The Man Who Loved Children (74 page)

Now, he proposed a five-year-plan for his creditors: he refused to let one borrowed cent go round the world in ragged trousers with his name to it—he would pay back everything. He had no money. They saw in him a penniless man, whose good name had been torn from his back by the wickedness of the world, but he would win his way back, make a new world for his children, and pay back all the money that the wretched creature had borrowed. There was not even any sense to all this waste: it was mere pointless ruin, for the money had gone to buy clothes and food that would have been paid for out of his salary if his salary had not been eaten up secretly by the loan sharks and bloodsucking usurers against whom he had no recourse, since their procedures were illegal. He walked back to Spa House a beaten man, with his pockets out and his name mud-spattered, true, said he; but what did he care for slander and name-slinging? In five years he would have paid off all, and his children would be prouder than ever of their father’s honor; his truth crushed to earth would rise again, fresher from her mud bath.

For a few weeks they remembered Henny. They would hear her footsteps in the hall, in her bedroom upstairs; Louie would hear her in the kitchen making tea or poking the fire on a few Mondays, out in the washhouse. Streams of visitors came, mostly women, to look after the motherless children, so horribly orphaned, and to help out the fourteen-year-old girl who now would be “a little mother to them all” (as no one failed to remark): they helped with the cooking, put the children to bed, even scrubbed and washed, neighbors, aunts, cousins alike, and Sam’s men friends, who had secreted themselves for years in their dugouts in Baltimore and Washington, began to roll down in cars or on shanks’ ponies and hold long commiserating confabs with him. The world had changed entirely. Aunt Hassie had a quarrel with Aunt Eleanor about who should take Chappy for a few weeks, until Sam got a housekeeper. Aunt Hassie won, and the anemic Cathy, who up till now had played with her platoon of dolls, now had a human doll to take care of. She got some color in her cheeks and even put on a little flesh round the waist, and Hassie began to think that it would be a good idea if she, Hassie, adopted Chappy and let Cathy get married to some good man who could bring her up firmly.

The friendly folk who came down gave the children small pieces of money and one day, after quite a party of them had gone, Ernie found a five-dollar bill in the grass. He could hardly believe his good luck, but went round in silence for several hours, at the end of which he took the money to his father and said glumly, that he supposed one of the visitors had dropped it. Sam, however, who had in the meantime inquired into Ernie’s finances (needing money himself), told Ernie rather gruffly that he could keep it until its claimant turned up. Its claimant never turned up, and this led Ernie into several heartening thoughts about the possibility of money’s dropping from heaven, upon the place beneath. He made up his mind to leave school as soon as possible and go out into that world in which five-dollar bills nested in double-lined pockets, and yet where so little care was taken of such charming nestlings that no one noticed them when they flapped off clumsily on their own account.

When the guests went each day, then was the time that the image of Henny started to roam, and also in the early mornings, before Sam started to whistle them up and also just after. The window curtains flapped, the boards creaked, a mouse ran, and Henny was there, muttering softly to herself, tapping a saucepan, turning on the gas. The children were not frightened. They would say, laughing, somewhat curious, “I thought I heard Mothering,” and only Evie or Tommy (“that little kissing-bug who is always mugging me,” as Henny had said) would look a bit downcast; and perhaps Chappy missed her, that queer, gypsylike, thin, tanned, pointed face with big black eyes rolling above him which, with its regular white teeth, had looked for, begged for his smiles, had tickled him into smiles, and hugged him just under its chin, when he smiled. But Chappy was away learning to punch playfully the large bosom of Hassie, and already his ideas of faces were confused.

For days Louie would not think of her, having too much to do. It was the summer vacation, and the entire work of the house, outside washing day, fell on Louie and Evie, with occasional help from the boys. Sometimes women came and helped, sometimes Sam would do the dishes; and not only was there so much to do, but the boys and Sam grumbled bitterly about the food, their beds, and so on. Not all would grumble at once. Ernie would come sweetly to them with that touching dependence on them that women laugh at but cultivate in their husbands, and ask, with melancholy, about his buttons or his socks; or Tommy -would come, rather timidly, to show a large hole just “come somehow” in his shirt, or bathing trunks would have to be mended before they were “arrested by the society for indecency.” This period was hard for them, but it was in many ways sweet, too. Sam told them that soon they would have someone to help them. He thought that someone might be Bonniferous.

