The Man Who Loved Children (13 page)

“Get upstairs and out of my sight, go on, I’m sick of putting up with you and your nonsense.”

Bonnie, the survivor of many similar scenes, pleaded in a cowardly way, “Pet, I’ll get you another (I don’t know how) but you may be sure”

“Don’t call me Pet. I don’t want you here. I only put up with you and your eternal gossiping and buzzing because you’re too much of a fool to keep a job and your brother wants to keep you off the streets.”

Bonnie flashed, “I work for it: I earn my keep and my—five dollars.”

“Your five dollars, your five dollars, take your five dollars and ram it down your throat,” cried Henny: “do I get even five dollars the months we’re behind? Doesn’t he punish me, the way he punishes the children and all of us? Why are you throwing it up at me? I’d give you more.”

“I could bite my tongue out,” said Bonnie.

“Do you think I get five dollars for slaving my head off for him and his breed, and never getting a decent bite, nor a rag to my back? Do you think I’d care about the silly, stupid thing if I had another rotten rag in my wardrobe to get on my back? You could have it and all the rest of your rot,” she finished impatiently. “Get out of my sight: Louie will help me with the dinner, and then I’m going out, and let them lock me up for a lunatic if I ever set foot again in such a madhouse.”

“What’s the matter, Pet?” asked Bonnie, looking queer. “You’re not yourself Pet: I know this is your offday.”

“Go upstairs and pack,” screamed Henny: “I don’t want you and your filth round the house where my children can see it. Get upstairs and get out or I’ll scream it out to the neighbors.”

Bonnie crimsoned and huffily went into the hall while Sam, with a peculiar inquisitive and guilty air, was standing in the southern door of the hall. When Henny sped out of the kitchen, she saw him and gave him a black look. He said diffidently,

“Pet, don’t make such a noise about it: you’ll get another blouse: from your cousin Laurie, no doubt,” he finished with a faint sneer. Henny went into action at once, glad of the provocation.

“I won’t have your guttersnipe of a sister here, running after every cheap common man she meets in the gutter, staying out on the tiles till all hours, with her commercial travelers, going to their rooms and smoking. I smelled smoke in her room this morning.”

Bonnie, pale with injured pride, was going upstairs without a word. Henny followed her intolerantly to the bottom of the stairs, conscious of Sam’s standing there. Bonnie turned on the fifth or sixth step,

“Henny, how can you? I’ve always been your friend, you know that.”

“Go up, go up at once, or I’ll let them know what you put in the washhouse,” said Henny with a spot of color under her rouge. She flung open the hall door, “I’ll let that man Bannister, across the street, that you think’s so fine, that you’re always showing your legs to, know what I have to put up with.”

Bonnie, pale, looked over the balustrade at her brother, who however said nothing, only looked foolish and helpless there in his overalls, half naked, with spots on his face. She started up the stairs again. Henny rapaciously cried out,

“You used your slip to wipe up a spilled pot; and not satisfied with that, you’ve brought home bedbugs from some dirty low dive you’ve been in, like a sloppy servant girl, and the mice go there to eat up all the greasy crumbs you’ve got in little bags in your dressing table. You were born in the slums and bring the slums with you into my house, you and your rotten, slave-driving brother. And the whole place looks like a slaughterhouse.”

Bonnie began to bawl and they heard her tripping up the next pair of stairs. Behind her back Henny still cried out vile things, while Samuel with that intimidated but sordid expression moved away with his little tribe towards the back porch. He called out suddenly,

“Loozy! Alevena!”

He put out the blowtorch and gathered the children round him in the long dining room and looked out through the open northern window for a minute without speaking. They saw his wet eyelashes. Then he put one arm round Evie and one round the silent, mystified Tommy, drew them to him, and said,

“Let’s be quiet together, kids. I wanted us to be so happy today, happy and rejoicing because your poor little Sam loves you and is doing what is best for everyone.”

Looking at them all tenderly, he cut up the fruit himself and poured out the tea. On Sunday they were all allowed to have tea all day to be with him.

“Thick for the lads, thin for the girls,” said Sam, suiting the action to the words as he handed out the slices of bread.

“Now masticate, denticate, chump, chew, and swallow.” Then he fell silent again, and nothing was heard for a space but the mild breeze blowing through the hall and making the gong vibrate softly,
ton, ton!

