Read Online The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams - Free Book Online Page B

madness and murder—the usual human preoccupations) seems to begin when he has reached the age of twenty-one. A veteran, though no war hero, his combat has consisted of earnest attempts to maim his fellow soldiers rather than the enemy. He doesn’t really approve of violence, and rather believes that he is always having to defend himself; his theory is that he is not so large that he overawes potential aggressors, nor so small that they might overlook him. There is some truth in most theories. There is also the theory that he wants to kill the world for girls like Mary Tolliver, and a certain raw look upon the faces of large, aggressive men suggests to him the causes of her unhappiness. Let us say that he believes that one human being should not cause pain in another, and that whenever he himself sins against this catchall bit of orthodoxy he is clearly aware of it; whatever it is that he has done is printed coldly and permanently upon his soul. This is Allard Benson’s voice, of course, masking certain things in an unfortunate flippancy.
    And then there is Harold Roux. Poor Harold. What visions did he have of college? The war was over at last, and no longer would this pale, thin, sensitive young man have to experience the crudity, the vulgarity, the sheer horror of barracks life. He must have thought longingly of ivy-covered walls in the bright autumn light, of formal elegance and wit, the life of the mind, of dignified professors in tweeds, of long, serious discussions of great issues in places like “Commons.” Also of the talented and beautiful girl who would be his companion. Allard always wondered if Harold got any further with this last dream than holding hands, perhaps, or achaste kiss. Because on the day after his discharge from Fort Dix, New Jersey, Harold went to New York and made a strange decision, a magical decision which, like all choices in magic, contained its own dark laughter and the necessity of the third and last wish, the one that always erases the damage done by the first two. Harold made this Midas choice; he later paid and paid again the price that magic exacts from mortals.
    While in the army Harold had gone bald. It was nothing pathological, just an inevitable shedding of his top hair—first a tonsure, then the lenghthening of the forehead, then the shiny top of the skull bare from brow to where the cowlick once grew and beyond, the whole process complete at the age of twenty-three. And in Manhattan he happened to pass the doors of an establishment whose necromancers claimed the undetectable restoration of Harold’s loss. He hesitated, he smiled, he began to walk on, he hesitated again. He looked through the display windows at pictures of men of forty (before) suddenly transformed (after) into dashing young men of thirty surrounded by luscious, though rather witless-looking girls. As far as Harold was concerned, they could keep that type of girl, but still …
    Allard brooded often upon Harold’s need, the desperate wishfulness that led him to enter. “Abandon all candor, ye who enter here.” Harold could never successfully deceive, never. But once he entered that place, the world and all its former values changed. He entered the place of believers, and for a while believed.
    Allard once knew an Arthur Murray dance instructor, and for minutes after talking with him felt himself shedding an odd feeling of the importance of the man’s gigolo enthusiasms. At one time in the army he had felt at home in a group of men whose enthusiasm was for the kill. He thought he understood Harold’s conversion. He had known people whose clothes preoccupied them, or whose automobiles, old bottles, or muscles, became central to their lives. Harold in his need was no match for the spell the hairmakers wove. Butthey wove their spell better than their hair; Harold could pass at a certain distance, yet the intimate distance, the one he had beautified himself to attain, betrayed his secret. Midas’ wish. He was