The Man Who Loved Children (17 page)

“Daddy,” said Little-Sam, “make them stop now.”

“Take it like a man, you fathead,” cried Sam to Saul. “Fight him: what are you bawling for?” He shoved him forward. Saul automatically sent a soft blow wide, and then suddenly, with a loud bellow, turned and ran up the orchard as fast as he could. But his legs were shaking, and he stumbled at every step. Sam shouted,

“Sawbones, Sawbones!” and impulsively, yanking Tommy to his feet, Sam crowed, “Come on, boys, after him. The boy who ran away! C’mon! Give him the fright of his life!” With shrieks, they started after the fugitive, Sam in front dragging along Little-Sam whose face was anxious. Saul gave a look behind, saw the pack after him, darted sideways through the grasses, and went sprawling behind a young pine tree. He lay there face downwards, sobbing into the earth. Sam came up, with the boys slightly astern, and stood there, for a moment, then poked his son with his toe,

“Get up, son!”

Quite broken, Saul began to pick himself up, dispersedly, as if his skeleton had become disarticulated and floated off in impossible directions. Sam got out his handkerchief and wiped Saul’s eyes on it, then said,

“C’mon, kids: job! Work heals all sorrows!”

With an occasional sob, Saul tailed along, and in a quarter of an hour it seemed as if there had never been a cloud in the sky. When they were shifting their ladder so as to get on the roof itself, Sam sat down on the edge of the path and, drawing them round him into one of his powwows, said, with his arm along Saul’s shoulder,

“Kidalonks! When there is bad blood in this family, I want you to get it out of your system by a man-to-man fight. Then we’ll all be very happy and love one another. Nothing is worse than a nursed grudge. Our tempers are our worse natures and when they come along, we give ’em a good physical shakeup and hey, presto! we’re wholesome and clean again, good citizens and good brothers.” He looked round the little manhood with satisfaction. “My good boys,” he said. And then began the difficult, exciting, and dangerous business of climbing on the roof. From it they saw the Cathedral and the capital city.

The capital city
,
always duller than hard-working, mercantile, familiar Baltimore, is detestable on Sundays, dull and Pharisaical, thought Henny. Nothing but an emergency would have induced her to go downtown on a Sunday: the department stores were shut, there was no obsessed crowd of women on Seventh and Eighth Streets in which she could hide her garments, shabby bag, untended hair, and old skin. Her poverty was naked on the empty streets, and if no one walked abroad she felt all the more ghastly, like a wretched sinner in the sight of God. For Washington is Heaven, and Henny, disfigured, burdened with shameful secrets, felt like a human being would feel on first entering the sight of the angels. She detested perennial Heaven, Sinai’s thunder, the new Jerusalem’s powerful hierarchy; she felt it was the Eden of fleshpot men and ugly women striving for God knows what ugly, unhewn, worthy ends, not for the salvation of miserable creatures like herself. When she had first come to Washington, she had come with no more sense of married life or of social life than a harem-reared woman, being then a gentle, neurotic creature, wearing silk next to the skin and expecting to have a good time at White House receptions. Here she was, Collyer’s youngest spoiled daughter, haggard, threadbare, over-rouged, worrying about how to indebt herself, going to meet a coarse fellow who was her lover merely because she could not get him into trouble. She rarely cried now, but she felt her eyes smart.

Where, in all the self-righteous lying world, could she turn for a friend? She even thought angrily of her children—they were simply eating up her flesh as they had when they were at the breast, no less. Did they know or would they ever know what a torture cell her life had been for them, borrowing money to buy them clothes, to avoid quarrels with their father, the quarrels already too many and already making cowards and sneaks of them? What would have happened if I’d never been born? she thought; they would never have been born. That hypocrite would have got some other woman with his yellow hair and big smile, but I should not have been responsible for their calvary, nor had even this toothache!

She thought bitterly about all men, most of all about her brother-in-law, her beautiful sister Eleanor’s husband. He had loved Henny first and then discovered that Eleanor was the favorite and would get a bonus as well as her share of the estate; or that was how Henny put it to herself.

