The Man Who Loved Children (51 page)

“Look at this now—a bit of string to hang myself with: but my neck’s too thick—he didn’t think of that! And the pocket’s—where’s the pocket? Ouch! I can feel my knee—my knee’s in the pocket. But who said anything about pockets? Look, just air—it’s lined with air: but that’s a swell style, the latest thing: there are more wearing pockets of air and linings of air at this minute than linings of silk. Who cares for the naval dears with their plackets and braid? The best part of mankind wears overcoats entirely of air. First a suit of skin, then a decoration of hair, then an overcoat of air!”

Then deciding that she was dissatisfied with her overcoat, air or no air, she would shuffle off a few steps, and Louie, who would have been standing, grinning but dissatisfied, sometimes rather stern, at the edge of the crowd, would take her arm and say, “Clare, Clare!”

“What, Louie?”

“Clare—” Louie knew that Clare only behaved like this when her poverty rankled worst; Clare’s poverty was no secret to anyone—she came of a brilliant family that after the death of father and mother had come into the hands of a poor, stiffnecked maiden aunt. One eldest sister was even now at work, helping to keep the two younger sisters and small brother. As soon as Clare graduated, she would take up the burden. Half the weeks in the year it was a question whether Clare would have a roof over her head at all. What was there to say? Clare would smile at her ruefully and grip her hand.

“Ah, Louie, what do I care? When I get through I’ll earn; but where will I be still? There’s my sister and brother and two mortgages—the only thing that worries me is the boys: the brutes won’t look at a poverty like me! What does it matter what I am?” Louie was silent. Then stupidly she would say, “Well, you’re only fourteen, Clare—” Clare would open her arms wide, spreading the loose garments that fell about her, with a gesture that somehow recalled the surf beating on a coast, the surf of time or of sorrows,

“Look at me? Will I ever be any different?” Clare resolutely refused to visit Louie at her home and would never even cross the bridge to Eastport for fear of meeting Louie with her family; she would always refuse, hanging her head and smiling to herself, though at what, Louie could never make out. “You don’t want me, Louie: I’ll see you at school.” One day, just before Christmas, she came, without galoshes, but dragging, on a stockinged foot, a completely ruined shoe. Her toes peeped through holes in the stockings. Some of the girls who were hanging about exclaimed, pointed, and others running up commenced to make a great hullabaloo. Clare stopped in her tracks and, laughing at the great fun, picked up the shoe out of the muddy snow and began swinging it round and round her head: suddenly it flew loose and seemed to fly into the sky, but it landed on the roof instead and while they all stood laughing hysterically, holding their bellies and going into shrieks of laughter, Clare rushed into the janitor’s room, took a ladder, scrambled up to the roof, and began mounting it towards the shoe, making a fall of snow, but’ still going up carefully on hands and knees. Her patched and tired underwear could be seen all over the grounds. An old teacher (Clare was her protégée) came running and, in a stern high voice, cried out to Clare to come down quickly, while the janitor with a long pole began to poke after the shoe. Clare, looking round, and greeting her audience with a flustered laugh, began to back down again—the shoe slid towards her, she tweaked it off the roof and sent it flying down to the ground. She happened to be looking at her friend, the old teacher, and so the shoe struck the woman in the face. She started back but said nothing, only blushed and rubbed her face; and then she stooped and picked up the miserable object, and stood with it dangling in her hand until Clare had reached the ground again. The children, much struck, had fallen silent, and as Clare sheepishly came up to the woman and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and they looked from one to the other, they saw that Miss Harney (the mistress) was crying. She took Clare under the arm, upstairs and into her own room. Louie trailed after her, and because Miss Harney also liked her, she was allowed to remain there.

“Have you no other shoes?”

“No, ma’am,” said Clare brightly.

“Why not?”

“No money, ma’am!”

“Don’t call me ‘ma’am,’ Clare.”

“No, ma’am—Miss—ma’am—Miss …”

Miss Harney shrugged, “I am going to send to get you a pair of shoes.”

“No need, ma’am: no need at all, thankee kindly.”

“Stop acting the fool, Clare.”

“No’m, yes’m thankee’m.”

Miss Harney, very tall, spare, spectacled, with iron-gray hair, struggled with a smile, “Clare, you don’t have to go through this, surely? I’ll write to your aunt. You have friends here: we’ll gladly help you.”

