The Man Who Loved Children (24 page)

“I’m not going into the black past—”

She interrupted him, turning her back, “If you have something to say, out with it and leave me alone.”

“I am going away for six or eight months—that depends on funds and results,” Sam said deliberately, “and during that time you are, of course, my lieutenant, and have to run the house and bring up the children. I hope you will try to do it on a proper budget and without unnecessary waste. The remuneration is good, and we can perhaps save something. We will need it, Henny. I have heard that your father, with all his obligations and his keeping of your weak-kneed brothers and their big families, is not doing well. It’s pouring money into a quicksand to give it to your brothers. I wish there had been more like Hassie in the family. But let that pass. I want you to take thought to the future. And perhaps we can come to a better understanding. You know yourself that we can’t go on like this.”

“I wish to God we could not,” said Henny desperately, “but we can, that’s the devil of it—”

“It’s on account of this language,” Sam exclaimed impatiently, “that I have to come down like this in the middle of the night. My children ought not to hear such expressions. They hear nothing like that from their father. And I must insist on your controlling your language while I’m away. You know if I could I would take them from your influence—I cannot. The law keeps me in bondage and so I see them daily being filched from me, sneaked away by a hundred kinds of mean tricks and bitter expressions and my own home life run in the Collyer style—”

“The Collyer style,” she repeated twice: “where would you be without the Collyer style? You Dr. Know-All! You don’t know where your bread and butter comes from. You know everything but that!”

Sam gave her a hard look, “You know I cannot provide for two homes, or I would.”

“You probably do as it is,” Henny teased. “No, I know you; you haven’t the guts for it. You just keep them tailing along.” He kept his temper, “Well, I see you’re not in a proper mood. I’ll wait till the morning. Get some sleep. Don’t stay up brooding and fixing your facial muscles into those hag lines: you look like a woman of forty-five!”

She gave him a fierce look, “Just as you please!” She turned to pour out another cup of tea, her hands trembling more and more. She realized that he was still standing there. Swiftly she turned to him, “I might as well tell you now; why should I drag through another sleepless night? It’s beyond my endurance. It will kill me. Sam, let us separate! I can’t stand it. You’re not happy. I’ll go back to Mother and take the children while you’re away, and when you come back we can fix things up without anyone noticing particularly. Your going away makes just the right opportunity. We can close this damn-fool rackety old barn, and I’ll live at Monocacy. I’ll even take your stinking animals along and let the man look after them, if you want the kids to have them. And Father can let Tohoga House, if he’s as hard up as he seems.”

Anger and balking gleamed in Sam’s eyes,

“You will never break up my home. I know that’s been your object for years and the aim of all your secret maneuvers. I love my children as no man ever loved his before. I know men love their children, but mine are bound up in me, part of me—” he paused breathless for a moment. “In all my misery they are my great consolation; there could be no joy in the world like my home to me. Men wreck their lives, endure backbreaking toil for years for their children. Some women cannot even understand such love as man feels in his strength for those weak ones playing round him who—” He paused again, much moved. “The light of the years to come, to me; and the law would give them into your charge because you are their mother, no matter what kind of a woman you are.”

“How dare you say that! How dare you—”

“Silence!” he said very sternly. “I’ll say no more now. Get to bed. I see there are some things to be thrashed out. I might have known you had some such devilish scheme to work as soon as your chance came. You have no respect for my work; you only look meanly on this absence of mine as a chance to wreak all your spite and vengeance. When a woman hates, she will wreck a dozen lives to pay back what she conceives to be some injury. You only see in this a chance to further your own work of disintegration. You devil of rust and rot and boring. You will not smash my family life. You will carry your bargain through to the end. You will look after my children—” his voice trembled, and he said very bitterly,—“ours!” He collected himself and turned towards the door. “Good night! I’ll speak to you in the morning.”

“I’ll divorce you,” cried Henny. “I’ll find a way. There must be a way. And I’ll take my children from you. The man who loves children! You can have your own. That’s all you really care about, anyway. You and she can go and live together and think about your rotten fine thoughts and you can weep over that sweet woman that would have made your life a paradise. Poor wretch! She died.”