How hot it was in Washington! It was a hundred degrees in the shade, at least, thought Henny, and she seemed already to smell herself; she was no better than the painted young girls who buzzed round the journalists in the cafe. She looked in open kitchen windows, at the suits worn by little boys, at their scuffed shoes. She swept along without looking at adults, thinking of her children and the mounting cost of keeping them. They were such fine big children (as everyone said constantly) that a suit of clothes lasted a boy about three months. She thought of her big house on the hill and snickered bitterly. Even Bert Anderson, who had known her for so long, would give a lot to get inside it, to be able to say,

“I was up at Sam Pollit’s the other Sunday, you know he married the Collyer clam-and-oyster money, young Henrietta, she was a Baltimore belle at one time, and they certainly have a crowd of fine little kiddies—was kidding Sam telling him his Roosevelt, the Great Democrat, would soon be the forgotten man,” etc. This little preview of Bert Anderson, her stand-by from the Department of Internal Revenue, made Henny smile a little. This red-cheeked, lusty, riotous giant was not a gentleman, but he treated her as a single girl, listened to every word she had to say, always seemed eager, gave her advice, and was fascinated by money matters. He called her jocosely “young Henrietta,” too, tried to improve her appearance in his brutal style, behaved like a grizzly-bear cub, and had no morality, character, ambitions, or way of life that she need respect.

Henny went upstairs when she came to the bar and restaurant near Twelfth Street and was glad to see that it was after one already. Bert would be there promptly at one-fifteen. She fiddled with the table silver and the menu, wished she had dawdled longer, muttered, “But I feel too conspicuous parading up and down the streets smirking nicely at mothers with children: and I might run into one of the Commissioner’s fine friends, too. Bert is never late.”

She saw Bert, shining with health, bursting in through the door, his hat still on his head to hide his thinning hair. He looked young, presentable, with a tight red skin and a thick irrepressible black beard newly ground off to skin level, jutting nose and chin, bright black eyes, and a ready grin; the lips were too red, the teeth too white in this grin, one thought, at first meeting. He bustled down to her, holding out both hands, and hailing her,

“Well, I’m not late, I’m not late. I told you one-fifteen, didn’t I?” He looked round for a hook for his hat, then pressed her mouth with his cushiony lips.

“You’re good to me, Bert, to come running when I get a freak and ring you up.”

“Bert Anderson, always on tap,” he affirmed. “I’m your guy, aren’t I? If not me, then who? Maybe you’ve got someone else.” He chuckled. “Well, what are we eating? And drinking? Cigarette? Smoking? No oysters I guess for the daughter of Paty du Clam? You don’t mind if I do? Hello, hello there! How’s things, Mullarkey? What’s new? That’s fine, that’s fine!” He gave their order and then, one hand washing another, leaned over the table to Henny,

“Now then, what’s new? Want to hear the latest? Did you hear about the fellow who had a nag racing out at Bowie? He kind of liked the horse and took it out a few magazines to read in the stable. The horse just looked and turned back to eat its hay. The little dog burst out laughing, and said, ‘Hey, you don’t think a horse can read, do you?’ ”

“Where’s the joke?” asked Henny.

“Ha, ha, ha—ha, ha, ha,” roared Bert, “you don’t see it! Did you hear about the two dickybirds who were sitting on a tree and one said, ‘That’s Hitler!’ and the other said, ‘What are you waiting for?’ ”

“What an idiot!” said Henny, laughing. “Oh, I’ll admit one thing, I get a good laugh with you. That young miss at the telephone sounded snippety. I heard what she said!”

“I know,” he howled cheerfully, “I told her to cover the goddam mouthpiece when she made a silly crack like that. ‘Well, how old is she, anyhow?’ the kid said. I said, ‘Oh, about thirty-two, thirty-three,’ I told her. ‘Well, what did I say? I said an old lady,’ the kid said; ‘what is she beefing about?’ I told her, ‘That’s a lady, something you don’t know about.’ I won’t tell you what she said, since you are a real lady!”

“No, but you’re dying to,” said Henny with a grimace, “I should like a stiff drink. I wish the churches and the smug big shots with cellars of their own hadn’t passed this law.”

“Good old Sinai, good old Jenkins Hill,” cried Bert, “got to make the nation’s capital safe for the bug-eyed tourist. I guarantee Samuel the Righteous thinks it’s fine.”

Henny shrugged, “Of course, he thinks that if he could get in and have half an hour’s talk with President Roosevelt, he would banish alcohol for his term from the White House. The reason he knew Woodrow Wilson was God Almighty was that prohibition came in in his presidency. I sometimes think I live in the White House—or I think Samuel thinks so—” she shrugged again. “I can’t understand why he never went into politics, with his gift of the gab and greensward style!”