Yes, Bonniferous had run away from Auntie Jo’s in rebellion, hate, and anger, saying dreadful things, saying she was going to get her baby somehow, find it wherever they had stuck it, even if it was underground, and bury it herself, or if it was living, make a living for it herself, “any way, any way at all” (and when they repeated this, the women would lower their voices and look at each other). But Sam had already been several times to the police to ask them to look for Bonnie and to look for her baby too, for perhaps one was with the other. He liked the police: they were good, decent fellows, helping people in misery, keeping order, punishing only crime, and friendly enough if one approached them in the right spirit as man to man, not calling them names (for they were only workers like him and his friends), but jollying them, being kind to them. And these kind men liked him, too. The Commissioner himself had put himself out to help Sam; so that now Sam had every hope of soon seeing his favorite sister again. He had spoken very severely, in the midst of his sorrow, to the frightened and contrite Jo. Jo showed her contrition in the usual way, by gobbling, quarreling, and blaming everyone but herself; but she was contrite, said Sam, and she would show it: she would be kind to Bonnie, she had promised it. She would make clothes for the lost little baby born beyond the pale.

So the little girl struggled on from day to day, hoping to hear about Bonniferous and, in the meantime, getting the house into a mess much worse than ever poor Henny had got it in. Sam was puzzled by all this, and was heard, at least once a day, to wonder how on earth he had got into “sich a passel of uncompetent shemailes”: when Bonniferous came back to them, with her little baby, he would have to “organize them shemailes, and all would run like clockwork under scientific management.” Life was noisy, busy, and full of speculations, and so Louie had little time to think about the strange day when Henny died.

But sometimes, when she least expected it, she would think about it: the terror of it, and her secret complicity would seem so naked to the sky that she would break out into an icy sweat and wonder that no one could hear what was going on in her brain. She would never tell anyone, and this was as a corpse sealed up in the house which she alone knew of and which would eventually molder and leave little trace, until the mindless years,” with the vague gesture of an idiot, brought it unaccusingly to light. This was a terror she could live with. But she lived a queer life, and the noises, cries, philosophies of others seemed like silly games that kindergarten children play. She was on the other side of a fence; there was a garden through the chinks that she had once been in, but could never be in again. Yet she did not care. She still believed that she had done the only right thing, the only firm thing, and that Fate itself had not only justified her but saved her from consequences. It annoyed her only to hear Sam talking about Henny’s rash act, dreadful deed, and shameful self-ruin, folly next to wickedness and mindless self-destruction, and the long, long talks he had with one and another about the whole thing. “What do you know?” she would think. She soon reached a point when she could not sit at the table with him and listen to his misbegotten notions and morality with its mistaken examples. When they were served, she would take her own plate and go with it to sit on the front lawn, or down the orchard, and no matter how many messages were sent to her to come in and join the family, she would obstinately and even mutely sit there, self-righteous, proud, and contemptuous.

The tempests of July and the swamped earth and flooded rivers had come to wash away the sorrows of Henny: headstones sank in the graveyard, and the new earth piled over her fell in. Towards the end of July it was as if Henny too had stormed, but in another room in the universe, which was now under lock and key.