Sam turned and shouted, “Don’t try to smear my past happiness.” The house no longer contained snores either fantastic, light, and querulous, or determined and snorty, but Louie still slept well.

Henny said, “When you come back there’ll be no home. You’ll have to find another way to provide for me and them.”

“Shut up,” shouted Sam, “shut up or I’ll shut you up.”

“You took me and maltreated me and starved me half to death because you couldn’t make a living and sponged off my father and used his influence, hoisting yourself up on all my aches and miseries,” Henny began chanting with fury, “boasting and blowing about your success when all the time it was me, my poor body that was what you took your success out of. You were breaking my bones and spirit and forcing your beastly love on me: a brute, a savage, a wild Indian wouldn’t do what you did, slobbering round me and calling it love and filling me with children month after month and year after year while I hated and detested you and screamed in your ears to get away from me, but you wouldn’t let me go. You were quite certain in your heart of hearts where your marvelous success came from, forcing me to stay here in this rotten old molar of a house to suit yourself, making me go down on my hands and knees to scrub floors and wash your filthy linen and your torn old bed sheets, your blankets, and even your suits—I’ve stuffed mattresses for you and your children and cooked dinners for the whole gang of filthy, rotten, ignorant, blowing Pollits that I hate. I’ve had the house stinking like a corpse cellar with your formalin that you’re proud of and had to put up with your vile animals and idiotic collections and your blood-and-bone fertilizer in the garden and everlasting talk, talk, talk, talk, talk,” she screamed in a hoarse voice, “boring me, filling my ears with talk, jaw, jaw, till I thought the only way was to kill myself to escape you and your world of big bluffs, and big sticks, saving the whole rotten world with your talk. I’ve stood you and your rotten stinking little brat combing lice from her hair from the public school and her green teeth falling from the roots with dirt and your sweat and you know nothing all the time. It’s ten years and it’s too much, I’m through; you can pack your things and get put with your filthy brat. This is my house and you can go and find the tenement house you lived in, in Baltimore, before you slipped about in the slime in my father’s fishshop, with the slum brats you were raised with; find the house and stay in it with your loud-mouth, dung-haired sister and take your whore sister with you.”

Sam hit her, with his open hand, across the mouth. Looking back madly at him over her shoulder, she raced into the hall, groped and found the stick in the dark and struck the gong, shrieking for the children to come downstairs and saying she would rouse the neighbors, that the beast was at her again. When she heard Bonnie on the stairs, she ran into the kitchen, seized the bread knife, and rushed at him, slashing him backwards and forwards across the arm and shoulder, and began slashing at his face before he had the presence of mind to knock it out of her hand and push her away. She stumbled and fell to the floor, where she lay exhausted and trembling.

Bonnie and Louisa, who had been brought up short in the hall, petrified with horror, rushed into the kitchen, crying and begging the man and woman to come to their senses. Blind with her tears, and sobbing loudly, Louie, tripping over her nightdress, went to help her mother, who was resting on her elbow as she got up slowly, weeping dejectedly. Louie began tugging at her, but Henrietta pushed her away, saying, “Don’t touch me, I’ve had enough of everything!” while Bonnie was wiping the blood off Sam’s face and arm with a damp cloth, crying and saying, “What happened, Henny? Whatever happened, Sam? Oh, it wasn’t because of me? What did you do to her, Sam? The children—I”

Sam was unable to articulate, full of rage, fear, and astonishment. He pushed Bonnie away and finished the wiping himself. Then as he watched Henny, leaning, like the dying gladiator, on her arm, and brushing her hand across her mouth, he said in a strange, distant voice, “Leave us; go to bed and leave us!”

Bonnie looked at him, terrified, but said nothing.

Henny looked up at him, “I don’t want to be left with the likes of you; I’m afraid for my life.” She began to move like a creature broken with pain, and sniffing, still feeling her mouth with a drooping wrist, she stood up and pushed back her hair.

Sam said automatically, “The gas is on full!” and Henny turned to it, and turned it down under the bubbling kettle.

