The Man Who Loved Children (10 page)

But she sometimes let them snuggle into the shawls, old gowns, dirty clothes ready for the wash, and blankets thrown over her great easy chair, hold their small parliament on the flowered green carpet, or look at all the things in her dressing table, and in what they called her
treasure drawers.
All Henny’s drawers were treasure drawers. In them were spilled and tossed all sorts of laces, ribbons, gloves, flowers, jabots, belts, and collars, hairpins, powders, buttons, imitation jewels, shoelaces, and—wonder of wonders!—little pots of rouge, bits of mascara, anathema to Sam, but to them a joyous mystery. Often, as a treat, the children were allowed to
look in the drawers
and then would plunge their hands into this mess of textures and surfaces, with sparkling eyes and rapt faces, feeling, guessing, until their fingers struck something they did not recognize, when their faces would grow serious, surprised, and they would start pulling, until a whole bundle of oddments lay on the floor and their mother would cry,

“Oh, you pest!”

There were excitement, fun, joy, and even enchantment with both mother and father, and it was just a question of whether one wanted to sing, gallop about, and put on a performance (“showing off like all Pollitry,” said Henny), or look for mysteries (“Henny’s room is a chaos,” said Sam). A child could question both father and mother and get answers: but Sam’s answers were always to the point, full of facts; while the more one heard of Henny’s answer, the more intriguing it was, the less was understood. Beyond Sam stood the physical world, and beyond Henny—what? A great mystery. There was even a difference in the rooms. Everyone knew everything that was in Sam’s rooms, even where the life-insurance policy and the bankbook were, but no one (and least of all Sam, that know-all and see-all) knew for certain what was in even one of Henrietta’s closets and tables. Their mother had locked cabinets with medicines and poisons, locked drawers with letters and ancient coins from Calabria and the south of France, a jewel case, and so on. The children could only fossick in them at intervals, and Sam was not even allowed into the room. Thus Henny had at times, even to Louie, the air of a refuge of delight, a cave of Aladdin, while Sam was more like a museum. Henrietta screamed and Samuel scolded: Henny daily revealed the hypocrisy of Sam, and Sam found it his painful duty to say that Henny was a born liar. Each of them struggled to keep the children, not to deliver them into the hands of the enemy: but the children were not taking it in at all. Their real feelings were made up of the sensations received in the respective singsongs and treasure hunts.

Louisa was Henny’s stepchild, as everyone knew, and no one, least of all Louie, expected Henny to love this girl as she loved her own. But though Henny’s charms had perceptibly diminished, Henny’s treasures, physical and mental, the sensual, familiar house life she led, her kindness in sickness, her queer tags of folklore, boarding-school graces, and femininity had gained on Louie. Uncritical and without knowledge of other women, or of mother’s love, she was able to like Henny’s airs, the messes of her linen and clothes closets, her castoff hats and shoes, the strange beautiful things she got secondhand from rich cousins, her gifts, charities, and the fine lies to ladies come to afternoon tea. As for affection, Louie did not miss what she had never known. Henny, delicate and anemic, really disliked the powerful, clumsy, healthy child, and avoided contact with her as much as she could. It happened that this solitude was exactly what Louie most craved. Like all children she expected intrusion and impertinence: she very early became grateful to her stepmother for the occasions when Henny most markedly neglected her, refused to instruct her, refused to interpret her to visitors.

Henny, in the clouded perspectives of Louie’s childish memory, had once been a beautiful, dark, thin young lady in a ruffled silk dressing gown, mother of a very large red infant in a ruffled bassinet, receiving in state a company of very beautiful young ladies, all in their best dresses. After this particular day, Louie’s memory was blacked out, and only awoke some years later to another Henny. The dark lady of the ruffles had disappeared and in her place was a grubby, angry Henny, who, after screeching, and crying at them all, would fall in a faint on the floor. At first, Sam would run to get cushions; later, when they reached the epoch where Sam habitually said, “Don’t take any notice, Looloo, she is foxing!” Louie still ran for the cushions, and would puff and struggle over the deathlike face, drawn and yellow under its full black hair; and would run to the kitchen to ask Hazel, the thin, bitter maid, for Henny’s tea. When quite small, she had been trusted to go to the forbidden medicine chest, to get out Henny’s medicine—phenacetin, aspirin, or the tabu pyramidon—or her smelling salts; and even once had brought the bottle of spirits hidden behind all those bottles at the back, which all the children knew was there, and which none of them would ever have revealed to their father. None of them thought there was cheating in this: their father was the tables of the law, but their mother was natural law; Sam was household czar by divine right, but Henny was the czar’s everlasting adversary, household anarchist by divine right.