On Monday the twenty-fifth, the heavy rain having at last stopped, Sam went into Baltimore to talk about a favorite project of his. Many friends had urged him to try to get on to a radio program, and they thought either foreign affairs or the children’s hour would suit him, but he himself thought of himself as “Uncle Sam,” and for some time had discussed his “Uncle Sam” with friends, journalists (whom he highly respected as a communicating medium between recondite truth and the truth-hungry mob), and “responsible” people with whom he was intimate. Sam was no bootlicker of people in high place: he so honestly admired them, and so wholeheartedly believed that capacity is always rewarded by “the people” in the shape of high place that his love for them was a pure thing. Sam had been doing the rounds of the elect of the people, for some time, and saw “Uncle Sam” as “an eventuality of the immediate future.” On his Uncle Sam Hour, he would tell not only folk tales that had been handed down from our forefathers, things devised in their frontier nights after hand-to-hand battles with hardship, and distorted stories brought over from crooked old Europe, but also tales of our revolutionary past, high deeds of stern men and brave women whereby we won the freedom we have, such freedom that, thank Heaven, there is no need to go through again the turmoil that now confronts poor bonded Europe. He would lead them by the hand down the highways of the world and the bypaths of Nature and teach them all her secrets, even as Hiawatha learned them.

Sam had no difficulty in interesting advertisers, and these were days of great hope for him: at last he had found his function. He had told his children and friends for many years that the radio was the great new medium of spreading enlightenment—radio and the movies. He wished that he knew the directors of M.G.M. and Warner Brothers, for they must be good men, since they catered to the people, and he had the same dear wish about Franklin D. Roosevelt and Stephen S. Wise. They made mistakes, he felt, but after a short talk with them, they would become his friends, and he could give them ideas, put them more intimately in touch with the people, a thing for which they lived. He had always said that though, no doubt, Jesus Christ never existed, the idea of “the second coming” was a touching illustration of mankind’s wish for uplift and regeneration; and that if a real savior ever came, he would come over the radio. Perhaps, he, Samuel Clemens Pollit, was a forerunner of the truly great man. At any rate he would begin by touching the heart of the little world, the Lilliputians. Far from despising the advertisers of radio programs, he liked them, he thought them wonderfully humane people because, instead of merely broadcasting crude publicity, they wished to entertain and educate the people.

After a most satisfactory talk with a sponsor, Sam took a walk this Monday down South Eutaw Street, between Lexington and Mulberry Streets, to look in the pet shops, and then turned up Mulberry Street to go to the library. Coming towards him was a touching young mother, with long silver-gilt hair, and a baby in her arms. Sam’s heart jumped, his eyes misgave him, and then he saw that it really was Bonnie. He rushed to her and took her into his arms.

“Oh, Bonniferous! Bonniferous! Why didn’t you come to your poor brother? Bonniferous! Where are you? Everyone has been looking for you. Did you know Henny died? I am all alone, Bonniferous.”

Sam wept openly, and Bonnie wept openly, and then the baby (which was a boy and which Bonnie was quite sure was her baby) wept openly, and as he had the great lust for weeping in him, he outdid them, and insisted upon attention to himself alone. Sam was for taking Bonnie home at once, but Bonnie had to get her things and give notice at the place where she worked and—

“And see the man?” inquired Sam, in a sad voice.

“Oh!” cried Bonnie, “I’ll never look at him again if I live to be a hundred.”

Then Sam wanted to know if the boy was to be without a father, and Bonnie said better no father than such a wretch; and Sam said, in that case, he would be its father—what difference would another little fellow make in his great phalanstery of sons down at Spa House? He was getting two jobs, both in the public service (later on he would be a biologist)—his own children were growing up, and Bonnie could look after the house for him and save him the expense of a housekeeper: and he would protect her. Perhaps later on, she would find a good man—Mr. Right, this time, not Mr. Wrong. He saw Bonnie to her room, kissed his new nephew (whom she had called “Samuel-Charles”), and went galloping home, singing to himself. He could hardly wait to get home, burst into the house, and tell them all the wonderful news: they had a new brother, Samuel-Charles (yes, another Sam, Little-Sam), and he would soon be Uncle Sam on his own Hour, he thought. “All things work together for the good of him that loves the Truth,” said the train to him as it rattled down towards the Severn, “all things—work—together—for the good—of him—that loves—the
TRUTH
!” Even Henny’s death had worked for him: even Henny’s debts, for now he had got a new sphere of influence, and friends had rallied round him in an altogether unexpected way. “It is—lovely—to be loved!” said the train to him. “It is splendid—to be—loved! If we only—can—live up—to the thoughts—of us—by them—that love us!”