The Man Who Loved Children (45 page)

But the nurse, a good-natured, foal-faced girl who always put her foot in it (as Bonnie later explained), after some mild laughing, said, “But I do know a man who made his eldest daughter do that; and she married very young; she had a son at eighteen years old. It didn’t stop her at all. Isn’t that funny?”

Bonnie sat biting her lip and trying to nod the careless nurse towards the listening children; finally she said stiffly, “Well, please don’t tell my brother; or he’ll take your word for it. That kid knows enough already; she had enough trouble,” and she motioned towards Louisa, who was just returning flushed from viewing the new baby. She burst out without noticing anybody,

“The new baby’s going to be called Albert-Charles, Mother says.”

They all turned to her.

“Charles-Franklin,” cried Sam appearing, where he had been lurking, at the southern door of the long dining room. “My Benjamin will be called Franklin, and I should put in Phoebus Apollo if I wanted to imitate those silly old Dagos what thought our beloved old Sol was a young man, a good-looker too; he was born at morning-rise, and I have just been giving him a serenade outside his window, not that he hears it yet. Morning is sacred; all great ideas are born in the morning or at midnight’s starry clang. I have thoughts in the morning, in the new-time, in the dewtime, that I don’t have the rest of the day. Most poicks [poets] write poems about sunset and that’s jes why I don’t read no poickry; poicks don’t love nature enough to get up early. In the morning everyone is the same age, father and child, Ming-Sedgewing and Bullhead and Loogoobrious Looloo and Dad-the-Bold-Tuan-Pollit too are all the same age; yes, even Looloo here what has the burdens of the world on her shoulders, which is only right because she makes the poor old world heavier herself, and even Nurse Putnam and Bonniferous are all the same age in the morning.”

“Then we’re all just born,” cried Evie, astonished.

“Charles-Franklin didn’t get up yet, so he’s old,” declared Little-Sam grinning.

“Looloo never gets up early in the morning,” piped Saul maddeningly, thinking thereby to earn approval.

Sam said wearily, “Kids, no sarcasm please; sarcasm is akin to hate. More coffee, Sedgewing! Get your little Paternal
subbor cawf
[some more coffee].
Kop kopi, syce
.”

He surveyed them all, but refrained from criticizing them for various disorders he saw in them, bad manners, grins, wasteful habits. He could not conceal for a moment that he was grown a more serious man; his jokes and comic names rolled rustily off his tongue.

“I want you to listen to an idea I had today while your little brother was being born. The laws of nature are few, and she follows them inevitably; she obeys her own laws. She can’t help it. The law of nature which the plant, the family, and the universe follows is expansion, growth, sometimes growth by transmutation, sometimes by acquisition.”

“What about death?” asked Louie.

“Death is only transmutation. Now I believe that the universe, our universe is the same. I believe in the expanding universe, and you will find as time goes on, that great men will prove that it is so. I pick these ideas out of the air, and yet, I have proof too for all things go by analogy. That’s the Mark Twain new-world spirit; horse sense and close analogy.

“Perhaps as Looloo says, it sometimes expands and sometimes contracts, for death is only recession, just as our minds do, the tide does, metals do and our fortunes do, going from richness to richness and understanding to understanding, just as the life of man does, following the law of progress.

“These things are not mystic, they follow an inexorable law. Remember my words!”

“How do you know?” asked Louie.

“When you get older and wiser,” he said, “you will know your dad was always right. I make it rain, don’t I, kids?”

“Yes,” they said eagerly.

“When I say, ‘Sun, you can shine!’ doesn’t it shine?”

“Yes, yes,” they chorused joyfully.

“And when I say, ‘Rain, you kin rain half an hour and then stop,’ don’t it obey me?”

“Yes.”

“But Looloo thinks I don’t know nuffin; Looloo only thinks of hummilatin [humiliating] her wise father.”

“You don’t make it rain,” said Louie. The children, much interested, looked from one to the other. Sam, looking to them, saw the hesitation.

“Kids?” he inquired reproachfully.

“No, you don’t,” cried Ernie at once.

“Don’t I, Little-Womey?”

Puzzled, she looked at the three older faces, “I dunno!”