Gently Sam leaned over his baby, “Tomkins, here!” Tommy reached his fat face to his father. To the boy’s pouted lips he joined his own, siphoning the chewed sandwich into Tommy’s mouth.

“Not only for the ptyalin,” Sam communicated to them, “which is now already mixed with the food and helps Tommy to digest, but also for the communization of germs. Tommy will not, I think, suffer from the dyspepsia that all you other kids do. All you other kids are like your poor little Sam—your heads go whizz, and your digestion doesn’t agree! Good digestion is for the bovine. But Tomkins, though not strictly bovine, will probably be a prize fighter, and so I’m helping him along. I used to do this to Looloo when she was a little girl and lost her mother.” He stopped for a moment sadly, as always when harking back to Rachel and his short marriage with her. “I had to be mother and father too, to little Looloo. This is what parent birds sometimes do to their nestlings. We were very close then,” he continued, looking Louie over intently, “and communicated by thought alone: she could hardly speak, but we each knew what the other was thinking, because she was the child of a great love!”

He passed a thin sandwich to Evie. He nodded all round the table at the exercising jaws, “Looloo still loves her father too, although she pretends to be so unfeeling and so cussed.” He looked at her again and began to laugh. Very annoyed, with a stern face, Louie pretended not to hear. “Come here, my Looloo!” She got up and came to his side, rather shyly. “Right here!” Surprised, she came closer. Mottled with contained laughter, he stretched his mouth to hers, trying to force the banana into her mouth with his tongue, but she broke away, scattering the food on the floor and down the front of her much spotted smock, while everyone clamored and laughed. Sam himself let out a bellow of laughter, but managed to say,

“Get a floor cloth, Looloo-girl: you ought to do what I say!”

With a confused expression, the girl trudged to the kitchen and came back to clean the floor. When she got up she was scarlet with the exertion. She cleaned the cloth and then let herself out dreamily into the yard. Clouds were passing over, swiftly staining the garden, the stains soaking in and leaving only bright light again. Louie forgot the incident completely as a dream.

This messiness was only like all Louie’s contacts with physical objects. She dropped, smashed, or bent them; she spilled food, cut her fingers instead of vegetables and the tablecloth instead of meat. She was always shamefaced and clumsy in the face of that nature which Sam admired so much, an outcast of nature. She slopped liquids all over the place, stumbled and fell when carrying buckets, could never stand straight to fold the sheets and tablecloths from the wash without giggling or dropping them in the dirt, fell over invisible creases in rugs, was unable to do her hair neatly, and was always leopard-spotted yellow and blue with old and new bruises. She shut drawers on her fingers and doors on her hands, bumped her nose on the wall, and many a time felt like banging her head against the wall in order to reach oblivion and get out of all this strange place in time where she was a square peg in a round hole.

There was a picture of a sweet, gay, shy little girl with curls all over her head, in an old frame in her father’s room. She could hardly believe that she, the legend of the family, whom everyone had a right to correct, had been that little girl. She wondered vaguely, from time to time, if she would have been any different if her mother had lived. But she did not believe it, and the picture of a yearning, tragic, sickly young woman that Sam drew did not catch her fancy. She was not like that: she felt a growling, sullen power in herself which was merely darkness to the splendid sunrise that she felt certain would flash in her in a few years. She acknowledged her unwieldiness and unhandiness in this little world, but she had an utter contempt for everyone associated with her, father, stepmother, even brothers and sister, an innocent contempt which she had never thought out, but which those round her easily recognized. It enraged Henny beyond expression: “the Pollit snobbishness!” she would say ten times a day. But it fell on deaf ears. Louie knew she was the ugly duckling. But when a swan she would never come sailing back into their village pond; she would be somewhere away, unheard of, on the lily-rimmed oceans of the world. This was her secret. But she had many other intimations of destiny, like the night rider that no one heard but herself. With her secrets, she was able to go out from nearly every one of the thousand domestic clashes of the year and, as if going through a door into another world, forget about them entirely. They were the doings of beings of a weaker sort.

