The Man Who Loved Children (55 page)

This Sunday in mid-May, Henny was to go to town for Cathleen’s birthday, and the house buzzed joyously from early morning, because a “new deal” was to be had by all members of the household—Henny was to have Sundays off, this being the first Sunday; Sam was to superintend the housework and show them all how easily it could be managed by “system” and “scientific management.” The girls were to cook, the boys were to do the ordinary jobs of house upkeep such as hoeing, weeding, washing verandas, and moving heavy objects. Henny left early and as soon as she went, they all rushed in, clustered round their father, while he “started the machine going.”

“Man must work and women must sweep,” declared Sam, first of all. “Little-Womey, subbor cawf! Now, I’ll show you all how to wash the dishes.” Commanding from his honorable position behind the coffee cup, he made Little-Womey and Looloo scrape and stack the dishes in the wash-basin, get the dish towels, dishcloth, dish mop, and soap saver, while he entertained them with his philosophy and schemes for the world.

“The Philosopher at the Breakfast Table,” he announced complacently, “we have risen superior to the raw struggle for supremacy, the tooth-and-nail stage; it is now a struggle of types, brains and philosophies. With a council of scientists running the world—” and so forth, and then, “If I were autocrat of all nations,” with “supreme power, the lives of all, the life of the world in my hands,” he told them what he would do. For example, he might arrange the killing off of nine tenths of mankind in order to make room for the fit. “This would be done by gas attacks on people living ignorant of their fate in selected areas, a type of eugenic concentration-camp: they would never know, but be hurled painlessly into eternity, or they would pass into the lethal chamber of time and never feel a pang.”

“But you would keep yourself alive,” said Louie unpleasantly.

“The great point in washing dishes,” said Sam, “is to have the water bilin’ and the dishes scraped and rinsed first under the tap: all extra grease should be removed and the plates can then be dipped and stacked without extra work. A little scientific method would eliminate all work from the household, so to speak: now, if me and not Henny was runnin’ this institution, you would see: because all the improvements in household technique have been made by men, becaze women got no brains. Now, Looloo-Meany, is the water a-bilin’?”

“Yes.”

“Then Sam-the-Bold es a-comin’,” he sang, “quick’s the word and smart’s the action: watch me—we’ll be through in two shakes of a dead lamb’s tale. Ermy?” He gave all their whistles and marshaled them in order of age with the dish towels. “I hain’t had time to make that there dish rack, but I got cheap labor well organized.”

With a great deal of shouting and bumping they got through most of the dishes, and then Sam slid under the sink the oatmeal saucepan, coffeepot, and skillet, remarking that “the women could do the dirties next time.” Sam then retired from scientific management and went out into the sun, “Can’t miss great Sol’s benefits,” said he, “for a lot of women’s messin’,” and when they all hastened to jump on him and point out that he did no work, he only laughed and stretched himself on the grass. “I work with myed [my head], I got lieutenants to do the rest of the work,” said he, and expatiated on the work he did with his head during the times he had his eyes closed. This foolery annoyed and amused the children; but while he rested, they scattered off to their innumerable occupations. Tommy had a gift for carving boats out of bits of wood: he imitated the skiffs, powerboats, and even the
Reina Mercedes.
The fish- and boatmen round the shore gave him bits of wood and showed him how to shape the hulls and prows and where to put the masts. On one of his productions, a sort of marlin-bellied yacht, they had shown him how to fix a fin keel. He had a lifeboat round which Louie had looped a cord. Sam at once predicted great things for him as a boat designer: “Perhaps you can design special observation vessels for the Bureau of Fisheries, or the Government Chesapeake Fisheries which I envisage for the future”; then when Tommy had run out again to chat with his dearly beloved longshoremen and boat owners and Chesapeake sailors, Sam would shake his head at the others, “Tommy great lad, great lad, but no bean, no upperworks, a fine hull but no captain on the bridge: that’s all, but no matter, no matter, we cain’t all be philosophers and scientists: there be they what must hew water and draw wood.”