“Don’t want any help: no’m,” Clare said.

Soon the school was talking about it and saying the teachers had got together and bought Clare a blouse, skirt, and so forth, and that the very next day, out of pride, no doubt, Clare had come back in the former sordid outfit—but this protest did not last. She wore the better clothes, and during the winter Miss Harney looked after her constantly, for Clare had developed a bad cough. She parodied the cough too, of course: it was a great source of inspiration to her. Just before they broke up for Christmas, Clare tied the draw cord of the Venetian blind round her neck and accidentally fell out of the window.

When examination results were posted, Clare appeared in most lists at the top or as runner-up. Most often she would be “sick” the day before a test, or her aunt would be sick the week before a term examination. On the morning of the examination, Clare would turn up, ragged, but with a clean blouse and cheerful as ever. She would throw balls of paper about the room, write hard, begin early, and end late. Louie, meanwhile, spent so much time pouring out her energies for the love of Miss Aiden that though she worked like everyone else, her results were mediocre. But in Aiden’s subjects, naturally, she was unequaled. The class went into examination on all literary subjects with great
sang-froid,
and it never entered anyone’s head to try to compete with the great lover. The staff room made serious complaints: Louie worked only for one teacher, and her example set up little frenzies in the rest of the school amongst the younger girls: there were numerous cults now, and some of them had developed into secret societies. At first Louie had founded, with Leana, a secret society, wearing white ribbons with gold letters, SSAA (Secret Society for the Adoration of Aiden), but the inactive members eventually fell away. Parents complained about the plague of secrecy and suspected their children of dark schemes and evil thoughts. In a few weeks, all secret societies were suppressed, by the principal’s order: one or two of them rebelliously stuck it out for a day or two, but these withered away under public ridicule and suspicion. When the story of Louie’s Aiden Cycle became public, there then began a fashion in original poetry so that pathetic pallid serious-eyed girls would be seen sitting in classrooms and corners of the ground scribbling; and some would timidly send their efforts to Louie for criticism. Needless to say, the ferment round Miss Aiden irritated all the rest of the staff. Miss Aiden was admonished by all the older teachers and told that she must discourage her admirers. But who could? What teacher can discourage popularity? It was asking too much of her.

Sam (after the secret societies were beaten) displayed the greatest interest in Louie’s friends and in Miss Aiden. In the noisy morning of some Sunday-Funday, he would always send one of the children flying inside to ask Louie,

“How are Aidoneus’ bunions this morning?” or, “Daddy said to ask you does she Miss Aidin’ Franco?” or, “Daddy said, Do you love him better than Miss Aiden?” and he begged Louie every day to bring home to Spa House, Claribella, or Clarior-e-tenebris, as he variously called her. Clare would meet Louie at the joining of Compromise and Duke of Gloucester Streets, and they would walk all round Annapolis; Clare would then cross the bridge with her again, even to the Eastport side, and from the middle of the bridge they would stand and look at Spa House while Louie pointed out its parts and named the Pollits who happened to be in sight. But beyond that, Clare would never go. Sam knew this was only a little girl’s timidity, and sent loving messages to Clare, “Tell Clarigold from Little Sam-the-Bold that she gotta come the next Saturnday that is and paint the porch,” and, “Tell Clarior-e-tenebris to come en wun woun [run round] the Wishing Tree.” (Sam had planted a new Wishing Tree on the lawn in front of the house to attract the small fry of Eastport Village.)

All through the winter months, on any bright day after school, or after dinner, Sam and one of his children would be seen patrolling the dirt roads of Eastport, rowing up and down the creek, or taking long walks around Annapolis. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, when the jobs round the house were done, they would sometimes take the train to Severnside, or even as far as Jones and beat around the hills, studying the birds, insects, and trees, if the roads and tracks were passable, getting up great roses in the children’s cheeks and freezing their fingers and toes. Every Sunday, though, Sam and Louie alone walked out to free Louie from the house and to walk off her fat. She was by this time a mere barrel of lard, as everyone said; and nothing was more clownish on earth than Louisa with her “spiny gray eyes, long ass’s face, lip of a motherless foal, mountainous body, sullen scowl, and silly smile” (as Henny remarked), going into ecstasies over Miss Aiden and forever scribbling about love.