But here came Louie observing them both fitfully and with difficulty, since her last birthday. There did not seem to be any secrets in her parents’ life. Henny was very free of comments on her husband, and Sam, in season, took each of his children aside, but most particularly the eldest, and told, in simple language, the true story of his disillusionment. In this light, Louie and clever Ernie, who observed and held his tongue, saw, in a strange Punch-and-Judy show, unrecognizable Sams and Hennys moving in a closet of time, with a little flapping curtain, up and down.

“The night of our marriage I knew I was doomed to unhappiness!”

“I never wanted to marry him: he went down on his knees!”

“She lied to me within three days of marriage!”

“The first week I wanted to go back home!”

“Oh, Louie, the hell, where there should have been heaven!”

“But he stuck me with his brats, to make sure I didn’t get away from him.”

The children tried to make head or tail of these fatal significant sentences, formed in the crucible of the dead past, and now come down on their heads, heavy, cold, dull. Why were these texts hurled at them from their parents’ Olympus: Louie tried to piece the thing together; Ernie concluded that adults were irrational.

On her eleventh birthday in February, Henny had given Louisa the old silver mesh bag that her stepdaughter had desired for years. Love and gratitude welled up in Louie; the more so that Sam made an especially poor showing on the same occasion, giving an exercise book that Louie needed for school. Since then Louie had passed on to an entirely original train of thought which was, in part, that Henny was perhaps not completely guilty towards Sam, that perhaps there was something to say on Henny’s side. Was she always a liar when she spoke of her pains and miseries, always trying to make a scene when she denounced Sam’s frippery flirtations and domestic crimes? Henny was gradually becoming not a half-mad tyrant, whose fits and maladies must be cared for by a stern, muscular nurse; not all a hysteric, the worthless, degenerate society girl whom Sam had hoped to reform despite vitiated blood and bad habits of cardplaying, alcohol, and tobacco; but she was becoming a creature of flesh and blood, nearer to Louisa because, like the little girl, she was guilty, rebellious, and got chastised. Louie had actually once or twice had moments when she could listen to Henny’s scoldings and (although she trembled and cried bitterly) could recognize that they came from some illness, her neuralgias, or cold hands and feet, or the accumulation of bills, or from Sam’s noisy joys with the children, and perennial humanitarian orations.

Although Louisa was on the way to twelve and almost a woman, Sam had not suspected this veering. He went on confiding in her and laying the head of his trouble on her small breasts. But Henny, creature of wonderful instinct and old campaigner, had divined almost instantly. No, it was deeper. Henny was one of those women who secretly sympathize with all women against all men; life was a rotten deal, with men holding all the aces. The stepmother did nothing extraordinary to bring out Louisa’s sympathy, because she had left too much behind her and gone too far along her road to care about the notions of even the flesh of her own flesh, but this irresistible call of sex seemed now to hang in the air of the house. It was like an invisible animal, which could be nosed, though, lying in wait in one of the corners of this house that was steeped in hidden as well as spoken drama. Sam adored Darwin but was no good at invisible animals. Against him, the intuitions of stepmother and stepdaughter came together and procreated, began to put on carnality, feel blood and form bone, and a heart and brain were coming to the offspring. This creature that was forming against the gay-hearted, generous, eloquent, goodfellow was bristly, foul, a hyena, hate of woman the house-jailed and child-chained against the keycarrier, childnamer, and riothaver. Sometimes now an involuntary sly smile would appear on Henny’s face when she heard
that dull brute, Sam’s pigheaded child,
oppose to his quicksilver her immovable obstinacy, a mulishness beyond rhyme and reason. Sam had his remedies, but Henny smiled in pity at his remedies. He would take Louie out, often in view of the street, in order to give his “lesson a social point” and say, in that splendid head tone of his,

“You see, I am not angry: I am not punishing you out of pique. I am just. You know why I am punishing you. Why is it?”