It was jolly, though, with Henny away: the morning flowed away like a clear running tide. Sam schemed with them; they listened to the birds and wondered where the mourning dove was nesting. They had birdbaths and seedboxes in their grounds and the thick trees invited many birds. They had left a wilderness patch at the far end of the orchard where old ivy, clematis, and honeysuckle mantled the tottering fence; for the hedge dwellers and the low-flying, insect hunters who loved to dart and sway on the slender sappy masts, goldfinches and flycatchers. Along the side porch, inside the beams, were five nests, two of house wrens and three untidy ones of sparrows: they had thrown out the sparrows’ nests in order to leave the house wrens in peace. It was a thriving, thickly inhabited wilderness, and merely lazing and looking, amateur naturalists, they could have spent the day. No urgent calls for help—to beat eggs, string beans, peel potatoes, empty slops, came from the unwomaned house. “Peace, perfect peace,” sighed Sam a dozen times in the morning.

When he felt cheerfully warm, they began to talk about the neighbors, about whom they had just as many comical legends as about the Georgetown neighbors; and the kingpin, of course, was the atrocious “Coffin” Lomasne. Fearful tales were told of him—he was a vile spider of usury spinning foolish, weak, necessitous flies into his web. Sam told them all about poor Lai Wan Hoe and his troubles with the usurers, how he had to embezzle and fly, all because of Usurious Greed; and how they should not say such a man was an octopus, because an octopus was a sweet, clean beast whose rose-pink flesh they had eaten, but who would want to eat ghoulish Lomasne? An octopus was swift as shadow, a subtle chameleon, brave, clever, a battler—who could say so of “Coffin” Lomasne? And then they invented wilder tales about “Coffin”—dead marines rose out of his cheap coffins at night; one night the sucking marsh would open underneath him and try to digest him into the black mud where his poor corpses, oozing from their cheap coffins, lay, but being too vile and indigestible, he would be spewed up again. He was so mean, said Sam (inventing freely), that he kept his own excrement in a pit and doled it out to his own vegetables. The children shrieked, gasped with laughter, and got red in the face; for in general such jokes were not allowed at Spa House. Sam averred that “Coffin” was slowly turning diarrhea color, his clothes were stolen “from the swaddling clothes they wraps corps [corpses] in,” and his cap was a candle extinguisher stolen from a wake. He made his wife eat candles stolen from wakes, said Sam, and they ate dandelion salad. What were the rats and cats that hung round “Coffin” Lomasne’s, asked Sam, especially at night? Where did “Coffin” put his money, Sam speculated. He pictured the money put away in one of the coffins, and then he pictured “Coffin’s” end: one night at one o’clock when all slept and the mud bubbled round his place, the mud that could not digest him, three poor blacks, invisible in the black night, would come and take “Coffin,” place him in one of his own coffin-rowboats and row him out and across the deeps of the Chesapeake; and when they came to the Happy Hunting Grounds of the dead Susquehannocks, the shady braves would skin him alive and skin him dead and burn him at the stake and chop him up to feed the ghosts of sharks upon, and those ghostly sharks expiring in a shady way would become devil sharks and feed upon the others, and so on to a great Armageddon in the shadow world, all because no one could stand the poison of “Coffin’s” shade.

The children breathed peacefully before this wonderful story of “Coffin” Lomasne and were half believing it; but at the end, to bring their father back and make him start another of his tales of marvels, they pricked him on a sore point—why was the local postal delivery at present being done by a relieving man, given into the hands of Popeye Banks? Popeye Banks was a revolting being of seventeen years old, with an exophthalmic goiter excruciating to see. Generally he wore eyeshades, but sometimes he did not. Sam declared he was feeble-minded as well, and gosh only knew what else he did and had! He probably stole and spied: he certainly leered and limped. Like many a handsome body, Sam was not only revolted by deformity and plainness but actually saw essential evil in it: and essential evil, most particularly, was what robbed him, Sam Pollit.

Join the Navee and see the world!

And what’d we see? We saw the sea,

sang Ernie.