Sam went to the window, studied the sky carefully for a while, then went out into the back yard. After feeling the air, he came in solemnly and said, “Because I have a lot of mean kids around, I just went out and told it it could rain tomorrow morning or this evening at the earliest.”

Little-Womey looked scared, thinking about her own incredulity. Louie laughed, “You’re just faking. You know it’s going to rain, perhaps.”

“The sun draws up the water, the water makes clouds and when they reach an icy layer the water is precipitated,” Ernie explained. “The teacher told us, the teacher told us.”

“How could you have the rainfall chart behind the door, if you could make it rain any time?” Louie said. Sam grinned self-consciously at this; but he would not give in, and to crush the influence of his two older children who had reached the age of dissent, he wickedly seized a large blowfly which he had been watching on the tablecloth for some time and putting it between finger and thumb flipped it at his elder daughter. It hit her on the nose. The children turned red with laughter. Louie gave him a glance of scorn and saying nothing, dug her nose into her glass of milk. Her father was now laughing, and singing, “Longnose Bluebeak, bluebeak Loobeck: why don’t you laugh, Looloo: bluestocking Looloo got hit by a blowbloo!” Little-Sam, holding his belly, rolled backwards and forwards on the grass, yelling with laughter. Louie sat quite still, and this new sort of behavior calmed the children sooner than Sam expected.

Sam became solemn at once, “By smiling, we turn devils into angels, enemies into friends; the cup of poison becomes the loving cup.”

“I have no enemies,” declared Louie sternly.

“One day you will get to know the world better,” said Sam, still unable to forgive the skeptic of his blood.

“I know something,” said Louie, “I know there are people not like us, not muddleheaded like us, better than us.”

“What do you mean?”

“But I know something else: if it is chaos, it will not be chaos forever: ‘out of chaos ye shall give birth to a dancing star!’ Nietzsche said that.”

Sam blushed, and he said gently, “You mean, out of confusion we will bring order.”

“No,” cried Louie, “no, no; you understand nothing. People like us understand nothing. I know people at school better than us, better in their minds than—” she stopped in deep embarrassment. The children were following her intently, trying to understand what she had found out, something they were dimly groping for.

“All right, Looloo,” said Sam gently, “all right. All right.”

Five minutes later he was singing them some more of his saga, as he fixed a red silk Chinese pajama suit on Evie and wound a sarong over her head and shoulders.

“Little
perempuan Melayu, Singapura punya,
sitting under an umbrella selling Eastern candies, black eyes moist as the antelope, oval copper face, full wide lips, my Little-Womey, Little Malay beauty!” and he sang to each of them as he busied himself with them, dressing them up in all the wonderful scarves, sarongs, a Kelantan shawl of woven silk with body of royal yellow and ends of Malay red and orange; a sarong batek made in Java of dyed cotton, blue with center bister and white; a handkerchief of Malay-red silk interwoven with gold thread, the center brocaded in heliotrope and yellow; a blue and gold silk sarong from Trengganu; and beautiful strange clothing that he had picked up wherever he went, for his women at home, for Henrietta, Louisa and Evelyn, getting to be a woman lover in the land of wealth, beauty, and color, promising himself, who had despised all sensual things, a future madness of material beauties.

Short of the old family plate he had acquired on his marriage with Henny and the wedding presents, he had had none of this world’s goods and despised them with puritan alarm and scoffing; but the moment he set foot on the age-old shores of the East, where no one respected his new Western morality, he easily let slip this hardness and came out for every glorious profusion of art in artisanship that was possible to his purse or persuasive powers. He had learned to smile, beg, and collect, largely take the largesse of his friends. “My smile brings it to me,” he would say contentedly, and, “They know I love them.”

Mrs. Smith, from Volta Place, came to the open front door to inquire about Henrietta. Sam, who thought her a fine, upstanding woman, was delighted to bring her in and show her his treasures, which still lay in profusion in several rooms. Then the White boys came shyly (“How big you’ve got to be!” called Sam), with a message from their mother about Henrietta. What with the new baby and the splendors from Malaya, it was a morning of satisfactions. Sam could see, himself, that his return was considered a great event in the neighborhood. Resting on the settee, on a billow of silks and cottons, with his head on his clasped hands, he dropped a tear over the passing of Old David Collyer and began to imagine his own future now. Tohoga House would be his own, and there might be a quarterly allowance for Henrietta, or one or other of the children, from the estate.