“Go to bed,” Sam admonished Louie in an undertone. Louie and Bonnie moved out, full of doubt, but not daring to intervene, realizing that this was a conflict on another plane. Bonnie, pausing on the stairs, sent the little girl to bed, whispering to her, “I’ll just wait for a while, darlin’; don’t you fret: Bonnie will watch.”

“Henny!” Sam said.

“Oh, what do you want?” she murmured mournfully.

“Look at me!” He held out his arm and turned his face, showing the cuts which were still bleeding.

She gave a swift glance and picked up the damp dishcloth which she handed to him again, “Here, wipe yourself off: don’t stand there with that blessed martyred air like a saint in church!” She looked at him awkwardly and with much difficulty wrenched her ashamed gaze away.

He dropped the rag in the sink, dried his hands, and, looking at her sideways from the towel, said evenly, “The worst part of it is, Pet, that you love me still in a way; everything you do—even this!—shows me that. I know it!”

Henny, after tightening all the taps on the stove, stood hunched, with her arms folded tightly gripping her forearms, her head bent towards her right shoulder; and in a moment she noticed the frosty glare of the wedding ring on her left fist. As she looked dully at the band of gold that was with her night, day, in her washings and cleanings, in the children’s sickness and at their birthday parties, that went into the bath water, the dough bowl, and the folds of new cotton print running over the sewing machine, that went to the maternity ward with her and to the manicurist and fortuneteller’s, that she saw when drinking cocktails with Bert and when signing away her every cent on some scrap of paper at the moneylender’s, that stayed with her as stayed the man she had taken it from, she took a grip on herself. If this plain ugly link meant an eyeless eternity of work and poverty and an early old age, it also meant that to her alone this potent breadwinner owed his money, name, and fidelity, to her, his kitchen-maid and body servant. For a moment, after years of scamping, she felt the dread power of wifehood; they were locked in each other’s grasp till the end—the end, a mouthful of sunless muckworms and grass roots stifling his blare of trumpets and her blasphemies against love. The timid, fame-loving wretch would never dare to shake her off; and that was how she had him still.

Sam was saying, “—I had long shuddering days, Henny, when it was as if the north wind was blowing all day, when I thought of our home here on the heights, exposed to all the winds of our anger and hate, those winds raging every hour of the day and night through our rooms and corridors. What would I find when I reached home? You will never know—because you do not care in that way for me—what I suffered in the early days of our marriage. You talk of your own sufferings, Henny. I know, for instance, that that is why Hassie does not come here. But what about me? I loved you. Can you imagine the hours of horror I spent before I reached home, wondering if I would find my children slaughtered, as you promised, and yourself weltering in your own blood? One day I came home and looked everywhere for you. I called you. There was no answer. Nearly fainting, I rushed from room to room; and all the time, enjoying my exhaustion and horror, perhaps, you were hiding in the closet in the staircase. When I opened the door, I found you moaning and spent in the corner, worn out by your own dramatics! I never knew when you meant it, nor that you were always shamming so shamefully. I saw my entire life a waste, a desert of shame and unspeakable sorrow, and behind me, a suicided wife! I spent those years in fever and agony, those years that I would have gladly given to my country alone. The man with a peaceful nest to fly home to, has everything; there is no effort he will not make for his mate and offspring. A public office is a public trust; and yet above me I had this sword of Damocles. I could have gone farther, Henny. You could have been the wife of a bigger man, a better one. But I, the most natural and loving of husbands and fathers, have been denied this simple pleasure, the only reward, besides public esteem and the love of friends, that I ever wanted.”

Henny, meanwhile, had been quietly busy at the stove and now pushed towards him, over the sink cover, a little white cup full of hot coffee.

“Take some coffee, Samuel; the sugar’s on the dresser.”

“I made long trips,” said Sam, in a warmer voice. “I visited the hatcheries and the foreshores and even went with the investigation vessel so that you would have time to settle down.”

Henny said nothing but sat with her back to him, taking gulps of tea. Her face flushed slightly, and her eyes brightened.

Sam broke the silence with a lamentable note, “And instead you flirted with Mark Colefax; I take your word it was no more.”