“What is going on in your head, all this time, besides this foolishness?” Sam would often ask, in kind gravity. “You must be thinking about things too?” Louie would be silent, trying to recall anything she thought about besides Miss Aiden.

“You do think about things, as I have taught and shown you, Looloo-dirl?”

“Yes, of course,” she would mutter, flustered.

“When you are ready, you will show me your thoughts,” Sam would conclude, not wishing to annoy her. When he got away from the children where his weakness for playground leadership forced him to cavort and fool, he was as kind as he could possibly be; and he would explain this to Louisa,

“Naturally, I am thinking much about you, Looloo, but I am not saying anything; I know this is a phase and it will pass over; it belongs to your age and a little later on you will get out of it and you will laugh at yourself, I suppose—we all do.” (How darkly the girl flushed! Certainly things passed in her mind that he was unaware of: he had himself well in hand, though, and left her to her own devices.) After a pause he would say, dubiously, “I can trust you, Looloo: I know I can trust my own girl; you will soon be a woman, and I know you will be very close to me; for although you tend to be mean now, you will improve—you have some of your dear mother’s traits.”

One Saturday in early April they went for a quiet walk along the back grass-grown streets and bays of rotting hulls, Sam hailing everyone they met (he knew most of Eastport by name), jollying the pickaninnies when they came to the daylight-pierced, damp-rotted shacks where the Negroes live—shells of verminous woods, with shrunken seams, afloat on the marsh and horrider than Coleridge’s death ship, A. Gordon Pym’s carrion hulk. These places, as all Eastport, are repugnant to the refined citizens of Annapolis, sure enough; but with the houses they condemn the population. Sam, burning with shame, had already sent in three memorials and was preparing a pamphlet, “Eastport Squalor: A Backwater of the Chesapeake,” which his friend Saul Pilgrim would publish on his little press and sell. (If he was kicked feloniously out of the Department of Commerce, said Sam, it would be but one of Fate’s little tricks, for the country at large would gain in other ways: his energies no longer being at the service of official business, he would seize the crying question of the moment, publicize it and regiment men’s minds and the sympathies of the public-spirited. “I begin at home,” said Sam, referring to his pamphlet.

Presently they came back from the mud-sunk cove, after interchanging a few words with the Ryatt boys, who were patching up and painting an old fore-and-aft coffin with a motor, which they had renamed “Our Dimes,” and after saying hullo to the shopkeepers at the three corners and to “Coffin” (James) Lomasne, they turned to the Eastport Bridge, laughing at his scurrility. Jim Lomasne was a derelict of the Florida boom, native of Connecticut, who, working his way north after the collapse, had never got farther than Eastport. He had sold coffins and rowboats on all the dead-and-alive waterways and in all the bankrupt resorts of the coast. The coffins were for Negro and poor-white funerals; they were worth ten dollars at the outside, while Lomasne (as he shamelessly told all and sundry) sold them for seventy dollars and had laid up a nice piece of change for himself. His boat business was slow, and he was now offering to sell the land on which his rickety boat shed stood, as well as his coffin-cum-boat business to the first comer. He also tried to interest speculators in the lucrative or coffin side; but, as Sam peaceably observed, not even a Johns Hopkins fanatic collecting peculiarly loathsome antediluvian growths, or a syphilographer, would touch “Coffin” Lomasne with a forty-foot pole. He had two legs, but clearly he crawled on them; he had a backbone, but it was pliant as a willow wand; he had clothes and they were as clean as any boat-builder’s on the shore, but these clothes were looser than grave-clothes, had a moral not a corporeal stench quite sensible to the nose, and though “Coffin” Lomasne did not lack flesh, through his long immersion in marshy places and abandoned, despised sumps, it clung to his bones like grave wax. You looked at Lomasne and saw an obsequious, fifty-year-old dead beat and, as soon as your back was turned, you felt certain that there stood a loathsome ghoul. But it amused Sam to chat with this mud turtle, and, still chanting and improvising on the immoral perfection of “Coffin,” they crossed the bridge.

The afternoon had clouded after a still, warm blue day; the water was halfway down, and contained jellyfish. They paused and looked down to count them.