The boys flew into an excited discussion of the Naval Academy’s spring sports schedule, baseball and plebe baseball (here Sam stuck in his nose, and said on no account to use that British import, “plebe”), and crew and track—they despised “the sissies,” but Naval Academy made up half their talk, and the boys all now had an interest in living: they did not miss the nation’s capital for a moment, but felt that they were now living in the heart of the United States. Here they (“the sissies,” that is) were visited by Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, University of Virginia, Pittsburgh, and, of course, their own Georgetown. Their life was full of passionate discussions. They blessed Sam for bringing them to this little creek which was a whirlwind of boy life, and Ermy had even begun to weaken—with his mathematical talents he might even go to the Academy: how the little boys would admire him then! Many of their schoolmates, and Louie’s too, were children of the Academy staff, and the boys brought home plenty of gossip: So-and-so was a stinker (“say a stench,” emended Sam), and they were sissies, they had to arrange and sew their own clothes and sweep their own rooms like girls, and Navy could of course win this year—no Baltimore college had a ghost of a chance (for their patriotism was limited to Spa Creek, and the United States Naval Academy was a Spa Creek affair). Sam was very happy, for he saw his gang (he now called them “his plebes”) very happy. The “little women” were discontented, but, after all, he was a man too: this was a man’s world. All girls were discontented till they married and had men and babies.

Both Sam and Henny now speculated openly (though separately) about the sort of man Louisa would marry. Henny went to Hassie’s fortune teller who told her her stepdaughter would marry an officer at the Annapolis Naval Academy. “It’s wonderful,” said Henny in great surprise, to all her friends and even to Louisa, “I am certain she never saw me before yesterday.” She immediately began to believe that Louisa would marry a naval officer and she looked on Louisa with more respect, began at last to listen to Louie’s pleas about getting a permanent and a dancing frock. “If you’re going to begin going about,” said Henny optimistically, “your father will simply have to give up his stupid ideas about dancing and all his insane puritanical ideas. A great big girl your age who has never had a dancing lesson!” and she went so far as to write a note to Sam on this subject: “Samuel C. Pollit: You must arrange for your daughter to get dancing lessons and a suitable dress.” This note enraged Sam beyond belief; in it he saw only another vicious attempt of “women brought up in the Baltimore white-slave tradition,” to debauch his daughter. He refused once for all to allow Louisa to take part in such orgies or even to think about them. Henny, with grim, bitten lip looking ugly as sin (for her lips were purplish now and her skin dry saffron), had gone out with Hassie on a shopping expedition and bought what she conceived to be a young girl’s dress, a thine that might have suited her well enough in her young days, a peach-colored, silky, filmy cotton, made with three frills round the shoulders and a trail of roses hanging from the waist.

It ended in Louie’s not going to any dances, however, and in “mooning and moping” over Miss Aiden till the entire family of Pollits thought the child was queer, while Hassie told Henny she must early look out for a husband for her, or else some accident would happen to the great overgrown child. Henny, though she felt old-fashioned now, began to look round Baltimore, surreptitiously, for a husband for her stepdaughter—there was time, of course; Louie was only fourteen, but she looked like seventeen at least, and, thought Henny, “I’ve got to save her before he makes her a bluestocking that no man will want!”

They lived in a strange world. Sam did not yet go to work (although now a job as biologist was assured); Henny picked money out of the wind; Louie had left this earth completely and was floating about somewhere between Elysium and Inferno; Ernie had become “a crank,” and the little children were inextricable from some mazy world of birds, flowers, winds; and tides. Sam was as near happy as he could be, and his chief worry now was Ernie and his “miserliness.” The greatest family joke now going was that Ernie was growing up to be a miser, both a reproach and a great joke. Sam, too, not long ago, deciding to take the bull by the horns and to be as scientific as possible, much perturbed because Louisa had an “unscientific” view of procreation, had come to her where she stood washing her long waterfall of hair in the bathroom, and after poking his nose this way and that round all the corners to be sure that “the childer” were not within earshot, had given her three books—Shelley’s
Poems
(to help her poetry, said he), Frazer’s
Golden Bough
(for the anthropological side of the question, said he), and James Bryce’s book on Belgian atrocities (to explain our entry into the war and the need for America’s policing the world, said he). Louie now read stern proofs of stranger fairy tales acted in reality, more gruesome than any Grimms have recorded, though the Grimms are fearful enough, with their tales of forest cannibalism and murders. From the two latter books Louie was able to fill her daydreams and night thoughts with the mysteries of men’s violence—women crucified (so it was set forth with judicial severity) and unborn children torn from their bellies, young girls sent into barns with detachments of soldiers and “the ripening grain,” soldiers winding the hair of women round their sabers and thus dragging them to the floor to satisfy their bestial desires.