Bert laughed interrogatively.

“Biggity style, all in the higher regions. I wish to all creation he’d picked out another woman, for his own sake, too.”

“Maybe he will,” Bert consoled her.

Henny laughed bitterly. “You know his favorite quotation? ‘Good name in man and woman is the immediate jewel of their souls.’ The children, Dad’s money, his fat job, his reputation with all the high and mighty people he knows!” She laughed in an embarrassed way, “And he believes men should be virgins when they marry!”

“Holy mackerel!”

“We had our first fight over that. I simply didn’t believe him! Now I do. And all the rest goes with it—no cards, no dirty jokes, no drinks, no smokes, no lively books. When I married him he had more than four thousand books and not one novel! He lectured me so when he caught me with one of Hassie’s library books that I didn’t dare read a novel for six months. But like all hypocrites and sneaks, it’s all right if it has another label. He lets that child of his read stuff about hysteria—nuns having fits in convents and dreaming the Old One has what he might have for all I know, and animals breeding and old customs on European farms and all sorts of rot he lets that child of eleven read, because it’s science! She drives me mad with her reading. She’s that Big-Me all over again. Always with her eyes glued to a book. I feel like snatching the rotten thing from her and pushing it into her eyes, into her great lolling head: I’d like to stew the rotten books in one of my jam pans and make them both eat it. The feast of learning he’s always talking about! I’d like to see their great bellies swell with their dirty scientific books the way he makes mine with wind and—” she stopped. Bert meekly ate his oysters and drank his wine.

“Now the mistake you make, young Henrietta, is that you think about these things all the time,” said Bert, after a pause. “Now look at me,” he coaxed, “suppose I started to worry over the fact that my old man never turned an honest cent in his life, but scrounged on me, his kid, eh?”

“You know, Bert,” she said, trembling slightly, “the impulse to kill him becomes so strong sometimes, when I think of the way he’s taken my life and trampled all over it and then thinks it’s sufficient if he reads a few highbrow books, that I don’t know how to get over it. I clench my fists together to keep from rushing at his greasy yellow head, or throwing something into that noisy mouth, forever boasting and screaming. If I could kill him and that child,” she said, “I’d gladly do time for it. But what would the kids do? Go to an asylum? No one would stand it. No one could stand it. Hassie, who only has one kid anyhow, says, ‘Compromise, compromise!’ She wouldn’t compromise; she has a meek little skinned rat of man who runs out all over the streets anyhow and goes to bars with queer fish, while she stays at home and runs the business; what does she know about compromise? The very one who tells me to compromise wouldn’t compromise for half a minute. He talks about human equality, the rights of man, nothing but that. How about the rights of woman, I’d like to scream at him. It’s fine to be a great democrat when you’ve a slave to rub your boots on. I have to stuff mattresses because we haven’t enough money to buy new ones! Look at my hands!”

She showed him her worn hands. The skin was darkened by dirt ground in and snowy in patches, where the coarse soap had bitten it.

“And I rub in hand lotion every day,” she said bitterly. “They say in the magazines, look after yourself and your husband will love you. If love was got by a woman giving her last drop of blood to wash the clothes in and her last shred of skin to carpet the house with, I wouldn’t get it, and he wouldn’t notice it. He is injured, if you don’t mind! He boasts and screams about how cheap he buys his clothes for a man in his position, and what he gives up for the kids! He writes poems to himself on the subject: and what about me? I’m the heiress: I’m the rich woman who can stop up all the holes and darn all the tatters in her underwear and borrow old coats from her sister and beg old-fashioned jackets from her cousins, and I don’t sacrifice at all. It is all on account of me. The whole thing is due to my bad management.” Bert raised his eyes quizzically and held up his pencil,

“Henny, why can’t you make a go of it on eight thousand a year? You pay fifty dollars a month rent to your old man, that’s all.”

“What?” cried Henny indignantly, “Food alone costs me three thousand and more a year. Everything is budgeted to the minimum, and it never works out. You know how much I had to spend on the two girls last year? Thirty-two dollars. Hassie gave me a dress for Evie, but she detests Louisa and will never give me a thing for her. There isn’t a person in the family her size, she’s so enormous, and I can’t get any hand-me-downs for her. And I waste money! So says the Professor. The house is falling to pieces: there are always repairs. That’s why we got it so cheap. Dad couldn’t sell it. And you know the taxes we have to pay on that white elephant.”