Henny was annoyed to see the tribe bow before herself in the role of virago; she had not been brought up to think that she would succeed because of a mean disposition. She had been nurtured in the idea that she was to be a great lady, like the old-time beauties of the South. So now she hurried to dress herself and get out of a house where all her hopes had been ruined and where she was forced by circumstances to slur and smut herself to herself. She was restless, full of spite, contempt, and unhappiness—what a spineless crowd, a Baltimore slum breed, the spawn of a man who had begun by taking the kicks and orders of some restaurant keeper or fish handler at the age of twelve and so had never learned independence! The worst was that they looked upon her as an heiress, and she hadn’t a nickel in her purse and was forced to go into debt to keep the breed alive. She had no car she could use and was forced on a Sunday (Funday!) to rattle downtown in a streetcar, hungry and without a clean blouse. She supposed she could have forced some money out of him, but she hadn’t the patience or the interest to carry on her victory. She was sunk for life. Old David Collyer would never take her back, and what other man seriously wanted a woman with five children even if the Collyer estate was free of debt? She did not care two ticks whether she won victories over such cowards or not: they had won the final victory over her.

She took a bit of cold meat, a hard-boiled egg, some currants, and an onion and made herself a one-man curry, which she ate hastily with some tea made for her by Louie. Then she swished upstairs to the attic, to find Bonnie. Bonnie was reading some old love letters and had only packed two vests in her trunk.

Henny said, with her head high, “I take back all I said: I let my temper run away with me. You can stay if you like, though I’m darned if I would! I’m going to town and I’ll be late home.”

“I know you didn’t mean it, Pet.”

“Oh, I’m a brute; but the way they drive me mad and I feel as weak as a cat through getting nothing to eat!”

“Let me make you a little bite, Pet!” Bonnie cried eagerly, rising and putting the letters back in her drawer.

“I’ve eaten a bit of curry,” Henny unbent, and seemed pathetic and graceful to butter-hearted Bonnie. “I don’t know why I jump on you.”

Bonnie started to say something and bit her lip. Then, “I’ll get the dinner, Pet. And I’ll get you another blouse somehow.”

Henny turned about and gave a hard laugh, “Don’t be a fool! Where will you get the money to pay for one? Did I pay for it? I’m a mendicant from my rich relatives! Like an old washerwoman I get their out-of-date clothes, sweaty under the arms. Cheap servants like you and me can’t buy decent clothes, or pay back debts. I’ll wear any old thing. Who would look at an old hag like me?”

“Whatever you wear, you look so much the lady, Henny!”

She said roughly, “I look like what I am, a poor old wreck: if I’d done ten years of streetwalking I wouldn’t look so weather-beaten! Well, will you look after feeding the kids and so on? I’d like to be out all day if I could.”

Henny hurried downstairs again, but out of the flush of reconciliation, she thought, I have to smoodge her: I can’t employ a girl here who would live in. I never could keep a servant. No one but a Pollit would stand me; not even an Uncle Tom. She laughed to herself and went in to finish her dressing.

Cheered by the news that Henny was going out before lunch, they all went back to work with vim.

“Little, Mother said to clean her shoes,” dictated Evie to Little-Sam who was mooning on the path, on his haunches and drawing invisibly with one finger.

“Little is commooning with his thoughts and with Nature,” said Sam-major in a low voice. “Leave him to it.”

“Then Ernie must do them,” said Evie strictly.

“You shut up!” snapped Ernest.

“What’s Mothering want clean shoes for?” inquired Sam under his breath.

“She’s going to meet Aunt Hassie.”

“Why doesn’t Hassie bring her car up and take Mother down?” continued Sam, painting with his practiced stroke.

“I don’t know,” Evie admitted sadly. When Hassie came she always brought something for Evie; but she did not come often.

“Why does everything have to be done in a hole-and-corner way?” said Sam without anger. “Pet simply loves deceit. It took me a long time to realize that that was part of the way she was brought up and I was rather harsh at first, I admit. I don’t want deceitful ways round the home, kids! Now I know Henny doesn’t look at it that way: that is the curse of the bringing-up of women to useless arts. They used to be brought up to catch men. Yes, that was the ultimate goal—to get a rich husband. Strange, in our republic! But it was so. Now, you know I’m always frank and honest myself. But women have been brought up much like slaves, that is, to lie. I don’t want to teach you to criticize your mother.”