“These are sordid considerations,” he said to himself; but with the sun and fresh wind and the kindness of the climate, so different from all his Malayan mornings, he could not help being cheerful. Soon the nurse came down, smiling, and said Sam was to go up to see Mrs. Pollit, and carrying in his hand a pair of tiny red silk pajamas that he had brought specially for the baby and an exquisite little wreath of artificial orange flowers (he had hoped for a baby girl) that he now intended for Henny’s dark, hair, the happy father went upstairs. The new baby had hair of an almost invisible blond.

“Seventh child of a seventh child,” said Sam, grinning at the nurse.

“Born with a caul,” said the nurse, grinning at Sam.

When Sam went down, he telephoned his little prig of a brother-in-law, Archie Lessinum, to announce the birth to the family and to make arrangements about the funeral.

David Collyer was no better than other millionaires: when he died, his estate was scandalously less than anyone had supposed; and in fact, since Old David loved children too much, and had too many, and treated them too well, when he found out that their characters were weak all, he left even less than anyone could have predicted by any skimping of a mean imagination. Rather he left something very great—a great hole in his credit that it would take his executors a number of years to fill in. Monocacy, Tohoga House, a great stretch of still unsettled land along Cold Spring Lane, a row of white-stepped houses in South Baltimore, a house of dubious reputation (that is, certain reputation for evil) in Highlandtown, and all his shares and bonds were to be sold; and a certain amount of money was to be put back into the business. This part of the business alone would remain to pay small quarterly dividends to the sick, sallow, and financially suffering members of the great Collyer brood. Old Ellen received nothing but a small cottage in which to spend her last days with Barry.

Sam Pollit came home from the reading of the will with drooping shoulders. Nothing else since the death of his first wife Rachel had been able to affect his long-legged gay walk and the straightness of his backbone. It seemed to him, at moments, that this was nothing but a dream, that Old David could not have died so inconsequentially as to leave his youngest, spendthrift daughter penniless in a cold world, without a shoe or shell to house her children. This house, now named Tohoga Place, that he had painted and carpentered, where he had built his rockeries and all his dreams of the future, had to go under the hammer. It was not marketable as it was; would, at last, be cut up for a row of unhealthy, elbowing houses like those already spawned along one side of it. Sam did not know where they would go. He supposed he would have to join the great number of commuters who came in from Virginia every day, and settle in some ugly new bureaucrats’ suburb without trees, with new-turned clay and garages lumbering along the landscape; live in some modern bungalow with a Dirty Jack on one side, and a Ratty-Matty on the other, himself indistinguishable from the crowd of public servants and their newfangled offspring. He felt bruised. He had always believed that he was the favorite son-in-law of Old David and that Old David liked him better than his own boys, because of his struggles.

Henny was still in bed, looking wasted, her eyes were red. Her hair was pulled back and plaited in two tails.

“I was there,” said Sam.

Henny’s black eyes searched his face bitterly, but it was not bitterness because of him, but because of all the blows she could feel were coming, from the family and from the world. She had been through the pains of death, and she felt that she did not care whether she ever saw outer air again or not. Many times that day she wished she had been buried with her poor “beau of the nineties,” her gay, kindhearted father who had ruined her life by spoiling her so.

“Well,” she said, after a sigh, “well, I suppose it’s bad news, or you’d tell it to me. He was broke, of course.”

“Yes. I’m afraid Old David was in deeper than we dreamed. Your mother is to have the cottage.” He stopped, knowing that she would understand a great deal from this. But she flashed an angry look at him and cried,

“What? He didn’t leave me the house? What are we to do with all those children? He came at a nice time,” and she nodded at the new boy, “A caul and he brings nice luck to us. Poor Old David, poor Dad: with his fine air, and his flighting and floating, and his keeping fifteen homes going, I might have known. I
did
know! But everyone’s too much of a darn coward to look out for himself. I knew! Why didn’t I go and see him oftener before he took so ill?” She gave Sam a blue look. “I did go: but he was too ill. Before he lived with his woman. He put me off. Archie wouldn’t tell me. He knew! Why didn’t he tell me?”