Maggie Cassidy came out I had a lot of trouble. People calling me and the neighbors talking. It was awful.
Jack was so sweet. He was a sweet, good kid, and the people in Lowell didn’t understand him. They never did. Nobody ever reads here. They wouldn’t even put up a plaque for him.
Jack was so sensitive. All he wanted was a house and a job on the railroad. Jack used to tell me everything.
Nobody would understand anyway, so I’m not going to talk any more. I made up my mind a long time ago I wouldn’t, so I’m going to stick to it. Nobody listens anyway.
G. J. Apostolos:
There was no connection between Maggie Cassidy and Mary Carney. Jack invented her. I remember Jack came back after the war and made me call up Mary Carney. He wanted to see her. She said all right, for ten minutes, so we went over there: me, Jack, and a couple of my buddies.
Mary was sitting on the porch Jack talks about in Maggie Cassidy. She was surrounded by her fiancé, her mother, and her father.
Jack and she just stared at each other. He didn’t say anything. He was frozen. There wasn’t anything between them. It was all in Jack’s mind, his imagination. There really wasn’t anything between them in the first place.
After Leo lost his shop in the flood the Kerouacs moved to the top floor of a tenement over a lunch counter on Moody Street. One night as Jack sat in his room reading, he heard a stranger’s voice calling his name from the street. The caller was Sammy Sampas, a boy a year older than Jack who lived on the other side of town. He had heard of Jack by reputation—not as a halfback, but as a voracious reader, and as a writer. Like Jack, Sammy was studying serious authors according to his own syllabus, but his tastes were a little loftier and a good deal surer. Perhaps most important of all, Sammy was certain that he would be able to make his living as a writer, and his personal vision of success included Broadway, where he hoped to be a producer as well as a playwright.
Roland Salvas:
That guy Sammy was a smart person. I met him through Jack and George. Their vocabulary was much higher than mine, so when they’d talk, the three of them, there’s lots of times when I’d shake my head. Even Scotty and I couldn’t understand. But it didn’t matter, you know. It didn’t matter.