“For no reason.”

He would give her a gentle flip, “Don’t be obstinate! You know why!”

He would keep it up, till she began to bawl, yielded, “Yes, I know.”

Then he would make her hold out her hands, and would beat her, “You will understand why I have to do this when you get a little older.”

“I will never understand.”

“You will understand and thank me!”—and in what a contented tone!

“I will never understand and never forgive you!”

“Looloo-girl!” this, yearning.

“I will never forgive you!”

He laughed. Henny, half indignant, half interested, behind the curtain, would think, “Wait, wait, wait: only wait, you devil!” Henny had begun to beat Louisa less; and Louie had not been wrong in seeing a distorted sympathy for her in Henny’s pretense of strangling her the night before.

L
OUIE, PASSING HER MOTHER’S
door on the way to the stairs, thought nothing at all of the night scene, but went in and dawdled awkwardly at the bedside.

“Mother, do you think my neck’s getting too long?” Henny peered at her as if she had not seen her for months.

“Of course not.”

“Mother, my dress is so old: in that dress my neck looks so long now.”

“I have no money for new dresses. Perhaps next month.”

“Sing it, Moth, sing it,” whined Tommy. Henrietta looked at him, pulled her glasses down on her nose, and sang,

Like his father, like his father.

He has the cut of a kangaroo.

Bandy-legged and ginger too;

And his nose is very pecu-li-ar—

He winds it round the back of his neck

Just like his pa!

“Sing it again, Moth!”

“Oh, go to Tokyo!”

Tommy was immensely flattered. Louie earnestly continued,

“Mother, when Miss Bundy makes my dresses next time could she make something distinguished?”

“Distinguished! Distinguished!” cried Henny, looking at her angrily.

“Sing, ‘When Uncle John,’ ” urged Tommy.

“It has to be distinguished now, with the ten cents he gives me,” cried Henny in indignation.

“Moth! Mother! Go on.”

“Be quiet! Distinguished—some more of your Pollit swank and snobbery!”

Louie began to weep quietly and edged out.

“Mo-oth!”

“Oh, you pest!”

“Mo-o-th!”

When Uncle John came home from sea

He brought a parrot home to me,

And it could laugh and it could sing

And it could say like anything,

“Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly, Polly-wolly-doodle,”

all the day.

“Mother, I love that!”

“Well, I don’t. Go and annoy your father now.”

“Can I have a piece of sugar, Mother?”

“Go and bring in Mother’s toast, baby.”

“Then can I have a piece of your sugar?”

“My name’s Jimmy: take all you gimme.”

“Can I, Mother?”

“You can, my son.”

“But Mother, may I?”

“Mother, may I go out to swim? Yes, my darling daughter.”

“Mother!”

“Ask Louie: she’ll give you a piece.”

“No, she wo-on’t, no she won’t, Mother.”

“Ask her.”

“No, she won-on’t, Mother.”

“Tell her I said so.”

“All right.”

Tommy rushed out of the room, where he had been getting quite bored, with his usual small trophy. Tommy had brought one piece of wisdom from the womb,
Ask and ye shall receive.
His wide, crooked, irresistible grin and nodding curls did nothing to undeceive him.

But now Aunt Bonnie was heard crying,

“Hot pog, there! Hot pog, there! Make way,” and Evie and Tommy, having raced to the gong, began to wrestle about who should
bong
it. Bonnie seized the stick and authoritatively sent the separate soft notes floating all round the neighborhood. There was a rush of overalled males from the washhouse, and Sam began whistling. Each one had a special whistle: there was also a signal for sitting-down and one for come-in-a-hurry.

They were standing in the hall, answering their whistles, the rule being that no one was to enter the dining room till the signal was given. Sam asked Ernest,
sotto voce,

“Did you tell them?”

Ernest gave him a glance, rushed to the kitchen, shouting, “Dad’s going to Malaya,” then to the bottom of the stairs where he shouted, “Louisa, Dad’s going to Malaya!”